From the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Denis Herbert Howell, Baron Howell
(1923–1998)
by Tam Dalyell
https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/69605Published in print: 23 September 2004
Published online: 23 September 2004
Howell, Denis Herbert, Baron Howell (1923–1998), politician, was born on 4 September 1923 at 115 Guildford Street, Birmingham—a back-to-back house—the middle of the three children of Herbert Howell (d. 1961), an engineer's fitter, and his wife, Bertha Amelia Watkins. Political awareness came early: his first memory was of sitting on his father's knee at a general strike meeting in 1926. So too did his devotion to football, and to Aston Villa Football Club in particular. He left Handsworth grammar school, in Birmingham, at fifteen and started work as an office boy. Rejected for military service, he served as a firewatcher and in the Home Guard throughout the Second World War, and began refereeing football matches for the Birmingham Sunday League in 1942. In 1951 he graduated as a linesman in the Football League, and was a Football Association referee from 1956 until 1966.
Howell was active from an early age in the Clerical and Administrative Workers' Union—he was president, from 1971 to 1989, of its expanded successor, the Association of Professional, Executive, Clerical and Computer Staff (APEX)—and in 1942 he joined the Labour Party. He was elected to Birmingham city council at twenty-three, and four years later, in 1950, was elected to the important post of secretary of the Labour group. This experience was his training ground as one of the most effective operators in British politics of his generation. He contested the unwinnable King's Norton parliamentary seat in 1951, won Birmingham All Saints in 1955, and lost it by twenty votes in 1959. On 20 August 1955 he married Brenda Marjorie Willson (b. 1928/9), with whom he had three sons and a daughter. He found great pleasure and support in his family: 'I find the fellowship and affection of the family to be an indispensable part of my public life' (Howell, 85). Out of parliament, and with characteristic resilience, he founded his own public relations company and became a founding member of the Campaign for Democratic Socialism, the Gaitskellite organization formed to counter the left-wing unilateralists in the Labour Party. The connections he formed at this time helped to get him the Labour nomination for the 1961 by-election at Birmingham Small Heath, which he held for the next thirty-one years. He thus had a power-base in the party; Harold Wilson, from a different political stable, could never ignore Howell.
On Labour's victory in 1964 Harold Wilson appointed Howell the country's first minister for sport, as a parliamentary under-secretary at the Department of Education, but did not want to give him a budget because 'the country's broke' (Howell, 142). Howell, no respecter of persons and the least deferential of men, reminded the prime minister that Britain was to host the 1966 world cup and would need funds. Howell got his budget—and his prestige was mightily, if irrationally, enhanced by England's winning the tournament. Howell—sometimes a bully and cajoler, always active—became one of Whitehall's most effective ministers. In the teeth of civil service opposition he set up the Sports Council. He appointed an important enquiry, under Sir Norman Chester, of Nuffield College, Oxford, into Association Football (1966–8). A committed opponent of apartheid, especially in sport, he shamed the MCC into cancelling their 1968–9 tour of South Africa on account of the racial problems surrounding the Worcestershire and England cricketer Basil D'Oliveira, which marked the beginning of the long sporting boycott of South Africa. He was a tower of strength in creating the conditions for the Commonwealth games in Edinburgh in 1970. In 1969 he was moved from the Department of Education to be minister of state at the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, but carried his portfolio as minister of sport with him, 'the first man in history to take a Ministry with him when he moves' (ibid., 199).
Howell sat on the opposition front benches between 1970 and 1974, and was inevitably reappointed minister for sport when Labour returned to office in 1974. Shortly after the election an IRA car bomb was planted at his Birmingham home; his wife and youngest son narrowly escaped death or injury. Sport now came under the Department of the Environment. Here he gained a reputation as a different kind of rain-maker. In the notoriously dry summer of 1976 James Callaghan appointed him minister for drought. The legend quickly grew up that just as he appealed for restraint in the use of water it began to rain, and continued to do so for most of a month. In fact the rains did not arrive for ten days, beginning in Yorkshire just as Howell ceremonially turned on an emergency standpipe.
Back in opposition Howell energetically opposed Margaret Thatcher's ban on British athletes competing at the Moscow Olympic games in 1980, following the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. He raised funds to send a British team, bolstered Dennis Follows, the wavering chairman of the British Olympic Association, and forcefully expressed the view that the Olympic games were beyond politics. The military forces of the west were unable to interpose themselves between the USSR and Afghanistan; Howell and his supporters would not accept that 'our freedoms must be defended by Olympic sport' (Howell, 293). The depleted British team won twenty-one medals; Howell was awarded the Olympic order silver medal by the International Olympic Committee Congress.
Denis Howell retired from the House of Commons in 1992, after two major heart operations and the tragic death in a car crash of his youngest son, David, in 1986. He took a life peerage as, inevitably, Baron Howell, of Aston Manor in the city of Birmingham. His last great campaign was an unsuccessful attempt to bring the 1992 Olympics to the city to which he always owed his greatest allegiance. He published his autobiography in 1990, under the apt title Made in Birmingham. Lord Howell collapsed after making a speech at a dinner in support of Cancer Research at Birmingham, and died from heart disease in Solihull Hospital on 19 April 1998. His public funeral took place on 24 April at St Paul's Church, Birmingham, where many tributes were paid to the man known in his own city as Mr Brum.
1968 photograph by Godfrey Argent Studios ; collection National Portrait Gallery, London
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