At Senior House Assembly on Friday morning, Academic-in-Residence Richard McMillan gave a talk on Hampstead resident and Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell. Gaitskell led the Labour Party from 1955 until his sudden death in 1963. Though he came from a prosperous background, he came to see socialism as morally and materially superior to free-market capitalism, which appeared to many of his generation to be in crisis. Elected to Parliament in the Labour landslide of 1945, Gaitskell was soon given governmental responsibility, ending up as Chancellor of the Exchequer before Labour’s defeat at the hands of Winston Churchill in 1951.
Following the resignation of Clement Attlee as leader in 1955, he stood successfully for the leadership. This period of his career encompassed the Suez Crisis, defeat at the hands of Harold Macmillan, the bitter battle over public ownership and equally acrimonious conflicts over nuclear weapons and Britain’s role in Europe. Though many of the figures were unfamiliar to pupils, the issues were not, and there was a great deal of participation in the talk. There were also a number of questions at the end, including one on who out of Elgar, Freud and Gaitskell was ‘most famous’. Richard replied that that was largely a matter of opinion! What was clear was that Gaitskell was a man of principle who but for his untimely death might well have come to lead the country
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