(John) Enoch Powell (1912–1998), by Jane Bown, 1968
Powell, (John) Enoch (1912–1998), politician, was born on 16 June 1912 in Flaxley Lane, Stetchford, Birmingham, the only child of Albert Enoch Powell (1872–1956), schoolmaster, and his wife, Ellen Mary (1886–1953), daughter of Henry Breese, a policeman, of Liverpool, and his wife, Eliza. The Powells were of Welsh descent, though by the time of John Enoch's birth had lived in the Black Country for four generations, working first as miners and then in the iron trade. He grew up in a household where learning and self-improvement were prized. His father was an elementary school headmaster, and his mother gave up her own teaching career on her marriage. As soon as her son could grasp the letters of the alphabet, she put them up on cards around her kitchen and taught them to him. By six he was a precocious reader, and would lecture his parents on the subjects of his previous week's reading each Sunday evening. Thanks largely to his mother's coaching he won a scholarship to King Edward's School in Birmingham in 1925; and after a term there she taught him Greek (in which she herself was self-taught) so he could transfer to the classical side of the school. He also became an accomplished clarinettist, and contemplated a career in music. However, by the time he left school in 1930, on a scholarship to Trinity College, Cambridge, he had collected almost all the school prizes for classics, and had begun his own translation of Herodotus. That achievement and a love of Thucydides made him decide on a career as a scholar. Since there was already a well-known classicist named J. U. Powell—and J. E. Powell feared confusion with him—the boy known as Jack to his parents now began to style himself J. Enoch Powell, in confident anticipation of his own fame in his chosen field.
Academic and military career
Powell maintained this academic excellence at Cambridge, whence he graduated with first-class honours in the classical tripos in 1933. At university as at school he was a loner, obsessed with scholarship. From the start of his undergraduate career he was submitting articles analysing fragments of Greek texts to learned journals. In his spare time he also undertook papyrological research. He had very little social life. Under the influence of A. E. Housman he developed his skills as a textual critic, an arid branch of study but one that gave the logician in Powell great satisfaction. He became the first freshman ever to win Trinity's Craven scholarship, which he soon followed with the college's Greek prose prize. He won many such trophies at Cambridge, notably the Porson prize and the Sir William Browne medal.
Powell for a time considered a career in the diplomatic service, his linguistic skills already extending beyond the classics and into French, German, and Italian. However, he accepted his father's advice that the fellowship Trinity offered him after a year of postgraduate study, and at the remarkably early age of twenty-two, was too good to turn down. None the less, he found Cambridge suffocating. He spent much of his three and a half years as a fellow of Trinity studying ancient manuscripts in Italian libraries, mainly in the course of work on Thucydides. His translation of that author was published in 1942, and his other main work of research, his Lexicon to Herodotus, appeared in 1938. His translation of Herodotus into the English of the Authorized Version of the Bible—not an affectation, but a means of accentuating its antiquity—did not appear until 1949.
As an emotional outlet, Powell started to write poetry, lyrics that appear heavily, if not extremely, influenced by Housman. There is not just a metrical similarity, but also a thematic one, Powell (like the author of A Shropshire Lad) being obsessed with early death and echoing a repressed sexuality. Two volumes were published before the war, First Poems in 1937 and Casting off in 1939. His poetry was influenced by his belief that the First World War had been interrupted, not ended, and that battle would be rejoined soon. His other main cultural obsession was with German thought and literature, though he developed a distaste for Germany after the rise of Hitler. Attracted to atheism as a schoolboy reading The Golden Bough, he was confirmed in that mindset by a thorough reading of Nietzsche in his twenties.
Powell determined to beat Nietzsche's record of securing a professorship by the age of twenty-four. However, universities to which he applied rejected him as soon as they discovered his age. Eventually one took the bait: and in the winter of 1938, still aged twenty-five, Powell was on the flying boat to Australia, to become professor of Greek in the University of Sydney. On arrival he stunned the vice-chancellor by informing him that war would soon break out in Europe, and that when it did he would be heading home to enlist in the army. The next eighteen months were a time of torture for Powell, as he witnessed from afar the abasement of his country before Hitler, yet felt powerless to do anything to expiate the shame. On 4 September 1939 he kept his promise, and started for England. With no military experience he had trouble enlisting, eventually doing so as a private soldier in the Royal Warwickshire regiment, but only after passing himself off as an Australian. Selected for officer training within weeks, he was commissioned second lieutenant in May 1940, and began a long and unsuccessful struggle to be posted to the front line. Recognizing this officer's superior intellectual abilities—he had by now added various other languages, from Russian to medieval Welsh, to his armoury—the army had no intention of allowing Powell to do anything other than staff jobs. Though he found these frustrating, he nevertheless played an important part in the war.
In October 1941 Powell was posted to Cairo, where he was soon promoted major. For the next two years he helped mastermind the attack on Rommel's supply lines that contributed so much to his defeat and the German evacuation of north Africa. The hardest time for Powell was seeing brother officers go to their deaths at El Alamein, while he remained in comparative safety. He was promoted lieutenant-colonel in August 1942 and given command of an intelligence group, MI (Plans). In this capacity he attended the conference between Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill at Casablanca in the spring of 1943, an event that would have a profound intellectual effect upon him. He confronted the American political mind for the first time, and it made him profoundly anti-American. He believed from that moment that America's main war aim, and in the peace that followed its main foreign policy aim, was to extinguish British imperial and strategic power.
With the war effectively over in north Africa, Powell determined to be posted to India, for a chance of fighting the Japanese. Although he secured the posting, he was no more successful at seeing action. He arrived in Delhi in August 1943, having been appointed a military MBE for his work in north Africa, and soon set about helping to plan the war in the Far East. Despite having pressed his case with General Orde Wingate, he was kept at staff work to the end of the war and beyond. However, he found India deeply rewarding. He loved the country, its cultures and peoples. He learned Urdu and immersed himself in the native literature, and it was in India that he acquired the love of architecture that became a main antiquarian interest in later life. By 1945, promoted brigadier, he was one of a small commission charged with settling the shape of the Indian army after the war, the report on which he wrote single-handedly. With early independence that hard labour, too, bore less fruit than it might have done. The commander-in-chief in India, Sir Claude Auchinleck, offered Powell the commandant's post at what was intended to be the Indian equivalent of Sandhurst. Powell turned this down, and returned to England in February 1946. Even at this late stage he still had an unshakeable belief that India would remain British indefinitely. He had formed the ambition to be viceroy, and thought that the best way to accomplish this was from the House of Commons.
Into politics
Despite having voted for Attlee in the 1945 election—not for ideological reasons, but to punish those responsible for Munich—Powell was a visceral tory, and it was to the Conservative Party that he went on his arrival in London. As a brigadier and former fellow of Trinity he cut an impressive figure. He was immediately appointed to the party's parliamentary secretariat, later merged into the research department. He shared an office with Iain Macleod and Reginald Maudling, and together they set about shaping the party's policies for its renaissance in the 1950s.
Powell's viceregal ambitions crumbled in February 1947, when Attlee announced that Indian independence was imminent. Powell was shocked by the change of policy, so much so that he spent the whole of the night after it was announced walking the streets of London, trying to take it in. He came to terms with it by becoming fiercely anti-imperialist, believing that once India had gone the whole empire should follow it. This logical absolutism explained his later indifference to the Suez crisis, his contempt for the Commonwealth, and his urging that Britain should scrap any remaining pretence that she was a world power.
Although he could no longer achieve his main ambition, Powell had unintentionally stumbled upon a new, more passionate love, that of parliament itself. Being a member of parliament would now be an acceptable end in itself. That same winter he fought a hopeless by-election for the Yorkshire mining seat of Normanton, and then set out to find a seat he could win at the next general election. It was not easy. Despite his political, academic, and military qualifications, his manner was off-putting. A spare man of medium height, he had his hair cut en brosse which, with his intently staring eyes and stern demeanour when not among intimates, made him rather terrifying. He spoke in an exact way, with a slight but metallic west midland accent. He had little small talk, and at that stage no point of contact with women. When he finally secured the nomination for a seat—Wolverhampton South-West, in December 1948—the agent advised the selection committee not to be put off by his ‘short hair on end and his bulging eyes’ (Heffer, 126).
For the next year Powell nursed the constituency carefully, cutting down and finally resigning from his work at the research department. He was returned at the general election of 1950 after a campaign run like a military operation. He became an active opponent of the government, and with Macleod and other new members formed the One Nation group of MPs. In June 1950 he rebelled against his party by refusing to support the Schuman plan, adoption of which would have made Britain one of the founder members of the European Coal and Steel Community, forerunner of the European Union. This act of independence set back his career, but was indicative of Powell's anti-careerist view of politics. Through One Nation he articulated a radical, free-market Conservatism for which there was then little sympathy in the party. He and Macleod both specialized in the health and social services, but it was Macleod who, to Powell's chagrin, was invited to become minister of health in the spring of 1952, barely six months after the Conservative Party had regained power. Later that year Powell refused a job at the Home Office with responsibility for Welsh affairs, saying that he was interested only in an economic ministry. He had to wait three years for another offer, while his contemporaries clambered up the greasy pole.
Powell's emotional life had been somewhat unconventional. A religious experience in 1949 caused him to abandon his militant atheism. His poetry revealed turbulent inner forces that he otherwise kept repressed. A double volume of it was published in 1951: Dancer's End, a collection of verse written during the war, and The Wedding Gift, written in a period of ‘epic struggle’ with his emotions in the summer of 1950 (Powell, ix). The ‘struggle’ had been to persuade the first woman with whom he had fallen in love—at the age of thirty-eight—to marry him. He failed. He had earlier had two intense friendships with men, one a pupil at Cambridge and the other a brother officer in India, but there is no evidence that they had a physical side. He married, on 2 January 1952, Margaret Pamela Wilson (b. 1926), a former colleague from Conservative central office, who provided him with the settled and happy family life essential to his political career. They had two daughters.
In the Commons, Powell demonstrated a wide range of expertise in his speeches and interventions, whether on his pet social services interests, or on defence, or on the constitutional questions that were becoming of deep interest to him. He believed his speech in March 1953 on the Royal Titles Bill was the finest of his life. He argued in it that the substitution of the idea of the queen's ‘realms’ for ‘realm’ was ‘literally meaningless’ (Hansard 5C, 512.242). It was an early example of his opposition to the idea of a Commonwealth as a sticking plaster for the wound left by the amputation of empire, and helps explain why he was not one of those tories distressed by the failure of the Suez operation in 1956.
Into government
In 1954 One Nation published a pamphlet entitled Change is our Ally, mostly written by Powell and his friend and colleague Angus Maude. It argued for a fast retreat from the planned economy in order to maximize efficiency. However unclubbable and intellectually isolated Powell was, his sheer ability could not be ignored indefinitely. On 21 December 1955 Anthony Eden appointed him parliamentary secretary to Duncan Sandys at the Ministry of Housing. He soon mastered the detail of the Housing Subsidies Bill then before parliament. He took charge of measures on slum clearance and, finally, oversaw the Rent Bill. This was a measure close to Powell's radical heart, deregulating leaseholds and decontrolling many rents after years of wartime and post-war state control. Such was the assurance and technical mastery Powell displayed that, after barely a year, he was promoted on 14 January 1957 to the most important departmental post outside the cabinet, that of financial secretary to the Treasury.
There, Powell could take on the Keynesian forces whose essentially socialist doctrine still underpinned the Conservative government. With sterling depressed after the débâcle of Suez in late 1956 and the country living beyond its means, tough measures were needed to steady the economy. Together with the economic secretary, Nigel Birch, Powell impressed upon the chancellor, Peter Thorneycroft, that inflation was the government's doing. The three men agreed in the summer of 1957, largely under Powell's guiding influence, that inflation was a monetary phenomenon; and that only by strict control of the money supply could it be eliminated and sound money restored. Two basic tools were used to enforce this discipline. First, the bank rate was increased in September 1957 from 5 to 7 per cent. Second, Thorneycroft told his cabinet colleagues in the summer of 1957 that they would have to pare back government spending in 1958–9 to the levels of the previous year. Fearing political damage, they were reluctant to agree, and the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, was at best ambivalent. This studied freedom from conviction by the then prime minister, whom Powell regarded as an actor–manager rather than as a politician, would be at the root of Powell's later intense—and reciprocated—dislike of him.
Powell had long been attracted by the economic ideas of the Manchester Liberals of the nineteenth century, tying in as they did with his belief in the individual over the corporate state. It was also, for him, a matter of logic that inflation was caused by having too much money in circulation, and therefore by governments. He reinforced these views with later readings of Hayek and Adam Smith, but he came to them largely by his own reasoning. As financial secretary, he had to deal directly with the spending bids of ministers. The matter came to a head in a series of cabinet meetings at the turn of 1957–8, when Thorneycroft—armed with intellectual arguments by Powell—refused to back down from demanding that a further £50 million of spending cuts had to be found. On 6 January 1958, when Macmillan refused to back the chancellor, Thorneycroft and his two colleagues resigned. Powell's doubts about Macmillan, although he served him again, matured into contempt.
In this first period on the back benches after holding office, Powell suffered increasing frustration, though he continued to make a name for himself as both a thinker and a politician. He used his time to return to some literary work put aside earlier. Since the late 1940s he had been working on a history of the House of Lords, and he took up that task again wholeheartedly, though it was not published until 1968, and then only covered the period to 1540. He also wrote a shorter book entitled Great Parliamentary Occasions (1960), reflecting his love of the institution. More substantially, in 1959–60 he wrote an important tract of liberal economics, Saving in a Free Society (1960); and, after a relative parliamentary silence in 1958 (once he had signalled his opposition to the legislation introducing life peerages), he began once more to make weighty contributions from the back benches in 1959. The most significant of these was his speech in July 1959 on the Hola Camp massacre in Kenya, in which he attacked British policy in the colony. In it, he argued that the government could not: