Early Life
Born in Neath, in Wales, his father, John Neale Dalton, was chaplain to Queen Victoria and tutor to the future King.
Dalton was educated at Summer Fields School in Summertown, a suburb of Oxford, and then at Eton College, in the small town of Eton in Berkshire, where he was head of his house, but was disappointed not to be elected to "Pop". After leaving school he went up to King's College, Cambridge, where his socialist views, then very rare amongst undergraduates, earned him the nickname "Comrade Hugh". Whilst there, he made three unsuccessful attempts to be elected Secretary of the Cambridge Union.
He went on to study at the London School of Economics and the Middle Temple. During the First World War, he was called up into the Army Service Corps, later transferring to the Royal Artillery. He served as a Lieutenant on the French and Italian Fronts, where he was awarded the Italian decoration, the Medaglia di Bronzo al Valor Militare, in recognition of his 'contempt for danger' during the retreat from Caporetto; he later wrote a memoir of the war called With British Guns in Italy. Following demobilisation, he returned to the LSE and the University of London as a lecturer, where he was awarded a PhD for a thesis on the principles of public finance in 1920.
Read more about this topic: Hugh Dalton
Famous quotes containing the words early life, early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Quintilian [educational writer in Rome around A.D. 100] thought that the earliest years of the child’s life were crucial. Education should start earlier than age seven, within the family. It should not be so hard as to give the child an aversion to learning. Rather, these early lessons would take the form of play—that embryonic notion of kindergarten.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“The ceaseless labor of your life is to build the house of death.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)