39 Facts About Hugh Dalton

Edward Hugh John Neale Dalton, Baron Dalton, was a British Labour Party economist and politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1945 to 1947.

Hugh Dalton shaped Labour Party foreign policy in the 1930s, opposing pacifism; promoting rearmament against the German threat; and strongly opposed the appeasement policy of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938.

Prime Minister Clement Attlee accepted his resignation; Hugh Dalton later returned to the cabinet in relatively minor positions.

Hugh Dalton's father, John Neale Dalton, was a Church of England clergyman who became chaplain to Queen Victoria, tutor to the princes George and Albert Victor, and a canon of Windsor.

Hugh Dalton was educated at Summer Fields School and then at Eton College.

Hugh Dalton 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".

Hugh Dalton did not succeed in becoming President of the Cambridge Union Society, despite three attempts to be elected Secretary.

Hugh Dalton went on to study at the London School of Economics and the Middle Temple.

Hugh Dalton 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.

Hugh 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.

At the 1929 general election, he succeeded his wife Ruth Hugh Dalton, who retired, as Labour Member of Parliament for Bishop Auckland.

Hugh Dalton gained ministerial and foreign policy experience as Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office in Ramsay MacDonald's second government, between 1929 and 1931.

Hugh Dalton lost this position when he, and most Labour leaders, rejected MacDonald's National Government.

Hugh Dalton published Practical Socialism for Britain, a bold and highly influential assessment of a future Labour government's policy options, in 1935.

Hugh Dalton's emphasis was on using the state as a national planning agency, an approach that appealed well beyond Labour.

However Hugh Dalton was not enthusiastic for the Labour party policy of wanting to intervene in the Spanish Civil War, later stating:.

Hugh Dalton's views were different from those of Attlee, later recalling that before the Second World War he believed:.

Hugh Dalton was a bitter enemy of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.

On 16 March 1939, Hugh Dalton played a leading role in the debates in the House of Commons about the end of Czechoslovak independence.

Hugh Dalton stated that Chamberlain "should disappear from office", saying that the only decent thing left for him to do would be to resign immediately.

Hugh Dalton ended his speech by warning of "a rapidly increasing danger to Britain", supported the idea put forward by the former Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden for a bloc of states to resist further aggression and urged a barrier to further aggression under the slogan "thus far, but no further".

Hugh Dalton established the Special Operations Executive, and was later a member of the executive committee of the Political Warfare Executive.

Hugh Dalton became President of the Board of Trade in 1942; the future Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, drafted into the civil service during the war, was his Principal Private Secretary.

Alongside Bevin, Clement Attlee, Herbert Morrison and Stafford Cripps, Hugh Dalton was one of the "Big Five" of the Labour government.

Hugh Dalton wanted to avoid the high interest rates and unemployment experienced after the First World War, and to keep down the cost of nationalization.

Hugh Dalton gained support for this cheaper money policy from Keynes, as well as from officials of the Bank of England and the Treasury.

Budgetary policy under Hugh Dalton was strongly progressive, as characterised by policies such as increased food subsidies, heavily subsidised rents to council house tenants, the lifting of restrictions on housebuilding, the financing of national assistance and family allowances, and extensive assistance to rural communities and Development Areas.

Hugh Dalton was responsible for funding the introduction of Britain's universal family allowances scheme, doing so "with a song in my heart", as he later put it.

Hugh Dalton returned to the cabinet in 1948, as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, making him a minister without portfolio.

Hugh Dalton became Minister of Town and Country Planning in 1950, the position being renamed as Minister of Local Government and Planning the following year.

Hugh Dalton still had the ear of the Prime Minister, and enjoyed promoting the careers of candidates with potential, but was no longer a major political player as he had been until 1947.

Hugh Dalton left government after Labour lost the 1951 general election.

In 1914 Hugh Dalton married Ruth with whom he had a daughter who died in infancy in the early 1920s.

In 1908, Hugh Dalton made advances at James Strachey, "waving an immense steaming penis in his face and chuckling softly", as Brooke reported to James' brother Lytton.

Hugh Dalton's papers, including his diaries, are held at the LSE Library.

Hugh Dalton's diaries have been digitised and are available on LSE's Digital Library.

Hugh Dalton was created a life peer as Baron Dalton, of Forest and Frith in the County Palatine of Durham on 28 January 1960.

Hugh Dalton substantially expanded Max Otto Lorenz's work in the measurement of income inequality, offering both an expanded array of techniques but a set of principles by which to comprehend shifts in an income distribution, thereby providing a more compelling theoretical basis for understanding relationships between incomes.

Hugh Dalton offered a theoretical proposition of a positive functional relationship between income and economic welfare, stating that economic welfare increases at an exponentially decreasing rate with increased income, leading to the conclusion that maximum social welfare is achievable only when all incomes are equal.