Ernest Davies
Physicist and MP who served in the new Ministry of Technology
ERNEST DAVIES, who has died aged 93, was a physicist and university lecturer who during a brief parliamentary career was a junior minister for eight months in Tony Benn’s Ministry of Technology.
As a technocrat in the Harold Wilson mould, and in Labour terms slightly right of centre, Davies’s main interest was defence and foreign policy. He was Private Parliamentary Secretary, first to George Brown, and then after Brown resigned as Foreign Secretary, his successor Michael Stewart, who made him a delegate to the 1969 UN general assembly. He also served as vicechairman of Labour’s defence and services group.
Davies’s four-year spell in the Commons representing Stretford was nearly even shorter: in 1968 he was shot at by Fedayeen guerrillas with his colleagues David Owen and Colin Jackson as they approached a refugee camp in Jordan.
One of seven Davieses in the Commons, he struggled to establish an identity, frequently receiving the others’ mail. He tried to ease the confusion by styling himself “Doctor”, as he held a Cambridge PHD.
Ernest Arthur Davies was born at Nuneaton on October 25 1926, the son of Dan Davies, a miner who died when Ernest was a child, and the former Ada Smith, a primary schoolteacher. He left technical college in Coventry in 1942 to join the RAF as an aircraft apprentice, but after a year was discharged, having contracted pleurisy.
He taught in Coventry, then won a scholarship to St Andrews University, taking a First in Physics and the Neil Arnott Prize in 1954. He moved to St John’s College, Cambridge, where he took his doctorate in semiconductors. In 1957 he joined Associated Electrical Industries as a research scientist, and six years later took up a lectureship at Manchester University.
Davies was elected to Stretford council in 1961, and in 1966 unseated the borough’s Tory MP Sir Sam Storey by 3,365 votes.
Labour’s landslide re-election was followed by an economic crisis exacerbated by a seamen’s strike. Davies made his maiden speech on the Prices and Incomes Bill brought in by Wilson and James Callaghan to steady the ship, stressing that its success rested on a willingness to accept self-discipline.
After the Torrey Canyon disaster of 1967 Davies was appointed to the Science and Technology Committee investigating oil pollution. Its report criticised the Government’s failure to give its chief scientific adviser, Sir Solly Zuckerman, the powers or funding to initiate urgent research projects.
In October 1969 Wilson set up a Ministry of Technology with overall responsibility for British industry, with Tony Benn in charge and five junior ministers. One was Davies, allocated research establishments and liaison with private industry. Almost his only public utterance was a claim that British shipyard orders had doubled over five years – rightly scorned from the Opposition benches by Sir Keith Joseph.
For the 1970 election in Stretford, the Conservatives fielded Winston Churchill, the grandson of Sir Winston. With a late and unpredicted swing to the Tories, Churchill took the seat back by a majority of 4,015.
Davies became a management selection consultant, then for six years, until his retirement in 1987, lectured in Business Studies at Hammersmith and West London College. Previously a JP in Lancashire, he became an Inner London magistrate in 1972 and a Southwark councillor from 1974 to 1982.
In later life Davies drifted Rightwards, and began to vote Conservative.
In his leisure time he attended classical concerts, took courses on the history of art and had a passionate interest in the history of the two world wars.
His marriages, to Margaret Gatt and Patricia Bates, were dissolved. There were no children. He is survived by his partner Jennifer Hailey.