Philip John Noel-Baker (November 1, 1889 - October 8, 1982) was a politician, diplomat, academic and outstanding amateur athlete who received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1959.
Noel-Baker was born to a Canadian-born Quaker father, Joseph Allen Baker, who moved to England to set up a manufacturing business and himself served on the London County Council and in the House of Commons. Initially educated in the US at the Quaker-associated Haverford College, he attended King's College, Cambridge from 1910 to 1912, where as well as being an excellent student he became President of the Cambridge Union Society and the Cambridge University Athletic Club.
He was selected and ran for Great Britain at the Stockholm Olympic Games, and was team manager as well as a competitor for the British track team for the 1920 and 1924 Olympics. In 1920 at Antwerp he won a silver medal in the 1500 metres. The exploits of the British team at the 1924 Games were later made famous in the 1982 film Chariots of Fire, though Noel-Baker's part in such was not portrayed in that film.
During the World War I, Noel-Baker organised and commanded the Friends' Ambulance Unit attached to the fighting front in France (1914-1915), and was then adjutant of the First British Ambulance Unit for Italy (1915-1918), for which he received military medals from France and Italy as well as his own country.
After the war, Noel-Baker was heavily involved in the formation of the League of Nations, serving as assistant to Lord Robert Cecil, then assistant to Sir Eric Drummond , the league's first secretary-general. He also spent time as an academic early in his career, as a professor of international law at the University of London from 1924 to 1929 and as a lecturer at Yale University from 1933 to 1934.
His political career with the Labour Party began in 1924 when he ran unsuccessfully for Parliament. He was elected as the member for Coventry in 1929, but lost his seat in 1931. In 1936 Noel-Baker won a byelection in Derby after J.H. Thomas resigned; when that seat was divided in 1950, he transferred to Derby South and continued until 1970.
As well as a parliamentary secretary role during World War II under Winston Churchill, he served in a succession of junior ministries in the Attlee Labour Government. He was also prominent within Labour, serving as Chairman of the Labour Party in 1946. In the mid-1940's, Noel-Baker served on the British delegation to what became the United Nations, helping to draft its charter and other rules for operation as a British delegate.
Noel-Baker married Irene Noel, a field hospital nurse, in 1915, adopting the hyphenated name in 1943. Their only son, Francis Noel-Baker, also became a parliamentarian and served together with his father in the Commons. Philip Noel-Baker's mistress from 1936 to 1956 was Lady Megan Lloyd George, daughter of the former Liberal Party leader David Lloyd George and a Liberal MP.
References
- Nobel Committee information on Noel-Baker http://www.nobel.se/peace/laureates/1959/index.html .
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