The British politician Hugh Gaitskell (1906-1963) was chancellor of the exchequer from 1950 to 1951. He was leader of the Labour Party from 1955 to 1963.

Hugh Todd-Naylor Gaitskell was born in London on April 9, 1906, the son of Arthur Gaitskell, an Indian civil servant. He had a middle-class upbringing which included periods of time spent in Burma. He was educated at Winchester and New College, Oxford, where he received first class honors in "Modern Greats" (politics, philosophy, and economics) in 1927.

For the next ten years Gaitskell pursued a career in teaching. He lectured to Nottingham miners for a year (1927-1928) on behalf of the Workers' Educational Association, his first extended contact with working-class life. Then he taught economics and politics at University College, London, rising to the position of reader in political economy in 1938. In 1937 he married Dora Frost, with whom he had two daughters.

Gaitskell's interest in socialism was stimulated initially...