Nobel Peace Prize Recipient, Olympic Medal Recipient. Philip Noel-Baker, a British politician, diplomat, as well as an amateur athlete, received worldwide recognition after being awarded the 1959 Nobel Peace Prize. According to the Nobel Prize committee, he received the coveted award "for his long standing contribution to the cause of disarmament and peace." Since 1952, he received eight nominations for the Nobel candidacy. In an interview, he stated "War is a damnable, filthy thing and has destroyed civilization after civilization – that is the essence of my belief." He published at least a dozen books on disarmament and peace during his lifetime. In 1936, he published the 600-page "The Private Manufacture of Armaments in the Arms Race: A Program for World Disarmament," which can be found in law libraries in the 21st century. In 1958, he published a comprehensive, historical, and analytical study, "Personal Experiences Which Began at the Peace Conference in Paris in 1919," receiving the Albert Schweitzer Book Prize for the text in 1961. He accepted the position at the University of London to become the first Sir Ernest Cassell Professor of International Law, occupying this chair from 1924 to 1929. Except for a year spent as Dodge Lecturer from 1933 to 1934 in the United States at Yale University, he devoted the rest of his life to politics and international affairs. Politically, he was a Labor Party member of parliament from 1929 to 1931 and from 1936 to 1970, serving in several offices and the cabinet. He became a member of the Labor Party's National Executive Committee in 1937. During World War II, he was a parliamentary secretary at the Ministry of War Transport from February of 1942, and served as Minister of State for Foreign Affairs after the Labor Party's victory in the 1945 general election. He moved to become Secretary of State for Air in October of 1946, and then became Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations in 1947 and joined the cabinet. Born Philip John Baker, the sixth of seven children of his Canadian-born Quaker father, Joseph Allen Baker, who served as a member of Parliament, and Scottish-born mother, Elizabeth Balmer Moscrip, he was educated at Ackworth School, Bootham School and then in the United States at the Quaker-associated Haverford College in Pennsylvania. Besides classes in Paris and Germany, he studied at King's College at Cambridge from 1908 to 1912, earning a BS in economics. Speaking seven languages fluently, he was President of the Cambridge Union Society in 1912 and President of the Cambridge University Athletic Club from 1910 to 1912. During World War I, as a Quaker, he organized and commanded the Friends' Ambulance Unit serving in France, later, served with a British ambulance unit in Italy, and received several medals for bravery. In 1915 he married a nurse, Irene Noel, and as early as 1921, he was using the hyphened Noel-Baker surname, though not formally changed until 1943. The couple had one son, who followed his father's footsteps with a political career. After the war in 1919, he was a member of the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, subsequently joining the League of Nations as secretariat. As an outstanding amateur athlete, he carried the British team flag and received the Olympic silver medal for the men's 1500 meters in track at the 1920 Summer Olympics in Antwerp. As the captain of the British track team for the 1920 Summer Olympics, he had competed in the Olympic Games before and after World War I. He is the only person to have been awarded an Olympic medal and also received a Nobel Prize. He was the minister responsible for organizing the 1948 Olympic Games in London. Maintaining for life the body of an athlete, he was commandant of the 1952 British Olympic team and in 1960 became president of the International Council of Sport and Physical Recreation of UNESCO. In 1977, he was made a life peer as Baron Noel-Baker, of the City of Derby. After his death, he was buried next to his wife.