Leverton Harris

Frederick Leverton Harris (17 December 1864 – 14 November 1926) was a British businessman and Conservative Party politician. He sat in the House of Commons for three periods between 1900 and 1918. His role in Parliament was largely insignificant until World War I, when he used his knowledge of shipping to play a crucial role in the United Kingdom's economic warfare against the German Empire, and joined the government in 1916 in a newly created post with specific responsibility for the blockade of Germany. As the war drew to a close, his political career looked set to flourish, but was destroyed by scandal. Early life and family Harris was the son of Frederick William Harris and his wife Elizabeth née Wylie, of London and Withyham, East Sussex. His siblings included Sir Austin Edward Harris, who became a noted banker, Walter Burton Harris, a journalist, writer, traveller and socialite who achieved fame for his writings on Morocco, and pianist and composer Clement Harris, who was killed in the Greco-Turkish War of 1897. He was educated at Winchester College and then Caius College, Cambridge, where he graduated in 1884. The following year he became a partner in coal-factoring and ship-owning business of Harris & Dixon in London, and he later became a director of the National Discount Company and the Metropolitan Electricity Supply Company. In 1886, he married Gertrude Richardson, from Bessbrook, County Armagh. They had no children.