Charles Stuart Parker, MP

OBITUARY - MR. C. S. PARKER We regret to announce the death of the Right Hon. Charles Stuart Parker, which occurred at his residence in Westminster on Saturday, in his 81st year. Mr Parker was the eldest son of a West India merchant of Fairlie [Ayrshire] and Aigburth, Liverpool. His grandfather was a Glasgow merchant, and an intimate friend of Dr Chalmers, the great Free Church preacher. Mr Parker was distantly related to Mr Gladstone, and a cousin of the late Principal Rainy. Educated at Eton and University College, Oxford, where he was Scholar and Fellow, in the days of Dean Stanley and Professor Goldwin Smith, he graduated with first-class honours in classics. He was appointed a commissioner for the fine arts in the great Paris Exhibition [1855], but when he was elected a Fellow of University College he returned to Oxford, and for some years was public examiner for honours as well as in the pass schools. In 1864 he entered public life as private secretary to his uncle, Mr (afterward Viscount) Cardwell, at the Colonial Office. Four years later he became a candidate for Perthshire, on the recommendation of Mr Gladstone, and won a memorable victory by displacing the late Sir William Stirling Maxwell, who, however, regained the seat in 1874. In 1878 Mr Parker transferred his attentions to Perth city, for which he was returned four times, retaining the seat until 1882. In the House of Commons he did good work, especially in committee, devoting attention particularly to education. He was made a Commissioner under the Public Schools Act of 1868, and the English and Scottish Education Acts owed something to his laborious pioneer work. When Lord Cardwell became War Minister, Mr C.S. Parker was his secretary and to him fell a considerable share of the work of Army reorganization, In the House he took special interest in the question of allotments, ground game, reform of local taxation, and amendment of the Crofters Act, and supported strongly local control of the liquor traffic. He was a member of the Commission which reported on the endowed schools and hospitals in Scotland, and, under the Conservative Government, was chairman of a Departmental Committee on Scottish Secondary Education. Throughout his Parliamentary career he was a supporter of Mr Gladstone's policy. Mr Parker was the author of a "Life of Sir Robert Peel" "from his private papers", published in three volumes in 1899. He had the good fortune to receive for this work the warm praise of Lord Rosebery, who, in a review, since published in book form, declared that Mr Parker, as editor, "might be cited among the rare masters of that fastidious calling "- laborious, conscientious, and fair, he was never anxious to obtrude himself on the reader's attention. Mr Parker also published the "Life and Letters of Sir James Graham". Few men kept assiduously abreast of the political and intellectual movement of his time. He was a constant attendant of the debates, when not in Parliament, was as deeply interested in science as in politics, and was the friend of Kelvin and Tyndall. Canon Henson, referring at St Margaret's, Westminster, to Mr Parker's death, said he had reached an advanced age, which his erect mien and stately carriage helped to conceal, and to the end of his long life he was the centre of personal affection to a large circle of friends and relatives, young and old. They would long remember there that tall, dignified form, with the noble hand, white with the snows of honoured age, and reverently bent in worship. Some of them who had the privilege of his personal friendship would associate with that recollection the traits of a courteous and gentle character, and the rare distinction which fine scholarship and the habit of intellectual work could add to natural powers. He was a man of deep and unobtrusive piety, open-handed and tender-hearted, whose good deeds were many, and mostly unsuspected. Mr Parker never married, but his home at Fairlie and in London was the centre of warm hospitality to a large circle of relatives and friends. He received honorary degrees at Glasgow and at his own University of Oxford in 1908. He was made a Privy Councillor in 1907; and his last public act was to attend the meeting of the Privy Council immediately after the death of King Edward VII. He was thus one of the signatories of the Proclamation of King George V. [ Daily Telegraph, 21 June 1910, p. 9 ]