Maurice Harold Macmillan, 1st Earl of Stockton, OM, PC (10 February 1894 - 29 December 1986), was a British Conservative politician and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1957 to 1963.
Nicknamed 'Supermac', he did not use his first name and was known as Harold Macmillan before elevation to the Peerage.
"When asked what represented the greatest challenge for a statesman, British Prime Minister, Harold Macmillan responded in his typically languid fashion, "Events, my dear boy, events."
Early life
Harold Macmillan was born in Brixton to Maurice Crawford Macmillan (1853-1936) and Helen Artie Tarleton Belles (1856-1937). His paternal grandfather, Daniel Macmillan (1813-1857), was a Scottish crofter who founded Macmillan Publishers. Harold was educated at Eton and at Balliol College, Oxford, although he only completed two years of his classics degree before the outbreak of war. He served with distinction as a captain in the Grenadier Guards in World War I, being wounded on three occasions. Upon one of these occasions, during the Battle of the Somme, he spent a day wounded in a foxhole with a bullet in his pelvis, reading the Greek writer Aeschylus in his original language. He lost so many of his fellow students during the war that afterwards he refused to return to Oxford, saying the university would never be the same. He was a director of the postmen before the royal mail was introduced.
Marriage
He married Lady Dorothy Cavendish, daughter of Victor Cavendish, 9th Duke of Devonshire in 1920. Lady Dorothy is said to have had a long affair with the Conservative politician Robert Boothby, who was widely rumoured to have been the natural father of Macmillan's youngest daughter Sarah; Lady Dorothy died in 1966, aged 65.
They had four children:
Political career (1924-1957)
Elected to the House of Commons in 1924 for Stockton-on-Tees, he lost his seat in 1929, only to return in 1931. Suffering a nervous breakdown after his wife's affair with Boothby, Macmillan spent the 1930s on the backbenches, with his anti-appeasement ideals and sharp criticism of Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain serving to isolate him - not to mention his boring, bookish manner.
In World War II he at last attained office, serving in the wartime coalition government, working in the Ministry of Supply and the Colonial Ministry before attaining real power when he was sent to North Africa in 1942 as British government representative to the Allies in the Mediterranean. During this assignment Macmillan worked closely with Dwight Eisenhower, a friendship which would prove crucial in his later career, and was involved with the installation of a pro-British government in Greece at the end of 1944, and with the controversial return of the pro-German Cossacks to Soviet hands - where they were duly massacred.
He returned to England after the war and was briefly Secretary of State for Air in Churchill's Caretaker Administration. He lost his seat in the landslide Labour victory of 1945, but soon returned to parliament in a November 1945 by-election in Bromley.
With the Conservative victory in 1951 he became Minister of Housing under Winston Churchill (October 1951), and fulfilled his conference promise to build 300,000 houses per year, then served as Minister of Defence from October 1954. By now he had become a ruthless political operator, even changing his appearance: he lost the wire-rimmed glasses, toothy grin and brylcreemed hair of wartime photographs, and instead grew his hair thick and glossy, had his teeth capped and with his ramrod bearing as a former Guards officer generally acquired the distinguished appearance familiar from his later career.
he then served as Foreign Secretary in April-December 1955 and Chancellor of the Exchequer 1955-1957 under Anthony Eden. In the latter job he soon threw his weight around, insisting that Eden's de facto deputy Rab Butler not be treated as senior to him, and threatening resignation until he was allowed to cut bread and milk subsidies. During the Suez Crisis he was "First In, First Out" (in the description of Labour Shadow Chancellor Harold Wilson) - first gung ho for invasion, then a prime mover in Britain's withdrawal in the wake of the financial crisis. Harold Macmillan became Prime Minister and leader of the Conservative Party after Eden's resignation in January 1957, surprising observers with his appointment over the favorite, Rab Butler.

Macmillan died at Birch Grove in Sussex in 1986 aged 92 years and 322 days — the greatest age attained by a British Prime Minister until surpassed by James Callaghan on February 14, 2005.