Harold Macmillan

Biography

Harold Macmillan was born in 1894 into the family that owned Macmillan Publishers. He was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, and was badly wounded as a captain in the Grenadier Guards during the First World War. After the war he joined the family firm and in 1924 entered Parliament for Stockton-on-Tees, losing the seat in 1929 and regaining it in 1931. In the 1930s he argued for economic planning and opposed appeasement.

He entered government in 1940 and from late 1942 served as Minister Resident in North Africa and the Mediterranean. After 1951 he was a successful housing minister and then minister of defence, foreign secretary and chancellor of the exchequer under Anthony Eden. When Eden resigned after the Suez Crisis in January 1957, Macmillan succeeded him as prime minister and Conservative leader.

A One Nation Conservative, he presided over a time of affluence, telling Britons in 1957 that they had never had it so good, and won an increased majority in 1959. He rebuilt relations with the United States, acquired Polaris missiles, helped secure the 1963 nuclear test ban treaty, and after his 1960 Wind of Change speech oversaw much of the decolonisation of Africa. France vetoed his bid to join the European Economic Community, and the 1962 cabinet purge, the Vassall and Profumo scandals and ill health preceded his resignation in October 1963.

In retirement he chaired Macmillan Publishers from 1964 to 1974, remained Chancellor of the University of Oxford, an office he had held since 1960, and sat in the House of Lords as Earl of Stockton. He died in 1986.