Henry Lucy
Sir Henry William Lucy JP, (5 December 1842 – 20 February 1924) was a famed English political journalist of the Victorian era, acknowledged as the first great lobby correspondent.
President Woodrow Wilson said Lucy's articles in The Gentleman's Magazine inspired his mind and propelled him into public life.
His article was used as evidence by Hugh Foster MP to demand clarity from the government on the budgetary proposals being blocked in the Lords.
A pioneer of the profession of public affairs consultancy, Lucy had already been awarded a knighthood, when invited to Buckingham Palace by Queen Mary, to whom he presented a gift of his political anecdote collection.
[6] Sir Henry Lucy died of bronchitis at Whitethorn, his country house at Hythe, Kent in 1924, aged 81.
[11] "Never in the House, but always of it, Lucy seemed to occupy for a long time a position of his own, as a species of familiar spirit or licensed jester, without which no Parliament was complete.
Lucy's analytical observations of the Conservative antagonist Benjamin Disraeli were characteristic: The physical energy with which this election speech was delivered was certainly very remarkable for a man in his seventy-fourth year.
The vigour is spasmodic, the strength artificial, and the listener has a feeling that at any moment a spring may break, a screw go loose, and the whole machinery come to a sudden stop.
Remarking on the Liberal counterpart's performance in the chamber, he sensed that Gladstone's tours de force are perfectly natural.
With the Premier, the excitement of the moment over and the appointed task achieved, he falls into a state of prostration painful to witness.
In spite of the sneers from disappointed or flippant persons, a seat in the House of Commons remains one of the highest prizes of citizen life.
The horde of impecunious babblers and busybodies attracted by such a bait would trample down the class of man who compose the present House of Commons and who are, in various ways, in touch with all the multiform interests of the nation.
The Strand Magazine, 1893[18]I would rather have been editor of Punch, than Emperor of India[19]Yesterday Herbert Spencer died at Brighton.
To put the incontestable fact another way, he was perhaps the most irascible man who has ever been faced by the inconvenience of other people presuming to inhabit the same globe[20]
