Henry John Cockayne Cust
Date of birth: 1861.10.10
Place of birth: London
Date of death: 1917.03.02
Place of death: London
Category: editor
Identity:
Henry John Cockayne Cust was a journalist and MP. His father Major Henry Francis Cockayne Cust had been an MP before him. He married Emmeline Welby-Gregory in 1893.
Life:
Cust studied law in London and Paris and was called to the bar but soon abandoned it for politics. He was first elected an MP for Stamford, Lincolnshire in 1890, resigning his post in 1895, by which time he had been appointed as editor of the Pall Mall Gazette. It was in his role as editor that he was in communication with Whistler in the 1890s.
In 1896 he returned to politics and was elected MP for Bermondsey in 1900. During the First World War, he was active in promoting government propaganda and in its aftermath, devising employment schemes.
He was remembered as a cosmopolitan figure and a vivid conversationalist.
Bibliography:
Who's Who, London, 1898; Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford, 1997.
