Jack Lawson - Member of Parliament

Member of Parliament

Two years after moving there, Lawson was elected to the County Council for the Chester-le-Street division. He wrote a pamphlet campaigning for minimum wage for miners and was a leading figure in Durham during the miners' strike of 1912 on this issue. He and his wife had a second daughter, Edna, while his brother Will, whom he had tutored, took a diploma in Economics and Political Science at Ruskin. In 1913 he was a delegate to the Miner's International in Carlsbad. Journeying through Leipzig and Dresden, he saw the growing Prussian army, and once in the Balkans witnessed some of the troubles that would spark the first World War. When war broke out in 1914, Will Lawson became an officer in the Durham Light Infantry. Jack Lawson followed his example, volunteering for service; experienced with horses, he was assigned as a driver with the Royal Field Artillery, serving in France. Another brother, Tom, joined the Border Regiment. Will Lawson was sent to Ypres in January 1915, and died in battle thirteen months later.

Following the end of the war, Jack Lawson was granted temporary leave to contest the Seaham division of Durham in the 1918 general election; he campaigned against war reparations and won only a third of the votes against a coalition candidate. After that he was sent to Clipstone in Derbyshire, where he was demobbed. Returning to work at Alma Colliery and as a county councillor, he started to have health problems and was sick during the council elections the following year. The Labour Party, which entered the election with around a dozen out of one hundred councillors, won control of the council.

Later in 1919, John Taylor, Labour MP for Chester-le-Street since 1906 and a friend of Lawson's, resigned his seat due to ill health. Though reluctant to risk leaving Durham and the colliery for London and Parliament, Lawson was persuaded to stand for Labour in the by-election. He was sponsored by the Durham Miner's Association and won with a majority of eleven thousand, entering the House of Commons in November 1919.

Ramsay MacDonald appointed Lawson as Financial Secretary to the War Office in the 1924 Labour government. He worked alongside Clement Attlee, and the two came to enjoy a very firm friendship and mutual admiration. Both felt odd, controlling generals they'd served under a few years before, but the generals liked them, considering them less idle than their predecessors. He served as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Labour in the 1929 Labour government, but refused MacDonald's invitation to join the National Government following the split in 1931.

The 1931 general election was disastrous for Labour, and Lawson was one of only two Durham Labour MPs to keep their seats, out of seventeen who won there in the 1929 election. During the 1930s, Lawson supplemented his income as an MP by writing. He published his autobiography, A Man's Life, in 1932, intended as a record of the family life of miners. He followed this with a novel about miners, Under the Wheels, and biographies of Peter Lee and Herbert Smith. He also wrote for newspapers and periodicals.