Born in Brayton, near Carlisle, Lawson, who in his own words was ‘a fanatic, a faddist, and an extreme man’, was a leading temperance campaigner and the first parliamentary spokesman for the United Kingdom Alliance.1Sir Wilfrid Lawson: a memoir, ed. by G.W.E. Russell (1909); G.W.E. Russell, ‘Lawson, Sir Wilfrid, second baronet (1829-1906)’, rev. D.M. Fahey, Oxf. DNB, www.oxforddnb.com. His father, whose original surname was Wybergh, had taken the name Lawson in 1812 upon succeeding to the estates of his brother, Thomas, who had inherited the property following the death without issue of their uncle, Sir Wilfrid Lawson, tenth and last baronet, in 1806.2Russell, ‘Lawson, Sir Wilfrid’; R.S. Ferguson, Cumberland and Westmoreland MPs from the Restoration to the Reform Bill of 1867 (1871), 397. Lawson’s father, who was made a baronet in 1831, was a teetotaller and championed the causes of temperance, peace and free trade. Dreading the ‘contaminating influences of university life’, he had invited J. Oswald Jackson, later a Congregationalist minister, to tutor Lawson, who subsequently asserted that he ‘had never had any education’, though he undoubtedly acquired a good knowledge of Greek and Latin.3J. Morrison Davidson, Eminent English Liberals in and out of Parliament (1880), 67-8; Russell, ed., Sir Wilfrid Lawson, 5-10.
Lawson’s father, whose political convictions left an indelible mark upon him, persuaded him to enter Parliament at the earliest opportunity.4Russell, ‘Lawson, Sir Wilfrid’. After being defeated by two Conservatives at West Cumberland in 1857, Lawson stood, alongside his uncle Sir James Graham, as a Liberal for Carlisle at the 1859 general election, and following a heated campaign in which he championed the ballot, was returned in second place.5Sir Wilfrid Lawson, 11-13; Morning Chronicle, 30 Apr. 1859. Although a teetotaller, Lawson had refrained from publicly espousing the cause of prohibition during the campaign, and it was only in retrospect that his return was seen as a victory for the United Kingdom Alliance.6B. Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: the temperance question in England, 1815-1872 (1971), 240.
Appearing in Parliament for the first time as ‘a good looking young man, smartly dressed with “Dundreary whiskers” and peg-top trousers’, Lawson joined the radical wing of the Liberal party, and his zealous advocacy of parliamentary reform and non-intervention in foreign affairs saw him frequently clash with Palmerston’s ministry.7Sir Wilfrid Lawson, 26. He criticised the premier for ‘having done too little in the way of reform’, 10 Apr. 1861, and dismissing Lord John Russell’s lament that the Lords would inevitably block any franchise extension, he recorded in his journal that the ministry was ‘the most subservient to the aristocracy which this country has seen for many a year’.8Ibid., 40. He divided in minorities for Locke King’s county franchise bill, 13 Mar. 1861, and Baines’s borough franchise bill, 10 Apr. 1861 and 11 May 1864. Described by a contemporary as ‘the very incarnation of the righteous spirit of anti-jingoism’, he opposed what he felt to be Palmerston’s warmongering in China, recording in his journal in 1860 that ‘it has always seemed to me a curious idea that it is our duty to fight all the wicked people in the world’.9Davidson, Eminent English Liberals, 71-2; Sir Wilfrid Lawson, 33. A supporter of religious equality, he also voted for church rate abolition, 14 May 1862, and the tests abolition (Oxford) bill, 16 Mar. 1864. His known select committee service was limited.10Lawson is known to have sat on select committees on the salmon and trout fisheries bill, dockyards and the salmon fishery act amendment bill: PP 1861 (433), xiv. 328; PP 1864 (270), viii. 11; PP 1865 (358), xii. 437.
A ‘most unusual combination of humanitarian and humorist’, who ‘possessed a great facility for versification’, Lawson’s speeches were ‘no less reasoned than wittily conceived’.11Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, 252-3; The Times, 2 July 1906; Davidson, Eminent English Liberals, 64-7, 74. Disraeli, who once alluded to Lawson as ‘young and curly’, noted that he possessed an admirable ‘spirit of gay wisdom’.12Davidson, Eminent English Liberals, 64. In his maiden speech he criticised the Liberal ministry’s reform bill, declaring ‘give us the ballot without the bill, rather than the bill without the ballot’, 1 July 1860. His contribution, though, was barely heard as, in his own words, ‘like a perfect fool’ he ‘got up at the sacred dinner hour’, though according to Sir John Trelawny, Lawson displayed ‘a calmness and temper amid unfair interruption’.13Sir Wilfrid Lawson, 34-5; The parliamentary diaries of Sir John Trelawny, 1858-1865, ed. by T.A. Jenkins (1992), 111. He made further attacks on the ministry’s inability to tackle franchise reform and corrupt practices at elections, 10 Apr. 1861, and divided in the minority for the conveyance of voters bill, believing that ‘to legalize the conveyance of voters to the poll was, in his opinion, neither more nor less a system of bribery’, 26 Feb. 1862.
Lawson dedicated the majority of his speeches to the temperance issue. Although, according to one historian, he was one of the very few ‘really reliable intermediaries between the pressure groups and the Liberal party’, Lawson, in his speeches, did not explicitly identify the prohibitionist position as a Liberal one, and he pressed for support from members of both political parties.14D.A. Hamer, The politics of electoral pressure: a study in the history of the Victorian reform agitation (1977), 8. He spoke in opposition to the sale of spirits bill, insisting that the issue ‘ought to be considered, not in the interests of the publicans, but in the interest of the people’, 21 May 1862, and on the question of spirit licences, he argued, in a ‘very fair speech’ that ‘the licensing system, in its present state, could hardly be defended by any one’, 27 June 1862.15Parliamentary diaries of Sir John Trelawny, 215. Subsequently, in the 1863 session he doggedly pressed the home secretary, Sir George Grey, on whether the government intended to ‘amend laws by which sale of intoxicating liquors is permitted and regulated’, 10 Feb., 26 Feb., 28 Apr. 1863. Rebuffed by Grey, he moved that the licensing system required ‘immediate alteration’ and, in a speech that mixed humour with outrage, declared that the inland revenue office ‘thought the great object for which man was sent into the world was to consume duty-paid liquor’, but his motion was defeated 87-21, 16 July 1863.
On 8 June 1864 Lawson brought forward his intoxicating liquors bill, also known as the ‘Permissive bill’, which proposed that drink-shops should be suppressed in any neighbourhood where a two-thirds majority of the inhabitants voted against their continuance. Aware that the proposal, which had been originally authored by the United Kingdom Alliance and was supported by 2,549 petitions bearing 482,413 signatures, was unpopular in the Commons, he insisted that ‘whatever might be the feeling of the House with regard to the bill ... there was undoubtedly out of doors, among a large portion of the community, a strong desire that the measure should pass’ and because many of the petitioners ‘belonged to the poorer classes of the community’ who could not vote, ‘the House should pay some attention to their prayer’.16Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, 254. His speech, which displayed a mastery of detail, was also ‘amusing and personal’, but his claim that John Arthur Roebuck was a ‘canting hypocrite’ for supporting the Sunday closing bill but opposing his proposal caused uproar, prompting Lawson to issue an apology. The bill was ultimately rejected, 292-35.17Hansard, 8 June 1864, vol. 175, cc. 1390-423; Parliamentary diaries of Sir John Trelawny, 285; Sir Wilfrid Lawson, 60. Undeterred, he continued to press Grey on the issue, 6 Mar. 1865, but, in a controversial move, he opposed the Liverpool licensing bill, arguing that the licensing question could only be addressed by a public and not a private bill, 24 Feb. 1865.
At the 1865 general election Lawson stood again for Carlisle, but following a campaign marked by violence he was defeated in third place.18The Times, 13 July 1865; Newcastle Courant, 14 July 1865. He later reflected that ‘I had committed the unpardonable sin of bringing in the permissive bill. ... Drink was king then’.19Sir Wilfrid Lawson, 68. Thereafter he spoke regularly in Cumberland on the extension of the franchise, claiming that ‘parliament will not do right without an immense deal of pressure’ and remembering Palmerston as ‘the concealed enemy of reform’.20The wit and wisdom of Sir Wilfrid Lawson: being selections from his speeches 1865-1885; with a biographical sketch (1886), 11-14. Following the death of his father in June 1867, he succeeded to the baronetcy and estates.
Returned at the head of the poll for Carlisle at the 1868 general election, Lawson continued to champion the ‘Permissive bill’, introducing it annually, with varying degrees of failure, until 1879 when he switched to bringing forward a ‘local option’ resolution, which was carried for the first time the following year.21Russell, ‘Lawson, Sir Wilfrid’. His vision of a ‘local veto’ of the retail drink trade, however, was never realised, despite its inclusion in the Liberal party’s Newcastle programme of 1891.22Ibid. According to one historian, ‘his wit caused Westminster audiences to doubt the seriousness of his intent’ and ‘the rigidity of Lawson’s faith in local option obstructed compromises essential for real achievement and discouraged the empirical researches necessary for temperance progress’.23Harrison, Drink and the Victorians, 253.
Lawson sat for Carlisle until 1885, when he sought election for the Cockermouth division of Cumberland, where he was narrowly defeated. Returned for Cockermouth as a Liberal in 1886, he represented the division until 1900 when his pro-Boer sympathies cost him his seat. He sat briefly for the Camborne division of Cornwall before his re-election at Cockermouth in 1906. Seventy-six years of age, he was now one of the longest serving members, but with his health declining, he made little impact in the Commons.24Ibid.; The Times, 2 July 1906. He died at his London residence, 18 Ovington Square, in July 1906. His effects were valued at £227,114 4s. 10d.25England and Wales, National Probate Calendar, Index of wills and administration, 1861-1941, 31 Aug. 1906. He was succeeded by his eldest son, Wilfrid, Liberal MP for Cockermouth, 1910-16. Lawson’s verses on political themes were collected by Sir F. Carruthers Gould in Cartoons in Rhyme and Line (1905) and his correspondence with leading political figures is held at a number of archives.26Letters to W.E. Gladstone, BL Add. Mss 44456-44526; letters to Henry Broadhurst, British Library of Political and Economic Science; letters to Sir William Harcourt and Lewis Harcourt, Bodleian Library, Oxford; letters to the earl of Carlisle, Castle Howard, north Yorkshire; letters to Sir W. Trevelyan, University of Newcastle, Robinson Library.