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Political Biography:

Clement Attlee

(b. London, 3 Jan. 1883; d. 8 Oct. 1967) British; Prime Minister 1945 – 51; Earl 1955 Clement Attlee's government (1945 – 51) is widely regarded as Labour's most successful government. The administration decisively shaped post-war Britain, establishing the policies for full employment, the welfare state, mixed economy, and passage from the British Empire to Commonwealth.

Attlee was born into a comfortable middle-class family and there was little in his background to suggest that he would lead a party of the left. His father was a city solicitor, able to send him to Haileybury. Attlee graduated from Oxford University and qualified as a barrister. His shock at witnessing poverty in London's East End, reinforced by his reading, made him into a socialist.

The East End was to be his political base for the next fifty years. In 1907 he began to manage a Boys' Club in Stepney and eventually combined this with lecturing in social administration at the London School of Economics. His distinguished record in the 1914 – 18 war earned him the title "Major Attlee" in the 1920s. He became mayor of Stepney in 1919 and was elected as Labour MP for Limehouse in 1922. With a private income from his parents he was able to become a full-time politician. He was a middle-class university graduate in a party still recruited largely from the working class.

Attlee held junior office in the first Labour government in 1924. Between 1927 and 1929 he served as one of two Labour members on the Simon Commission on India. In the second Labour government (1929 – 31) he replaced Oswald Mosley as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, when the latter resigned in 1930, and the following year he became Postmaster-General. When the minority government collapsed in 1931, and Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald went off to lead the National Government, Attlee had no doubts about staying in the Labour Party. He regarded MacDonald's act as a betrayal.

Attlee gained from the devastation of the Labour Party in the 1931 general election. Just fifty Labour MPs were returned and only a handful had any ministerial experience. He was elected deputy leader and found himself necessarily speaking on a great variety of subjects in the House of Commons. When the leader George Lansbury resigned shortly before the 1935 election, Attlee was elected as his successor — obviously, so people thought, as an interim leader. In the new parliament over 150 Labour MPs were returned and in a leadership election Attlee beat the more fancied Herbert Morrison and held the post for the next twenty years, the longest spell in the party's history. Attlee's election was helped by the fact that he was the man in post. But he was also seen as the antithesis of MacDonald. His modest demeanour and his willingness to subordinate himself to the views of the majority in the party were qualities Labour MPs were looking for.

In the late 1930s Labour was increasingly divided over foreign policy and what to do about the rising menace of Nazism in Germany. The party had a strong pacifist group and was opposed to rearmament. In 1940 Attlee led Labour into Churchill's wartime coalition. He became Lord President of the Council, Deputy Prime Minister 1942 – 5, and was a member of the five-man War Cabinet. He chaired a number of Cabinet committees, including an important one on post-war reconstruction. As members of the coalition government, Labour ministers demonstrated both their competence and patriotism.

When Labour won the 1945 general election, unsuccessful moves were made to stop him becoming Prime Minister. The left-wing intellectual Harold Laski was a supporter of the claims of Herbert Morrison, and asked Attlee to wait on the approval of Labour MPs before accepting the King's request to form a government. Attlee ignored the request. In another letter, Laski informed Attlee that he lacked "the peculiar personal qualities" of a great leader and should step down. Attlee's memorable reply was:

"Dear Laski

Thank you for your letter, the contents of which have been noted.

C R Attlee"

As Prime Minister of the 1945 government, Attlee led an experienced team. The massive majority in the House of Commons ensured the speedy passage of radical legislation including major measures of nationalization of the Bank of England, railways, coal, gas, electricity, and steel. Other measures extended welfare provision and established the National Health Service. The government also speeded up the end of the empire and granted independence to India and Pakistan in 1947. The government had to cope with severe economic difficulties consequent on the shift to a peacetime economy and the ending of American lend-lease. It also began the production of Britain's atomic bomb.

As Prime Minister, Attlee kept his talented colleagues together by acting as a broker between different factions and delegated responsibility to key ministers. His style in Cabinet was to wait for a majority view to emerge; he rarely took an independent stand or a prominent part in the growing left-right controversies. He was in hospital when Bevan and other ministers resigned over Gaitskell's 1951 budget.

Labour gained a narrow victory in the 1950 general election but lost another in October 1951. The party showed signs of running out of steam; the manifestos essentially defended its record in office. There then began a battle over future policy and the succession to Attlee. After leading the party to another election defeat in 1955, Attlee resigned at the age of 72. Supporters of Herbert Morrison claimed that Attlee's refusal to step down earlier was motivated by a determination to block their man. In retirement, Attlee described Morrison's appointment as Foreign Secretary as "The worst appointment I ever made!"

Attlee wrote a brief and unrevealing autobiography, As it Happened, in 1954. His reticence was such that he has been called an unknown Prime Minister. In his retirement, he proved to be a pungent and much quoted commentator on the working of British government.

 
 
US Military Dictionary: Clement Richard Attlee

Attlee, Clement Richard (1883-1967) British statesman. As Labour prime minister (1945-51), Attlee replaced Churchill midway through the Potsdam Conference (1945), attended also by President Harry S. Truman and Josef Stalin, and established Britain as a close ally with the United States early in the cold war confrontation with the Soviet Union.

See the Introduction, Abbreviations and Pronunciation for further details.

 
Biography: Clement Richard Attlee

Clement Richard Attlee, 1st Earl Attlee (1883-1967), was prime minister of England from 1945 to 1951. He led the labour government that established the welfare state in Great Britain.

Clement Attlee was born in Putney, near London, on Jan. 23, 1883, the son of Henry Attlee, a successful solicitor, and Ellen Watson Attlee, a cultivated and educated woman. The family was devoutly religious. Attlee attended Haileybury College and then University College, Oxford, where he read modern history and achieved second-class honors in 1904.

Heading for a legal career, Attlee joined the Inner Temple, studied and worked in chambers, was called to the bar in 1906, and set up his own office. After a visit to Haileybury House in east London, a boys' club supported by his old school, he moved to the East End. He continued practicing law, helped evenings in the club, and soon became its manager. He developed a new outlook and a new purpose. By 1908 he was a member of the Fabian Society (a socialist organization) and of the Independent Labour party, and he was a socialist in the practical sense of being committed to improving the lot of the working class.

In 1909 Attlee gave up his law practice and spent a brief period as secretary of Toynbee Hall, the best-known of the university settlements in the East End. Then he lectured at Ruskin College, Oxford, and was appointed tutor and lecturer in social science at the London School of Economics in 1913.

In 1914 he had leanings toward pacifism but concluded that the war was justified. Promptly commissioned, he served in Gallipoli and in Mesopotamia. He was discharged as a major, a title he continued to use, and returned to the London School of Economics. Still residing in the East End, he became the first labour mayor of Stepney in 1919 and a member of the executive committee of the London Labour party. In 1922 he was returned to Parliament from Limehouse, and that year he married Violet Helen Millar of Hampstead; four children were born to them.

Attlee now devoted full time to Labour politics. Ramsay MacDonald, as leader of the Opposition, appointed Attlee his parliamentary private secretary and then in 1924 in the first Labour government designated him undersecretary of state for war. Though at first excluded from the Labour Cabinet in 1929, Attlee became chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster in 1930 and a year later postmaster general. In the landslide victory for the National (coalition) government in 1931, Attlee, one of three surviving Labour members with front-bench experience, was made deputy leader of the party. Labour members of Parliament became almost hopelessly divided on armaments and diplomacy; in a tumultuous meeting in October 1935 Attlee was elected party leader, because of his demonstrated parliamentary qualities. It cannot be said that either Attlee or his party had imaginative views for dealing with Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy, but on the other hand the National government made no moves toward developing common policy. Attlee did reunite his party.

When war came and Winston Churchill formed a true coalition government in May 1940, Attlee joined the War Cabinet of five and in 1942 became deputy prime minister. He attended the San Francisco conference in April 1945, which established the United Nations. At Potsdam, the final wartime conference of the allies, in July 1945, power shifted from Churchill to Attlee after the overwhelming electoral victory of Labour at the polls. Attlee formed a strong government, and in nationalization of basic industries, the extension of social insurance, and the establishment of the National Health Service, he carried out most of his party's pledges. Under his guidance India and Pakistan became independent and England entered the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Labour was less successful in dealing with economic problems; leadership shifted in 1951 to the Conservatives. Within the party Attlee managed to hold on, despite attacks from the left wing, until 1955, when he suffered a stroke and resigned after 20 years of leadership.

Attlee received the Order of Merit in 1951. In 1955 he was made a knight of the Garter and granted an earldom. For several years he was active in the House of Lords and devoted considerable time to writing and lecturing. He died on Oct. 8, 1967.

Further Reading

Roy Jenkins, Mr. Attlee: An Interim Biography (1948), is useful on Attlee's early years but continues only to 1945. Another early biography is Cyril Clemens, The Man from Limehouse: Clement Richard Attlee (1946). Attlee tells his own story to 1953 in As it Happened (1954). Francis Williams records conversations with Lord Attlee concerning the war and postwar periods in A Prime Minister Remembers (1961). Background studies which discuss Attlee include R. T. McKenzie, British Political Parties (1955; 2d ed. 1963); Henry Pelling, A Short History of the Labour Party (1961; 2d ed. 1965); D. N. Pritt, The Labour Government, 1945-51 (1963); Francis Boyd, British Politics in Transition, 1945-63 (1964); and Carl F. Brand, The British Labour Party: A Short History (1964).

 
Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Clement (Richard) Attlee, 1st Earl Attlee of Walthamstow

Clement Attlee, photograph by Yousuf Karsh.
(click to enlarge)
Clement Attlee, photograph by Yousuf Karsh. (credit: © Karsh — Rapho/Photo Researchers)
(born Jan. 3, 1883, Putney, London, Eng. — died Oct. 8, 1967, Westminster, London) British Labour Party leader (1935 – 55) and prime minister (1945 – 51). Committed to social reform, he lived for much of the years (1907 – 22) in a settlement house in London's impoverished East End. Elected to Parliament in 1922, he served in several Labour governments and in the wartime coalition government of Winston Churchill, whom he succeeded as prime minister in 1945. Attlee presided over the establishment of the welfare state in Britain, the nationalization of major British industries, and the granting of independence to India, an important step in the conversion of the British Empire into the Commonwealth of Nations. He resigned when the Conservatives narrowly won the election in 1951.

For more information on Clement (Richard) Attlee, 1st Earl Attlee of Walthamstow, visit Britannica.com.

 
British History: Clement Attlee

Attlee, Clement, 1st Earl Attlee (1883-1967). Prime minister. The son of a solicitor, Attlee grew up in a comfortably middle-class environment. He was educated at Haileybury and University College, Oxford. Called to the bar in 1905, he forsook the law for a career in social work after viewing poverty at first hand in London's East End. Meanwhile Attlee became committed to socialism, joining the Fabians in 1907 and the Independent Labour Party in 1908. He volunteered for military service in the First World War, fighting with distinction in Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and France. In later years he retained the title of ‘Major’, setting himself apart from the strong anti-militarist strain within the Labour movement.

With the war over Attlee became mayor of Stepney and was elected to Parliament as member for Limehouse in 1922. He immediately became parliamentary private secretary to Ramsay MacDonald and was appointed under-secretary at the War Office in the short-lived Labour government of 1924. He became chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster in November 1930, but was soon promoted to be postmaster-general. When this second Labour government collapsed in the summer of 1931, Attlee refused to follow Mac Donald when the latter re-emerged as prime minister of an all-party National Government.

Ironically, Labour's catastrophic performance in the general election of that year worked to Attlee's advantage. So depleted was the party's front bench that Attlee faced no opposition when the pacifist George Lansbury was forced out of the leadership in 1935. Even so, it was widely expected that Attlee would be only a stop-gap leader. After the general election of 1935, however, he retained his position in a contest with Herbert Morrison and Arthur Greenwood.

It was always easy to underestimate his qualities. He was no orator. Even his private conversation was clipped and uninformative. But Attlee emerged as a consummate politician, capable of controlling difficult and wilful colleagues. During the 1930s he played his part in curbing the excesses of Labour's left and re-establishing Labour as a viable party of government. In May 1940, following the debate on the ill-fated Norwegian campaign, he made it clear that Labour would not serve in a government headed by Neville Chamberlain.

Under Churchill Attlee served successively as lord privy seal, dominions secretary, and lord president. From 1942 he was also designated deputy prime minister and was the most powerful figure on the home front. With the resumption of party politics in the general election of 1945 Attlee was the beneficiary of the mood of popular radicalism. He emerged as the head of the first majority Labour government in British history.

As prime minister 1945-51 Attlee helped shape the development of British politics for the next quarter-century. The administration presided over a substantial extension of the public ownership of British industry, the development of the welfare state including the creation of the National Health Service, and the establishment of Britain's position within the western alliance. Attlee headed a talented, if not always harmonious, group of senior ministers, which included Ernest Bevin, Hugh Dalton, and Herbert Morrison. Despite considerable difficulties, Labour sustained its public support.

Though Labour was again victorious in the general election of 1950, its massive majority of 1945 was all but wiped out. Party unity came under severe strain, while the outbreak of the Korean War imposed new difficulties. Conservative tactics in the House of Commons made the business of government difficult and Attlee went to the country again in October 1951. Labour was narrowly defeated and the moment was perhaps opportune for Attlee to resign the leadership. As leader of the opposition Attlee engaged in little more than an exercise in damage limitation, failing to define a new role for the Labour movement. After a further electoral defeat in 1955, Attlee resigned and went to the House of Lords with an earldom.

A modest man by nature, Attlee came to enjoy great respect from the majority of those who worked under him and the electorate at large. Though the ideas of central planning, state intervention, and welfarism have been less in vogue over the last two decades, his historical reputation remains high.

 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Attlee, Clement Richard Attlee, 1st
Earl (ăt') , 1883–1967, British statesman. Educated at Oxford, he was called to the bar in 1905. His early experience as a social worker in London's East End led to his decision to give up law and devote his life to social improvement through politics. In 1907 he joined the Fabian Society and soon afterward the Labour party. He was a lecturer in social science at the London School of Economics, and, after service in World War I, he became (1919) the first Labour mayor of Stepney.

Attlee entered Parliament in 1922. In 1927 he visited India as a member of the Simon commission and was converted to views that strongly favored Indian self-government. He joined the Labour government in 1930 but resigned in 1931 when Ramsay MacDonald formed the National government. As leader of the Labour party from 1935, Attlee was an outspoken critic of Conservative foreign policy, objecting particularly to the government's failure to intervene in the Spanish civil war. During World War II he served (1940–45) in Winston Churchill's coalition cabinet, and on Labour's electoral victory in 1945 he became prime minister.

Under Attlee's leadership, the Bank of England, the gas, electricity, coal, and iron and steel industries, and the railways were nationalized. His government also enacted considerable social reforms, including the National Health Service. Independence was granted to Burma (Myanmar), India, Pakistan, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and Palestine, and Britain allied itself closely with the United States in the cold war confrontation with the Soviet Union. The postwar economic crisis required stringent economic and financial controls, which reduced support for the government. Labour won the 1950 general election by a narrow margin, but in 1951, Attlee decided to go to the country again and was defeated. He was leader of the opposition until his retirement in 1955, when he received the title of Earl Attlee.

Bibliography

See his autobiographies, As It Happened (1954) and Twilight of Empire (ed. by F. Williams, 1962); biography by K. Harris (1983); studies by K. Morgan (1984) and P. Hennessy (1994).

 

1883 - 1967

British Prime Minister (1945 - 1951) and leader of the Labour Party (1935 - 1955).

Clement Attlee was a member of Winston Churchill's war cabinet as Lord Privy Seal (1940 - 1942) and deputy Prime Minister (1942 - 1945). He resigned in May 1945 and won the general election in July of the same year. His premiership came at an important juncture in the Middle East, even though his government's Middle Eastern policy was conducted mainly by Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin and Colonial Secretary Arthur Creech Jones.

Attlee initiated the formation of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry to make recommendations on the future of Palestine (1946), and won the consent of U.S. president Harry S. Truman. He was reluctant, however, to meet the latter's request to lift the barriers to Jewish immigration to Palestine. Under Attlee's premiership, an Anglo-Egyptian draft treaty was concluded in 1946, paving the way for the eventual British evacuation from Egypt. In the same year, Britain surrendered its mandate over Jordan and in 1948 its mandate over Palestine, which resulted in the establishment of the state of Israel.

Bibliography

Attlee, Clement. As It Happened. New York: Viking Press; London: Heinemann, 1954.

Attlee, Clement. A Prime Minister Remembers: The War and Post-War Memoirs of the Rt. Hon. Earl Attlee, Based on His Private Papers and on a Series of Recorded Conversations. London: Heinemann, 1961.

Cohen, Michael J. Palestine and the Great Powers, 1945 - 1948. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982.

Louis, William Roger. The British Empire in the Middle East,1945 - 1951: Arab Nationalism, the United States, and Postwar Imperialism. New York: Oxford University Press; Oxford, U.K.; Clarendon, 1984.

— JENAB TUTUNJI UPDATED BY JOSEPH NEVO

 
Quotes By: Clement Attlee

Quotes:

"Russian Communism is the illegitimate child of Karl Marx and Catherine the Great."

 
Wikipedia: Clement Attlee
The Rt Hon. the 1st Earl Attlee
Clement Attlee

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 3 January 1883(1883--)
Putney, London, England
Died October 8 1967 (aged 84)
London, England
Political party Labour
Spouse Violet Attlee
Alma mater University College, Oxford
Profession Lawyer
Religion Raised Anglican

Clement Richard Attlee, 1st Earl Attlee, KG, OM, CH, PC (3 January 18838 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]

Early life and family

He was born in Putney,London, England 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 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 (1925-1991) and Lady Alison Elizabeth (b. 1930).

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.

Opposition

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

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.

Deputy prime minister

Attlee remained opposition leader when war broke out in 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.

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. [3]

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 reforms 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." [4]

Attlee (left) President Harry S. Truman and Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam Conference
Enlarge
Attlee (left) 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". [5] 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. [6]

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. [7] 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.

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 - and died of pneumonia on 8 October 1967.

He lived to see his old constituency of Walthamstow West fall to the Conservatives in a by-election in September 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.

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). [8] 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."[9] 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.

Statue of Attlee outside Limehouse Library.
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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.

Attlee's cabinet 1945-1950

Changes

Attlee's cabinet 1950-1951

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

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.

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