Hugh Dalton
Edward Hugh John Neale Dalton, Baron Dalton, PC (16 August 1887 – 13 February 1962) was a British Labour Party economist and politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1945 to 1947.[1] He shaped Labour Party foreign policy in the 1930s, opposing pacifism; promoting rearmament against the German threat; and strongly opposed the appeasement policy of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938. Dalton served in Winston Churchill's wartime coalition cabinet; after the Dunkirk evacuation he was Minister of Economic Warfare, and established Special Operations Executive. As Chancellor, he pushed his policy of cheap money too hard, and mishandled the sterling crisis of 1947. His political position was already in jeopardy in 1947 when he, seemingly inadvertently, revealed a sentence of the budget to a reporter minutes before delivering his budget speech. Prime Minister Clement Attlee accepted his resignation; Dalton later returned to the cabinet in relatively minor positions.
The Lord Dalton
26 August 1887
Neath, Wales
13 February 1962 (aged 74)
His biographer Ben Pimlott characterised Dalton as peevish, irascible, given to poor judgment and lacking administrative talent.[2] Pimlott also recognised that Dalton was a genuine radical and an inspired politician; a man, to quote his old friend and critic John Freeman, "of feeling, humanity, and unshakeable loyalty to people which matched his talent."[3]
Early life[edit]
Hugh Dalton was born in Neath in South Wales. His father, John Neale Dalton, was a Church of England clergyman who became chaplain to Queen Victoria, tutor to the princes George (later King George V) and Albert Victor, and a canon of Windsor.
Dalton was educated at Summer Fields School and then at Eton College. He then went to King's College, Cambridge, where he was active in student politics; his socialist views, then very rare amongst undergraduates, earned him the nickname "Comrade Hugh". Whilst at Cambridge he was President of the Cambridge University Fabian Society. He did not succeed in becoming President of the Cambridge Union Society, despite three attempts to be elected Secretary.
He went on to study at the London School of Economics (LSE) and the Middle Temple. During the First World War he was called up into the Army Service Corps, later transferring to the Royal Artillery. He served as a lieutenant on the French and Italian fronts, where he was awarded the Italian decoration, the Medaglia di Bronzo al Valor Militare, in recognition of his "contempt for danger" during the retreat from Caporetto; he later wrote a memoir of the war called With British Guns in Italy. Following demobilisation, he returned to the LSE and the University of London as a lecturer, where he was awarded a DSc for a thesis on the principles of public finance in 1920.[4][5]
There have been suggestions that he was homosexual, but they are rejected by his major biographer Ben Pimlott, who states "no evidence exists that Dalton ever had a sexual relationship with another man, and his private life seems to have been one of blameless monogamy."[6] However he does refer to Dalton having "homosexual tendencies", mentioned below.
Second World War[edit]
When war came, Chamberlain's position became untenable after many Conservative MPs refused to support him in the Norway Debate in April 1940, and Dalton and other senior Labour leaders made clear they would join any coalition government except one headed by Chamberlain. After Chamberlain resigned early in May, and Lord Halifax had declined the position, Winston Churchill became Prime Minister. During Churchill's coalition government (1940–45) Dalton was Minister of Economic Warfare from 1940 to 1942. He established the Special Operations Executive, and was later a member of the executive committee of the Political Warfare Executive. He became President of the Board of Trade in 1942; the future Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell, drafted into the civil service during the war, was his Principal Private Secretary. In this position he tackled the price rings.
Personal life[edit]
In 1914 Dalton married Ruth with whom he had a daughter who died in infancy in the early 1920s.[20]
Dalton's biographer, Ben Pimlott, suggests that Dalton had homosexual tendencies but concludes he never acted on them.[21] Michael Bloch, on the other hand, thinks that Dalton's love for Rupert Brooke, whom he met at Cambridge University's Fabian Society, went beyond the platonic, citing bike rides in the countryside and sleeping naked under the stars.[22]
In 1908, Dalton also made advances at James Strachey, "waving an immense steaming penis in his face and chuckling softly",[23] as Brooke reported to James' brother Lytton. In later life, Dalton seems to have refrained from sexual relationships with men, though he kept a fatherly interest in the career of various young men (such as Hugh Gaitskell, Richard Crossman and Tony Crosland, who had been noted for their good looks and had had same-sex experiences at Oxford) and was rather touchy-feely with them.[22]
In 1951, Dalton wrote to Crossman: "Thinking of Tony, with all his youth and beauty and gaiety and charm... I weep. I am more fond of that young man than I can put into words."[24] According to Nicholas Davenport,[25] Dalton's unrequited feelings for Crosland became an embarrassing joke within the Labour Party.
Dalton's papers, including his diaries, are held at the LSE Library. His diaries have been digitised and are available on LSE's Digital Library.[26]
Awards[edit]
Dalton was president of the Ramblers' Association from 1948 to 1950, and Master of the Drapers' Company in 1958–59. He was created a life peer as Baron Dalton, of Forest and Frith in the County Palatine of Durham on 28 January 1960.[27][28]
Contributions in economics[edit]
Dalton substantially expanded Max Otto Lorenz's work in the measurement of income inequality, offering both an expanded array of techniques but also a set of principles by which to comprehend shifts in an income distribution, thereby providing a more compelling theoretical basis for understanding relationships between incomes (1920).
Following a suggestion by Pigou (1912, p. 24), Dalton proposed the condition that a transfer of income from a richer to a poorer person, so long as that transfer does not reverse the ranking of the two, will result in greater equity (Dalton, p. 351). This principle has come to be known as the Pigou–Dalton principle (see, e.g., Amartya Sen, 1973).
Dalton offered a theoretical proposition of a positive functional relationship between income and economic welfare, stating that economic welfare increases at an exponentially decreasing rate with increased income, leading to the conclusion that maximum social welfare is achievable only when all incomes are equal.[29]
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