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Hugh Dalton
Edward Hugh John Neale Dalton, Baron Dalton, PC (16 August 1887 – 13 February 1962) was a British Labour Party economist and politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1945 to 1947. He shaped Labour Party foreign policy in the 1930s, opposing pacifism; promoting rearmament against the German threat; and strongly opposing the appeasement policy of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938. Dalton served in Winston Churchill's wartime coalition cabinet; following the Dunkirk evacuation he was Minister of Economic Warfare, and established the Special Operations Executive. Later in the war he was President of the Board of Trade. As Chancellor in Clement Attlee's Labour Government, he pushed his policy of cheap money too hard, and mishandled the sterling crisis of 1947, in which much of the 1946 Anglo-American loan was wasted. His political position was already in jeopardy in 1947 when he was forced to resign for, seemingly inadvertently, revealing a sentence of the budget to a reporter minutes before delivering his official budget speech. Dalton later returned to the cabinet in multiple relatively minor positions.
Hugh Dalton was born in Neath in South Wales. His father, John Neale Dalton, was a Church of England clergyman who became chaplain to Queen Victoria, tutor to the princes Albert Victor and his younger brother George (later King George V), and a canon of Windsor.
Dalton was educated at Summer Fields School and then at Eton College. He then went to King's College, Cambridge, where he was active in student politics; his socialist views, then very rare amongst undergraduates, earned him the nickname "Comrade Hugh". Whilst at Cambridge he was President of the Cambridge University Fabian Society. He did not succeed in becoming President of the Cambridge Union Society, despite three attempts to be elected Secretary. At Cambridge, Dalton was especially close to Rupert Brooke whom he met on his first day as an undergraduate and about whom he wrote in the 1950s that "the radiance of his memory still lights my path". Dalton's decision as an undergraduate to join the Labour Party gave him the reputation of being a "class traitor" and an "Etonian renegade" who had abandoned the traditional "Establishment" values of his Eton-Cambridge education; many Conservatives of similar public school and Oxbridge background always had a special distaste for him. Dalton came from a deeply Anglican Tory family devoted to what later generations would call "one nation Conservatism" who instilled into him the idea that members of the British elite had a duty to the nation to serve the greater good by using their talents. He did not see his conversion to socialism as a betrayal of his background as his critics alleged, but rather a continuation; he claimed that socialism was merely the more efficient system at obtaining the greater good for ordinary people.
He went on to study at the London School of Economics (LSE) and the Middle Temple. During the First World War he was called up into the Army Service Corps, later transferring to the Royal Artillery in January 1917. He served as a lieutenant on the French and Italian fronts, where he was awarded the Italian decoration, the Medaglia di Bronzo al Valor Militare, in recognition of his "contempt for danger" during the retreat from Caporetto; he later wrote a memoir of the war called With British Guns in Italy. Dalton's military service was the formative event of his youth. Dalton later wrote: "I am of that generation which during the Great War was massacred in droves upon the battlefields. Like many millions of others, I served in the Army and unlike most of the best friends of my youth I survived the war. It was my beliefs that politics, rightly handled, can put an end to war, which more than anything else, drew me into the active life of politics when the war was over." Unlike many others involved in the Labour Party in the interwar period, Dalton was no pacifist, and instead embraced the idea that collective security and armed deterrence were the best means of avoiding another world war. Following demobilisation, he returned to the LSE and the University of London as a lecturer, where he was awarded a DSc (hence his title "Dr Dalton") for a thesis on the principles of public finance in 1920.
Dalton stood unsuccessfully for Parliament four times: at the 1922 Cambridge by-election, in Maidstone at the 1922 general election, in Cardiff East at the 1923 general election, and the 1924 Holland with Boston by-election, before entering Parliament for Peckham at the 1924 general election.
Dalton was unusual amongst Labour MPs, most of whom felt very strongly that the Treaty of Versailles was too harsh towards Germany, and who advocated revising the treaty in favour of Germany. Dalton's war experiences in the First World War had made him something of a Germanphobe. In 1926, he visited Poland and discovered that in the disputed regions of Upper Silesia and the Polish Corridor that German and Polish populations were hopelessly geographically mixed with no clear-cut geographical lines between the two quarrelling communities. As such, Dalton concluded that returning Upper Silesia and the Polish Corridor to Germany would not solve the German-Polish dispute as all that would do would be to transfer Poles into Germany just as transferring Upper Silesia and the Polish Corridor had transferred Germans into Poland. Dalton argued that "wholesale transfers of population" were the only way to achieve "perfection" because otherwise there would always be communities of Poles or Germans on the "wrong" side of the frontier. At the time, Dalton rejected this course and urged the "obliteration" of frontiers between Germany and Poland as the best way of securing peace in Europe, arguing for some sort of German-Polish federation. He recalled about his visit to Poland: "I came away aware for the first time of this most gifted and romantic nation, so brave, so gay, with so much good looks and personal charm in both sexes...It was this visit that finally determined me to try to rewrite the foreign policy of the Labour Party". Dalton wrote the prevailing viewpoint in the Labour Party in the 1920s was "...a silly syllogism 'Everything that came out of the Allied victory in the war and the Treaty of Versailles is bad. Poland came out of all that. Therefore Poland is bad'. But few of these "experts" had ever visited Poland or met typical Poles". Dalton was very interested in Eastern Europe and maintained close ties with the Polish Socialist Party. In his 1928 book Towards the Peace of Nations, Dalton praised the forced population exchanges between Turkey and Greece in 1922–1923 for their "cumulatively good" consequences, and recommended a similar policy towards Eastern Europe.
Dalton was regarded in the 1920s as a protégé of Arthur Henderson and like Henderson, he supported the League of Nations, which he saw as an organisation that would promote free trade, disarmament, and arbitration of international disputes. There was a notable contradiction within the Labour Party in the interwar period between its support for disarmament vs. support for collective security, which implied a willingness to go to war against an aggressor state. Dalton was one of the first Labour leaders to confront the contradiction, which led him to choose collective security over disarmament. Other Labour leaders such as Ramsay MacDonald and Arthur Ponsonby preferred disarmament or to gloss over the contradiction by claiming that support for collective security would automatically lead to disarmament. In Towards the Peace of Nations, Dalton argued that if the League of Nations should invoke military sanctions against a state that had committed aggression, then Britain should go to war, which led him to argue the British military should not be abolished or sharply reduced as others in the Labour Party wanted.
Widely respected for his intellectual achievements in economics, Dalton rose in the Labour Party's ranks, with election in 1925 to the shadow cabinet and, with strong union backing, to the Labour Party National Executive Committee (NEC). At the 1929 general election, he succeeded his wife Ruth Dalton, who retired, as Labour Member of Parliament (MP) for Bishop Auckland. He gained ministerial and foreign policy experience as Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office in Ramsay MacDonald's second government, between 1929 and 1931. Starting in 1930, Dalton became a Zionist and strongly supported seeing the Palestine Mandate (modern Israel) ultimately becoming a Jewish state. Most Zionists at the time were socialist, and Dalton in a 1930 speech predicated a future Israeli state would be a "socialist commonwealth". As undersecretary, he clashed with the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Henderson, who favoured returning the Polish Corridor and Upper Silesia to Germany. Dalton wrote in 1940 that "there was no reason why we should back German claims against Poland, and that moreover, it could not be in British interests to aggrandise at Poland's expense a Germany, which had been and might become again, what Poland could never be, a grim menace to this country". He lost this position as under-secretary when he, and most Labour leaders, rejected MacDonald's National Government. As with most other Labour MPs, he lost his seat in 1931; he was elected again in 1935.
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Hugh Dalton
Edward Hugh John Neale Dalton, Baron Dalton, PC (16 August 1887 – 13 February 1962) was a British Labour Party economist and politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1945 to 1947. He shaped Labour Party foreign policy in the 1930s, opposing pacifism; promoting rearmament against the German threat; and strongly opposing the appeasement policy of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938. Dalton served in Winston Churchill's wartime coalition cabinet; following the Dunkirk evacuation he was Minister of Economic Warfare, and established the Special Operations Executive. Later in the war he was President of the Board of Trade. As Chancellor in Clement Attlee's Labour Government, he pushed his policy of cheap money too hard, and mishandled the sterling crisis of 1947, in which much of the 1946 Anglo-American loan was wasted. His political position was already in jeopardy in 1947 when he was forced to resign for, seemingly inadvertently, revealing a sentence of the budget to a reporter minutes before delivering his official budget speech. Dalton later returned to the cabinet in multiple relatively minor positions.
Hugh Dalton was born in Neath in South Wales. His father, John Neale Dalton, was a Church of England clergyman who became chaplain to Queen Victoria, tutor to the princes Albert Victor and his younger brother George (later King George V), and a canon of Windsor.
Dalton was educated at Summer Fields School and then at Eton College. He then went to King's College, Cambridge, where he was active in student politics; his socialist views, then very rare amongst undergraduates, earned him the nickname "Comrade Hugh". Whilst at Cambridge he was President of the Cambridge University Fabian Society. He did not succeed in becoming President of the Cambridge Union Society, despite three attempts to be elected Secretary. At Cambridge, Dalton was especially close to Rupert Brooke whom he met on his first day as an undergraduate and about whom he wrote in the 1950s that "the radiance of his memory still lights my path". Dalton's decision as an undergraduate to join the Labour Party gave him the reputation of being a "class traitor" and an "Etonian renegade" who had abandoned the traditional "Establishment" values of his Eton-Cambridge education; many Conservatives of similar public school and Oxbridge background always had a special distaste for him. Dalton came from a deeply Anglican Tory family devoted to what later generations would call "one nation Conservatism" who instilled into him the idea that members of the British elite had a duty to the nation to serve the greater good by using their talents. He did not see his conversion to socialism as a betrayal of his background as his critics alleged, but rather a continuation; he claimed that socialism was merely the more efficient system at obtaining the greater good for ordinary people.
He went on to study at the London School of Economics (LSE) and the Middle Temple. During the First World War he was called up into the Army Service Corps, later transferring to the Royal Artillery in January 1917. He served as a lieutenant on the French and Italian fronts, where he was awarded the Italian decoration, the Medaglia di Bronzo al Valor Militare, in recognition of his "contempt for danger" during the retreat from Caporetto; he later wrote a memoir of the war called With British Guns in Italy. Dalton's military service was the formative event of his youth. Dalton later wrote: "I am of that generation which during the Great War was massacred in droves upon the battlefields. Like many millions of others, I served in the Army and unlike most of the best friends of my youth I survived the war. It was my beliefs that politics, rightly handled, can put an end to war, which more than anything else, drew me into the active life of politics when the war was over." Unlike many others involved in the Labour Party in the interwar period, Dalton was no pacifist, and instead embraced the idea that collective security and armed deterrence were the best means of avoiding another world war. Following demobilisation, he returned to the LSE and the University of London as a lecturer, where he was awarded a DSc (hence his title "Dr Dalton") for a thesis on the principles of public finance in 1920.
Dalton stood unsuccessfully for Parliament four times: at the 1922 Cambridge by-election, in Maidstone at the 1922 general election, in Cardiff East at the 1923 general election, and the 1924 Holland with Boston by-election, before entering Parliament for Peckham at the 1924 general election.
Dalton was unusual amongst Labour MPs, most of whom felt very strongly that the Treaty of Versailles was too harsh towards Germany, and who advocated revising the treaty in favour of Germany. Dalton's war experiences in the First World War had made him something of a Germanphobe. In 1926, he visited Poland and discovered that in the disputed regions of Upper Silesia and the Polish Corridor that German and Polish populations were hopelessly geographically mixed with no clear-cut geographical lines between the two quarrelling communities. As such, Dalton concluded that returning Upper Silesia and the Polish Corridor to Germany would not solve the German-Polish dispute as all that would do would be to transfer Poles into Germany just as transferring Upper Silesia and the Polish Corridor had transferred Germans into Poland. Dalton argued that "wholesale transfers of population" were the only way to achieve "perfection" because otherwise there would always be communities of Poles or Germans on the "wrong" side of the frontier. At the time, Dalton rejected this course and urged the "obliteration" of frontiers between Germany and Poland as the best way of securing peace in Europe, arguing for some sort of German-Polish federation. He recalled about his visit to Poland: "I came away aware for the first time of this most gifted and romantic nation, so brave, so gay, with so much good looks and personal charm in both sexes...It was this visit that finally determined me to try to rewrite the foreign policy of the Labour Party". Dalton wrote the prevailing viewpoint in the Labour Party in the 1920s was "...a silly syllogism 'Everything that came out of the Allied victory in the war and the Treaty of Versailles is bad. Poland came out of all that. Therefore Poland is bad'. But few of these "experts" had ever visited Poland or met typical Poles". Dalton was very interested in Eastern Europe and maintained close ties with the Polish Socialist Party. In his 1928 book Towards the Peace of Nations, Dalton praised the forced population exchanges between Turkey and Greece in 1922–1923 for their "cumulatively good" consequences, and recommended a similar policy towards Eastern Europe.
Dalton was regarded in the 1920s as a protégé of Arthur Henderson and like Henderson, he supported the League of Nations, which he saw as an organisation that would promote free trade, disarmament, and arbitration of international disputes. There was a notable contradiction within the Labour Party in the interwar period between its support for disarmament vs. support for collective security, which implied a willingness to go to war against an aggressor state. Dalton was one of the first Labour leaders to confront the contradiction, which led him to choose collective security over disarmament. Other Labour leaders such as Ramsay MacDonald and Arthur Ponsonby preferred disarmament or to gloss over the contradiction by claiming that support for collective security would automatically lead to disarmament. In Towards the Peace of Nations, Dalton argued that if the League of Nations should invoke military sanctions against a state that had committed aggression, then Britain should go to war, which led him to argue the British military should not be abolished or sharply reduced as others in the Labour Party wanted.
Widely respected for his intellectual achievements in economics, Dalton rose in the Labour Party's ranks, with election in 1925 to the shadow cabinet and, with strong union backing, to the Labour Party National Executive Committee (NEC). At the 1929 general election, he succeeded his wife Ruth Dalton, who retired, as Labour Member of Parliament (MP) for Bishop Auckland. He gained ministerial and foreign policy experience as Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office in Ramsay MacDonald's second government, between 1929 and 1931. Starting in 1930, Dalton became a Zionist and strongly supported seeing the Palestine Mandate (modern Israel) ultimately becoming a Jewish state. Most Zionists at the time were socialist, and Dalton in a 1930 speech predicated a future Israeli state would be a "socialist commonwealth". As undersecretary, he clashed with the Foreign Secretary, Arthur Henderson, who favoured returning the Polish Corridor and Upper Silesia to Germany. Dalton wrote in 1940 that "there was no reason why we should back German claims against Poland, and that moreover, it could not be in British interests to aggrandise at Poland's expense a Germany, which had been and might become again, what Poland could never be, a grim menace to this country". He lost this position as under-secretary when he, and most Labour leaders, rejected MacDonald's National Government. As with most other Labour MPs, he lost his seat in 1931; he was elected again in 1935.
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