Herbert Morrison(1888–1965)

Herbert Stanley Morrison was born at Stockwell, on the south London border of Brixton, on 3 January 1888, fifth of seven children of a Metropolitan Police constable. He was schooled at the Stockwell Road Board School to fourteen, left at the standard working-class leaving point, and worked as errand-boy, shop-assistant and telephone operator before becoming a circulation clerk at the Daily Citizen, the Labour Party daily of the pre-war period.

He joined the Independent Labour Party at eighteen and the Brixton Labour Party in 1907. He was elected to Brixton Borough Council at twenty-five and at thirty became the first Labour Mayor of Hackney, where the 1919-20 mayoralty was his administrative apprenticeship: the post-war housing programme, the borough public-health and school-meals schemes, and his arrival as one of the rising London Labour figures of the period.

The London County Council was the institutional achievement of his career. Labour-leader on the LCC from 1925, he led the party to its first LCC majority at the 1934 election and held the leadership of the council for six years to 1940, running the modernisation that defined the post-1930s London civic apparatus: the Green Belt scheme, the LCC Architects' Department housing programme, the unified London Ambulance Service, and the Waterloo Bridge reconstruction. He was, by 1940, the most senior Labour local-government figure in the country.

He sat in Parliament for Hackney South across the inter-war years and took Cabinet office in the Churchill wartime coalition: Minister of Supply in 1940, then Home Secretary and Minister of Home Security from 1940 to 1945, the tenure that ran the Blitz administration, the evacuation of London's children, and the post-Beveridge welfare-and-social-services planning he led from the Home Office.

In the post-war Attlee government he was Lord President of the Council, Leader of the House of Commons and Deputy Prime Minister, the architect of the post-war nationalisation programme and, against Treasury opposition, of the 1951 Festival of Britain on the South Bank. He was raised to the peerage as Baron Morrison of Lambeth in 1959 and died at Sidcup on 6 March 1965, seventy-seven years old. His daughter Mary was the mother of Peter Mandelson, the later Labour Cabinet minister. The Morrison name, the western Hebridean patronymic Mac Gille Mhoire, he carried from a Brixton police-constable's family into the London-Labour administrative apparatus of the modern British state.