Harry Pursey

Background

He was born in Sidmouth, and educated at the Royal Hospital School (a school for naval orphans) and the Royal Naval College in Greenwich.

Career

He joined the Royal Navy in 1907, as a boy seaman with HMS Impregnable. During the First World War he served with the Dover Patrol and with the Grand Fleet. He took part in the Battle of Jutland aboard Revenge.

In 1917 he was promoted to the rank of gunner and saw service in the Aegean aboard Forward.

That October, he was second-in-command of a landing party from the Forward which successfully evacuated a Royal Naval Air Service station on Lesbos Island, for which he was commissioned and received a mention in dispatches. After the war he was posted to the Black Sea and around Turkey, and saw action in Somaliland and Mesopotamia.

He was promoted to Lieutenant in 1920. In 1926 he was posted to Benbow.

He was promoted to Lieutenant-Commander in February 1928, and transferred to Vernon in April.

In May 1929 he was appointed to Eagle and in March 1931 to Hood. He retired in 1936. During the Spanish Civil War, he worked as a journalist in Spain. In the 1951 general election, he held the seat with a majority of 11,500 votes, rising to 12,700 votes in 1955, 16,300 votes in 1964, and 23,000 in 1966.

He announced in 1967 that he would resign at the next election, and was succeeded by John Prescott in the 1970 election.

He had a great interest in "below-decks" naval history, and spent his later years working on a history of the Invergordon Mutiny, though it does not appear to have been published. His obituary in The Times described him as "the first naval officer promoted from the lower deck" to enter Parliament.

Achievements

• He later won a lawsuit against her solicitor, who had argued that although he had conducted her defence without entering Canada, he was a licensed Canadian solicitor as well as an English one and thus not required to comply with English regulations.

Membership

38th United Kingdom Parliament. 39th United Kingdom Parliament. 40th United Kingdom Parliament.

41st United Kingdom Parliament.

42nd United Kingdom Parliament. 43rd United Kingdom Parliament.

44th United Kingdom Parliament]

He was elected as the Labour member of parliament for Kingston upon Hull East in the 1945 general election.