15 - A life hereafter

Summary

Ostensibly to add to the rather paltry Labour representation in the House of Lords, maybe also in a futile attempt to pre-empt an old Radical's propensity to embarrass the government, or perhaps simply to reward a long-serving and courageous politician, who also happened to have been a friend of the prime minister for over thirty years, Wedgwood was ennobled, along with three Labour colleagues, in the New Year's Honours List of December 1941 (Ralph Wedgwood received a baronetcy at the same time). He had been offered a peerage by Churchill, via Lord Halifax in the Washington embassy, while he was touring America in June 1941. Perhaps forgetting that he had once referred to the House of Lords as, ‘an eighteenth-century mummy, which stood for the vested interests against the public, which impeded progress, and had no constituents to keep it straight’, he replied that he was delighted to accept. Unfortunately his advice to the senator to ‘go soak his head’ then meant that the prime minister had to defer Wedgwood's ennoblement until the end of the year.

Wedgwood's first thoughts on being made a peer were for the future not of his baronial seat – which would in time pass to his eldest son Charles – but of his parliamentary seat, which he rather hoped would pass to his younger son, Josiah. But young Josiah had once promised the directors of the Wedgwood Pottery that he would not leave for a political career, and now, as managing director, and with a factory to rebuild, he kept his word.

At his inauguration to the Lords, Wedgwood – now the first Baron Wedgwood of Barlaston – promised that the first issue that he would raise would be Britain's bad attitude towards the Jews. It was an apposite promise, not least as of the 273 congratulatory messages he received from around the world many, probably most, came from Jewish well-wishers. The Detroit Jewish Chronicle, in an eighteen-column-inch encomium, described him, along with Jan Smuts, as ‘the outstanding friend of the Zionist cause’ among Christian statesmen. It was not to be long before Wedgwood got his chance to raise Jewish matters in his new political home.