Clement Attlee Totally Explained

Everything about Clement Richard Attlee 1st Earl Attlee totally explained

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 until Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party in the 1970s.
   His government also presided over the decolonization of a large part of the British Empire, a process by which India and the countries that are now Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Bangladesh obtained independence.
   In 2004, he was voted as the greatest British prime minister of the 20th century in a poll of professors organized by MORI.

Early life and family

He was born in Putney, London, England, into a middle-class family, the seventh of eight children. His father was Henry Attlee (1841–1908) and was a solicitor, and his mother was Ellen Bravery Watson (1847–1920). He was educated at Northaw School, Haileybury and University College, Oxford, where he graduated with a Second Class Honours MA in Modern History in 1904. Attlee then trained as a lawyer, and was called to the Bar in 1906. After the war, he returned to teaching at the London School of Economics until 1923.
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 Lady Janet Helen (b. 1923), Lady Felicity Ann (1925-2007), Martin Richard (1927-1991) 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 metropolitan borough of Stepney in 1919. During his time as mayor, the council undertook action to tackle slum landlords who charged high rents but refused to spend money on keeping their property in habitable condition. The council served and enforced legal orders on house owners to repair their property. It also appointed health visitors and sanitary inspectors, and reduced the infant mortallity rate 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 wouldn't 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 both men.
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). Attlee supported Churchill in his continuation of Britain's resistance after the French capitulation in 1940, and proved a loyal ally to Churchill throughout the conflict.

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.
   Attlee's government was also responsible for the nationalisation of basic industries and public utillities such as the Bank of England, coal mining, the steel industry, electricity, gas, telephones, and inland transport (including the railways, road haulage and canals). 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."
   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".
   In a crucial contribution to the economic stability of post-War Europe, Attlee's cabinet was instrumental in promoting the American Marshall Plan for the economic recovery of Europe.
   In an early "good-will" gesture that has been criticised more recently, 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.
   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. The Attlee government then became instrumental in the creation of the successful NATO defence alliance to protect Western Europe against any Soviet aggression. Attlee also shepherded Britain's successful development of a nuclear weapon, although the first successful test didn't 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. Attlee appointed Lord Louis Mountbatten as Viceroy of India, and agreed to Mountbatten's request for plenipotentiary powers for negotiating Indian indepenendence. In view of implacable demands by the political leadership of the Islamic community in British India for a Muslim homeland, Mountbatten conceded the partition of India between a largely Hindu India and a heavily Islamic Pakistan (which at the time incorporated East Pakistan, now Bangladesh). Partition was only accomplished at the cost of large-scale population movements and heavy communal bloodshed on both sides. 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.
   His short list of Resignation Honours announced in November 1951 included an Earldom for William Jowitt, Lord Chancellor.

Return to opposition and retirement

Following the defeat in 1951, Attlee continued to lead the party in opposition. His last four years as leader are widely seen as one of the Labour Party's weaker periods. The party became split between its right wing led by Hugh Gaitskell and its left led by Aneurin Bevan. One of his main reasons for Attlee's staying on as leader was to frustrate the leadership ambitions of Herbert Morrison 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's 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 wasn't really running a team. Every time you've 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." 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. In foreign affairs, he did much to assist with the post-war economic recovery of Europe, though this didn't 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 wasn't 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 wasn't 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

July 1946 - Arthur Greenwood becomes Paymaster-General as well as Lord Privy Seal.

October 1946 - The three service ministers (Secretary of State for War, Secretary of State for Air, and First Lord of the Admiralty) cease to be cabinet positions. A. V. Alexander remains in the cabinet as Minister without Portfolio. George Hall replaces A. V. Alexander as First Lord of the Admiralty, outside the cabinet. Arthur Creech Jones succeeds Hall as Secretary of State for the Colonies.

December 1946 - A. V. Alexander succeeds Attlee as Minister of Defence.

February 1947 - George Tomlinson succeeds Ellen Wilkinson as Minister of Education upon her death.

March 1947 - Arthur Greenwood ceases to be Paymaster-General, remaining Lord Privy Seal. His successor as Paymaster-General isn't in the cabinet.

April 1947 - Arthur Greenwood becomes Minister without Portfolio. Lord Inman succeeds Arthur Greenwood as Lord Privy Seal. William Francis Hare, Lord Listowel succeeds Lord Pethick-Lawrence as Secretary of State for India and Burma.

July 1947 - The Dominion Affairs Office becomes the Office of Commonwealth Relations. Addison remains at the head.

August 1947 - The India and Burma Office becomes the Burma office with India's independence. Lord Listowel remains in office.

September 1947 - Sir Stafford Cripps becomes Minister of Economic Affairs. Harold Wilson succeeds Cripps as President of the Board of Trade. Arthur Greenwood retires from the Front Bench.

October 1947 - Lord Addison succeeds Lord Inman as Lord Privy Seal, remaining also Leader of the House of Lords. Philip Noel-Baker succeeds Lord Addison as Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations. Arthur Woodburn succeeds Joseph Westwood as Secretary of State for Scotland. The Minister of Fuel and Power, Emanuel Shinwell, leaves the Cabinet.

November 1947 - Sir Stafford Cripps succeeds Hugh Dalton as Chancellor of the Exchequer.

January 1948 - The Burma Office is abolished with Burma's independence.

May 1948: Hugh Dalton re-enters the Cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. Lord Pakenham enters the Cabinet as Minister of Civil Aviation.

July 1948: Lord Addison becomes Paymaster-General.

April 1949: Lord Addison ceases to be Paymaster-General, remaining Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Lords. His successor as Paymaster-General isn't in the Cabinet.

Attlee's cabinet 1950-1951

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

Clement Attlee: Prime Minister

Lord Jowitt: Lord Chancellor

Herbert Morrison: Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons

Lord Addison: Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Lords

Sir Stafford Cripps: Chancellor of the Exchequer

Ernest Bevin: Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs

James Chuter Ede: Secretary of State for the Home Department

Jim Griffiths: Secretary of State for the Colonies

Patrick Gordon Walker: Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations

Harold Wilson: President of the Board of Trade

Lord Alexander of Hillsborough: Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster

George Tomlinson: Minister of Education

Hector McNeil: Secretary of State for Scotland

Tom Williams: Minister of Agriculture and Fisheries

George Isaacs: Minister of Labour and National Service

Aneurin Bevan: Minister of Health

Emanuel Shinwell: Minister of Defence

Hugh Dalton: Minister of Town and Country Planning

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 isn't 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

Art

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.

Literature

Attlee composed this limerick about himself to demonstrate how he'd 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

Sport

In 1981, Attlee again entered British popular culture as one of the famous English people taunted by name in Bjørge Lillelien's legendary commentary immediately after Norway defeated England in a FIFA World Cup qualifier.

Drama

Played by Patrick Troughton in Edward & Mrs. Simpson.

Appeared as a character in the play Tom and Clem, by Stephen Churchett. In the original production in 1997, Alec McCowen played Attlee, and Michael Gambon played Tom Driberg.

Played by Alan David in the final episode of the BBC sitcom Goodnight Sweetheart,

The main character in the BBC Radio 4 Saturday Play That Man Attlee. Broadcast on 15th September 2007, it was written by Robin Glendinning, with Bill Wallis playing Attlee.Further Information
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