Background
Donald Bradley Somervell was born at Harrow on 24 August 1889, the second son of Robert Somervell, master and bursar of Harrow School, and his wife, Octavia Paulina, daughter of the Rev. John Churchill.
politician statesman Home Secretary
Donald Bradley Somervell was born at Harrow on 24 August 1889, the second son of Robert Somervell, master and bursar of Harrow School, and his wife, Octavia Paulina, daughter of the Rev. John Churchill.
He was educated at Harrow and then at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he graduated with first-class honors in chemistry. In 1912 he was elected a fellow of All Souls, Oxford. He began to study law at the Inner Temple, but World War I interrupted his studies.
During the war he served in India (1914—1917) and Mesopotamia (1917—1919). He was called to the bar in his absence, in 1916, and after the war he became involved in work connected with the commercial clauses of the Treaty of Versailles. He took silk (became King’s Counsel) in 1929.
He was defeated at Crewe in the 1929 general election, but won that seat by narrow majorities in both 1931 and 1935. In 1936 he became attorney general (law officer to various ministries) in Baldwin’s National government, retaining that position for a decade, until 1946. In 1938 he became a member of the Privy Council. During this period he was supportive of Neville Chamberlain’s attempt to appease Hitler at Munich. Somervell served as home secretary between 25 May and 2 August 1945, in Winston Churchill’s caretaker government (between the end of the wartime coalition government and the formation of the first Attlee Labour government). Labour’s victory brought an end to his modest political career, but he continued in his legal one, acting as Lord Justice of Appeal between 1946 and 1954. He died in London on 18 November 1960.
Politically he had been sympathetic to the Liberal cause; but faced with the Liberal Party’s decline and given his admiration for Stanley Baldwin, he was soon attracted to the Conservative Party.