1. Hastings Bertrand Lees-Smith PC was a British Liberal turned Labour politician who was briefly in the cabinet as President of the Board of Education in 1931.
16 Facts About Hastings Lees-Smith
1. 2.
Hastings Lees-Smith was the acting Leader of the Opposition and Leader of the Labour Party from 1940 until his death, during the time Clement Attlee was in government.
3.
Hastings Lees-Smith's father was a major in the Royal Artillery and he was born in British India.
4.
Hastings Lees-Smith was educated at Aldenham School, as a cadet at the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and Queen's College, Oxford.
5.
Hastings Lees-Smith was Chairman of the Executive Committee of Ruskin College, Oxford, from 1907 to 1909.
6.
Hastings Lees-Smith resigned on appointment as Professor of Public Administration at the University of Bristol.
7.
Hastings Lees-Smith joined a territorial regiment in 1915, and was wounded as a stretcher bearer on the Western Front and invalided out of the armed forces in 1917.
8.
Hastings Lees-Smith married Joyce Holman in 1915, and they had two children.
9.
At the January 1910 general election, Lees-Smith was elected as a Liberal for the two-member Northampton constituency.
10.
Hastings Lees-Smith was the member of Parliament who, in July 1917, read Siegfried Sassoon's declaration that the First World War had continued too long and should be ended.
11.
Hastings Lees-Smith was picked as Labour candidate for Keighley and won the seat in the 1922 general election, profiting from a divided opposition.
12.
Hastings Lees-Smith was a noted speaker on banking and on reform of the House of Lords, about which he wrote several books including Second Chambers in Theory and Practice.
13.
The collapse of the Liberal Party in the 1924 general election meant that Hastings Lees-Smith won his seat back, and he was swiftly appointed to a frontbench role.
14.
Hastings Lees-Smith had only a brief time in office before the government fell, and Lees-Smith refused to follow Ramsay MacDonald into the National Government.
15.
Hastings Lees-Smith served on the front bench but was not invited by Winston Churchill to join the Coalition government in 1940.
16.
Hastings Lees-Smith died at his home in London on 18 December 1941.