notable in public life included Madron Seligman, Nicholas Henderson and Mark Bonham Carter. During the Second World War, Jenkins received his officer training at Alton Towers and was posted to the 55th West Somerset Yeomanry at West Lavington, Wiltshire. Through the influence of his father, in April 1944 Jenkins was sent to Bletchley Park to work as a codebreaker; while there he befriended the historian Asa Briggs. Early political career (1945–1965) Having failed to win Solihull in 1945, after which he spent a brief period working for the Industrial and Commercial Finance Corporation, he was elected to the House of Commons in a 1948 by-election as the Member of Parliament for Southwark Central, becoming the "Baby of the House". His constituency was abolished in boundary changes for the 1950 general election, when he stood instead in the new Birmingham Stechford constituency. He won the seat, and represented the constituency until 1977. In 1947 he edited a collection of Clement Attlee's speeches, published under the title Purpose and Policy. Attlee then granted Jenkins access to his private papers so that he could write his biography, which appeared in 1948 (Mr Attlee: An Interim Biography). The reviews were generally favourable, including George Orwell's in Tribune. In 1950, he advocated a large capital levy, abolition of public schools and introduction of a measure of industrial democracy to nationalised industries as key policy objectives for the Labour government. In 1951 Tribune published his pamphlet Fair Shares for the Rich. Here, Jenkins advocated the abolition of large private incomes by taxing them, graduating from 50 per cent for incomes between £20,000 and £30,000 to 95 per cent for incomes over £100,000. He also proposed further nationalisations and said: "Future nationalisations will be more concerned with equality than with planning, and this means that we can leave the monolithic public corporation behind us and look for more intimate forms of ownership and control". He later described this "almost Robespierrean" pamphlet as "the apogee of my excursion to the left". Jenkins contributed an essay on 'Equality' to the 1952 collection New Fabian Essays. In 1953 appeared Pursuit of Progress, a work intended to counter Bevanism. Retreating from what he had demanded in Fair Shares for the Rich, Jenkins now argued that the redistribution of wealth would occur over a generation and abandoned the goal of public school abolition. However, he still proposed further nationalisations: "It is quite