Hugh Gaitskell

Hugh Gaitskell was born in Kensington, London, the third and youngest child of Arthur Gaitskell (1869–1915), of the Indian Civil Service, and Adelaide Mary, née Jamieson (died 1956), 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.

Hugh Todd Naylor Gaitskell (9 April 1906 – 18 January 1963) was a British politician who served as Leader of the Labour Party and Leader of the Opposition from 1955 until his death in 1963.

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.

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.

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 (technically a lockout rather than a strike) did not end until November.

He graduated with a first-class degree in Philosophy, politics and economics in 1927.

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 moved to University College London in the early 1930s at the invitation of Noel Hall.

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.

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.

This event 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.

In 1934 he joined the XYZ Club, a club for Labour financial experts (e.g. Hugh Dalton, of whom he became a protégé, Douglas Jay and Evan Durbin) 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.

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.

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 was loved and hated for his confrontational leadership and brutal frankness.

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.

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.

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.

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.