Up for auction "Baron Williams of Barnburgh" Tom Williams Signed 3.25X5.5 Card. 

ES-4081E

Thomas Williams, Baron Williams of

Barnburgh, PC (18

March 1888 – 29 March 1967) was a British coal miner who became a Labour Party politician.

Born

in Blackwell, Derbyshire, Williams

grew up in Swinton in Yorkshire, and

began work in 1899 in Kilnhurst colliery. He became

involved in trade unionism and

joined the Independent Labour Party,

switching briefly to the British Socialist Party during World War I before joining the Labour Party. In 1918, he was elected as a Labour member of

the Bolton-upon-Dearne Urban District Council. He

was elected at the 1922 general

election as the Member of Parliament (MP)

for Don Valley, and

held the seat until he stepped down at the 1959 general

election. In the First Labour Government,

from January to October 1924, Williams was Parliamentary Private

Secretary (PPS) to Noel Buxton,

the Minister of

Agriculture. In the Second Labour Government from

1929 to 1931, he was PPS to the Minister of Labour, Margaret Bondfield.

Williams

first held ministerial office in Winston Churchill's wartime Coalition Government,

when he was Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries from

1940 to 1945, serving under the Conservative minister Robert Hudson. He

was made a Privy

Counsellor in August 1941. In Clement Attlee's post-war Labour government,

he was Minister of

Agriculture, Fisheries and Food from 1945 to 1951, and

after Labour lost the 1951 general

election he was the opposition spokesperson on Agriculture

until 1959. After his retirement from the House of

Commons in 1959, he was created a life peer on 2 February 1961 taking the title Baron

Williams of Barnburgh, of Barnburgh in the West Riding of the County of York.

His autobiography, in which he gives an account of his life since childhood,

was published in 1965 with a foreword by Clement Attlee