ABSTRACT
When he was elected for the Lincolnshire fishing constituency of Grimsby in the General Election of 5 July 1945, Kenneth Gilmour Younger was just one of the 259 new Labour MPs whose election contributed to the biggest landslide in British politics since 1906 and which resulted in the formation of the first majority Labour government under the leadership of Clement Attlee. Younger’s background, however, was hardly typical. Born on 15 December 1908, his family was staunchly Conservative. Indeed, his grandfather, the brewer George Younger, was made a viscount in 1922 as a reward for the important services he had rendered to the Conservative and Unionist Party after he was appointed its chairman in 1916, and his great-nephew, also named George Younger, was a Cabinet minister in Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government of the 1980s.
