John Wardlaw-Milne

Sir John Sydney Wardlaw-Milne (7 May 1879 – 11 July 1967) was a Scottish Conservative Party politician and a first-class cricketer. The son of a Scottish banker, Wardlaw-Milne spent the early part of his life in British India, where he became a prominent figure in Bombay civic society. It was in India that he played first-class cricket for Bombay and the Europeans cricket team. Following the First World War, he returned to the United Kingdom and was elected the Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) for Kidderminster in 1922, an office he would hold until his defeat in the 1945 general election. As an MP, he was a member of the Imperial Economic Committee and during the Second World War was a critic of Prime Minister Winston Churchill, notably attempting to intitate a vote of no confidence against him in June and July 1942.

Biography Early life and time in India The son of the banker James Milne and his wife, Elizabeth Wardlaw, he was born at Elgin in May 1879. He was educated in Scotland at the Larchfield Academy. After completing his education, he went to British India, where he was employed in commerce in Bombay. Five years later, he appeared in first-class cricket for the Europeans cricket team against the Parsees in the 1907–08 Bombay Triangular Tournament; he played first-class cricket for the Europeans until September 1911, making six appearances.

Milne became a director at the shipping agents Turner Morrison in 1907, which led him gaining prominence on the Bombay Chamber of Commerce. In-turn, he was nominated to the Bombay Municipal Corporation, the board of trustees for the Port of Bombay, the City of Bombay Improvement Trust, and to the Bombay Presidency legislature. After the war, he was sent to Britain in 1919 in order to comment on the Government of India Act, which was passing through the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Thereafter, he toured the United States, where he lectured on matters pertaining to British foreign policy in the East. His prior experience in India served him well in parliament, with Wardlaw-Milne sitting on the Conservative Indian affairs committee from 1930 to 1935. He additionally sat on the Joint Select Committee on Indian constitutional reform from 1933 to 1935, The Conservative politician Robert Boothby, appearing in Martin Gilbert's documentary on Churchill's life, said, "It was the only time in the whole of the war that I saw him [Churchill] looking really anxious, because the only thing in the world he feared was Parliament." Wardlaw-Milne proposed the vote of no confidence on Churchill's running of the war. His speech, according to biographer Roy Jenkins, was "a fiasco." According to Jenkins, Wardlaw-Milne felt that operation of the war should be turned over to: "a dominating figure to run the war and also a generalissimo to command all the armed forces. It was not clear whether Milne wanted them to be the same person.... However, it did not greatly matter for he turned his whole argument into bathos by nominating the Duke of Gloucester, the third son of George V, for either or both of these jobs."

Gloucester was regarded as "a figure of fun" and "he idea that he could be turned into a dominating warrior prince scuppered both his own and Wardlaw-Milne's reputations". The final vote on the proposal, on 1 July 1942, was 475 to 25 in favor of Churchill's government. Jenkins gives the vote as 477 to 27, including tellers.

Later life and death Following his defeat in the 1945 general election, Wardlaw-Milne sat on the board of Cable & Wireless until 1953, having been appointed in 1943. He played an important role in the renovation of the Royal Albert Hall in his capacity as president of its corporation from 1949 to 1952. In his latter years, he moved firstly to Rhu in Dunbartonshire, before relocating to Grouville in Jersey in 1952.

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