Harcourt Johnstone, nicknamed Crinks, was a British Liberal Party politician.
14 Facts About Harcourt Johnstone
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One of his ancestors was Sir William Vernon Harcourt Johnstone who was Home Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer under William Ewart Gladstone.
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Harcourt Johnstone was educated at Eton College and at Balliol College, Oxford.
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Harcourt Johnstone was again chosen to contest the seat for the Liberals and won by a majority of 5,176 votes over the Conservative George Frederick Stanley.
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Harcourt Johnstone held the seat in the 1923 general election, only to lose it to Stanley at the 1924 general election.
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Harcourt Johnstone then tried and failed to return to the House of Commons at by-elections: first at Eastbourne in 1925 and later at Westbury in 1927, where he lost by just 149 votes.
7.
Harcourt Johnstone fought Westbury a second time at the 1929 general election again losing narrowly.
8.
In May 1940, even though Harcourt Johnstone was outside Parliament, Winston Churchill decided to appoint him to the government as Secretary to the Department of Overseas Trade.
9.
Two months later the Liberal constituency of Middlesbrough West became vacant when the sitting MP, Frank Kingsley Griffith, was made a county court judge and Harcourt Johnstone was returned for the seat at a by-election on 7 August 1940 unopposed under the terms of the wartime electoral truce.
10.
Harcourt Johnstone is to date the last MP for South Shields to have represented any party other than Labour.
11.
Harcourt Johnstone was a key figure in the Liberal Party Organisation between the two World Wars and was Secretary of the influential Liberal Candidates Association.
12.
Harcourt Johnstone had been a member and one-time co-secretary with Brendan Bracken of the Other Club since the early 1930s.
13.
Harcourt Johnstone was known as a lover of books, furniture and pictures, being good fun and good company and not being a great exponent of taking exercise.
14.
Aged only 49, Harcourt Johnstone died suddenly in March 1945 at Westminster Hospital of a cerebral stroke.