MR STANLEY DEAD

Otago Daily Times, Issue 27570, 12 December 1950, Page 7

MR STANLEY DEAD

Leading Conservative Member DISTINGUISHED CAREER NZPA—Copyright Rec. 0.5 a.m. LONDON, Dec. 11. The death has occurred of Mr Oliver Stanley, Conservative member of the House of Commons and a former Cabinet Minister, He was 54 years of age. Recognised as No. 3 in the Conservative Party hierarchy, Mr Stanley first entered Parliament in 1924. His experience of office was wider than most of his colleagues. In parliamentary ability he had few superiors on the Opposition side, and he had the particularly valuable quality of being able to make the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Stafford Cripps, think twice. Mr Stanley belonged to one of that handful of aristocratic families whose records of public service are continually being quoted, often to the embarrassment of their members, as a justification of hereditary privilege. His father, the seventeenth Earl of Derby, was Secretary,of State for War in the Lloyd Ge'orge Coalition, and gave his name to a famous scheme of army recruitment. A great-grand-father was Prime Minister in a remarkable Government which included his own son, Lord Stanley, as Foreign Secretary, and Disraeli as Chancellor of the Exchequer. Born in 1896, he was educated at Eton, and would probably have distinguished himself at Oxford had his career not been interrupted by the First World War. He served as a lieutenant-colonel in the Lancashire Hussars, and won the M.C. and the Croix de Guerre. In 1919 he was called to the Bar, practised for a while on the Northern Circuit, and then became a stockbroker. On entering the House, in 1924, Mr Stanley embarked almost immediately on the dull round of junior posts which forms the apprenticeship of a Cabinet Minister. Then, in 1934, he was suddenly promoted straight from being Parliamentary Under-secretary, Ministry of Transport, to the most vulnerable of all Cabinet offices at the time, the Ministry of Labour. The intractable problem of 2,000,000 unemployed was handed to a man under 40, without previous experience of Cabinet office. The result was the gravest setback in Mr Stanley’s career. The regulations issued under his Unemployment Assistance Act provoked furious opposition and the Government was forced to withdraw them. Throughout the crisis he regularly met-deputations of the unemployed and more than once

quelled stormy meetings by the candour with which he admitted his mistakes and the readiness he showed to redress them; but the impression of failure was too great to be eradicated by charm, and before long he moved to the quieter post of President of the Board of Education. His next move was to the Board of Trade, where he took a large and not generally acknowledged part in negotiating the Anglo-American trade agreement of 1938. There he stayed until early in 1940. when Mr Chamberlain made him War Minister in succession to Hore-Belisha. The fact that he was the Minister responsible for the military side of the unhappy Norwegian campaign ought not to be weighed against him when it is remembered that Mr Churchill was the Minister responsible for the naval side. When the Chamberlain Government fell he was left out of Mr Churchill’s Coalition and spent the next two years in the Army. Recalled in 1942 to the Colonial Office, he seemed to have found exactly the right job. Mr Stanley, for the first five months of 1940, was Secretary of State for War. Mr Stanley’s early successes were due largely to the spur and aid provided by his talented wife, formerly Lady Maureen Stewart, and since her death he withdrew more and more into his shell, emerging occasionally to deliver a broadside against the Government and then retiring to his country house near Reading. He would have hated nothing more than the Party leadership, but he was never a man to shirk responsibility.