Sydney Arnold, 1st Baron Arnold

As a member of the General Committee of the Manchester Liberal Federation, he served as Honorary Treasurer of the North-West Division of the Free Trade Union.

[1] He unsuccessfully contested the Conservative seat of Holderness Division of the East Riding of Yorkshire at the December 1910 General Election.

He was elected in 1912 as Member of Parliament for Holmfirth in what was then the West Riding of Yorkshire at a by-election following the resignation of the long-serving Liberal MP Henry Wilson.

[citation needed] In 1922, he joined the Labour Party and was ennobled in 1924 as Baron Arnold, of Hale in the County of Chester,[6] and served as Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies in Ramsay MacDonald's short-lived 1924 Labour Government, and as Paymaster General from 1929 to 6 March 1931 in Macdonald's second government.

[3] Subsequently, his name was one of twenty-six attached to a letter printed in The Times supporting a policy of appeasement towards Germany.