Arthur Creech Jones

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Jones, Arthur Creech (1891–1964), politician, was born at 11 Arthur Street, Redfield, St George, Bristol, on 15 May 1891, the second of the three sons of Joseph Jones, journeyman lithographic printer, and his wife, Rosina Sweet. Until 1905 he attended Whitehall Boys' School, winning a scholarship which enabled him to study French, mathematics, and commercial subjects for an extra year. For another year he worked in a solicitor's office while preparing for the civil service junior clerks' examination. As plain Arthur Jones he followed a respectable but dull career as a minor civil servant in the War Office and the crown agents' office until 1916. Later he used his second name as well and became known to all but his closest friends as Creech Jones.

Evening classes made Creech Jones question the teaching of the Methodist church, though he remained a subscribing member until 1912. Through lectures he organized from 1910 for the Liberal Christian League's study group, he met leading radical churchmen and politicians. He fulfilled the league's membership pledge to undertake social service by helping to found the Camberwell trades and labour council in 1913 and the Dulwich branch of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and acting as their honorary secretary. Ultimately finding certain tenets of the nonconformist church unsupportable, he became a humanist and international socialist. For the ILP he organized anti-conscription meetings throughout London, joining both the South London Federal Council against Conscription and the No-Conscription Fellowship.

As an absolutist conscientious objector Creech Jones was imprisoned from September 1916 to April 1919. Imprisonment was particularly hard for him to bear, as rambling and sketching were his chief relaxations. However, he read history, politics, and economics as determinedly and widely as possible in the circumstances, and emerged with greater understanding of his own character, abilities, and vocation. By then he was acquainted with several rising men in the post-war Labour Party. On 23 July 1920 he married Violet May (d. 1975), younger daughter of Joseph Sidney Tidman, a second cousin, with whose family in Goose Green, Camberwell, he had lodged since 1907.

Debarred from returning to the civil service, on his release Creech Jones did some work on prisons for the Labour Party research department and was soon appointed secretary of the National Union of Docks, Wharves, and Shipping Staffs and editor of its journal, Quayside and Office. On the union's amalgamation with the Transport and General Workers' Union (TGWU) in 1922 he was promoted national secretary of the administrative, clerical, and supervisory section, an ideal position for him. The TGWU sent him to the Ruhr with Ben Tillett and Samuel Warren in 1923 to report on the effect of French occupation on the workers.

Although Creech Jones had long been interested in the theory of colonial rule, his first practical contact with African problems was in 1926 when he was asked to instruct Clements Kadalie, general secretary of the black South African Industrial and Commercial Workers' Union, on trade union organization. In 1928 the Workers' Educational Association published his handbook, Trade Unionism To-Day, which was much used in the colonies.

After unsuccessfully contesting the Heywood and Radcliffe parliamentary constituency in Lancashire in 1929, Creech Jones left the union to become organizing secretary of the Workers' Travel Association (WTA), on the management committee of which he had served since its inception in 1921. Always an ardent traveller, by 1939 he had visited Palestine and most countries in Europe and written about his experiences in the association's journal, the Travel Log. Through the WTA he directed the emergency rescue of hundreds of Czechoslovakian socialists and Jews by train, ship, and aeroplane from Prague after Chamberlain signed the Munich agreement.

Because of Ramsay MacDonald's assumption of leadership of the National Government in 1931, Creech Jones joined his friend Ernest Bevin, G. D. H. Cole, and Harold Laski in setting up a new political party, the Socialist League. Like Bevin's, his association with it was very brief; instead he transferred from the ILP to the Labour Party. Nevertheless, he became an active member of Cole's New Fabian Research Bureau for the promotion of radical political and institutional reforms, while remaining a member of the original Fabian Society. For a while he refused to contemplate a parliamentary career but events in Germany convinced him he should again stand for parliament and in 1935 he was elected member for the Shipley division of Yorkshire. The Parliamentary Labour Party recognized his interest in colonial affairs by co-opting him to its advisory committee on imperial questions, of which he became chairman in 1943, and nominating him to the Colonial Office advisory committee on education in the colonies. This enabled him to make an important, continuous contribution to the formation of the party's colonial policy. In 1937 he was a founder member of the Trades Union Congress colonial affairs committee, for which he had long campaigned. There were then no official Labour Party spokesmen on specific subjects, yet multifarious problems from every part of the empire were submitted to him to bring to the notice of parliament, the British public, the trade union movement, and the Labour Party. His diligence, energy, enthusiasm, and persistence established him as an acknowledged expert in colonial affairs; his warm friendliness, approachability, and ‘colour-blindness’ brought him the trust and affection of colonial peoples.

Meticulous attention to detail enabled Creech Jones, where others had failed, to pilot through parliament, as a private member's bill, the Access to Mountains Act in 1939—a cause very dear to his heart as an executive member of the Ramblers and the Youth Hostels associations. From May 1940 to June 1944 Creech Jones was parliamentary private secretary to Ernest Bevin; in the Ministry of Labour he worked for the interests of conscientious objectors, immigrant labourers, the disabled, and for the education and vocational training of the armed forces.

In 1940, with Dr Rita Hinden, Creech Jones founded the Fabian Colonial Bureau; on their fact finding and research from 1943 the Labour Party based much of its policy for post-war action. He paid his first visit to colonial territories that same year as vice-chairman under Walter Elliot of the commission on higher education for west Africa.

In August 1945 Creech Jones entered the Colonial Office, where he served as parliamentary under-secretary of state from October and later as secretary of state for the colonies until his narrow defeat in the general election of 1950. He did a great deal to reorganize the Colonial Office and to reshape the colonial service in order to meet the changed and increasing needs of the colonial peoples, founding the Colonial Development Corporation and fostering colonial research projects. He paid several visits to the colonies and represented Britain at the United Nations during the debates on the cession of the Palestine mandate in 1946 and 1947–8. In preparing British dependencies for political independence Creech Jones was deeply involved in reforming their constitutions and promoting their economic and social development. His memorandum on local government issued in 1948 confirmed the government's intention gradually to transform indirect rule to responsible government. Ceylon was the first colony with a non-European population to achieve independence. Creech Jones presided over the Montego Bay conference on West Indian federation in 1947 and over the first African conference at Lancaster House in 1948.

Creech Jones consistently maintained that adult education was a necessary preliminary to self-government and encouraged the development of mass education in the colonies through films, broadcasts, and education schemes run by trade unions and co-operatives. Adult education in Britain had always been one of his prime concerns since he himself had benefited so much from it. He was a governor of Ruskin College (1923–56) and from 1954 also of Queen Elizabeth House, the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in Oxford where groups of mature students from Britain and the dependencies could take specific courses of study relevant to their work. He was also a vice-president of the Workers' Educational Association and a vice-chairman of the British Institute of Adult Education.

While out of parliament (1950–54), Creech Jones worked for the Commonwealth by writing, lecturing, chairing conferences for the Fabian Colonial Bureau, editing Fabian Colonial Essays which defined its principles for colonial policy, acting as chairman and delegate for the British Council of Pacific Relations, and leading deputations to ministers from the Anti-Slavery Society and the Africa Bureau. Through the two bureaux he steadfastly opposed the federation of British central Africa, helped reconcile Tshekedi and Seretse Khama, and supported their petition to the government to rescind their exile.

Defeated in Romford, Essex, in the 1951 general election, Creech Jones won a by-election at Wakefield, Yorkshire, in 1954 and represented it until ill health forced him to resign in August 1964. His efforts to promote international responsibility for developing countries and international understanding in colonial affairs involved many visits to Commonwealth countries as a delegate of the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association.

Creech Jones was unimpressive in appearance; he was not a brilliant or witty speaker; but he was one whom the House of Commons greatly respected for his knowledge, integrity, and sincerity. He was sworn of the privy council in 1946. He died at the Lambeth Hospital, Kennington, London, on 23 October 1964 and was cremated at Golders Green crematorium on 28 October.

sources:

Sources Bodl. RH, Creech Jones MSS, MS Brit. Emp.s.332 · Bodl. RH, Fabian Colonial Bureau MSS, MS Brit. Emp.s.365 · PRO, Colonial Office MSS · Bodl. RH, Africa Bureau MSS, MSS Afr.s.1681, 1712–14 · BLPES, Fabian Society MSS · London, Workers' Travel Association MSS · London, Workers' Education Association MSS · London, Labour party MSS · London, Trades Union Congress MSS · Nuffield Oxf., G. D. H. Cole MSS · Fabian Society [various pubns, incl. Empire / Venture] · Hull Central Library, Winifred Holtby papers · private information (1981)