The Second Baron Milford made his maiden speech to the House of Lords on this day. He used it to advocate the abolition of the House of Lords. This didn't come as much of a surprise to anyone, as Baron Milford was the only member of the Communist Party of Great Britain ever to sit in the upper chamber.
Wogan Philipps (1902-93) had a standard upbringing for the son of a business tycoon, being schooled at Eton and Oxford and during the holidays living at one or another of various family homes scattered around Britain and the wider world.
He turned out not to have much interest in or aptitude for insurance or shipping or any of his father's business interests, and eventually the First Baron agreed to subsidise the lad for two years while he pursued his vocation, art. This arrangement ended when the senior made an unannounced visit to the junior's studio and was shocked by a painting of a female nude complete with pubic hair. Relations between the two never recovered.
Like so many of his generation, Wogan moved steadily and irrevocably to the left during the 1930s because of the Fascist coup in Spain. He served in the Spanish Civil War as an ambulance driver until a wound sent him home. He then used his knowledge of the shipping industry to help the elected government undermine the blockade of their ports.
Around this time he married his second wife; she was a Communist, and Philipps joined the party too. That was too much for his father - first the pubic hair, now Bolshevism! - and Wogan was disinherited.
In WW2, he was rejected for active service on health grounds and for other war work on political grounds, so he became a much-admired farmer in Gloucestershire. At one point he was elected, standing as a Communist, to Cirencester District Council, becoming that body's only non-Tory member. He was the party's candidate in many other elections locally, his campaigning sometimes facing concerted violence by fascists.
When he inherited a large estate in Italy, Philips persuaded the farm workers to run it as a commune. But when his father died, leading CP figures convinced him to take up his seat in the Lords and use it as a unique platform for propaganda. By that time, the Communists had no members left in the Commons, and Lord Attlee, in his speech formally welcoming Wogan to the Lords, famously remarked that having a Communist voice in the upper chamber was one of the advantages of the hereditary system.
After retirement from agriculture, Wogan Phillips lived in Hampstead for the rest of his life so that he could continue to attend the House and put the Communist case in debates on disarmament and colonialism. By all accounts a man of great charm, he was widely loved. As a painter, however, he never acquired the reputation he might have hoped for - though that never stopped him working. Today his name most commonly pops up in biographies of his one-time wife, the novelist Rosamund Lehmann.
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Sources:
https://biography.wales/article/s6-PHIL-WOG-1902
Britain's Communists the untold story by John Green (Artery, 2014)
https://grahamstevenson.me.uk/2008/09/20/wogan-phillips/
www.independent.co.uk/news/people/obituary-lord-milford-1465048.html