Sir Andrew William Barton (5 August 1862 – 9 July 1957) was a British Liberal politician and businessman. Family Barton was born on 5 August 1862 near Glasgow, the son of Robert Barton, a mining engineer from Hamilton, South Lanarkshire, and his wife Annie (née Gray). In 1895, he married Jessie Cuthbertson, the daughter of James Boyd a Manchester merchant. They had one daughter. Jessie Barton died in 1915 and Barton married again in 1918. His second wife was Olive Ruth Bryson who had been Matron of the Balmoral Red Cross Hospital in Flanders. They too had one daughter. In religion Barton was a Presbyterian. Education Barton was educated at the High School of Glasgow, among whose most notable former pupils were Liberal prime minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and Conservative prime minister and Liberal Coalition partner, Bonar Law . He later graduated from the University of Glasgow where he specialized in commercial law, political economy and modern languages. Typically for his time, Barton later promoted education and self-improvement by becoming a director of the Manchester Athenaeum, an institution founded in 1835 and devoted to the arts and learning and one of whose founding fathers was Richard Cobden. Career After university Barton went into the textile industry in Glasgow where he learned the trade of calico printing and he later established a calico printing business of his own in Manchester. Politics Into Parliament Barton learned his political trade on Manchester City Council where he was an elected councillor between 1906 and 1909. In 1909 one of the two Members of Parliament for Oldham, J A Bright the son of the great Liberal reformer John Bright decided to stand down at the next election and Barton was selected to replace him as candidate. The next election came in January 1910 and Barton was comfortably elected as Oldham's second Liberal member alongside Alfred Emmott the Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons who had held his seat since a by-election in 1899, when one of the defeated Conservative candidates was Winston Churchill. Barton had a majority of 5,378 votes over his nearest Conservative rival in January 1910. He held the seat at the December 1910 election with a reduced but still substantial majority of 3,501 with Emmott again winning the other seat. Rupture with Oldham Liberals However, in 1913 Barton had a falling out with his local party in Oldham, although he continued