Business and Political Career
Born in Kennington, to a working class family but educated privately, Norris left school at 14 to join a solicitor's firm, leaving 18 years later to pursue a career in property development trade, partnering W.G. Allen in the firm Allen & Norris. He made his fortune building houses in south and west London — Fulham in particular. He was commissioned into the 2nd Tower Hamlets Rifle Volunteers in 1896, but resigned the following year. He was later Mayor of the Metropolitan Borough of Fulham from 1909 to 1919, a member of the London County Council from 1916 to 1919, and served as Conservative MP for Fulham East from 1918 to 1922, retiring after falling out with his party on the issue of tariff reform.
During World War I Norris had worked heavily as a military recruitment officer for the British Army. He served in the 3rd Middlesex Artillery Volunteers and in 1917 he was knighted and given the honorary rank of colonel for services to his country. He was also a prominent Freemason, rising to become Grand Deacon of the United Grand Lodge of England, and a well-known local philanthropist with close connections to the Church of England; he counted the Archbishop of Canterbury, Randall Thomas Davidson as a personal friend.
Read more about this topic: Henry Norris (businessman)
Famous quotes containing the words business, political and/or career:
“The art which we may call generally art of the wayside, as opposed to that which is the business of men’s lives, is, in the best sense of the word, Grotesque.”
—John Ruskin (1819–1900)
“All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.”
—John Arbuthnot (1667–1735)
“What exacerbates the strain in the working class is the absence of money to pay for services they need, economic insecurity, poor daycare, and lack of dignity and boredom in each partner’s job. What exacerbates it in upper-middle class is the instability of paid help and the enormous demands of the career system in which both partners become willing believers. But the tug between traditional and egalitarian models of marriage runs from top to bottom of the class ladder.”
—Arlie Hochschild (20th century)