Thomas Taylor, Baron Taylor of Gryfe

Thomas Johnston Taylor, Baron Taylor of Gryfe (born April 27, 1912 in Glasgow , † July 13, 2001 in St Andrews ) was a Scottish politician.

Early years

Thomas Taylor was orphaned at the age of three when his father died; his mother had to raise him and his two siblings alone. He attended Bellahouston Academy in his hometown of Glasgow and left school at 15 to work as an office boy for the Co-operative Wholesale Society . In 1931 he received a grant from the company that took him to Germany for a year . There he became a member of the Young Socialists and also took part in street fighters with supporters of the NSDAP . After the " seizure of power ", he returned to Germany and helped eight Austrian opposition politicians to flee. On the day Austria was annexed to Germany in March 1938, he was in Vienna and saw Joseph Goebbels in person .

The outbreak of World War II plunged Taylor into a moral dilemma, on the one hand he was a staunch pacifist and on the other hand an ardent opponent of Hitler . Nevertheless, he refused to do military service; later he became a Quaker . He was involved in the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and took part in the reconstruction in Germany after the war. In 1992 he was honored with the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany .

Political career

As a young man, Taylor was a member of the Independent Labor Party (ILP) and was elected to the Glasgow City Council in 1934, at the age of 22, as the youngest councilor at the time. In 1941 he was set up by the ILP in by-elections for the lower house. He later joined the Labor Party , then the Social Democratic Party , until returning to Labor in the 1990s . Taylor was initially opposed to Scottish independence, but later changed his mind. Although he opposed the Government's Railways Bill in 1993 , according to which the railroad was privatized and split up, he always emphasized that he had no objections to privatization in general.

In 1968 Thomas Taylor was raised to a life peer with the title Baron Taylor of Gryfe of Bridge of Weir in the County of Renfrew . In the House of Lords he particularly campaigned for public access to the British forests.

further activities

Taylor was President of the Co-operative Wholesale Society in Scotland, the consumer society where he had worked as an office boy as a young man. However, his attempts at modernization based on the American model failed. He was then from 1970 to 1976 chairman of the British Forestry Commission . From 1971 to 1980 he was Chairman of the Boards of Scottish Railways and a number of other companies, including Morgan Grenfell in Scotland.

Web links

• Obituary for The Guardian
• Obituary for The Telegraph
• Thomas Johnston Taylor, Baron Taylor of Gryfe on ansard.millbanksystems.com
• Who's who. Edition 2000
• Lord Taylor of Gryfe smokes his pipe on National No Smoking Day