Enoch powell brief biography of william

By Bill Schwarz

Enoch Powell was born one hundred years ago on 16 June 1912. His was a provincial, Birmingham family, his parents — both schoolteachers — still retaining a hint of Lloyd Georgeradicalism.

The young Enoch, nicknamed by his mother ‘The Professor’, was given to ferocious study. Gradually, as he grew into his teens, the family’s historic radicalism came to be increasingly attenuated as loyalty to King and Empire took on life as a moral absolute.

Enoch powell brief biography of william shakespeare

This shift from radicalism to loyalism was not peculiar to the Powells; it signified a deeper political shift in the lived experience of Birmingham itself.

However Powell, as we might expect, was not one to do things by half.

In the late thirties, in letters to his parents, he expressed the hope that the Tory appeasers would be strung up by the right-thinking body of stalwart Englishmen, for whom reverence for monarchy and Empire was (he believed) simply the natural order of things.

In 1939, when war w