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John Enoch Powell, MBE (16 June 1912 – 8 February 1998) was a British politician, linguist, writer, academic, soldier and poet.

He was a Conservative Party Member of Parliament (MP) between 1950 and February 1974, and an Ulster Unionist MP between October 1974 and 1987. He was controversial through most of his career, and his tenure in senior office was brief. He had strong and distinctive views on matters such as immigration, national identity, monetary policy, and the United Kingdom's entry into the European Economic Community, which later became the European Union. He was dismissed from the Shadow Cabinet for his controversial and widely remembered 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech in opposition to mass Commonwealth immigration to Britain.

Enoch Powell was born in Stechford, Birmingham, England. He lived there for the first six years of his life before moving, in 1918, to Kings Norton, where he lived until 1930. He was the only child of Albert Enoch Powell (1872–1956), primary school headmaster, and his wife, Ellen Mary (1886–1953). Ellen was the daughter of Henry Breese, a Liverpool policeman and his wife Eliza, who had given up her own teaching career after marrying. The Powells were of Welsh descent, having moved to the developing Black Country during the early 19th century. His great-grandfather was a coal miner, and his grandfather had been employed in the iron trade.^[1]

Powell was a pupil at Kings Norton Boys' School before moving to King Edward's School, Birmingham, where he studied classics (which would later influence his 'Rivers of Blood' speech), and was one of the few pupils in the school's history to attain 100% in an end-of-year English examination. He studied at Trinity College, Cambridge, from 1930 to 1933, during which time he fell under the influence both of the poet A. E. Housman, then Professor of Latin at the university, and of the writings of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. He took no part in politics at university.

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