Hugh Dalton, Date of Birth, Place of Birth, Date of Death

Hugh Dalton

Welsh politician and British MP

Date of Birth: 26-Aug-1887

Place of Birth: Neath, Wales, United Kingdom

Date of Death: 13-Feb-1962

Profession: politician, economist

Nationality: United Kingdom

Zodiac Sign: Virgo

Edward Hugh John Neale Dalton, Baron Dalton, (16 August 1887 – 13 February 1962) was a British Labour Party economist and politician who served as Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1945 to 1947.
He shaped Labour Party foreign policy in the 1930s, opposing pacifism and promoting rearmament against the German threat, and strongly opposed the appeasement policy of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain in 1938.
Dalton served in Winston Churchill's wartime coalition cabinet; after the Dunkirk evacuation he was Minister of Economic Warfare, and established the Special Operations Executive.
As Chancellor, he pushed his policy of cheap money too hard, and mishandled the sterling crisis of 1947.
His political position was already in jeopardy in 1947, when, he, seemingly inadvertently, revealed a sentence of the budget to a reporter minutes before delivering his budget speech.
Prime Minister Clement Attlee accepted his resignation; Dalton later returned to the cabinet in relatively minor positions. His biographer Ben Pimlott characterised Dalton as peevish, irascible, given to poor judgment and lacking administrative talent.
Pimlott also recognised that Dalton was a genuine radical and an inspired politician; a man, to quote his old friend and critic John Freeman, "of feeling, humanity, and unshakeable loyalty to people which matched his talent."