James Callaghan
Leonard James Callaghan, Baron Callaghan of Cardiff, KG, PC (/ˈkæləhæn/ KAL-ə-han; 27 March 1912 – 26 March 2005), commonly known as Jim Callaghan, was a British statesman[1] and politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1976 to 1979 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1976 to 1980. Callaghan is the only person to have held all four Great Offices of State, having served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1964 to 1967, Home Secretary from 1967 to 1970 and Foreign Secretary from 1974 to 1976. He was a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1945 to 1987.
"Jim Callaghan" redirects here. For other uses, see James Callaghan (disambiguation).
The Lord Callaghan of Cardiff
Elizabeth II
Margaret Thatcher
Margaret Thatcher
Michael Foot
Michael Foot
Harold Wilson
Michael Foot
Harold Wilson
Harold Wilson
Harold Wilson
Reginald Maudling
Roy Jenkins
- Hugh Gaitskell
- George Brown (acting)
- Harold Wilson
Harold Wilson
Reginald Maudling
26 March 2005 (aged 92)
Ringmer, East Sussex, England
3, including Margaret Jay
Second World War
Born into a working-class family in Portsmouth, Callaghan left school early and began his career as a tax inspector, before becoming a trade union official in the 1930s; he served as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. He was elected to Parliament at the 1945 election, and was regarded as being on the left wing of the Labour Party. He was appointed to the Attlee government as a parliamentary secretary in 1947, and began to move increasingly towards the right wing of the Labour Party, while maintaining his reputation as a "Keeper of the Cloth Cap" – that is, seen as maintaining close ties between Labour and the trade unions. Following Labour's defeat at the 1951 election, Callaghan increasingly became regarded as the leader of the right wing of the Labour Party, and stood for the positions of deputy leader in 1960 and for leader in 1963, but was defeated by George Brown for the former and Harold Wilson for the latter.
Following Labour's victory at the 1964 election, Wilson appointed Callaghan as Chancellor of the Exchequer; this appointment coincided with a turbulent period for the British economy, during which Callaghan had to tackle both a chronic balance of payments deficit and various speculative attacks on the pound sterling, with its exchange rate to other currencies being fixed by the Bretton Woods system. On 18 November 1967, having initially denied that it would do so, the Government devalued the pound sterling. In the wake of the decision, Wilson moved Callaghan to the role of Home Secretary. During this time, Callaghan was responsible for overseeing the operations of the British Army to support the police in Northern Ireland, following a request from the Northern Ireland government. Callaghan remained in the Shadow Cabinet during Labour's period in Opposition from 1970 to 1974; upon Labour's victory at the 1974 election, Wilson appointed Callaghan as Foreign Secretary. Callaghan was responsible for renegotiating the terms of Britain's membership of the European Communities (EC), and strongly supported the successful "Yes" vote campaign in the 1975 referendum, which confirmed the UK's membership of the EC.
When Wilson suddenly announced his retirement in March 1976, Callaghan defeated five other candidates to be elected Leader of the Labour Party; he was appointed prime minister on 5 April 1976. Despite winning a narrow majority in the House of Commons at the 1974 election, Labour had lost this by the time Callaghan became prime minister, and several by-election defeats and defections in his early months forced Callaghan to strike a confidence and supply agreement with the Liberal Party. While this initially proved stable, in the wake of significant industrial disputes and widespread strikes in the 1978–79 "Winter of Discontent", and the defeat of the referendum on devolution for Scotland, led to minor parties joining the Conservatives to pass a motion of no-confidence in Callaghan on 28 March 1979. Although remaining personally popular in opinion polls, Callaghan led Labour to defeat at the 1979 election and was replaced by Margaret Thatcher.
Callaghan initially remained as Labour leader, serving as Leader of the Opposition until November 1980. He attempted to reform the process by which Labour elected its leader. After leaving the leadership, he returned to the backbench, and between 1983 and 1987 was Father of the House of Commons. On retiring from the Commons in 1987, he was elevated to the House of Lords as Baron Callaghan of Cardiff. He died in 2005 at the age of 92, and remains to date the UK's longest-lived former prime minister.
Early life and career[edit]
Leonard James Callaghan was born at 38 Funtington Road, Copnor, Portsmouth, England, on 27 March 1912. He took his middle name from his father, James (1877–1921), who was the son of an Irish Catholic father who had fled to England during the Great Irish Famine and a Jewish mother. Callaghan's father ran away from home in the 1890s to join the Royal Navy; as he was a year too young to enlist, he gave a false date of birth and changed his surname from Garoghan to Callaghan, so that his true identity could not be traced. He rose to the rate of Chief Petty Officer.[2][3]
His mother was Charlotte Callaghan (née Cundy, 1879–1961) an English Baptist. As the Catholic Church at the time refused to marry Catholics to members of other denominations, James Callaghan senior abandoned Catholicism and married Charlotte in a Baptist chapel. Their first child was Dorothy Gertrude Callaghan (1904–82).[2]
James Callaghan senior served in the First World War on board the battleship HMS Agincourt. After he was demobbed in 1919, he joined the Coastguard and the family moved to the town of Brixham in Devon, but he died only two years later of a heart attack in 1921 at the age of 44, leaving the family without an income, and forced to rely on charity to survive. Their financial situation was improved in 1924 when the first Labour government was elected, and introduced changes allowing Mrs Callaghan to be granted a widow's pension of ten shillings a week, on the basis that her husband's death was partly due to his war service.[4][5][6]
In his early years, Callaghan was known by his first name Leonard. When he entered politics in 1945 he decided to be known by his middle name James, and from then on he was referred to as James or Jim.[7] He attended Portsmouth Northern Secondary School. He gained the Senior Oxford Certificate in 1929, but could not afford entrance to university and instead sat the Civil Service entrance exam.[8] At the age of 17, Callaghan left to work as a clerk for the Inland Revenue at Maidstone in Kent. While working at the Inland Revenue, Callaghan joined the Maidstone branch of the Labour Party and the Association of the Officers of Taxes (AOT), a trade union for this branch of the Civil Service; within a year of joining he became the office secretary of the union. In 1932 he passed a Civil Service exam which enabled him to become a senior tax officer, and that same year he became the Kent branch secretary of the AOT. The following year he was elected to the AOT's national executive council. In 1934, he was transferred to Inland Revenue offices in London. Following a merger of unions in 1936, Callaghan was appointed a full-time union official and to the post of assistant secretary of the Inland Revenue Staff Federation (IRSF), and resigned from his Civil Service duties.[9]
During his time working in the Inland Revenue in the early-1930s, Callaghan met his future wife Audrey Moulton, and they were married in July 1938 at Maidstone.[10]
His union position at the IRSF brought Callaghan into contact with Harold Laski, the Chairman of the Labour Party's National Executive Committee and an academic at the London School of Economics. Laski encouraged him to stand for Parliament, although later on he requested Callaghan several times to study and lecture at the LSE.
Following the outbreak of World War II Callaghan applied to join the Royal Navy in 1940, but was initially turned down on the basis that a Trade Union official was deemed to be a reserved occupation. He was finally allowed to join the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve as an Ordinary Seaman in 1942. While he trained for his promotion his medical examination revealed that he was suffering from tuberculosis, so he was admitted to the Royal Naval Hospital Haslar in Gosport near Portsmouth. After he recovered, he was discharged and assigned to duties with the Admiralty in Whitehall. He was assigned to the Japanese section and wrote a service manual for the Royal Navy The Enemy: Japan. He then served in the East Indies Fleet on board the escort carrier HMS Activity and was promoted to the rank of lieutenant in April 1944.[11][12] As of 2024, Callaghan remains the last British prime minister to be an armed forces veteran and the only one ever to have served in the Royal Navy.
While on leave from the Navy, Callaghan was selected as a Parliamentary candidate for Cardiff South—he narrowly won the local party ballot with twelve votes against the next highest candidate George Thomas, who received eleven. Callaghan had been encouraged to put his name forward for the Cardiff South seat by his friend Dai Kneath, a member of the IRSF National executive from Swansea, who was in turn an associate and friend of the local Labour Party secretary, Bill Headon.[13]
By 1945, he was serving on HMS Queen Elizabeth in the Indian Ocean. After VE Day, he returned, along with other prospective candidates, to the United Kingdom to stand in the general election.[14]
Callaghan's interests included rugby (he played lock for Streatham RFC before the Second World War), tennis and agriculture. He married Audrey Elizabeth Moulton, whom he had met when they both worked as Sunday School teachers at the local Baptist church,[60] in July 1938 and had three children—one son and two daughters.
Although there is much doubt about how much belief Callaghan retained into adult life, the Baptist nonconformist ethic was a profound influence throughout all of his public and private life.[62] It is claimed that Callaghan was an atheist,[63] who lost his belief in God while he was working as a trade union official.[64] His son Michael Callaghan disagrees: "My father, Jim Callaghan, was brought up as a practising Baptist and as a young man was a Sunday school teacher. As a young man embracing socialism he had difficulties reconciling his new beliefs with the teachings of his church, but he was persuaded to stay in his Baptist chapel. ... Incidentally, the title of his autobiography is 'Time and Chance', a quote from Ecclesiastes 9: 11."[65]
One of his final public appearances came on 29 April 2002, when shortly after his 90th birthday, he sat alongside the then-Prime Minister Tony Blair and three other surviving former prime ministers at the time – Edward Heath, Margaret Thatcher and John Major at Buckingham Palace for a dinner which formed part of the celebrations for the Golden Jubilee of Elizabeth II, alongside his daughter Margaret, Baroness Jay, who had served as leader of the House of Lords from 1998 until 2001.[66]