Ernest Lamb, 1st Baron Rochester

Ernest Henry Lamb, 1st Baron Rochester, CMG (4 September 1876 – 13 January 1955) was a British Liberal and National Labour politician who served as Paymaster General from 1931 to 1935 in the National Government of Ramsay MacDonald.

The eldest son of Benjamin Lamb of Yorkshire, Ernest was educated at Dulwich College and Wycliffe College before training as an electrical engineer. He specialised in the new technology of telephony, travelling extensively in Europe in this twenties. and was knighted in 1914.

Lamb joined the Labour Party in 1929. On 23 January 1931, he was raised to the peerage as Baron Rochester, of Rochester in the County of Kent. He was a supporter of Ramsay MacDonald after the latter formed the National Government in August 1931 and his subsequent expulsion from the Labour Party, and became a member of the National Labour Organisation, founded the same year by supporters of MacDonald. In November 1931 MacDonald appointed him Paymaster General in the National Government. He continued to hold this post until 1935, and during the same period also represented the Ministry of Labour in the House of Lords.

After 1935, he took little further part in politics, devoting himself to religious and philanthropic activities. A Methodist, Rochester had acted as lay preacher since the nineteenth century. in 1941 he was elected vice president of the Methodist Conference. He served for many years on the board of the National Children's Home and Orphanage, was secretary of the Wesleyan Temperance and Social Welfare Department and vice president of the British and Foreign Bible Society.

He married Rosa Dorothea Hurst, daughter of William John Hurst of Drumaness, County Down, in 1913, and they had six children. He died at his home in Croydon, Surrey, in January 1955, aged 78, and was succeeded in the barony by his eldest son Foster Charles Lowry Lamb.