Hugh gaitskell biography

The British politician Hugh Gaitskell (1906-1963) was chancellor of the exchequer from 1950 to 1951. He was leader of the Labour Party from 1955 to 1963.

Hugh Todd-Naylor Gaitskell was born in London on April 9, 1906, the son of Arthur Gaitskell, an Indian civil servant. He had a middle-class upbringing which included periods of time spent in Burma. He was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, where he received first class honors in "Modern Greats" (politics, philosophy, and economics) in 1927.

For the next ten years Gaitskell pursued a career in teaching. He lectured to Nottingham miners for a year (1927-1928) on behalf of the Workers' Educational Association, his first extended contact with working-class life. Then he taught economics and politics at University College, London, rising to the position of reader in political economy in 1938. In 1937 he married Dora Frost, with whom he had two daughters.

Gaitskell's interest in socialism was stimulated initially during his student days at Oxford, where he came under the influence of G. D. H. Cole, the socialist philosopher and historian. His first political act was to assist the workers in Oxford during the nine days' general strike of 1926. In 1935 he ran unsuccessfully as Labour Party candidate for a parliamentary seat at Chatham. He began to make speeches and to participate in party activities. He advocated collective security against fascism and took a moderate socialist line on economic questions, arguing in favor of social equality and against revolution.

During World War II Gaitskell joined the civil service on a temporary basis. He served in several important ministries and worked closely with the Labour politician Hugh Dalton. In the general election of 1945 he won the seat in Parliament for Leeds South, which he held for the remainder of his life. In the postwar government of Clement Attlee he was appointed to the positions of minister of fuel and power (1947-1950), min

Primary Sources

(1) Harold Wilson, Memoirs: The Making of a Prime Minister, 1916-64 (1986)

Hugh Gaitskell had many fine qualities, including unswerving loyalty to his close band of friends and to the principles of economics as he interpreted them, together with great personal charm. But once he came to a decision, a remarkably speedy process associated with great certainty, the Medes and the Persians had nothing on him. Whether the argument took place in the Shadow Cabinet or the National Executive, any colleague taking a different line from his was regarded not only as an apostate, but as a troublemaker or simply a person lacking in brains.

Hugh Gaitskell and Nye Bevan were as temperamentally and politically opposed to one another as it was possible to be within a single political party. I had relations of fairly long standing with both of them. I had first come close to Nye during my housing stint at the Ministry of Works, although it had taken time for the relationship to develop. Nye was suspicious of university-trained MPs, particularly those from Oxford and above all economists, but I had broken down that barrier and we had great confidence in each other. I had early developed an admiration for Hugh Gaitskell's qualities and in many way we were intellectual partners. He was more doctrinaire and I was more of a pragmatist.

One other fact soon became clear about Hugh. He was certainly ambitious, and had close links with the right-wing trade unions. It was not long before that ambition took the form of a determination to outmanoeuvre, indeed humiliate, Aneurin Bevan. Hugh, for his part, despised what he regarded as emotional oratory, and if he could defeat Nye in open conflict, he would be in a strong position to oust Morrison as the heir apparent to Clement Attlee. At the same time he would ensure that post-war socialism would take a less dogmatic form, totally anti-communist but unemotional.

(2) Herbert Morrison, An Autob