Obituary from the Hoylake and West Kirby Advertiser
February 12th 1954
At the age of 77, Mr. George Harold Jager, of The Old Garden, Meols Drive. Hoylake, died peacefully in Hoylake Cottage Hospital on Tuesday of this week after a short illness.
Born in Birkenhead on January 9th. 1877, he was the eldest son of George Jager, Junior, a Liverpool sugar refiner, and was for many years a director of the company of George Jager and Son, Ltd., founded by his grandfather in 1840.
Educated at Birkenhead School, Rugby School and Balliol College. Oxford, he was called to the Bar at the Inner Temple and was for some years a member of the Northern Circuit. During part of this period he was in chambers with F. E. Smith, later Lord Birkenhead, and was actively associated with F E and Harold Smith in their political work.
An enthusiastic advocate of Tariff Reform, he was chairman of the Birkenhead Workingmen's Conservative Association from 1908 till 1913 when he left Birkenhead for Gerards Cross, Bucks, in order to take charge of a paint manufacturing factory at Greenford. His manifold political activities up to this time are racily described in his book "Brief Life" published in 1934.
He married Dorothy Maclver, daughter of David Maclver, the Liverpool shipowner and Member of Parliament for Birkenhead and later for Kirkdale, in 1908, and leaves six children and five grandchildren.
After his wife's death in 1924 he returned to Cheshire and lived at HoylaKe. He renewed his association with the Birkenhead Workingmen's Conservative Association and became chairman of the Liverpool branch of the National Union of Manufacturers and a vice-president of the national body.
During the war he was a keen member of the Home Guard and in 1945 he wrote and published "The Rise and Ascent of Number Two Platoon" to the great pleasure of his fellow members.
He delighted to cruise each autumn with his friend H. I. MacIver off the West Coast of Scotland and to describe (and if possible to publish) and to paint in water colours the details of each cruise. He was in 1953 elected an honorary life member of the Tranmere Sailing Club. He was a keen member of the Royal Liverpool Golf Club and had been in excellent spirits at a private club dinner shortly before his final illness overtook him.
He was a kind and gentle man and though his most severe criticism of a contemporary was that "no one even hated him", he was indeed loved and respected by his political opponents as well as by his many friends.