Philip Noel-Baker: Olympic Silver and a Nobel Peace Prize
He is the only human being who has ever won both an Olympic medal and a Nobel Prize, and the two achievements were not unrelated. Philip Noel-Baker took silver in the 1500 metres at Antwerp in 1920, at a Games staged in a city still wrecked by the war he had spent four years driving ambulances through, and he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1959 for a lifetime spent trying to make such wars structurally impossible. In between he sat in Parliament for thirty-six years and in the Cabinet for four.
A Quaker Household
He was born Philip John Baker on 1 November 1889 in Brondesbury Park, London, the sixth of seven children in a Quaker family. His father, Allen Baker, was a Canadian-born Quaker who had come to England in 1876, served as a Progressive member of the London County Council from 1895 to 1906 and then sat as Liberal MP for East Finsbury from 1905 to 1918. His mother, Elizabeth Balmer Moscrip, was Scottish. The pacifism was therefore inherited, and so was the assumption that conscience was something you exercised in public life rather than in private.
He was educated at the Quaker schools Ackworth, in the West Riding of Yorkshire, and Bootham, in York, then crossed the Atlantic to Haverford College in Pennsylvania before going up to King's College, Cambridge, in 1908.
Cambridge: The Union and the Track
Cambridge revealed both of his talents at once. He took a second in the first part of the history tripos and a first in the second part in economics, presided over the Cambridge Union Society in 1912, and served as president of the Cambridge University Athletic Club from 1910 to 1912. He also ran fast enough to reach the Olympics: at the 1912 Stockholm Games he competed in the 800 and 1500 metres and made the 1500 metres final. On graduating he was awarded the Whewell Scholarship in international law — the discipline that would become his life's other subject.
In 1914 he was appointed vice-principal of Ruskin College, Oxford, the adult education institution for working-class men that stood outside the university proper, and in 1915 he was elected a fellow of King's.
Four Years of Ambulances
Then the war came, and Noel-Baker's Quakerism was put to the only test that counts. He organised and led the Friends' Ambulance Unit attached to the French front in 1914 and 1915. From 1916 he was a registered conscientious objector, and from 1915 to 1918 he served as adjutant of the First British Ambulance Unit for Italy, working with the British Red Cross. He was decorated for it by three governments — Britain, France and Italy — a rare combination of refusing to fight and being honoured by armies for what he did instead.
In June 1915 he married Irene Noel, a field hospital nurse. In 1921 the couple took the hyphenated surname Noel-Baker by deed poll.
Antwerp, 1920
At the Antwerp Olympics of 1920 he was captain and flag-bearer of the British team. He won his first-round heat in the 800 metres and then took the silver medal in the 1500 metres, finishing behind his own teammate Albert Hill. He captained the British team again in Paris in 1924 but did not compete. Sport remained a lifelong commitment rather than a youthful phase: he organised the 1948 London Olympic Games and served as president of the International Council of Sport Science and Physical Education from 1960 to 1976.
Building the League
His serious work began with the peace. Noel-Baker was closely involved in the creation of the League of Nations, first as assistant to Lord Robert Cecil and then to Eric Drummond, the League's first secretary-general, and he did substantial work on its mandates system. He became the first Sir Ernest Cassel Professor of International Relations at the London School of Economics, holding the chair from 1924 to 1929, and lectured at Yale from 1933 to 1934. When the League's successor was built in the mid-1940s he was there too, serving on the British delegation to the United Nations and helping to draft its charter and rules of procedure. Few people had a hand in the constitutions of both twentieth-century attempts at collective security.
Coventry, Derby, and the Cabinet
He entered the Commons as Labour member for Coventry in May 1929 and lost the seat in the rout of October 1931. After unsuccessful attempts at Birmingham Handsworth in 1924 and Coventry in 1935, he returned in July 1936, winning the Derby by-election caused by J. H. Thomas's resignation, and he stayed — for Derby and then, from 1950, for Derby South — until 1970. His parliamentary career ran to thirty-six years.
Office came with the war and after it: parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of War Transport from February 1942, Minister of State for Foreign Affairs from 1945 to 1946, Secretary of State for Air from October 1946, Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations from October 1947 — which brought him into the Cabinet — and Minister of Fuel and Power from February 1950 until Labour lost power in October 1951. He sat on Labour's National Executive Committee from 1937 and chaired the party in 1946–47, losing his NEC place to Michael Foot in 1948.
The Arms Race
Disarmament was the thread through all of it. As early as 1938 he was arguing that half-measures were useless: "The only way to prevent atrocities from the air is to abolish air warfare and national air forces altogether." In the 1950s he opposed the Bevanite left and argued for multilateral rather than unilateral nuclear disarmament — a position that satisfied neither camp but which he held on the practical ground that disarmament had to be negotiated to be real. In 1958 he published *The Arms Race: A Programme for World Disarmament*, the book that consolidated the case and, the following year, brought him the Nobel Peace Prize.
Ninety-Two Years
He declined appointment as a Companion of Honour in the 1965 New Year Honours, and stood down from Derby South at the 1970 general election. He accepted a peerage eventually, created a life peer in the 1977 Silver Jubilee and Birthday Honours and raised to the Lords on 22 July 1977 as Baron Noel-Baker of the City of Derby, aged eighty-seven. Two years later, at ninety, he co-founded the World Disarmament Campaign with Fenner Brockway and served as its co-chair for the rest of his life. He was still speaking in Lords debates in his nineties, intervening on the Falkland Islands conflict in 1982.
Irene had died in 1956; their son Francis became a Labour MP and sat in the Commons alongside his father. Noel-Baker died on 8 October 1982 at his Westminster home, aged ninety-two. The Philip Noel-Baker Peace Garden in Elthorne Park, in the London Borough of Islington, carries his name.
