| Chapter 1: | Two Tory Radicals: Lord Randolph Churchill, Joseph Chamberlain and the Evolution of their Views on the Irish Question to 1880 |
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He used his work as a palliative, but there had still been ‘an annealing of character and compression of temperament’.16
As time went by, Chamberlain became involved in the movement to promote education for poorer children, founded by George Dixon. The Birmingham Education League provided payment of school fees to enable poorer children to attend schools where they were available, and to lobby for more schools where they were not. By 1868, Chamberlain was chairman of the League. When the National Education League was formed in 1869, with Dixon as president, Chamberlain became the chairman of its executive council. Together with the nonconformists, Chamberlain and the National Education League were fighting to achieve free, compulsory and secular education for all. In June 1868, Chamberlain found renewed happiness when he remarried. His second wife was Florence Kenrick, Harriet’s cousin. However, the happiness was to last only a few years because in February 1875 Florence also died in childbirth. Chamberlain was devastated, the effect of the two deaths on him was profound, causing him to forsake his religion and possibly explaining much of the self centred approach he took to life afterwards.
Chamberlain’s experiences in Birmingham, together with a nonconformist leaning away from landowners and conservatism, led him towards the Liberal party. However this trend was to be severely tested when Gladstone’s Liberal government introduced the long awaited Education Bill in 1870. The proposed Bill shocked Chamberlain and the National Education League; their expectations of a free, national, secular and compulsory scheme were dashed. The Minister who introduced the Bill, W.E. Forster, attracted the full force of Chamberlain’s outrage. When George Dixon, the founder of the League, showed signs of moderation, Chamberlain asked him to remind Forster that he had ‘succeeded in raising the whole of the Dissenters against him’ and that they ‘will teach him his mistake’.17 Chamberlain failed to teach him his mistake, and in fact was unsuccessful in beating Forster, but the whole episode had a profound effect on him. Forster became his bête-noire for ever after, and in 1875 Chamberlain and the National Education League were instrumental