Background
Charles Thomson Ritchie was born in 1838 at Broughty Ferry, on the edge of Dundee, Scotland, the son of a jute merchant and manufacturer.
Charles Thomson Ritchie was born in 1838 at Broughty Ferry, on the edge of Dundee, Scotland, the son of a jute merchant and manufacturer.
He was educated, until age 15, at the City of London School, before going off to work in the family firm’s London office.
In 1874, at the age of 36, he won a parliamentary seat as Conservative candidate for the two-member constituency of Tower Hamlets, in London.
In the first Salisbury Conservative government (1885-1886), he was appointed financial secretary to the Admiralty. He was successful in this post, and within a year of his appointment, the construction rate of British battleships tripled. A year later, when Salisbury formed his second administration (1886-1892), Ritchie was promoted to president of the Local Government Board.
When Salisbury formed his third government (1895—1902), Ritchie was appointed president of the Board of Trade, thus occupying the second-ranking cabinet position, which had often served as a stepping-stone for aspirants to the post of chancellor of the exchequer.
In November 1900 he was appointed to the post of home secretary.
At the end of the South African/Boer War in June 1902, Prime Minister Salisbury and Chancellor of the Exchequer Hicks Beach decided to resign. The new prime minister, Arthur James Balfour, opted for Ritchie as chancellor of the exchequer, and the appointment was duly made on 8 August 1902. From the start, however, Balfour and Ritchie were unable to develop a close working relationship. Ritchie, famed for his legislative activity, had probably become chancellor, as Balfour’s secretary suggested, because he was a “hard-working minister of pedestrian methods.”
Ritchie was at odds with the mood of Balfour and the cabinet. By this time he had become a fervent free trader—an attitude that did not sit well in a cabinet that was edging in the direction of mild protectionism, as indicated in the prior imposition of Hicks Beach’s 1 shilling (5p) registration duty on corn imports. Ritchie was determined to remove this duty, and did so in his budget of 1903. He also announced that income tax would be reduced by 4d (1.6p) to 1 Id (4.4p) on the pound; this reduction, though, was lower than might have been expected, given that the Boer War was at an end. Ritchie’s budget came before Parliament at a time of intense political conflict within Conservative ranks. Shortly after the budget announcements, on 15 May 1903, Joseph Chamberlain declared his intention to raise the Imperial Preference issue. He resigned from the cabinet in September 1903 to pursue his protectionist political campaign. Ritchie resigned on 5 October 1903, along with several other free traders.
Ritchie’s resignation at age 65 in effect put an end to his political career. He stayed in the House of Commons until the end of 1905, when he was raised to the House of Lords as the first Lord Ritchie of Dundee. For a time, he played a minor role in the activities of the Unionist Free Food League. He died in Biarritz on 9 January 1906.
A Scottish Liberal Nonconformist, Ritchie was to the left of the Conservative Party. From his seat on the backbench in Commons, he successfully promoted an 1875 bill to extend the Bank Holiday Act of 1871 to dockyard and custom house employees. He also campaigned vigorously against the continuation of the sugar bounties paid by foreign governments to sugar beet producers. He argued that such foreign bounties damaged the business prospects of London’s East End sugar refiners. His argument for Britain’s imposition of countervailing duties failed to persuade; but he did have the satisfaction of being appointed chairman of a select committee (of M.P.s) formed to study the issue in 1879.
When Tower Hamlets was split up as a result of the extension of the franchise and reorganization of constituencies in 1884, Ritchie moved to the single-member constituency of St. George’s- in-the-East, which he won in 1885. However, he was defeated in the 1892 general election and did not return to Parliament until 1895, following his electoral victory at Croydon, near London. Despite this hiatus, Ritchie did eventually gain ministerial experience.
Ritchie’s political career was hardly the stuff of greatness. Nevertheless, he was a determined, prolific, and principled legislator who resigned from office largely due to his commitment to free trade in a cabinet that was divided and dithering on the issue.
He married at 20 and seemed set for a career as a businessman.