that time was prominent as a trade union official. In 1875 he was elected secretary of the parliamentary committee of the trade union congress. He entered Parliament in 1880 as Liberal mem- ber for Stoke-on-Trent. In 1885 he was elected for the Bordesley division of Birmingham, and in Feb. 1886 was appointed under-secretary to the Home Office, going out with the Glad- stone Government later in the year. He belonged to the older school of trade unionism and was opposed to such demands as an 8-hour day fixed by law. His moderate policy was defeated at the trade union congress of 1890, and he then resigned his secretaryship. Both in 1892 and 1893 he was unsuccessful in his parliamentary candidatures. In 1892 he was appointed a member of the royal commission on Labour, and in 1894 he was elected Liberal member for Leicester, which seat he held until 1906, when he retired on account of ill health. He died at Cromer Oct. 111911. He published the story of his life in 1 901 , and a book on Leasehold Enfranchisement in conjunction with Lord Loreburn in 1885.
BROCK, SIR THOMAS (1847- ), English sculptor (see
4.623), was in 1911 created K.C.B.
BROCKDORFF-RANTZAU, COUNT ULRICH VON (1869- ),
German diplomatist, was born May 29 1869 at Schleswig. After having held various diplomatic positions at St. Petersburg,
Vienna and Budapest he was appointed German minister at
Copenhagen, a post which he held from 1912 to 1918. He was
very active in the Danish capital during the World War in
collecting news and keeping in touch with the various inter-
national agencies which were interested in paving the way for
peace or endeavouring to undermine the war spirit of the
Western Powers. On Dec. 20 1918 he was appointed Secretary
of State for Foreign Affairs and in March 1919 went to Versailles
as chief of the German delegation for the peace negotiations.
He resigned on June 20 in consequence of his unwillingness to
advise the German Government to accept the terms of the
Treaty of Versailles.
BROOKE, SIR CHARLES JOHNSON (1829-1917), 2nd Raja of Sarawak (see 24.208), died at Cirencester May 15 1917. He
was succeeded by his eldest son, Charles Vyner Brooke (b. 1874).
BROOKE, RUPERT (1887-1915), English poet, was born at Rugby Aug. 3 1887, and educated at Rugby and King's Col-
lege, Cambridge, where he afterwards won a fellowship. In
1911 he issued his first volume of Poems. In 1913 he under-
took a journey through America and on to Samoa, sending
home vivid letters, which recall those of R. L. Stevenson, to a
London evening paper; they were published after his death in
volume form as Letters from America (1916) with a prefatory
appreciation by Henry James. These two books and a second
and posthumous volume of poetry 1914 and other Poems, with
an essay on John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama (1916), make
up his literary output; but its quality and high promise render
the greater the loss to English literature by his premature
death on active service. He had joined the Naval Brigade very
early in the World War, took part in the ill-fated effort to
relieve Antwerp, spent the winter in an English camp and went
out to Gallipoli in the spring, but on the way there fell ill of
blood-poisoning and died at sea in a French hospital ship April
23 1915. He was buried on the island of Lemnos. His Col-
lected Poems, with a prefatory memoir by Edward Marsh, were
published in 1918.
BROOKE, STOPFORD AUGUSTUS (1832-1916), English
divine and man of letters (see 4.645), died at Ewhurst, Sur., March 18 1916.
See L. P. Jacks, Life and Letters of Stopford Brooke (1917).
BROOKFIELD, CHARLES HALLAM ELTON (1857-1913),
English actor and playwright, was born in London May 19
1857, and educated at Westminster and Trinity College, Cambridge. He studied law for a time at the Inner Temple,
though he was never called to the bar, and he was for several
years on the staff of the Saturday Review. In 1879 he took to the
stage, appearing first in Still Waters Run Deep and becoming a
member of the Bancrofts' company at the Haymarket theatre,
London, from 1880 to 1885. Later he played there with Herbert Tree in Jim the Penman, The Red Lamp and other melodramas, as well as in Oscar Wilde's An Ideal Husband. But it was rather as a wit and a writer that his reputation was gained, his stories and mots becoming famous. He wrote alone, or in collaboration, a number of lively plays, of which the best known was Dear Old Charlie, and he published his Random Reminiscences (1902). He also collaborated with his wife, Frances Mary Brookfield, in an account of his parents Mrs. Brookfield and her Circle (1905). Frances M. Brookfield was also the author of The Cambridge Apostles (1906) and of some notable novels, especially My Lord of Essex (1907) and A Friar Observant (1909). In 1911 Brook- field was appointed joint-examiner (censor) of plays under the Lord Chamberlain an appointment which had an element of humour in view of the character of some of his own plays. He died in London Oct. 20 1913.
BROUGH, FANNY WHITESIDE (1854-1914), English actress, who came of a well-known family of actors, was born in Paris July 8 1854. She first appeared on the stage at Manchester in 1869 in a pantomime written by her uncle, William Brough. In 1870 she appeared in London with Mrs. John Wood at the St. James's theatre. She played in Money with the Bancrofts in 1872, in The Wife's Secret and The Ironmaster with the Kendals in 1888, and in The Man from Blankley's with Charles
Hawtrey in 1901 and again in the United States in 1903. She
died in London Nov. 30 1914.
BROUGHTON, RHODA (1840-1920), English novelist, was
born in N. Wales Nov. 29 1840, the daughter of a clergyman, who was squire as well as rector of Broughton, Staffs. She produced her first novel, Cometh up as a Flower, in 1867, following it at brief intervals by Not Wisely but too Well and Red as a Rose is She. In the English county society, in which she had been brought up, such novels were then regarded as too daring experiments, to be kept as far as possible out of the hands of the young. But this succès de scandale was short-lived and, as mid-Victorianism began to fade, Miss Broughton's reputation as a shocker of convention soon gave place to a more sober recognition of her merit as a story-teller. "I began life as Zola," she said of herself, "I finish it as Miss Yonge." In the interval she
had spent 20 years in Oxford, where she was a distinguished social figure, and the last 30 years at Richmond as a semi-invalid, and she had published some 20 novels, the latest, A Fool in her Folly, appearing after her death, with a prefatory appreciation by Marie Belloc-Lowndes. She died at Headington near
Oxford, June 5 1920.
BROWN, FRANCIS (1849-1916), American Semitic scholar (see 4.658), died in New York Oct. 15 1916. He had been president of Union Theological Seminary, New York, since 1908. In 1911 he was tried for heresy before the Presbyterian General Board on the ground that he had published statements "contrary to cherished Presbyterian and evangelical doctrines," but was exonerated.
BROWN, JOHN GEORGE (1831-1913), American painter (see 4.661), died in New York City Feb. 8 1913.
BROWN, PETER HUME (1850-1918), Scottish historian, was born in Haddingtonshire Dec. 17 1850, and educated at
Edinburgh University, where he afterwards became professor
of ancient history. In 1908 he was appointed Historiog-
rapher Royal for Scotland, and from 1913 to 1914 Ford
lecturer at Oxford. Besides his various histories, he is the
author of a Life of John Knox (1895) and is mentioned as an
authority in the bibliography of John Knox (see 15.882). He
died at Edinburgh Nov. 30 1918; his unfinished Life of Goethe
was completed by Lord Haldane and published in 1920.
BROWNE, SIR BENJAMIN CHAPMAN (1839-1917), British
engineer, was born at Stout's Hill, Glos., Aug. 26 1839
and was apprenticed to the Elswick works near Newcastle-
on-Tyne. He became an expert on harbour work and car-
ried out harbour works at Tynemouth, Falmouth and in the
Isle of Wight. In 1870 he took over the locomotive works of R. & W. Hawthorn at Forth Banks, in 1886 combined these with those of Andrew Leslie & Co., and until 1916 was chairman of
