Vyvyan Adams

Samuel Vyvyan Trerice Adams (born April 22, 1900 , † August 13, 1951 ; pseudonym: "Watchman") was a British politician of the Conservative Party .

Life and activity

Adams was at the King's College School and at King's College of Cambridge University trained. He then worked as a barrister .

In the 1931 general election, Adams was elected as a candidate in the Leeds West constituency in the House of Commons , the British Parliament, and was a member of the House of Commons for fourteen years until the elections in the summer of 1945 . He lost his seat in the House of Commons when he lost to his constituency Labor candidate Tom Stamford in the 1945 election, which ended in a general landslide victory for the Labor Party . Attempts to return to parliament in a 1947 by-election and in the 1950 lower house elections, in which he ran in the Fulham East constituency , also ended in defeat. In the parliamentary elections of 1951 , Adams was already a candidate for the Darwen constituency, which was considered safe for the Conservatives , but died before the election.

During his parliamentary term, Adams stood out as an opponent of the appeasement policies of the Stanley Baldwin and Arthur Neville Chamberlain governments and as an opponent of the death penalty . In November 1938, for example, he brought a bill to the House of Commons which provided for a trial suspension of the death penalty in peacetime for a period of five years. At the same time he conducted extensive correspondence on this subject with Winston Churchill , who considered the time unsuitable for such a development, which he did with reference to the high crime wave of this time and reference to the already low number of executions in Great Britain (From 1929 to 1938, the number of only 83 people executed in Great Britain, which is small in a European comparison, was justified). Adams' remark that even backward Russia had temporarily abolished the death penalty after the October Revolution of 1917, Churchill dismissed with the remark: “ They have of course abolished the death penalty in Russia, because they prefer to toil them to death in slavery. ”

During World War II , Adams was a member of the Duke of Cornwall's Light Infantry .

Adams died swimming at Cunwalloe Church Cove near Helston in Cornwall in 1951 .

family

In 1925, Adams married Mary Campin, with whom he had at least one daughter.

Fonts

• Right Honorable Gentlemen. 1939 (under the pseudonym Watchman).
• What of the Night? 1940 (under the pseudonym Watchman).
• Churchill: Architect of Victory. 1940 (under the pseudonym Watchman).
• A Letter to a Young Politician. 1946.
• The British Co-operative Movement. 1948.

literature

• Obituary. In: The Times , Aug 15, 1951, p. 6.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Randolph Churchill, Martin Gilbert: Winston S. Churchill. never despair . 1966, p. 401.