Despite the loss of both legs in action during the Second World War, Richard Wood entered the House of Commons in 1950 and made a considerable success of his ministerial career under four Conservative Prime Ministers. However, he is remembered less for his record of quiet competence than for being the minister unfairly blamed for undermining Selwyn Lloyd's pay pause and for his brief emergence centre stage as a possible successor to Edward Heath. Far from hampering him, his own disability made him an effective campaigner for the disabled and he was appointed to chair the Disablement Services Authority in 1987. Although he knew his own mind, he was the most patient and courteous of men, good at handling differences in a civilised manner, and as Lord Robens recalled, "never the arrogance which power brings to most people." A staunch Anglican like his father, wherever he was, he almost always managed to attend communion. "If ever there was a man of saint-like qualities in public life", Lord Boyd Carpenter recalled, it was Richard Wood.
Richard Frederick Wood was the third son of the first Earl of Halifax, Viceroy of India, Foreign Secretary, and wartime Ambassador to the United States. He was educated at Eton and New College Oxford, where he completed his degree after the war. After serving briefly as an honorary attaché to the British Embassy in Rome in 1940, he enlisted as a private and was commissioned as a Lieutenant in the King's Royal Rifle Corps in 1941. He served with the 8th Army in the desert and was blown up by a land mine on a raid in Tunisia in January 1943. Both his legs had to be amputated. Nothing daunted, within months he was touring American hospitals, encouraging the disabled as much by his example as with words.
He was elected for Bridlington in 1950, defeating a Yorkshire businessman who had held the Buckrose seat before redistribution, and massively increased his majority in 1951. Despite his war injuries he drove a car and rode; indeed he canvassed parts of his constituency on horseback. He held the seat until 1979, when he accepted a life peerage as Lord Holderness. His interest in the Limbless ex Serviceman's Association, for whom he toured the United States, led to his appointment as a Governor of Queen Elizabeth's Foundation for the Disabled in 1951, a residential establishment for training the disabled, and that was where he first came into contact with Alf Robens, a fellow governor.
Derek Heathcoat Amory asked him to be his Parliamentary Private Secretary at the Ministry of Pensions in October 1951 and he moved with Amory to the Board of Trade in 1953 and to the Ministry of Agriculture in 1954. Eden gave him office as junior minister at Pensions and National Insurance in December 1955 and Macmillan shifted him to become Macleod's Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Labour in April 1958. At pensions he too responsibility for war pensions, a job that involved a good deal of travel, getting in and out of cars, mastering town hall steps, and standing about at gatherings. Boyd Carpenter, his ministerial chief, was impressed with the way in which he dealt with these obstacles and with the way that he got his head bitten off if he tried to help. In May 1958 Macmillan moved him to serve as Macleod's Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Labour and eighteen months later gave him his own department as Minister of Power, a tricky assignment since his predecessor, Lord Mills, was in the Cabinet and prone to interfere. Before he had held the job a year, he came under heavy fire from the Conservative backbenches for appointing an outsider to run the Coal industry. The choice had fallen on a leading Labour politician, Alf Robens, who went on to serve two terms.
Wood spent four years in the department, longer than all but one of his predecessors and all his successors until the department was absorbed into the Ministry of Technology in 1969. Most of them had a bad press from Robens, who thought they were manoeuvred by their civil servants. Wood was the exception, "a man with whom you could work well", and as the official historian of the Coal Board records, in a long line of sponsoring ministers, he "probably ranked with Gaitskell as most willing and able to understand the problems of the coal industry." That did not prevent him from resisting efforts by Robens to abort the incipient decision to import liquid methane from North Africa, a decision that was secured with the aid of "Rab" Butler in the teeth of Lord Mill's prolonged opposition in Cabinet. Wood also took a tremendous interest in the seismic surveys that were being carried out by the Gas Council in the North Sea and on one memorable occasion in heavy seas he transferred from a small service vessel to the survey ship "refusing all aid and relying only on a stout walking stick". It was the same determination that he showed when touring the pits underground with Robens. It fell to Wood to announce the scaling back of the nuclear programme undertaken after Suez and to give his consent to the building of two coal fired power stations at Cottam and Widnes; he also looked with favour on the Chancellor's decision to introduce an oil fuel levy, which helped level the playing field between the different forms of power. Wood understood better than most of his successors the relationship between the big capital investment decisions, employment and the future of whole communities and the need therefore to ensure the whole picture was brought into the costings. When the Treasury insisted in 1961 that all nationalised industries should secure an 8% rate of return on their capital, Wood jibbed at the 13% increase in electricity prices involved and was one of those who secured the omission of a specific figure from the White Paper.
Perhaps the most controversial moment in his career came when the Electricity Council decided to breach the pay pause in November 1961 and earned a public rebuke from the Prime Minister. Wood had been consulted and, while he had duly passed on the Government's view, he admitted that it was not conducive to averting the almost inevitable strike that would follow a refusal to settle. Neither he nor Mills was ready to take responsibility for plunging the industry into industrial strife since they knew the Government had not the stomach for that particular fight, but his failure to warn either the Prime Minister or the Chancellor attracted Macmillan's ire. But the Prime Minister knew that without legal powers, there was nothing the minister could do and did not seek his resignation. Nor was the legacy unhelpful. Little more than a year later, in January 1963, the Prime Minister convened a meeting of ministers, Wood being one, in the face of a fresh power dispute. They urged a reluctant Electricity Council to negotiate and the upshot was a three year agreement and a productivity-based rise of about 4% a year, as Macmillan noted, "very good from the Incomes Policy point of view".
In October 1963 Wood took over the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance, a job made for him, but where he had little time to do more than push through a Family Allowances and National Insurance bill that improved the lot of widowed mothers and relaxed the earnings rule.
In opposition he held a number of front bench posts and when the Conservatives returned to power, Heath made him Minister for Overseas Development, a role which he retained when that department was absorbed into the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. Much of his work was done abroad, in Africa and Asia.
After Heath had lost two elections in succession in 1974, moves were speedily afoot to replace him and the late Lord Alport consulted Douglas Home about the possibility of running Wood as Heath's successor. Home had the highest opinion of Wood, but thought his particular strengths had been out in the field, whereas as leader of the Opposition, he would have to talk, not do, and he questioned whether his health would stand it. There was nevertheless sufficient interest and press briefing for several commentators to mention his name. To those who approached him, Wood stressed his moderation, but the party was in no mood to job backward and in the end he chose not to run.
Wood, who had earlier served as a director of Yorkshire Newspapers and the Hulton Press took up a directorship with the Hargreaves Group and from 1981 to 1990 served also as a regional director for the Yorkshire and Humberside board of Lloyd's Bank. In 1981 he took on the Presidency of Queen Elizabeth's Foundation and from 1987 to 1991 he served as Chairman of the Disablement Services Authority.
Wood was a keen shot, a horseman and a gardener. As a rifleman, he was delighted to have been made Hon. Colonel of the Queen's Royal Rifles in 1962, a role that he also fulfilled for a territorial battalion of the Green Jackets between 1967 and 1989. The courage, compassion and kindness that he revealed in all his activities won the respect and affection of all who knew him and he is recalled by those who dealt with him as a minister as accessible, easy to deal with, surprisingly apolitical, civilised in argument, and understanding, simply as one civil servant put it, "a very good man".