NOTED STATESMAN

Taranaki Central Press, Volume IV, Issue 436, 18 May 1937, Page 5

NOTED STATESMAN

STORMY CAREER Drawn Into Politics By Accident Philip Snowden, whose death was reporoted yesterday, was born at Cowling in the West Riding of Yorkshire on July 18, 1864. His father, John Snowden, a weaver, was.' a devout Wesleyan and a Left Wing Liberal His mother, too, was a weaver. She died only a few years ago, just short of 100 years old. Philip was a wiry youth with a ready tongue and a hunger for knowledge. Eschewing the mill he became at 12 years of age a pupil teacher at the local school, and afterward' an insurance clerk. Then, passing a Civil Service examination, he received employment as an excise official and was sent to many part’s of England -and Scotland on, duty. His politics were those of his father. From the Liberal faith he might never have been weaned had not his back been injured in a cycling accident which left him helpless in. bed for a year, and thereafter a cripple. While he was laid up his father died; and when at last, lie could move painfully about lie was asked to read a paper on Socialism to the Cowling Liberal Club. He steeped himself I in Socialist literature, and it was not i long before he convinced! himself that he, too, was a Socialist. ; Not until 1906, after 12 years of intense effort, was Philip Snowden elected to Parliament by the Lancashire city of Backburn. Meanwhile, he had tasted, again and again, the bitterness of defeat, and had learned that a man’s worst foes were often to be found in his own party household. Ascendancy in Commons. Yearhjt year his hold on the House of Commons grew. He liked its atmosphere, and its members liked him. They felt he was a man, not a “deadhead.” In August, 1929, he became overnight a national hero when, at The Haguel Reparations Conference, he stood out against the French demands'. He became' a hero not so much because .he had gained' substantial advantages in a wrangle about war debts and reparations, but because at long last a British Minister had put his foot down and kept it there. The financial crisis' in 1931 led ’ to the formation of a National Government with Mr 'Ramsay MacDonald j Prime Minister and Philip Snowden | still as Chancellor of the Exchequer, j It was not National in; the truly ac- | cepted meaning of the word, for, with very few exceptions, the whole of the Labour (Party went intp opposition as a protest at the radical economics that had to be undergone if Britain’s finances’ were to be placed on a i sound footing. I On Thursday, September It), 1931, ; Philip Snowden presented the National Government's emergency Budget, the most momentous Budget ever submitted to the House of Commons |in peacetime. He had to make good ■an estimated! deficit of over £79,1000,090, which within the next 12 | months would amount to the colossal figure of £179,000,000. Before the J 931 general election, he and other Labour members who had supported the National Government were expelled from the Labour Barty. Toward the winning of that election Mr. Snowden had a great deal to do by speech, broadcast, and writing, in that Government he took the office- of Lord Privy Seal. On November 17. 1931, he went to the House of Lords. “I hope I shall be believed," lie says that a peerage had no attraction for. in?." He accepted it as being the only way he could remain in the Government. The Labour pe°rs boyeo ,r ed his introduction ceremony in the I ords. He went into retirement in 1932, | and there he wrote bis autobiography.