Roderick Kedward (politician)
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Rev. Roderick Morris Kedward (14 September 1881 – 5 March 1937) was a Wesleyan minister and a Liberal Party politician in the United Kingdom.
Roderick Kedward was born at Westwell in Kent, one of fourteen children of a local farmer, originally from Hereford but resident in Kent since the 1870s.[1] He became a minister in 1903 having trained at Richmond College. In 1906, he married Daisy Fedrick and they had three sons and three daughters.
In 1908, Kedward was made minister of three Wesleyan congregations in Hull and earned the nickname 'the fighting parson' for physically protecting a woman from her wife-beating husband.[2]
During the
Kedward unsuccessfully contested the
Transferring his political allegiance to his original home area, Kedward stood at the 1929 general election for Ashford in Kent. He won a remarkable victory with a swing of over 20% from the Conservatives to the Liberals. During this time, Kedward was strongly associated with the National Tithe-payers Association, a group which campaigned against the collection of tithes by the Church of England mainly for the upkeep of the clergy and which was unevenly levied across the country, hitting some areas harder than others. In 1931, having sided with the Simonite faction in the Liberal party, Kedward fought Ashford as a Liberal National but was defeated as the local Conservatives refused to endorse his candidacy, seeing him as too radical and disliking his overt non-conformism (anti-tithe stance). They put up their own candidate against him. He was unsuccessful again at the 1933 by-election (this time as an anti-government Liberal) following his successor's elevation to the House of Lords.
At the time of his death from the sudden onset of a
His grandson