John Enoch Powell (16 June 19128 February 1998) was a British politician, scholar, soldier and writer. He was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Wolverhampton South West for the Conservative Party from 1950 to February 1974 and the MP for South Down for the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) from October 1974 to 1987. He was Minister of Health from 1960 to 1963 in the second Macmillan ministry and was Shadow Secretary of State for Defence from 1965 to 1968 in the Shadow Cabinet of Edward Heath.
Before entering politics, Powell was a classical scholar; in 1937 he was appointed Professor of Greek at the University of Sydney, aged 25. He served in the British Army during the Second World War, reaching the rank of brigadier. He wrote both poetry and books on classical and political subjects. He is remembered particularly for his views on immigration and demographic change. In 1968 Powell attracted attention nationwide for his "Rivers of Blood" speech, in which he criticised immigration to Britain, especially the rapid influx from the Commonwealth of Nations (former colonies of the British Empire) in the post-war era. He opposed the Race Relations Bill, a major anti-discrimination bill proposed by the Labour government of Harold Wilson, which ultimately became law. His speech was criticised by some of his own party members and The Times as racialist.Editorial comment, The Times, 22 April 1968. Heath, who was then the leader of the Conservative Party and the leader of the Opposition, dismissed Powell from the Shadow Cabinet the day after the speech. In the aftermath several polls suggested that between 67 and 82 per cent of the British population agreed with Powell.
Shortly before the February 1974 general election, Powell turned his back on the Conservatives and endorsed a vote for the Labour Party, 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 constituency of South Down in Northern Ireland. He represented it until he was defeated at the 1987 general election. Powell died in 1998, aged 85, and remains a divisive and controversial figure in Britain.
Early years John Enoch Powell was born on 16 June 1912 in Stechford, within the city of Birmingham, and was baptised at St Nicholas's Church in Newport, Shropshire, where his parents had married in 1909. He was the only child of Albert Enoch Powell, a primary school headmaster, and his wife Ellen Mary Powell (who 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 that his grandfather had shot, which were displayed in his parents' home. In 1918 the family moved to Kings Norton, where Powell remained until he went up to the University of Cambridge in 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. Enoch's 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 loved to read. Every Sunday he would give lectures to his parents on the books that he had read and also conducted evensong and preached 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.
Education Powell attended a dame school 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 13. The legacy of the First World War loomed large for Powell; almost all his teachers had fought in the war. He formed the view that Britain and Germany would fight again.
Powell's mother began teaching him Greek in the two weeks of Christmas break in 1925. By the time he started the next term, he had attained a level 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 and kept to himself ... he was reputed to be cleverer than any of the masters".
Precociously, Powell won all three of the school's classics prizesThucydides, Herodotus and Divinity and would win more later in his school career. In the fifth form he began to translate Herodotus's Histories. He entered the sixth form two years before his classmates and was remembered as a hard-working student.Powell's 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. He was influenced by reading James George Frazer's The Golden Bough and Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, which led him towards the works of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Nietzsche.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.
Aged 17, Powell 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's 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". Powell studied at Trinity from 1930 to 1933. He became almost a recluse and devoted his time to studying.On days without lectures or supervisions, he would read from 5:30 am to 9:30 pm. The British literary magazine Granta called him "The Hermit of Trinity".Powell 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 18 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 began referring to himself as "Enoch Powell". Powell won the Craven scholarship at the beginning of his second term in 1931. It was at Cambridge that Powell fell under the influence of the poet A. E. Housman, then Professor of Latin at the university.
At Cambridge, Powell won a number of prizes, including the Percy Pemberton Prize, the Porson Prize, the Yeats Prize and the Lees Knowles, the Members' prize for Latin prose, the Browne Medal, the First Chancellor's Classical Medal and the Cromer Greek essay prize of the British Academy.having written on "Thucydides, his moral and historical principles and their influence in later antiquities"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". He graduated with first class with distinctionShortly 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.
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.Vernon Bogdanor, 'Enoch Powell and the Sovereignty of Parliament'. gresham.ac.uk. Retrieved 20 November 2019. Powell went on to learn other languages, such as Welsh, modern Greek and Portuguese.
Academic career After graduating from Cambridge, Powell stayed on at Trinity College as a fellow, spending much of his time studying ancient manuscripts in Latin and producing academic works in Greek and Welsh. He won the Craven travelling scholarship, which he used to fund travels to Italy, where he researched Greek manuscripts. He also learned Italian. Powell was still convinced of the inevitability of war with Germany after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933: he told his father in 1934, "I want to be in the army from the first day that Britain goes to war". He suffered a spiritual crisis when he heard of the Night of the Long Knives in July 1934, which shattered his vision of German culture.Powell recalled that he sat for hours in a state of shock: "So it had all been illusion, all fantasy, all a self-created myth ... The spiritual homeland had not been a spiritual homeland after all, since nothing can be a homeland, let alone a spiritual homeland, where there is no justice, where justice does not reign".
Powell spent his time at Trinity teaching and supervising undergraduates and worked on a lexicon of Herodotus. Since 1932, Powell had been working on the Egyptian manuscripts of J. Rendel Harris and his translation from Greek into English was published in 1937.