LABOR'S NEW LEADER

Successor to Clement Attlee as leader of Britain's Labor Party and a future Prime Minister if Labor should return to power: Hugh Todd Naylor Gaitskell.

Born: April 9, 1906, the younger of two sons, in London. His mother was Scottish, his father an English official in the colonial service. Young Hugh spent his first years shuttling with a nanny between England and Burma.

Education: The best Britain provides--private prep school, Winchester, then New College, Oxford, where he took first-class honors in "Modern Greats" (politics, philosophy, economics) and first developed an interest in Socialism. During the General Strike of 1926, other students swarmed off to man buses or unload ships; Hugh got himself a union card and distributed the strikers' newspapers. When a fond aunt offered to subsidize him in an army career, Hugh replied: "My future belongs to the working class."

Academic Career: After graduation, took a poorly paid job lecturing to coal miners for the Workers' Educational Association. In 1928 became teacher of economics at London University, department head in 1938.

Political Career: Ran unsuccessfully for Parliament in 1935. When World War II began, entered government service. At the Board of Trade under Hugh Dalton, he rationed Britain's coal, regulated its retail prices. At war's end, despite a coronary thrombosis which prevented him from campaigning, was elected to Parliament with a 10,000-vote majority.

Postwar Career: His rise was meteoric. In less than two years he was Minister of Fuel and Power, responsible for nationalizing Britain's coal mines. (Urging fewer baths to conserve coal, he once joked: "Personally, I've never had a great many hot baths myself. Anyway, what's underneath isn't seen by anybody.") In 1950 he became Minister for Economic Affairs, then Chancellor of the Exchequer when ailing Stafford Cripps resigned. Forced to find the money for rearmament in his first budget, he courageously slashed expenses of the welfare state, imposed charges for spectacles and false teeth under the health service--the decision which led to the rebellion of Aneurin Bevan and launched their enmity. Bevan calls Gaitskell "a desiccated calculating machine"; Gaitskell thinks Bevan an irresponsible demagogue.

Personal Life: An Anglican, he is married to tiny, dark, vivacious Dora Creditor Frost, a divorcee of Russian-Jewish descent. They live modestly in a twelve-room house in Hampstead, rent five rooms to a tenant. They have two teen-age daughters, one son by Mrs. Gaitskell's first marriage. Gaitskell has blue eyes and pale red hair, loves parties, likes to dance. "My dancing is notorious," he admits. In Parliament, he is sharp, often witty, but occasionally suffers from a tendency to lecture his colleagues like the economics professor he is. He disdains backroom political intriguing, is usually surrounded by a few young, admiring economists.

Views: Very early, he decided that the working classes succeed only in alliance with the middle class. He does not think in Marxian terms of class warfare, has incurred the enmity of the far left by demanding the expulsion of Communists from union leadership. Says he: "I want to see a society of equal men and women. I want everyone to have the opportunity of developing his personality to the full; I want fellowship and fraternity and I want to see these things achieved by democracy . . . These to me are Socialist ideas. Nationalization to me is a means, not an end."

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