Leslie Hore-Belisha

Origins and early life

Leslie Hore-Belisha was born at Devonport on 7 September 1893 into a Sephardi Jewish family of Manchester and London origin, the son of Jacob Isaac Belisha, an insurance company official who died when the boy was nine; he was a Jew all his life, never converted, and the antisemitism directed at him is part of his story.

Work and career

He served in the First World War, rose to major, and was called to the bar before entering Parliament as Liberal member for Devonport in 1923. As minister of transport from 1934 he took hold of a country where road deaths were rising without check and rewrote the rules of the road: he introduced the Highway Code, the modern driving test and licence, the thirty-mile-an-hour speed limit in built-up areas, pedestrian crossings, and the orange globes on black and white posts that were named Belisha beacons after him and still stand at British crossings ninety years later.

Road deaths fell sharply. In 1937 Neville Chamberlain made him secretary of state for war, and he set about reforming an army run by a caste: he raised the pay and living conditions of the private soldier, forced the retirement of elderly generals, opened the officer corps beyond the traditional families, doubled the Territorial Army and introduced conscription in peacetime in April 1939, over great opposition. That programme, and his manner, made him enemies among the senior officers, and this fiche says plainly that when Chamberlain dismissed him in January 1940 the affair was widely and credibly attributed to antisemitism in the military establishment and at court.

He sat in Parliament until 1945, was made a baron in 1954, and died at Reims on 16 February 1957 while addressing a Franco-British meeting.