MITCHELL, Alexander (1831-1873), of 6 Great Stanhope Street, London, Mdx. and Carolside, Berwick-upon-Tweed

Mitchell, who described himself as ‘a zealous and consistent Liberal’, was born at Aberdeen, the first son of Alexander Mitchell, the cashier of the Aberdeen town and county bank.1The Caledonian Mercury, 12 July 1865. While still a minor, he inherited his father’s extensive estates in Berwickshire, Selkirkshire, Midlothian and Ayrshire, which had been passed from the banker Gilbert Innes of Stow to the Mitchells by family inheritance.2Berwick in Parliament: a history of the representation of Berwick in the House of Commons, 1529-2001 (2001), 110-11. At the age of nineteen he left Oxford University to enter the army, and served with the Grenadier Guards for six years, including a year in the Crimea, where he was remembered as ‘a shy, thoughtful, sensitive youth’.3A.W. Kinglake, The invasion of the Crimea (1901), ii. 173-4. According to his family, Mitchell’s service in the trenches during the siege of Sebastopol in 1855 took a toll on his health from which he never recovered.4Berwick in Parliament, 110-11.

In June 1863 Mitchell offered as a Liberal for a vacancy at Berwick-upon-Tweed created by the death of the sitting member, but after a fractious contest, he was defeated by his Conservative opponent. Although he petitioned against the return on the grounds of bribery and corruption, 13 July 1863, the election committee upheld the result, 4 Mar. 1864. Contesting the seat again in 1865, he called for a substantial extension of the franchise while insisting that he would not support the disenfranchisement of freemen, and after a highly partisan campaign, in which he described the Conservative party as being ‘actuated by the desire to oppose all progress’, he was returned in second place.5The Caledonian Mercury, 12 July 1865.

Although his attendance was often curtailed by poor health, Mitchell divided loyally with the Liberals on most major issues. He backed the Russell ministry’s reform bill, 27 Apr. 1866, and the defeated redistribution bill, 18 June 1866, which precipitated the government’s resignation. With the Liberals in opposition, he divided with Gladstone on all the main features of the representation of the people bill, and, as a staunch opponent of the Maynooth grant and the regium donum, he voted for his leader’s resolutions on the Irish church, 3 Apr. 1868.

Mitchell rarely spoke in debate, and his two known interventions on electoral reform met with little success. During the debates on the representation of the people bill, he proposed the division of every two-member borough into two districts with a separate register, with each district returning one member to Parliament independent of the other, arguing that such a scheme would diminish bribery and give minorities more effective representation, 17 June 1867. The proposal garnered some cautious support in the House, but, citing his wish not to impede the passing of the bill, he withdrew the amendment.6Hansard, 17 June 1867, vol. 187, cc. 1973-76. The following year Mitchell, 26 Mar. 1868, moved an amendment to the government’s corrupt practices at elections bill, claiming that to have judges trying election petitions rather than the Commons would destroy the House’s ‘ancient right and privilege to hold in its own hands the power of determining who are its Members’ and undermine its ‘dignity and independence’. The motion came to nothing.

His health failing, Mitchell retired from public life at the dissolution in 1868. He died at his home in Great Stanhope Street, London, in May 1873.7Morning Post, 21 May 1873. Although he never made his mark in the Commons, a sympathetic obituary remembered him as an ‘excellent man’ whose abilities ‘were very high, especially as a public speaker’.8Berwick Journal, 20 May 1873.