Sir Thomas Russell, 1st Baronet, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

    

Sir Thomas Russell, 1st Baronet

British politician

Date of Birth: 28-Feb-1841

Place of Birth: Cupar, Scotland, United Kingdom

Date of Death: 02-May-1920

Profession: politician

Zodiac Sign: Pisces


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About Sir Thomas Russell, 1st Baronet

  • Sir Thomas Wallace Russell, 1st Baronet (28 February 1841 – 2 May 1920), was an Irish politician and agrarian agitator.
  • Born at Cupar, Fife, Scotland, he moved to County Tyrone at the age of eighteen.
  • He was secretary and parliamentary agent of the Irish temperance movement and became well known as an anti-alcohol campaigner and proprietor of a Temperance Hotel in Dublin.He unsuccessfully contested Preston in 1885 as a Liberal.
  • However, he opposed William Ewart Gladstone's Home Rule policy and was elected to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland as a Liberal Unionist in 1886 for South Tyrone.
  • He served between 1895 and 1900 as Parliamentary Secretary to the Local Government Board in the Unionist administration of Lord Salisbury. However, Russell's views on Home Rule underwent a change around the turn the century and he gradually became a critic of Unionist policies in Ireland.
  • From 1900 put himself at the head of the Farmers and Labourers Union, an Ulster tenant-farmer protest movement demanding compulsory land purchase, similar to the land and labour movement in the south.
  • His 1901 book Ireland and the Empire was an attack on the Irish agrarian system.
  • From 1902 to 1903 he was a key Ulster farmer representative at the Dublin "Land Conference" which resulted in the passing of the Land Purchase Act of 1903.
  • This defused the Protestant tenant-farmers' revolt.Russell continued to represent Tyrone South in Parliament, but in 1906 he was re-elected as an "Independent Unionist", one of several candidates referred to as "Russellite Unionist".
  • He was vice-president of the Irish Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction (DATI), in which capacity he displaced Horace Plunkett as head of the Department in 1907.
  • He disapproved of Plunkett's cooperative Irish Agricultural Organisation Society involving itself in the affairs of farmers, and ended DATI's help for the society. He rejoined the Liberal Party and stood as a Liberal candidate at the general election in January 1910, when he lost his seat to the Unionist Andrew Horner.
  • Russell does not appear to have contested the December 1910 general election, but in 1911 he won a by-election in Tyrone North, a seat he held until the constituency was abolished in 1918.Russell was sworn of the Irish Privy Council in 1908 and created a Baronet, of Olney in the County of Dublin, in 1917.He retired from politics in 1918 and died in May 1920, aged 79, when the baronetcy became extinct.

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