Andrew Bonar Law

Andrew Bonar Law was the Glasgow iron merchant who became Prime Minister, the only holder of the office raised and made in the city. Though he was born in Canada, he was a Glaswegian in all but birth, and his rival Asquith once mocked him as a man with ‘the mind of a Glasgow Baillie’.

A Glasgow merchant

Born in New Brunswick in 1858, the son of an Ulster-Scots minister, Bonar Law was sent as a boy to Glasgow to be raised by his mother’s family, the wealthy Kidstons. He was educated at the High School of Glasgow and went into the Clyde iron trade, and by the age of thirty he was a prosperous partner in the Glasgow firm of William Jacks and Company, a child of the industrial city we describe in our post on the Second City of the Empire and its trade.

An unusual Tory

He first entered Parliament in 1900 for a Glasgow seat, and in 1911 he became the first leader of the Conservative Party to come from a business rather than a landed background. A plain, hard-working and rather melancholy man, he led the Conservatives for over a decade and was a dominant figure in the wartime coalition, serving as Chancellor of the Exchequer and Leader of the Commons under Lloyd George. He was a major voice in the politics of his day.

The Unknown Prime Minister

In October 1922 Bonar Law led the Conservative revolt that ended the coalition, and became Prime Minister. But his time at the summit was brief. Struck by throat cancer, he resigned after just 209 days, the shortest premiership of the twentieth century, and died in 1923. At his funeral in Westminster Abbey, Asquith is said to have called him ‘the Unknown Prime Minister’ – a quiet Glasgow merchant who had reached the very top of British public life.