Edward Evans (politician)

Edward Evans CBE (11 January 1883 – 30 March 1960) was a teacher and Labour Party politician in the United Kingdom. Noted for his work for and with deaf people and the blind, he entered the House of Commons in his 60s, and sat from 1945 to 1959.

Evans was born in Manchester to Welsh parents. He was educated at Llanelli Science Schools and at St Paul's College in Cheltenham, before training as a teacher at the University of London. He taught first at an elementary school in London, then successively at Linden Lodge Special School for the Blind, the Old Kent Road School for the Deaf and the East Anglian Schools for Blind and Deaf in Gorleston, Norfolk. He held special diplomas in the teaching of blind and of deaf people, and retired as the headmaster of Gorleston in 1943, having been a teacher for 40 years, and served for the next two years as Secretary of the National Institute for the Blind.

A sometime member of Great Yarmouth Borough Council and its education committee, he was elected at the 1945 general election as the Member of Parliament (MP) for Lowestoft in Suffolk.The Times newspaper had predicted that the sitting Conservative Party MP Pierse Loftus as "likely to be re-elected", but 62-year-old Evans had overturned a majority of 22% to become Lowestoft's first Labour MP. He was made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) "for political and public services" in the King's Birthday Honours List 1949, and represented Lowestoft in the House of Commons for 14 years, until his defeat at the 1959 general election by the Conservative James Prior.

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