Education
He was educated at an industrial school in the Kirkdale area of the city, leaving school aged 13 to work in a coalmine in Ashton in Makerfield.
Member of Parliament in the United Kingdom
He was educated at an industrial school in the Kirkdale area of the city, leaving school aged 13 to work in a coalmine in Ashton in Makerfield.
Born in Liverpool, Walsh became an orphan at a very young age. Walsh was an official of the Lancashire and Cheshire Miners" Federation before he was elected to parliament for Ince in the 1906 general election. Later that year he attacked the idea that an Member of Parliament needed an Oxbridge education further adding that: "To use an arithmetical metaphor, the Labour party had reduced the points of difference among the working classes to the lowest common denominator, and had promoted and developed the greatest common measure of united action".
Walsh stood in the 1918 election as a Coalition Labour candidate opposed by the official Labour Party.
He was Vice-President of National Union of Mineworkers from 1922 to 1924 until he was appointed Secretary of State for War by Ramsay MacDonald in January 1924, a post he held until the government fell in November of the same year. He was sworn of the Privy Council in January 1924.
One of Walsh"s sons died in World War I. Walsh himself died in March 1929, aged 69.
28th United Kingdom Parliament. 29th United Kingdom Parliament. 30th United Kingdom Parliament.
31st United Kingdom Parliament.
32nd United Kingdom Parliament. 33rd United Kingdom Parliament.
34th United Kingdom Parliament]
Walsh was a member of David Lloyd George"s Coalition Government as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of National Service in 1917 and as Parliamentary Secretary to the Local Government Board from 1917 to 1919.