| abstract | - Lieutenant-Colonel Charles W Ford (1847-4 February 1918) was a solicitor and Liberal Party politician. The son of Richard William Ford, clerk of the peace and mayor of Portsmouth, he was educated at Portsmouth Grammar School and the Naval College at Gosport before becoming a solicitor with a practice at The Strand, London. Ford was legal editor of the Bankers' Magazine and edited the Law Times. He held a commission as a major and honorary lieutenant-colonel in the 4th Volunteer Battalion, Essex Regiment until 1891. At the 1886 general election he was a Liberal candidate for the parliamentary seat of Devonport, but failed to be elected. At the first elections to the London County Council in 1889 he unsuccessfully stood as an Independent Liberal for Lambeth North, but failed to be elected by 131 votes. In September 1889 J F B Firth, a sitting councillor for Haggerston, died suddenly. Ford was approached to contest the ensuing by-election but did not stand. At the second election of the London County Council in 1892, he was adopted as a candidate of the governing Progressive Party, and won the Lambeth North seat, holding it until 1901. At the 1900 General Election he was chosen by the Liberal Party to contest the parliamentary seat of Lambeth North on the retirement of the Liberal Unionist Party MP, Sir Henry Moreton Stanley. The election was held at the height of the Second Anglo-Boer War, a fact that benefited the governing Conservative Party, who won the seat. He retired to Southsea in Hampshire, where he died aged 72. He was cremated and his ashes placed in Portsmouth Cathedral.
|
