Political Wings: William Wedgwood Benn, First Viscount Stansgate by Alun Wyburn-Powell

The names Benn and Stansgate are perhaps today best known for the constitutional impasse caused between 1961 and 1963 when Anthony (Tony) Wedgwood Benn was required to inherit his father’s hereditary title of Viscount Stansgate, and thus lose his seat in the House of Commons. Benn successfully fought a court case to have this ruling reversed, enabling his to sit in the Commons for a further four decades.

However the man whose death occasioned this crisis, William Wedgwood Benn, the first Viscount Stansgate, has been overlooked hitherto in the historiography of twentieth century political history. That lacuna has now been addressed by Alun Wyburn-Powell’s superbly researched and engagingly written biography, published by Pen and Sword this year.

William Wedgwood-Benn was himself the son of an MP, John Benn, and came from nonconformist stock on both sides of the family, his paternal grandparents being Congregationalists from Manchester. William’s wife, Margaret Benn, later became the President of the Congregational Federation and campaigned for the ordination of women in the Church of England. Their eldest son, Michael, who was tragically killed in a flying accident in 1944, was a devoted Christian and their second son, Tony, based much of his philosophy on his understanding of the battle between right and wrong, as seen in the Bible.

William himself had a remarkable career, or careers. He was elected as Liberal MP for Tower Hamlets in 1906, holding that seat until 1918. Like many MPs, he volunteered for service during the First World War and was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the Middlesex Yeomanry (Duke of Cambridge’s Hussars). In 1916 he was transferred to the Royal Flying Corps and won the Distinguished Service Order in 1917 and the Distinguished Flying Cross in 1918.

In 1927 Benn resigned from the Liberal Party and became Labour MP for Aberdeen North, serving in the cabinet as Secretary of State for India. However he resigned from the government when Ramsay MacDonald entered the National Government with the Conservatives in 1931, and subsequently lost his seat.

He was retuned as MP for Gorton, Manchester in 1937, and on the outbreak of the Second World War, he joined the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve.  He was elevated to the peerage in 1942, in order for the House of Lords to better reflect the composition of the wartime coalition government, choosing the title Stansgate, from the wooden home which was, and still is, the family retreat in the Essex marshes. William worked within the Air Ministry during the war, and after the Labour landslide of 1945, he re-entered the cabinet as Secretary of State for Air.

Beyond his political and military life, William was a meticulous amasser of information and compiler of files, a trait he handed down to his sons. Alun Wybun-Powell has worked through the Stansgate Papers in the Parliamentary Archives, national and local collections, as well as being granted access to private papers still in the possession of the Benn family, held at Stansgate House in Essex. The result is a book which raises the profile of an important but overlooked figure.  This work will appeal to those with an interest in the development of air warfare, in British radical politics of the twentieth century, in the story of a remarkable political dynasty, and in the biography of a fascinating character who played many diverse roles between 1900 and 1960.

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, which I read in conjunction with other books from the Benn family, as part of my own research into the Christian faith of William’s son Michael, whose story will be featured in my second book Fight the Good Fight: Voices of Faith from the Second World War, to be published in April 2016.