Sir James Edward Parrott (1 June 1863—5 April 1921) was a British teacher and author, who served as the Liberal Member of Parliament from Edinburgh South for 1917-1918.

Born in Marple, Cheshire, the eldest son of a schoolteacher, he was educated at St. Paul’s College, Cheltenham and then became an elementary schoolteacher, studying for a MA degree at Trinity College. He worked in education in Sheffield and then Liverpool for several years, during which time he began to write schoolbooks; as a result of this work, he was appointed educational editor at Thomas Nelson & Sons in 1898, and moved to Edinburgh.

He was elected chairman of the South Edinburgh Liberal Association in 1904 (until 1917), and the chair of Edinburgh United Liberal Committee in 1908 (until 1919). He was knighted in 1910 for services to the Liberal Party.

In 1917, the Member of Parliament for Edinburgh South, Charles Henry Lyell, stood down and Parrott was offered the candidacy by the local Liberal Association in April and he accepted it. He remained loyal to H. H. Asquith in the post-war split of the Liberal Party, considering himself a “Gladstonian Liberal”.

His publications included various books on the First World War and a large number of schoolbooks, and he edited Funk and Wagnall’s Standard Encyclopaedia and Nelson’s New Age Encyclopaedia.—Source: Wikipedia