He was educated at Rugby School and at Balliol College, Oxford, before qualifying as a barrister (admitted at the Inner Temple in 1930).

During the Second World War, the new party showed signs of a breakthrough, especially in London and Merseyside, winning three by-elections.

[citation needed] As an advocate of public land ownership, Acland felt it impossible to reconcile his possession of the Acland estates with his politics; in 1944 he sold his West Country estates at Killerton in Devon and Holnicote in Somerset to the National Trust for £134,000 (2011 equivalent £13.5 million),[5] partly out of principle and also to ensure their preservation intact.

The terms of this deal were kept secret; "in widespread publicity from which the National Trust and the Aclands emerged glowing with virtue, the entire transaction was portrayed as a gift" and "the Aclands held on to... eighteenth-century family plates and dishes, portraits and landscapes, a group of family miniatures, an early nineteenth-century piano... they were able to buy a nice house in Hampstead at 66 Frognal Street; there was to be an education fund for the boys; and Common Wealth received about £65,000, allowing it to win two more by-elections."

[8] Acland's sons were in later years displeased with the sale of the estates; the heir, John, left a 1994 document at Devon Record Office outlining "how he had made many requests that his mother 'should explain to me why the Killerton and Holnicote estates had been given [sic] to the National Trust in the 1940s'... John found on reading [the letters between his mother and father] that she had destroyed all the documents from the critical period at the end of 1942... His note continued: 'Anne only talked to me once, in 1989, about the gift [sic] of the estates... her principal contention was that she and Richard had been in complete agreement at every stage.'

"[9] Soon after leaving parliament he took a job as a maths master at Wandsworth Grammar School in Sutherland Grove, new Southfields, London, with effect from September 1955.

Acland's book, Unser Kampf, published by Penguin in 1940, containing ideas inspired by a Christian-based moral view of society.

[11] He advocated common ownership, citing the work of Conrad Noel as well as the Bible to support his views.