John Bright

John Bright married Elizabeth Priestman of Newcastle in 1839, and had a daughter, Helen, with her. After Elizabeth’s death, he married Margaret Elizabeth Leatham and fathered seven more children.

Suffering from lung congestion complicated by diabetes and chronic nephritis, he died on March 27, 1889, in his home, One Ash, and was buried in Rochdale. A funeral service was held at Westminster Abbey.

John Bright was born on November 16, 1811, in Rochdale England. He was one of the 11 children born to Jacob Bright and his second wife Martha Wood. Jacob, like his wife, was a Quaker and ran a profitable cotton-spinning mill.

He was a day-scholar at a boarding school run by William Littlewood near his home and also went to the Ackworth School, the Bootham School, York, and a school in Newton, near Clitheroe.

He learnt Latin and Greek, and loved English literature. He was member of the Rochdale Juvenile Temperance Band and fine-tuned his oratorical skills during its meetings.

After his formal schooling ended, he joined the family business. He joined his brother in a campaign that opposed compulsory tax support of the Anglican Church in Rochdale.

John Bright met Richard Cobden, an alderman of the Manchester Corporation, who invited him to speak against the Corn Laws in Rochdale, in 1838. He joined the Anti-Corn Law League, the following year.

In the national campaign against the Corn Laws, he gave many speeches calling for its reform. He attacked it for widening the divide between the landed aristocracy and the poor peasants and workers.

In 1843, he was elected to the House of Commons from Durham. He led deputations to the home-secretary and to the representatives of the Board of Trade, seeking the repeal of the Corn Laws.

In his first speech in the Commons in 1843, he supported the motion by liberal politician William Ewart calling for lesser import duties. However, the motion was defeated.

Led by Cobden and Bright, the Anti-Corn Law League intensified its campaign and could no longer be ignored. The leaders complemented each other well¬¬ – Cobden’s speeches were argumentative while Bright’s were rhetorical.

In 1846, John Bright’s fight against the unjust Corn-law bore fruit when PM Robert Peel’s government passed a law that cut the duty on oats, barley and wheat to only one shilling per quarter.

The first to broach the issue of free trade with France in the parliament, he supported Cobden’s effort in the direction. The Cobde-Chevalier Treaty or the Anglo-French Free Trade treaty was signed in 1860.

The 1867 Reform Act was a victory for him, as it gave the vote to every male adult householder living in a constituency; smaller constituencies were also redrawn, keeping in mind their population.