(b. London, 3 Jan. 1888; d. 6. Mar. 1965) British; deputy leader of the Labour Party 1951 – 5, Foreign Secretary 1951; Baron (life peer) 1959 Herbert Morrison was involved with the Labour Party from its creation until his death and a leading figure in its politics for over twenty-five years. He was the son of a policeman and largely self-educated. After holding various short-term jobs he became circulation manager of a Labour newspaper in 1912, a post which he held for three years. He then became part-time secretary of the London Labour Party, holding this post until 1947. Morrison had few links with the trade union movement and the early influences were the socialist societies, the Independent Labour Party, and the Social Democratic Federation.
Morrison was always interested in translating ideas into measures which would help people, particularly working people. In 1919 he became mayor of Hackney and in 1922 was returned as MP for Hackney South. He also became a member of the London county council (LCC) in 1922. He never lost this connection; he was council leader between 1934 and 1940, and a member until 1945.
Morrison's administrative talents were shown in the 1929 Labour government. As Minister for Transport he was responsible for the Road Traffic Act and the eventual establishment of the London Passenger Transport Board. This provided for the public management of the capital's bus and underground railway services. It also established the public corporation as the appropriate form for future nationalized industries. He expanded his ideas in a book; Socialisation and Transport (1933). Industries would be run by managers, not workers, and be answerable to parliament through ministers.
It was Morrison's misfortune that he was one of many Labour MPs swept away in the 1931 general election. Had he been returned, he would almost certainly have been elected party leader. When he returned to the Commons after the 1935 election, he was defeated in the party's leadership election by Clement Attlee, who already held the post. For the next twenty years Morrison was never fully reconciled to his subordinate status.
In his years as LCC leader, Morrison displayed his vision in schemes of reclamation and an ambitious house-building programme. Labour in London showed what it could do in power. He was always conscious of Labour's need to appeal to the respectable working class and lower middle class. In parliament, he opposed schemes for rearmament and conscription to meet the rising menace of Nazi Germany. When Britain was at war, it was Morrison who moved the censure motion which eventually precipitated Neville Chamberlain's resignation in 1940. During the wartime coalition, he was Minister of Supply, then Home Secretary and a member of the War Cabinet between 1942 and 1945.
Morrison was a key member of the 1945 – 51 Labour government. At the outset, he and his supporters challenged Clement Attlee's right to accept the monarch's invitation to form a government without first receiving party approval. Morrison hoped that he would be chosen as leader. The move failed, although he was made Deputy Prime Minister. The hostility of Ernest Bevin, the Foreign Secretary, prompted Attlee to confine Morrison to Home Affairs. As Lord President of the Council, he coordinated domestic policy, although Stafford Cripps took over economic policy in 1947. He was also leader of the House of Commons and deserves credit for getting so much radical legislation passed. He succeeded Bevin as Foreign Secretary for a few months in 1951 but damaged his reputation in the post. He lacked experience of foreign affairs. Morrison was acting Prime Minister (Attlee was in hospital), when Bevan and Harold Wilson resigned from the Cabinet.
Returned to political opposition after 1951, Morrison favoured consolidation rather than more radical measures, particularly on public ownership, and was the main influence on the 1951 election manifesto. The left detested him as a narrow-minded machine politician and he was voted off the party's national executive at the 1952 conference. Attlee hung on to the leadership and Morrison saw himself overtaken by younger men. As a long-serving deputy leader his opportunity had passed when Attlee resigned in late 1955 but it did not help when the latter called for his successor to be somebody born in the twentieth century. Morrison finished a poor third behind Gaitskell and Bevan in the leadership election in December 1955 and bitterly refused the offer of deputy leadership. He retired in 1959 and took a peerage, as Morrison of Lambeth. He wrote an uninformative Autobiography in 1954.
Herbert Morrison
| Political Biography: Herbert Morrison |
| 5min Related Video: Herbert Morrison |
| British History: Herbert Morrison |
Morrison, Herbert (1888-1965). Labour Party politician and statesman. After he became secretary in 1915, Morrison's organizational skills accelerated the steady rise of the London Labour Party. Mayor of Hackney 1920-1, London county councillor from 1922, and MP for South Hackney in 1923-4, 1929-31, 1935-45 (and Lewisham 1945-59), Morrison led Labour to victory in the 1934 LCC elections. The culmination of his London-based successes was the 1951 Festival of Britain. After a brief spell as minister of supply (May-October 1940), for most of the war he served as Churchill's popular home secretary (1940-5). In the post-war Labour government, Morrison played a co-ordinating role as lord president and leader of the Commons (1945-51) before an unhappy tenure as foreign secretary (March-October 1951). Despite serving as Attlee's deputy for a decade, Morrison was defeated for the Labour leadership in 1955, as he had been in 1935.
| Wikipedia: Herbert Morrison |
| The Right Honourable The Lord Morrison of Lambeth CH PC |
|
|
|
|
| In office 26 July 1945 – 26 October 1951 |
|
| Prime Minister | Clement Attlee |
|---|---|
| Preceded by | Clement Attlee |
| Succeeded by | Anthony Eden |
|
|
|
| In office 9 March 1951 – 26 October 1951 |
|
| Prime Minister | Clement Attlee |
| Preceded by | Ernest Bevin |
| Succeeded by | Anthony Eden |
|
|
|
| In office 26 July 1945 – 16 March 1951 |
|
| Preceded by | Anthony Eden |
| Succeeded by | James Chuter Ede |
|
|
|
| In office 4 October 1940 – 23 May 1945 |
|
| Prime Minister | Winston Churchill |
| Preceded by | John Anderson |
| Succeeded by | Donald Somervell |
|
|
|
| Born | 3 January 1888 Lambeth, London, UK |
| Died | 6 March 1965 (aged 77) Peckham, South London, UK |
| Nationality | British |
| Political party | Labour |
Herbert Stanley Morrison, Baron Morrison of Lambeth, CH, PC (3 January 1888 – 6 March 1965) was a British Labour politician; he held a various number of senior positions in the Cabinet, including Home Secretary, Foreign Secretary and Deputy Prime Minister.
Morrison was the son of a police constable and was born in Lambeth, London. As a baby he lost the sight in his right eye due to infection. Morrison, like many early Labour leaders, had little in the way of formal education and left school at 14 to become an errand boy. Morrison's early politics were radical, and he briefly flirted with the Social Democratic Federation over the Independent Labour Party (ILP). As a conscientious objector, he worked in a market garden in Letchworth in World War I. Morrison eventually became a pioneer leader in the London Labour Party.
Morrison was elected to the Metropolitan Borough of Hackney in 1919 when the Labour Party won control of the Borough. He was Mayor in 1920-21. Morrison was also elected to the London County Council (LCC) in 1922 and the following year he became MP for South Hackney in the 1923 General Election, but lost that seat the following year when Ramsay MacDonald's first administration lost the general election.
Morrison returned to Parliament in the 1929 general election, and MacDonald appointed him Minister of Transport. Morrison, like many others in the party, was deeply disheartened by MacDonald's national government. Morrison lost his seat again in 1931.
Morrison continued to sit on the London County Council and in 1933 was elected to lead the Labour Group. Unexpectedly, Labour won the 1934 LCC election and Morrison became Leader of the Council. This gave him control of almost all local government services in London. Morrison's main achievement in London included the unification of bus, tram, trolleybus services with the Underground, with the creation of the London Passenger Transport Board (colloquially known as London Transport) in 1933, and creating a 'green belt' around the suburbs. He confronted the Government over its refusal to finance the replacement of Waterloo Bridge, and eventually they agreed to pay 60% of the cost of the new bridge.
Morrison is often credited as saying that he would "build the Tories out of London", ie. build enough council housing to ensure Labour a solid majority of Labour voters, the opposite intent to that attributed to Westminster Council under the leadership of Shirley Porter in the 1980s. Morrison's biographers Donoughue & Jones insist that the quotation is apocryphal.
In the 1935 election Morrison was once again elected to the House of Commons and immediately challenged Clement Attlee for the leadership of the party. He lost badly, a defeat ascribed to his unfamiliarity with the MPs who had served in the previous Parliament. Both he and his supporter Hugh Dalton put some of the blame on the masonic New Welcome Lodge, who they claimed backed the third place leadership candidate Arthur Greenwood and then switched their votes to Attlee.[1] After losing, Morrison concentrated on his LCC work.
In 1940 Morrison was appointed as first Minister of Supply by Winston Churchill, but shortly afterwards succeeded Sir John Anderson as Home Secretary. Morrison's London experience in local government was particularly useful during the Blitz, and the Morrison shelter was named after him. However, Morrison had to take many potentially unpopular and controversial decisions by the nature of wartime circumstances. In 1943, Morrison ran for the post of Treasurer of the Labour Party, but lost a close contest to Arthur Greenwood.[2]
After the end of the war, Morrison was instrumental in drafting the Labour Party's 1945 manifesto Let us Face the Future.[citation needed] He was the organiser of the general election campaign and enlisted the help of left-wing cartoonist Philip Zec with whom he had clashed during the early stages of the war when, as Minister of Supply he took exception to an illustration commenting on the costs of the supplying the country with petrol.[3][4] Labour won a massive and unexpected victory. Morrison was appointed Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the House of Commons. In this capacity Morrison was the chief sponsor of the Festival of Britain. After Ernest Bevin's resignation as Foreign Secretary, Morrison took over his role, but did not feel at ease in the Foreign Office. However, Morrison took an aggressive stance against Iran's democratic socialist Prime Minister Mohammed Mosaddeq and approved his overthrow for what would later be known as Operation Ajax.[5] His tenure there was cut short by Labour's defeat in the 1951 general election.
Although Morrison had effectively been Attlee's heir apparent since the 1930s, Attlee had always distrusted him. Attlee remained as Leader through the early 1950s, and fought the 1955 election, finally announcing his retirement after Labour's defeat. Morrison was 67 and was seen to be too old to embark on a new leadership. Although he stood, he finished bottom - by a wide margin - of the three candidates, with many of his supporters switching to Gaitskell. Hugh Gaitskell won the election, and Morrison resigned as Deputy Leader.
Morrison stood down at the 1959 general election and was made a life peer as Baron Morrison of Lambeth, of Lambeth in the County of London. He was appointed President of the British Board of Film Censors.
He died in 1965, symbolically in the same month as the London County Council was abolished. His grandson Peter Mandelson was a cabinet minister in the Labour governments of Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. (Interestingly, whilst Morrison had held the post of Deputy Prime Minister, 2009 saw his grandson appointed First Secretary of State, notwithstanding the fact that the titles are sometimes though incorrectly seen as synonymous.)
Morrison was Foreign Secretary at the time of the defection of the double agents Guy Burgess and Donald Duart Maclean. In the 1977 BBC TV play Philby, Burgess and Maclean by Iain Curteis, Arthur Lowe made a cameo appearance as Morrison - glowering to camera in his final shot to show the opaque right lens of his spectacles.
References
- ^ The Masons' Candidate: New Welcome Lodge No. 5139 and the Parliamentary Labour Party, By John Hamill and Andrew Prescott, Labour History Review, Volume 71, Number 1, April 2006 , pp. 9-41(33); this cites as note number 2 H. Morrison, Herbert Morrison: An Autobiography by Lord Morrison of Lambeth, London, Odhams, 1960, p. 164
- ^ "Greenwood, Arthur", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
- ^ Contentious Cartoon by Dr Tim Benson, PoliticalCartoon.co.uk
- ^ Tabloid Nation: The Birth of the Daily Mirror to the Death of the Tabloid, by Chris Horrie, André Deutsch (2003)
- ^ Painter, David S. (1988), The United States, Great Britain, and Mossadegh, Georgetown University, ISBN 1-56927-332-4, http://userpages.umbc.edu/~simpson/Hist%20725%20Summer%202006/The%20US%20and%20Mossadegh%201951-1953.pdf, retrieved 2009-11-23
Further reading
Herbert Morrison published his Autobiography in 1960. His other publications included:
- Socialisation and Transport, 1933;
- Looking Ahead (wartime speeches), 1933;
- Parliamentary Government in Britain, 1949.
The main biography is:
- Herbert Morrison - Portrait of a Politician, by Bernard Donoughue and George Jones. (Reprinted by Orion with an introduction by Peter Mandelson 2001). ISBN 1842124412
Biographical essays include:
- 'Herbert Morrison' by John P. Mackintosh in the original Dictionary of National Biography (supplement).
- 'Herbert Morrison' by Greg Rosen in Kevin Jefferys (ed) Labour Forces IB Taurus, 2003.
External links
 |
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Herbert Morrison |
- Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Herbert Morrison
|
|||||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
||||||||||
This entry is from Wikipedia, the leading user-contributed encyclopedia. It may not have been reviewed by professional editors (see full disclaimer)
 | Cell 227: Alfred Hitchcock Presents (TV Episode) (1960 TV Episode) |
| Morrison - Grady Plan (1946) |
| Clement Attlee (British politician) |
 | Who is Herbert the clown? Read answer... |
| Who is Courtney herbert? Read answer... |
| In Star Trek TOS did space hippies chant Herbert Herbert Herbert and if so why? Read answer... |
 | Which labour politician is the grandchild of Herbert Morrison? |
| How many children did Herbert Morrison MP have? |
| Who is edmund morrison? |
Copyrights:
 |
 | Political Biography. A Dictionary of Political Biography. Copyright © 1998, 2003 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Read more |
|
| British History. A Dictionary of British History. Copyright © 2001, 2004 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Read more |
 |
| Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Herbert Morrison". Read more |
- What is a morrisons?
- What is James Morrison to Jim Morrison?
- What nationality is morrison?
- What are morrisons objectives?
- Who is herbert morrison mp grandson?
- Was herbert morrison MP jewish?
- How many brothers and sisters did Herbert Morrison have?
Mentioned in
- Cell 227: Alfred Hitchcock Presents (TV Episode) (1960 TV Episode)
- Morrison - Grady Plan (1946)
- Clement Attlee (British politician)
- Little Minister (1921 Film)
- Hugh Gaitskell
- Herbert Morrison (disambiguation)
- Ellen Wilkinson
- Labour party (organization, United Kingdom – in politics)
- Hackney South (UK Parliament constituency)
- George Trefgarne, 1st Baron Trefgarne
- Frances Marjorie Graves
- Labour Party (UK) leadership election, 1935
- Hans Neumann
- Percy Pybus
|
