Dictionary of National Biography, 1927 supplement/Cust, Henry John Cockayne
CUST, HENRY JOHN COCKAYNE (1861–1917), politician and journalist, was born in London 10 October 1861, the elder son of Major Henry Francis Cockayne Cust, M.P., of Cockayne Hatley, Bedfordshire, grandson of the first Baron Brownlow, by his wife, Sarah Jane, daughter of Isaac Cookson, of Meldon Park, Northumberland, and widow of Major Sidney Streatfeild. He was educated at Eton and in 1888 gained a scholarship at Trinity College, Cambridge. Called to the bar in Paris, and a bar student in London, he deserted the law and went early into politics. He was returned to parliament for the Stamford division of Lincolnshire in the unionist interest in 1890, resigning the seat in 1895. Five years later he was returned for Bermondsey, which he represented until the general election of 1906. In 1892 he proposed, as an amendment to the Small Holdings Bill, that small holdings should be dealt with as personal property, and he had the satisfaction of seeing his amendment accepted.
Meanwhile, in 1892, Cust had made a sudden and accidental incursion into journalism. Asked across the dinner-table by Mr. William Waldorf (afterwards Viscount) Astor if he would edit the Pall Mall Gazette, he assented immediately. It was an adventure after his own heart. He knew nothing of newspapers; he had never been in Fleet Street; but he had confidence in his own powers, and in the end he proved a worthy successor of Frederick Greenwood [q.v.] and John (afterwards Viscount) Morley. He possessed all the qualities of a good editor: he was a quick judge of men, and when once he had formed his staff he had the good sense to trust it. Thus, under his editorship, the Pall Mall Gazette maintained a definite and consistent policy both in letters and in politics. In 1896 this episode came to an end, and Cust made no further experiments in journalism.
During the European War Cust was tireless in the work of propaganda. The founder, in August 1914, and chairman of the Central Committee for National Patriotic Organizations, he found full scope for his tact and activity in the information of neutrals and allies, while, looking ahead, he devised schemes for employment after the War both at home and overseas. For the services rendered by him as chairman of the Central Committee he was thanked by Mr. Asquith in the House of Commons, and a Cust annual lecture ‘on some important current topic relating to the British Empire’ was endowed at Nottingham University College in order to commemorate his work. He died in London 2 March 1917.
In spite of what he achieved Cust was remarkable rather for what he was than for what he did. It was in society that he won his greatest triumphs. He was, before all things, a talker, born and trained, and few of his contemporaries added more than he did to the stock of harmless pleasures. An assiduous traveller from his youth upwards, he knew both men and cities, and he spoke fully and amply, not only from the books which he had read and remembered, but from his own gay and vivid experience of life. After his death a volume of his Occasional Poems was printed at Jerusalem (1918).
Cust, who in 1893 became heir to the barony of Brownlow, married in that year Emmeline, only daughter of Sir William Welby-Gregory, fourth baronet, of Denton Manor, Grantham. They had no children.
[The Times, 3 and 6 March 1917; Blackwood's Magazine, April 1918; personal knowledge.]