Soskice was born in Geneva on 23 July 1902. His father, David Vladimir Soskice, was a Russian liberal, and his mother, Julia Hueffer, was a granddaughter of Ford Madox Brown, the pre- Raphaelite painter. His father had been a member of Kerensky’s secretariat at the time of the Russian revolutions of 1917.
Frank was educated at St. Paul’s School and at Balliol College, Oxford. After graduating from Oxford, he went into law and was called to the bar of the Inner Temple in 1926. During World War II, he served in the army.
In the 1945 general election, he became M.P. for Birkenhead East, which he represented until 1945. He then represented Sheffield Neepsend from 1950 to 1955, and after a break, Newport from 1956 to 1966.
Soskice’s first government office came in August 1945, when he was appointed solicitor general in Atdee’s first Labour government. He was briefly promoted to attorney general in the second Attlee government, serving as the government’s supreme legal official from April 1951 until October 1951.
When Harold Wilson (Labour leader after Gaitskell’s death in 1963) became prime minister of a new Labour government in 1964, Soskice was appointed home secretary. Beleaguered in his post, Soskice resigned on the grounds of ill health on 23 December 1965. He briefly took up the post of Lord Privy Seal, but left the House of Commons in 1966, after which he was raised to the House of Lords as Baron Stow Hill. He participated little in parliamentary politics after this point, focusing instead on professional interests. He died on 1 January 1979.
He was obsessed with legal procedure and precedent, however, and his efforts at political decision making were therefore highly ineffective. He placed an immigration control bill that followed from the Conservative Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 in jeopardy while it was still in committee, on the grounds that immigration controls were being widely evaded and that he was attempting to tighten the loopholes. The white paper he had produced suggested the need to limit immigration to 8,500 professional and skilled workers per year through the allocation of vouchers. In 1965 he introduced the Race Relations Act, which outlawed direct discrimi-nation on grounds of color, race, or national or ethnic origin in some public places; but the board set up to implement this law was given insufficient power and resources to do its job.
During the 1950s he became a close friend of Hugh Gaitskell, Labour leader from 1955 until 1963, and was part of the “Hampstead set” of friends that Gaitskell gathered around him. In fact, he lived about 200 yards from Gaitskell’s house in Hampstead, in a remarkably impressive building on Church Row.
