Leonard James Callaghan, Baron Callaghan of Cardiff, KG, PC, was a British politician. He served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1976 to 1979. He also served as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary. Callaghan is the only person to have held all four Great Offices of State.
About James Callaghan in brief
Leonard James Callaghan, Baron Callaghan of Cardiff, KG, PC, was a British politician. He served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1976 to 1979. He also served as Chancellor of the Exchequer, Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary. Callaghan is the only person to have held all four Great Offices of State. He is remembered chiefly for the ‘Winter of Discontent’ of 1978–79. His battle with trade unions led to immense strikes that seriously inconvenienced the public, leading to his electoral defeat by Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher. He was the longest lived British prime minister in history. He entered the House of Commons in 1945, and was on the left wing of the party. He took his middle name from his father, James, who was the son of an Irish Catholic father who had fled to England during the Great Irish Famine, and a Jewish mother. He died at the age of 44 years of a heart attack without an income, leaving the family to rely on charity, and forced to be granted a widow’s pension of shillings a week, on the basis that her husband’s death was partly due to his war service. In his early years, Callaghan was known by his first name Leonard, and from then on he was referred to as James or Jim. He attended Portsmouth Grammar School and Oxford University. He became a Chief Petty Officer in the Royal Navy during World War II. He joined the Labour Party in 1945 and became a tax inspector in the 1930s.
After Labour was defeated at the 1970 general election, he played a key role in the Shadow Cabinet. In 1974 he became Foreign Secretary, taking responsibility for renegotiating the terms of the UK’s membership of the European Communities, and supporting a \”Yes\” vote in the 1975 referendum to remain in the EC. In 1976 he became Prime Minister, defeating five other candidates to be elected as his replacement. He continued as Labour Party leader until November 1980, and campaigned to reform the process by which the party elected its leader, before returning to the backbenches where he remained until he was made a life peer as Baron Callagan of Cardiff. He had a son and a daughter, Dorothy Gertrude Callaghan and daughter, Charlotte Callaghan. His mother was an English Baptist, and he married Charlotte in a Baptist chapel. His father ran away from home in the 1890s to join the Navy; as he was a year too young to enlist, he gave a false date of birth and changed his surname from Garogher to Callaghan so that his true identity could not be traced. In 1919, he joined the Coastguard and the town of Brixham in Devon, however he later died only two years later. His family moved to Portsmouth in 1924 when the first Labour government was elected, but he could no longer rely on the charity. In 1929, he gained the Oxford Senior Certificate in 1929, and went on to become an Oxford Senior School teacher.
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