He attended Cambridge through a Surrey county scholarship, which did not cover his living expenses, and he ran out of funds at university, dropping out without a degree at the end of his second year.

He retained this post until he became a Government minister, and he gradually took over running the Association, as well as dominating education policy in Surrey, a county where population increases brought about the need for much new school building.

[14] Ede was first elected to the House of Commons as Member of Parliament (MP) for Mitcham, at a by-election in March 1923, which caused a considerable stir in the media.

He also contributed greatly to environmental protection in Surrey, encouraging extension of green belt, the purchase of property to prevent development, and building bypasses to restrict traffic in town centres.

[22] In the wartime coalition, Ede was appointed on 15 May 1940 to junior ministerial office as Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Education, and served under two Conservative Presidents, first Herwald Ramsbotham, and then Rab Butler.

[23] Ede was a very safe pair of hands and his background complemented that of Butler, who was a practising Anglican, privately educated and from a well-to-do family, and who initially had little knowledge of state elementary schools.

[27] On 4 February 1942 Ede, who had already grown to respect Butler, declined a request that he move to the Ministry of War Transport, although he would have obeyed a “direct order” from Churchill.

[29] The Church of England had been relatively sympathetic to Herwald Ramsbotham's Green Book (June 1941), which had proposed permitting denominational teaching - which would in practice have been mostly Anglican - in state schools to children over the age of 11, lifting the ban which had been in place since the Cowper-Temple Clause of the 1870 Forster Act.

[31] Ministers and officials had less success negotiating with the Roman Catholic Church, who wanted to retain complete autonomy in their schools while receiving 100% state subsidy for infrastructure (rather than the 50% on offer for Voluntary Aided, ie.

Ernest Bevin and Ede threatened to resign if Butler was forced out, and Churchill made the amendment a matter of confidence and ensured its defeat by 425-23 on 30 March.

[36] The Act set the school-leaving age at 15 with effect from April 1947, with the long-term aim of raising it to 16, and made secondary education free, abolishing the term "elementary school".

Independent schools were put under a programme of inspection, a compulsory act of worship introduced, and the rôle and requirements of local education authorities made clear.

Inheriting child care services and magistrates’ courts operating piecemeal throughout the country, his reforms set up consistent procedures and practices.

[39] Changes to the electoral system in the Representation of the People Act finally established the principle of "one person, one vote" and single-member constituencies, for which in Ede's view there had been pressure from the time of the Civil War and through the era of Chartism to his own period.

[41] The Criminal Justice Act abolished the sentences of hard labour, penal servitude and whipping, and established new arrangements for probation and the treatment of young offenders.

[46] Ede ceased to be in government when Labour lost the 1951 United Kingdom general election, and pursued other interests during his remaining 15 years in opposition.

[47] As well as his British Museum work, he became an active member of the BBC's General Advisory Council, and held a leading role in the Unitarian Church.

This did not result in any change in the law but, when he was Home Secretary, his own Criminal Justice Bill in 1948 was successfully amended by MPs who wished to abolish hanging.

A person sentenced to hang was entitled to appeal to the Monarch for mercy, so in practice the Home Secretary, to whom the task was delegated, decided whether each execution should proceed.

For a while he agreed to commute every death sentence to life imprisonment, but the House of Lords then rejected the amendment, and the Criminal Justice Act 1948 did not abolish capital punishment.

[53] The diaries (largely neither transcribed nor published) give an account of his wartime activities from 1941 to 1945 in great detail, as well as shorter memoirs from his time as Home Secretary, which illustrate the wide range of duties and concerns which went with that office in the mid-20th century.

[54] At the suggestion of an historian who used them, with his permission, in her research, he left most of them to the British Museum, of which he became a trustee – initially ex officio as Home Secretary, and then in his own right when he lost office.