Alec Douglas-Home

Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home, Baron Home of the Hirsel ( ; 2 July 1903 – 9 October 1995), known as Lord Dunglass from 1918 to 1951 and the Earl of Home from 1951 to 1963, was a British statesman and Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1963 to 1964. He was the last prime minister to hold office while being a member of the House of Lords, before renouncing his peerage and taking up a seat in the House of Commons for the remainder of his premiership. His reputation, however, rests more on his two stints as Foreign Secretary than on his brief premiership.

Within six years of first entering the House of Commons in 1931, Douglas-Home (then called by the courtesy title Lord Dunglass) became a parliamentary aide to Neville Chamberlain, witnessing first-hand Chamberlain's efforts as prime minister to preserve peace through appeasement in the two years before the outbreak of the Second World War. In 1940 Douglas-Home was diagnosed with spinal tuberculosis and was immobilised for two years. By the later stages of the war he had recovered enough to resume his political career, but he lost his seat in the general election of 1945. He regained it in 1950, but the following year he left the Commons when, on the death of his father, he inherited the earldom of Home and thereby became a member of the House of Lords. Under the premierships of Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan he was appointed to a series of increasingly senior posts, including Leader of the House of Lords and Foreign Secretary. In the latter post, which he held from 1960 to 1963, he supported United States resolve in the Cuban Missile Crisis and in August 1963 was the United Kingdom's signatory to the Partial Nuclear Test Ban Treaty.

In October 1963 Macmillan was taken ill and resigned as prime minister. Home was chosen to succeed him. By the 1960s it had become generally considered unacceptable for a prime minister to sit in the House of Lords; Home renounced his earldom and successfully stood for election to the House of Commons. The manner of his appointment was controversial, and two of Macmillan's cabinet ministers refused to take office under him. He was criticised by the Labour Party as an aristocrat, out of touch with the problems of ordinary families, and he came over stiffly in television interviews, by contrast with the Labour leader, Harold Wilson. The Conservative Party, in power since 1951, had lost standing as a result of the Profumo affair, a 1963 sex scandal involving a defence minister, and at the time of Home's appointment as prime minister it seemed headed for heavy electoral defeat. Home's premiership was the second briefest of the twentieth century, lasting two days short of a year. Among the legislation passed under his government was the abolition of resale price maintenance, bringing costs down for the consumer against the interests of producers of food and other commodities.

After a narrow defeat in the general election of 1964, Douglas-Home resigned the leadership of his party, after having instituted a new and less secretive method of electing the party leader. From 1970 to 1974 he was in the cabinet of Edward Heath as Secretary of State at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office; this was an expanded version of the post of Foreign Secretary, which he had held earlier. After the defeat of the Heath government in 1974, he returned to the House of Lords as a life peer, and retired from front-line politics.

Early life and education

Douglas-Home was born on 2 July 1903 at 28 South Street in Mayfair, London, the first of seven children of Lord Dunglass (the eldest son of the 12th Earl of Home) and of his wife, the Lady Lilian Lambton (daughter of the 4th Earl of Durham). The boy's first name was customarily abbreviated to "Alec". Among the couple's younger children was the playwright William Douglas-Home.

In 1918 the 12th Earl of Home died; Dunglass succeeded him in the earldom, and the courtesy title passed to his son, Alec Douglas-Home, who was styled Lord Dunglass until 1951. The young Lord Dunglass was educated at Ludgrove School, followed by Eton College. At Eton his contemporaries included Cyril Connolly, who later described him as:

After Eton, Dunglass went to Christ Church, Oxford, where he graduated with a third-class honours BA degree in Modern History in 1925.

Dunglass was a talented sportsman. In addition to representing Eton at fives, he was a capable cricketer at school, club and county level, and was unique among British prime ministers in having played first-class cricket. Coached by George Hirst, he became in ''Wisden'''s phrase "a useful member of the Eton XI" that included Percy Lawrie and Gubby Allen. Wisden observed, "In the rain-affected Eton-Harrow match of 1922 he scored 66, despite being hindered by a saturated outfield, and then took 4 for 37 with his medium-paced out-swingers". At first-class level he represented the Oxford University Cricket Club, Middlesex County Cricket Club and Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC). Between 1924 and 1927 he played ten first-class matches, scoring 147 runs at an average of 16.33 with a best score of 37 not out. As a bowler he took 12 wickets at an average of 30.25 with a best of 3 for 43. Three of his first-class games were internationals against Argentina on the MCC "representative" tour of South America in 1926–27."Sir Alec Douglas-Home"
CricInfo, accessed 13 April 2012

Dunglass began serving in the Territorial Army in 1924 as a lieutenant in the Lanarkshire Yeomanry, and was promoted to captain in 1928.

Member of Parliament (1931–1937)

Election to Parliament

The courtesy title Lord Dunglass did not carry with it membership of the House of Lords, and Dunglass was eligible to seek election to the House of Commons. Unlike many aristocratic families, the Douglas-Homes had little history of political service. Uniquely in the family the 11th earl, Dunglass's great-grandfather, had held government office, as Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office in Wellington's 1828–1830 government.Dutton, p. 2 Dunglass's father stood, reluctantly and unsuccessfully, for Parliament before succeeding to the earldom.

Dunglass had shown little interest in politics while at Eton or Oxford. He had not joined the Oxford Union as budding politicians usually did. However, as heir to the family estates he was doubtful about the prospect of life as a country gentleman: "I was always rather discontented with this role and felt it wasn't going to be enough." His biographer David Dutton believes that Dunglass became interested in politics because of the widespread unemployment and poverty in the Scottish lowlands where his family lived. Later in his career, when he had become prime minister, Dunglass (by then Sir Alec Douglas-Home) wrote in a memorandum: "I went into politics because I felt that it was a form of public service and that as nearly a generation of politicians had been cut down in the first war those who had anything to give in the way of leadership ought to do so". His political thinking was influenced by that of Noel Skelton, a member of the Unionist party (as the Conservatives were called in Scotland between 1912 and 1965). Skelton advocated "a property-owning democracy", based on share-options for workers and industrial democracy. Dunglass was not persuaded by the socialist ideal of public ownership. He shared Skelton's view that "what everybody owns nobody owns".

With Skelton's support Dunglass secured the Unionist candidacy at Coatbridge for the 1929 general election. It was not a seat that the Unionists expected to win, and he lost to his Labour opponent with 9,210 votes to Labour's 16,879. It was, however, valuable experience for Dunglass, who was of a gentle and uncombative disposition and not a natural orator; he began to learn how to deal with hostile audiences and get his message across. When a coalition " National Government" was formed in 1931 to deal with a financial crisis Dunglass was adopted as the pro-coalition Unionist candidate for Lanark. The electorate of the area was mixed, and the constituency was not seen as a safe seat for any party; at the 1929 election Labour had captured it from the Unionists. However, with the pro-coalition Liberal party supporting him instead of fielding their own candidate, Dunglass easily beat the Labour candidate.Dutton, p. 7

House of Commons

Membership of the new House of Commons was overwhelmingly made up of pro-coalition MPs, and there was therefore a large number of eligible members for the government posts to be filled. In Dutton's phrase, "it would have been easy for Dunglass to have languished indefinitely in backbench obscurity." However, Skelton, appointed as Under-secretary at the Scottish Office, offered Dunglass the unpaid post of unofficial parliamentary aide. This was doubly advantageous to Dunglass. Any MP appointed as official Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to a government minister was privy to the inner workings of government but was expected to maintain a discreet silence in the House of Commons. Dunglass achieved the first without having to observe the second. He made his maiden speech in February 1932 on the subject of economic policy, advocating a cautiously protectionist approach to cheap imports. He countered Labour's objection that this would raise the cost of living, arguing that a tariff "stimulates employment and gives work ndincreases the purchasing power of the people by substituting wages for unemployment benefit."

During four years as Skelton's aide Dunglass was part of a team working on a wide range of issues, from medical services in rural Scotland to land settlements, fisheries, education, and industry. Dunglass was appointed official PPS to Anthony Muirhead, junior minister at the Ministry of Labour, in 1935, and less than a year later became PPS to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Neville Chamberlain.

Wartime career (1937–1945)

Chamberlain and war

By the time of Dunglass's appointment, Chamberlain was generally seen as the heir to the premiership, and in 1937 the incumbent, Stanley Baldwin, retired, and Chamberlain succeeded him. He retained Dunglass as his PPS, a role described by the biographer D. R. Thorpe as "the right-hand man ... the eyes and ears of Neville Chamberlain", and by Dutton as "liaison officer with the Parliamentary party, transmitting and receiving information and eepinghis master informed of the mood on the government's back benches." This was particularly important for Chamberlain, who was often seen as distant and aloof; Douglas Hurd wrote that he "lacked the personal charm which makes competent administration palatable to wayward colleagues – a gift which his parliamentary private secretary possessed in abundance."Hurd, Dougla
"Home, Alexander Frederick Douglas-, fourteenth earl of Home and Baron Home of the Hirsel (1903–1995)"
''Oxford Dictionary of National Biography'', Oxford University Press, 2004, accessed 14 April 2012 Dunglass admired Chamberlain, despite his daunting personality: "I liked him, and I think he liked me. But if one went in at the end of the day for a chat or a gossip, he would be inclined to ask 'What do you want?' He was a very difficult man to get to know."

As Chamberlain's aide, Dunglass witnessed at first-hand the Prime Minister's attempts to prevent a second world war through appeasement of Adolf Hitler's Germany. When Chamberlain had his final meeting with Hitler at Munich in September 1938, Dunglass accompanied him. Having gained a short-lived extension of peace by acceding to Hitler's territorial demands at the expense of Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain was welcomed back to London by cheering crowds. Ignoring Dunglass's urging, he made an uncharacteristically grandiloquent speech, claiming to have brought back "Peace with Honour" and promising "peace for our time". These words were to haunt him when Hitler's continued aggression made war unavoidable less than a year later. Chamberlain remained prime minister from the outbreak of war in September 1939 until May 1940, when, in Dunglass's words, "he could no longer command support of a majority in the Conservative party". After a vote in the Commons, in which the government's majority fell from more than 200 to 81, Chamberlain made way for Winston Churchill. He accepted the non-departmental post of Lord President of the Council in the new coalition government; Dunglass remained as his PPS, having earlier declined the offer of a ministerial post as Under-secretary at the Scottish Office. Although Chamberlain's reputation never recovered from Munich, and his supporters such as R. A. Butler suffered throughout their later careers from the "appeasement" tag, Dunglass largely escaped blame. Nevertheless, Dunglass firmly maintained all his life that the Munich agreement had been vital to the survival of Britain and the defeat of Nazi Germany by giving the UK an extra year to prepare for a war that it could not have contested in 1938. Within months of his leaving the premiership, Chamberlain's health began to fail; he resigned from the cabinet, and died after a short illness in November 1940.

Military service and backbench MP

Dunglass had volunteered for active military service, seeking to rejoin the Lanarkshire Yeomanry shortly after Chamberlain left Downing Street. The consequent medical examination revealed that Dunglass had a hole in his spine surrounded by tuberculosis in the bone. Without surgery he would have been unable to walk within a matter of months.Thorpe (1997), p. 109 An innovative and hazardous operation was performed in September 1940, lasting six hours, in which the diseased bone in the spine was scraped away and replaced with healthy bone from the patient's shin.

For all of Dunglass's humour and patience, the following two years were a grave trial. He was encased in plaster and kept flat on his back for most of that period. Although buoyed up by the sensitive support of his wife and family, as he later confessed, "I often felt that I would be better dead". Towards the end of 1942 he was released from his plaster jacket and fitted with a spinal brace, and in early 1943 he was mobile for the first time since the operation. During his incapacity he read voraciously; among the works he studied were ''Das Kapital'', and works by Engels

HOME


Content is Copyleft
Website design, code, and AI is Copyrighted (c) 2014-2017 by Stephen Payne


Consider donating to Wikimedia



As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases