John William Belcher (2 August 1905 – 26 October 1964) was a British Labour Party politician, who served as a trade minister in the post-Second World War Labour government. In February 1949, after an investigation into possible corrupt practices in the Board of Trade, Belcher resigned his ministerial and parliamentary offices when the Lynskey tribunal determined that he had misused his powers as a minister by granting favours in return for small gifts. Belcher, a former railway clerk, entered parliament in the 1945 general election, and was one of the first of that intake to be promoted to office. As minister, he sought to build up good relations with the business community, and maintained that while he may have been unwise in his choice of friends and associates, his actions did not amount to corruption. On leaving parliament he returned to his clerical job with the railways. He died in 1964. Life Early career Belcher was born on 5 August 1905 in Kensington, London, the son of John Thomas Belcher, a sometime postal worker, and his wife Lillie Harriett, née Garrard. After attending Brackenbury Road elementary school, at the age of 11 Belcher won a scholarship to Latymer Upper School, where he remained until 1921. He then found clerical employment at the Great Western Railway goods depot in Smithfield, where he became a member of the Railway Clerks' Association (RCA), and by 1929 was serving as branch secretary. Belcher was active in union affairs throughout the 1930s. He served in various RCA offices, and was the founder of a Workers' Educational Association economics study group for his fellow-clerks at Smithfield. He attended lectures as an external student at London University, and in 1934 received a diploma in economics and social sciences. He had married in 1927; the marriage produced three children. Because of long-standing health problems, when war came in 1939 Belcher was classified as disabled, and was not called up; he spent the war on loan to the Ministry of Information, working as a lecturer and administrator. MP and junior minister In the July 1945 General Election, which brought Labour to power under Clement Attlee, Belcher was elected as the Labour member for Sowerby, capturing the seat from his Conservative opponent with a majority of 6,933. He entered parliament with considerable idealism; his daughter later wrote: "He had seen the deprivation that so many people had suffered in the