Born in Swinton, near Rotherham, Yorkshire, England, Hattersley earned degrees in economics and law from Cambridge University before moving to Alberta in 1956 where he worked as a lawyer.
Hattersley had campaigned on a platform of broadening the party's base and appealing to a wider spectrum of voters but was unable to overcome Reznowski's more doctrinaire approach advocating social credit monetary theory.
[5] In August 1988, the body of Hattersley's 29-year-old daughter, Cathy Greeve, was found in the bathroom at an Edmonton Transit station.
[7] Since his daughter's murder, Hattersley has been involved in an Edmonton victim's support group and has spoken in prisons on alternatives to violence.
Over the course of his life he served as a Lay Reader and choir director at a number of Anglican churches in Edmonton and Ottawa, and in 1974, was ordained as a `priest in secular employment'.