Sir Thomas Russell, 1st Baronet

Sir Thomas Wallace Russell, 1st Baronet (28 February 1841 – 2 May 1920) was an Irish politician and outspoken campaigner for agrarian reform. Born in Cupar, Fife, he moved to County Tyrone at the age of eighteen. He served as secretary and parliamentary agent of the Irish temperance movement and became well known as an anti-alcohol campaigner and as the proprietor of a temperance hotel in Dublin.

Career

He unsuccessfully contested Preston in 1885 as a Liberal. However, he opposed William Ewart Gladstone's Home Rule policy and was elected to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland as a Liberal Unionist in 1886 for South Tyrone. He served between 1895 and 1900 as Parliamentary Secretary to the Local Government Board in the Unionist administration at the Dublin "Land Conference" which resulted in the passing of the Land Purchase (Ireland) Act 1903. This defused the Protestant tenant farmers' revolt.

Russell continued to represent Tyrone South in Parliament. In 1906, supported by Lindsay Crawford and his Independent Orange Order while at the same acknowledging his debt to Catholic tenant farmers, he was re-elected as an "Independent Unionist", one of several candidates referred to as "Russellite Unionist".

Russell was vice-president of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction for Ireland (DATI), Russell does not appear to have contested the December 1910 general election, but in 1911 he won a by-election in Tyrone North, a seat he held until the constituency was abolished in 1918. He retired from politics in 1918 and died in Dublin on 2 May 1920, aged 79, when the baronetcy became extinct.

Arms