Edward Grigg, 1st Baron Altrincham

Edward William Macleay Grigg, 1st Baron Altrincham (born September 8, 1879 in Madras , † December 1, 1955 in Tormarton , Gloucestershire ) was a British colonial official and politician (Liberal Party, Conservative Party). He served as Governor of Kenya from 1925 to 1930 and - with interruptions - from 1924 to 1945 as a member of the British House of Commons.

Life and activity

Grigg was a son of Henry Bridewell Grigg, an employee of the British civil administration in India, and his wife Elizabeth Louisa, nee Thomson, a daughter of Edward Deas Thomson.

After finishing school, Grigg studied at New College, Oxford University . He then worked as a journalist: in 1903 he became an employee of the Times , where he was employed as secretary to the publisher George Earle Buckle. In 1905 he moved to the magazine The Outlook , where he took over the position of assistant editors . In 1906 Grigg returned to the Times , where he took over the department for reporting on the British colonies (colonial Department). In 1913 he quit this job to become co-editor of The Round Table Journal .

After the outbreak of World War I , Grigg volunteered for the Grenadier Guards, with whom he was deployed in France. In 1916 he was transferred to the staff service. By the end of the war, he had reached the rank of lieutenant colonel.

From 1919 to 1920 Grigg served as the military secretary of the Prince of Wales , the British Crown Prince ( Edward VIII ), whom he accompanied on extensive trips to the British Dominions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand. He also wrote most of the speeches the heir to the throne made during this period. On his return to Great Britain in 1920, Grigg then took over the post of Private Secretary to then Prime Minister David Lloyd George .

In 1919 he was accepted as Companion in the Order of St Michael and St George and as Commander in the Royal Victorian Order . On October 11, 1920 he was knighted as Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order.

On the occasion of the general election in 1922, Grigg was elected to the British House of Commons as a candidate for the Liberal Party in the constituency of Oldham. In parallel, he acted from 1923 to 1925 as secretary of the Rhodes Trust .

On February 10, 1925, Grigg was appointed British Governor of Kenya to succeed Edward Denham . He gave up his seat in the House of Commons when he took over this position. He held his governor post, in which he was subordinate to the Colonial Minister Leopold Amery , until September 27, 1930. His successor was Henry Monck-Mason Moore. His main task as governor was to carry out the organizational and administrative merger of Kenya with the neighboring colonies of Uganda and Tanganyika . Further focal points of the work were the improvement of agriculture, education and the infrastructure of the areas under his control.

In 1930 Grigg returned to Great Britain. He turned down the position of British Governor of India offered to him for health reasons. Instead, he returned to politics, now for the Conservative Party. On the occasion of the general election of 1931 he ran in the constituency of Leeds Central for this party, withdrew his candidacy in favor of the Labor candidate Richard Denman in favor of the then bipartisan national concentration government . In 1933 he was able to return to parliament on the occasion of a by-election in the Altrincham district, which he now belonged to until 1945. In addition to his parliamentary activities, Grigg published a number of books since the 1920s. In two of them he spoke out in favor of intensifying British military armaments to protect against the dangers emanating from National Socialist Germany, which at the time was arming its military to a threatening degree.

Grigg's opposition to the Nazi state did not go unnoticed by the police authorities: In the spring of 1940 the Reich Main Security Office put him on the special wanted list GB, a list of people who, in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British island by the Wehrmacht, would be followed by SS special commands should be located and arrested with special priority.

During the Second World War, Grigg took on various posts in the all-party government under Winston Churchill : In April 1940 he became Finance Secretary and then Parliamentary Undersecretary of the War Department (until March 1942). He turned down the position of First Commissioner of Works offered to him by Churchill. In November 1944 he was appointed Prime Minister of the British Government in the Middle East. In the same year he was appointed Privy Counselor, a member of the Privy Council.

On the occasion of the general election in the summer of 1945, Grigg lost his seat in Parliament in the House of Commons . He was instead raised to hereditary nobility on August 1, 1945 as Baron Altrincham , of Tormarton in the County of Gloucester, and thereby received a seat in the House of Lords .

From 1948 to 1954, Grigg was the editor of the National Review magazine .

Marriage and offspring

Grigg was married to Joan Alice Katherine Dickson-Poynder, the only daughter of John Dickson-Poynder, 1st Baron Islington . Both had three children:

• John Grigg, 2nd Baron Altrincham (1924-2001);
• Hon. Annabel Desirée Grigg (* 1931);
• Anthony Grigg, 3rd Baron Altrincham (* 1934).

Fonts

• The Greatest Experiment in World History , 1924.
• Unity , 1935.
• The Faith of an Englishman , 1936.
• Britain Looks at Germany , 1938.
• The British Commonwealth: Its Place in the Service of the World , 1944.
• Kenya's Opportunity: Memories, Hopes and Ideas , 1955.

literature

• Obituary in: The National and English Review , Vol. 146, 1956, pp. 5-12.

Web links

• Newspaper article about Edward Grigg, 1st Baron Altrincham in the 20th Century press kit of the ZBW - Leibniz Information Center for Economics .
• Edward William MacLeay Grigg, 1st Baron Altrincham on thepeerage.com

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Knights and Dames at Leigh Rayment's Peerage
2. ^ Entry on Grigg on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London).

predecessor	title	successor
New title created	Baron Altrincham 1945–1955	John Grigg