Alec Douglas-Home

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The Rt Hon Sir Alec Douglas-Home

Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
In office October 19, 1963 – October 16, 1964
Preceded by	Harold Macmillan
Succeeded by	Harold Wilson

Born	July 2, 1903 Mayfair, London, England
Died	October 5, 1995, age 92 Coldstream, Berwickshire, Scotland
Political party	Conservative (SUP)
Spouse	Elizabeth Hester Alington

Alexander Frederick Douglas-Home, Baron Home of the Hirsel,^[1] KT, PC (July 2, 1903 – October 9, 1995), 14th Earl of Home from 1951 to 1963, was a British Conservative (actually SUP) politician, and served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom for a year from October 1963 to October 1964. As the last aristocratic Prime Minister, he held a series of records: he was the last member of the House of Lords to be appointed Prime Minister; the only Prime Minister to renounce his peerage to leave the House of Lords and contest a by-election to enter the House of Commons (and therefore for a short period, the only Prime Minister to belong to neither House of Parliament); and the last Prime Minister to be chosen personally by the British monarch. He was also the first Prime Minister born in the 20th century and the only Prime Minister to have played first class cricket.

1 Early life
2 Cricket career
3 Political life
4 Titles from birth to death
5 Nicknames
6 Sir Alec Douglas-Home's Government, October 1963 – October 1964
- 6.1 Changes
7 Notes
8 References
9 External Links

[edit] Early life

Douglas-Home was born in Mayfair, London, England, the eldest of seven children born to Charles, Lord Dunglass, (the eldest son of the 12th Earl of Home) and Lady Lilian Lambton, daughter of Frederick Lambton, 4th Earl of Durham. His mother was the great-great-granddaughter of the reforming Prime Minister Charles Grey, 2nd Earl Grey. After his father's succession to the Earldom in 1918 he held the courtesy title Lord Dunglass. One of his brothers was the dramatist William Douglas-Home.

He was educated at Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford. At Eton, his classmates included Cyril Connolly, who later described him as "a votary of the esoteric Eton religion, the kind of graceful, tolerant, sleepy boy who is showered with all the laurels, who is liked by the masters and admired by the boys without any apparent exertion on his part". Connolly famously concluded, "in the eighteenth century he would have become Prime Minister before he was 30: as it was he appeared honourably ineligible for the struggle of life".^[2] Other classmates included George Orwell. In 1936 he married Elizabeth Alington, the daughter of Cyril Alington, who had been Douglas-Home's headmaster at Eton.

[edit] Cricket career

He was a talented cricketer at school, club and county level, and is the only British prime minister to have played first-class cricket. He represented the MCC, Middlesex CCC, Oxford University Cricket Club, HDG Leveson-Gower's XI, Free Foresters and Harlequins at first-class level, playing under the name "Lord Dunglass", his title at the time. Between 1924 and 1927, Dunglass played 10 first-class matches, scoring 147 runs at an average of 16.33 and a best score of 37 not out. As a right-arm fast-medium bowler he took 12 wickets at an average of 30.25 with a best of 3 for 43. Three of his first-class games were internationals against Argentina on the MCC 'representative' tour of South America in 1926-27. After Douglas-Home had retired as prime minister, he became president of the MCC in 1966. Between 1977 and 1989 Lord Home was Governor of I Zingari, the well-known nomadic cricket team. His cricket career served him well later in life when, at a particuarly rowdy election hustings, Douglas-Home had an egg thrown at him and was able to catch it without it breaking.

[edit] Political life

He became the Scottish Unionist Party Member of Parliament (MP) for Lanark in 1931. His high birth gave him a head start in Parliament, and he served as Parliamentary Private Secretary (1937-9) to Neville Chamberlain, witnessing at first hand the latter's attempts to stave off World War II through negotiation with Adolf Hitler. Douglas-Home fell gravely ill with spinal tuberculosis in 1938, which kept him immobile on his back for two years and prevented him from fighting in World War II.

He lost his parliamentary seat in the Conservatives' landslide defeat in the 1945 general election, but regained it in 1950. However Douglas-Home was automatically disqualified from the Commons in 1951 when he inherited his father's seat in the House of Lords, becoming the 14th Earl of Home.

This did not blunt his political aspirations. Lord Home, as he then was, served not only as Commonwealth Secretary from 1955 during the time of the Suez Crisis but, from 1957, also as Leader of the House of Lords and Lord President of the Council (the latter twice; briefly in 1957 and subsequently from 1959). Home traded all three for the Foreign Office in 1960. In 1962, he was created a knight of the Order of the Thistle — the highest honour outside the nobility available to a Scot and in the personal gift of the Monarch — which entitled him to be styled "Sir" after later renouncing his earldom.

[edit] Appointment as Prime Minister

In 1963, Conservative Prime Minister Harold Macmillan suddenly resigned following prostate trouble from which he (wrongly) thought he would not recover. At the time, the Conservative Party had no formal procedure for selecting a leader, merely a series of confused precedents and the Queen expected to choose on the basis of advice given by the party's elder statesmen. Though Rab Butler, nominally the "Deputy Prime Minister" (officially no such constitutional office then existed, with the title on its rare usages being an honorific one), was the favourite among Conservative MPs, Home was preferred by the elder statesmen, some of whom indicated that they would refuse to serve in cabinet under Butler or the other potential candidate, Quintin Hogg, then Lord Hailsham. Macmillan's resignation took place at the time of the 1963 Conservative Party Conference, which rapidly became something akin to an American political convention as various candidates and their supporters jostled publicly for the position. Following a series of consultations to determine who could command support from across the party and prove the best compromise candidate, Macmillan advised Queen Elizabeth II. Though it was argued that he had no right to advise the Queen as to whom to invite to kiss hands as Prime Minister, and the Queen was under no obligation to accept his advice, the Queen duly invited the Earl of Home to become Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury.

Home, the first UK Prime Minister born in the 20th century, believed it would not be practical to serve as PM from the Lords (it was widely believed that Lord Curzon had not been invited to become prime minister in 1923 because of his seat in the Lords). Using the Peerage Act 1963 passed earlier in the same year after Tony Benn's campaign to renounce his peerage, Home disclaimed his Earldom and, as "Sir Alec Douglas-Home", contested a by-election in the safe seat of Kinross & West Perthshire. Home duly won, entering the history books as the last peer to become Prime Minister and the only Prime Minister to resign the Lords to enter the Commons.

[edit] Defeat and opposition

Linked as it was to the damaged former government's Profumo Affair of 1963, Douglas-Home's tenure as prime minister lasted only one year. The October 1964 general election was won by the Labour Party under the new leadership of Harold Wilson. However, the margin of victory proved narrow and the election thus provided a much sterner test for Wilson than expected. Indeed it was in this campaign that Home made his most famous remark. Wilson kept gibing Home that he was not a man of the people, as he was the 14th Earl of Home. Home responded, "as far as the 14th Earl is concerned I suppose that Mr. Wilson, when you come to think of it, is the 14th Mr. Wilson".

He remained leader of the party until his resignation in July of the following year. At this time, Douglas-Home himself revised the rules of the Conservative Party to allow the party leader to be henceforth selected by a series of ballots of all Conservative MPs. The resulting leadership election was won by Edward Heath, who defeated Reginald Maudling and Enoch Powell. Over the following six years, Home was notably loyal to Heath, comparing those who questioned his position with impatient gardeners who would keep digging up a tree to gauge its progress by examining its roots. When, in 1970, Heath became prime minister, Home returned to the post of Foreign Secretary which was deemed to suit him so well.

In 1973 Home intimated his intention to retire from Parliament and government at the next general election, but was overtaken by the calling of a snap general election in February 1974. Following the defeat of the Heath government by that of Harold Wilson in 1974, Home retired from front-line politics, standing down from the Commons at the October 1974 election. In the 1979 Devolution referendum, he made a high profile statement arguing that an incoming Conservative Government would introduce a better Scottish Assembly. Margaret Thatcher's government did not do so.

[edit] Later life and family

Home was restored to the House of Lords when he accepted a life peerage, becoming known as Baron Home of the Hirsel, of Coldstream in Berwickshire (The Hirsel being his family seat in Berwickshire), and continued to appear in the House of Lords into his nineties. To date, Home ranks as the third-longest-lived British Prime Minister, behind James Callaghan and Harold Macmillan. His autobiography, The Way The Wind Blows, was published in 1976. He was also the author of Peaceful Change (1964) and Border Reflections (1979). His correspondence with his grandson Matthew Darby was published as Letters to a Grandson in 1983.

On his death at The Hirsel in 1995, aged 92, he was succeeded as Earl of Home by his only son, David Douglas-Home. He also had three daughters, Lady Caroline Douglas-Home DL, Lady Meriel Darby (who married Adrian Darby OBE, of Kemerton Court) and Lady Diana Wolfe Murray.

[edit] Titles from birth to death

The Hon. Alec Douglas-Home (1903 – 1918)
Lord Dunglass (1918 – 1931)
Lord Dunglass, MP (1931 – 1945)
Lord Dunglass (1945 – 1950)
Lord Dunglass, MP (1950 – 1951)
The Rt Hon. Lord Dunglass, MP (1951)
The Earl of Home, PC (1951 – 1962)
The Earl of Home, KT, PC (1962 – 1963)
The Rt Hon. Sir Alec Douglas-Home, KT (1963)
The Rt Hon. Sir Alec Douglas-Home, KT, MP (1963 – 1974)
Lord Home of the Hirsel, KT, PC (1974 – 1995)

[edit] Nicknames

Home was referred to as 'Baillie Vass' by the magazine Private Eye. This running joke began in 1964 when a provincial newspaper, the Aberdeen Evening Express accidentally used a picture of Home over a caption referring to a baillie called Vass. Private Eye then affected to believe that Home was an impostor whom the newspaper had unmasked, and the magazine maintained this conceit until Home's death.

[edit] Sir Alec Douglas-Home's Government, October 1963 – October 1964

Further information: Conservative Government 1957-1964

Sir Alec Douglas-Home: Prime Minister
Lord Dilhorne: Lord Chancellor
Quintin McGarel Hogg: Lord President of the Council
Selwyn Lloyd: Lord Privy Seal
Reginald Maudling: Chancellor of the Exchequer
Rab Butler: Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs
Henry Brooke: Secretary of State for the Home Department
Sir Keith Joseph: Minister of Housing and Local Government
Peter Thorneycroft: Secretary of State for Defence
Julian Amery: Minister of Civil Aviation
Ernest Marples: Minister of Transport
Frederick James Erroll: Minister of Power
Edward Heath: Secretary of State for Industry, Trade, and Regional Development and President of the Board of Trade
Duncan Edwin Sandys: Secretary of State for the Colonies and Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations
Sir Edward Boyle: Secretary of State for Education
Anthony Barber: Secretary of State for Health
John Boyd-Carpenter: Chief Secretary to the Treasury and Paymaster-General
Joseph Bradshaw Godber: Minister of Labour and National Service
Geoffrey Rippon: Minister of Public Works
Christopher Soames: Minister of Agriculture
Michael Noble: Secretary of State for Scotland
Lord Blakenham: Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
William Francis Deedes: Minister without Portfolio
Lord Carrington: Minister without Portfolio, Leader of the House of Lords

[edit] Changes

April 1964: Quintin McGarel Hogg becomes Secretary of State for Education and Science. Sir Edward Boyle leaves the Cabinet.

[edit] Notes

^ Family name pronounced 'Hume'
^ Connolly, Cyril (1938). Enemies of Promise.

[edit] References

Dickie, J. (1964). The Uncommon Commoner: A Study of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Pall Mall.
Dutton, D. (2006). Alec Douglas-Home (20 British Prime Ministers of the 20th Century), Haus Publishing.
Home of the Hirsel, Lord. (1976). The Way the Wind Blows: An Autobiography, London: Collins.
Home of the Hirsel, Lord. (1983). Letters to a Grandson, London: HarperCollins.
Hughes, E. (1964). Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Housman
Thorpe, D.R. (1996). Alec Douglas-Home, Sinclair-Stevenson
Young, K. (1971). Sir Alec Douglas-Home, Fairleigh Dickinson

[edit] External Links

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Alec Douglas-Home

Parliament of the United Kingdom
Preceded by Thomas Scott Dickson	Member of Parliament for Lanark 1931–1945	Succeeded by Thomas Steele
Preceded by Thomas Steele	Member of Parliament for Lanark 1950–1951	Succeeded by Patrick Maitland
Preceded by Gilmour Leburn	Member of Parliament for Kinross and Western Perthshire 1963–1974	Succeeded by Nicholas Fairbairn
Political offices
Preceded by The Viscount Swinton	Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations 1955–1960	Succeeded by Duncan Sandys
Preceded by The Marquess of Salisbury	Leader of the House of Lords 1957–1960	Succeeded by The Viscount Hailsham
Preceded by The Marquess of Salisbury	Lord President of the Council 1957	Succeeded by The Viscount Hailsham
Preceded by The Viscount Hailsham	Lord President of the Council 1959–1960	Succeeded by The Viscount Hailsham
Preceded by Selwyn Lloyd	Foreign Secretary 1960–1963	Succeeded by Rab Butler
Preceded by Harold Macmillan	Prime Minister of the United Kingdom 1963–1964	Succeeded by Harold Wilson
Preceded by Harold Macmillan	Leader of the British Conservative Party 1963–1965	Succeeded by Edward Heath
Preceded by Harold Wilson	Leader of the Opposition 1964–1965	Succeeded by Edward Heath
Preceded by Christopher Soames	Shadow Foreign Secretary 1966–1970	Succeeded by Denis Healey
Preceded by Michael Stewart	Foreign Secretary 1970–1974	Succeeded by James Callaghan
Preceded by James Callaghan	Shadow Foreign Secretary 1974	Succeeded by Geoffrey Rippon
Peerage of Scotland
Preceded by Charles Douglas-Home	Earl of Home (disclaimed) 1951–1963	Succeeded by David Douglas-Home