Bert Hazell

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Bert Hazell

British Member of Parliament
In office 1964 – 1970
Preceded by	Edwin Gooch
Succeeded by	Ralph Howell
Constituency	North Norfolk

Born	April 18, 1907 (1907-04-18) (age 101) Attleborough, Norfolk, England
Political party	Labour
Occupation	President of the National Union of Agricultural Workers

Bert Hazell CBE (born April 18, 1907), also known as Bertie Hazell, is a retired British Labour Party politician and trade union activist.

The son of a Norfolk farmworker, he left school at 14 to work on a farm in Wymondham, where his duties included scaring crows. When agricultural wages slumped after the First World War sparking the Norfolk farm workers' strike in 1923, Hazell became active in the National Union of Agricultural Workers.

He unsuccessfully contested the safe Tory parliamentary seat of Barkston Ash in Yorkshire in the 1945 and 1950 elections, before returning to Norfolk to help North Norfolk Labour MP Edwin Gooch.

He was elected Member of Parliament (MP) for North Norfolk in 1964. The constituency had the rare distinction of being an agricultural seat electing Labour MPs since 1945, owing to a history of organised agricultural trade unionism and a working-class rural Labour vote in Norfolk at the time, very untypical of the rest of the country. Hazell himself was the president of the National Union of Agricultural Workers. He lost his seat after six years, however, at the 1970 general election to the Conservative candidate Ralph Howell. Subsequently Labour have never regained Norfolk North, and were relegated to third place while the Liberal Democrats eventually gained the seat in 2001.

As president of the NUAAW for 10 years until he retired in 1978, Bert devoted nearly 60 years to the cause of agricultural workers.

Mr Hazell was made an MBE in 1946, and a CBE in 1962.

Hazell, who reached his 100th birthday in April 2007, is the oldest living person to have served as an MP in the United Kingdom. He lives in Yorkshire and is now in frail health. Upon the death of Baron Renton in May 2007, Hazell became the last surviving MP in the United Kingdom to have been born in the 1900s. On 8 November 2008 he will replace the late Lord Shinwell as the longest-living former MP.^[1]