Enoch Powell
John Enoch Powell was a British politician, scholar and writer. He was Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West for the Conservative Party from 1950 to February 1974 and the MP for South Down for the Ulster Unionist Party from October 1974 to 1987. He was Minister of Health from 1960 to 1963 in the second Macmillan ministry and was Shadow Secretary of State for Defence from 1965 to 1968 in the Shadow Cabinet of Edward Heath.
Before entering politics, Powell was a classical scholar; in 1937 he was appointed Professor of Greek at the University of Sydney, aged only 25. He served in the British Army during the Second World War, reaching the rank of brigadier. He wrote both poetry and books on classical and political subjects. He is remembered particularly for his views on immigration and demographic change. In 1968 Powell attracted attention nationwide for his "Rivers of Blood" speech, in which he criticised immigration to Britain, especially the rapid influx from the Commonwealth of Nations in the post-war era. He opposed the Race Relations Bill, a major anti-discrimination bill which ultimately became law. His speech was criticised by some of his own party members and The Times as racialist. Heath, who was then the leader of the Conservative Party and the leader of the Opposition, dismissed Powell from the Shadow Cabinet the day after the speech. In the aftermath several polls suggested that between 67 and 82 per cent of the British population agreed with Powell.
Powell turned his back on the Conservatives and endorsed a vote for the Labour Party, which returned as a minority government at the February 1974 general election. Powell was returned to the House of Commons in October 1974 as the Ulster Unionist Party MP for the constituency of South Down in Northern Ireland. He represented it until he was defeated at the 1987 general election. Powell died in 1998 aged 85 and remains a divisive and controversial figure in Britain.
Early years
John Enoch Powell was born on 16 June 1912 in Stechford, within the city of Birmingham, and was baptised at the St Nicholas's Church in Newport, Shropshire, where his parents had married in 1909. He was the only child of Albert Enoch Powell, a primary school headmaster, and his wife, Ellen Mary Ellen. His mother did not like his name and as a child he was known as "Jack". At the age of three, Powell was nicknamed "the Professor" because he used to stand on a chair and describe the stuffed birds that his grandfather had shot, which were displayed in his parents' home. In 1918 the family moved to Kings Norton, where Powell remained until he went up to the University of Cambridge in 1930.The Powells were of Welsh descent and from Radnorshire, having moved to the developing Black Country during the early 19th century. Enoch's great-grandfather was a coal-miner and his grandfather had been in the iron trade.
Powell read avidly from a young age; as early as three, he could "read reasonably well". Though not wealthy, the Powells were financially comfortable and their home included a library. By the age of six, Powell loved to read. Every Sunday he would give lectures to his parents on the books that he had read and also conducted evensong and preached a sermon. Once he was old enough to go out on his own, Powell would walk around rural Worcestershire with the aid of Ordnance Survey maps, which instilled in him a love for landscape and cartography.
Education
Powell attended a dame school until he was eleven. He was then a pupil for three years at King's Norton Grammar School for Boys before he won a scholarship to King Edward's School in Birmingham in 1925, aged 13. The legacy of the First World War loomed large for Powell; almost all his teachers had fought in the war. He formed the view that Britain and Germany would fight again.Powell's mother began teaching him Greek in the two weeks of Christmas break in 1925. By the time he started the next term, he had attained a level in Greek that most pupils would reach after two years. Within two terms, Powell was top of the classics form.
Precociously, Powell won all three of the school's classics prizes and would win more later in his school career. In the fifth form he began to translate Herodotus's Histories. He entered the sixth form two years before his classmates and was remembered as a hard-working student. Powell also won a medal in gymnastics and gained a proficiency in the clarinet. He contemplated studying at the Royal Academy of Music, but his parents persuaded him to try for a scholarship at Cambridge.
It was during his time in the sixth form that Powell learned German. He was influenced by reading James George Frazer's The Golden Bough and Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, which led him towards the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Nietzsche.
Aged 17 Powell sat the classics scholarship paper at Trinity College, Cambridge, and won the top award.
Powell studied at Trinity from 1930 to 1933. He became almost a recluse and devoted his time to studying. The British literary magazine Granta called him "The Hermit of Trinity". At the age of 18 his first paper to a classical journal was published in the Philologische Wochenschrift, on a line of Herodotus. While studying at Cambridge, Powell became aware that there was another classicist who signed his name as "John U. Powell". Powell decided to use his middle name and began referring to himself as "Enoch Powell". Powell won the Craven scholarship at the beginning of his second term in 1931. It was at Cambridge that Powell fell under the influence of the poet A. E. Housman, then Professor of Latin at the university.
At Cambridge, Powell won a number of prizes, including the Percy Pemberton Prize, the Porson Prize, the Yeats Prize and the Lees Knowles, the Members' prize for Latin prose, the Browne Medal, the First Chancellor's Classical Medal and the Cromer Greek essay prize of the British Academy.
Powell took a course in Urdu at the School of Oriental Studies, because he felt that his long-cherished ambition of becoming Viceroy of India would be unattainable without knowledge of an Indian language. Later, during his political career, he would speak to his Indian-born constituents in Urdu. Powell went on to learn other languages, such as Welsh, modern Greek and Portuguese.
Academic career
After graduating from Cambridge, Powell stayed on at Trinity College as a fellow, spending much of his time studying ancient manuscripts in Latin and producing academic works in Greek and Welsh. He won the Craven travelling scholarship, which he used to fund travels to Italy, where he researched Greek manuscripts. He also learned Italian. Powell was still convinced of the inevitability of war with Germany after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933: he told his father in 1934, "I want to be in the army from the first day that Britain goes to war". He suffered a spiritual crisis when he heard of the Night of the Long Knives in July 1934, which shattered his vision of German culture.Powell spent his time at Trinity teaching and supervising undergraduates and worked on a lexicon of Herodotus. Since 1932, Powell had been working on the Egyptian manuscripts of J. Rendel Harris and his translation from Greek into English was published in 1937.
Powell published the collection First Poems in 1937, which was influenced by Housman. His second volume of poems, Casting Off, and Other Poems, was printed in 1939. A further collection of poems, Dancer's End and The Wedding Gift, were published in 1951. A full collection of poems was published in one volume in 1990.
In 1937 he was appointed Professor of Greek at the University of Sydney, aged 25,. He was the youngest professor in the British Empire. He revised Henry Stuart Jones's edition of Thucydides' Historiae for the Oxford University Press in 1938. His most lasting contribution to classical scholarship was his Lexicon to Herodotus, published by Cambridge University Press the same year, which was well received by critics.
Soon after his arrival in Australia, he was appointed Curator of the Nicholson Museum at the University of Sydney. He informed the vice-chancellor that war would soon begin in Europe and that when it did, he would be heading home to enlist in the army. In his inaugural lecture as professor of Greek in May 1938, he condemned Britain's policy of appeasement. At the outbreak of war, Powell immediately returned to England.
Military service
In October 1939 Powell enlisted as a private in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. He had trouble enlisting, as during the "Phoney War" the War Office did not want men with no military training. Rather than waiting to be called up, he claimed to be Australian, as Australians were allowed to enlist straight away. He was promoted from private to lance-corporal and completed officer training. He told colleagues that he expected to be at least a major-general by the end of the war.On 18 May 1940 Powell was commissioned as a second lieutenant onto the General List. He was transferred to the Intelligence Corps and later promoted to captain, posted as GSO3 to the 1st Armoured Division. During this time, he taught himself Russian; as insufficient Russian-speaking officers were available at the War Office, his knowledge of Russian and his textual analysis skills were used to translate a Russian parachute training manual; he was convinced that the Soviet Union must eventually enter the war on the Allied side.
In October 1941 Powell was posted to Cairo in the Kingdom of Egypt and then transferred back to the Royal Warwickshire Regiment. He was promoted to major in May 1942 and then to lieutenant colonel in August 1942. In that role he helped to plan the Second Battle of El Alamein, having previously helped to plan the attack on Erwin Rommel's supply lines. The following year, he was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire for his military service. During his time in Algiers, Powell began to distrust the United States' position. Powell's suspicion of the anti-British Empire nature of the US federal government's foreign policy continued for the remainder of the war and into his subsequent post-war political career.
Following the Axis defeat at the Second Battle of El Alamein, Powell's attention increasingly moved to the Far East theatre, where the Allies were fighting the Imperial Japanese Army. He wished to be assigned to the Chindits units operating in Burma. He secured a posting to the British Indian Army in Delhi as a lieutenant-colonel in military intelligence in August 1943. Powell was appointed Secretary to the Joint Intelligence Committee for India and Lord Mountbatten's Southeast Asia Command, involved in planning an amphibious offensive against Akyab.
Powell had continued to learn Urdu. He had an ambition of eventually becoming Viceroy of India, and when Mountbatten transferred his staff to Kandy, Ceylon, Powell chose to remain in Delhi. He was promoted to full colonel at the end of March 1944, as assistant director of military intelligence in India, giving intelligence support to the Burma campaign of Field Marshall William Slim. Powell ended the war as a brigadier, for a while, the youngest in the British Army. He told a colleague that he expected to be head of all military intelligence in "the next war". Powell never experienced combat and felt guilty for having survived, writing that soldiers who did so carried "a sort of shame with them to the grave".