HARRIS, John Quincey (1815-1846), of Winchester House, Southwark, Surrey; Brenchley, Kent

A London ‘hat manufacturer & fur cutter’ and Reformer, Harris’s time in the Commons was curtailed by his being unseated for bribery less than a year after his election.1Dod MS, ii. 561. However, this still meant that his parliamentary career was marginally longer than that of his father, John Rawlinson Harris (1774-1830), who had been elected for Southwark at the 1830 general election only to die before taking his seat.2HP Commons, 1820-32, v. 514-15. The Harris family, Quaker converts to Anglicanism, had been involved in the London hat trade for at least two generations by the time Harris succeeded his father, when he inherited a personal estate worth £50,000 and property in Essex and London, including forty-two houses in Southwark.3Ibid.

In 1841 Harris accepted a requisition from Liberal electors to stand for Newcastle-under-Lyme, the constituency’s staple trade being hat manufacture.4Staffordshire Advertiser, 5 June 1841. It was a connection which Harris sought to exploit, telling electors that ‘he had asked for their votes on the ground of his being interested in the trade of the town’.5Staffordshire Advertiser, 12 June 1841. During a spirited and energetic campaign Harris, ‘an enemy to all monopolies’, regularly inveighed against the corn laws, denying that their repeal would cause low wages.6Ibid. He also criticised the East India Company, and the sugar and timber duties which favoured Indian and Canadian producers respectively.7Staffordshire Advertiser, 19 June 1841. Although not hostile to the principle of the new poor law, ‘as a man who considered poverty no crime’ Harris thought some of its clauses, including the restriction of outdoor relief, were ‘a disgrace to the statute book’. He supported triennial parliaments and a system of national education, but objected to the ballot as ‘un-English’. His Conservative opponents found it difficult to mobilise a ‘church in danger’ cry against Harris on account of his Anglicanism, although he did favour the abolition of church rates.8Staffordshire Advertiser, 12 June 1841. Harris’s opposition to the corn laws and the new poor law proved popular among the Newcastle-under-Lyme freemen and he was returned in second place.

Although he later claimed otherwise, Harris, who appears to have been a silent member, voted against Peel’s revised corn law, 9 Mar. 1842, having earlier supported Villiers’ amendment to end all duties. He was absent from the votes on the reintroduction of the income tax. A petition alleging that Harris did not have the requisite property qualification and had used bribery had been presented, 7 Sept. 1841, and he was unseated by an election committee, 11 May 1842.9CJ, xcvi. 548-9; ibid., xcvii. 279. Despite being disqualified Harris stood at the subsequent by-election, during which he organised a large and colourful procession to accompany his entry into the town. He had prepared the ground by offering large orders to Conservative hatters as an inducement to switch sides.10The Times, 10 June 1842. At the nomination Harris claimed that he had supported Sir Robert Peel’s revision of the corn laws and import duties as a step towards free trade, but argued that the Whigs also deserved credit. He also admitted that not petitioning against his Conservative colleague after the general election had been a mistake, as ‘the great probability was that they would both … have been down here together’.11Morning Post, 14 June 1842. Harris won by twenty votes, and returned to Parliament to endorse the ballot and the abolition of the poor law commission. However, as he had been disqualified from sitting in the present Parliament, another election committee declared his opponent duly elected, 22 July 1842.12The Times, 15 June 1842; CJ, xcvii. 518. Harris, who evidently made no further attempt to enter the Commons, died of apoplexy at the age of thirty-one in 1846.13Gent. Mag. (1846), ii. 327. A bachelor, he was survived by his mother and his brothers.14See the report of his mother’s will in The law journal reports for the year 1864 (1864), 181.