Clement Attlee

Prime minister of the United Kingdom (1945-1951)

• Born: January 3, 1883
• Birthplace: London, England
• Died: October 8, 1967
• Place of death: London, England

As prime minister, Attlee led his Labour government as it became a close ally with the United States, granted Indian independence, nationalized major sectors of the economy, established a welfare state, and restructured the postwar economy. With his decisiveness, sound judgment, and managerial abilities, Attlee himself contributed significantly to that success.

Early Life

Clement Attlee (AT-lee) was born in Putney, near London. He was reared in a large, late-Victorian, Christian, upper-middle-class family by his father, Henry, an eminent solicitor, and his mother, née Ellen Watson, a sensitive and affectionate woman. Small and ill as a child, Attlee was shy and loved reading. His conventional upper-middle-class education was at public school (Haileybury) and at University College, Oxford, where he took second class honors in modern history. Influenced by his older brother Tom and by the works of Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and William Morris, Attlee developed a social consciousness while working at the Haileybury Club, a boys’ club in Stepney, in London’s East End slums, and he chose to live nearby. Attlee became its manager from 1907 to 1909 and then served a year as secretary at the famous settlement house Toynbee Hall. His education and personal experience helped him become a tutor and lecturer in the Social Services Department of the new, pioneering London School of Economics from 1913 to 1923. With great empathy and respect for the poor, Attlee decided that self-help projects were not sufficient; society itself must be changed. Attlee thus became a socialist, not from a Marxist or any other theoretical position, but because of his concern for social justice and social efficiency. A volunteer in World War I, he reached the rank of major and served in Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and France.

Life’s Work

Returning from the war, Attlee immersed himself in local London Labour Party politics. Already balding at age thirty-six, with a mustache, of medium height and build, his voice weak though crisp, Attlee was physically unimpressive. Yet he was effective because he was trusted. He was experienced in leadership, articulate though not effusive in speech, knowledgeable of local problems, decisive in action, and a conciliator not linked to any personal or policy factions. These characteristics would later propel him to high national office.

An effective manager of the Labour Party’s borough elections in Stepney, Attlee became its mayor (1919-1920) and then an alderman (1920-1927). The well-respected, young, and enthusiastic Attlee was soon elected to Parliament in 1922. Even though he moved from Stepney following his marriage to Violet Millar in 1922, his long personal ties to his constituency allowed him to be continually reelected to Parliament, even in 1931, when most other Labour MPs were defeated, thus catapulting him to deputy leader of the party in Parliament. Meanwhile, he had served as parliamentary private secretary (1922-1924) to the party leader, Ramsay MacDonald, and then as a junior minister in the first Labour government (1924) as undersecretary in the War Office. Attlee’s appointment to the Simon Commission on India (1927-1930) sparked his interest in India. The commission’s work, though, prevented his obtaining office initially in the second Labour government (1929-1931), though he eventually held minor positions including that of postmaster general.

Faced with an international financial crisis and projected escalating governmental deficits, the Labour government collapsed in August, 1931. When MacDonald remained as prime minister of the new coalition cabinet, the bitter Labour Party expelled him from membership. Following the sudden October election that decimated Labour’s ranks, Attlee emerged as deputy leader. Now considered on the party’s left, he worked tirelessly and effectively so that the small Labour contingent in Parliament fulfilled the traditional role of the opposition party, himself having to speak often in Parliament on wide-ranging subjects. Attlee also prevented the parliamentary Labour Party from being dominated by the party’s national executive committee or by the Trades Union Congress. While seldom original in his thoughts, he supported currents within Labour advocating that the party never take office again unless it had majority support in Parliament and that in office the party implement socialism: nationalization of some major enterprises, economic planning, and expanded social services.

Chosen leader of the small party in Parliament on the eve of the 1935 general election, Attlee was, surprisingly, reelected leader even after all the other major Labourites returned to Parliament. World War II greatly enhanced his position. He led criticism of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s ineffectiveness in war, decided on the Commons censure debate that toppled Chamberlain, and brought his party into a coalition government under the new prime minister, Winston Churchill. Attlee immediately persuaded Churchill to restructure and improve the governmental machinery and to establish only a small war cabinet, on which Attlee served for its entirety (1940-1945) as lord privy seal (1940-1942) and officially as deputy prime minister (1942-1945). Attlee was a superb team player and often leader. Besides serving as acting leader of the House of Commons and chairing cabinet meetings during Churchill’s absences, Attlee presided over the major domestic policies committee (as lord president of the council, 1943-1945), was responsible for colonial and Pacific theater issues (as dominions secretary, 1942-1943), and influenced planning for postwar Germany. This wide experience as well as his control over Labour Party personnel in the coalition enhanced his status, even though several other Labourites were much better known to the public.

Following Germany’s defeat, Labour resigned from the coalition government and new elections were held. Labour won a surprising and massive victory, with 393 seats to the Conservatives’ 220 and others’ 18. As prime minister, Attlee presided over one of the strongest and most active governments in British history. A financially exhausted Great Britain was faced with major new postwar military obligations in Germany, Greece, southeast Asia, and elsewhere; continuing worldwide colonial concerns; a need for postwar economic recovery; and a commitment to expanded social services, now expected by both the party and the electorate. Attlee’s great contribution was to direct his ministry to tackle all those issues almost simultaneously, and many of them successfully.

On international matters, Attlee worked closely with Ernest Bevin , his foreign secretary and now closest political ally. Because they agreed in principle, Attlee usually allowed Bevin great latitude. While anticommunist, they initially expected Great Britain to work with both the United States and the Soviet Union; as the Cold War evolved, they then led Great Britain into a close relationship with the United States and encouraged it to play an active role in Western Europe. Great Britain also received significant American support through an early loan and then Marshall Plan aid. Attlee himself worked well with President Harry S. Truman, whom he met twice in 1945 and again in December, 1950, concerning the Korean War. Attlee also launched Great Britain (without the cabinet’s knowledge) into its own nuclear program for civilian and military use when the United States in 1945 reneged on its wartime agreement of mutual sharing of atomic developments with Great Britain and Canada.

On colonial matters, Attlee allowed a muddled British policy on Palestine, resulting in a United Nations’ solution and an Arab-Israeli War that discredited Great Britain in both camps. Attlee personally guided British action on independence for India and Pakistan, however, and he boldly appointed Lord Mountbatten as viceroy to produce the settlement there.

Attlee was strongest in 1945-1946 as his government implemented massive new programs concerning nationalization (of coal, transportation, gas, and electricity), a national health service, a coherent national insurance system of social services, and postwar economic recovery. After Great Britain’s difficult year of 1947, Attlee was never quite as effective. The 1950 general election reduced the party’s parliamentary majority to five, and Attlee and some other key leaders appeared old, weary, and ill. Attlee did reassert himself in foreign affairs to support the United States in the Korean War and also, on behalf of Western Europe, to temper American actions in Asia while ensuring a strong and mutual Western commitment in Europe.

Attlee called a new election in 1951 and resigned as prime minister following the narrow Conservative victory. He remained as party leader until 1955 (having served twenty years, the longest in Labour history), and he was created Earl Attlee (1955) and made a Knight of the Garter (1956). An elder statesman, he occasionally made reasoned public appeals to the American government during the Cold War era. He lived very modestly in retirement, survived his wife, and died on October 8, 1967.

Significance

In a 1984 poll of members of the British Politics Group, Attlee was ranked as the fourth most successful British prime minister since 1830 (behind Churchill, William Ewart Gladstone, and Benjamin Disraeli). Attlee’s gift was the ability to manage a very talented but often discordant group of Labourites, ensuring that they worked in concert and took action on multifarious pressing issues. Remarkably he led a united party into and out of a war coalition and then into Great Britain’s most active peacetime government; this lasted with only brief interruption for twelve years. Moreover, he made a long-term impact on Great Britain’s policy-making process through improved cabinet procedures and the restructuring and expanding of the cabinet committee system.

Many other actions of Attlee and his government have had a long-lasting effect on Great Britain, both internally and internationally. The successful transfer of power to India and Pakistan and the creation of a multiracial Commonwealth set a tone for further British decolonization, which, despite some tension and violence, was more successful than for most other European colonial empires.

As the Cold War developed, the Attlee government recognized Great Britain’s’s inability to pursue its traditional balance-of-power policies and perceived a need for major American commitments to Europe and for significant West European cooperation, as reflected in the Marshall Plan and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which Great Britain helped mold. Favoring European cooperation over integration, however, Attlee and his government steered Great Britain away from the negotiations that led France, West Germany, Italy, and three others eventually to form the European Economic Community, which Great Britain only joined in 1973.

Attlee’s initiation of Great Britain as a nuclear power was begun before the United States asserted its strong commitment to Europe in alliance with Great Britain. Since the 1950’s, both Great Britain’s nuclear arms and its American alliance have become controversial issues within Great Britain, especially within the Labour Party, and have affected Attlee’s reputation. After all, Attlee himself helped gain the American public’s and congressional support of Great Britain a socialist Great Britain, at that.

Great Britain also retains the postwar Labour government’s domestic pattern of a mixed economy, a welfare state, and modest planning agencies. In the public mind, this is Attlee’s greatest legacy. Its supporters praise Attlee for successfully presiding over its establishment, while latter-day Labour advocates of much more extensive socialist programs acclaim his achievement of (for what is to them) a successful first-stage peaceful revolution. It was significant that the prime minister of Labour’s first government with a majority in Parliament and with major programs to implement was not a demagogue who polarized Great Britain politically but was the sensible, modest, taciturn, and eminently respectable Clement Attlee.

Bibliography

Attlee, C. R. As It Happened. Melbourne, Vic.: William Heinemann, 1954. Drafted while he was prime minister and published while he was still party leader, this autobiography is brief, restrained, and noncontroversial. As such, the book has been much criticized, but it is vintage Attlee.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. The Labour Party in Perspective. London: Victor Gollancz, 1937. Later republished with a new introduction while prime minister, this general analysis of the party and its programs by its new leader reflects his efforts to unite the party and to demonstrate both its respectability and convictions to Labour supporters and to the entire electorate.

Burridge, Trevor. Clement Attlee: A Political Biography. London: Jonathan Cape, 1985. This fine, modest-sized biography is well written and thoroughly researched. It admirably develops Attlee’s role in relationship to others within the Labour Party, Parliament, and the war and postwar governments.

Harris, Kenneth. Attlee. New York: W. W. Norton, 1983. This very readable biography designed for a knowledgeable public is by an experienced political journalist who incorporated into his sources extensive interviews, including several with the retired Attlee. This official and highly favorable work treats both the public and private Attlee.

Moore, R. J. Escape from Empire: The Attlee Government and the Indian Problem. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1983. This is a detailed scholarly re-examination, from the Labour government’s perspective, of the transfer of power to India. In this third work of Moore’s trilogy on India, Attlee’s contribution is discussed throughout, although it is well balanced by an effective recognition of others, most notably Stafford Cripps.

Morgan, Kenneth O. Labour in Power, 1945-1951. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1984. A profound and sustained treatment, this work is favorable to Attlee and his governments. It admirably relates the actions of the Attlee governments to the wider British twentieth century political experience.

Pelling, Henry. The Labour Governments, 1945-51. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984. One of the most respected historians of British Labour history here presents a short and forceful work with a sobering reassessment of Attlee’s governments their problems and their achievements. Attlee’s positive role is seldom stressed, except for his handling of the cabinet and of India.

Reid, Alastair J., and Henry Pelling. A Short History of the Labour Party. New ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. A concise, fluent, and updated survey, this book is often recommended for first reading when beginning a study of the British Labour Party.

Swift, John. Labour in Crisis: Clement Attlee and the Labour Party in Opposition, 1931-40. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Outlines the development of Attlee and his Labour Party from the collapse of the second Labour government in 1931 to their entrance into a coalition with Winston Churchill in 1940. Describes how the Labour Party helped win World War I and how Attlee rose from obscurity to become a major figure in Churchill’s wartime cabinet.

Williams, Francis. A Prime Minister Remembers: The War and Post-War Memoirs of the Rt. Hon. Earl Attlee. London: Heinemann, 1961. Based on extensive recorded interviews with the retired Attlee and on some of his private papers, these reminiscences are more personal, lively, and penetrating than his earlier autobiography. Williams was an experienced Labour journalist and press officer to Attlee while he was prime minister.