VISIT TO N.Z.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 281, 26 November 1937, Page 7

VISIT TO N.Z.

British Labour Party Head Coming. DR. HUGH DALTON'S PLANS. (Received 11 a.m.) LONDON, November 25. Dr. Hugh Dalton, M.P. (Lab., Durham, Bishop Auckland is going to Australia in December as a guest at the New South Wales sesquicentenary. Dr. Dalton is a member of the Parliamentary executive and chairman of the Labour party for 1936-37. He probably did more Labour member to induce the conference decision not to oppose rearmament.

New South Wales has also invited a Conservative who has yet to be chosen. Dr. Dalton will afterwards spend a week in New Zealahd. He told the Australian Associated Press that he was anticipating his first visit to Australia and New Zealand. "It will be a pleasure," he said, "to renew acquaintance with Mr. Savage and Mr. Nash."

Hugh Dalton, scholar, lawyer and Labour politician, was born at NeatHi, Glamorgan, in 1887, and educated at Eton, and King's College, Cambridge, where lie took t>hc Winchester Reading Prize in IJK)9. His father was Canon J. X. Dalton. In 1911 Hugh Dalton won the Hutchinson research scholarship at the London School of Economics. He had just been called to the Bar at the Middle Temple wfhen the war broke out. Joining the Army Service Corps, he served throughout the war first with that branch and later with the Royal Garrison Artillery, on the French and Italian fronts. receiving the Italian medal for military valour. In 1911 he was employed on special investigations by the Ministry of Labour, and was appointed a lecturer at tire London School of Economics.

He afterwards took the London D.Sc. degree, and became Reader in Economics at London University, and a member of tilie Statutory Commission at Cambridge and of the council of the Royal Statistical Society. Elected Labour M.P. for Peckham in 1924. lie still held the seat in February. 1929. when a vacancy occurred at Bishop Auckland, for which he had promised to stand at the next election. As he could not be a candidate at the bye-election his wife, a daughter of the late T. Hamilton Fox, stood in his place and won the seat. At the general election in May she retired and Dr. Dal ton _ was duly elected and appointed Parliamentary Under Secretary to the Foreign Office. As a practical Socialist politician Dr. Dalton is regarded as being in the front rank. He has been described as "the intellectual dynamo of the party's executive." Devoted to democratic principles, he advised that the next Labour Government should "start off with a well-planned rush."