His mother's family was involved both financially and in the management of Elswick Shipyards and Armstrongs Armament manufacturers in Newcastle upon Tyne.

He worked for a year from 1895 as an Assistant Naval Constructor in Portsmouth before returning to Newcastle-upon-Tyne to head Armstrong's drawing office.

[1] Following the outbreak of the Second Boer War in late 1899 he was given the army rank of captain on 3 March 1900,[2] and for three years commanded a volunteer battery of the Royal Field Artillery equipped with naval guns.

He became disillusioned with the Liberals after 1910, when it became clear that the government would not honour campaign commitments to land reform and opposing vested interests.

It was while serving at Gallipoli that he met volunteers of the Zion Mule Corps commanded by Joseph Trumpeldor that would affect his views about British policy on Palestine.

[4] Back in Parliament he expressed concern at under-staffing and support for national service, though he also defended the rights of conscientious objectors.

He supported a number of unpopular causes, including opposition to the reparations from Germany contained in the Treaty of Versailles.

In 1920 he criticised the government's partition of British territories into Palestine and Transjordan, and continued to attack what he saw as its bias against Zionism for the next two decades.

There was tacit co-operation between Labour and the opposition Liberals in some seats at the 1923 general election, and Wedgwood ran unopposed in Newcastle-under-Lyme.

Having been re-elected vice-chairman of the party in 1922 and 1923, Wedgwood expected a seat in the Cabinet when Labour formed its first government at the start of 1924.

After some pressing, MacDonald gave him a seat in the Cabinet, but with the sinecure title of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster rather than a departmental portfolio.

After the fall of the government, Wedgwood publicly criticised MacDonald's leadership and Labour's reliance on civil servants.

He sat on Labour's front bench in opposition, speaking on, amongst other policy areas, local government, where he encouraged Clement Attlee.

Whilst Wedgwood was in America, Winston Churchill offered him a peerage, inviting him to sit for Labour in the House of Lords.

Wedgwood was impressed by his contact with the Zion Mule Corps in 1915, while serving in World War I, and said that he first became aware of Zionism "as a creed" in 1916 when Dorothy Richardson invited him to address a Zionist meeting.

[11] In October 1926, Wedgwood, a devoted Zionist, visited Palestine and challenged the Mandatory government's policies in his 1928 book The Seventh Dominion, accusing the British administration of hindering the country's social and economic development.

[12] In 1942 he prefaced the booklet STOP THEM NOW, the first public report printed in English about the non-stop destruction of the Jews in German-occupied territories, in which he says : "The Huns and the Mongols, Tamerlane with his mountains of skulls, all these demons of long ago were patterns of chivalry compared with the pureblooded devils into which Hitler has converted Germans.