Manny Shinwell

Emanuel Shinwell, Baron Shinwell (18 October 1884 – 8 May 1986) was a British politician who served as a government minister under Ramsay MacDonald and Clement Attlee. A member of the Labour Party, he served as a Member of Parliament (MP) for 40 years, representing Linlithgowshire, Seaham and Easington.

Born in the East End of London to a large family of Jewish immigrants, Shinwell moved to Glasgow as a boy and left school at the age of eleven. He became a trade union organiser and one of the leading figures of Red Clydeside. He was imprisoned in 1919 for his alleged involvement in the disturbances in Glasgow in January of that year. He served as a Labour MP from 1922 to 1924, and from a by-election in 1928 until 1931, and held junior office in the minority Labour Governments of 1924 and 1929–1931. He returned to the House of Commons in 1935, defeating former UK Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald, who by that time had been expelled from the Labour Party. During the Second World War, he was a leading backbencher critic of the Coalition Government.

Shinwell is perhaps best remembered as the Minister of Fuel and Power in the Attlee ministry that nationalised coal mining in 1946. He was in charge of Britain's coal supply during the extremely harsh winter of January to March 1947, during which the supply system collapsed, leaving the United Kingdom to freeze and close down. He became unpopular with the public and was sacked in October 1947. He then served as Secretary of State for War, and then as Minister of Defence from 1950 to 1951. The high defence spending which he demanded, partly to pay for British involvement in the Korean War, was a major factor causing then-Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Gaitskell to impose NHS charges, prompting the resignation of Aneurin Bevan from the Cabinet.

Following Labour's defeat in 1951, Shinwell continued to serve in the Shadow Cabinet in Opposition until he stepped down in 1955. Thereafter he was a senior backbencher until 1970, by which time he was in his mid-eighties. That year he accepted a life peerage and was an active member of the House of Lords until shortly before his death, aged 101, in 1986.

Early life, career and trade union activities

Shinwell was born in Spitalfields, London, but his family moved to Glasgow, Scotland. His father was a Polish Jew who had a small clothing shop, and his mother, a Dutch Jew, was a cook from London. He was the eldest of thirteen children.

He educated himself in a public library and at the Kelvingrove Art Gallery. He enjoyed sport, particularly boxing, and he was the trainer of a local football team. He left school at age eleven to be apprenticed as a tailor, and began his working life as a machinist in a clothing workshop. In 1903, he became active in the Amalgamated Union of Clothiers' Operatives, and joined the Glasgow Trades Council in 1906 as a delegate of that union.).

In 1919, he gained national notoriety through his involvement in the Glasgow 40 Hours' Movement. This movement culminated in clashes between police and protesters in Glasgow's George Square in January 1919, in which he was alleged to have been involved. He was afterwards tried for incitement to riot and was sentenced to five months' imprisonment in Calton Jail, Edinburgh. in the First Labour Government. He lost his seat in 1924, but was re-elected for Linlithgowshire at a by-election in 1928. Shinwell took this to be an anti-semitic remark and struck Bower on the side of the head causing internal bleeding, a blood clot, and a burst left eardrum. Both men then apologized to each other.

In May 1940 Shinwell refused a position in Winston Churchill's Coalition Government in the Ministry of Food. He thought the offer of the Food post a “bloody insult”. He became chairman of the Labour Party in 1942. During the Second World War he was a vigorous but patriotic backbench critic of Churchill. He and Earl Winterton, another serial critic of the government, were known as "Arsenic and Old Lace". In 1947-8 he was Chairman of the Labour Party. Shinwell was widely criticised for his failure to avert this crisis. His earlier comment that "There will be no fuel crisis. I am Minister of Fuel and Power and I ought to know", was later included in the official handbook for Conservative Party members to use in speeches and leaflets.

In 1947 Shinwell presided over the nationalisation of electricity. In October 1947 he was sacked. He was bitterly resentful at being replaced by Hugh Gaitskell, his former deputy and a public schoolboy. He was also attacked by James Callaghan (then a junior minister) for his lack of zeal about further nationalisation.

Minister of Defence

Shinwell's seat became Easington at the February 1950 election, after which he was promoted to Minister of Defence and became a full member of the Cabinet once more. Edmund Dell described him as "putty in the hands of the defence chiefs" and his promotion as "[a] ludicrous appointment. No failure was ever great enough to persuade Attlee to deny one of his cohorts new opportunities to do damage … Shinwell never forgave Gaitskell, whom he blamed for his disgrace." Gaitskell, promoted to Chancellor of the Exchequer later in the year, recorded in his diary that Shinwell "never loses an opportunity of picking a quarrel with me, sometimes on the most ridiculous grounds".

His term of office saw the Malayan Emergency and the early stages of Korean War, which began in June 1950 and to which British troops were deployed.

Later political career

Shinwell stepped down from the Shadow Cabinet (which at that time was elected by Labour MPs when the party was in opposition) in 1955. That year he published a volume of memoirs, Conflict Without Malice. He was vehemently opposed to Wilson's attempt to enter the EEC in 1966, and resigned as Chairman of the Labour Party in 1967. He later became chair of the All-Party Lords Defence Study Group. In 1973 he published another volume of memoirs, I've Lived through It All. He voted against the Labour Government in 1976. He resigned the Labour Party whip in 1982 in protest at left wing militancy. He became the longest-lived peer on 26 March 1986, dying a little over a month later on 8 May, aged 101. He held the record for the second longest-lived British MP (after Theodore Cooke Taylor) until overtaken by Bert Hazell in November 2008.

Personal life

Shinwell was married three times: from 1903 to 1954 to Fay (Fanny) Freeman, by whom he had two sons and a daughter, from 1956 to 1971 to Dinah Meyer, who was Danish, and from 1972 to 1977 to Sarah Sturgo. Shinwell's great-niece is the former MP for Liverpool Wavertree, Luciana Berger.

Shinwell sat for sculptor Alan Thornhill for a portrait in clay. The correspondence file relating to the Shinwell portrait bust is held as part of the Thornhill Papers (2006:56) in the archive of the Henry Moore Foundation's Henry Moore Institute in Leeds and the terracotta remains in the collection of the artist. A bronze (accession number S.309) was purchased for the Collection of Glasgow City Art Gallery in 1973.

Shinwell was a lifelong smoker, having smoked tobacco from the age of 13; on many occasions he was seen smoking with his pipe. Shinwell was also an enthusiastic drinker of spirits, particularly whisky.

References

Bibliography

Shinwell wrote three volumes of autobiography:

Conflict Without Malice (1955)
I've Lived Through it All (1973)
Lead With the Left (1981)

Shinwell wrote

"When The Men Come Home" (1944)

Biography:

Slowe, Peter, "Manny Shinwell" Pluto Press (1993), foreword by Harold Wilson.

Scholarly studies:

Robertson Alex J.. The Bleak Midwinter 1947 (Manchester University Press. 1987). pp. x, 207

Book used for citations:

, essay on Shinwell written by Kenneth O. Morgan