Richard Acland


Sir Richard Thomas Dyke Acland, 15th Baronet was one of the founding members of the British Common Wealth Party in 1942, having previously been a Liberal Member of Parliament. He joined the Labour Party in 1945 and was later a Labour MP. He was one of the founders of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.

Career

Acland was the eldest son of Sir Francis Dyke Acland, 14th Baronet, a Liberal Member of Parliament and Eleanor Margaret Cropper. Born on 26 November 1906 at Broadclyst, Devon, he was educated at Rugby School and Balliol College, Oxford, before qualifying as a barrister. He briefly served in peacetime as a lieutenant in the 96th Field Brigade, RA. He married Anne Stella Alford, an architect, and together they had four sons, including John Dyke Acland and Robert D. Acland. He succeeded his father as baronet in 1939.
Acland stood unsuccessfully for Parliament as potential MP for Torquay at the 1929 general election. He was elected Liberal MP for Barnstaple at the 1935 election, having first contested the seat in the 1931 general election. He was a junior whip for the Liberals. He helped launch the Popular Front in December 1936. His politics changed course subsequently, as seen in the various political pamphlets he wrote.

Common Wealth Party

In 1942, Acland broke from the Liberals to found the socialist Common Wealth Party with J. B. Priestley and Tom Wintringham, opposing the coalition between the major parties. During the Second World War, the new party showed signs of a breakthrough, especially in London and Merseyside, winning three by-elections. However, the 1945 general election was a severe disappointment. Only one Member of Parliament, Ernest Millington, was elected, and other figures left, some joining the Labour Party. Acland himself lost his seat in Putney, where he came third.

Labour MP

He then joined Labour and was selected to fight the Gravesend seat following the expulsion of the Labour member of parliament Garry Allighan from the party for making allegations of corruption. He won the Gravesend by-election of November 1947 with a majority of 1,675.
Back in Parliament, Acland served as Second Church Estates Commissioner 1950–51. In 1955, he resigned from Labour in protest against the party's support for the Conservative government's nuclear defence policy, and lost Gravesend standing as an independent the same year, allowing the Conservatives to take the seat, denying it to the new Labour candidate, Victor Mishcon.

Later career

As an advocate of public land ownership, Acland felt it impossible to reconcile his possession of the Acland estates with his politics; in 1944 he sold his West Country estates at Killerton in Devon and Holnicote in Somerset to the National Trust for £134,000, partly out of principle and also to ensure their preservation intact. This decision to relinquish the Acland property led to disagreements with his wife and the possibility of separation, but they eventually reconciled; Anne Acland, before depositing her letters, destroyed all those relating to this period of disagreement, between mid-summer 1942 and January 1943.
Corresponding with the National Trust, Acland said: "I am not giving you all my property. I am keeping some of it to live on, some of it to buy a house, and some of it I am giving to Common Wealth. With what is left I pay off as much of the debts as possible , and then hand over the rest to you, leaving you, I regret to say, to look after what is left of the debts."
The terms of this deal were kept secret; "in widespread publicity from which the National Trust and the Aclands emerged glowing with virtue, the entire transaction was portrayed as a gift" and "the Aclands held on to... eighteenth-century family plates and dishes, portraits and landscapes, a group of family miniatures, an early nineteenth-century piano... they were able to buy a nice house in Hampstead at 66 Frognal Street; there was to be an education fund for the boys; and Common Wealth received about £65,000, allowing it to win two more by-elections." Additionally, Acland retained some feudal rights, including the gift of the living at the parish church, and entitlement to shooting and fishing.
Acland's sons were in later years displeased with the sale of the estates; the heir, John, left a 1994 document at Devon Record Office outlining "how he had made many requests that his mother 'should explain to me why the Killerton and Holnicote estates had been given to the National Trust in the 1940s'... John found on reading that she had destroyed all the documents from the critical period at the end of 1942... His note continued: 'Anne only talked to me once, in 1989, about the gift of the estates... her principal contention was that she and Richard had been in complete agreement at every stage.' Perhaps all this secrecy, the denial of the story, was an attempt by Anne and Richard to protect themselves from the rage of their children."
Soon after leaving parliament he took a job as a maths master at Wandsworth Grammar School in Sutherland Grove, new Southfields, London, with effect from September 1955. He was a successful and charismatic teacher, popular with his pupils. In 1957 he helped to form the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, and was a senior lecturer in education at St. Luke's College of Education, Exeter, between 1959 and his retirement in 1974. Acland died in Exeter in 1990, at the age of 83.

Writings

Acland's book, Unser Kampf, published by Penguin in 1940, containing ideas inspired by a Christian-based moral view of society. It proved immensely popular, going through 5 impressions in six months. His later works, The Forward March and How it can be done elaborated on these themes. He advocated common ownership, citing the work of Conrad Noel as well as the Bible to support his views.

Key Publications