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#Post#: 18652--------------------------------------------------
From the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ; Denis Herbert
Howell, Baron Howell
DIR By: Timbo
Date: July 3, 2020, 11:22 am
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From the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Denis Herbert Howell, Baron Howell
(1923–1998)
by Tam Dalyell
HTML https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/69605
Published in print: 23 September 2004
Published online: 23 September 2004
Howell, Denis Herbert, Baron Howell (1923–1998), politician, was
born on 4 September 1923 at 115 Guildford Street, Birmingham—a
back-to-back house—the middle of the three children of Herbert
Howell (d. 1961), an engineer's fitter, and his wife, Bertha
Amelia Watkins. Political awareness came early: his first memory
was of sitting on his father's knee at a general strike meeting
in 1926. So too did his devotion to football, and to Aston Villa
Football Club in particular. He left Handsworth grammar school,
in Birmingham, at fifteen and started work as an office boy.
Rejected for military service, he served as a firewatcher and in
the Home Guard throughout the Second World War, and began
refereeing football matches for the Birmingham Sunday League in
1942. In 1951 he graduated as a linesman in the Football League,
and was a Football Association referee from 1956 until 1966.
Howell was active from an early age in the Clerical and
Administrative Workers' Union—he was president, from 1971 to
1989, of its expanded successor, the Association of
Professional, Executive, Clerical and Computer Staff (APEX)—and
in 1942 he joined the Labour Party. He was elected to Birmingham
city council at twenty-three, and four years later, in 1950, was
elected to the important post of secretary of the Labour group.
This experience was his training ground as one of the most
effective operators in British politics of his generation. He
contested the unwinnable King's Norton parliamentary seat in
1951, won Birmingham All Saints in 1955, and lost it by twenty
votes in 1959. On 20 August 1955 he married Brenda Marjorie
Willson (b. 1928/9), with whom he had three sons and a daughter.
He found great pleasure and support in his family: 'I find the
fellowship and affection of the family to be an indispensable
part of my public life' (Howell, 85). Out of parliament, and
with characteristic resilience, he founded his own public
relations company and became a founding member of the Campaign
for Democratic Socialism, the Gaitskellite organization formed
to counter the left-wing unilateralists in the Labour Party. The
connections he formed at this time helped to get him the Labour
nomination for the 1961 by-election at Birmingham Small Heath,
which he held for the next thirty-one years. He thus had a
power-base in the party; Harold Wilson, from a different
political stable, could never ignore Howell.
On Labour's victory in 1964 Harold Wilson appointed Howell the
country's first minister for sport, as a parliamentary
under-secretary at the Department of Education, but did not want
to give him a budget because 'the country's broke' (Howell,
142). Howell, no respecter of persons and the least deferential
of men, reminded the prime minister that Britain was to host the
1966 world cup and would need funds. Howell got his budget—and
his prestige was mightily, if irrationally, enhanced by
England's winning the tournament. Howell—sometimes a bully and
cajoler, always active—became one of Whitehall's most effective
ministers. In the teeth of civil service opposition he set up
the Sports Council. He appointed an important enquiry, under Sir
Norman Chester, of Nuffield College, Oxford, into Association
Football (1966–8). A committed opponent of apartheid, especially
in sport, he shamed the MCC into cancelling their 1968–9 tour of
South Africa on account of the racial problems surrounding the
Worcestershire and England cricketer Basil D'Oliveira, which
marked the beginning of the long sporting boycott of South
Africa. He was a tower of strength in creating the conditions
for the Commonwealth games in Edinburgh in 1970. In 1969 he was
moved from the Department of Education to be minister of state
at the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, but carried his
portfolio as minister of sport with him, 'the first man in
history to take a Ministry with him when he moves' (ibid., 199).
Howell sat on the opposition front benches between 1970 and
1974, and was inevitably reappointed minister for sport when
Labour returned to office in 1974. Shortly after the election an
IRA car bomb was planted at his Birmingham home; his wife and
youngest son narrowly escaped death or injury. Sport now came
under the Department of the Environment. Here he gained a
reputation as a different kind of rain-maker. In the notoriously
dry summer of 1976 James Callaghan appointed him minister for
drought. The legend quickly grew up that just as he appealed for
restraint in the use of water it began to rain, and continued to
do so for most of a month. In fact the rains did not arrive for
ten days, beginning in Yorkshire just as Howell ceremonially
turned on an emergency standpipe.
Back in opposition Howell energetically opposed Margaret
Thatcher's ban on British athletes competing at the Moscow
Olympic games in 1980, following the Soviet invasion of
Afghanistan. He raised funds to send a British team, bolstered
Dennis Follows, the wavering chairman of the British Olympic
Association, and forcefully expressed the view that the Olympic
games were beyond politics. The military forces of the west were
unable to interpose themselves between the USSR and Afghanistan;
Howell and his supporters would not accept that 'our freedoms
must be defended by Olympic sport' (Howell, 293). The depleted
British team won twenty-one medals; Howell was awarded the
Olympic order silver medal by the International Olympic
Committee Congress.
Denis Howell retired from the House of Commons in 1992, after
two major heart operations and the tragic death in a car crash
of his youngest son, David, in 1986. He took a life peerage as,
inevitably, Baron Howell, of Aston Manor in the city of
Birmingham. His last great campaign was an unsuccessful attempt
to bring the 1992 Olympics to the city to which he always owed
his greatest allegiance. He published his autobiography in 1990,
under the apt title Made in Birmingham. Lord Howell collapsed
after making a speech at a dinner in support of Cancer Research
at Birmingham, and died from heart disease in Solihull Hospital
on 19 April 1998. His public funeral took place on 24 April at
St Paul's Church, Birmingham, where many tributes were paid to
the man known in his own city as Mr Brum.
1968 photograph by Godfrey Argent Studios ; collection National
Portrait Gallery, London
#Post#: 18661--------------------------------------------------
Re: From the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ; Denis
Herbert Howell, Baron Howell
DIR By: reflector
Date: July 3, 2020, 4:41 pm
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Can't say how good or otherwise he was as a referee but he was
a highly effective Minister of Sport, unlike most of his
successors, the majority of whom I don't even remember. The
1966 World Cup final undoubtedly raised his profile but I can't
think of one who followed him who came anywhere near in terms of
achievements.
#Post#: 18674--------------------------------------------------
Re: From the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ; Denis
Herbert Howell, Baron Howell
DIR By: Timbo
Date: July 5, 2020, 6:06 am
---------------------------------------------------------
--- Quote from: reflector link ---
>
> Can't say how good or otherwise he was as a referee but he
was a highly effective Minister of Sport, unlike most of his
successors, the majority of whom I don't even remember. The
1966 World Cup final undoubtedly raised his profile but I can't
think of one who followed him who came anywhere near in terms of
achievements.
>
--- End Quote ---
Two subsequent names that come to mind are :-
1. David Mellor - was he ever Minister for Sport ?
2. Colin Moynihan - aka the "Miniature for Sport".
I seem to recall that the latter held the role at the time of
the Hillsborough Disaster.
#Post#: 18678--------------------------------------------------
Re: From the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ; Denis
Herbert Howell, Baron Howell
DIR By: Acme Thunderer
Date: July 5, 2020, 8:08 am
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David Mellor was appointed as the first Secretary of State of
the newly-formed Department of National Heritage in 1992, a
department which I believe included Sport. He was later referred
to as the 'Minister for Fun'. I rather fancied Tessa Jowell who
was Minister for the Olympics as well as the Sports Minister,
purely professionally of course Mrs AT ;D
#Post#: 18680--------------------------------------------------
Re: From the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography ; Denis
Herbert Howell, Baron Howell
DIR By: Timbo
Date: July 5, 2020, 11:08 am
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--- Quote from: Acme Thunderer link ---
>
> I rather fancied Tessa Jowell who was Minister for the
Olympics..... ;D
>
--- End Quote ---
Pictured below with her son and daughter-in-law. Image borrowed
from :-
HTML https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-44098760
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