Patrick Chrestien Gordon Walker, Baron Gordon-Walker, CH,PC (7 April 1907 – 2 December 1980) was a British Labour Party politician. He was a Member of Parliament for nearly 30 years and twice a cabinet minister. He lost his Smethwick parliamentary seat at the 1964 general election in a bitterly racial campaign conducted in the wake of local factory closures.
Early life
Born in Worthing, Sussex, Gordon Walker was the son of Alan Lachlan Gordon Walker, a Scottish judge in the Indian Civil Service. He was educated at Wellington College and at Christ Church, Oxford, where he took a second in Modern History in 1928 and subsequently gained a B. Litt.[1] He was a student (fellow) in history at Christ Church from 1931[2] until 1941.[3]
From 1940 to 1944, Gordon Walker worked for the BBC's European Service, where from 1942 he arranged the BBC's daily broadcasts of the BBC German Service. In 1945, he worked as assistant director of the BBC's German Service working from Radio Luxembourg, travelling with the British forces. He broadcast about the liberation of the German concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen, and wrote a book on the subject called The Lid Lifts.[4][5]
In 1938, he was selected to stand again in the Oxford by-election. The Liberal Party had selected Ivor Davies,[7] who offered to stand down from the by-election if Labour did the same and backed a Popular Front candidate against the Conservatives.[8] Eventually, Gordon Walker reluctantly stood down and both parties supported Sandy Lindsay as an Independent Progressive.[9]Quintin Hogg, the Conservative candidate, defeated Lindsay in the by-election.
Gordon Walker did not contest the 1945 general election, but was elected later in 1945 as member of Parliament (MP) for Smethwick in a by-election on 1 October 1945 after Labour's Alfred Dobbs was killed in a car accident the day after winning the seat at the 1945 general election.[4] After the by-election, Gordon Walker's support in the constituency gradually declined.
As Commonwealth secretary in 1950, Gordon Walker persuaded the cabinet to agree to prevent Seretse Khama, the heir to the throne of the British protectorate of Bechuanaland, from becoming its king, on the grounds that he had married a white English woman, Ruth Williams, an inter-racial marriage that had upset Bechuanaland's neighbouring state, apartheid South Africa.
Khama had been brought to Britain by the government under false pretences, ostensibly to talk about his future, and at Gordon Walker's behest he was then prevented from returning to his homeland for five years, subsequently increased to a lifetime ban (although eventually rescinded by a later, Conservative, government). Khama said the unexpected and earth shattering news of his exile was given to him by Gordon Walker in an "unemotional" and "unfeeling" manner. "I doubt that any man has been asked to give up his birthright in such cold, calculating terms", he said.[10]
In opposition from 1951, Gordon Walker disagreed with the Labour leadership's stance on the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland (also known as the Central African Republic): this led Gordon Walker to remain outside the Shadow Cabinet.[11] He re-joined the front bench in 1955 and was successful in the Labour Party Shadow Cabinet elections in 1956, as he was to be in every year until 1963 (the last before Labour returned to government). In opposition, Gordon Walker was a close ally of the Labour Leader Hugh Gaitskell, and briefly considered standing for the leadership after Gaitskell's death in January 1963.[11]
Following the 1964 general election, after a successful career in opposition, Gordon Walker became foreign secretary in the Labour government; he had held the shadow role for the previous year. Gordon Walker had signalled that Labour would represent continuity in foreign policy; he set out in an article in the American journal Foreign Affairs that Labour in office would remain committed to NATO and to Britain's global role.[12] In office, the new Labour government made the decision to continue with the Polaris (UK nuclear programme); the decision was taken at a Cabinet committee by Harold Wilson, Denis Healey (the Secretary of State for Defence) and Gordon Walker.
Although Labour did win the 1964 election to end 13 years of Conservative rule, Gordon Walker was defeated in controversial circumstances by the Conservative candidate, Peter Griffiths. Smethwick had been a focus of immigration from the Commonwealth but the economic and industrial growth of the years following the Second World War were coupled with local factory closures, an ageing population and a lack of modern housing. Griffiths ran a campaign critical of the opposition's, and the government's, policies, including immigration policies. Griffiths' supporters made wide use of the slogan "If you want a nigger neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour". Griffiths did not accept that he had invented the slogan, but steadfastly refused to condemn it.[4][13]
Despite, therefore, not being an MP or peer able to answer to Parliament, Gordon Walker was appointed to the Foreign Office by Harold Wilson. To resolve this unusual situation, he stood for the normally "safe" Labour constituency of Leyton in the Leyton by-election in January 1965; however, he lost, and was finally forced to resign as foreign secretary.[4] After a sabbatical conducting research in Southeast Asia,[citation needed] he finally won Leyton in the 1966 general election. Following this election, he sat in the cabinet in 1967–68, first as minister without portfolio, then as secretary of state for education and science. He was involved in controversy on the plan for Enfield Grammar School to become a comprehensive and then later in 1967 on the postponement (on cost grounds) of raising the school leaving age to sixteen.[11] The following April, after seven months in the role, Harold Wilson asked for his resignation. After leaving cabinet in 1968, he was appointed a Member of the Order of the Companions of Honour.[4]
In 1934 he married Audrey Muriel Rudolf. They subsequently had twin sons and three daughters. Lord Gordon-Walker died in London in 1980, aged 73.[4] He was found dead in the back of a taxi arriving at the Palace of Westminster.[15]
Bibliography
Gordon Walker, P. C. (1937). "Capitalism and the Reformation". Economic History Review.
Gordon Walker, P. C. (1939). An Outline of Man's History. London: N.C.L.C. Publishing Society.
↑Celinscak, Mark (2015). Distance from the Belsen Heap: Allied Forces and the Liberation of a Concentration Camp. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ISBN9781442615700.
↑Williams, Susan. 2006. Colour Bar. Allen Lane. pp. 125–126
123Morris, Ted (2025). Managing Decline: British Foreign Secretaries of the Twentieth Century. Troubador. p.326. ISBN9781806342136.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
↑Gordon Walker, Patrick (1964). "The Labour Party's Foreign and Defence Policy". Foreign Affairs. 42 (3): 391–398.
↑Gordon Walker, Alan (2022). Patrick Gordon Walker: A Political and Family History. Umbria Press. p.138. ISBN978-1-910074-42-8.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date and year (link)
Gordon Walker, Alan. Patrick Gordon Walker: A Political and Family History, Umbria Press, 2022.
Morris, Ted. Managing Decline: British Foreign Secretaries of the Twentieth Century, Troubador, 2026
Avi Shlaim, Peter Jones and Keith Sainsbury. British Foreign Secretaries Since 1945, David & Charles, 1977. Profile on Patrick Gordon Walker by Peter Jones.
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