Harry Midgley

rdf:langString Harry Midgley

rdf:langString Position abolished

rdf:langString Hugh Gemmell

rdf:langString S. Dobbin

rdf:langString Chair of the Northern Ireland Labour Party

rdf:langString Member of Parliament for Belfast Dock

rdf:langString Leader of the Northern Ireland Labour Party at Stormont

rdf:langString Member of Parliament for Belfast Willowfield

rdf:langString Organising Secretary of the Irish Linen Lappers' and Warehouse Workers' Trade Union

rdf:langString Henry Cassidy Midgley, PC (NI), known as Harry Midgley (1893 – 29 April 1957) was a prominent trade-unionist and politician in Northern Ireland. Born to a working-class Protestant family in Tiger's Bay, north Belfast, he followed his father into the shipyard. After serving on the Western Front in the Great War, he became an official in a textile workers union and a leading light in the Belfast Labour Party (BLP). He represented the party's efforts in the early 1920s to provide a left opposition to the Unionist government of the new Northern Ireland while remaining non-committal on the divisive question of Irish partition. From 1932 as secretary of the BLP's successor, the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP), he urged a closer relationship to British labour movement. Midgley's support for the Republic in the Spanish Civil War, and more broadly his criticism of Irish neutrality in the Second World War. antagonised Catholic voters and precipitated a split with party colleagues. At the end of 1942 Midgley formed the Commonwealth Labour Party and entered the Northern Ireland government first as Minister for Public Security and then as Minister for Labour. After the war, and as an Ulster Unionist, he served as Minister for Education overseeing the raising of the school leaving age to 15 and an expanded programme of school construction.