
The Viscount Crookshank, 1932.
Henry Frederick Comfort Crookshank, 1st Viscount
Crookshank,
CH PC (27 May 1893 – 17 October 1961), known as
Harry Crookshank, was a British
Conservative Party politician.
Crookshank
was born in Cairo
and educated
at Eton
College
and Oxford University
. In
World War I
he served in the
Grenadier Guards
and was castrated by shrapnel in 1916.
He then worked in the
British Embassy in Washington, D.C.
until 1924.
Crookshank
was Conservative MP for Gainsborough
, 1924–56. He served as
Parliamentary Under-Secretary,
Home Office, 1934–5; Parliamentary
Secretary, Mines, 1935–39;
Financial Secretary to the
Treasury, 1939–43;
Postmaster General,
1943–45; Minister of Health, 1951–52;
Lord Privy Seal, 1952–55;
Leader of the House of
Commons, 1951–55.
He was raised to the peerage as the
Viscount Crookshank in 1956, a title which became
extinct upon his death in Chelsea
aged
68.
Papers released by The National Archives, London, November 2007,
show that Crookshank, with
Harold
Macmillan, led a faction within the Cabinet of Sir Winston
Churchill's government, who opposed what they perceived to be an
attempt to bounce the Cabinet into a premature decision to
authorise a British thermonuclear bomb programme in July
1954.