Godfrey Lushington

Sir Godfrey Lushington GCMG KCB (8 March 1832 – 5 February 1907) was a British civil servant. A promoter of prison reform, Lushington served as Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office of the United Kingdom from 1886 to 1895.

Biography

Lushington was born in Westminster, on 8 March 1832, to Stephen and Sarah Grace (née Carr) Lushington; his twin brother was Vernon Lushington, Q.C., a county court judge. Educated at Rugby School and Balliol College, Oxford, he received his degree in 1854, and was President of the Oxford Union in 1853–1854 and was elected a fellow of All Souls in 1854. Two years later, in 1856, he wrote a "rather scathing essay on his Alma Mater" in The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine.^[1]

In 1865, he married Beatrice Anne Shore Smith (1835–1914), daughter of barrister Samuel Smith and granddaughter of William Smith. She was also a cousin of Florence Nightingale and of Barbara Bodichon.^[2]

With his brother Vernon, he advocated positivist philosophy, motivated by the ideas of Auguste Comte. A supporter of labour movements, he, and fellow positivist intellectuals A.J. Mundella, Edward Spencer Beesly, Henry Crompton, and Frederic Harrison, played a leading role in the acceptance of trades' union legitimacy.^[3]

Influenced by Frederick Denison Maurice, Lushington joined his brother, and Frederic Harrison, as a teacher at the Working Men's College, and became a benefactor and member of the College governing corporation.^[4]

He rose to Permanent Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office in 1885, and was knighted in 1892. During his Home Office tenure the Whitechapel Murders gripped attention and imagination; a Jewish and Anarchist connection was seriously considered. The chalked Goulston Street message was seen by Commissioner Charles Warren to have potential for increased religious tension; Warren explained to Lushington that reason for the immediate removal of the message.^[5][6]

He retired from the civil service in 1895 and became an alderman of London County Council, a position held until 1898 when he became one of the British Government delegates to the Rome Anti-Anarchist Congress, (24 November to 21 December 1898) with Sir Philip Currie and Sir C. Howard Vincent.

After retirement, Lushington gave evidence to the Gladstone Committee on prison reform:^[7] "I regard as unfavourable to reformation the status of a prisoner throughout his whole career; the crushing of self-respect, the starving of all moral instinct he may possess, the absence of all opportunity to do or receive a kindness, the continual association of none but criminals, the forced labour, and the denial of all liberty. I believe the true method of reforming a man, of restoring him to society, is exactly in the opposite direction to all these."^[8]