17 Charlotte Square, Edinburgh, birthplace of Richard Haldane
Haldane at West Point sometime before the Great War.
The Viscount Haldane, Lord Chancellor, 1912
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1903
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1921
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1922
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Richard Haldane was born at 17 Charlotte Square, Edinburgh, the son of Robert Haldane and his wife Mary Elizabeth, daughter of Richard Burdon-Sanderson. He was the grandson of the Scottish evangelist James Alexander Haldane, the brother of respiratory physiologist John Scott Haldane, Sir William Haldane and author Elizabeth Haldane, and the uncle of J. B. S. Haldane and Naomi Mitchison.
He received his first education at the Edinburgh Academy, and then at the Göttingen University He gained a first and MA at University of Edinburgh where he received first-class honours in Philosophy and as Gray scholar and Ferguson scholar in philosophy of the four Scottish Universities.
After studying law in London, he was called to the Bar by Lincoln's Inn, in 1879, and became a successful lawyer. He was taken on at 5 New Square Chambers by Lord Davey in 1882 as the junior. By 1890 he had become a Queen's Counsel. By 1905 he was earning £20,000 per annum at the Bar. He became a bencher at Lincoln's Inn in 1893.
He sat in the House of Commons from 1885 until his elevation to the peerage in 1911. As a member of the imperialist wing of the Liberal Party, he supported the British effort in the South African War (1899-1902), thereby differing from the party leader, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman. The latter’s appointment of Haldane to the War Office (effective December 11, 1905) proved fortunate for Great Britain because of the administrative abilities Haldane demonstrated in his new post. Although the Territorial Force that he created was nominally an army reserve organization for protecting the British Isles, many of its units volunteered to fight in continental Europe in World War I. The speedy mobilization of the British Expeditionary Force in August 1914 was largely the result of his planning. He also took the lead in forming a national general staff (from 1904) and an imperial general staff (from 1909); for this purpose, Emperor William II allowed him to study German general staff operations at first hand in 1906. As Anglo-German relations were deteriorating, Haldane went to Berlin in February 1912 on a well-publicized but ineffectual mission concerning British neutrality and the relative naval strength of the two countries.
On June 10, 1912, Haldane became lord chancellor in H.H. Asquith’s Liberal government. He soon increased the number of lords of appeal and otherwise worked to hasten the judicial process. In May 1915, however, when Asquith formed a wartime coalition ministry, he excluded Haldane, who was unjustly accused of being pro-German. By the end of the war his political orientation had shifted to the left. In Ramsay MacDonald’s first Labour Party government (January-November 1924), he once more served as lord chancellor.
Long interested in education, Haldane was associated with the Fabian Socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb in founding the London School of Economics in 1895.
He died suddenly of heart disease at his home in Auchterarder, Scotland, on 19 August 1928, aged 72. The viscountcy became extinct on his death.
Richard Haldane created the officers training corps, set up the territorial army, and established the general staff organization, which was further extended two years later to include the imperial general staff.
He recognized the importance of science by founding the National Physical Laboratory at Teddington.
A believer in peace, he visited Germany in 1912 to sound out the government there on the possibility of some agreement in regard to armaments, but his mission had no results. There was no justification for later charges that he was pro-German.
A philosopher of very considerable merit, he was Gifford Lecturer at St. Andrews (1902-1904), and he took a general and vigorous interest in the problems of universities and urged their modernization.
Haldane was deep thinker, an unusual breed: a philosopher-politician. During his stay at Göttingen he expanded an interest in the German philosophers, Schopenauer and Hegel.
Physical Characteristics: Haldane had health problems all his life. He suffered from bad rheumatism, a stigmata in the eye and in 1909, he had to take bed rest when going blind from iritis. A lifelong walker and cigar smoker, he was diagnosed diabetic.
Quotes from others about the person
Osbert Sitwell described him as "entering a room with the air of a whole procession".
Leo Amery said he looked like "the old-fashioned family butler".
Haldane remained a lifelong bachelor after his fiancée, Miss Valentine Ferguson, broke off their engagement.
Sir William Stowell Haldane (19 August 1864 - 7 November 1951) of Cloan was Crown Agent for Scotland.
Elizabeth Sanderson Haldane (27 May 1862 - 24 December 1937) was an author, biographer, philosopher, suffragist, nursing administrator, and social welfare worker.
