David Pitt, Baron Pitt of Hampstead

David Thomas Pitt, Baron Pitt of Hampstead (3 October 1913 – 18 December 1994), was a British Labour Party politician, general practitioner and political activist. Born in Grenada, he was the second peer of African descent, to sit in the House of Lords.

Born in St. David's, Grenada, Pitt won a scholarship to come to Britain in 1933 to study medicine at the University of Edinburgh, where he was an active member of Edinburgh University Socialist Society. He went on to graduate with honours. He was always concerned for broader social issues. He witnessed the poverty of the working classes in the slums of Edinburgh and saw similarities to the rural poverty he witnessed as a child. Nicholas Rea, in the British Medical Journal, said of Pitt: “it was in the slums of Edinburgh as much as in the Caribbean that he became convinced of the links between poverty, disadvantage, and ill health". In 1936, he joined the Labour movement.

He returned to the Caribbean to begin his medical career, founding his own practice and in 1943 married (Lady) Dorothy (née Alleyne). His passion for social justice continued alongside his medical career. In 1941, Pitt had been elected to the San Fernando Borough Council and then in 1943, he became a founding member and leader of the West Indian National Party (WINP) – a socialist party whose main aim was to deliver political autonomy across the Caribbean. Under Pitt, the party demanded self-government for Trinidad and Tobago, constitutional reform and the nationalisation of commodities industries such as oil and sugar.

After decades of campaigning, the people of Trinidad and Tobago were granted universal adult suffrage by the British Parliament in 1945. The first elections took place in 1946. WINP and others formed the United Front with Pitt as one of the candidates. He was not successful but he continued his activism and in 1947 led a group of WINP members to Britain to lobby the Clement Attlee government for Commonwealth status for a Federation of the West Indies.

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