LEES, John Frederick (1809-1867), of Werneth, Oldham, Lancs.

Aside from being a local resident, Lees ‘had nothing particular to recommend him as a politician’, according to one contemporary.2B. Grime, Memory sketches (1887), 26. One local Radical declared that ‘had he not from a strange concurrence of circumstances become an M.P. he might have passed through his whole period of human existence and no person been aware of it, except his most immediate friends’.3Manchester Times and Gazette, 8 July 1837. A cotton manufacturer, Lees came from an established Oldham family, who were among the principal landed proprietors in the borough. His grandfather John, also a cotton manufacturer (and commander of the Oldham volunteers from 1803), had purchased the lordship of the manor of Werneth in 1795 for £30,000. This passed to Lees’ father Edward in 1823, and was inherited by Lees on his father’s death in 1835.4J. Wheeler, Manchester: its political, social and commercial history, ancient and modern (1836), 436; VCH Lancashire, v. 92-108 [www.british-history.ac.uk]; London Gazette, 3 Nov. 1803. In addition to cotton, the family had colliery interests, and Edward Lees had added to their wealth by winning £30,000 on the Glasgow lottery.5J. Foster, Class struggle and the industrial revolution (1974), 275; Hull Packet, 12 Sept. 1834. Lees contributed to the family’s gentrification by acquiring a coat of arms.6Burke’s General Armory of England, Scotland and Wales (1878), 595.

Lees owed his brief stint as Oldham’s first Conservative MP to divisions among Oldham’s radicals at the 1835 by-election that followed the death of William Cobbett, which allowed him to gain the seat with a majority of just 13 votes. At the first annual dinner of Oldham’s Operative Conservative Association in 1836, he made clear his admiration for Peel, describing him as ‘the man prepared to use the pruning knife judiciously, to lop off the rotten branches, and leave the healthy and strong parts to flourish’, and in the Commons, Lees was usually found in the opposite lobby from his fellow Oldham MP, John Fielden, who refused to associate with him.7The Times, 8 Jan. 1836; S. Weaver, John Fielden and the politics of popular radicalism 1832-1847 (1987), 135. This was particularly the case on religious issues: Lees voted for the third reading of the established church bill, which Fielden opposed, 25 July 1836, and against the abolition of church rates, which Fielden supported, 15 Mar. 1837. In his 1837 speech to Oldham’s Operative Conservative Association, he asserted that ‘he would never see the Protestant church of Ireland destroyed, and the Roman Catholic church raised on its ruins’, and would oppose the Irish Church Bill so long as the appropriation clause was attached: he had voted in the minority for Stanley’s alternative proposals, 3 June 1836.8The Times, 10 Jan. 1837. He is not known to have spoken in debate during his brief tenure of the seat.

Faced with a unified radical opposition at the 1837 general election, Lees and his fellow Conservative candidate withdrew after only three hours of polling. He is not known to have sought re-election and does not appear to have taken an active role in Oldham’s parliamentary politics thereafter. In 1845, he served on the provisional committee for the Oldham District Railway Company.9Manchester Times and Gazette, 12 July 1845. He was appointed as a magistrate for Lancashire in 1842 and for the West Riding in 1851.10Liverpool Mercury, 14 Jan. 1842; Leeds Mercury, 12 Apr. 1851. In later life, he appears to have taken up residence in Gloucestershire, where he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Royal North Gloucestershire Militia in 1853.11Morning Chronicle, 12 Feb. 1853. He died in September 1867 at Cheltenham, where he is commemorated with a memorial in Christ Church.12Gent. Mag. (Oct. 1867) ii. 549; http://www.glosgen.co.uk/cheltenham/cheltchristmi.htm His brother George (1810-79) succeeded him as lord of the manor of Werneth.13VCH Lancashire, v. 92-108.