George Shaw-Lefevre, 1st Baron Eversley

George John Shaw-Lefevre, 1st Baron Eversley PC, DL (12 June 1831 – 19 April 1928) was a British Liberal Party politician. In a ministerial career that spanned thirty years, he was twice First Commissioner of Works and also served as Postmaster General and President of the Local Government Board.

Background and education

Eversley was the only son of Sir John Shaw-Lefevre and Rachel Emily, daughter of Ichabod Wright. He was born in Battersea, and was the nephew of Charles Shaw-Lefevre, 1st Viscount Eversley, Speaker of the House of Commons. He was educated at Eton and at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was called to the Bar, Inner Temple, in 1855.

Political career

Eversley stood unsuccessfully as the Liberal candidate for Winchester in 1859 but was successfully returned for Reading in 1863, a seat he held until 1885. He carried a vote in House of Commons for arbitration of the Alabama Claims in 1868. He held cabinet rank under Whig Lord Russell as Civil Lord of the Admiralty in 1866, a post he held until the government fell the same year, and later served under William Ewart Gladstone as Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Trade from 1868 to 1871, as Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department from January to March 1871, as Parliamentary Secretary of the Admiralty from 1871 to 1874 and again in 1880, after Christmas was sworn of the Privy Council. A successful barrister-at-law, he was appointed a Bencher of the Inner Temple in 1882.

In parliament, the Liberal government made Shaw Levevre First Commissioner of Works from 1881 to 1885, before he finally entered Gladstone's cabinet in November 1884 on his appointment to Postmaster-General. He relinquished the post of First Commissioner of Works in February 1885 but continued as Postmaster General until the Liberals lost power in June 1885 to Salisbury's 'Caretaker' ministry. A general election was called for 27th November 1885, and Eversley lost his seat in parliament at the 1885 general election. He did not serve in Gladstone's brief 1886 administration, which was a coalition with Joe Chamberlain's Liberal Unionists. He was able to return to the House of Commons in April 1886 when he was elected for Bradford Central in a by-election, which constituency he represented until 1895.

He once again became First Commissioner of Works and a member of Gladstone's cabinet in 1892. When Lord Rosebery became Prime Minister in 1894 he was appointed President of the Local Government Board, which he remained until the following year, when the Liberals were again defeated by Lord Salisbury's Conservatives. In 1897 he was elected a member of the London County Council as Progressive for the Haggerston Division. In 1906 he was raised to the peerage as Baron Eversley, of Old Ford in the County of London, a revival of the Eversley title held by his uncle. He made his last speech in the House of Lords in 1913.

Other public positions

Eversley was also a Commissioner to negotiate a Convention on Fisheries with French Government in 1858, a member of Sea Fisheries Commission in 1862, President of the Statistical Society of London between 1878 and 1879 and Chairman of the Royal Commissions on the Loss of Life at Sea in 1885 and on the Agricultural Depression between 1893 and 1896. In 1865 he co-founded the Commons Preservation Society, becoming its first chairman and, in 1905, its president.

He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1899.

Family

Lord Eversley married Lady Constance Moreton, daughter of Henry Reynolds-Moreton, 3rd Earl of Ducie, in 1874. They had no children. He died in April 1928, aged 96, when the barony became extinct. He is buried in the graveyard at St Mary's Church, King's Worthy. Lady Eversley survived him by a year and died in February 1929.

It is interesting that one of his sisters, Maria Louisa Shaw Lefevre, can be identified as the anonymous author of The Notebooks Of A Spinster Lady, 1878-1903, published by Cassell in 1919. In her notebooks she tells amusing stories of life in the upper classes of society in England at the time, makes candid observations of contemporary people and recounts jokes she heard told. She records that she attended the funeral of her good friend Augustus Hare in 1903. The book's editor, also unnamed, says she died in 1908. Reference to "The Times" lists her in its report on the funeral and the death records confirm she died in 1908.

Another sister, Madeleine Shaw-Lefevre, was the first Principal of Somerville Hall; and another Rachel married Arthur Hamilton-Gordon, son of the Prime Minister the 4th Earl of Aberdeen.