Background
McEntee was born in Kingstown (now Dún Laoghaire) near Dublin, the son of William Charles McEntee, a physician, and Kate, daughter of Valentine Burchell.
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Valentine Louisiana Touche McEntee
Edit ProfileMember of Parliament in the United Kingdom
Career
McEntee was a carpenter by trade. So far as is known McEntee was not at all active in the SPGB. He resigned on 4 March 1905 after he was nominated as parliamentary candidate for the Labour Representation Committee (predecessor of the Labour Party). After leaving the SPGB McEntee joined the Independent Labour Party.
By 1908 he was back in the SDF, being a local election candidate for that organisation in Walthamstow in that year.
The following year he was a delegate at the Social Democratic Party (as the SDF had been renamed) Conference and was elected to its 1910–1911 Executive Committee. (Other ex-SPGBers in the NLHL include R M Fox of Smokey Crusade fame.
Les Boyne, an early member who was also in East J B Allen’s Advocates of Industrial Unionism and Industrial League Harry Young, first active in the NLHL, was an SPGB member later in life) In 1920 McEntee became a local councillor for the Labour Party in Walthamstow. He went on to become Member of Parliament for Walthamstow West from 1922 to 1924 and again from 1929 to 1950, and served Parliamentary Private Secretary (Parliamentary Private Secretary) to the Parliamentary Secretary for the Ministry of Works, George Hicks, from 1942 to 1945.
He was also Mayor of Walthamstow from 1929 to 1930 and 1951 to 1952.
He was appointed a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1948 and in 1951 he was elevated to the peerage as Baron McEntee, of Walthamstow in the County of Essex, in recognition of his "political and public services".
Politics
From 1896 to 1899, like Con Lehane, he was a member of James Connolly"s Irish Socialist Republican Party. In 1909 he published a short pamphlet Socialism Explained, a criticism of capitalism.
Membership
32nd United Kingdom Parliament. 33rd United Kingdom Parliament. 35th United Kingdom Parliament.
36th United Kingdom Parliament.
37th United Kingdom Parliament. 38th United Kingdom Parliament]
After a brief stay in the United States he moved to London and became a member of Social Democratic Federation (SDF), whence he went on to help found the Socialist Party of Great Britain in June 1904.
McEntee presumably became a member of the Labour Party via the British Socialist Party, the successor to the SDF, which affiliated in 1916. During the later part of the First World War he was a member of the relatively large and actively anti-war North London Herald League, as documented in Ken Weller’s Don’t Be a Soldier.
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Born
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Died
February 11, 1953 (aged 82) -
Nationality
United Kingdom -
Political Party
Labour Party