Tommy Henderson
In 1920, he offered himself as a potential Unionist candidate for the House of Commons of Northern Ireland at the first election but was met by a patronising response from the Chairman of the selection meeting who looked down at him (Henderson was significantly below average height) in his ill-fitting and paint-spattered clothes and asked "What kind of a man are you?".At the 1925 election, he fought the Belfast North constituency and topped the poll with 10,306 first preference votes, the only candidate to have the electoral quota on the first count.[citation needed] The high point of Henderson's Parliamentary career came on 26 May 1936 when he decided to speak on the annual Appropriation Bill, a government measure which applied spending to each department and service.Henderson was a vocal critic of the Northern Ireland government's failure to put in place effective air raid precautions during the Second World War, which led to severe loss of life when Belfast was bombed on the night of 15 April 1941 (although he excluded the Minister of Public Security, John MacDermott from the criticism despite his technical responsibility).[citation needed] In an unconnected incident, he told of an occasion when the Marquess of Londonderry had invited him to a private room in the Grand Central Hotel in Belfast to discuss Germany.