132 Facts About Hugh Dalton

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.

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 Albert Victor and his younger brother George, 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.

At Cambridge, Hugh 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".

Hugh 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.

Hugh Dalton did not see his conversion to socialism as a betrayal of his background as his critics alleged, but rather a continuation as he claimed that socialism was merely the more efficient system for ensuring the greater good of ordinary people.

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.

Hugh 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.

At the time, Hugh 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.

Hugh Dalton was very interested in Eastern Europe and maintained close ties with the Polish Socialist Party.

Hugh Dalton was regarded in the 1920s as a protege 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.

Hugh Dalton was one of the first Labour leaders to confront the contradiction, which led him to choose collective security over disarmament.

In Towards the Peace of Nations, Hugh 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, Hugh 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.

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 as under-secretary 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.

Hugh Dalton had the reputation of being "a brilliant man, but rash, hot-headed and impulsive, a shinning diamond of mercurial, unstable gifts with a penchant for self-damage".

Hugh Dalton was considered to be one of the most intelligent of the Labour MPs who was destined for high office should Labour win a general election, but someone who had a self-destructive streak owning to his vanity and impulsive tendencies.

Hugh Dalton had a very Euro-centric conception of British foreign policy and tended to see Japan's imperialistic policy towards China as a far lesser concern compared to the potential threat posed by Nazi Germany.

The Labour Party was divided between one faction opposed on principle to all war vs another that was willing to support war against fascist aggression, and as one of the leaders of the latter faction, Hugh Dalton frequently fought against the pacifist faction.

Hugh Dalton clashed in particular with Stafford Cripps, the leader of the pacifistic extreme left wing of the Labour Party.

Hugh Dalton charged that Cripps had expressed the "judgement of a flea" in that speech, but opposed having Cripps expelled from Labour under the grounds that it would divide Labour and might led to the government calling a snap election.

In September 1936, Hugh Dalton visited Paris to see the French Premier Leon Blum.

Hugh Dalton sharply criticised Blum for not offering more aid to the Spanish Republic, only to be countered by Blum who stated he was afraid of causing a civil war in France if he intervened in Spain.

However Hugh Dalton was not enthusiastic for the Labour party policy of wanting to intervene, 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.

Hugh Dalton was a strong supporter of the League of Nations and its principles of collective security, and believed that should be the basis of an Anglo-Soviet alliance.

Hugh Dalton was attached to the principle of collective security rather than alliance with the Soviet Union per se, and stated that if the Soviet Union should invade Germany, Britain should come to Germany's aid, and likewise favoured coming to aid of the Soviet Union should Germany invade.

Hugh Dalton stated that what he really wanted was "a system of mutual guarantee against aggression in Europe".

Hugh Dalton visited the Soviet embassy in London on a frequent basis to confer with Maisky and pick up information.

Hugh Dalton defended the Soviets against the charge of acting in bad faith by only promising to go to war if France did so first, arguing that Moscow was acting in accord with the text of the 1935 Soviet-Czechoslovak alliance, that the Soviet Union was only obligated to go to war if aggression against Czechoslovakia activated the 1924 Franco-Czechoslovak alliance.

Hugh Dalton believed it was possible for Britain to pressure Poland and Romania into granting the Red Army transit rights to aid Czechoslovakia, which did not have a direct border with the Soviet Union.

At a meeting with Chamberlain on 17 September 1938, Hugh Dalton criticised the latter for accepting at face value the claims of the French foreign minister Georges Bonnet that the Soviet Union would do nothing if Germany invaded Czechoslovakia, and therefore it was foolish to trust the promises from the Soviet foreign commissar Maxim Litvinov who claimed otherwise.

Hugh Dalton was well aware that the Yezhovschina had wrecked the Red Army at least for the moment, but still felt that the Soviet Union was the only power capable of engaging with Germany in Eastern Europe, and was worth having as an ally against the Reich.

Hugh Dalton assumed if the crisis came to war, the Dominions would all join Britain.

Likewise, Hugh Dalton assumed if war came, Poland and Romania would give transit rights for the Red Army to defend Czechoslovakia, which was not the case.

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 argued that Poland was too weak to play the role of the eastern pivot, and only the Soviet Union had the sufficient industrial and military capacity to engage in war with Germany.

In particular, Hugh Dalton charged that Chamberlain was inept in offering the "guarantee" of Poland without any conditions as he noted that Britain had no leverage over the Polish foreign minister, Colonel Jozef Beck, into granting transit rights to the Red Army in the event of a German invasion of Poland.

Hugh Dalton told Maisky that the Soviet claim his government had no interest in the Low Countries was "sheer tripe" under the grounds "there will be a war in which the SU is engaged in or not".

Hugh Dalton approved of Chamberlain's handling of the Tientsin incident, saying in August 1939 that there was no need for a statement on the crisis in Tientsin as "I am watching Europe day by day" as he felt that the crisis in Danzig to be far more important.

Hugh Dalton was among the 2,300 names of prominent persons listed on the Nazis' Special Search List, of those who were to be arrested on the invasion of Great Britain and turned over to the Gestapo.

Hugh Dalton saw the Polish ambassador, Count Edward Raczynski, to ask if he could assist Poland by asking questions in the House of Commons about when Britain would declare war.

Hugh Dalton confronted Corbin by pointing to his watch and saying: "My country is at war now in fulfilment of our pledge to Poland".

Hugh Dalton had long considered himself a Polonophile and was close to Count Edward Raczynski, the Polish ambassador to the Court of St James.

Hugh Dalton continued to lobby government ministers to open a strategic bombing offensive against Germany until 27 September 1939 when Warsaw surrendered after being besieged.

At a party hosted by Count Raczynski at the Polish embassy on 18 November 1939, Hugh Dalton first met Colonel Colin Gubbins who had served with the British military mission in Poland and had escaped via Romania.

Hugh Dalton argued that to prevent a repeat of the German complaints about the Polish Corridor that East Prussia should be annexed to Poland after the war.

Hugh Dalton called for expelling the entire German community of the Sudetenland as the "indisputable condition of future tranquility".

Just before the Norway Debate about allegations that the government had mismanaged the expedition to Norway, Hugh Dalton told the anti-Chamberlain Conservative MP Harold Macmillan that the Labour would treat the Norway debate as a confidence vote, and urged Macmillan to have his allies vote against the government.

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

The British historian Terry Charman wrote Hugh Dalton was greatly respected for his intelligence and dynamism, but that he had "a very abrasive and bullying personality" that alienated many.

At a meeting on 1 July 1940, Hugh Dalton put forward to the Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax and the service ministers his case for the Ministry of Economic Warfare having its own armed wing.

Hugh Dalton disliked General Charles de Gaulle whom he hoped would be replaced by someone else as the leader of the Free French, writing in his diary: "Still no Frenchmen blowing any trumpets anywhere except de G in London and his trumpet blasts are becoming a bit monotonous".

Hugh Dalton saw de Gaulle as a power-hungry adventurer of questionable democratic convictions, and had no faith in him as an ally.

Hugh Dalton had a special interest in Poland as it was the only country in 1940 where guerrilla warfare was actually being waged, primarily by Polish Army soldiers who had retreated to the forests in 1939.

Hugh Dalton had pressed since the summer of 1940 for the Royal Air Force to make aircraft available to parachute in SOE agents to make contact with the Polish resistance, a request that was finally approved by the Air Ministry in late 1940.

Hugh Dalton had insisted upon making Gubbins the military head of SOE and he reported to duty on 18 November 1940.

Gubbins later stated that Hugh Dalton was a difficult minister to serve, but that he was completely dedicated to making SOE a success and was relentless in defending SOE from its many critics in Whitehall.

Hugh Dalton spent Christmas 1940 in Scotland as the guest of General Sikorski where he reviewed the Polish divisions that been had stationed there.

Hugh Dalton described Polish soldiers he reviewed as "fine soldiers and attractive human beings".

Besides making speeches, Hugh Dalton's visit to Scotland was to make contact with the Sixth Bureau in order to find volunteers for the SOE.

Hugh Dalton was able to use the role of the Polish Air Force squadron to finally have Churchill overrule the Air Ministry's opposition to the long and dangerous flight to Poland, and make an aircraft available for SOE's Polish operations.

Hugh Dalton was overjoyed when the news reached him that despite all the wanted posters the three Polish agents had reached Warsaw and made contact with the Resistance, which he saw as the beginning of a great revolt in Poland.

Hugh Dalton did not seem to understand that Poland was at the extreme range of British aircraft and that his plans to fly in a massive number of weapons and agents, as the prelude for sending in an entire airborne division with the aim of launching a revolt, were unrealistic.

On 17 February 1941, Frank Nelson of SOE recorded a phone call from Morton whose general gist was that "the Prime Minister hated Hugh Dalton, hated Jebb, hated me, hated the entire organisation".

The claim that the SOE had launched coup in Belgrade did much to improve Hugh Dalton's standing with Churchill.

In May 1941, Hugh Dalton came into a dispute with Archibald Wavell, the GOCinC of Middle East Command, over the control of the SOE's station in Cairo, which was responsible for SOE operations in the Middle East and the Balkans.

Hugh Dalton wrote to Wavell protesting against placing a SOE station "under the direct orders of your staff", saying that as Minister of Economic Warfare, all SOE stations were under his control.

In June 1941, Eden suggested lifting the blockade, saying that much of the Greek population was going to starve to death, which was opposed by Hugh Dalton who argued this would render the blockade of Europe ineffective.

On 3 July 1941, Hugh Dalton reversed himself and told Eden that he was prepared to ignore food shipments to Greece via Turkey, saying he wanted "a tacit understanding with the Greeks that we wink at shipments of food and not attack ships engaged in this traffic".

On 28 August 1941, Simovic met with Churchill to tell him of the existence of the Chetniks and on the same day Churchill ordered Hugh Dalton to offer whatever support SOE could to the Chetniks.

On 29 August 1941, Hugh Dalton declared that his policy towards the Chetniks was to have SOE offer maximum support in form of arms and ammunition, and that "the guerrilla and sabotage bands now active in Yugoslavia should show sufficient resistance to cause constant embarrassment to the occupying forces".

However, Hugh Dalton vetoed having the Chetniks "attempt any large-scale uprisings or ambitious military operations which only result at present in severe repression".

Hugh Dalton told Churchill he was in the process of dispatching a SOE mission to the Chetniks that would consist of two Yugoslav officers, Zahariji Osojic and Mirko Lalatovic, and a British officer, Bill Hudson.

On 8 October 1941, de Gaulle wrote to Hugh Dalton requesting permission to have the Gaullist resistance groups undertake "political" work instead of the purely military work that they had been performing to date.

Hugh Dalton vetoed this request under the grounds that the purpose of SOE was to encourage resistance in France, not take sides in French politics by backing the Gaullists, against the other non-Gaullist groups.

Hugh Dalton wrote it was "absolute essential to keep the revolt going if we possibly can and to regard it as an extension of the Libyan front".

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.

On 21 February 1942, Churchill phoned Hugh Dalton to offer to promote him to President of the Board of Trade.

Hugh Dalton wrote in his diary that day: "Handing over SOE twangs my heart strings, and I shall feel very desolate and unfriended if I lose the daily presence of whose who have been for 21 months my trusted inner circle".

In March 1942, Hugh Dalton introduced a bill in the House of Commons for coal rationing, which led to strong opposition from the Conservative MPs who saw his bill as the first step towards the nationalisation of the coal industry.

At least 50 Tory MPs threatened to resign from the party and go over to the opposition side if Hugh Dalton's bill was passed, which would had eroded the government's majority.

Hugh Dalton was very close to Edvard Benes and supported his plans to expel the entire Sudeten German community after the war, saying that the Sudetenland crisis of 1938 had proven that Sudeten Germans were not loyal to Czechoslovakia.

In November 1942, Hugh Dalton circulated Meade's paper to the rest of the cabinet, having "taken account, but not too much account of all the frightened and too prudent shrieks of my officials".

Hugh Dalton wrote that the Treaty of Versailles was flawed because it left all of their peoples of Eastern Europe in their places and imposed a series of minority treaties on the states of Eastern Europe designed to protect the rights of minorities, which had provided an excuse for German aggression.

Hugh Dalton called for Allied occupations of both Japan and Germany; for both Japan and Germany to be completely disarmed forever; and for Anglo-American-Soviet control of the German economic and financial system.

Hugh Dalton argued that millions of Germans were involved in Nazi war crimes in one way or another as he stated the German working class which was "doing their utmost" to sustain the German war effort by building weapons for the Wehrmacht were just as guilty of war crimes as members of the National Socialist German Workers' Party and the Wehrmacht.

Hugh Dalton declared his support for Zionism as his paper called for a post-war Labour government to work to establish a Jewish state in the Palestine Mandate after the war.

Hugh Dalton argued that Palestine was less than half the size of Wales; that the Arab world was large; and the Palestinians should be financially compensated for agreeing to leave Palestine.

Hugh Dalton's paper drew opposition from Aneurin Bevan who charged that his paper was too harsh towards Germany and would drive the Germans towards supporting the Nazi regime, which was clearly losing the war by this point.

Hugh Dalton's paper was important as preparation for a general election.

Hugh Dalton still hoped to keep the coalition government going after the war, but he felt that hope was becoming increasingly unrealistic.

The most important bill Hugh Dalton passed in the Churchill government was the Distribution of Industry Act, which he introduced in 1944, which called for the government to encourage industries to relocate to the economically depressed areas of the North of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

In February 1944, Hugh Dalton complained about the slow pace of reaching a common position with the Dominions on trade, declaring "it is incredible how these rambling discussions succeed one another with no new arguments and no one ever changing sides and never any firm decisions".

Hugh Dalton believed that lower tariffs would mean lower prices for goods, especially food, for the British people and that the expanded trade with the United States caused by lowering tariffs would be crucial for Britain's postwar economic recovery.

At a cabinet meeting in February 1944, Hugh Dalton was the subject of much abuse by Lord Beaverbook, a long-standing advocate of Imperial Preference.

When Beaverbrook claimed that the government of his native Canada wanted to keep the Imperial Preference system, Hugh Dalton flatly told him that he was wrong and the Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King wanted a multilateral economic order with lower tariffs amongst the nations of the West.

In 1945, Hugh Dalton announced that Labour would only win a general election "with the votes of the football crowd", arguing that Labour needed to take a populist stance that would appeal to working class men who were not necessarily socialists but were only loyal to their local football clubs.

Hugh Dalton favoured continuing the coalition government headed by Churchill into peacetime, but at a Labour Party conference in Blackpool on 19 May 1945 the delegates led by Herbert Morrison voted overwhelmingly to leave the coalition and thus force a general election.

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.

Hugh Dalton supported independence for India, saying in a 1946 speech: "If you are in a place where you are not wanted, and where you have not got the force, or perhaps the will, to quash those who don't want you, the only thing to do is come out".

Hugh Dalton complained that subsiding the Greek government, which was losing a civil war against Communist guerrillas, was costing the British treasury too much and advised ending the subsidies.

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.

Hugh Dalton lost his place on the Labour National Executive Committee in 1952.

Hugh Dalton retired from the Shadow Cabinet in 1955, after thirty years as a front-bencher, and stood down from Parliament in the 1959 general election.

Hugh Dalton was made a Life Peer in 1960, but died two years later on 13 February 1962.

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.