However, this version of the story of the declaration's origins has been described as " fanciful ", a fair assessment considering that discussions between Weizmann and Balfour had begun at least a decade earlier.

In late 1905 Balfour had requested of Charles Dreyfus, his Jewish constituency representative, that he arrange a meeting with Weizmann, during which Weizmann asked for official British support for Zionism ; they were to meet again on this issue in 1914.

The White Paper of 1939, stated that with over 450, 000 Jews having now arrived in Palestine, the Balfour Declaration aim of " a national home for the Jewish people " had been achieved.

The Statute of Westminster 1931 passed by the Imperial Parliament in December 1931, which repealed the Colonial Laws Validity Act and implemented the Balfour Declaration 1926, had a profound impact on the constitutional structure and status of the Union.

In vain, the King urged Conservative leaders Balfour and Lord Lansdowne to pass the Budget ( Lord Esher advised that this was not unusual, as Queen Victoria had helped to broker agreement between the two Houses over Irish disestablishment in 1869 and the Third Reform Act in 1884 ), although on Asquith's advice he did not offer them an election ( at which, to judge from recent by-elections, they were likely to gain seats ) as a reward for doing so.

Balfour refused to be drawn on whether or not he would be willing to form a Conservative government, but advised the King not to promise to create peers until he had seen the terms of any proposed constitutional change.

As a result, Britain pooled its energy into winning over Arab opinions by abandoning the Balfour Declaration and the terms of the League of Nations mandate which had been entrusted to it in order to create a " Jewish National Home ".

Although wounded, the queen managed to escape and sent a directive ahead to Edinburgh for the now James II to be shielded from any widening of the conspiracy and had the boy king's custodian, the pro-Atholl John Spens, removed from his post and replaced by the trusted John Balfour.

Edinburgh Castle was initially handed by its Captain, James Balfour, to the Regent Moray, who had forced Mary's abdication, and now held power in the name of the infant King James VI.

The King privately urged Conservative leaders Balfour and Lord Lansdowne to pass the Budget ( this was not unusual, as Queen Victoria had helped to broker agreement between the two Houses over Irish Disestablishment in 1869 and the Third Reform Act in 1884 ).

Balfour refused to be drawn on whether or not he would be willing to form a Conservative government, but advised the King not to promise to create peers until he had seen the terms of any proposed constitutional change.

The Prime Minister was keen that Balfour, his nephew should succeed him, but realised that Chamberlain's followers felt that the Colonial Secretary had a legitimate claim to the premiership.

Balfour had endorsed cautious protectionism soon after Chamberlain's resignation, but was unwilling to go further or to announce an early general election, by-election results being comprehensively unfavourable for the Unionists.

By now, Chamberlain had accepted that the Unionists were likely to lose the general election, and criticised Balfour for delaying the inevitable.

Although in opposition, it appeared that Chamberlain had successfully associated the Unionists with the cause of tariff reform, and that Balfour would be compelled to accede to Chamberlain's future demands.

Indeed, for a short period in early 1906, Chamberlain was the de facto leader of the Unionist alliance in the House of Commons, as the Conservative party leader, and former Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour had lost his seat in the election ( though he soon managed to return to parliament after a conveniently-arranged by-election ).

It is possible that at this stage Chamberlain could have become leader of all the surviving Unionists ( at least all those in favour of Tariff Reform ) and forced Balfour to resign, but even protectionist Tories were reluctant to choose Chamberlain as their leader, not having forgotten how, as a Liberal, in the 1880s, he had been one of their sternest critics.

Balfour succeeded his uncle Lord Salisbury as Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader in July 1902 ( Balfour had been Conservative leader in the House of Commons since 1891 ).

Arthur Balfour had his early education at the Grange preparatory school in Hoddesdon, Hertfordshire ( 1859 – 1861 ), and Eton ( 1861 – 1866 ), where he studied with the influential Master William Johnson Cory.

Although he coined the saying, " Nothing matters very much and few things matter at all ", Balfour was distraught at the early death from typhus in 1875 of his cousin May Lyttelton, whom he had hoped to marry: later in life he was to receive a series of messages from mediums, claiming to pass on messages from her, known as the " Palm Sunday Case ".

In middle age Balfour had a forty-year long friendship with Mary Charteris ( née Wyndham ), Lady Elcho, later Countess of Wemyss and March.

Another biographer believes that they had " no direct physical relationship ", although he dismisses as unlikely suggestions that Balfour was homosexual, or, in view of a time during the Boer War when he replied to an important message whilst drying himself after his bath, Lord Beaverbrook's famous claim that he was " a hermaphrodite " whom no-one ever saw naked.

Hoping to split the difference between the free traders and tariff reformers in his cabinet and party, Balfour came out in favour of retaliatory tariffs — tariffs designed to punish other powers that had tariffs against British goods, supposedly in the hope of encouraging global free trade.

At the same time, Balfour tried to balance the two factions by accepting the resignation of three free-trading ministers, including Chancellor Ritchie, but the almost simultaneous resignation of the free-trader Duke of Devonshire ( who as Lord Hartington had been the Liberal Unionist leader of the 1880s ) left Balfour's Cabinet looking weak.

The government eventually relented, with Balfour stating that " as soon as the necessary arrangements under the London Government Act have been completed, there will be conferred on the borough of Westminster, as constituted under the Act, the title of city, originally conferred in the time of Henry VIII ".

At this point Lloyd George resigned, and on 5 December 1916, no longer enjoying the support of the press or of leading Conservatives, Asquith himself resigned, declining to serve under any other Prime Minister ( Balfour or Bonar Law having been mooted as potential new leaders of the coalition ).

Smith in 1891, Balfour became First Lord of the Treasury — the last one in British history not to have been concurrently Prime Minister as well — and Leader of the House of Commons.

In earlier centuries it had not been exceptional for a former Prime Minister to serve in the cabinet of a successor, and even in the past fifty years Arthur Balfour, Stanley Baldwin, Ramsay MacDonald and Neville Chamberlain had done so.

The suggestion was no more Law's than it was any of the other dozens of conservatives who had suggested this to Balfour, and his comment was simply an attempt to " pass the buck " and avoid the anger of Austen Chamberlain, who was furious that such an announcement had been made without consulting him or the party.

In the aftermath of the general election of 1892, Balfour and Chamberlain wished to pursue a programme of social reform, which Salisbury believed would alienate " a good many people who have always been with us " and that " these social questions are destined to break up our party ".

* Tone Poem No. 3, later dubbed Orchestral Drama: Fifine at the Fair ( 1901, after Browning's Pippa Passes, Birmingham Festival, 1912, conducted by the composer, then Eighth Balfour Gardiner Concert, Queen's Hall, first performance in London, New SO / Gardiner, 18 March 1913 ; this was to have been given at an RPS concert in the 1911-12 season but was cancelled due to a dispute over fees.

Modern applications of continuously supported track include Balfour Beatty's ' Embedded Slab Track ' which uses a rounded rectangular rail profile ( BB14072 ) embedded in a slipformed ( or pre-cast ) concrete base ( development 2000s ), the ' Embedded Rail Structure ', used in the Netherlands since 1976, initially used a conventional UIC 54 rail embedded in concrete, later developed ( late 1990s ) to use a ' mushroom ' shaped SA42 rail profile ; a version for light rail using a rail supported in an asphalt concrete filled steel trough has also been developed ( 2002 ).

According to Sykes, Churchill, and Balfour the areas lying east of the line from Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Alleppo ( the Hedjaz Railway route ) had been pledged to the Arabs ( as noted in Churchill's analysis ).

The works were let out to commercial construction firms including Balfour Beatty, Costain, Nuttall, Henry Boot, Sir Robert McAlpine and Peter Lind & Company, who all still operate today, and Cubitts, Holloway Brothers, Mowlem and Taylor Woodrow, who all have since been absorbed into other businesses that are still operating.

The significance of the Program to a Jewish Commonwealth was in stepping beyond the terms of the Balfour Declaration ( which had been reaffirmed as British policy by Winston Churchill's White Paper of 1922 ) that there should be a " Jewish National Home " in Palestine.

For wavelength specificity, prior to Kirchhoff, the ratio was shown experimentally by Balfour Stewart to be the same for all bodies, but the universal value of the ratio had not been explicitly considered in its own right as a function of wavelength and temperature.

President Woodrow Wilson and Prime Minister David Lloyd George in Paris had been the only previous leaders to meet face-to-face, but had enjoyed nothing that could be described as a special relationship, although Lloyd George's wartime Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, got on well with Wilson during his time in the United States and helped convince the previously skeptical president to enter the war.

Though in his earlier years he had been a fair-trader, he was strongly opposed to Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain's movement for a preferential tariff, and he was sacked by Balfour in September 1903.

Having been private secretary to Arthur Balfour during the years around 1890 when Balfour was Chief Secretary for Ireland, Wyndham was himself made Chief Secretary by Salisbury in 1900.

The Zionists were similarly upset, with the Sykes – Picot Agreement becoming public only three weeks after the Balfour Declaration.

Balfour became a Professor of Botany, first at the University of Glasgow in 1841, moving to Edinburgh University and also becoming Regius Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and Her Majesty's Botanist in Scotland in 1845.

Quilter was educated first in the preparatory school at Farnborough, then moving to Eton College and later becoming a fellow-student of Percy Grainger, Cyril Scott and Henry Balfour Gardiner at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt, where he studied for almost five years under the guidance of Russian professor of composition, Iwan Knorr.

In 1917, Britain drafted the Balfour Declaration, becoming the first Great Power to support Zionist calls for a ' Jewish National Home ' in Palestine.