Anthony John Mundella PC (28 March 1825[1]– 21 July 1897) was an English manufacturer[2] and later a Liberal Party MP and Cabinet Minister who sat in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom from 1868 to 1897.

[3][7] From his father, and the exiled Italians who occasionally visited the family home, Mundella acquired at an early age what was described as "a kind of strange unconventional political education".

[9] He was further politically inspired by the arrival in Leicester of Richard Cobden on his nationwide campaign for the repeal of the Corn Laws,[10] and was always active in advocating the causes of the working classes.

[3] At the age of eighteen Mundella left Kempson's to become a journeyman, then an overseer (in which post he earned £200 a year and a commission on profits) and ultimately manager of a large warehouse set up by another hosiery manufacturing business in Leicester, Harris & Hamel.

[16] Not by his own invention, but by encouraging inventors within the company (many of them loom operators) and sharing patents with them, Mundella was able to develop plentiful new hosiery-making machinery, a lot of it steam-driven, including a technological revolution: a machine which for the first time enabled a stocking to be made and fully fashioned automatically without stopping the action.

[13] There was a setback in 1859 when Hine & Mundella's factory was damaged by fire, but it was soon rebuilt and returned to operation with the advantage of newer and more powerful machines, in large part paid for by the company's insurers.

[3] From 1859, at the time of increased fear of an invasion by France, he was one of the founding members of the local volunteer corps, the Robin Hood Rifles, joining in May 1859 and being promoted to lieutenant in June and captain five months later.

Mundella had already stated that he "did not feel obliged to go on toiling to amass a great fortune, but was justified in giving up commerce to devote himself to political life and his love of beautiful things".

[21] With his evident confidence, the respect in which he was held as a pioneer of industrial arbitration and as an expert on social matters, combined with the early perception that he was a hard worker, he immediately found himself to be one of the most highly regarded MPs of the new intake.

[6] In the middle of March Mundella's stock rose higher when his board of arbitration was commended in the newly published Report of the Royal Commission on Trade Unions.

And he attacked the inconsistent treatment of men and women in the Contagious Diseases Acts of the 1860s which in ports and garrison towns subjected female prostitutes, and those suspected of being such, to arrest, inspection, and (if they were found to be infected) incarceration for up to one year, while no provision was made for the examination of their male customers.

[9] In the same year he aided the passage of the Coal Mines Regulation Act, paying particular attention to the clauses restricting the working hours of women and children.

He continued his campaign for fewer hours for women and children with the introduction of a nine-hours factory bill in 1872 but it made slow progress and in the summer of 1873, due to opposition from manufacturers, it was withdrawn.

[23] In 1877 Mundella sponsored a bill to abolish the property qualification for standing for local office, pointing out that 80 to 90 per cent of the voters in his constituency were disqualified from being councillors and yet were the first to be pressured by rises in rates.

Mundella improved the inspection of schools, including employing some women inspectors, and insisting that the health and mental capacity of children should be taken into consideration when examining their learning progress.

Gladstone returned to the prime ministership barely three months later in January 1886 and after briefly considering Mundella for the post of Chancellor of the Exchequer he instead elevated him to the cabinet as President of the Board of Trade.

[3] In the short period before the next general election Mundella had little time at the Board of Trade to effect major legislative improvements but he was able to introduce a number of administrative changes.

An improvement in the way merchant seamen were paid their wages at the end of a voyage ensured they did not have to linger for long periods in the seaports rather than returning home, thereby reducing prostitution in the ports.

In the year following his resignation, Mundella arbitrated successfully in the Hanley pottery dispute in March 1895 and was intensively occupied as chairman of the committee examining the poor law schools in London.

Mundella's final utterance in the House, after 3,280 vocal contributions over nearly thirty years as an MP,[22] was a brief interjection in the debate on the second reading of the education (Scotland) bill on 1 July 1897.

The coffin was draped in a pall of Venetian brocade, with a marble statuette of the Madonna and Child and a photograph of Mundella's late wife placed at its head.

[2] Many of the improvements he fostered have been altered somewhat in the years since his death, but the long-term effects of everything he enabled have remained:[3] children must still go to school, trade unions are still legal, freshwater fish are still allowed a peaceful breeding season.

Despite Mundella's beneficial influence on education, industry, and the protection of children, after his death in 1897 his name and reputation disappeared from public view and he became mostly a forgotten man of Gladstone's administrations.

[38] It was the intention of Mundella's daughter Maria Theresa to write his biography (which would presumably have been celebratory), but despite working for some years on his archive, collecting contributions and loans from others, and making lengthy transcriptions, nothing was published.

When Mundella was a manufacturer he commissioned a large new villa, designed by the architect Thomas Chambers Hine, in The Park Estate in Nottingham, and after moving to London when he became an MP the family lived, firstly, in Dean's Yard in Westminster, then rented a house in Stanhope Gardens in Kensington before, at the end of 1872, purchasing 16 Elvaston Place nearby.

The crash of the New Zealand company which had been the cause of his resignation left him in financial difficulties, but on the recommendation of Lord Rosebery he was awarded an annual Civil List pension of £1,200 (equivalent to £172,593 in 2023)[18] which enabled him to continue to live in Elvaston Place.

He was far too confident and masterful for a quiet life, and in an age of overflowing political activity his mind and methods appeared to stand for the whole menace of radical change.

"[13] As he grew older the cabinet held him in high esteem but younger politicians were "never quite sure whether he was a rogue or a fool, but they were convinced that he was a bore" because of his determined enthusiasm on a few dominant themes.

[3] Mundella was a Fellow of the Royal Society, an honour awarded in 1882 that he described as "the most agreeable and distinguished that could fall upon me",[3] In 1884 he became President of the Sunday School Union, a position he deeply valued.

[53] Though Mundella was not Jewish (his mother being a Protestant and his father a Catholic), throughout his political life his looks, his foreign-sounding name, and his artistic individualism in dress encouraged opponents and hostile cartoonists and journalists to indulge in anti-semitic insults.