Herbert Morrison(1888–1965)

Herbert Stanley Morrison was born at 240 Ferndale Road, Stockwell, on the south London border of Brixton, on 3 January 1888, fifth of seven children of Henry Morrison, a Metropolitan Police constable of the Stockwell Y division, and Priscilla Lyon Caroline Whiston. The household was lower-working-class south-London-Cockney: the two-up two-down rented terrace, the father on Y-division shift work, the mother taking in laundry to make ends meet. He contracted a bacterial eye infection at three months that destroyed the sight of his right eye permanently; the partial blindness was the defining physical fact of the rest of his life. He was schooled at the Stockwell Road Board School from five to fourteen, left at fourteen as the standard 1902 working-class school-leaving point, and worked across the next ten years as an errand-boy, a shop-assistant at a Camberwell grocer's, a part-time telephone-exchange operator, and from 1912 at twenty-four as a circulation clerk at the *Daily Citizen*, the Labour-Party daily-newspaper of the pre-war period.

He joined the Independent Labour Party in 1906 at eighteen and the Brixton Labour Party local in 1907. The next twenty-five years were the foundational organisational work of his political career. He was elected to the Brixton Borough Council in 1913 at twenty-five, served as a Brixton Labour councillor through the war years (he was a conscientious-objector-but-not-pacifist position on the 1915 to 1918 conscription debates, voting with the Labour-Party national-objection wing rather than the pacifist Independent Labour Party wing), and at thirty in 1918 was elected the first Labour Mayor of Hackney. The Hackney Mayoralty of 1919-20 was the administrative apprenticeship: he ran the Hackney post-war housing programme that delivered the first Hackney Council Housing block at Springfield Park, set up the Hackney Borough public-health-and-school-meals programme, and became, by 1920 at thirty-two, one of the London Labour-Party rising-figures of the immediate post-war period.

The London County Council was the institutional achievement of his political career. He was elected to the LCC for South Hackney in 1922 at thirty-four, served as the Labour-Party leader on the LCC from 1925 onwards through the long Conservative-majority 1925 to 1934 LCC period, and at the 1934 LCC election (the Labour-Party landslide that took the LCC from the Conservatives for the first time since the County Council Act of 1888 had created the body) became Leader of the London County Council. He held the LCC leadership through six consecutive years, 1934 to 1940, and ran the modernisation programme that defined the post-1930s London civic-administrative apparatus: the Green Belt scheme around outer London (1934 onwards), the Hyde Park Lido development (1935), the London County Council Architects' Department housing programme (the Roehampton Estate, the Battersea Park rebuilding), the London Ambulance Service unification (1935), and the Waterloo Bridge reconstruction (commissioned 1934, completed 1942 under wartime conditions). He was, by 1940 at fifty-two, the most senior Labour-Party local-government figure in the United Kingdom.

He was returned to Parliament for Hackney South at the 1923 general election, lost the seat in 1924, returned in 1929 as MP for Hackney South, lost the seat in 1931 at the Labour-Party 1931-election collapse, and returned in 1935 as MP for Hackney South. The Churchill wartime coalition gave him the Cabinet office. He served in the May 1940 coalition formation as Minister of Supply (May to October 1940), then as Home Secretary and Minister of Home Security from October 1940 to May 1945 (the wartime tenure that included the Blitz administration, the Defence Regulation 18B detention of British Union of Fascists members, the evacuation of London children, and the reform of the Metropolitan Police-and-Fire-Service unification under wartime emergency administration). The senior achievement of the wartime Home Office was the post-1941 Beveridge Report reception and the senior post-Beveridge welfare-and-social-services planning that he led from the Home Office across 1942 to 1944.

The senior post-war Labour government of 1945 to 1951 took him to the Cabinet rank of Lord President of the Council, Leader of the House of Commons, and Deputy Prime Minister to Clement Attlee. He was the architect of the post-war Festival of Britain of 1951 (the national-cultural-revival exhibition on the South Bank that he had pushed through against the Treasury opposition of Stafford Cripps in 1949 and 1950), the nationalisation programme (the electricity and gas nationalisations of 1947 and 1948 that the senior post-war welfare-state programme was built on), and the 1948 representation-of-the-people Act electoral reform. He was Foreign Secretary briefly from March to October 1951 on the Ernest Bevin death; the Foreign Secretary tenure ran across the 1951 Iranian oil nationalisation by Mosaddegh and was generally regarded as a failure of the post-Bevin period. He lost the 1955 Labour-leadership contest to Hugh Gaitskell on the Attlee resignation, retired from the front bench, and was raised to the peerage as Baron Morrison of Lambeth in 1959. He died at the Sidcup home in Kent of his daughter Mary on 6 March 1965, seventy-seven years old. His daughter Mary (1925-2017) was the mother of Peter Mandelson, the post-Blair Labour-government Cabinet Minister who served as the Trade and Industry Secretary 1998 and First Secretary of State 2009-10. The Morrison name in the Scottish-side catalogue is the patronymic *Mac Gille Mhoire* (the son of the servant of Mary), the foundational western Hebridean surname of the medieval Lewis-and-Harris-and-Mannin tradition; he carried the Brixton-Cockney-police-constable variant of it into the London-Labour-administrative apparatus of the modern British state.