Robert Palmer, 1st Baron Rusholme

Robert Alexander Palmer, 1st Baron Rusholme (born November 29, 1890 in Manchester , † August 18, 1977 ) was a British political activist.

Life and activity

Palmer was a son of William Palmer. He left school when he was fourteen. At twenty-one he became director of the Manchester and Salford Co-operative Society , the largest consumer cooperative in Manchester.

During the First World War , Palmer was used with the Manchester Regiment in Egypt , Belgium and France .

In 1920 Palmer took over the post of treasurer and financial advisor to the Co-operative Union, the trading tool of the consumer cooperative movement in Great Britain. In 1929 he was appointed general secretary of that organization, a post he held for twenty-eight years until 1947. From 1930 he also worked in the International Co-operative Alliance (ICA). In 1934 he was appointed vice president of that organization. From 1940 to 1946, when the previous President of the ICA, Vainö Tanner , was unable to perform his duties due to the war situation, Palmer took over this office in an executive manner. From 1946 to 1948 he held the presidential post as regular president after being elected to him.

Due to his position in public life in Great Britain, at the end of the 1930s, Palmer was targeted by the police forces of National Socialist Germany, who classified him as an important target: in the spring of 1940, the Reich Security Main Office in Berlin put him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who were the Nazi surveillance apparatus considered particularly dangerous or important, which is why in the event of a successful invasion and occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht they should be located and arrested by the occupying forces following special SS units with special priority.

In 1945 Palmer was raised to hereditary nobility as Baron Rusholme, of Rusholme in the City of Manchester. Since then, until his death in 1977, he was a member of the British House of Commons.

From 1947 to 1959, Palmer was a member of the British Transport Commission. In 1955 he became additional chairman of the London Midland Area Board of the British Railways. In 1960 he retired.

literature

• Jack Shaffer: Historical Dictionary of the Cooperative Movement , 1999, p. 330.

Individual evidence

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