BURNHAM, HARRY LAWSON WEBSTER LAW SON, 1St VISCOUNT eldest son of the 1st Baron Burnham, was born in London, Dec. 18, 1862, and educated at Eton and Balliol college, Oxford. He represented, as a Liberal, West St. Pancras from 1885 to 1892, East Gloucestershire from 1893 to 1895, and the Mile End division of the Tower Hamlets from 1905 to 1906, and again, but this time as a Unionist, from 1910 to 1916, when he succeeded to his father's title. He also served on the London County Council from 1889 to 1892, and from 1897 to 1904, and was mayor of Stepney in 1908 and 1909.
In 1903, when his father retired from the active duties of the managing proprietorship of The Daily Telegraph, the Hon. Harry Lawson, as he then was, became the sole director of the conduct and policy of that newspaper. These duties, however, did not prevent him from devoting a large share of his time to public work. Lord Burnham was a member of the committee which drafted the Reform act of 1918, and of Lord Bryce's committee on the problem of the reform of the powers and constitution of the second chamber. He has been a chairman or a member of innumerable committees, commissions, conciliation boards, etc. In the year 1921 he was unanimously elected president of the International Labour Conference of the League of Nations at Geneva and was re-elected to the same post in the following year. Lord Burnham presided over the standing joint committees on the salaries of teachers, and made an award on the proposed new scales of payment. The Burnham scales, as they are univer sally called, received the support of the teachers, the local authori ties, and the Ministry of Education, and when they came up for revision in 1924, Lord Burnham was again asked to undertake the task.
During these years of parliamentary and public activity he gave the closest attention to the direction of The Daily Telegraph (which he sold at the end of 1927), and was prominent in the various organizations of the newspaper press. He succeeded his father as president of the Newspaper Press Fund and the News vendors' Benevolent Institution. In 1910 he was president of the Institute of Journalists, chairman of the Newspaper Proprietors' Association from its foundation, during the World War he was chairman of the Press Conference, to which the Government con signed the responsible duty of the regulation of news. Lord Burnham succeeded his father as president of the Empire Press Union and presided over the National Press conferences in Canada in 1920 and in Australia in 1925. In 1917 Lord Burnham was made a companion of honour and in 1919 a viscount. He married in 1884, Olive, daughter of Sir Henry de Bathe, bart., and he has one daughter. The heir to the barony is his brother, Col. the Hon. William Arnold Webster Lawson (b. 1864).