Lives in Cricket No 29 - AN Hornby

18 Born with a silver spoon After failing in the by-election of 1853, he was elected as Conservative MP for Blackburn in the General Election of March 1857, retaining his seat in the subsequent General Elections of 1859 and 1865. In 1863 he made his only speech in the House of Commons, in response to William Ferrand MP, who had attacked the cotton manufacturing industry. But William was never far away from controversy in the political arena. He retained his seat for a third time in November 1868, together with his kinsman Joseph Feilden, but the pair were accused of intimidating voters. A petition was heard at the town hall in March 1869 by Mr Justice Willes as a result of which the election was declared void. In the wake of Justice Willes’ ruling, William quietly returned to private life, but at the resulting by- election his son Edward was elected along with Joseph’s son Henry Master Feilden. Both candidates appealed for support as a tribute to their fathers, and Edward Hornby asserted that he had ‘no vain idea’ that his own merits were enough to qualify him as an MP. In another political incident many years earlier, during the election of 1835, William was thrown over the parapet of Salford bridge in Blackburn by an infuriated mob, but escaped unhurt. He had just emerged from the Bay Horse Inn with a few friends when he was set upon and thrown into the mud on the easterly side of the stream that ran beneath the bridge. Charles Haworth, a well- known local artist, who was an eye-witness, helped to scrape the mud from William’s clothes in a hat shop on the bridge. Aged only 27, he had become chairman of the Blackburn Conservative party when the town was given two MPs under the Reform Act of 1832. A.N.’s father, William Henry Hornby, cotton manufacturer, employer of 1,400 people, first Mayor of Blackburn and the town’s MP for twelve years. The portrait is a detail from ‘The Laying of the Foundation Stone of the Blackburn Cotton Exchange’, painted by Vladimir Ossipovich Sherwood in 1863.