HENNIKER-MAJOR, John Major (1842-1902), of 6 Grafton Square, London and Thornham Hall, Eye, Suffolk

According to one contemporary, when Henniker-Major was first returned for Suffolk East at the age of twenty-three, he had ‘little notion of political matters’, even though he was born into a Suffolk family with an impressive parliamentary pedigree.1Public men of Ipswich and East Suffolk (1875), 117. His great-great-grandfather, Sir John Henniker (1724-1803), first Baron Henniker in the Irish peerage, had sat for Sudbury and Dover; his great-grandfather, John Henniker-Major (1752-1821), for Steyning, Rutland and Stamford, while his father, John Henniker-Major, represented Suffolk East as a Conservative for nearly a quarter of a century over two separate occasions.2HP Commons, 1754-1790, ii. 607-9; iii. 99. When his father was created an English peer in July 1866, however, Henniker-Major, who had graduated from Cambridge only three years earlier, had little experience of public life, save for his fledging service as a magistrate and deputy lieutenant in his native county.

Henniker-Major’s political inexperience was the source of much comment at the Suffolk East double by-election in July 1866, when he came forward as a replacement for his father, who had been created Baron Hartismere. Although the Conservative-supporting Ipswich Journal generously praised his ‘courageous, manly and self-reliant manner’, it was later noted that the ‘sturdy East Suffolk voters had not much faith ... in a schoolboy’.3Ipswich Journal, 21 July 1866; Public men of Ipswich and East Suffolk, 117. He thus endured ‘a rather arduous’ campaign in which he was repeatedly ‘waylaid’ by interventions from local Liberals at his election meetings.4Ibid., 118-9. At the nomination he echoed his father’s earlier campaign speeches, presenting himself as a Conservative who supported ‘progress and improvement’, though he warned that no alterations to the franchise should be made ‘without due consideration and deep thought’. On the question of foreign policy he lavished praise upon the United States and called for the repeal of the malt tax, a position that was an essential pre-requisite to standing in a rural division home to a significant malting industry.5Daily News, 26 July 1866. With no Liberal opposition forthcoming, he was elected unopposed alongside his uncle, Sir Edward Kerrison, MP for Eye since 1852, who was generally regarded as the ‘leading man in Suffolk’ on political questions.6Ipswich Journal, 21 July 1866. As one later election account quipped, Henniker-Major ‘could hardly have gone to Westminster better chaperoned’.7Public men of Ipswich and East Suffolk, 119.

A frequent attender, Henniker-Major followed Disraeli into the division lobby on most major issues, though he was prepared to condemn the Conservative ministry when he felt it failed to satisfactorily defend the agricultural interest. In a forthright maiden speech, he expressed his ‘very great disappointment’ that Disraeli had failed to bring forward a bill to reduce or repeal the malt tax and argued that Members of Parliament would not have tolerated ‘for a moment’ the dire situation that now faced barley growers if it was replicated in any other branch of industry, 14 May 1867. He voted with Disraeli on the major clauses of the Conservative ministry’s representation of the people bill, but his own amendment to divide Suffolk into three double-member divisions rather than the existing two, to reflect the county’s size and wealth, came to nothing, 9 July 1867. He also made brief interventions to draw attention to the dangers of using ‘Lucifer matches’, which had been the cause of a number of accidental fires in Suffolk, and inquire about the future of the foreign cattle market bill, 24 July 1868. He divided with the Conservatives on the major clauses of the Scottish reform bill and, a staunch Anglican, voted against Gladstone’s resolutions on the Irish church, 3 Apr. 1868. He sat on the 1867-68 select committee on county financial arrangements.8PP 1867-68 (421), ix. 198.

Henniker-Major topped the poll at the 1868 general election and continued to make occasional contributions to debate, principally on local issues. On his father’s death in April 1870 he succeeded as second Baron Hartismere and thereafter was an ‘active’ and ‘intelligent’ member of the Lords, where he took a particular interest in agricultural and educational matters.9Public men of Ipswich and East Suffolk, 119. His loyalty to the Conservative party was rewarded in July 1877 when he was made a lord-in-waiting to Queen Victoria, a post he held on three further occasions until his appointment as lieutenant-governor of the Isle of Man in January 1896. As lieutenant-governor, he attempted to introduce legislation on employers’ liability that would bring the island into line with Britain, but his initiatives were defeated in the House of Keys.10D. G. Kermode, Offshore Island politics: the constitutional and political development of the Isle of Man in the twentieth century (2001), 17, 41.

Hartismere died from ‘Bright’s disease’ at Government House on the Isle of Man in June 1902.11The Times, 28 June 1902. His effects were valued at £9,757 9s. 10d.12England and Wales, National Probate Calendar, 8 Nov. 1902. He was succeeded by his third but only surviving son, Charles, a captain in the 3rd rifle brigade.13The Times, 28 June 1902. The family papers, from 1892 onwards, are held by the Suffolk Record Office.14Suff. RO, HA116.