Tom Williams, Baron Williams of Barnburgh

(Thomas) "Tom" Williams, Baron Williams of Barnburgh, PC (18 March 1888 – 29 March 1967) was a Labour Party politician in the United Kingdom.

Born in Blackwell, Derbyshire, Williams grew up in Swinton in Yorkshire, and began work in 1899 in Kilnhurst. He became involved in trade unionism and joined the Independent Labour Party, joining the British Socialist Party briefly during World War I. In 1918, he was elected as a Labour member of the Bolton-upon-Dearne Urban District Council.

He was elected at the 1922 general election as Member of Parliament (MP) for Don Valley, and held the seat until he stepped down at the 1959 general election.

In Winston Churchill's wartime Coalition Government, he was Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries from 1940 to 1945, serving under the Conservative minister Robert Hudson. He was made a Privy Counsellor in 1941. In Clement Attlee's post-war Labour government, he was Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food from 1945 to 1951.

After his retirement from the House of Commons in 1959, he was made a life peer in February 1961 as Baron Williams of Barnburgh, of Barnburgh in the West Riding of Yorkshire.

References

*Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
*Rayment