Ernest Bennett (politician)

Sir Ernest Nathaniel Bennett (12 December 1865 – 2 February 1947) was a British academic, politician, explorer and writer.

Upon his return to the UK, George became Master of Kirby Hill Grammar School (which closed in 1957 and is now owned by the Landmark Trust).

George married Eliza, the daughter of Captain Thomas Fewson of the East India Company, in 1856, by whom he had three children: Mary (eldest), Ernest, and Gertrude.

He wrote an article shortly afterwards for the Contemporary Review in which he complained of British atrocities against wounded Dervishes after the battle, which provoked a hostile reaction from patriotic readers in Britain.

[8] In 1899 he joined the Voluntary Ambulance Corps in South Africa at the outset of the Boer War, and wrote a book about his experiences.

[10] Bennett later worked as a press censor for the Turkish Army in Thrace during the Balkan War, and was made a Pasha in reward.

In 1900 (through 1902), Bennett assumed command (as a Lieutenant) of a platoon of Oxford University Volunteers of the 1st Battalion of the Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry in the Orange River Colony during the Boer War.

Too old to serve on the front line in the First World War, Bennett was initially a British Red Cross (BRX) Commissioner in Belgium, France and Serbia (1914–15).

Bennett sailed for Serbia in January 1915 with Sir Thomas Lipton in the latter's yacht, the Erin, which had been dedicated to the transport of medical personnel and supplies for the BRX, initially to France and subsequently to the Balkans.

Some 150,000 people are believed to have died from typhus during this epidemic, which was so virulent that it interrupted military action in Serbia for nearly six months until it was brought under control.

Bennett later joined the Staff of the 11th Infantry Brigade, British Expeditionary Force, and was then attached to the IX Army Corps H.Q.

In 1904, he tried (as prospective candidate) to recruit the support of Winston Churchill (a fellow Liberal at the time) for women's suffrage, asking him to speak to the subject in Bicester, Oxfordshire.

[16] Bennett was highly critical of the terms of the Versailles Treaty (concluding the First World War in 1919), which he considered to be inconsistent with Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points (the basis of the Armistice with Germany), too harsh and liable to sow the seeds of renewed conflict.

Quite apart from the excessive financial burden that the reparations placed on Germany, Bennett believed that the Treaty put too much blame on Germany for starting the War, when in reality the whole of Europe had been dragged into unintended global conflict by a multitude of bilateral treaties and alliances triggered by a relatively local dispute between Serbia and Austria-Hungary.

[19] MacDonald was likewise opposed to the terms of the Versailles Treaty, and sought to mollify them in his first brief period as Prime Minister of the short lived Labour government in 1924.

MacDonald supported further austerity, and unable to carry his Labour party on the issue, he was asked by the King to lead a National coalition government with the Liberals and Conservatives.

Having visited Germany during the economic chaos of the Weimar Republic, Bennett admired the way in which the new Nazi government had rebuilt the country's economy and restored its confidence—in sharp contrast to the apparent malaise afflicting the UK in the early 1930s.

[23] But to some English men and women, including Bennett, who had lived through the First World War and were keen to avoid another seemingly pointless European bloodbath, it offered (at the time) hope for peace.

[24] In 1940, as the Second World War unfolded and France fell, Archibald Ramsay (a Scottish Unionist MP) was interned under Defence Regulation 18b as a security risk and potential traitor.

However, historians of the Red Book generally concede that the anti-Semitic philosophy associated with the Right Club (via Ramsay's opinions) would have been at odds with Bennett's own expressed position.

[26] Bennett made clear on numerous occasions that he was against the persecution of the Jews by the Nazi government, stating (for example) in 1936 that he "frankly deplore[d] Germany's harsh treatment of her Jewish subjects", and again in 1939, that he "could not accept" German explanations "of Jewish arrogance, their mutual control of the legal and medical professions, and so on ... as any real justification for wholesale methods of persecution".

[29] Bennett closely observed the wildlife on the island and collected a range of insects and spiders which he donated to the Hope Museum, Oxford.

[34] While he undoubtedly hoped for positive findings, his rigorous and systematic scientific approach left him empty handed in the end.