Lyon Playfair,1st Baron PlayfairGCBPCFRS (1 May 1818 –29 May 1898) was a British scientist and Liberal politician who was Postmaster-General from 1873 to 1874.
After returning to Britain,Playfair became manager of a calico works in Primrose,near Clitheroe,and in 1843 was appointed Professor of Chemistry at the Royal Manchester Institution,where he was assisted by Robert Angus Smith. Two years later,he was made chemist to the Geological Survey,and subsequently became Professor in the new School of Mines. In 1848,he was elected to the Royal Society,and three years later was made Special Commissioner and a member of the executive committee of the Great Exhibition.
After the Exhibition,the Society of Arts organised a series of lectures to draw attention to the lessons which should be learned from the Exhibition. Playfair's two lectures were devoted to technical education,which he considered in Britain to be unfit for an increasingly competitive world.[2] In preparation for his lectures,Playfair toured France,Holland,Belgium,Germany,Austria and Scandinavia to study their education systems. His first lecture was delivered to the School of Mines,under the title "Industrial Instruction on the Continent",and was published in the Records of the School of Mines. It aroused great public interest and Playfair later claimed that it gave a considerable impulse to technical education in Britain,with the government establishing the Department of Science and Art soon afterwards.[3]
During the 1870's and early 1880's,anti-vaccination supporters sought to repeal UK government legislation for compulsory childhood vaccination against smallpox.[6] Playfair's speech to parliament in 1883[7] helped the government win a motion to keep compulsory vaccination by over 250 votes.[6]
In November 1887,a meeting of the National Union of Conservative and Constitutional Associations held in Oxford passed a resolution calling for Fair Trade (a form of protectionism).[8] The following month,Playfair defended free trade in a speech in Leeds,which was published by the Cobden Club under the title "On Fair Trade and the Depression in Agriculture". He later claimed that this pamphlet sold around 100,000 copies.[9] The veteran free trade campaigner,John Bright,wrote to Playfair and said his speech was "one of the best,if not the best,spoken on the question".[10]
Playfair delivered a speech to the City Liberal Club in London,where he claimed that economic depressions were not due to fiscal arrangements but were universal and synchronous in all industrialised nations. The advances in science,such as improved transport and the substitution of machine for manual labour,had lowered the value of labour of quantity and heightened the value of labour of quality. This,Playfair claimed,had dislocated labour.[10] Playfair enlarged on this speech in an article for The Contemporary Review of March 1888.[11] Afterwards,Playfair delivered a speech to the National Liberal Club,which was published as "On Industrial Competition and Commercial Freedom" by the Cobden Club. The Liberal Party leader,William Ewart Gladstone,wrote to Playfair to thank him for his "admirable tract;so comprehensive,clear,simple in statement,rich in illustration".[12]
The grave of Lyon Playfair,East Cemetery,St Andrews
Lord Playfair died at his home at Onslow Gardens in South Kensington,London,in May 1898,aged 80. His body was returned to Scotland,where he was buried in the Eastern Cemetery,St Andrews,towards the north-east corner. He was succeeded in the barony by his son from his first marriage,George James Playfair (1849-1939) who is buried with him.[14]
A memorial fountain was erected to Playfair in St Andrews in 1899,to a design by Robert Lorimer.[15] The main library at Imperial College in London was originally known as the Lyon Playfair Library in his honour,although now it is simply known as Central Library.[16]
Playfair married three times. He firstly married Margaret Eliza Oakes,daughter of James Oakes,in 1846. After her death in August 1855 he married Jean Ann Millington,daughter of Crawley Millington,in 1857. There were children from both marriages. Jean Ann died in 1877 and is buried in Dean Cemetery in Edinburgh facing the section known as "Lords Row". After her death,he married Edith Russell of Boston,whose 1884 portrait is in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts.[17]
Notes
1 2 Dorothy Porter, Roy Porter (editors). "Lyon Playfair and the Idea of Progress". Doctors, Politics and Society: Historical Essays. Vol.23. Rodopi, 1993.{{cite book}}: |author= has generic name (help)
↑ Wemyss Reid, Memoirs and Correspondence of Lyon Playfair (London: Cassell, 1900), pp. 148–149.
William Ewart Gladstone was a British statesman and Liberal politician. In a career lasting over 60 years, he served for 12 years as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, spread over four non-consecutive terms beginning in 1868 and ending in 1894. He also served as Chancellor of the Exchequer four times, serving over 12 years.
Sir James Dewar was a British chemist and physicist. He is best known for his invention of the vacuum flask, which he used in conjunction with research into the liquefaction of gases. He also studied atomic and molecular spectroscopy, working in these fields for more than 25 years.
John Playfair FRSE, FRS was a Church of Scotland minister, remembered as a scientist and mathematician, and a professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. He is best known for his book Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth (1802), which summarised the work of James Hutton. It was through this book that Hutton's principle of uniformitarianism, later taken up by Charles Lyell, first reached a wide audience. Playfair's textbook Elements of Geometry made a brief expression of Euclid's parallel postulate known now as Playfair's axiom.
John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1st Baron Acton, 13th Marquess of Groppoli,, better known as Lord Acton, was an English Catholic historian, politician, and writer. He is best remembered for the remark he wrote in a letter to an Anglican bishop in 1887:
"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men…"
John Bright was a British Radical and Liberal statesman, one of the greatest orators of his generation and a promoter of free trade policies.
Richard Cobden was an English Radical and Liberal politician, manufacturer, and a campaigner for free trade and peace. He was associated with the Anti-Corn Law League and the Cobden–Chevalier Treaty.
John Morley, 1st Viscount Morley of Blackburn, was a British Liberal statesman, writer and newspaper editor.
George John Douglas Campbell, 8th and 1st Duke of Argyll, was a Scottish polymath and Liberal statesman. He made a significant geological discovery in the 1850s when his tenant found fossilized leaves embedded among basalt lava on the Island of Mull. He also helped to popularize ornithology and was one of the first to give a detailed account of the principles of bird flight in the hopes of advancing artificial aerial navigation. His literary output was extensive writing on topics varying from science and theology to economy and politics. In addition to this, he served prominently in the administrations of Lord Aberdeen, Lord Palmerston, John Russell and William Gladstone.
Baron Playfair, of St Andrews in the County of Fife, was a title in the Peerage of the United Kingdom. It was created on 3 September 1892 for the scientist and Liberal politician Sir Lyon Playfair. He was succeeded by his only son, the second Baron. The second Baron was a Brigadier-General in the British Army. The second Baron's only son, the Hon. Lyon George Henry Lyon Playfair (1888-1915), was a Captain in the Royal Field Artillery and was killed in action in the First World War, unmarried. Consequently, the title became extinct on the death of the second Baron in 1939.
Sir Thomas Wemyss Reid was an English newspaper editor, novelist and biographer.
Sir William Job Collins, was an English surgeon, anti-vaccinationist and later a Liberal politician and legislator.
Francis Wrigley Hirst was a British journalist, writer and editor of The Economist magazine. He was a Liberal in party terms and a classical liberal in ideology.
Sir Hugh Lyon Playfair LL.D Kt was a Scottish politician, army officer and photographic pioneer. He was Provost of St Andrews from 1842 until his death in 1861.
James Octavius Playfair FRSE (1736–1819) was a Scottish minister, academic and author and a figure in the Scottish Enlightenment.
The 1892 Leeds South by-election was a parliamentary by-election for the House of Commons constituency of Leeds South in the West Riding of Yorkshire held on 22 September 1892.
David Page FRSE FGS LLD (1814–1879) was a 19th-century Scottish geologist and scientific author. He was President of the Edinburgh Geological Society.
Dr William Smoult Playfair FRCP was a leading Scottish obstetric physician and academic. In 1896 a trial, Kitson v. Plafair, found against him for a breach of medical confidentiality.
Sir (Robert) Lambert Playfair was a British soldier, diplomat, naturalist and author.
James Leslie FRSE was a Scottish civil engineer specialising in docks, harbours bridges and reservoirs, largely on the east coast of Scotland. He was also an amateur meteorologist.
Alexander Thoms FRSE (1837–1925) was a 19th/20th century Scottish mineralogist. His collection of rocks and minerals form a core part of the collection within the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery in Glasgow.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
