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Bruce Douglas-Mann

British politician (1927-2000)

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMar 22, 2026
Entity authorityQ4977395 ↗
Source-derived summary

Bruce Leslie Home Douglas-Mann (23 June 1927 – 27 July 2000) was a British politician.

Early life

Bruce Douglas-Mann was born at Bexhill, Sussex, the son of a solicitor, Leslie John Douglas-Mann, MC.

Douglas-Mann was educated at Upper Canada College, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, and following national service in the navy, read PPE at Jesus College, Oxford, from 1948 to 1951. In 1954, he qualified as a solicitor and served as a councillor on Kensington Borough Council 1962-65 and on the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea from 1964. As a solicitor he specialised in trade union law and claims over industrial accidents and injuries. He also worked on obscenity cases and briefed barrister John Mortimer on the film Last Tango in Paris. He was chairman of the Society of Labour Lawyers from 1974 to 1980.

Parliamentary career

Douglas-Mann contested St Albans in 1964 and Maldon in 1966 as a Labour candidate. He was elected Member of Parliament for Kensington North in 1970, then for Mitcham and Morden in February 1974.

Douglas-Mann spoke out on the plight of refugees. In 1971, in the East Bengal (now Bangladesh) refugee crisis (during the Bangladesh Liberation War) he said it was "the worst tragedy the world had known" and the following year, when Idi Amin ordered the expulsion of Asians from Uganda he said that returning them would be "like sending Jews back to Hitler in the 1930s".

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Bruce Douglas-Mann” is british politician (1927-2000). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Bruce, Douglas-Mann and British, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewStrongest as a route into the people, institutions and dated events that shaped the subject’s public record. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1927, 2000, 1948, 1951—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1927-06-23. For this dossier, Bruce, Douglas-Mann and British is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “british politician (1927-2000)” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 22, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q4977395. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1927, 2000, 1948 and 1951.

Critical limits

Public reputation and documentary evidence do not always develop together; absence from a summary is not evidence of historical absence. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Bruce Douglas-Mann”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Bruce Douglas-Mann primary sources, Bruce Douglas-Mann archive and Bruce research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Bruce Douglas-Mann”?
  2. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
  3. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Bruce Douglas-Mann” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.