1863; but his work and interests subsequently lay at Newcastle (where he served an apprenticeship as moulder at Robert Steph- enson & Co.'s works), and in the county of Durham. He gradually became prominent in connexion with his own trade union and in the trade-union movement generally. After a while he took a leading part in local affairs, and was for some years a member of the Newcastle city council, and Darlington borough council. He was mayor 1903; and was made a magistrate for the county of Durham. He entered Parliament for Barnard Castle as a Labour member, at a by-election in 1903. When the Labour party were first returned to Parliament in force, in 1906, he soon made his mark as one of their leaders. In 1907 he took a prom- inent part in advocating the ending, rather than the mending, of the House of Lords; and in 1908 he was elected chairman of the party, a post which he held for two years and to which he was reflected in the autumn of 1914 when the then chairman, Mr. Ramsay Macdonald, had to resign owing to his pacifist views. As chairman, at the opening of the new session in that autumn, Mr. Henderson promised the full support of organized labour in maintaining the " splendid unity " of the nation.
When Mr. Asquith formed the first Coalition Ministry in 1915, he included Mr. Henderson in the Cabinet as President of the Board of Education, and also adviser of the Government on Labour questions arising out of the World War. Indeed his functions as Labour adviser so occupied his time and attention, that it was thought desirable to relieve him in Aug. 1916 of the Board of Education, and give him the practical sinecure of Paymaster-General, so that he might be free to devote himself to the more congenial part of his work. Throughout the Ministry Mr. Henderson showed himself resolved on a strenuous prose- cution of the war. He warmly advocated both the Munitions bill and the Registration bill, and had no hesitation in taking the further step of compulsory service, asserting, on the first Military Service bill, that the choice was between compulsion and defeat, and on the second bill, that the first had brought in more men than was expected and, therefore, that there was every reason to anticipate the success of the second. He followed up this action by strongly urging the Labour party to rally in Dec. 1916 to Mr. Lloyd George, and by accepting himself the position of an original member of the War Cabinet of four with- out portfolio. In consequence of his prominence as a labour protagonist of the war, his life was threatened, along with the Prime Minister's, by the conspiracy of a Derby family of an- archists, who were duly convicted, and sentenced to considerable terms of penal servitude, in March 1917.
After the revolution in Russia in the spring of 1917 Mr. Hen- derson visited that country on behalf of the British Govern- ment. He found there, as he subsequently explained, the most confused ideas current as to the aims of the Allies in the war, and deliberate perversions circulated by enemy agents. The then Pro- visional Government at Petrograd favoured an international Labour and Socialist Conference, which was being promoted by the International Socialist Bureau and was to meet at Stock- holm. They pressed Mr. Henderson to use his influence with British Labour to attend this Conference; and he, believing the Conference to be inevitable, came to the conclusion that, pro- vided it were merely consultative, it would be better that British representatives should go, rather than permit Russian representa- tives to meet German representatives alone. He returned with these ideas to England, and, being still secretary of the Labour party as well as a member of the War Cabinet, used his influence as secretary to promote British Labour participation in the Con- ference. But though the majority of Labour men were apparently in his favour, public opinion in other classes was strongly against any conference with Germans in the midst of war. The Sailors' and Firemen's Union refused to carry the delegates. Mr. Hen- derson visited Paris in the company of Mr. Ramsay Macdonald to discuss the situation with Labour over there, but found that neither French, nor Belgian, nor Italian, nor American Labour was disposed to join. Moreover, all Mr. Henderson's Labour colleagues in the Government opposed his views; and on Mr. Lloyd George expressing the surprise of the rest of the War
Cabinet at his action and their dissent from his policy he resigned and was succeeded by Mr. George Barnes.
The attitude of Labour internationalism was maintained by Mr. Henderson out of office, and he warmly espoused the Labour policy of the latter part of 1918, to take the Labour men out of the Government and appeal for support on a Labour platform, in conjunction with the pacifist wing of the party. This policy cost Mr. Henderson his seat in Parliament at the General Elec- tion of Dec. 1918. He was defeated by a candidate of the Nation- al Democratic party in East Ham, and none of the Pacifist Labour men with whom he had made common cause found their way into Parliament. He himself returned to the House of Commons at a by-election for Widnes in Sept. 1919. He strongly promoted the League of Nations in the early part of that year; he attended the International Socialist Conference at Berne; and in Dec. 1920 he paid an informal visit to Ireland in the hope of promoting peace. (G. E. B.)
HENDERSON, SIR DAVID (1862-1921), British general, was born on Aug. n 1862. He served in the Nile Expedition of 1898, and in the defence of Ladysmith and the subsequent advance into the Transvaal 1899-1900. In the later phases of the S. African War he was chief of the Intelligence Department, and on its conclusion he was promoted brevet lieutenant-colonel and received the D.S.O. He afterwards held many staff appoint- ments at home, was promoted colonel in 1905, and became director of military training in 1912. In the meantime he had taken up the study and practice of aviation, and in the following year he was appointed the first director of military aeronautics. On the outbreak of the World War he went to France in command of the Royal Flying Corps, while retaining the position of director at the War Office, and he was promoted major-general for dis- tinguished service within a few weeks. But, finding it impossible to combine the duties, he gave up his command at the front early in 1915, and thenceforward devoted himself to the develop- ment and expansion of the military flying service. He was pro- moted lieutenant-general at the beginning of 1917, and at the end of that year he joined the Air Ministry on its creation, as chief of the general staff; but he resigned this position in the following April. In May 1919 he became director-general of the League of Red Cross Societies. He was created K.C.B. in 1914, and K.C.V.O. in 1919. He died at Geneva Aug. 17 1921.
HENRY, EDWARD LAMSON (1841-1919), American painter (see 13.299), died at Ellenville, N.Y., May 9 1919.
HENRY, O. (1862-1910), American short-story writer, was born at Greensboro, N.C., Sept. n 1862. His real name was William Sydney Porter, and he came from an old southern family. Until 15 years of age he attended a school directed by his maternal aunt in Greensboro and then entered his uncle's drugstore as a clerk. From early years he was a constant reader, and he secured a wide knowledge of the English classics. He has recorded that his favourite books were Lane's translation of The Arabian Nights and Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, and that he was a devoted admirer of Tennyson. The close confinement as drug-clerk impaired his health, and in 1882 he was sent to a friend's ranch in Texas, where he remained two years. In 1884 he went to Austin, Tex., where he lived ten years, first as a book-keeper in a real estate office, then as an employee in the General Land Office and from 1891 as teller in the First National Bank of Austin. In 1894 he purchased Brann's Iconoclast, a weekly, which after a short time he renamed The Rolling Stone. This paper he converted into a ten-page weekly, he alone furnishing most of the matter and the illustrations. Even as a young boy he had been locally famous for his cartoons. After a year the paper " rolled away," to use his own words, and in 1895 he became a reporter on the Houston Daily Post. In 1896 he was charged with having embezzled money while teller in the Austin bank some years before. He fled to Honduras, and thereafter visited several South American countries. In 1897 he returned to Austin and the following year was convicted and sentenced to serve four years in the Ohio penitentiary. Later his innocence seemed to have been established, and it was generally agreed that had he originally stood trial he would have been acquitted. He entered prison
