John James Lawson, 1st Baron Lawson, PC was a British trade unionist and a Labour politician. A miner and later Member of Parliament in County Durham, 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.
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. The family now included ten children five boys and five girls. Two of his elder brothers worked with his father at the local colliery and the family was no longer on the breadline. A year later, they moved to County Durham, where th
Source: Wikipedia