Clement Attlee

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The Right Honourable
 The Earl Attlee 
KG, OM, CH, PC
Image:Attlee cropped.jpg

In office
27 July 1945 – 26 October 1951
Monarch George VI
Deputy Herbert Morrison
Preceded by Winston Churchill
Succeeded by Winston Churchill
In office
19 February 1942 – 23 May 1945
Prime Minister Winston Churchill
Preceded by None
Succeeded by Herbert Morrison
Born January 3 1883(1883-01-03)
Putney, London, United Kingdom
Died October 8 1967 (aged 84)
London, United Kingdom
Political party Labour
Spouse Violet Attlee
Alma mater University College, Oxford, United Kingdom
Profession Lawyer
Religion Raised Anglican

Clement Richard Attlee, 1st Earl Attlee, KG, OM, CH, PC (3 January 1883 – 8 October 1967) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1945 to 1951. The Labour Party under Attlee won a landslide election victory over Winston Churchill immediately after Churchill had led Britain through World War II. He was the first Labour Prime Minister to serve a full Parliamentary term and the first to have a majority in Parliament.

The government he led put in place the post-war consensus, based upon the assumption that full employment would be maintained by Keynesian policies, and that a greatly enlarged system of social services would be created -- aspirations that had been outlined in the wartime Beveridge Report. Within this context, his government undertook the nationalisation of major industries and public utilities as well as the creation of the National Health Service. After initial Conservative opposition, this settlement, generally known as the post-war consensus was by and large accepted by all parties[1] until Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party in the 1970s.

His government also presided over the decolonisation of a large part of the British Empire, in which India and the countries that are now Myanmar, Sri Lanka and Pakistan obtained independence.

In 2004, he was voted as the greatest British prime minister of the 20th century in a poll of professors organised by MORI.[2]

Contents

[edit] Early life and family

He was born in Putney, London, into a middle-class family, the seventh of eight children. His father Henry Attlee (1841–1908) was a solicitor, while his mother Ellen Bravery Watson (1847–1920) was the daughter of Thomas Watson of London. He was educated at Northaw School, Haileybury and University College, Oxford, training as a lawyer. He turned to socialism after working with slum children in the East End of London. He left the Fabian Society and joined the Independent Labour Party in 1908. Attlee became a lecturer at the London School of Economics in 1913, but promptly applied for a Commission in August 1914 for World War I.

During World War I, Attlee served with the South Lancashire Regiment in Gallipoli, where he was one of the final men to be evacuated from Suvla Bay, and Mesopotamia, where he was badly wounded at El Hanna. He recovered back in England, and was sent to France in 1918 to serve on the Western Front for the last few months of the war. By the end of World War I, he had reached the rank of major, and continued to be known as "Major Attlee" for much of the inter-war period. After the war, he returned to teaching at the London School of Economics.

Attlee met Violet Millar on a trip to Italy in 1921. Within a few weeks of their return they became engaged and were married at Christ Church, Hampstead on January 10, 1922. Theirs would be a devoted marriage until her death in 1964. Their four children were Janet Helen (b. 1923), Lady Felicity Ann (1925-2007), Martin Richard (1927-1991) and Lady Alison Elizabeth (b. 1930).

[edit] Early political career

Attlee became involved in local politics in the immediate post-war period, becoming mayor of the London borough of Stepney in 1919. At the 1922 general election, Attlee became the MP for the constituency of Limehouse in Stepney. He was Ramsay MacDonald's parliamentary private secretary for the brief 1922 parliament.

His first taste of ministerial office came in 1924, when he served as Under-Secretary of State for War in the short-lived First Labour Government, led by MacDonald.

In 1926, he actively supported the General Strike. In 1927, he reluctantly joined the multi-party Simon Commission, a Royal Commission set up to examine the possibility of granting self-rule to India. As a result of the time he needed to devote to the commission, he was not initially offered a ministerial post in the Second Labour Government. Ironically, though, his unsought service on the Commission was to equip Attlee (who was later to have to decide the future of India as Prime Minister) with a thorough exposure to India and many of its political leaders.

In 1930, Labour MP Oswald Mosley left the party after its rejection of his proposals for solving the unemployment problem. Attlee was given Mosley's post of Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. He was Postmaster General at the time of the 1931 crisis, during which most of the party's leaders lost their seats.

[edit] Opposition

Attlee was given the deputy leadership under George Lansbury in the aftermath of the 1931 General Election.

Like MacDonald and Lansbury, Attlee and most Labour MPs (in concert with the Liberal Party) opposed rearmament in the interwar period, a position criticised by Winston Churchill in his book The Gathering Storm. However, after the rise of Adolf Hitler Attlee and most of the Labour Party would come to oppose appeasement, especially after the pacifist Lansbury's resignation in 1935.

Attlee was appointed as an interim leader until after the general election that year. In the post-election leadership contest Attlee was elected, beating out both Herbert Morrison and Arthur Greenwood, and remained leader of the party until 1955 -- to date, Labour's longest-serving party leader.

[edit] Deputy prime minister

Attlee remained opposition leader when war broke out in September 1939. The disastrous Norwegian campaign resulted in a vote of no confidence in the government.[3] Although Chamberlain survived this, the reputation of his administration was so badly damaged that it was clear that a coalition government was necessary. The crisis coincided with the Labour Party Conference. Even if Attlee had been prepared to serve under Chamberlain (in a "national emergency government"), he would not have been able to carry the party with him. Consequently, Chamberlain tendered his resignation, and Labour and the Liberals entered a coalition government led by Winston Churchill.

In the World War II coalition government, three interconnected committees ran the war. Churchill chaired the War Cabinet and the Defence Committee. Attlee was his regular deputy in these committees, and answered for the government in parliament, when Churchill was absent. Attlee chaired the third body, the Lord President's Committee, which ran the civil side of the war. As Churchill was most concerned with executing the war, the arrangement suited civil-minded Attlee.

Only he and Churchill remained in the war cabinet throughout World War II. Attlee was Lord Privy Seal (1940–1942), Deputy Prime Minister (1942–1945), Dominions Secretary (1942–1943), and Lord President of the Council (1943–1945). Throughout the conflict Attlee would prove to be a loyal ally of Churchill, and supported the latter in his continuation of Britain's resistance after the French capitulation in 1940.

[edit] Prime Minister

The war set in motion profound social changes within Britain, and led to a popular desire for social reform. This mood was epitomised in the Beveridge Report. The report assumed that the maintenance of full employment would be the aim of postwar governments, and that this would provide the basis for the welfare state. All major parties were committed to this aim, but perhaps Attlee and Labour were seen by the electorate as the best candidates to follow through with their programme.

The landslide 1945 Election returned Labour to power and Attlee became prime minister. In domestic policy, the party had clear aims. Attlee's first Health Secretary, Aneurin Bevan, fought against the general disapproval of the medical establishment in creating the British National Health Service. Although there are often disputes about its organisation and funding, British parties to this day must still voice their general support for the NHS in order to remain electable.[4]

Attlee's government was also responsible for the nationalisation of basic industries such as coal mining and the steel industry, and for the creation of the state-owned British Railways. Other changes included the creation of a National Parks system.

Nevertheless, the most significant problem remained the economy; the war effort had left Britain practically bankrupt. During the period of transition to a peacetime economy, the maintaining of strategic military commitments created an imbalance of trade, and the dollar gap. This was mitigated by an American loan negotiated by John Maynard Keynes and the (reluctant) devaluation of the pound in 1949 by Stafford Cripps. With hindsight, the economic recovery was relatively rapid, yet rationing and coal shortages would continue in the postwar years. Despite the corruption scandal exposed by the Lynskey tribunal in 1948, Attlee remained personally popular with the electorate.

Relations with the Royal Family, on the other hand, were more strained. A letter from Queen Elizabeth (later the Queen Mother), dated May 17th 1947, showed "her decided lack of enthusiasm for the socialist government" and describes the British electorate as "poor people, so many half-educated and bemused" for electing Attlee over Winston Churchill, whom she saw as a war hero. That said, according to Lord Wyatt, this was to be expected as the Queen Mother was "the most right-wing member of the Royal Family."[5]

Image:Potsdam big three.jpg
Clement Attlee (left) with President Harry S. Truman and Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference

In foreign affairs, Attlee's cabinet was concerned with four issues: postwar Europe, the onset of the cold war, the establishment of the United Nations, and decolonisation. The first two were closely related, and Attlee was assisted in these matters by Ernest Bevin. Attlee attended the later stages of the Potsdam Conference in the company of Truman and Stalin.

In the immediate aftermath of the war, the Government faced the challenge of managing relations with Britain's former war-time ally, Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Union. Attlee's Foreign Secretary, the former trade union leader Ernest Bevin, was passionately anti-communist, based largely on his experience of fighting communist influence in the trades union movement. Bevin's initial approach to the USSR as Foreign Secretary has been described by historian Kenneth O. Morgan as "wary and suspicious, but not automatically hostile".[6] Attlee's cabinet was instrumental in promoting the American Marshall Plan for the economic recovery of Europe.

In an early "good-will" gesture much criticized later, the Attlee government allowed the Soviets access, under the terms of a 1946 UK-USSR Trade Agreement, to several Rolls-Royce Nene jet engines. The Soviets, who at the time were well behind the West in jet technology, reverse-engineered the Nene, and installed their own version in the MiG-15 interceptor, used to good effect against US-UK forces in the subsequent Korean War, as well as in several later MiG models.[7]

After Stalin took political control of most of Eastern Europe and began to subvert other governments in the Balkans, Attlee's and Bevin's worst fears of Soviet intentions were borne out, and they became instrumental in the creation of the successful NATO defence alliance to protect Western Europe against any Soviet aggression.[8] Attlee also shepherded Britain's successful development of a nuclear weapon, although the first successful test did not occur until 1952, after he left office.

One of the most urgent problems concerned the future of the Palestine Mandate. This was a very unpopular commitment and the evacuation of British troops and subsequent handing over of the issue to the UN was widely supported by the public.

Attlee's cabinet was responsible for the first and greatest act of decolonisation in the British Empire -- India. The partition of India soon created Pakistan, which then incorporated East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. The independence of Burma and Ceylon was also negotiated around this time. Some of the new countries became British Dominions, the genesis of the modern Commonwealth of Nations.

His government's policies with regard to the other colonies, however, particularly those in Africa, were very different. A major military base was built in Kenya, and the African colonies came under an unprecedented degree of direct control from London, as development schemes were implemented with a view to helping solve Britain's desperate post-war balance of payments crisis, and (perhaps secondarily) raising African living standards. This 'new colonialism' was, however, generally a failure: in some cases, such as a then-infamous Tanganyika groundnut scheme, spectacularly so.

The Labour Party was returned to power in the general election of 1950, albeit with a much reduced majority in the first past the post voting system; it was at this time that a degree of Conservative opposition recovered at the expense of the dying Liberal Party.

By 1951, the Attlee government was looking increasingly exhausted, with several of its most important ministers having passed away or ailing. The party split in 1951 over the austerity budget brought in by Hugh Gaitskell to pay for the cost of Britain's participation in the Korean War: Aneurin Bevan, architect of the National Health Service (NHS), resigned to protest against the new charges for "teeth and spectacles" introduced by the budget, and was joined in this action by the later prime minister, Harold Wilson. Labour lost the general election of 1951 to Churchill's renewed Conservatives, despite polling more votes than in the 1945 election and indeed more votes nationwide than the Conservative Party.

[edit] Return to opposition and retirement

Attlee led the party in opposition until December 1955, when he retired from the Commons and was elevated to the peerage to take his seat in the House of Lords as Earl Attlee and Viscount Prestwood on 16 December 1955. He attended Churchill's funeral in January 1965 - elderly and frail by then, he had to remain seated in the freezing cold as the coffin was carried, having tired himself out by standing at the rehearsal the previous day. He lived to see his old constituency of Walthamstow West fall to the Conservatives in a by-election in September 1967. Clement Attlee died of pneumonia on 8 October 1967.

On his death, the title passed to his son Martin Richard Attlee, 2nd Earl Attlee (1927 - 1991). It is now held by Clement Attlee's grandson John Richard Attlee, 3rd Earl Attlee. The third earl (a member of the Conservative Party) retained his seat in the Lords as one of the hereditary peers to remain under an amendment to Labour's 1999 House of Lords Act.

When Attlee died, his estate was sworn for probate purposes at a value of £7,295, a relatively modest sum for so prominent a figure.

His ashes are buried in the nave of Westminster Abbey, close to those of Lord Passfield and Ernest Bevin.

[edit] Legacy

"A modest man, but then he has so much to be modest about," is a quote about Attlee that is very commonly ascribed to Churchill (although Churchill in fact had every reason to respect Attlee's service in the War Cabinet).[9] Attlee's modesty and quiet manner hid a great deal that has only come to light with historical reappraisal. In terms of the machinery of government, he was one of the most businesslike and effective of all the British prime ministers. Indeed he is widely praised by his successors, both Labour and Conservative.

His leadership style of consensual government, acting as a chairman rather than a president, won him much praise from historians and politicians alike. Even Thatcherites confess to admiring him. Christopher Soames, a Cabinet Minister under Thatcher, remarked that "Mrs Thatcher was not really running a team. Every time you have a Prime Minister who wants to make all the decisions, it mainly leads to bad results. Attlee didn't. That's why he was so damn good."[10] Even Thatcher herself wrote in her 1995 memoirs, which charted her beginnings in Grantham to her victory in the 1979 General Election, that she admired Attlee saying: "Of Clement Attlee, however, I was an admirer. He was a serious man and a patriot. Quite contrary to the general tendency of politicians in the 1990s, he was all substance and no show".

His administration presided over the successful transition from a wartime economy to peacetime, tackling problems of demobilisation, shortages of foreign currency, and adverse deficits in trade balances and government expenditure. Another change he brought about in domestic politics was the establishment of the National Health Service and post-war Welfare State.

Image:Clement Attlee statue - Limehouse library.jpg
Statue of Attlee outside Limehouse Library.

In foreign affairs, he did much to assist with the post-war economic recovery of Europe, though this did not lead to a realisation that this was where Britain's future might lie. He proved a loyal ally of America at the onset of the cold war. Because of his style of leadership it was not he but Ernest Bevin who masterminded foreign policy.

It was Attlee's government that decided Britain should have an independent atomic weapons programme, and work began on it in 1947. Bevin, Attlee's Foreign Secretary, famously stated that "We've got to have it and it's got to have a bloody Union Jack on it." However, the first operational British A Bomb was not detonated until October 1952, about one year after Attlee had left office.

Though a socialist, Attlee still believed in the British Empire of his youth, an institution that, on the whole, he thought was a power for good in the world. Nevertheless, he saw that a large part of it needed to be self-governing. Using the Dominions of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand as a model, he began the transformation of the Empire into the Commonwealth.

His greatest achievement, surpassing many of these, was, perhaps, the establishment of a political and economic consensus about the governance of Britain that all parties subscribed to for three decades, fixing the arena of political discourse until the later 1970s.

[edit] Attlee's cabinet 1945-1950

[edit] Changes

[edit] Attlee's cabinet 1950-1951

In February 1950, a substantial reshuffle took place following the General Election:

[edit] Changes

  • October 1950: Hugh Gaitskell succeeds Sir Stafford Cripps as Chancellor of the Exchequer.
  • January 1951: Aneurin Bevan succeeds George Isaacs as Minister of Labour and National Service. Bevan's successor as Minister of Health is not in the cabinet. Hugh Dalton's post is renamed Minister of Local Government and Planning.
  • March 1951: Herbert Morrison succeeds Ernest Bevin as Foreign Secretary. Lord Addison succeeds Morrison as Lord President. Bevin succeeds Addison as Lord Privy Seal. James Chuter Ede succeeds Morrison as Leader of the House of Commons whilst remaining Home Secretary.
  • April 1951: Richard Stokes succeeds Ernest Bevin as Lord Privy Seal. Alf Robens succeeds Aneurin Bevan (resigned) as Minister of Labour and National Service. Sir Hartley Shawcross succeeds Harold Wilson (resigned) as President of the Board of Trade.

[edit] Appearance in popular culture

  • Attlee's portrait hangs in the dining hall (also known as the Great Hall) of University College, Oxford in recognition of his services to Britain.
  • Attlee composed this limerick about himself to demonstrate how he had overcome his lacklustre image:

"Few thought he was even a starter.
There were many in life who were smarter.
But he finished PM,
A CH, an OM,
An earl and a Knight of the Garter."
Source: Jobes, B., Barry Jones' Dictionary of World Biography, 1994

[edit] Further reading

Clement Attlee published his memoirs, As it Happened, in 1954.

Francis Williams' A Prime Minister Remembers, based on interviews with Attlee, was published in 1961.

Attlee's other publications include:

The Social Worker (1920); The Town Councillor (1925); The Will and the Way to Socialism (1935); The Labour Party in Perspective (1937); Collective Security Under the United Nations (1958); Empire into Commonwealth (1961).


Biographies include:

  • Roy Jenkins, Mr Attlee (1948);
  • Kenneth Harris, Attlee (1982);
  • Trevor Burridge, Clement Attlee: A Political Biography, (1985);
  • Francis Beckett, Clem Attlee (1997).

Biographies of Attlee and of his Cabinet can be found in:

  • Greg Rosen (ed) Dictionary of Labour Biography. Politicos Publishing. ISBN 1902301188

The entry on Attlee in the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) was prepared by Maurice Shock, who as a Fellow of University College, Oxford (Attlee's alma mater), came to know Attlee personally in his later years.

Accounts of the period include:

Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour in Power 1945-51, Oxford University Press, 1984;

Greg Rosen, Old Labour to New, Politicos Publishing, 2005.

[edit] References

Image:Wikiquote-logo-en.svg
Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
Clement Attlee
  1. ^ Conservative Party website - the postwar consensus
  2. ^ [1]
  3. ^ http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/norway_campaign_06.shtml
  4. ^ See, e.g., http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/reprint/8/4/52.pdf
  5. '^ (Andrew Pierce, What Queen Mother really thought of Attlee's socialist 'heaven on earth, The Times, 13/5/06, p.9 [2])
  6. ^ Morgan, Labour in Power.
  7. ^ Gordon, Yefim, Mikoyan-Gurevich MIG-15: The Soviet Union's Long-Lived Korean War Fighter, Midland Press (2001)
  8. ^ See, e.g., Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour in Power (Oxford, 1984), especially Chapter 6.
  9. ^ Walter L. Arnstein, Britain Yesterday and Today: 1830 to the Present, Chapter 19, p.363
  10. ^ Peter Hennessy, The Prime Minister: The Office and its Holders since 1945, Chapter 7, p.150

[edit] External links


Political offices
Preceded by
Wilfrid Ashley 		Under-Secretary of State for War
1924 		Succeeded by
The Earl of Onslow
Preceded by
Sir Oswald Mosley 		Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
1930 – 1931 		Succeeded by
The Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede
Preceded by
Hastings Lees-Smith 		United Kingdom Postmaster General
1931 		Succeeded by
Sir William Ormsby-Gore
Preceded by
George Lansbury 		Leader of the Opposition
1935 – 1940 		Succeeded by
Hastings Lees-Smith
Preceded by
Sir Kingsley Wood 		Lord Privy Seal
1940 – 1942 		Succeeded by
Sir Stafford Cripps
New title Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
1942 – 1945 		Succeeded by
Herbert Stanley Morrison
Preceded by
Viscount Cranborne 		Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs
1942 – 1943 		Succeeded by
Viscount Cranborne
Preceded by
Sir John Anderson 		Lord President of the Council
1943 – 1945 		Succeeded by
The Lord Woolton
Preceded by
Arthur Greenwood 		Leader of the Opposition
1945 		Succeeded by
Winston Churchill
Preceded by
Winston Churchill 		Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
27 July 1945 – 26 October 1951
Minister of Defence
1945 – 1946 		Succeeded by
A. V. Alexander
Leader of the Opposition
1951 – 1955 		Succeeded by
Hugh Gaitskell
Parliament of the United Kingdom
Preceded by
Sir William Pearce 		Member of Parliament for Limehouse
1922 – 1950 		Constituency abolished
Preceded by
Valentine McEntee 		Member of Parliament for Walthamstow West
1950 – 1956 		Succeeded by
Edward Redhead
Party political offices
Preceded by
John Robert Clynes 		Deputy Leader of the British Labour Party
1932 – 1935 		Succeeded by
Arthur Greenwood
Preceded by
George Lansbury 		Leader of the British Labour Party
1935 – 1955 		Succeeded by
Hugh Gaitskell
Peerage of the United Kingdom
New creation Earl Attlee
1955 – 1967 		Succeeded by
Martin Attlee
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Deputy Prime Ministers and First Secretaries of State of the United Kingdom

Clement Attlee† · Herbert Morrison† · Anthony Eden† · Rab Butler · George Brown‡ · Michael Stewart‡ · Barbara Castle‡ · William Whitelaw† · Geoffrey Howe† · Michael Heseltine · John Prescott
†only served as Deputy Prime Minister, ‡only served as First Secretary of State

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Leaders of the Labour Party
Keir Hardie · Arthur Henderson · George Nicoll Barnes · Ramsay MacDonald · Arthur Henderson · William Adamson · John Robert Clynes · Ramsay MacDonald · Arthur Henderson · George Lansbury · Clement Attlee · Hugh Gaitskell · George Brown · Harold Wilson · James Callaghan · Michael Foot · Neil Kinnock · John Smith · Margaret Beckett · Tony Blair · Gordon Brown
bn:ক্লিমেন্ট এট্‌লি

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