Background
Patrick Chrestien Gordon Walker was born 7 April 1907, at Worthing. He was the elder son of Alan Lachlan Gordon Walker—a Scottish judge of the supreme court of Lahore (in the Indian civil service)—and his wife, Dora Marguerite Chrestien.
Patrick Chrestien Gordon Walker was born 7 April 1907, at Worthing. He was the elder son of Alan Lachlan Gordon Walker—a Scottish judge of the supreme court of Lahore (in the Indian civil service)—and his wife, Dora Marguerite Chrestien.
He was educated at Wellington College and won a scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford. Narrowly missing first class honors in history in 1928, he nevertheless became a history tutor at Christ Church in 1931. He then spent a year at German universities, becoming fluent in German and developing a hostility toward both the Nazis and the Communists in Germany and elsewhere in Europe. His father’s Fabian socialist commitment to gradual social change also influenced him greatly.
Gordon Walker’s parliamentary career began in October 1945, when he was elected to Parliament in a by-election for the Birmingham seat of Smethwick. As a respected democratic socialist, he progressed rapidly through the political ranks of Clement Attlee’s postwar Labour governments. In 1946 he became parliamentary secretary to Herbert Morrison, who was then deputy prime minister and Lord President of the Council; and in 1947, a junior minister, as undersecretary of state to the commonwealth relations office. In this role he went to India and negotiated with Jawaharlal Nehru to try to keep the newly independent country within the Commonwealth. After the 1950 general election, he joined the cabinet as secretary of state for Commonwealth relations, being admitted to the Privy Council at the same time.
With Labour out of office for thirteen years (1951-1964), Gordon Walker remained Labour’s main spokesman on international affairs with regard to the Commonwealth and Europe.
When Gaitskell died in 1963, Gordon Walker refused to become a candidate for the leadership of the Labour Party. Harold Wilson, the new party leader, appointed him shadow foreign secretary. Labour came to power in the general election of October 1964, but Gordon Walker lost his Smethwick seat, a victim of the racist attacks leveled against him for his having opposed the Conservative Commonwealth Immigration Act of 1962. Nonetheless, Wilson made him foreign secretary, in the expectation that he would be reelected to the House of Commons in a forthcoming parliamentary by-election. However, in January 1965 he was defeated in a by-election for the East End London seat of Leyton. With this failure, his brief period as foreign secretary, which had extended from October 1964 to January 1965, came to an end. He remained out of Parliament until 1966.
When he returned to the House of Commons in 1966, having secured an 8,000-vote majority for Leyton, he rejoined the Labour cabinet first as minister without portfolio (1966-1967), and then, from 1967 to 1968, as secretary of state for education and science. However, he never returned to the high political position that he had once occupied. In 1974, he was made a life peer (as Lord Gordon Walker of Leyton) and thus acquired a seat in the House of Lords.
He died in London on 2 December 1980.
Politically, he was close to Hugh Gaitskell, the new Labour Party leader from 1955, supporting him on the need to modernize the party and to amend Clause Four, the clause in the Labour Party’s constitution committing it to public ownership; and opposing unilateral nuclear disarmament.
His political activities began in 1935, when he was defeated in his first parliamentary election, running for the Oxford City seat. He chose not to run for the Oxford by-election of 1938 in favor of the master of Balliol, A. D. Lindsay, an independent progressive. By this time, Gordon Walker had become a passionate advocate of the Popular Front against fascism, fearing the threat of fascist expansionism from the continent. During World War II, his knowledge of the German Social Democrats (Nazis) and the German language made him an important contributor to the BBC’s propaganda war against Germany. In 1944 he landed with the invading Allied troops and became chief editor for Radio Luxembourg, which was the main Allied radio station at the end of the war.
He was committed to a multiracial Commonwealth. However, he was criticized for his refusal to recognize (Sir) Seretse Khama—who was married to an Englishwoman, Ruth Williams—as head of the Bamangwata, the dominant tribe of Bechuanaland (as Botswana was then known), and thus Bechuanaland. He also was criticized for planning to set up a Central African Federation despite opposition from blacks in Nyasa- land, and from Northern and Southern Rhodesia. This move was ill-fated, and the federation was dismantled by the Conservative government that replaced Labour in 1951.
From 1975 to 1976 he served as one of the British members of the European Parliament.
An almost forgotten political figure whose career as foreign secretary was blighted by his unfortunate political defeat in a parliamentary election dominated by racist attacks.
He married Audrey Muriel Rudolf, who was born in Jamaica, in 1934, and she encouraged his later commitment to the ideal of a British multiracial Commonwealth of nations.