Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, 11th Baronet

Who was Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, 11th Baronet?

Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, 11th Baronet FRS was a British educational reformer and a politician who sat in the House of Commons between 1837 to 1886 initially as a Tory and later, after an eighteen-year gap, as a Liberal.

Acland was the eldest son of Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, 10th Baronet, and his wife Lydia Elizabeth Hoare, daughter of Henry Hoare, a partner in the banking firm of C. Hoare & Co. Sir Henry Wentworth Acland was his younger brother. He was educated at Harrow and Christ Church, Oxford, where he was friends with William Ewart Gladstone and Lord Elgin among others. He was a major in the Royal Devonshire Yeomanry Cavalry. In 1839 he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society.

In 1837, Acland entered Parliament for Somerset West as a Tory. During the tensions within the Tory party in the 1840s over the Corn Laws, Acland supported Sir Robert Peel's free trade policy. He did not stand for Parliament in the 1847 general election and was to remain out of the House of Commons for nearly twenty years.

Acland showed a strong interest in and commitment to educational reform.