Background

Enoch Powell was born on June 16, 1912, in Stechford, Birmingham, England, the United Kingdom, to Albert Enoch Powell and his wife Ellen Mary. He was the only child. His father was a primary school headmaster and his mother, a former school teacher.

Education

Enoch's mother gave up teaching in order to learn Greek and impart it to her son. Powell received his primary education from King’s Norton Grammar School for Boys before moving to King Edward’s School. In 1930 he enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he became greatly influenced by the writings of the poet A. E. Housman and German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. He was a brilliant student and did not participate in politics. At university, Powell displayed little interest in politics, in fact, his greatest ambition was to become the Viceroy of India and he took up the study of Urdu to further this ambition.

Career

After graduation, Enoch was a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge from 1934 to 1938. He was appointed Professor of Greek at the University of Sydney in 1937 when he was only 25 years old. He returned home in 1939 and enlisted in the Royal Warwickshire Regiment as an Australian; he was very excited about joining the army.

He was transferred to the Intelligence Corps in 1940. He was a very intelligent and hard-working officer and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel by 1942, and full colonel by 1944. By the end of the war, he was a Brigadier. However, he later expressed regret at his backroom duties and later said "I should like to have been killed in the war."

His ambition to become the viceroy of India ended abruptly when India became independent in 1947 so he joined the Conservatives and worked for the Conservative Research Department. He argued Britain should no longer maintain an Empire but give it up as it was no longer in a position to maintain it.

In 1950 he won a seat in Parliament as a Conservative. He was elected a Member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West in the general elections; his maiden speech was on a White Paper on Defence. In 1955, he was made the parliamentary secretary to Duncan Sandys at the Ministry of Housing. The next year he spoke for the Housing Subsidies Bill in the Commons and also in support of the Slum Clearance Bill. He advocated immigration control at the subcommittee on immigration control.

He was offered the post of Financial Secretary to the Treasury in January 1957; this was the most important job outside the Cabinet. He resigned in a year in January 1958 as a protest against government plans for increased expenditure. In 1965 he was made the Shadow Secretary of State for Defence. Giving his first speech holding this position, he outlined a fresh defense policy and defended Britain’s nuclear weapons.

On April 20, 1968, in what came to be called his Rivers of Blood speech, Powell evoked the British race question. The nationality acts, he argued, were flooding London and Midlands ghettos with Indian, Pakistani, African, and West Indian immigrants, who could claim British citizenship because of their Commonwealth status.

In time the influx, he charged, would cause a bloody race war. He also called for voluntary repatriation of these immigrants. He was sacked from the Shadow Cabinet the day after the speech. However, this speech made him a hero in the eyes of the public and he won huge support across Britain.

He returned to the parliament as Ulster Unionist Member of Parliament for South Down after winning the general elections in 1974. He strongly supported the Ulster Unionists in their desire to remain a constituent part of the United Kingdom.

He was a bitter opponent of America and in 1984 claimed that the Central Intelligence Agency had murdered Earl Mountbatten of Burma. He also accused the United States of killing Members of Parliament Airey Neave and Robert Bradford. These claims were however dismissed.

He lost his seat in the 1987 general elections and his political career came to an end. Powell also wrote a number of books, including such histories as Common Market: The Case Against (1970), Joseph Chamberlain (1977), and A Nation or No Nation?: Six Years in British Politics (1979).

Achievements

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  A brilliant man with an excellent military career under his belt, Enoch Powell was an outspoken politician made infamous by his Rivers of Blood speech in which he had criticized Commonwealth immigration and anti-discriminatory legislation. Enoch was noted for his controversial rhetoric concerning Britain’s nonwhite population and for his opposition to the nation’s entry into the European Economic Community.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Evolution of the Gospel

    (Many biblical scholars believe that the Gospel of Matthew...)

    1994
  • The Rendel Harris Papyri 1936
  • A Lexicon to Herodotus 1938
  • Great Parliamentary Occasions 1960
  • Medicine and Politics: 1975 and After 1976
  • Still to Decide 1972
  • The Common Market: Re-negotiate or Come Out 1973
  • No Easy Answers 1973
  • Joseph Chamberlain 1977
  • A Nation or No Nation?: Six Years in British Politics 1978
  • Reflections of a Statesman: The Selected Writings and Speeches of Enoch Powell 1991

Religion

Despite being an atheist earlier, Enoch Powell later switched to the Church of England. His last book, The Evolution of the Gospel (1994), was typically challenging, raising questions about how Christ might have died.

Politics

Enoch Powell voted for the Labor Party in 1945, to register his protest against the appeasement of the Conservatives in 1938. However, by 1950 he had joined the Conservative party and been elected as a Conservative member of Parliament for Wolverhampton South West in the 1950 general election. In 1974, he became an Ulster Unionist.

1956 saw two notable moments. He attended a committee in the Spring advocating restrictions on immigration. Later in the year, he said that restricting immigration would require a change in law, and "there would be very few people who would say the time had yet come when it was essential that so great a change should be made." He later claimed this was merely said out of loyalty to the Government line. In the same year, he spoke in support of the Rent Bill, which brought an end to wartime rent controls and phased out regulation of the cost of renting a property.

In the aftermath of the Birmingham pub bombings, he warned against the passing of the Prevention of Terrorism Act because it was conceived "in haste and under the immediate pressure." Margaret Thatcher refused Powell a chance to return because he had turned his back on the party by leaving and telling them to vote labor.

He opposed the Falklands conflict in 1990 with Iraq since the Middle East was no longer a British concern and Kuwait was not a British ally. He also opposed nuclear weapons.

Views

On some issues, Powell was liberal in sentiment. He voted against the death penalty and supported homosexual law reform. In 1969, he was asked by David Frost if he considered himself a racialist. Powell replied: "It depends on how you define the word "racialist." If you mean being conscious of the differences between men and nations, and from that, races, then we are all racialists. However, if you mean a man who despises a human being because he belongs to another race or a man who believes that one race is inherently superior to another, then the answer is emphatical "No."

Quotations: "Of course I am very proud of being a Tory. Yes, in my head and in my heart I regard myself as a Tory. As I have said, I was born that way; I believe it is congenital. I am unable to change it. That is how I see the world."

Personality

Enoch Powell was a protean figure, intellectually by far the most interesting of his political contemporaries, and a man with many lives. A fine classical scholar, he became a distinguished soldier. He was a politician of distinction who, if he never held the highest office, none the less had a palpable influence on great events. And he ended his life as a biblical scholar.

Interests

• reading

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Friedrich Nietzsche

• Politicians

  Joseph Chamberlain

• Writers

  A. E. Housman

Connections

Enoch Powell married Margaret Pamela Wilson in 1952. His wife was a former colleague from the Conservative Central Office. The couple had two daughters.

Father:

Albert Enoch Powell

Mother:

Ellen Mary Powell

Spouse:

Pamela Wilson

Powell stopped writing poetry for publication shortly after his marriage. However, on the anniversary of his marriage each year, he wrote a poem for Pamela.

Acquaintance:

Edward Heath

Daughter:

Susan Powell

Daughter:

Jennifer Powell

References

• Enoch Powell: Politics and Ideas in Modern Britain Best known for his notorious Rivers of Blood speech in 1968 and his outspoken opposition to immigration, Enoch Powell was one of the most controversial figures in British political life in the second half of the twentieth century and a formative influence on what came to be known as Thatcherism.
  2019
• Enoch at 100: A Re-evaluation of the Life, Politics and Philosophy of Enoch Powell A critical reassessment of the life and politics of one of Britain's most controversial politicians.
  2012
• Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain Enoch Powell's explosive rhetoric against black immigration and anti-discrimination law transformed the terrain of British race politics and cast a long shadow over British society. Using extensive archival research, Camilla Schofield offers a radical reappraisal of Powell's political career and insists that his historical significance is inseparable from the political generation he sought to represent.
  2009