Parents Francis Dyke Acland | Spouse(s) Anne Stella Alford Books The Next Step Name Richard Acland | |
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Title Acland Baronetcy of Columb John Term 9 June 1939 – 24 November 1990 Children Sir John Dyke Acland, 16th Baronet Similar People Vernon Bartlett, David Lloyd George, David Astor, Ernest Millington | ||
Predecessor Francis, 14th Baronet | ||
Sir Richard Thomas Dyke Acland, 15th Baronet (26 November 1906 – 24 November 1990) was one of the founding members of the British Common Wealth Party. He had previously been a Liberal Member of Parliament (MP) and joined the Labour Party in 1945. He was one of the founders of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND).
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Career
Acland was the eldest son of Sir Francis Dyke Acland, 14th Baronet, a Liberal Member of Parliament (MP) and Eleanor Margaret Cropper. Born on 26 November 1906 at Broadclyst, Devon, he was educated at Rugby School and Balliol College, Oxford, before becoming a barrister (admitted at the Inner Temple in 1930). He served as a lieutenant in the Royal Devon Yeomanry.
Acland stood for Parliament without success 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 pamphlets he wrote, and in 1942 he 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. He advocated public land ownership and in 1944 he gave his West Country estates at Killerton in Devon and Holnicote in Somerset to the National Trust partly out of principle and also to ensure their preservation intact.
The Common Wealth Party had shown signs during the Second World War 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 in Putney, where he came third. 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. 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 (CND), and was a senior lecturer in education at St. Luke's College of Education, Exeter, between 1959 and his retirement in 1974.
Personal life
Acland married Anne Stella Alford, an architect, and together they had four sons, including John Dyke Acland and Robert D. Acland. Having succeeded his father as baronet in 1939, Acland died in Exeter in 1990, at the age of 83.