Augustine Birrell, 'The Passive Resister's Last Hope'

Leslie Ward ('Spy') presents Augustine Birrell in three-quarter profile, hands clasped behind his back, wearing a long olive-brown frock coat and pince-nez — the uniform of the Edwardian Liberal professional. The caption, 'the Passive Resisters' last hope,' places him squarely in the era's fiercest education controversy: Nonconformist 'passive resisters' were refusing to pay rates that subsidised Anglican schools under the 1902 Balfour Act. Birrell, newly appointed President of the Board of Education under Campbell-Bannerman, was expected to reverse this. His 1906 Education Bill would attempt exactly that — and fail, killed by the Lords. Ward's likeness is genial rather than savage: a solid, slightly smug Liberal solicitor-turned-politician, caricatured through bulk and self-satisfaction rather than ethnic or physical grotesquerie.