Biography

Educated at Stowe School and St Thomas' Hospital, London, Taylor specialized in psychiatry and worked at the Royal Bethlem Hospital, the Royal Free and the Maudsley, serving in Royal Volunteer Naval Reserve specializing in neuro-psychiatry. Before the war he was briefly assistant editor of the Lancet, obtained his doctorate and Membership of the Royal College of Physicians. From 1941 he served as director of home intelligence in the Ministry of Information, establishing the wartime social survey. He joined the Labour Party and was elected as the Labour Member for Parliament for Barnet in 1945, serving as Parliamentary Private Secretary for Herbert Morrison 1948-1950, losing his seat in 1950. Taylor was Vice-President of the Harlow New Town Corporation and was its was the first director (1955-1967) of its Industrial Medical Service, establishing local health centres. Taylor conducted a survey of general practice for the Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust and published Good General Practice in 1954 and was made a Life Peer in 1958, becoming Baron Taylor of Harlow. In 1962 he chaired the Labour Party's study group on higher education and mediated a dispute between the Provincial Government of Sasketchewan, Canada and doctors. Taylor became Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies in the Commonwealth Office under the new Labour Government, resigning in 1967 to become Vice-Chancellor of the Memorial University of New Foundland, from which he retired in 1973. Taylor resigned from the Labour Party in 1981, continuing to sit on the cross-bench.

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