Sir Richard Thomas Dyke Acland (1906-1990), fifteenth baronet, politician and benefactor, was born in Broadclyst, Devon, as eldest son of Sir Francis Dyke Acland, landowner and liberal politician, and his wife Eleanor Margaret. He was educated at Rugby School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read philosophy, politics and economics. He then served as a lieutenant in the Royal North Devon Yeomanry.
He stood unsuccessfully as a Liberal candidate for Torquay in 1929, and for Barnstaple in 1931, finally winning the latter seat in 1935. By the start of the Second World War, he had moved from conventional Liberalism towards a Christian socialist concern for the transformation of the privileged world in which he had grown up. His published works include Unser Kampf (1940), The Forward March (1941), What it will be like (1942) and How it can be done (1943).
Together with the author J.B. Priestley, he brought together the Forward March movement and members of the 1941 Committee to form the Common Wealth Party in July 1942. This party adopted a manifesto which was socialist, calling for public ownership and morality in politics. In defiance of the Labour-Conservative truce during the Second World War, it fielded candidates against the Government and succeeded in returning three Members of Parliament in by-elections. Acland led the party to its by-election victories: the Party had four MPs by 1945 and appealed to the modest professional middle classes, notably in the London and Merseyside areas. However, after widespread defeat in the post-war General Election of 1945, when only one Common Wealth Party member was returned, Acland resigned. The Party was dissolved, with many of its members joining Labour.
Acland married the architect Anne Stella Alford in 1936, and the couple had four sons. On the death of Richard's father in 1939, he succeeded in the baronetcy. He donated his family's substantial Devon estates at Killerton, Devon, to the National Trust in 1943. He returned to parliament as MP for Gravesend, Kent, in 1947, representing Labour. He resigned his seat in 1955 in protest against the development of the H-bomb, becoming senior lecturer at St. Luke's College of Education (now part of the University of Exeter) from 1959-1974. He continued to write on education matters and world peace until his death at Broadclyst, Devon, in 1990.
From the guide to the Acland Papers, 1930s-c 1989, (University of Exeter)
