Alexander Walkden, 1st Baron Walkden

Alexander George Walkden, 1st Baron Walkden (born May 11, 1873 in Hornsey, London , † April 25, 1951 ) was a British trade unionist and politician (Labor Party).

Life and activity

Walkden was the second of nine children of Charles Henry Scrivener Walkden, an accountant with the Great Northern Railway, and his wife Harriet Rogers. He was educated at the Merchant Taylors' School in Ashwell. In July 1889 he entered the service of the Great Northern Railway.

Walkden became a full-time trade unionist in June 1906: that year he was appointed General Secretary of the Railway Clerks' Association of Great Britain and Ireland . He held this post for almost thirty years, until 1936. During this time he built the Association into an influential force within the British labor and trade union movement. He was also instrumental in building up the International Transport Workers Association. With a term of thirty years, Walkden was by far the longest serving general secretary of the Railway Clerks 'Association or the Transport Salaried Staffs' Association , under which name this union is known today. For this reason, as well as due to his other services to the organization, the new headquarters of the Association, built in London in the 1960s, was named after him as Walkden House .

In the British general election of December 1918, Walkden ran as a candidate for the Labor Party in the constituency of Wolverhampton West for a seat in the House of Commons, the British Parliament, but was defeated by his conservative opponent. Other candidacies for a seat in Parliament in the same constituency in a by-election in 1922 and in the regular parliamentary election of 1922, and a candidacy in the Heywood and Radcliffe constituency in 1924 also ended in defeat.

In the general election of 1929, Walkden was finally elected as a Labor Party candidate for the constituency of Bristol South as a member of the House of Commons, to which he initially belonged until 1931. In the early parliamentary election of 1931, Walkden lost his seat to his conservative rival candidate Noel Ker Lindsay . Four years later, in the general election of 1935, he was able to recapture his seat and move back to Parliament as a member of Bristol South, which he now belonged to for ten years, until the general election of summer 1945, in which he did not run for re-election. Instead, he was raised to the nobility in July 1945 as Baron Walkden, of Great Bookham in the County of Surrey and thus automatically a member of the House of Lords . In this he held from 1945 to 1949 the office of deputy chief whip (Captain of the Yeomen of the Guard) of the Labor Group.

At the end of the 1930s, the National Socialist police officers classified Walkden as an important target: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin placed him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who the Nazi surveillance apparatus considered particularly dangerous or important, which is why they should be in the case A successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht should be located and arrested by the occupying troops following special SS commandos with special priority.

Walkden's title of nobility expired as he was childless with his death in 1951.

Fonts

• The Railways Act, 1921 ... Notes and Observations Mainly for the Information of the Staff, Etc , 1921.
• A Practical Scheme for the Nationalization and Co-ordination of Public Transport. Memorandum Submitted by AG Walkden ... to the Royal Commission on Transport Together with Extracts of His Examination by the Commission , 1929.

literature

• Andrew Thorpe, 'Walkden, Alexander George, Baron Walkden (1873-1951)', 2004.