T. Edmund Harvey: Liberal Ascendant

T. Edmund Harvey (1875–1955) is a unique figure, a Quaker who was a member of the British parliament in both world wars. He began as a Liberal Radical MP under Asquith and ended as an Independent Progressive in Churchill’s wartime Parliament. He was a child of the Quaker Renaissance, a post-Victorian Christian gentleman whose religious and political life coincided with the era in Quaker history of ‘liberalism ascendant’, an era he helped shape. Harvey’s career evinces a fourfold typology of British Quakers, as liberals, socialists, anarchists and experientialists.