Leo Amery was born in Gorakhpur, British India, to an English father and a mother of Hungarian Jewish descent.
62 Facts About Leo Amery
2.
Leo Amery's father was Charles Frederick Amery, of Lustleigh, Devon, an officer in the Indian Forestry Commission.
3.
In 1887, Leo Amery went to Harrow School, where he was a contemporary of Winston Churchill.
4.
Leo Amery represented Harrow at gymnastics and held the top position in examinations for a number of years; he won prizes and scholarships.
5.
Leo Amery was elected a fellow of All Souls College.
6.
Leo Amery could speak Hindi at the age of three years; Amery was born in India and would naturally have acquired the language of his ayah.
7.
Leo Amery was the only correspondent to visit Boer forces and was nearly captured with Churchill.
8.
The Boer War had exposed deficiencies in the British Army and in 1903, Leo Amery wrote The Problem of the Army and advocated its reorganisation.
9.
Leo Amery described it as "a theoretical blast of economic heresy" because he argued that the total volume of British trade was less important than the question of whether British trade was making up for the nation's lack of raw materials and food by exporting its surplus manufactured goods, shipping, and financial acumen.
10.
Leo Amery was a member of the Coefficients dining club of social reformers, set up in 1902 by the Fabian campaigners Sidney and Beatrice Webb.
11.
Leo Amery turned down the chance to be editor of The Observer in 1908 and The Times in 1912 to concentrate on politics.
12.
In 1911 Leo Amery stood in the 1911 Birmingham South by-election again as a Liberal Unionist, this time unopposed and became a Member of Parliament.
13.
One reason that Leo Amery agreed to stand there under the Liberal Unionist label was that he had been a longtime political admirer of Joseph Chamberlain and was an ardent supporter of tariff reform and imperial federation.
14.
Later, as war cabinet secretary in Lloyd George's coalition government, Leo Amery was vested with parliamentary under-secretary like powers, and at the request of Lord Milner, he redrafted the Balfour Declaration.
15.
Leo Amery encouraged Ze'ev Jabotinsky in the formation of the Jewish Legion for the British Army in Palestine.
16.
Leo Amery was opposed to the Constitution of the League of Nations because he believed that the world was not equal and so the League, which granted all states equal voting rights, was absurd.
17.
Leo Amery instead believed that the world was tending towards larger and larger states that made up a balanced world of inherently stable units.
18.
Leo Amery contrasted that idea with what he called US President Woodrow Wilson's "facile slogan of self-determination".
19.
Leo Amery was First Lord of the Admiralty under Bonar Law and Stanley Baldwin.
20.
Leo Amery defended the financing of the Singapore Naval Base against both Liberal and Labour attacks.
21.
Leo Amery was Colonial Secretary in Baldwin's government from 1924 to 1929.
22.
Leo Amery expanded the role of the Commercial Adviser into the Economic and Financial Advisership under Sir George Schuster.
23.
Leo Amery created the post of Chief Medical Adviser, under Sir Thomas Stanton, and a range of advisers on education, agriculture, a Veterinary Adviser, and a Fisheries Adviser.
24.
Leo Amery was not invited to join the National Government formed in 1931.
25.
Leo Amery remained in Parliament but joined the boards of several prominent corporations.
26.
Leo Amery had spent a lot of time in Germany during the 1930s in connection with his work.
27.
Leo Amery was not allowed to send his director's fees out of the country so he took his family on holiday in the Bavarian Alps.
28.
Leo Amery had a lengthy meeting with Hitler on at least one occasion, and he met at length with Czech leader Edvard Benes, Austrian leaders Engelbert Dollfuss and Kurt von Schuschnigg and Italian leader Benito Mussolini.
29.
Leo Amery was a driving force behind the creation of the Army League, a pressure group designed to keep the needs of the British Army before the public.
30.
Leo Amery advocated a higher level of expenditure, but a reappraisal of priorities through the creation of a top-level cabinet position to develop overall defence strategy so that the increased expenditures could be spent wisely.
31.
Leo Amery thought that either he or Churchill should be given the post.
32.
When war came Leo Amery opposed cooperation with the Soviet Union against Germany.
33.
When Chamberlain announced his flight to Munich to the cheers of the House, Leo Amery was one of only four members who remained seated.
34.
Leo Amery differed from Churchill in hoping throughout the 1930s to foster an alliance with fascist Italy to counter the rising strength of Nazi Germany.
35.
Leo Amery thus was for appeasing Italy by tacitly conceding its claims to Ethiopia.
36.
Leo Amery is famous for two moments of high drama in the House of Commons, early in the Second World War.
37.
Leo Amery was greatly angered, and Chamberlain was felt by many present to be out of touch with the temper of the British people.
38.
Leo Amery himself noted in his diary that he believed that his speech was one of his best received in the House and that he had made a difference to the outcome of the debate.
39.
Leo Amery was disappointed not to be made a member of the small War Cabinet, but he was determined to do all he could in the position he was offered.
40.
Leo Amery was continually frustrated by Churchill's intransigence, and in his memoirs, he recorded that Churchill knew "as much of the Indian problem as George III did of the American colonies".
41.
Leo Amery opposed holding an inquiry for the 1943 Bengal famine, fearing that the political consequences could be "disastrous".
42.
At the 1945 general election, Leo Amery lost his seat to Labour's Percy Shurmer.
43.
Leo Amery was offered but refused a peerage because it might, when he died, have cut short the political career of his son, Julian, in the House of Commons.
44.
In retirement, Leo Amery published a three-volume autobiography My Political Life.
45.
Leo Amery strongly supported the evolution of the dominions into independent nations bound to Britain by ties of kinship, trade, defence and a common pride in the Empire.
46.
Leo Amery supported the gradual evolution of the colonies, particularly India, to the same status, unlike Churchill, a free trader, who was less interested in the Empire as such and more in Britain itself as a great power.
47.
Leo Amery felt that Britain itself was too weak to maintain its great power position.
48.
Leo Amery was very active in imperial affairs during the 1920s and 1930s.
49.
Leo Amery was in charge of colonial affairs and relations with the dominions from 1924 to 1929.
50.
Leo Amery maintained a very busy speaking schedule, with almost 200 engagements between 1936 and 1938, many of them devoted to imperial topics, especially Imperial Preference.
51.
Leo Amery resented American pressure on Canada to oppose imperial free trade.
52.
Leo Amery wanted to keep the UK and the newly independent British Dominions united by trade behind a common tariff barrier and away from the United States.
53.
Leo Amery viewed American intentions regarding the British Empire with increasingly grave suspicion.
54.
Leo Amery hoped the Labour government elected in 1945 would resist promises of trade liberalisation made by Churchill to the United States during the Second World War.
55.
Leo Amery was a noted sportsman, especially famous as a mountaineer.
56.
Leo Amery continued to climb well into his sixties, especially in the Swiss Alps but in Bavaria, Austria, Yugoslavia, Italy and the Canadian Rockies, where Mount Amery is named after him.
57.
Leo Amery was a member of the Alpine Club and of the Athenaeum and Carlton Clubs.
58.
Leo Amery was a Senior Knight Vice President of the Knights of the Round Table.
59.
On 16 November 1910, Leo Amery married Florence Greenwood, daughter of the Canadian barrister John Hamar Greenwood and younger sister of Hamar Greenwood, 1st Viscount Greenwood.
60.
Leo Amery's father amended his entry in Who's Who to read "one s[on]", with the editors' permission.
61.
Leo Amery served in the cabinets of Harold Macmillan and Sir Alec Douglas-Home as Minister for Aviation and held junior ministerial office under Edward Heath.
62.
Leo Amery is buried in the churchyard of St John the Baptist in his father's home village of Lustleigh, and an ornate plaque in commemoration of him is inside the church.