Sir Geoffrey Mander

Geoffrey Mander came from a strong liberal tradition. The Mander family were in the vanguard of the industrial revolution in the Midlands.²

In the early nineteenth century, they campaigned against the slave trade, lobbied for the reform of the criminal code, and set up a union mill to provide cheap flour and bread in the difficult aftermath of the Napoleonic wars. Four Manders at the same time were Town Commissioners in Georgian Wolverhampton. They pursued a 22-year chancery suit for the protection of non-conformist chapels and endowments, a test case which was heard by the lord chancellor Eldon and was to lead to an act of Parliament by 1844. In 1817, Charles Mander rode to London to petition the home secretary, Sidmouth, for the reprieve of two innocent soldiers condemned to death for stealing a shilling coin. It was a romantic incident which appealed to the imagination of contemporaries and became the inspiration of a forgotten Methodist novel by Samuel Warren.³ It led with the help of Samuel Romilly in Parliament (the Manders' first counsel in their litigation) to the repeal of the Blood Money Act (1818), 'one of the worst acts ever to disgrace the Statute Book'. The family founded chapels, fountains, free libraries and schools, and became progressive mayors, filling nearly every public office in the county. Geoffrey's younger brother, the Hollywood actor and novelist Miles Mander (who married an Indian princess), summarized the background writing 'to [his] son in confidence' (1934):

A family group at Wightwick in about 1898. Left to Right: Marjorie, Theodore, Lionel, Flora, Alan, Geoffrey.

Theodore in own his day was known as a Liberal and philanthropist. As a young man, he was active in public life in the arts and education, as a governor of the Grammar School, of Tettenhall College and of Birmingham University (where he endowed a scholarship), a member of the Royal Commission of the British Section of the Paris Exhibition and one of the founding benefactors of Mansfield College, Oxford, which was the first nonconformist college in the University. He described Henry Fowler, first viscount Wolverhampton, as 'his political mentor', chairing his election committee. In June 1895, he was offered the Mid-Worcester seat in Parliament. William Woodings of The Midland Liberal Federation wrote to him: 'Your name would be well known and you have almost a local connection… The constituency is Liberal in tendency and is not difficult to work.' He was still committed to municipal affairs, and didn't live long enough to contest the seat. He was a successful mayor of Wolverhampton at the turn of the century, he was presented to Queen Victoria and entertained the Duke and Duchess of York at Wightwick. But he died in office a few months later, in 1901, following an operation on his kitchen table. He was aged just 47.

Like most members of the family, he became a magistrate, in his case at the age of 24, and in due course Chairman of the Bench, serving for 50 years. By the time of the Kingswinford by-election in 1905, the press is describing him as 'a Liberal member of a distinguished local Conservative family'. He supported the Labour candidate for West Wolverhampton in the 1906 election against a family friend, Sir Alfred Hickman. He wrote later: 'My action caused great indignation in Conservative circles in the neighbourhood and I found myself cut in the hunting field by some of them.' His second wife Rosalie described how, like many radicals who refused to conform to the conventions of the 'County' pattern, he was looked upon askance by many families. This attitude only changed after the second world war, 'both because party bitterness in general had died out and because Geoffrey Mander's sincerity and his devotion to the causes in which he believed won respect all round':

He cut his teeth as a Liberal member of the Wolverhampton Borough Council (1911-20). He shocked the Councillors, showing a foretaste of later interests, when he proposed a minimum wage of 23s. for all municipal employees. He came out in favour of his cousin Gerald's campaign to save the Old Deanery, an historic landmark in Wolverhampton attributed to Christopher Wren. This initiative was frustrated by the onset of war and the building where Dickens is said to have stayed was demolished in 1921.

He was High Sheriff of Staffordshire in 1921. He again created a stir when he proposed a woman as his successor, Lady Joan Legge, daughter of Lord Dartmouth. The Privy Council wrote to her father to inquire whether she had the necessary property qualifications, and she was not appointed. But he did secure the selection of the first woman to serve on the grand jury, Mrs Kempthorne, the wife of the bishop of Lichfield.

He stood unsuccessfully as a Liberal candidate for the Midland constituencies of Leominster in 1920 and then Cannock and Stourbridge. In 1929 he finally realized his early ambition by entering Parliament as Liberal MP for East Wolverhampton, a seat which had been represented by Liberals continuously since the Reform Bill of 1832. It included only three wards of inner Wolverhampton itself (as opposed to eight in Wolverhampton West), with urban districts and a cluster of independent surrounding villages. It was an area where Mander Brothers was dominant, with factories in both Heath Town and Wednesfield, and many employees of his works among the voters.

He was active in the Liberal Party organisation from the early 1920s, as a member of the executive committee of the National Liberal Federation and a frequent speaker at party Assemblies. He made a reputation as a parliamentarian by his skilful use of 'awkward' Parliamentary Questions, cornering the government of the day with his determined invigilation. The journalist Percy Cater recorded his memories of:

As war again threatened again in the Thirties, he was one of the first to speak out against the Dictators. He tabled the International Economic Sanctions (Enabling) Bill of 17 May 1933, which made him 'one of the first to call attention to the German danger publicly in Parliament and at the same time make definite proposals for dealing with it'; supporters included Sir Austen Chamberlain whose 'death in 1937 was a heavy blow to peace'. The Peace Bill of 23 May 1935 (and subsequently) incorporated machinery embodied in the Covenant of the League of Nations for the settlement of international disputes, and was supported by Harold Macmillan, P. Noel-Baker, Sir Richard Acland and Lovat Fraser, inter alia.

In the 1935 General Election his comfortable victory against the Labour and Conservative opposition bucked the trend when the Liberals won only two other urban seats where they faced competition from both the other parties. He became a vehement, articulate critic of Neville Chamberlain's policy of Appeasement, and his 'inability to see what was going on in the world', an ally of Churchill, Eden and Sinclair, whose polemical jabs were a wake-up call against a deep-rooted national will to self-deception. He said that it would remain 'one of the regrets of my life that I did not make some sort of speech … when Mr. Chamberlain announced his intention of flying to Munich… If the Debate had been kept up, the spell would have been broken… Others would have followed and the dangers inherent in what was happening would have been exposed.' 

His polemic was set forth in his book, We were not all Wrong (1941), arguing that many people and parties foresaw the disaster to which errors of policy in dealing with 'the Nazi menace' in the 1930s would inevitably lead: 

A generation later, his son, John Mander, a political journalist and cultural critic, described the origins of Appeasement. Ironically, he wrote, in its intellectual perspective it was largely the creation of liberals of nonconformist background like his father: 

When Geoffrey spoke up in the House of Commons in support of sanctions against Italy after the invasion of Abyssinia, Mussolini fired off a personal diatribe against him in his paper, the Popolo d'Italia. In 1938, in a climate of international tension, il duce took reprisals against the Milan branch of 'Fratelli Mander' and asked customers to boycott their goods. 

A fine summer evening's view of Wightwick Manor from the rear garden.

He was far sighted in many of his peace campaigns. He was one of a handful of MPs who inveighed against Hitler's territorial ambitions in the Ukraine in 1935. As war broke out in 1939, he pleaded the Jewish cause, telling Parliament in July that Government immigration policy was leaving Jews with no escape from Germany 'other than by illegal immigration into Palestine'. In April 1941, he wrote in the Jewish Standard: 'The cause of the Jews throughout the world is the cause for which Great Britain and her allies are fighting'. 

Princess Sudhira Mander, who married Alan, Geoffrey's brother.

During the war, when the Liberals were asked to join the government coalition under Churchill, Geoffrey became Parliamentary Private Secretary (1942-5) to their leader, Sir Archibald Sinclair (later Lord Thurso), the Minister for Air.12 Mander Brothers' Heath Town works was marked with a red ring on a Luftwaffe plan, found after the war, as 'Chemikalien', indicated as a strategic target for bombing. He rescued various bomb-damaged fragments of the House of Commons from the Blitz, installing two stone crowns from the pinnacles of Big Ben as ornaments about the garden at Wightwick. He kept the archives of the League of Nations Union when they were forced by financial difficulties to move to smaller premises in the early 1940s. Wolverhampton East was one of the last urban constituencies that the Liberals managed to hold against both Labour and Conservative opposition up to 1945. But he lost his seat in the Labour landslide of that the 1945 General Election and was knighted in the same year (K.B.). His was a great loss to Parliament.

Thurso regretted the 'massacre' of so many 'able, experienced and popular' candidates as he.¹³ There was a rumour for a time of his being given a peerage, and the Press proposed he be gazetted with the equivocal title 'Lord Meander', in commemoration of his tireless crusades and pertinacious questions, seamless diatribes and string of private member's bills in the House. 

In 1948 he joined the Labour Party, arguing that it had become the logical successor of the Liberal tradition in his pamphlet To Liberals, written for the Labour Party in 1950. In due course he became a Labour member of the County Council. To many members of a family whose traditions stretched to radical Whiggery, this was beyond the pale. But he did say privately, that if he had not lost his seat, he would have remained a Liberal, and most likely have been appointed chief whip of the Liberals in Parliament. Geoffrey Mander the politician was not quite forgotten by an older generation. The first question Rab Butler asked me when I followed Cousin Geoffrey to Trinity, Cambridge was, 'How are you related to that b***er, Geoffrey?'14 My own memories are of a fusty, Edwardian patriarch, small in stature, with a watch chain, who called in after church with his political friends like Clem Attlee. Apart from his public service in politics, his liberalism is vividly exemplified in his career as an industrialist and an art patron.

Geoffrey Mander admiring the Morris 'bird' pattern curtains with the Attlees.

The family company, Mander Brothers, was known between the wars as a model company. Geoffrey, as the eldest of his generation, was chairman, while his cousin, Charles Arthur (the second baronet), was managing director. Sir Charles was 'wet' as a Tory, active in local government and Midland affairs, and deeply interested in everything that touched the human side of industry. In Parliament Geoffrey had pushed through the Joint Industrial Councils and Work Councils Bills. Together they implemented typically progressive initiatives in industrial welfare, to foster peace in industry. These included a joint works' council providing a workable system of joint consultation (1920), a welfare club (1920), profit-sharing schemes for employees, holiday schemes, suggestion schemes (1925), works pensions (1928), a house magazine, staff pensions (1935), and a 'contributory co-partnership scheme' setting aside shares for employees, with provisions to pay for shares by instalments. 

Most notably, Manders was the first company in the country to introduce the forty-hour week. The historic agreement, the first of its kind in Britain, was brokered and signed by Ernest Bevin, general secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union, in September 1932. 'Bevin was very proud of signing that agreement', said Geoffrey later: 'He used often to refer to it when were both in the House of Commons.' The press wrote: 'In the history of industrial welfare, Manders may claim a high place', where welfare had been 'part and parcel of the outlook of Manders as employers almost since the company's foundation in [1773]'. Geoffrey was reported summarizing:

Wightwick: postcard from Geoffrey Mander, 1932

As an art patron Geoffrey's contributions to Wightwick Manor have been his most secure legacy. When his father died young, much at Wightwick was left undone. But the sequel has been fortunate, for Wightwick is the creation of two generations. Geoffrey's was a man of vision and ability whose own contribution was decisive, and shows evolving attitudes at work in the interpretation of the nineteenth century.