Archibald Church

Archibald Church

Archibald George Church (born September 7, 1886 in Stepney , London , † August 23, 1954 in London) was a British officer and politician ( Labor Party ). He should not be confused with the American neurologist Archibald Church (1861–1952) of the same name .

Life and activity

Church attended St. Thomas Charterhouse School and was then educated at University College London . Before the First World War he worked as a school principal. He also served as President of the East London Teachers' Association.

From 1914 to 1918 Church took part in the First World War. In 1919 he was a member of the British expeditionary force, which intervened in the Russian civil war for the benefit of the counterrevolutionary "white" troops , in the area around Murmansk , where he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order for his achievements during this mission . He then left the army with the rank of major.

From December 1919 to 1931, Church served as general secretary for the Association of Intellectual Workers, representing the interests of scientists who were active in universities and other public institutions.

On the occasion of the parliamentary elections of 1923 Church succeeded for the first time to be elected to the House of Commons , in which he represented the constituency of Leyton East as a member until the early election of 1924 . As early as 1922, he had already applied for a seat in the 1922 election in the Spelthorne constituency , but was inferior to the conservative mandate holder Philip Pilditch . In the 1929 election he was able to return to Parliament, where he represented the constituency of Wandsworth Central until 1931 as the successor to Henry Jackson . In parliament, Church emerged as a proponent of a bill propagated by the Eugenics Education Society, which provided for the (initially voluntary) sterilization of mentally handicapped or abnormal people in the sense of a gradual eugenic upgrading of the genetic health of the population, with the establishment of a system of compulsory sterilization in the longer term certain groups of people had in mind. In parliament he was a member of the all-party commission to investigate living conditions in the former German colony of East Africa .

After the split in the Labor Party, Church joined the minority of MPs who backed then Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald and his national unity government , which was largely supported by conservative forces . In the general election of 1931 he stood as a National Independent candidate in the constituency of London University , but was clearly defeated by his rival candidate Ernest Graham-Little .

In later years he repeatedly applied for a seat in the House of Commons in vain: in the 1935 election he was defeated as a National Labor candidate in the Bristol constituency East Stafford Cripps , in a by-election in July 1936 in the constituency of Derby Philip Noel-Baker and in the election of 1945 in the constituency of Tottenham South finally Frederick Messer .

Since the 1920s, Church was politically and amicably connected to the German center politician and temporarily Chancellor Heinrich Brüning , so that after his escape to Great Britain in 1934, he and a. was cared for by Church. That same year, Church helped former Reich Minister Gottfried Treviranus flee Germany by bringing a fake British passport to his hiding place in Germany and then escorting him to Great Britain during his trip through the Netherlands .

From 1931 to 1939 Church sat on the board of directors of Baird Television Ltd. He was also a member of the League Council .

Church was classified as an enemy of the state by the National Socialist police forces in the late 1930s. In the spring of 1940, the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a list of people whom the Nazi surveillance apparatus considered particularly dangerous or important, which is why they would be removed from the occupation troops in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht Subsequent SS special commands were to be identified and arrested with special priority.

Fonts

• East Africa, a New Dominion. A Crucial Experiment in Tropical Development and its Significance to the British Empire , 1927.

literature

• The Labor Who's Who 1927, p. 40.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Entry on Church on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London) .