Hugh Gaitskell
Hugh Todd Naylor Gaitskell was a British politician who was Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition from 1955 until his death in 1963. An economics lecturer and wartime civil servant, he was elected to Parliament in 1945 and held office in Clement Attlee's governments, notably as Minister of Fuel and Power following the bitter winter of 1946–47, and eventually joining the Cabinet as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Facing the need to increase military spending in 1951, he imposed National Health Service charges on dentures and spectacles, prompting the leading left-winger Aneurin Bevan to resign from the Cabinet.
The perceived similarity in his outlook to that of his Conservative Party counterpart Rab Butler was dubbed "Butskellism", initially a satirical term blending their names, and was one aspect of the post-war consensus through which the major parties largely agreed on the main points of domestic and foreign policy until the 1970s. With Labour in opposition from 1951, Gaitskell won bitter leadership battles with Bevan and his supporters to become the Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition in 1955. In 1956 he opposed the Eden government's use of military force at Suez. Against a backdrop of a booming economy he led Labour to its third successive defeat at the 1959 general election.
In the late 1950s, in the teeth of opposition from the major trade unions, he attempted in vain to remove Clause IV of the Labour Party Constitution, which committed Labour to nationalisation of all the means of production. He did not reject public ownership altogether, but also emphasised the ethical goals of liberty, social welfare and above all equality, and argued that they could be achieved by fiscal and social policies within a mixed economy. His revisionist views, on the right wing of the Labour Party, were sometimes called Gaitskellism.
Despite this setback, Gaitskell reversed an attempt to adopt unilateral nuclear disarmament as Labour Party policy, and opposed Prime Minister Harold Macmillan's attempt to lead the UK into the European Common Market. He died suddenly in 1963, when he appeared to be on the verge of leading Labour back into power and becoming the next prime minister.
Early life
Hugh Gaitskell was born in Kensington, London, the third and youngest child of Arthur Gaitskell, of the Indian Civil Service, and Adelaide Mary, née Jamieson, whose father, George Jamieson, was consul-general in Shanghai and prior to that had been Judge of the British Supreme Court for China and Japan. He was known as "Sam" as a child. The Gaitskells had a long family connection with the Indian Army, and he spent his childhood in Burma. After his father's death, his mother soon remarried and returned to Burma, leaving him at boarding school.Gaitskell was educated at the Dragon School from 1912 to 1919, where he was a friend of the future poet John Betjeman. He then attended Winchester College from 1919 to 1924.
He attended New College, Oxford, from 1924 to 1927. Studying under G. D. H. Cole, Gaitskell became a socialist and wrote a long essay on Chartism, arguing that the working class needed middle class leadership. Gaitskell's first political involvement came about as a result of the General Strike of 1926. Most students supported the government and many volunteered for civil defence duties, or helped to run essential services. Gaitskell, unusually, supported the strikers and acted as a driver for people like his Oxford contemporary Evan Durbin and Cole's wife Margaret, who made speeches and delivered the trade union newspaper British Worker. After the collapse of the General Strike, Gaitskell spent another six months raising funds for the miners, whose dispute did not end until November. He graduated with a first-class degree in Philosophy, politics and economics in 1927.
Academic and early political career
In 1927–28 Gaitskell lectured in economics for the Workers' Educational Association to miners in Nottinghamshire. His essay on Chartism was published as a WEA booklet in 1928. This was his first experience of interaction with the working class. Gaitskell eventually came to oppose both Cole's Guild socialism and Syndicalism and to feel that the General Strike had been the last failed spasm of a strategy – attempting to seize power through direct trade union action – which had already been tried in the abortive Triple Alliance Strike of 1921. It is unclear whether Gaitskell was ever sympathetic to Oswald Mosley, then seen as a future leader of the Labour Party. Gaitskell's wife later insisted that he never had been, but Margaret Cole, Evan Durbin's wife and Noel Hall believed that he was, although as an opponent of factional splits he was not tempted to join Mosley's New Party in 1931.Gaitskell helped to run the New Fabian Research Bureau, set up by G. D. H. Cole in March 1931. He was selected as Labour candidate for Chatham in autumn 1932. Gaitskell moved to University College London in the early 1930s at the invitation of Noel Hall. In 1934 he joined the XYZ Club, a club for Labour financial experts and City people such as the economist Nicholas Davenport. Dalton and Gaitskell were often referred to as "Big Hugh and Little Hugh" over the next fifteen years.
In 1934 Gaitskell was in Vienna on a Rockefeller scholarship. He was attached to the University of Vienna for the 1933–34 academic year and witnessed first-hand the political suppression of the social democratic workers movement by the conservative Engelbert Dollfuss's government in February 1934. He sheltered activist and journalist Ilse Barea-Kulcsar when she was threatened with arrest. His experiences in Vienna made a lasting impression, making him profoundly hostile to conservatism but also making him reject as futile the Marxian outlook of many European social democrats. This placed him in the socialist revisionist camp.
At the 1935 general election, he stood unsuccessfully as the Labour Party candidate for Chatham. Gaitskell helped to draft "Labour's Immediate Programme" in 1937. This had a strong emphasis on planning, although not as much as his mentor Dalton would have liked, with no plans for the nationalisation of banks or the steel industry. He also drafted documents which would have been used in the election due in 1939–40. Dalton helped him to be selected as candidate for South Leeds in 1937, and had it not been for the war, he would very likely have become an MP by 1940.
Gaitskell became head of the Department of Political Economy at UCL when Hall was appointed Director of the National Institute of Economic and Social Research in 1938, jointly with Paul Rosenstein-Rodan. He also became a University Reader. He opposed the appeasement of Nazi Germany and supported rearmament.
Personal life
According to Michael Bloch, Gaitskell enjoyed a number of same-sex relationships while at Oxford, including with John Betjeman, and in the 1930s in Vienna, with John Gunther.Whilst a WEA lecturer in the late 1920s Gaitskell lived for a time with a local woman in Nottinghamshire. This is thought to have been his first adult relationship. Until the early 1930s he rejected marriage as a "bourgeois convention".
By the mid-1930s Gaitskell had formed a close relationship with a married woman, Dora Frost, who came out to join him in Vienna for the latter part of his stay there. Adultery still carried such stigma that she thought it best not to help him during his Parliamentary campaign in Chatham in 1935. After her divorce, hard to obtain prior to the passage of the Matrimonial Causes Act 1937, they were eventually married on 9 April 1937, Gaitskell's thirty-first birthday, with Evan Durbin as best man. Dora had a son, Raymond Frost, from her first marriage. The Gaitskells had two daughters: Julia, born in 1939, and Cressida, born in 1942. Dora Gaitskell became a Labour life peer a year after her husband's death and died in 1989.
Gaitskell had a long-term affair in the 1950s with the socialite Ann Fleming, the wife of the writer Ian Fleming. She wrote to Evelyn Waugh about a dinner party in 1958 in which Gaitskell and friends from Oxford days "held hands and recited verse because in early life they had loved each other in the same set", until the arrival of her husband "silenced the eminent homos", who "did not seem too pleased." Woodrow Wyatt wrote that "there was a scintilla of platonic homosexuality in affection for Tony Anthony Crosland|".
In private he was humorous and fun-loving, with a love of ballroom dancing. This contrasted with his stern public image. He was a member of the Steering Committee of the Bilderberg Group.
Wartime civil servant and election to Parliament
During the Second World War, from the formation of Churchill's coalition government in May 1940 Gaitskell worked with Noel Hall and Hugh Dalton as a senior civil servant for the Ministry of Economic Warfare, giving him experience of government. As Dalton's Private Secretary Gaitskell was more of a Chef de Cabinet and trusted adviser. Observers watched Gaitskell blossom and enjoy exercising power. Dalton liked to shout at his subordinates; Gaitskell sometimes shouted back. Along with Dalton, Gaitskell was moved to the Board of Trade in February 1942, where for the first time he came into contact with the leaders of the miners' unions, who were later to support him in his struggles against Aneurin Bevan in the 1950s. For his service, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1945.In March 1945 Gaitskell suffered a coronary thrombosis brought on by overwork. Advised to rest, he considered withdrawing from his parliamentary candidacy in Leeds, but he was popular with his constituency workers and they offered to campaign for him even if he was unable to do so. He was also approached to return to UCL as a Professor after the war, but he disliked the constant state of flux of academic economics and the increasing emphasis on mathematics, a subject of which he had little knowledge. By now he found himself more drawn to public life.
Gaitskell was elected Labour Member of Parliament for Leeds South in the Labour landslide victory of 1945. Despite his illness, as a protégé of Dalton he was seriously considered for immediate appointment as a junior minister, Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the Board of Trade. This would have been a rare honour since 263 of the 393 Labour MPs in 1945 were newly elected, but it did not take place.
As a backbencher he spoke in debates in support of Dalton's nationalisation of the Bank of England, which eventually received Royal Assent on 14 February 1946. Dalton was trying to score party points by claiming that he was reasserting political control over the City of London, a far-fetched claim as the Bank was already under political control. Although some Conservative MPs spoke against the measure it was not opposed by Churchill, then Leader of the Opposition, who had had an ambivalent view of the Bank since his own time as chancellor in the 1920s.