Enoch Powell

The Right Honourable Enoch Powell MBE (16 June 1912 – 8 February 1998) was a British politician.

He served as a Conservative Member of Parliament (1950–1974) and was Minister of Health (1960–1963) then Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) MP (1974–1987). Before entering politics, Powell was a classical scholar. During the Second World War, he served in both staff and intelligence positions, reaching the rank of brigadier. He also wrote poetry, and many books on classical and political subjects.

Powell attracted widespread attention for his "Rivers of Blood" speech, delivered on 20 April 1968 to the General Meeting of the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre. In it, Powell criticised the rates of immigration into the UK, especially from the New Commonwealth, and opposed the anti-discrimination legislation Race Relations Bill. The speech drew sharp criticism from some of Powell's own party members and The Times, with Conservative Party leader Edward Heath dismissing Powell a day after the speech from his position as Shadow Defence Secretary.

In the aftermath of the speech, several polls suggested that 67 to 82 per cent of the UK population agreed with Powell's opinions. His supporters claimed that the large public following that Powell attracted helped the Conservatives to win the 1970 general election, and perhaps cost them the February 1974 general election, when Powell turned his back on the Conservatives by endorsing a vote for Labour, which returned as a minority government. Powell was returned to the House of Commons in October 1974 as the Ulster Unionist Party MP for the Northern Ireland constituency of South Down. He represented the constituency until he was defeated at the 1987 general election.

Early years

John Enoch Powell was born in Stechford, Warwickshire, within the city of Birmingham, on 16 June 1912, and was baptised at Newport, Shropshire, in St Nicholas' church where his parents had married in 1909. He was the only child of Albert Enoch Powell (1872–1956), a primary school headmaster, and his wife, Ellen Mary (1886–1953). Ellen was the daughter of Henry Breese, a Liverpool policeman, and his wife Eliza, who had been a teacher. His mother did not like his name, and as a child he was known as "Jack". At the age of three, Powell was nicknamed "the Professor" because he used to stand on a chair and describe the stuffed birds his grandfather had shot, which were displayed in his parents' home. In 1918, the family moved to Kings Norton, Birmingham, where Powell remained until 1930.

The Powells were of Welsh descent and from Radnorshire (a Welsh border county), having moved to the developing Black Country during the early 19th century. His great-grandfather was a coal miner, and his grandfather had been in the iron trade.

Powell read avidly from a young age; as early as three he could "read reasonably well". Though not wealthy, the Powells were financially comfortable, and their home included a library. By the age of six Powell was addicted to reading, predominantly history books. Powell's Toryism and regard for institutions was formed at an early age: around this time his parents took him to Caernarfon Castle and he removed his cap when he entered one of the rooms. His father asked him why, to which Powell replied that it was the room where the first Prince of Wales had been born. Every Sunday, Powell would give lectures to his parents on the books he had read and he would also conduct evensong and preach a sermon. Once he was old enough to go out on his own, Powell would walk around rural Worcestershire with the aid of Ordnance Survey maps, which instilled in him a love for landscape and cartography.

Powell attended a dame school run by a friend of his mother's until he was eleven. He was then a pupil for three years at King's Norton Grammar School for Boys before he won a scholarship to King Edward's School in Birmingham in 1925, aged thirteen. The legacy of the First World War loomed large for Powell: almost all his teachers had fought in the war, and some of the pupils who had scratched their names on the desks had subsequently died in the conflict. Powell also read books on the war, which helped form his opinion that Britain and Germany would fight again.

The head of classics at the school saw that Powell had an interest in the subject and agreed to transfer him to the classics side of the school. Powell's mother taught him Greek in just over two weeks during the Christmas break in 1925 and by the time he started the next term he had attained fluency in Greek that most pupils would reach after two years. Within two terms Powell was top of the classics form. His classmate Christopher Evans recalled that Powell was "austere" and "really unlike any schoolboy one had known ... He was quite a phenomenon". Another contemporary, Denis Hills, later said that Powell "carried an armful of books (Greek texts?) and kept to himself ... he was reputed to be cleverer than any of the masters".

Powell won all three of the school's classics prizes (in Thucydides, Herodotus and Divinity) in the fifth form, two or three years younger than anyone else had won them. He also began to translate Herodotus' Histories and completed the translation of the first part when he was fourteen. He entered the sixth form two years before his classmates and was remembered as a hard-working student; his contemporary Roy Lewis recalled that "we thought that the masters were afraid of him". Powell also won a medal in gymnastics and gained a proficiency in the clarinet. He contemplated studying at the Royal Academy of Music but his parents persuaded him to try for a scholarship at Cambridge. Duggie Smith, Powell's form-master in the lower classical sixth and his principal classics master in the upper sixth, recalled in 1952: "Of all my pupils, he always insisted on the highest standards of accuracy and knowledge in those who taught him ... He was a pupil from whom I learnt more than most".

It was during his time in the sixth form that Powell learned German and began reading German books, which would influence his move towards atheism. Aged thirteen he also read James George Frazer's The Golden Bough and Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, which led him towards Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Nietzsche. During the last four years at King Edward's School he was top of his form and won a number of prizes in Greek and Divinity. In 1929 he was awarded the Higher School Certificate with a distinction in Latin, Greek and ancient history, and won the school's Lee Divinity Prize for an essay on the New Testament after having memorised St Paul's Epistle to the Galatians in Greek. Powell also won the Badger Prize for English Literature twice and the Lightfoot Thucydides Prize.

In December 1929, aged seventeen, he sat the classics scholarship paper at Trinity College, Cambridge, and won the top award. Sir Ronald Melville, who sat the exams at the same time, recalled that "the exams mostly lasted three hours. Powell left the room halfway through each of them". Powell later told Melville that in one-and-a-half hours on the Greek paper, he translated the text into Thucydides' style of Greek and then in the style of Herodotus. For another paper, Powell also had to translate a passage from Bede, which he did into Platonic Greek. In the remaining time, Powell later remembered, "I tore it up and translated it again into Herodotean Greek – Ionic Greek – (which I had never written before) and then, still having time to spare, I proceeded to annotate it".

He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1930 to 1933. Powell became almost a recluse and devoted his time to studying: on days without lectures or supervisions, he would read from 5.30 in the morning until 9.30 at night. Granta called him "The Hermit of Trinity". He later said "I thought the only thing to do was to work. I thought that was what I was going to Cambridge for, because I never knew of anything else". At the age of eighteen his first paper to a classical journal was published (in German) in the Philologische Wochenschrift, on a line of Herodotus. While studying at Cambridge, Powell became aware that there was another classicist who signed his name as "John U. Powell". Powell decided to use his middle name and from that moment referred to himself as "Enoch Powell". Powell won the Craven scholarship at the beginning of his second term in January 1931, the second time since the scholarship was established in 1647 that a freshman had won it.

It was at Cambridge that Powell fell under the influence of the poet A. E. Housman, then Professor of Latin at the university. He attended Housman's lectures during his second year in 1931 and later recalled that he was "gripped by the spectacle of that rigorous intellect dissecting remorselessly the textual deformation of poetry which his sensitivity would not permit him to read without betraying his emotions"; it was Housman's "ruthless and fearless logic with which he dissected the text" in an atmosphere of "suppressed emotion" that impressed him. Powell also admired Housman's lectures on Lucretius, Horace, Virgil and Catullus. Powell sent him a correction of Virgil's Aeneid and received the reply: "Dear Mr Powell. You analyse the difficulties of the passage correctly, and your emendation removes them. Yours sincerely, A. E. Housman". In later life Powell claimed that "no praise in the next forty years was ever to be so intoxicating".

Powell won a number of prizes, including the Percy Pemberton Prize, the Porson Prize, the Yeats Prize and the Lees Knowles. He won a distinction in Greek and Latin for Part I of his Classical Tripos and was awarded the Members' prize for Latin prose and the First Chancellor's Classical Medal. He also won the Cromer Greek essay prize of the British Academy in March 1933, having written on "Thucydides, his moral and historical principles and their influence in later antiquities". Also in 1933, Powell won the Browne Medal and delivered his winning essay in the Senate House, Cambridge. The Chancellor of Cambridge University, the Conservative Party leader Stanley Baldwin, told the Master of Trinity J. J. Thomson: "Powell reads as if he understands". Shortly before his finals in May 1933, Powell became ill with tonsillitis and then suffered pyelitis. His neighbour in Trinity Great Court, Frederick Simpson, arranged that the Tripos examination papers be sent to the nursing home where he was convalescing. Despite having a temperature of 104 degrees (40 °C) when he sat the last of the seven papers, Powell gained a first class with distinction. The Cambridge classical scholar Martin Charlesworth said after Powell's graduation: "That man Powell is extraordinary. He is the best Greek scholar since Porson".

As well as his education at Cambridge, Powell took a course in Urdu at the School of Oriental Studies (now SOAS, University of London), because he felt that his long-cherished ambition of becoming Viceroy of India would be unattainable without knowledge of an Indian language. Later, during his political career he would speak to his Indian-born constituents in Urdu. Powell went on to learn other languages, including Welsh (in which he edited jointly with Stephen J. Williams Cyfreithiau Hywel Dda yn ôl Llyfr Blegywryd, a text on Cyfraith Hywel, the medieval Welsh law), modern Greek, and Portuguese.

Election to Parliament

After unsuccessfully contesting the Labour Party's safe seat of Normanton at a by-election in 1947 (when the Labour majority was 62 per cent), he was elected as a Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) for Wolverhampton South West at the 1950 general election.

In the 1980s, Powell began espousing the policy of unilateral nuclear disarmament. In a debate on the nuclear deterrent on 3 March 1981, Powell claimed that the debate was now more political than military; that the UK did not possess an independent deterrent and that through NATO the UK was tied to the nuclear deterrence theory of the United States. In the debate on the address shortly after the general election of 1983, Powell picked up on Thatcher's willingness, when asked, to use nuclear weapons as a "last resort". Powell presented a scenario of what he thought the last resort would be, namely that the Soviet Union would be ready to invade the UK and had used a nuclear weapon on somewhere such as Rockall to demonstrate their willingness to use it:

What would the United Kingdom do? Would it discharge Polaris, Trident or whatever against the main centres of population of the Continent of Europe or in European Russia? If so, what would be the consequence? The consequence would not be that we should survive, that we should repel our antagonist—nor would it be that we should escape defeat. The consequence would be that we would make certain, as far as is humanly possible, the virtual destruction and elimination of the hope of the future in these islands. ... I would much sooner that the power to use it was not in the hands of any individual in this country at all.

Powell went on to say that if the Soviet invasion had already begun and the UK resorted to a retaliatory strike the results would be the same: "We should be condemning, not merely to death, but as near as may be the non-existence of our population". To Powell, an invasion would take place with or without the UK's nuclear weapons and therefore there was no point in retaining them. He said that after years of consideration, he had come to the conclusion that there were no "rational grounds on which the deformation of our defence preparations in the United Kingdom by our determination to maintain a current independent nuclear deterrent can be justified".

On 28 March 1981, Powell gave a speech to Ashton-under-Lyne Young Conservatives where he criticised the "conspiracy of silence" between the government and the opposition over the prospective growth through births of the immigration population, and added, "'We have seen nothing yet' is a phrase that we could with advantage repeat to ourselves whenever we try to form a picture of that future". He also criticised those who believed it was "too late to do anything" and that "there lies the certainty of violence on a scale which can only adequately be described as civil war". He also said that the solution was "a reduction in prospective numbers as would represent re-emigration hardly less massive than the immigration which occurred in the first place". The Shadow Home Secretary, Labour MP Roy Hattersley, criticised Powell for using "Munich beer-hall language". On 11 April, there was a riot in Brixton and when on 13 April an interviewer quoted to Thatcher Powell's remark that "We have seen nothing yet", she replied: "I heard him say that and I thought it was a very very alarming remark. And I hope with all my heart that it isn't true".

Death

A few hours following Powell's final admission to King Edward VII's Hospital in London, he asked where his lunch was. On being told that he was being fed intravenously, he remarked, "I don't call that much of a lunch." These were his last recorded words. On 8 February 1998, he died there at the age of 85. His study of the Gospel of John remained unfinished.

Dressed in a brigadier's uniform, Powell's body was buried in his regiment's plot in Warwick Cemetery, Warwickshire, ten days after a family funeral service at Westminster Abbey and public services at St. Margaret's, Westminster, and the Collegiate Church of St Mary, Warwick.

Over 1,000 people attended Powell's funeral, and during the ceremony he was hailed as a man of prophecy, political sacrifice and as a great parliamentarian. During the service, Lord Biffen said that Powell's nationalism "certainly did not bear the stamp of racial superiority or xenophobia". After Powell's death, many Conservative politicians paid tribute to him, including former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who said, "There will never be anybody else so compelling as Enoch Powell. He was magnetic. Listening to his speeches was an unforgettable privilege. He was one of those rare people who made a difference and whose moral compass led us in the right direction." Other mourners at the service included socialist Labour MP Tony Benn who, despite criticising the Rivers of Blood speech, maintained a close relationship with Powell, and when asked why he had attended the funeral, simply responded with "he was my friend."

Other politicians, including his rivals, also paid tribute to him, including former Labour Party leader Tony Blair who said, "However controversial his views, he was one of the great figures of 20th-century British politics, gifted with a brilliant mind. However much we disagreed with many of his views, there was no doubting the strength of his convictions or their sincerity, or his tenacity in pursuing them, regardless of his own political self-interest." He was survived by his widow and two daughters.

Personal life

Powell spoke German, French, Italian, Modern Greek, and Hindi/Urdu, and had a reading knowledge of Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, and Welsh. Among classical languages, he knew Ancient Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic.

Despite his earlier atheism, Powell became a devout member of the Church of England, thinking in 1949 "that he heard the bells of St Peter's Wolverhampton calling him" while walking to his flat in his (then future) constituency. Subsequently, he became a church warden of St. Margaret's, Westminster.

On 2 January 1952, the 39-year-old Powell married 26-year-old Margaret Pamela Wilson, a former colleague from the Conservative Central Office. Their first daughter, Susan, was born in January 1954, and their second daughter, Jennifer, was born in October 1956.

Powell firmly believed that William Shakespeare of Stratford on Avon was not the writer of the plays and poems of Shakespeare. He appeared on an episode of Frontline, "The Shakespeare Mystery," 19 April 1989, in which he said, "My astonishment was to discover that these were the works of someone who'd 'been in the kitchen.' They are written by someone who has lived the life, who has been part of a life of politics and power, who knows what people feel when they are near to the centre of power. Near to the heat of the kitchen." He called the traditional biography a "Stratfordian fantasy." On the subject of Shakespeare's will, he says, "That is a will in which this great spirit, this man of immense learning and vision, not only bequeathed no books..." but he also neglected to bequeath "the most valuable thing he had to bequeath, the remaining manuscripts of his plays which were eventually to be published seven years after his death." Powell calls the Droeshout portrait of Shakespeare in the First Folio, and the monument to Shakespeare in Stratford "a mask," "a fix," "a spoof" to conceal the identity of the true author.

Powell's rhetorical gifts were also employed, with success, beyond politics. He was a poet of some accomplishment, with four published collections to his name: First Poems; Casting Off; Dancer's End; and The Wedding Gift. His Collected Poems appeared in 1990. He translated Herodotus' Histories and published many other works of classical scholarship. He published a biography of Joseph Chamberlain, which treated the split with William Gladstone over Irish Home Rule in 1886 as the pivotal point of his career, rather than the adoption of tariff reform, and contained the line: "All political lives, unless they are cut off in midstream at a happy juncture, end in failure, because that is the nature of politics and of all human affairs". His political publications were often as critical of his own party as they were of Labour, often making fun of what he saw as logical fallacies in reasoning or action. His book Freedom & Reality contained many quotes from Labour party manifestos or by Harold Wilson that he regarded as nonsensical.

When asked by BBC interviewer Michael Parkinson what he regarded as his achievements, he replied "it is doubtful whether any man can say how the world was altered because he was in it." In August 2002, Powell appeared 55th in the list of 100 Greatest Britons of all time (voted for by the public in a BBC nationwide poll).

In March 2015, The Independent reported that Powell was one of the MPs whose activities had been investigated as part of Operation Fernbridge. His name had been passed to police by Paul Butler, the Bishop of Durham, after allegations of Powell's involvement in historic child abuse had been made by one individual in the 1980s to the then Bishop of Monmouth, Dominic Walker. Simon Heffer, who has published a biography of Powell, has described the allegation as a "monstrous lie" and criticised the Church of England's actions in "putting this smear into the public domain", while the church stated that it had simply responded to an inquiry from the press and confirmed that allegations about Powell, which related to an alleged satanic cult rather than any criminal activity, had been passed to the police.[272] David Aaronovitch of The Times wrote in April 2015 that the 1980s claims about Powell originated from fabricated claims invented by a conman, Derry Mainwaring Knight, whose false assertions had become known to the clergy, but had been unwittingly conveyed to the police in good faith.

According to Michael Bloch, in his old age, Powell confessed to Canon Eric James, a former Trinity College chaplain, that he had been in love with a fellow male undergraduate at Cambridge, whom Bloch identifies as "probably Edward Curtis of Clare College", and that this infatuation had inspired love verses published in his First Poems. This confession was revealed by Canon James in a letter to The Times on 10 February 1998.

Following his appointment as Professor of Greek at the University of Sydney in 1937, he wrote to his parents (on 22 May and 16 June 1938) that he was repelled by his female students, while feeling "an instant and instinctive affection" for young Australian males. This, he added, might be "deplored, but it cannot be altered", and it therefore had to be "endured – and (alas!) camouflaged." The letters are now in the Churchill College Archives (POLL 1/1/1).

Following a long illness, Pamela Powell died in November 2017 at the age of 91, 19 years after her husband.