Rab Butler

Richard Austen Butler, Baron Butler of Saffron Walden, (9 December 1902 – 8 March 1982), also known as R. A. Butler and familiarly known from his initials as Rab, was a prominent British Conservative Party politician; he was effectively Deputy Prime Minister to Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan, although he only held the official title for a brief period in 1962–63.

Richard Austen Butler was born 9 December 1902 in Attock, British India, the eldest son of Montagu Sherard Dawes Butler, a member of the Indian Civil Service, and Anne Smith.

He had two sisters, Iris (1905–2002), who married Lieutenant-Colonel Gervase Portal (1890–1961) and became a writer, and Dorothy (1909–1999), the wife of Laurence Middleton (1905–1982).

In July 1909, at the age of six, Butler's right arm was broken in three places in a riding accident, which left his right hand permanently disabled.

He attended a preparatory school in Hove but rebelled against going to Harrow School, where most of his family were educated.

His younger brother John (1914–1943) was killed in an air crash on active service in January 1943.

Having failed to win a scholarship to Eton College, he instead attended Marlborough College, leaving in December 1920.

In June 1921, he won an exhibition to Pembroke College, Cambridge.

At that stage, he planned a career in the Diplomatic Service.

Butler entered Pembroke College in October 1921 and became President of the Cambridge Union Society for Easter (summer) term of 1924.

Initially studying French and German, he graduated in 1925 with one of the highest first-class degrees in history in the university.

He was elected a fellow of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and gave lectures on the politics of the French Third Republic.

At Cambridge, he met Sydney Courtauld; after they married in 1926, his father-in-law awarded him an income of £5,000 a year after tax for life, which was comparable to a Cabinet Minister's salary and gave him the financial freedom to pursue a political career.

With the help of his Courtauld family connections, Butler was selected unopposed as the Conservative candidate on 26 November 1927.

Born into a family of academics and Indian administrators, Butler had a distinguished academic career before he entered Parliament in 1929.

He was elected in the 1929 general election, and retained the seat until his retirement in 1965.

Even before being elected to Parliament, Butler had been private secretary to Samuel Hoare.

When the National Government was formed in August 1931 Hoare was appointed Secretary of State for India, and Butler was appointed as Hoare's Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS).

In January 1932, he visited India as part of Lord Lothian's Franchise Committee, which was set up by the Round Table Conference and which recommended a large increase in the Indian electorate.

On 29 September 1932, Butler became Under-Secretary of State for India after the resignation of Lord Lothian and other Liberals over abandonment of free trade by the National Government.

As a junior minister, he helped to pass the Government of India Act 1935.

At 29, he was the youngest member of the government and was responsible for piloting the Government of India Act 1935 through Parliament in the face of massive opposition from Winston Churchill and the Conservative right.

He retained this position in Stanley Baldwin's third government (1935–1937), and when Neville Chamberlain replaced Baldwin as Prime Minister in May 1937, Butler was appointed Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Labour.

He strongly supported the appeasement of Nazi Germany in 1938 to 1939.

In the reshuffle caused by the resignation of Anthony Eden as Foreign Secretary and Lord Cranborne as Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs in February 1938, they were replaced by Lord Halifax and Butler, who became the main Foreign Office spokesman in the Commons.

In internal discussions after Germany's annexation of Austria on 12 March 1938, Butler counselled against giving Czechoslovakia a guarantee of British support and approved the Cabinet decision on 22 March not to do so, facts that he later omitted from his memoirs.

During the Sudeten Crisis, he was attending a League of Nations meeting in Geneva but strongly supported Chamberlain's trip to Berchtesgaden on 16 September, even if it meant sacrificing Czechoslovakia in the interests of peace.

Butler returned to Britain to make the winding-up speech for the Government in the Parliamentary Debate on the Munich Agreement on 5 October.

After Churchill had spoken, Butler said that war solved nothing and that it was better to "settle our differences with Germany by consultation".

However, he did not directly defend the Munich settlement; the motion was to support the avoidance of war and the pursuit of lasting peace.

Entering the Cabinet in 1941, he served as President of the Board of Education (1941–1945) and oversaw the Education Act 1944.

When the Conservatives returned to power in 1951, he served as Chancellor of the Exchequer (1951–1955), Home Secretary (1957–1962), First Secretary of State (1962–1963) and Foreign Secretary (1963–1964).

Butler had an exceptionally long ministerial career and was one of only two British politicians (the other being John Simon, 1st Viscount Simon) to have served in three of the four Great Offices of State but never to have been Prime Minister for which he was passed over in 1957 and 1963.

At the time, the Conservative leadership was decided by a process of private consultation, rather than by a formal vote.

After retiring from politics in 1965, Butler was appointed Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.

Butler's paternal family had a long and distinguished association with the University of Cambridge, dating back to his great-grandfather George Butler.

His great-uncle Henry Montagu Butler was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and Dean of Gloucester, and his uncle Sir Geoffrey G. Butler, a Cambridge historian and Conservative MP for the university.

His father was a Fellow and later Master of Pembroke College, Cambridge.

His maternal grandfather, George Smith, was Principal of Doveton Boys College, Calcutta.

He was one of his party's leaders in promoting the post-war consensus through which the major parties largely agreed on the main points of domestic policy until the 1970s; it is sometimes known as "Butskellism" from a fusion of his name with that of his Labour counterpart, Hugh Gaitskell.