John Peel made his career in two very different worlds, the Colonial Service and Westminster politics, but to both he brought the spirit of public service inculcated at public school and reinforced by parental example. His father, after a lifetime in the Colonial Administrative Service, completed his career as Governor of Hong Kong, and it was natural for both his sons to follow him. Peel saw and reflected the change in attitude towards the Colonial Empire, which after the war envisaged even the smallest of territories achieving a measure of self government. When economic circumstances forced a shift in career, politics was not his first thought, but an attractive one to a man who was brought up on a creed of service to his country; and his Conservatism was in the same mould. He did not believe that he was elected to push legislation to society to rights, but to serve his country as best he was able. He may be best remembered in the context of a memorable speech from Enoch Powell in the Hola Camp debate in 1959, but his real contribution to Conservative politics was made as a staunch supporter of the European cause and he was one of the first MEPs. As late as 1979, he was still trying to resume his career in the European Parliament, deprived by three votes only of the chance to contest and win the Isle of Wight.
William John Peel was born in June 1912 and in common with the families of many others who served the Empire was sent away to boarding school at the age of 7. His brother was only 5. It was not until he reached Wellington that he came to enjoy school life and it was there that he discovered hockey, the sport at which he excelled. He completed his education reading law at Queens' College, Cambridge and in 1933 joined the Colonial Administrative Service, spending his first year at New College, Oxford training under the Devonshire scheme. It was a perfect move since his future wife was already in Oxford.
His first appointment was as District Commissioner in the Cameron Highlands in Malaya where he operated as administrator and magistrate from a corrugated iron shack that also served as home for his wife and soon afterwards a newborn daughter. From there he was moved to Kuala Lumpur, where he played hockey at the Selangor Club and was chosen to play centre half in the national side, which he later captained. He had played Wanderers hockey at Cambridge and was elected to the Hawks Club, but he had gained a blue. It was therefore a considerable pleasure to recall, as he di, that the Cambridge skipper of his day could not find a place in the Malayan team.
At this stage of his career he had thought little about the future of the British Empire, but he recalled how, when on his first home leave in 1936, he was talking about his future with his father and the latter, slightly startled at an apparent lack of perception, said, "You don't think the British Empire is going to last for ever, do you?"
At the outbreak of war he joined the Straits Settlement Volunteer Force and, as a fluent Malay speaker, was given a staff appointment at military HQ. Once the Prince of Wales and Repulse were sunk, the writing was on the wall and he managed to get his wife and daughters away on one of the troopships that had brought in belated reinforcements. She was the second last ship out of Singapore. Peel was taken captive, incarcerated in Changi Jail and was subsequently part of H Force, the last group of officers sent to work on the Siam- Burma railway. The casualty rate was high and Peel himself nearly lost a leg when it became very badly ulcerated. Rather than amputate, the camp doctor resorted to the use of penicillin powder, purchaswed by his fellow prisoners on the black market. Although he bore the scars for the rest of his life, the ulcers had healed in a week. From his observation of the Malay and Thai prisoners, who died of Beri Beri, very largely because they discarede the rice husks, Peel concluded that Vitamin B was all important to survival. Buy the time the camp was liberated, he was down to six stone, but he had survived. Almost half of H Force had perished. Surprisingly, although he would never visit Japan, Peel was less resentful about his treatment than most of his contemporaries. He put it down to a very different culture in which those who surrendered had no right to humane treatment.
Singapore signalled the end of Empire and to those administering it the need was to develop effective native administrators and a largeish middle class before self-government came. Peel was no "Colonel Blimp", but he always believed that Lennox Boyd had been right about the pace of change and that at the end decolonisation had come too soon. His first postwar appointment in 1946 was as the British Resident in the protectorate of Brunei and he became a good friend of the father of the present Sultan. In 1969 he was made an honorary member of the Brunei nobility and perhaps his only incursion into the business world was to advise a British investment bank on how best to mmangte their affairs in Brunei.
Two years later he became the Resident Commissioner in the Gilbert and Ellice islands and he was party to the discussions of the Rees Committee on constitutional development in the smaller colonial territories. However, mindful of his own experience as a boy, when income tax was imposed on colonial administrators and he found himself poorer than he had been in 1935 and unable to bring his children out to visit, he determined to leave the Colonial Service. He spent two unhappy years as personal assistant to Halford Reddish of Rugby Portland Cement and was then persuaded to go into politics by the father of the man who had been his best friend before the war. Lord Selborne appears to have told him that he would make a good Member and he fought Meriden in the 1955 General Election, losing a close-fought fight by 1,105 votes.
Little more than eighteen months later one of the leading Suez rebels resigned his South East Leicester seat and Peel was selected to fight the by-election in November 1967. Although the Conservative majority dipped slightly, he held the seat comfortably enough and in 1959, he more than doubled his majority, taking more than two thirds of the total vote. Although it was a safe seat, Peel worked hard for his constituents and he was a popular figure amongst them.
His maiden speech was devoted to an attack on "woolly thinking" about Colonial self-determination and about the emphasis given to rights unaccompanied by any corresponding emphasis on duties. He was almost immediately pigeon holed as a right winger because he supported the current Government line on Cyprus. But he was singled out by the Whips' Office as good PPS material and served as Freddie Erroll's PPS when he was Economic Secretary to the Treasury 1958-9 and as Minister of State at the Board of Trade 1959-60. In 1960 he joined the Government as an unpaid Government Whip and he served as a Lord Commissioner of the Treasury from November 1961 until the Government was defeated in the 1964 election. Even when freed from the restrictions of the Whips Office, he made few speeches and rarely made the headlines.
He had acquired considerable notoriety for defending the Governor of Kenya and the Colonial Secretary when the Commons debated the beating of prisoners at the Hola Camp in the summer of 1959. Although he made no defence of the perpetrators, he spoke unwisely of "dealing with desperate and sub-human individuals" and when that drew fire from the Opposition, explained that if Members recalled the type of oath taken by Mau Mau, "I am staggered to think that they can come to any other conclusion but that such men were for the time being at least, sub-human." What followed belongs more to the life of Enoch Powell than that of Peel, a brilliant Parliamentary attack on the Government for not taking on themselves the responsibility for what had happened. Blimpish though he appeared to be, neither Peel nor the man he was defending, Alan Lennox Boyd, favoured the status-quo in Africa, but they saw no reason to surrender the ordered evolution they favoured to insurrectionary violence, and in the cold light of history their views, while arguably unrealistic, have rather more to be said for them than we care to admit.
Peel's prime interests lay in foreign affairs and defence. He was a staunch supporter of the Atlantic Alliance, a member of the North Atlantic Assembly from 1959 until 1974, its President in 1972 and leader of the British delegation from 1970-74; and and it would be fair to say that he was something of a Cold War warrior. He would never visit a Communist country and did not do so even when his son invited him to visit the Soviet Union during the period of perestroika under Gorbachev. But from the first he also took a keen interest in European unity. Like Macmillan he felt that the "civil war" in Europe had been a disaster, costing the lives of good friends like Bill Palmer, and while he never doubted that it had been right to fight it, he was determined that it should never happen again. He strongly supported the application to join the EEC and was one of six Conservative MPs who wrote to the principal European newspapers to declare that Britain did not intend to accept de Gaulle's veto. He had been selected as a Parliamentary Delegate to the Assemblies of the Council of Europe and of Western European Union. He particularly valued the latter as a place where Britain and the Six could get together and he made many good friends among the European delegates and especially the German Christian Democrats. He became Vice President in 1967, Chairman of the Defence and Armaments Committee 1970-72 and President in 1972. It was an enormous satisfaction to be the teller who announced the 112 vote majority in favour of joining the EEC and he was a natural choice to serve on the UK delegation to the Strasbourg Parliament, the first MEPs in 1973-4. He was knighted in 1973.
There were other satisfactions to be had from Europe. One tale that Peel liked to tell was of the evening when he and his then leader on the Council of Europe's Assembly dined at Le Crocodil in Strasbourg. They ate the entire supply of lobsters. "Quelle Homme" was the proprietor's admiring verdict on Lord Crathorne.
When his seat was redistributed before the February 1974 election, Peel indicated that he would like to continue, but he was reluctant to engage in a contest against his neighbouring MP and when the latter made it clear that he would contest the nomination, Peel chose to stand down. He continued briefly as an MEP and would have liked to find a permanent berth in Europe. But it was not to be. He had briefly served in Conservative Central Office after the 1955 election and he returned there as Honorary Director of the International Office 1975-6.
In retirement, he became one of the pillars of the Victoria League for Commonwealth Friendship, becoming its deputy Chairman 1976-81, its Chairman 1982-3 and Vice President and member of the Chairman's Advisory Committee thereafter. He also chaired the Joint Standing Committee with the Royal Commonwealth Society from 1975-83 and served from 1980 to 1986 on the Council of the Royal Overseas League.
Summing up Peel's career is to become aware just how far the Britain he knew has become another country, quite remote from our current experience. Peel's beau ideal in politics was Alec Douglas Home and it is a reminder that to be patriotic, rather old-fashioned and a paternalist does not necessarily indicate a closed mind. It is easy to misjudge Peel and his enthusiasm for Europe. He believed in a Europe of nation states, never thought that Britain could or indeed would want to dominate the enterprise, but saw it as a way of avoiding what he had come to see as the futility of war. He deserves to be remembered for that rather than for his ill-judged remarks in the Hola debate.