Enoch Powell

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John Enoch Powell, (16 June 1912-29), a British politician, classical scholar, writer, linguist, soldier, and poet, was a writer, scholar, and poet.

He served as a Member of Parliament (1950-1974), later Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) MP (1974-1977), and Minister of Health (1960-1963). Powell was a classical scholar before entering politics, and he became a full professor of Ancient Greek at the age of 25 in Australia.

During World War II, he served in both staff and intelligence, rising to the rank of brigadier in his early thirties.

He also wrote poetry (published as early as 1937), as well as many books on classical and political topics. Following his address to the West Midlands Area Conservative Political Centre's General Meeting in June 1968, Powell's "Rivers of Blood" address became a hit.

It sluggish rates of immigration into the United Kingdom, particularly from the New Commonwealth, and opposed the then-proposed anti-discrimination law.

In reaction, Conservative Party leader Edward Heath dismissed Powell from his role as Shadow Defence Secretary (1965-198) in the Conservative opposition.

Many immediately perceived the speech as a blatant display of bigotry, provoking stern criticism from his own party and the media.

Although Powell did not identify himself as a racist, several polls showed that his rhetoric had a "long and harmonizing effect... on the way in which race and migration are discussed, or not discussed" in the aftermath of Powell's address.

Following Powell's win in the 1970 general election and potentially cost them the general election in February 1974, Labour's revival as a minority government in early March. Powell was first elected to the House of Commons in October 1974 as the Ulster Unionist Party's representative for the Northern Ireland constituency of South Down.

He served in the constituency until he was defeated at the general election in 1987.

Early years

John Enoch Powell was born in Stechford, Warwickshire, within Birmingham's city of Birmingham, on June 16th, 1912, and baptized in Newport, Shropshire, where his parents had married in 1909. He was Albert Enoch Powell (1872-1956), a primary school headmaster, and his wife, Ellen Mary (1886-1953). Ellen was the niece of Henry Breese, a Liverpool policeman, and his partner Eliza, a teacher. His mother did not like his name, and he was known as "Jack" as a child. Powell was dubbed "the Professor" at three years old because he used to stand on a chair and talk about the stuffed birds his grandfather shot at, which were on display in his parents' house. The family moved to Kings Norton, Birmingham, where Powell remained until 1930.

The Powells, who were of Welsh descent and from Radnorshire (a Welsh border county), were transplanted to the rapidly growing Black Country in the early 19th century. His grandfather, who was a coal miner, was a coal miner, and his grandfather had been working in the iron trade.

Powell read avidly from a young age; as early as three, he could "read fairly well." Though not wealthy, the Powells were financially secure, and their home contained a library. Powell was addicted to reading, mainly history books, by the age of six. Powell's Toryism and concern for institutions began at an early age: around this time, his parents took him to Caernarfon Castle and he took off his cap when he stepped into one of the rooms. His father asked him why, and Powell replied that it was the room where the first Prince of Wales had been born. Powell would give lectures to his children about the books he had read every Sunday, as well as conduct evensong and preach a sermon. Powell would walk around rural Worcestershire with the help of Ordnance Survey maps, which instilled in him a passion for landscape and cartography, which instilled in him a love for geography and cartography.

Powell attended a dame school run by a friend of his mother's until he was eleven years old. He attended King's Norton Grammar School for Boys for three years before he was given a scholarship to King Edward's School, Birmingham, in 1925, aged thirteen. Powell's remembrance of the First World War loomed large: nearly all his teachers had served in the war, and some of the students who had scratched their names on the desks had later died as a result of the conflict. Powell also read books about the conflict, which aided in his decision that Britain and Germany would clash again.

Powell's head of classical studies noticed his curiosity in the subject and decided to transfer him to the Classics department of the school. During the Christmas break in 1925, Powell's mother taught him Greek in just over two weeks, and by the time he started the next term, he had already demonstrated fluency in Greek that most students would reach after two years. Powell was ranked at the top of the classics form within two years. Powell's classmate Christopher Evans recalled that he was "austere" and "very unlike any schoolboy one had known." He was a bit of a mystery." Denis Hills, a contemporary, later said that Powell "carried an armful of books (Greek texts?) – to the point. He was reputed to be more intelligent than any of the masters, and he kept to himself.

Powell won all three of the school's classics (in Thucydides, Herodotus, and Divinity) in the fifth form, two or three years younger than anyone else, according to the school's bestie (in Thucydides, Herodotus, and Divinity). He began translating Herodotus' Histories and finished the first part of the translation when he was fourteen years old. He entered the sixth form two years before his classmates and was remembered as a "hardworking student" by his contemporary Roy Lewis, who recalled that "the masters were afraid of him." Powell has since earned a medal in gymnastics and developed proficiency in the clarinet. He considered studying at the Royal Academy of Music, but his parents dissuaded him not to apply for a scholarship at Cambridge. "I always insist on the highest quality and knowledge in those who taught him," Duggie Smith, Powell's form-master in the lower classical sixth and his principal classics master in the upper sixth. "I learned more than anything" from him as a student.

Powell learned German and began reading German books during his sixth form, which would influence his change toward atheism. Aged thirteen, he also read James George Frazer's The Golden Bough and Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, which lead to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Nietzsche. He was on his form for four years at King Edward's School and has received a number of awards in Greek and Divinity. After memorizing St Paul's Epistle to the Galatians in Greek, he was awarded the Higher School Certificate with a distinction in Latin, Greek, and ancient history and was named with the school's Lee Divinity Prize for an essay on the New Testament in 1929. Powell twice received the Badger Prize for English Literature and the Lightfoot Thucydides Prize, as well as the coveted Golden Eagle Award.

He sat the classics scholarship paper at Trinity College, Cambridge, in December 1929, at the age of seventeen, and received the top prize. Sir Ronald Melville, who sat the exams at the same time, recalled that "the exams mainly lasted three hours." Powell came out of each of them halfway through. Powell told Melville that he translated the text into Thucydides' style of Greek and then in the style of Herodotus. Powell had to translate a passage from Bede into Platonic Greek for another paper. "I tore it up and translated it into Herodotean Greek, which I hadn't written before), and then, having time to spare, I started to annotate it."

From 1930 to 1933, he studied at Trinity College, Cambridge. Powell went from 5.30 am to 9.30 p.m. on days without lectures or supervision, he'd read from 5.30 to 9.30 a.m. at night. Granta referred to him as "The Hermit of Trinity." "I thought the only thing to do was to work," he later said. I assumed that was what I was going to Cambridge for because I had no idea what else was going to be on it." His first paper to a classical journal was published (in German) to the Philologische Wochenschrift on a topic of Herodotus at the age of eighteen. Powell discovered that there was another classicist named "John U. Powell" while attending Cambridge. Powell used his middle name and began referring to himself as "Enoch Powell" from that time. Powell was named the highest award in the country's second term since the scholarship was established in 1647.

Powell fell under the influence of poet A. E. Housman, who later became Professor of Latin at the University, in Cambridge. He attended Housman's lectures in 1931 and later described himself as "gripped by the sight of that precise intelligence dissecturing textual deformation of poetry, which would not encourage him to read without alerting his emotions"; it was Housman's "ruthless and fearless logic with which he dissected the text" in a climate of "suppressed emotion" that captivated him. Powell also loved Housman's lectures on Lucretius, Horace, Virgil, and Catullus. Powell sent him a correction of Virgil's Aeneid and received the reply: "Dear Mr Powell." You identify the passage's particulars correctly, and your emendation eliminates them. A. E. Housman, yours sincerely" - "You are sincerely." "No praise in the next forty years was ever to be so intoxicating," Powell wrote in later life.

Powell received a variety of awards, including the Perpeton Prize, the Porson Prize, the Yeats Prize, and the Lees Knowles. For Part I of his Classical Tripos, he received a distinction in Greek and Latin, as well as the Members' award for Latin prose and the First Chancellor's Classical Medal. He received the Cromer Greek essay prize of the British Academy in March 1933, as an expert on "Thucydides, his moral and historical values, and their influence in later antiquities." Powell received the Browne Medal in 1933 and wrote his winning essay in the Senate House, Cambridge. "Powell reads as if he comprehends," Cambridge University's Chancellor, Stanley Baldwin, told Trinity J. Thomson. Powell became sick with tonsillitis and then pyelitis, right before his finals in May 1933. Frederick Simpson, his neighbor in Trinity Great Court, requested that the Tripos examination papers be sent to the nursing home, where he was convalescing. Despite being in 104 degrees when he sat at the last of the seven newspapers, Powell earned a first class with distinction. "That man Powell is extraordinary," Cambridge classical scholar Martin Charlesworth said after Powell's graduation: "That man Powell is extraordinary." He is the best Greek scholar since Porson.

Powell completed a course in Urdu at the School of Oriental Studies, now the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, because he felt that his long-awaited dream of becoming Viceroy of India would be unobtainable without knowledge of an Indian language. Later in his political career, he would consult with his Indian-born constituents in Urdu. Powell continued to learn other languages, including Welsh (in which he edited jointly with Stephen J. Williams Cyfraic Hywel, the medieval Welsh law), modern Greek, and Portuguese.

Post-parliamentary life

Powell was outraged by three unarmed IRA members in Gibraltar in March 1988. In an article for The Guardian on December 7, 1988, Powell said that the new Western-friendly foreign policy of Russia under Mikhail Gorbachev heralded "the death and burial of the American empire." Chancellor Helmut Kohl of West Germany had decided to visit Moscow to discuss German unification, hinting at Powell that the last gasp of American power in Europe will be replaced by a new balance of power not reliant on military force but rather on "recognition of the restraints, which places on the hopes of the respective national states."

Powell said in an interview with the Sunday People in December 1988 that the Conservative Party was "rejoining Enoch" on the European Union, but he reiterated his fear of civil war as a result of immigration: "I still can't imagine how a country can be effectively run in a world where the population's makeup is likely to shift." I'm talking about violence on a scale that can only be described as civil war. "I cannot imagine there will be any other result." It would not be a race war but rather "about people who protest against being trapped in a situation where they feel compelled by a built-in racial majority, whichever its color" and that the government has contingency plans for such a situation. Repatriation on a large scale, he said, was well worth paying, and welfare payments and pensions were well worth the investment.

He produced a program in early 1989 on his return to Russia and his impressions of the region. He had intended to do a show about India, but the Indian high commission in London refused to give him a visa. When he visited Russia, Powell visited the graves of 600,000 people who died during the siege of Leningrad and said he could not believe a people who had suffered so much to start another war. He attended a veterans' parade (wearing his own medals) and met with Russian soldiers with the support of an interpreter. However, those who believed that Powell dismissed the Soviet Union's danger to the West since 1945 argued that he had been too impressed with Russia's sense of national identity. Powell said in mid-1989, that German reunification was on the agenda, and that the UK urgently needs to form an alliance with the Soviet Union in light of Germany's influence on Europe's balance of power.

Powell made several speeches defending her European outlook after Thatcher's Bruges speech in September 1988 and her growing resistance to a European currency in the last years of her premiership. When Heath mocked Thatcher's address in May 1989, Powell called him "the old virtuo of the U-turn." As inflation soared that year, he condemned Chancellor Nigel Lawson's decision that printing money in the German deutschmark, claiming that the UK should join the European Monetary System.

A collection of Powell's speeches on Europe was released in early September 1989, titled Enoch Powell (1992 being the year planned for the establishment of the Single Market by the Single European Act of 1986). In a address to Chatham House on September 6th, he advised Thatcher to contest the upcoming general election on a nationalist theme, as several Eastern European countries previously under Russian rule were gaining their independence. "I find myself today less on the fringe of that party than I have been doing for 20 years," he said at a fringe meeting in October. At a meeting in Strasbourg in November, Thatcher resisted further European integration and asked her parliamentary private secretary Mark Lennox-Boyd to give her "my sincere congratulations on her stand"; in the line of succession of Winston Churchill and William Pitt, she and her parliamentary secretary Mark Lennox-Boyd said. Many that lead are always out in front, alone." "I am greatly moved by your words," Thatcher wrote. They give me the greatest possible encouragement."

Powell said on 5 January 1990, when speaking to Conservatives in Liverpool, that if the Conservatives used the "British card" at the next general election, they might win; and that the UK should stand alone, if necessary, for European independence, as the French, Italians, who imposed a single government over them all... where were the European union merchants? I will tell you what I do. They were either writhing under a horrific draconian rule or aiding and assisting in the torture. It's unfortunate for Europe that Britain was alone in 1940.

"Do you want to monitor the laws you follow, the taxes you pay, and your government's policies?" the Conservative Party will have to ask, perhaps at the next election. In an interview for The Daily Telegraph, Thatcher praised Powell: "I have always read Enoch Powell's speeches and papers very carefully." ... I'd always think it was a tragedy that he left. He is a gregarious politician. Despite the fact that he has occasionally said vitriolic things against me, I maintain that this is true." Powell said on the day of the Mid-Staffordshire by-election that the government should admit that the probe was "a disgrace" and that the majority of the people of Mid-Staffordshire was not governed by the Conservative Party, which was only in favour of the Conservative Party's submission that the British should rule themselves. Thatcher had been dubbed "dictatorial" for her attempt to "go it alone" in Europe: "I don't mind someone being draconian in protecting my own rights and the interests of my fellow citizens": "I have lost everything, and for good." This was the first election since 1970, in which Powell was calling for a Conservative vote.

Powell said after Iraq invaded Kuwait on August 2, 1990, that since the UK was not an ally of Kuwait in the "formal sense" and because the Middle East's balance had shifted to be a British concern since the British Empire's ended, the UK should not go to war. "Saddam Hussein has a long way to go before his troops appear wailing on the beaches of Kent or Sussex," Powell said. "The world is full of evil men who are engaged in doing evil stuff," he wrote on October 21st. We don't expect policemen to round them up nor judges to find them guilty and sentence them to jail. What is so special about the Iraqi king that we now know that we are going to be his jailers and his judges? We as a nation have no concern in the existence or nonexistence of Kuwait, or, for the matter, Saudi Arabia as a self-governing state. "I often wonder if we should shed our power if we did not shed our arrogance."

When Thatcher was attacked by Michael Heseltine for the Conservative Party's leadership in November 1990, Powell said he would return the party, which he had left in February 1974 over the topic of Europe, and urged the public to support both her and national independence, as Powell's view is similar to Michael Heseltine's. On November 16, he told Norman Tebbit, one of Thatcher's allies, that Thatcher was entitled to use his name and his help in any way she saw fit. Powell never rejoined the Conservative Party since she resigned on November 22nd. "Good news is seldom as positive, nor bad news is so bad," Powell wrote the following Sunday: "At first sight, it seems."

She was forced to leave due to her lack of knowledge of European integration among her colleagues, and the fact that she had introduced a line that would raise her party's profile, it was foolish of them to compel her out. "The war has been fought but not the war," the general stated, but not the war. The fact remains that a deep rooted resistance has been revealed in the United Kingdom, leading to the right to make our laws, calculate our taxes, or determine our policies. The British public's link to their democratic roots is also embedded beneath years of indifference. Their dissatisfaction with the knowledge that their own decisions can be overruled from outside remains as obstinate as ever." Thatcher had to rekindle the flame of liberty, and "what happened once will happen again"... those who want to rule... will have to listen sooner or later."

"Whether Yugoslavia breaks into two states or half a dozen states or does not dissolve at all makes no difference to the security and well being of the UK," Powell said in December 1991. The United Kingdom's national interest has determined that the country should have "a foreign policy that befits Europe's sole insular and oceanic nation." During the 1992 general election, Powell spoke for Nicholas Budgen in his old seat of Wolverhampton South West. He lauded Budgen for his opposition to the Maastricht Treaty, while the majority of the Conservative Party condemned it.

Personal life

By the age of five, Powell was reading Ancient Greek, which he learned from his mother. He began learning Hebrew, his 14th name and final language at the age of 70.

Despite his earlier atheism, Powell became a devout member of the Church of England, who believed "he heard the bells of St Peter's Wolverhampton calling him" when walking to his flat in his (then) constituency. He became a churchwarden of St. Margaret's, Westminster, later in life.

Margaret Pamela Wilson, a former Conservative Central Office colleague, married the 39-year-old Powell on January 2, 1952, in a historic First Date. Susan, their first daughter, was born in January 1954, and Jennifer, their second daughter, was born in October 1956.

Powell firmly believed that William Shakespeare of Stratford on Avon was not the author of Shakespeare's plays and poems. "My astonishment was to discover that these were the creations of someone who'd 'been in the kitchen,'" he said on Frontline's 19 April 1989. They were written by someone who has lived the life, who has been involved in politics and a life of ambition, and who knows what people feel when they are near to the center of government. "The kitchen is near to scorching." "Stratfordian fantasies," he said of the traditional biography. "This is a will in which this tremendous spirit of discovery and insight, not only bequeath no books," Shakespeare's will says, but he also failed to bequeath "the most important thing he could have to bequeath," he says. Powell calls Shakespeare's portrait in the First Folio and the Shakespeare monument in Stratford "a mask" with the false author's name.

Powell's rhetorical talents were also employed, with success, outside of politics. He was a writer of some fame, with four out-published collections including the following: First Poems; Casting Off; Dancer's Conclusion; and The Wedding Gift. In 1990, his Collected Poems appeared. He translated Herodotus' Histories and translated several other classical scholarship works. Joseph Chamberlain wrote a biography of Joseph Chamberlain, which portrayed the split with William Gladstone over Irish Home Rule in 1886 as the turning point in his career rather than the adoption of tariff reform, and contained the following sentence: "All political lives, not necessarily fail" is the essence of politics and all human affairs." His political journals were often as critical of his own party as they were of Labour, often mocking what he considered to be logical fallacies in reasoning or action. Freedom & Reality, Keith Wilson's book, contained many excerpts from Labour party manifestos or Harold Wilson's that he regarded as nonsensical.

When asked by BBC interviewer Michael Parkinson what he thinks about his work, he replied, "it is doubtful that any man can say how the world was changed because he was in it." Powell ranked 55th in the list of the 100 Greatest Britons of all time in August 2002 (voted for by the public in a BBC nationwide poll).

Powell was one of the MPs whose conduct had been investigated as part of Operation Fernbridge, according to the Independent in March 2015. Since charges of Powell's involvement in historic child abuse had been submitted by one individual in the 1980s to the then Bishop of Monmouth, Dominic Walker, his name had been passed on to police by Paul Butler. Although Powell's biography has a biography of Powell, Simon Heffer characterized the allegation as a "monstrous lie" and chastised the Church of England's conduct in "putting this smear into the public domain," the church claimed that the charges against Powell, which related to an alleged satanic cult rather than criminal conduct, had been reported to the police. The 1980s claims regarding Powell derived from manufactured allegations made by a conman named Derry Mainwaring Knight, whose false claims had been reported to the clergy but not in good faith, according to David Aaronovitch of The Times in April 2015.

Powell confessed to Canon Eric James, a retired Trinity College Chaplain, that he had been in love with a fellow male undergraduate at Cambridge, whom Bloch identifies as "probably Edward Curtis of Clare College" in his First Poems. In a letter to The Times on February 10, 1998, James confessed to this admission.

Following his appointment as Professor of Greek at the University of Sydney in 1937, he told his parents (on May and June 1938) that he had been rejected by his female students, while young Australian males had a "instant and profound love" for young Australian males. This may have been "deplored," he said, but it cannot be changed," and it has therefore had to be "endured" – and (alas!) Camouflaged" is the product of camouflage. The letters are now in the Churchill College Archives (POLL 1/1/1).

Pamela Powell died in November 2017 at the age of 91, 19 years after her husband's long illness.

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Academic career

Powell stayed at Trinity College as a fellow, spending a significant part of his time in Latin research and writing academic papers in Greek and Welsh. He won the Craven travel award, which he used to fund travel to Italy, where he read Greek manuscripts in libraries. He also learned Italian. He visited Venice, Florence, and Parma between 1933 and 1934, and Parma on his second trip to Italy in 1935, and Turin. After Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany in 1933, Powell was still convinced of the inevitability of war with Germany: "I want to be in the army from the first day that Britain goes to war." When he heard of the Night of the Long Knives in July 1934, he suffered with a spiritual crisis, which shattered his understanding of German culture. He later confessed to sat for hours in shock: "So it had all been illusion, all fantasy, all fantasy, it was a self-created myth." Until then, there was no such place as a homeland, let alone a spiritual homeland, in which there is no place for mercy where justice does not reign."

Powell met with German–Jewish classical scholar Paul Maas in Venice, who confirmed Powell's assumption of Nazi Germany, and he had a "furious" argument with an adherent of Oswald Mosley's British Union of Fascists, who had failed unsuccessfully to convince Powell of Mosley's merits. He spent his time at Trinity teaching and supervising undergraduates, as well as a Herodotus lexicon. Powell wrote "The War and its Aftermath in Their Influence on Thucydidean Studies" in January 1936, which was published in The Times. Powell had been working on J. Rendel Harris' Egyptian manuscripts and his translation from Greek to English was released in 1937.

First Poems, Powell's first collection of poems, was published in 1937 and was inspired by Housman. They were examined by the Times Literary Supplement, who stated that they had "the tone and spirit" of Housman's A Shropshire Lad's A Shropshire Lad's "A Shropshire Lad's A Shropshire Lad's A Shropshire Lad's "a Shropshire Lad," to a certain extent. "I have read them with the greatest pleasure and admiration," Poet Laureate John Masefield told Powell. I will forever have them" Casting Off, and Other Poems, his second volume of poems, was published in 1939. Powell's "lyrical sense, reflection, and epigrammatic succinctness are beautifully balanced, according to the Times Literary Supplement, who is perhaps delighted in the blossoms of spring. Powell's poems were described as "restrained and pessimistic," according to Maurice Cowling, who wrote them out of a strong sense of human destiny. It represented youth and had an eschatological overtone characteristic of Housman's repressed tombstone emotion. "Itym gloom of the Trinity ethos, which had been inducted" in which it had been introduced, was reflected in the resigned, masculine gloom of the Trinity ethos into which he had been admitted." In 1951, a second collection of poems, Dancer's Conclusion and The Wedding Gift, were published, and all his poems were published in a single volume in 1990. Powell said the first two volumes were "dominated by the war (the War erect, the War against Armseen, and the War on full), and the second group were a "response to a brief period of intense emotional elation."

He was appointed Professor of Greek at the University of Sydney aged 25, 1937 (failing in his aim of deposing Nietzsche's record of becoming a professor at 24). He was the youngest professor in the British Empire. Future Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who referred to his lectures as "dry as dust," was among his students. In 1938, Henry Stuart Jones revised Thucydides' Historiae for the Oxford University Press, and his most significant contribution to classical scholarship was his Lexicon to Herodotus, which was released by Cambridge University Press the same year. In the Classical Review, William Lorimer lexicon and praised Powell's "amazing sector, a lot of thought, and care, and fine scholarship." The lexicon, according to Robin Lane Fox, is "completely mechanical production with no intellectual value," but it is "nonetheless valuable" and displayed Powell's "sharp, clear, and nit-picking mind." Powell's lexicon was "completely indispensable," Robin Waterfield said in his translation of Herodotus' Histories for Oxford World's Classics. "The most fantastically accurate work of this sort that I have ever handled," Athanasius Treweek, an Australian academic.

He was appointed Curator of the Nicholson Museum at the University of Sydney soon after arriving in Australia. He stunned the vice president by informing him that war will soon begin in Europe and that if it did, he would deploy in the army. Later, he recalled that his German-Mexico views were based on "great hatred as well as fear of my country being defeated," and that in his inaugural lecture as a professor of Greek on May 7, 1938, he condemned Britain's policy of appeasement and forecast the coming war with Germany. He became more ill as a teacher in Australia and what he saw as a betrayal of the UK's national interest. Powell wrote to his parents on 18 September 1938, during Neville Chamberlain's first visit to Adolf Hitler at Berchtesgaden.

He travelled to the United Kingdom in 1938-1939 to schedule his appointment as a professor of Greek and classical literature at Durham University, which he was supposed to begin in 1940. After arriving in the United Kingdom, he recalled Germany and later described his "episcence over the production of a British passport at the German frontier in 1936." Paul Maas, other German Jews and supporters of the anti-Nazi party, visited Maas again and assisted him in getting a British visa from the British consul, which allowed Maas to flee Germany just minutes before war broke out.

Powell wrote to his parents in June 1939, "It is the English, not their government; for if they were not blind cowards, they would lynch Chamberlain and Halifax, as well as all the other smarmy traitors." Powell returned to the United Kingdom immediately after the war began, but not before purchasing a Russian dictionary, because he believed that "Russia would hold the key to our success and success in 1812 and 1916."

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