Western Wood (MP)

Family

Wood was the fifth child, and third son, of Sir Matthew Wood, 1st Baronet (1768–1843) and his wife Maria née Page.{{cite book

Career

Wood was a merchant in the City of London, and a member of the Worshipful Company of Fishmongers, of which he was a warden by 1861.{{cite news

When the Lord John Russell, the Liberal Member of Parliament (MP) for the City of London, was elevated to the peerage as Earl Russell,{{cite book |author-link= F. W. S. Craig |orig-year=1977

At the selection meeting in the London Tavern on 18 July, one person favoured inviting the Chancellor of the Exchequer, William Ewart Gladstone, to be their candidate, but the others preferred Wood. He told the meeting that, like his father Sir Matthew and his brother Sir William, he supported the secret ballot. In an election address issued that evening he stated his selection was due "entirely to the favourable recollection of the services of my late father". He said that he had been a reformer since his youth, when those principles were not dominant, and pledged himself to support any measures to extend the franchise, expand education, and to achieve an "equitable adjustment of the vexed question of church-rates". In foreign policy, he pledged to follow the principles of Lord John Russell when Foreign Secretary, and said that while it was Britain's duty to express a "lively sympathy for the efforts of other nations to secure their civil and religious liberty", they should abstain "from all interference with the development of the national will".

He asserted that his own personal interests in the commercial of affairs of the city would ensure that he gave them due attention, and that his experience was that in business matters public and private interests were "identical". Finally, he asked the electors not to vote for him on any grounds other than that his opinions coincided with theirs.

His Conservative opponent was the then Lord Mayor of London, William Cubitt, who had resigned as MP for Andover{{cite web

Nominations took place at a hustings in the London Guildhall on 29 July,{{cite news with polling on 30 July 1861. When the result was formally declared on 31 July, Wood had won{{London Gazette

Wood died in office less than two years later, on 17 May 1863 aged 52, at his home North Crayplace in Kent.{{cite news

References

References

1. {{Rayment-hc. l. 3. (March 2012)
2. (2006). "Critical companion to James Joyce: a literary reference to his life and work". Facts on File, Inc.