Sir William Randal Cremer

William Randal Cremer was born into grinding poverty in Fareham, Hampshire. Abandoned by his father in infancy, his mother raised him on bread and potatoes while working long hours. Apprenticed as a carpenter at age fifteen, Cremer moved to London in 1852, becoming an active organizer in the building trades. In 1860, he helped lead the nine-hour workday strike and was elected to the provisional council of the International Workingmen's Association (First International), serving as its general secretary before resigning in disgust over revolutionary socialist dogma.

Cremer believed that war was an unmitigated disaster for the working class, who bore the burdens of military conscription and battlefield slaughter to serve aristocratic ambitions. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Cremer founded the Workmen's Peace Association, later renamed the International Arbitration League, serving as its secretary for nearly four decades.

Elected to the British House of Commons as Liberal-Labour MP for Haggerston in 1885, Cremer championed mandatory arbitration treaties. In 1887, he gathered the signatures of 232 British parliamentarians on an address to the US Congress urging an Anglo-American arbitration treaty, traveling personally to the White House to present it to President Grover Cleveland. In 1889, he co-founded the Inter-Parliamentary Union in Paris with Frédéric Passy. In 1903, Cremer became the first sole recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, donating the entire £8,000 endowment back to the International Arbitration League.