Philip Noel-Baker, Baron Noel-Baker (Q57737)

Philip Noel-Baker was a British statesman and advocate of international disarmament who received the Nobel Prize for Peace in 1959. Fluent in seven languages, he campaigned widely for 40 years for peace through multilateral disarmament. Noel-Baker sat in the House of Commons as a Labour member from 1929 to 1931 and from 1936 to 1970. Between 1945 and 1961, he was successively minister of state, secretary of state for air and for Commonwealth relations, and minister of fuel and power. He helped to draft the UN charter and was a member of the British delegation to the General Assembly in 1946-47. From 1960 to 1982 he was president of the International Council on Sport and Physical Recreation of UNESCO. His survey of the disarmament problem was published as The Arms Race: A Programme for World Disarmament (1958). Noel-Baker's other works include Disarmament and The League of Nations at Work, both published in 1926, and The Arms Race (1960). A retrospective study, The First World Disarmament Conference, 1932-33, and Why It Failed, was published in 1979. Noel-Baker was made a life peer in 1977 and spent his retirement working for the cause of world disarmament.