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Richard Wood 1941.
Richard Frederick Wood was born on 5th
October 1920. The youngest son of the
Earl of Halifax, Neville Chamberlain’s
foreign secretary and Churchill’s wartime
ambassador to Washington, he was
educated at Eton College and went up
to New College, Oxford. However, the
war cut short his studies and he served
as a junior attaché at the British Embassy
in Rome, escaping only days before
Italy entered the war. Enlisting firstly as
a private in the King’s Own Yorkshire
Light Infantry, he trained at Sandhurst
and was commissioned into the King’s Royal Rifle Corps on 22nd February 1941. Wood served in the Middle East, before losing both legs in 1943 when his jeep ran over a mine.
As soon as he was able to walk on prosthetic legs, Wood toured the United States, encouraging other wounded servicemen. After the war, he returned to complete his degree in politics, philosophy and economics, running the junior common room with future Labour MP Tony Benn. After a spell with the publisher of the Yorkshire Post, he stood for the safe Conservative seat of Bridlington in the 1950 general election. Over the next 30 years, he rose steadily through junior ministerial positions, firstly as a parliamentary private secretary then, in succession as minister for pensions, power, disability and, latterly, overseas development. His charm and persuasiveness were notably shown when he headed off a proposed strike by militant miners by making the Labour MP Alf Robens chairman of the National Coal Board. Wood harboured no great political ambition other than that of public service and, when touted as a possible successor to Edward Heath, remarked: ‘Some of my friends have ideas above my station’.
During his time in parliament, Wood was a constant champion of disabled people and, above all, disabled ex-servicemen. His own experience of badly fitted artificial limbs made him a knowledgeable chairman of the Disablement Services Authority, which did much to modernise the procurement, manufacture and distribution of
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