Background
James Chuter Chuter-Ede was born on 11 September 1882 in Epsom, Surrey, the son of James Ede, a grocer, and Agnes Mary Chuter.
James Chuter Chuter-Ede was born on 11 September 1882 in Epsom, Surrey, the son of James Ede, a grocer, and Agnes Mary Chuter.
He was educated at Epsom National School, Dorking High School, Battersea Pupil Teachers’ Centre, and then at Christ’s College, Cambridge, for which he had won a scholarship. However, he could not afford to complete his degree and he moved on to become an assistant master in various elementary schools in Surrey until 1914.
During World War I, he served as a sergeant in the East Surreys and Royal Engineers. Also during the war, he became a staunch Labour supporter, and in 1918 he stood as Labour candidate for the parliamentary division of Epsom. He lost this election but became Labour M.P. for Mitcham in 1923, following a parliamentary by-election; he did not retain this seat for long, losing it in the general election of December 1923. He returned to Parliament in 1929, as Labour M.P. for South Shields, holding the seat until Labour’s heavy political defeat in 1931. However, he was again Labour’s M.P. for South Shields from 1935 to 1964.
It was during World War II that Chuter-Ede first obtained ministerial experience. Between 1940 and 1945 he was parliamentary secretary in the Ministry of Education in Sir Winston Churchill’s wartime administration.
While serving in the Attlee governments, Ede also became deputy leader of the Labour Party, effectively deputy prime minister, in 1947, and was for a few months in 1951 the leader of the House of Commons. The defeat of the Labour government of 1951 brought his ministerial career to an end. He died on 11 November 1965.
He was closely involved in the passing of the 1944 Education Act, which ensured secondary education for all. The high point of his political career occurred between 1945 and 1951, when he served more than five years as home secretary in Clement Attlee’s Labour governments. In this role he sponsored numerous bills on parliamentary representation and criminal justice.
The latter interest consumed most of his time in this period, largely because of the controversy surrounding capital punishment. Ede opposed a private members’ bill, one put forward by a member of Parliament rather than the government, that advocated the suspension of capital punishment for a five-year experimental period. That clause was approved in the House of Commons but rejected in the House of Lords, giving Ede an opportunity to propose a compromise arrangement restricting capital punishment to a number of specific offenses. This clause also was defeated in the House of Lords, however, and the measure was dropped from the Criminal Justice Bill. Nevertheless, Chuter-Ede had the government set up a royal commission on capital punishment. After the commission submitted its report to the Con-servative government in 1955, Chuter-Ede voted in favor of a proposed measure to suspend capital punishment, but the measure was not carried.
In this area Chuter-Ede was greatly influenced by the fact that while serving as home secretary, he had denied a reprieve to Timothy John Evans, who had been convicted of murdering his wife, and that it had later become evident that the mass murderer John Christie, who lodged in Evans’s house, was most probably the actual culprit. Although Chuter-Ede had come to believe that the public would never vote in a plebiscite to accept such a radical measure as suspending capital punishment, he nonetheless was disturbed by the permanence of capital punishment, which prevented miscarriages of justice from being rectified. He adamantly opposed capital punishment. Despite the defeat of the 1955 measure, Chuter-Ede himself proposed a second measure in 1956 to suspend the death penalty. The proposal was carried in the House of Commons and eventually led to the Homicide Act, which restricted capital punishment to specific types of murder. This had been Ede’s compromise suggestion of 1947.
Although most political commentators today would not rank Chuter-Ede among the truly great political figures of the twentieth century, he is generally held in high regard for his performance as home secretary and his role in restricting capital punishment.
