SHERRIFF, Alexander (1816-1878), of Perdiswell Hall, Worcester, Worcs. and Dean’s Yard, Westminster, Mdx.

Sherriff was born in humble circumstances in Aberdeen, and was in early life a school-master at Armley, near Leeds, where he married the daughter of a local Methodist maltster and lectured to local working men’s societies.1Leeds Mercury, 17 Apr. 1841; Northern Star and Leeds General Advertiser, 20 June 1840. He afterwards obtained a clerkship in the goods department of the Leeds and Selby Railway and, following the company’s incorporation into the York and Midland Railway, rose to become sub-manager of the department at Hull.2In 1845 he gave evidence to a House of Commons railway committee on the Brayton and Goole line: Standard, 2 June 1845. Having improved his means by ‘various successful investments’, he became goods traffic manager for the North-Eastern Company, receiving particular praise from the corn factors and merchants of Leeds for the arrangements he made for the development of local trade. In 1856 he was appointed general manager of the ailing Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway, which brought him to Worcester, thus beginning an association with the city which lasted until his death.3Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 23 Mar. 1878. The railway had become so run down that it was dubbed the ‘Old Worse & Worse’: L.T.C. Rolt, Red For Danger. A History of Railway Accidents and Railway Safety (4th edn., 1982), 178. He retained this position when the line was amalgamated with the Worcester and Hereford line to become the West Midland Railway in 1860. Regarded as ‘an excellent man of business’, he was one of the originators of the Rosedale and Ferryhill Iron Company, which established ironstone workings on the North Yorkshire moors, where ‘Sherriff’s Pit’ was located.4Minutes of the Proceedings of the Institute of Civil Engineers, lii (1875), 284. In 1873 the Rosedale mines produced over half a million tons of ironstone. Sherriff’s Pit closed in 1911: www.abandonedcommunities.co.uk.

Having revived the fortunes of the railways in his charge, Sherriff retired when the West Midland company amalgamated with the Great Western Railway in 1863.5Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 11 Dec. 1858. He turned to other commercial ventures, establishing the Worcester Engine Works in 1864,6The company built about 70 locomotives before it failed in 1870: http://miac.org.uk/worcesterengine. and was ‘greatly instrumental’ in developing the business of the Worcester Royal Porcelain Works, of which he would become chairman.7Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 23 Mar. 1878. He was said to have placed ‘his talents as a businessman at the service of the city’, sinking his own capital into local schemes, such as the Engine Works, which failed to meet ‘the expectations of shareholders’: Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 21 Nov. 1868. He was considered ‘a generous employer’ who, in spite of his belief that ‘a more clumsy and cruel mode of adjusting capital and labour could not be adopted than strikes’, accepted trades unions on the principle ‘that if combination was fair for the masters it was fair for the men’.8Birmingham Daily Post, 14 Sept. 1865. In addition to several railway chairmanships, he took a prominent part in converting the Worcester City and County Bank into a limited company, and was a director of several other companies, including the Metropolitan and St. John’s Wood Railway, the Vyksounsky Iron Works, and several tramway companies.9Minutes … Institute of Civil Engineers, 284; W.R. Williams, The Parliamentary History of the County of Worcester (1897), 113; The Times, 28 Aug. 1877; Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 23 Mar. 1878. The Vyksounsky company was launched in 1865 for the purpose of extending the ironworks at Vuicksa in Russia: Glasgow Herald, 12 Apr. 1865.

Sheriff proposed the iron founder Richard Padmore as the Liberal candidate for Worcester in March 1860, and that November was chosen as a representative for Claines on Worcester town council.10Morning Chronicle, 13 Mar. 1860. Within twelve months he was appointed sheriff, and in November 1862 was elected mayor, when he assured an audience of local workhouse inmates that ‘poverty was no disgrace, and that many a good man and woman had been trained in a workhouse’. In spite of suffering a serious illness which prevented him from fulfilling his duties, he was re-elected as mayor in 1863. He was made an alderman in 1864 and a city magistrate the following year.11Birmingham Daily Post, 21 Nov. 1862; Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 18 Mar. 1865, 23 Mar. 1878.

The public service rendered by his business success led to Sherriff being invited to stand as a Liberal candidate for Worcester when the sitting member retired at the 1865 general election.12Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 3 June 1865. A progressive Liberal and supporter of Palmerston’s government, Sherriff was returned in a ‘severe contest’ at the head of the poll, being unpledged but in favour of the ballot and ‘a very wide extension of the franchise’ to ‘at least the £6 houses’.13Dod’s Parliamentary Companion (1865), 284; Birmingham Daily Post, 12 July 1865. He argued that because of progress in education, these occupiers were ‘more enlightened’ than those who had inhabited £10 houses thirty years earlier: Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 15 July 1865. Elaborating on this theme at a local meeting in September, he dismissed the notion that ‘the admission of working men would swamp the Constitution’, observing that due to the rapid strides made in education and the spread of political information through cheap newspapers, there was ‘a dissimilarity of sentiment and political opinions amongst them, precisely as there was amongst the higher classes of the community’, and arguing that an enfranchised working class would widen the constitutional basis of the country ‘and make it more firm than before’.14Birmingham Daily Post, 14 Sept. 1865.

An ‘effective rather than eloquent speaker’, he took little part in parliamentary debates, but occasionally questioned the home secretary over misconduct by poor law officials and magistrates, particularly towards minors.15Minutes … Institute of Civil Engineers, 284; Hansard, 12 Mar. 1868, vol. 190, cc. 1453-4. Such as the case of a girl of ten years of age, who was confined in the ‘lock up’ at Redditch for five days charged with having purloined a penny from the pocket of another child during divine service: Hansard, 23 Mar. 1866, vol. 182, cc. 845-6; 2 May 1866, vol. 183, c. 283. His practical knowledge rendered him an efficient member of railway and other committees. In 1866 he served on an inquiry into the railway guards and passengers communication bill and, having sat on the select committee on the Irish Tramways Acts, introduced a bill, with William Monsell, to amend that legislation in April 1867.16PP 1866 (465) xi. 611; PP 1866 (418) xi. 643; PP 1867 (128) vi. 439. In spite of being ‘a sincere churchman’, he favoured the ‘unconditional’ abolition of church rates, voting for the measure, 7 Mar. 1866, and supporting the Liberal reform bill, 27 Apr. 1866. That October he accompanied a deputation from Worcester town council to the home office to discuss the amalgamation of the prisons of the city and county of Worcester.17Morning Post, 20 Oct. 1866. He voted consistently with the Liberals and, during the passage of the reform bill, immersed himself in ‘the great question of rating versus rental’, voting for Gladstone’s amendment to enfranchise compound ratepayers, 12 Apr. 1867, and opposing Disraeli’s motion that each voter should be rated as an ordinary tenant, arguing that he ‘could not conceive an enactment more prejudicial’ or ‘more cruel’.18Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 15 Feb. 1868. He also supported amendments to enfranchise lodgers, 13 May, and allocate a third member to six boroughs with populations over 150,000, 17 June, but opposed the reduction of the residency qualification from 2 years to 1, 2 May, and the introduction of cumulative voting, 4, 5 July 1867.

Sherriff was an active constituency member, who readily afforded ‘counsel and active help’ to ‘the respective interests of the Corporation and other public bodies’, such as Worcester’s licensed victuallers and friendly societies.19Such as the Foresters, to whose superannuation fund he contributed liberally: Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 23 Mar. 1878. He considered ‘ignorance’ to be the ‘parent of crime’, and believed that nothing was more important than a general system of state-aided, secular, and ‘common-sense education’.20Birmingham Daily Post, 30 Jan. 1868; Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 15 Feb. 1868. Instead of ‘cramming boys who had to leave school at 13, 14, or 15 with a great deal of Latin and a little Greek’, he suggested they be instructed ‘in the principles of science’, adding that he ‘had never yet been able to see why a good, sound, liberal education could not be given to a boy or girl, and the religious training be left to the parents or guardians, the clergyman, or the minister’. He wished to see similar support provided for the widest possible dissemination of ‘technical education’, to help the country’s artisans respond to foreign competition in manufacturing industry.21He claimed that ‘in proportion to its population, Worcester contained a greater number of mechanical artisans than Manchester’, and that facilities should therefore be afforded ‘wherever artisans were employed’: Birmingham Daily Post, 30 Jan. 1868. He also called for the abolition of the patent laws, claiming that a ‘vast number of the inventions for which patents were taken out … were not the inventions of the patentees’ because of the prohibitive costs involved in registering them. Concerned that ‘the inventive genius of the body of the artisans’ of Britain was being unfairly taxed, he suggested that the patent laws be replaced by ‘a board who should reward inventors out of the public purse’.22Birmingham Daily Post, 30 Jan. 1868; Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 15 Feb. 1868. He regarded the Irish Church as that ‘of a miserable minority begotten in tyranny, and set up for the advantage of the few to the exclusion of the many’, and supported Gladstone’s motion of 3 April 1868, which laid the ground for its disestablishment the following year.23Stenton, Who’s Who of British MPs, i. 349. That February he asked reformers in Worcester ‘not to let their abhorrence of Fenianism weigh against the obligation to do justice to the people’ of Ireland, arguing that the country ‘must be ruled according to its own opinions, and not merely to suit our views’.24Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 15 Feb. 1868.

When Sherriff was re-elected in 1868, even the Conservative Berrow’s Worcester Journal ‘rejoiced’, holding that he was ‘not a narrow-minded man’ and had ‘no sympathy with cliques’. As ‘a good citizen of Worcester’, it continued, he was ‘a credit to that strong, energetic, noble class of men who have sprung up in the north of England, in connection with iron and railways, and given an impetus to our trade and commerce in all parts of the world’.25Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 21 Nov. 1868. He was returned at the top of the poll in 1874, and, his wife having died in 1868, moved to Craycombe House, Fladbury, before taking up residence at Walton-on-Thames. A ‘bluff, kind-hearted, and genial man’, he was said to be ‘a decided favourite with the people at large, and especially possessed the affections of the working classes’. After many months of serious illness, during which he was unable to attend to his duties in the Commons, he died in March 1878 at his final residence, Heatherdeane, in Weybridge, Surrey.26Minutes … Institute of Civil Engineers, 284. His estate was under £25,000: England and Wales, National Probate Calendar, Index of Wills and Administrations, 1861-1941 (15 July 1878). He was buried in a family vault in Worcester cemetery at with full civic honours, the working people being ‘present in large numbers’, and his funeral being likened ‘in some of its features to a great popular demonstration’.27Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 23 Mar. 1878. He was succeeded by his only son, Alexander Thomas Arthur (1847-80), who in 1872 had married the daughter of Henry Robertson, MP for Shrewsbury, 1862-5, 1874-85.28Berrow’s Worcester Journal, 7 Dec. 1872; Wrexham Advertiser, 14. Feb. 1880. Peter Underwood, the grandson of one of his business associates, named a diesel locomotive ‘The Sherriff’ in his memory: http://www.miac.org.uk/encyclo.htm.