Honorific-Prefix: | The Right Honourable |
The Lord Gordon-Walker | |
Office: | Secretary of State for Education and Science |
Primeminister: | Harold Wilson |
Term Start: | 29 August 1967 |
Term End: | 6 April 1968 |
Predecessor: | Anthony Crosland |
Successor: | Edward Short |
Office1: | Minister without Portfolio |
Primeminister1: | Harold Wilson |
Term Start1: | 6 April 1966 |
Term End1: | 29 August 1967 |
Predecessor1: | Peter Carington |
Successor1: | George Thomson |
Office2: | Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs |
Primeminister2: | Harold Wilson |
Term Start2: | 16 October 1964 |
Term End2: | 22 January 1965 |
Predecessor2: | Rab Butler |
Successor2: | Michael Stewart |
Office3: | Shadow Foreign Secretary |
Leader3: | Harold Wilson |
Term Start3: | 14 February 1963 |
Term End3: | 16 October 1964 |
Predecessor3: | Harold Wilson |
Successor3: | Rab Butler |
Office4: | Shadow Home Secretary |
Leader4: | Hugh Gaitskell |
Term Start4: | 13 May 1957 |
Term End4: | 12 March 1962 |
Predecessor4: | Kenneth Younger |
Successor4: | George Brown |
Office5: | Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations |
Primeminister5: | Clement Attlee |
Term Start5: | 28 February 1950 |
Term End5: | 26 October 1951 |
Predecessor5: | Philip Noel-Baker |
Successor5: | The Lord Ismay |
Office6: | Under-Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations |
Primeminister6: | Clement Attlee |
Term Start6: | 7 October 1947 |
Term End6: | 28 February 1950 |
Predecessor6: | Arthur Bottomley |
Successor6: | Angus Holden |
Office7: | Member of Parliament for Leyton |
Term Start7: | 31 March 1966 |
Term End7: | 8 February 1974 |
Predecessor7: | Ronald Buxton |
Successor7: | Bryan Magee |
Office8: | Member of Parliament for Smethwick |
Term Start8: | 1 October 1945 |
Term End8: | 25 September 1964 |
Predecessor8: | Alfred Dobbs |
Successor8: | Peter Griffiths |
Birth Name: | Patrick Chrestien Gordon Walker |
Birth Date: | 1907 4, df=yes |
Birth Place: | Worthing, Sussex, England |
Death Place: | London, England |
Party: | Labour |
Children: | 5 |
Alma Mater: | Christ Church, Oxford |
Patrick Chrestien Gordon Walker, Baron Gordon-Walker, (7 April 1907 – 2 December 1980) was a British Labour Party politician. He was a Member of Parliament for nearly 30 years and twice a cabinet minister. He lost his Smethwick parliamentary seat at the 1964 general election in a bitterly racial campaign conducted in the wake of local factory closures.
Born in Worthing, Sussex, Gordon Walker was the son of Alan Lachlan Gordon Walker, a Scottish judge in the Indian Civil Service. He was educated at Wellington College and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he took a second in modern history in 1928 and subsequently gained a B. Litt.[1] He was a student (fellow) in history at Christ Church from 1931[2] until 1941.[3]
From 1940 to 1944, Gordon Walker worked for the BBC's European Service, where from 1942 he arranged the BBC's daily broadcasts of the BBC German Service. In 1945, he worked as assistant director of the BBC's German Service working from Radio Luxembourg, travelling with the British forces. He broadcast about the liberation of the German concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, and wrote a book on the subject called The Lid Lifts.[4] [5]
From 1946 to 1948, he was chairman of the British Film Institute.[6]
He first stood for parliament at the 1935 general election, when he was unsuccessful in the Conservative-held Oxford constituency.[4]
In 1938, he was selected to stand again in the Oxford by-election. The Liberal Party had selected Ivor Davies,[7] who offered to stand down from the by-election if Labour did the same and backed a Popular Front candidate against the Conservatives.[8] Eventually, Gordon Walker reluctantly stood down and both parties supported Sandy Lindsay as an Independent Progressive.[9] Quintin Hogg, the Conservative candidate, defeated Lindsay in the by-election.
Gordon Walker did not contest the 1945 general election, but was elected later in 1945 as member of parliament (MP) for Smethwick in a by-election on 1 October 1945 after Labour's Alfred Dobbs was killed in a car accident the day after winning the seat at the 1945 general election.[4] After the by-election, Gordon Walker's support in the constituency gradually declined.
Once in parliament, Gordon Walker was promoted rapidly through the ranks of Clement Attlee's Labour government. In 1946, he was appointed a parliamentary private secretary (PPS) to Herbert Morrison, the leader of the House of Commons. From 1947 to 1950, he was a parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Commonwealth Relations Office, and in 1950 he joined the cabinet as Secretary of state for Commonwealth relations, serving until Labour's defeat at the 1951 general election.[4]
As Commonwealth secretary in 1950, Gordon Walker persuaded the cabinet to agree to prevent Seretse Khama, the heir to the throne of the British protectorate of Bechuanaland, from becoming its king, on the grounds that he had married a white English woman, Ruth Williams, an inter-racial marriage that had upset Bechuanaland's neighbouring state, apartheid South Africa.
Khama had been brought to Britain by the government under false pretences, ostensibly to talk about his future, and at Gordon Walker's behest he was then prevented from returning to his homeland for five years, subsequently increased to a lifetime ban (although eventually rescinded by a later, Conservative, government). Khama said the unexpected and earth shattering news of his exile was given to him by Gordon Walker in an "unemotional" and "unfeeling" manner. "I doubt that any man has been asked to give up his birthright in such cold, calculating terms," he said.[10]
After the 1964 general election, following a successful career in opposition, Gordon Walker became foreign secretary in the Labour government; he had held the shadow role for the previous year.
Although Labour did win that election to end 13 years of Conservative rule, Gordon Walker was defeated in controversial circumstances by the Conservative candidate, Peter Griffiths. Smethwick had been a focus of immigration from the Commonwealth but the economic and industrial growth of the years following the Second World War were coupled with local factory closures, an ageing population and a lack of modern housing. Griffiths ran a campaign critical of the opposition's, and the government's, policies, including immigration policies. Griffiths' supporters made wide use of the slogan "If you want a nigger neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour". Griffiths did not accept that he had invented the slogan, but steadfastly refused to condemn it.[4] [11]
Despite, therefore, not being an MP or peer able to answer to Parliament, Gordon Walker was appointed to the Foreign Office by Harold Wilson. To resolve this unusual situation, he stood for the normally "safe" Labour constituency of Leyton in the Leyton by-election in January 1965; however, he lost, and was finally forced to resign as foreign secretary.[4] After a sabbatical conducting research in Southeast Asia, he finally won Leyton in the 1966 general election. Following this election, he sat in the cabinet in 1967–68, first as minister without portfolio, then as secretary of state for education and science. On his retirement from the cabinet in 1968, he was appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour.[4]
Gordon Walker retired from the House of Commons at the February 1974 general election. On 4 July that year, he was made a life peer as Baron Gordon-Walker, of Leyton in Greater London, in 1974 and was briefly a member of the European parliament.[4]
In 1934 he married Audrey Muriel Rudolf. They subsequently had twin sons and three daughters. Lord Gordon-Walker died in London in 1980, aged 73.[4]
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