Henry Brooke, Baron Brooke of Cumnor, (9 April 1903 – 29 March 1984) was a British Conservative Party politician who served as Chief Secretary to the Treasury and Paymaster-General from 1961 to 1962 and — following the "Night of the Long Knives" — as Home Secretary from 1962 to 1964. Early life and education Brooke was born in Oxford, the son of artist Leonard Leslie Brooke and Sybil Diana Brooke, daughter of Irish Chaplain Stopford Augustus Brooke. He was educated at Marlborough College, where he was a classmate of Rab Butler, and Balliol College, Oxford. He had an elder brother, 2nd Lt. Leonard Stopford Brooke, who was killed in Germany in 1918 while serving with the Army Cyclist Corps. Political career After teaching philosophy at Balliol College for a year, Brooke worked at a Quaker settlement for the unemployed in the Rhondda Valley from 1927 to 1928. This experience led him to turn down the offer of a Fellowship in philosophy at Balliol in favour of a lifetime in politics. After a year on The Economist, Brooke became one of the original members, and subsequently Deputy Chairman, of the Conservative Research Department (1929–1937) under the chairmanship of Neville Chamberlain. The impetus for the pre-war "special areas" legislation was derived from his unsigned articles on "Places without a Future" which he wrote for The Times in 1934. He was elected as a Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) for Lewisham West in a 1938 by-election. He spoke at the request of the Whips in support of Chamberlain in the debate of May 1940, just before the prime minister's fall from power, and Brooke himself was defeated in the 1945 general election. The next year he was elected to the London County Council, and served as Conservative leader on the council until 1951, continuing to serve on the Council and the Hampstead borough council until 1955. In 1949, he led the Conservative party on the London County Council to the brink of seizing power for only the third time in its history. From 1946 to 1948 he was the last deputy chairman of the Southern Railway before nationalisation. Brooke returned to parliament in 1950 as MP for Hampstead, and entered Winston Churchill's government in 1954 as Financial Secretary to the Treasury, serving under Rab Butler and Harold Macmillan when they were Chancellors of the Exchequer. He continued in this job until 1957, when