Sydney Olivier, 1st Baron Olivier

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Sydney Olivier, 1st Baron Olivier : biography

16 April 1859 – 15 February 1943

Sydney Haldane Olivier, 1st Baron Olivier, KCMG, CB, PC (16 April 1859 – 15 February 1943), was a British civil servant. A Fabian and a member of the Labour Party, he served as Governor of Jamaica and as Secretary of State for India in the first government of Ramsay MacDonald. He was the uncle of the actor Laurence Olivier.

Background

Olivier was born in Colchester, the second of ten children of Anne Elizabeth Hardcastle (née Arnould) and the Reverend Henry Arnold Olivier, a stern Anglican.http://thepeerage.com/p18294.htm#i182931 During Olivier’s youth, the family spent time at Lausanne and Kineton, and at Poulshott in Wiltshire, where the Reverend Olivier was rector. Sydney Olivier was sent to Tonbridge School, and then studied philosophy and theology at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. At Oxford he became a close friend of Graham Wallas, who came from a similar background. After graduation he refused family pressure to become a barrister and sat the qualifying exam for the Civil Service. He came first, beating Sidney Webb into second place. Olivier entered the Colonial Office in spring of 1882, working as a resident clerk. He was joined by Webb shortly afterwards, and the two became good friends. In contrast to Webb, Olivier was an impulsive and dominating dandy, nicknamed the "socialist hidalgo".

At this time Olivier also worked at Toynbee Hall in the East End of London, living in the slums of Whitechapel and teaching Latin at the Working Men’s College. He was a member of the Land Reform Union, where he met George Bernard Shaw in 1883, and part of team which in 1883 established a monthly periodical called the Christian Socialist, inspired by the Christian Socialist movement of 1848-52. Olivier had become enthusiastic about Positivism after working as a tutor to the son of Henry Compton, a leading Positivist. He was attracted to the Positivist vision of a moral reform of capitalism, rather than mere amelioration, and for a while entertained this notion as an alternative to socialism that might be more palatable to Victorian England.

On 1 May 1885, Olivier and Sidney Webb followed Shaw’s lead and enrolled in the Fabian Society, which had been formed at the start of 1884; Wallas joined the following year, and the three became known as the Three Musketeers of the Society, with Shaw as their D’Artagnan. Partly through Olivier, the Fabians would adopt the policy of reforming capitalism as a necessary precursor to explicitly socialist reforms, Olivier arguing that the sudden introduction of socialism would result in either anarchy or tyranny and attacking Marxism’s neglect of non-economic values. The same month that he joined the Fabians, Olivier married Margaret Cox, the sister of Harold Cox, an old school friend and later a Liberal MP. Olivier’s wife was intimidated by the Fabians, preferring the less intellectual Simple Life movement, but Olivier was an eager member of the movement, serving as the Society’s secretary from 1886 to 1890. He began speaking at the Hampstead Historic Society, a reading group for a number of Fabians, and developed his oratorial skills to address larger meetings. In the summer of 1887 he took part in the Fabians’ mock legislature experiment, the Charing Cross Parliament, as Colonial Secretary.

Fabian and Civil Servant

In 1888 Olivier wrote the seventh Fabian tract, Capital and Land, in which criticised "Georgism" (a system, popular with some Radicals and Christian Socialists, in which land continued to be privately owned and managed but should be taxed for the benefit of the community) and instead advocated the communal ownership and control of land. That year he performed with Annie Besant clerical duties at the strike headquarters during the Bryant and May match factory strike. By now he was one of the "Big Four" of the Fabian movement in London, with Shaw, Webb and Wallas. In 1889 he wrote Moral Aspects of the Basis of Socialism in the Essays in Fabian Socialism, an attempt to develop a distinct programme for the Fabians. That year he stood down as Secretary of the Fabian Society, being succeeded by Edward R. Pease. The Oliviers bought a holiday home in Limpsfield in the North Downs; they had two daughters by now, and a third was born in November. He was a guest speaker at the London School of Economics, which had many Fabian connections.