Ronald Kidd

Ronald Kidd (11 July 1889 – 13 May 1942) was a civil rights campaigner.

Born in London, England, the son of surgeon Leonard Joseph Kidd, grandson of doctor Joseph Kidd, and nephew of doctors Percy Kidd and Walter Aubrey Kidd, Ronald Hubert Kidd had a variety of jobs before finding his vocation as a campaigner against injustices in 1930s and 1940s Britain.

In 1934, angered by Police responses to hunger marchers, he founded the Council for Civil Liberties (later the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) and now known as Liberty), which included such figures as E. M. Forster as its President and Clement Attlee, Aneurin Bevan, Havelock Ellis, Aldous Huxley, J. B. Priestley, Bertrand Russell, and H. G. Wells among its vice-presidents.

Sources

• Mark Pottle, ‘Kidd, Ronald Hubert (1889–1942)’. Retrieved 17 November 2007, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004 [with numerous further references, including:]
• Sylvia Scaffardi, Fire Under the Carpet: Working for Civil Liberties in the 1930s (London, 1986)