Jack Lawson
British politician (1881-1965)

John James Lawson, 1st Baron Lawson, PC (16 October 1881 – 3 August 1965) was a British trade unionist and Labour Party politician. A miner and later the Member of Parliament (MP) for Chester-le-Street in County Durham (1919–1949), he served in the governments of Ramsay MacDonald and Clement Attlee. In 1950 he was ennobled as Baron Lawson, of Beamish in the County of Durham, and is sometimes referred to as Lord Lawson of Beamish.
Background
Lawson was born in the port town of Whitehaven, Cumberland, and grew up in the nearby village of Kells. His father John Lawson was a sailor and miner who had begun working in a colliery by the age of nine, sailed round the world by eleven, and later served in the Royal Naval Reserve. His mother, Lisbeth Savage, was a strict disciplinarian. Both parents were illiterate and the family lived in extremes of poverty common at the time. At the age of three, Lawson was sent to the local National School, Glass House School. Here, he learned to read, developing an avid interest in popular fiction as a boy, and moving on to literary fiction and poetry in later years. When he was six his family moved to the village of Flimby, near the towns of Maryport and Workington.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Jack Lawson” as british politician (1881-1965). Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the people & ideas register because the source frames it as british politician (1881-1965). Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
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 Apr 5, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6113617. VIAF identifies the subject as 50146095193100370082. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1881, 1965, 1919 and 1949.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jack Lawson” 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.