R. A. Butler

British politician

• Born: December 9, 1902
• Birthplace: Attock Serai, India (now in Pakistan)
• Died: March 8, 1982
• Place of death: Great Yeldham, Essex, England

As chief architect of the Education Act of 1944, Butler accomplished one of the major educational reforms of the twentieth century, establishing the outlines of contemporary English secondary education. In the realm of politics, Butler was largely responsible for leading the Conservative Party’s acceptance of the welfare state and the mixed economy following the Labour Party’s triumph in the 1945 general elections.

Early Life

Son of Sir Montague Butler, an official in the Indian Civil Service, R. A. Butler was born at Attock Serai, India, which is now in Pakistan. Although the Butler family had little landed wealth, they had a distinguished record of public service, especially in the field of education. The family included ancestors who were headmasters at Harrow, a governor of Burma, and a master of Pembroke College, Cambridge, a position eventually attained by Butler’s own father. On his mother’s side, Butler was descended from an energetic family of Scottish missionaries, civil servants, and academics.

At an early age, his father gave Butler the diminutive “Rab” (taken from his initials) as a useful shorthand in any future career. He was known as Rab Butler in both public and private for the rest of his life. Under the tutelage of his father, young Butler developed a respect for the Indian people and their customs without the condescension that was frequently found among the British ruling class.

After an apparently happy childhood, Butler was sent back to England, at the age of eight, to begin the round of schooling that formed an essential characteristic of the English upper class. After failing entry to Eton, Butler chose Marlborough. Although a poor athlete because of a damaged left arm, he became a first-rate scholar. Only eleven when World War I broke out, Butler always felt a distinct separation from his colleagues only a few years older who had served in that dreadful conflict.

Attending his father’s college, Pembroke, at Cambridge, Butler came into his own as a brilliant scholar. He won a double first-class degree in both French and history. In his last year, he served as president of the Cambridge Union, one of the English-speaking world’s great debating societies. It provided invaluable experience for his later political career. On graduation in 1925, he was offered and accepted a fellowship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, with responsibility for lectures in modern French history.

Meanwhile, Butler had met and fallen in love with Sydney Courtauld, the only child of textile magnate Samuel Courtauld, with an income that allowed a comfortable living no matter what profession he entered. The union was a happy one, with many shared interests, particularly in art. They had four children, three sons and a daughter.

Eager to enter politics, Butler accepted an offer as Conservative candidate for Saffron Waldon in Essex, only a few miles from Cambridge. Elected at the age of twenty-seven in 1929, Butler held the seat until 1965, when he gave it up to enter the House of Lords. Conservative leaders saw Butler as a young man to watch. He was admired for what some called his “Rolls-Royce mind” along with his capacity for hard work and, above all, his loyalty to the party leaders. Shy and lacking the “common touch,” Butler spent little time socializing with other members of the House of Commons, which became a handicap later in his career. His habit of making witty and often cutting remarks about colleagues sometimes caused lingering resentment. As a young man, Butler cut an impressive figure. Of medium height with dark hair, he was reasonably good-looking without being handsome. As he grew older he developed pouches under his eyes, which were the source of endless caricatures by political cartoonists.

Life’s Work

Butler’s long career began with his appointment in 1932 as undersecretary to the secretary of state for India, Samuel Hoare. In that capacity Butler played an important role in guiding the India Act of 1935 through the Commons. The act, which provided a measure of provincial self-government, proved to be the beginning of Indian democracy, and much of it was incorporated into the Indian constitution of 1950. Significantly, Butler showed his great skill in debate against the right-wing imperialists of his own party, including Winston Churchill.

In 1937, Butler was appointed parliamentary secretary to the minister of labour, a post in which he gained firsthand experience of the unemployment and poverty covering much of the north of England and Wales. His experience awakened him to the need for more dynamic social policies, but his work was cut short by his appointment as undersecretary at the Foreign Office to Lord Halifax, the newly appointed foreign secretary, in February, 1938. Since Halifax was in the House of Lords, it was Butler’s responsibility to defend Prime MinisterNeville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement of Adolf Hitler’s expansion in Central Europe. In his memoirs, Butler defended appeasement as necessary because it provided Britain with a vital year in which it could complete rearmament. Despite his association with the disastrous appeasement policy, Butler was kept in his position even after Churchill became prime minister in May, 1940.

Butler was offered and accepted the presidency of the Board of Education in July, 1941. Churchill was surprised that Butler was willing to take on a job so far removed from his main area of effort, but Butler saw that it might provide an opportunity for a major piece of wartime social legislation. As chair of the Post-War Problems Central Committee, he had already recognized the need for the Conservatives to develop new social policies to meet the rapidly shifting public opinion favoring government intervention on a number of issues. Meanwhile, Butler carefully cleared the ground for his own educational reforms, which faced opposition from a number of quarters, not the least of which was the prime minister himself. Churchill feared that anything controversial, especially on the question of religious education, would threaten his coalition, but Butler gradually won him over by successful negotiations with the churches assisted by his parliamentary secretary, James Chuter Ede, a Labourite.

The major accomplishment of the Education Act of 1944 was its provision of free secondary education for all. Public secondary education in England and Wales was actually nonexistent for most children, who continued in “all-age” elementary schools until they finished at fourteen. For those wanting a real secondary education, the grammar schools emphasizing the classical liberal arts were available as entries to higher or professional education. Parents of middle-class children could afford to pay the fees to these grammar schools, while working-class students had to compete for a limited number of scholarships. By making all publicly supported secondary education free, new opportunities were open to the working class. In addition, the school leaving age was raised to fifteen, providing a sufficiently large age group for the development of true secondary schools in every community. Basically, the act provided a tripartite division of secondary education: the grammar schools for those bound for a university, secondary modern schools for children entering the workforce at fifteen or sixteen years of age, and technical schools to provide special skills for trade and industry workers. As a compromise, the church schools, mainly Anglican but also Roman Catholic, were provided with an increased subsidy to meet these changes, but they were also brought under closer governmental supervision. Finally, the Board of Education was abolished and Butler became the first minister of education.

Again, Butler showed his skill in moving this very complicated bill through the Commons. He faced only one defeat, when feminists and their supporters managed to push through an amendment granting equal pay to female teachers. Although Butler favored equal pay, Churchill wanted to punish his opponents by making the amendment a matter of a vote of confidence in his government. Needless to say, equal pay was not included in the final act.

As Butler had feared, both the Conservatives and Churchill were badly defeated by the Labour Party and its welfare-state program in the 1945 general election. Instead of returning to genteel opposition or becoming a corporate director, Butler took on himself the task of reshaping the Conservative Party’s ideology by chairing the Conservative Research Department between 1945 and 1964. With the aid of Harold Macmillan and a number of bright young Conservatives such as Ian Macleod and Reginald Maudling, Butler produced an entirely new Conservative approach to the Labour Party’s welfare state. The most important element of their work was the Industrial Charter, which appeared in May, 1947. Instead of negative opposition, it accepted the general outlines of the welfare state as well as full employment and a measure of state planning, while emphasizing a humane, efficient capitalism as a positive alternative to socialism. It formed the basis for Conservative policy for more than a generation, and its ideas were incorporated into party manifestos issued for the 1950 and 1951 general elections.

When the Conservatives returned to power in 1951, Butler was rewarded for his work when Churchill named him Chancellor of the Exchequer. Despite difficult economic conditions, Butler was able to moderate the worst of the postwar austerity in his 1952 and 1953 budgets. By 1954 most price controls were dropped, and food rationing finally came to an end. Butler also managed to find funds to commit the government to grant equal pay to women civil servants. Meanwhile, following Churchill’s stroke in May of 1953 and Anthony Eden’s simultaneous illness, Butler served not only as acting prime minister but also as acting foreign secretary in addition to his position as chancellor.

Butler’s own health and drive were seriously weakened by the death of his parents in 1952 and 1953, followed by that of his wife, Sydney, in 1954. He also suffered from a long-term virus in 1955 and lasting into 1956, during the critical Suez crisis. When Churchill finally retired, in April of 1955, Eden, the new prime minister, kept Butler on briefly at the exchequer, but long enough to bring in a supplementary October budget taking away many of the tax reductions of the previous April. Eden then named Butler leader of the House and Lord Privy Seal, with the responsibility for organizing Conservative publicity. With the developing Suez crisis in 1956, Butler opposed British intervention in Egypt but remained loyal to Eden in public. Nevertheless, when Eden was forced to resign because of ill health in early 1957, Conservative elder statesmen, including Churchill, advised the queen to appoint Macmillan, not Butler, as the next prime minister. Butler was seen by the right wing of his party as too critical toward this “last gasp of British imperialism,” whereas Macmillan had supported Eden, but then quickly repudiated the policy after its disastrous failure in November, 1956.

Macmillan rejected Butler’s request for the Foreign Office, and instead he was given the post of home secretary while retaining until 1961 his post as Leader of the House. Between 1959 and 1961, he was given the added responsibility of chair of the Conservative Party. While he was home minister, Butler was responsible for the first limitation on Commonwealth immigration in 1962, a regulation that he much regretted but which he believed was necessary as a result of the flood of immigrants into Great Britain in the early 1960’s. In addition, Butler was given the task of negotiating an end to the Central African Federation in 1962, when Africans led by Northern Rhodesia and Nyasaland demanded independence from the white settlers’ colony of Southern Rhodesia.

Meanwhile, Butler married again, in 1959. Mollie Courtauld, a cousin by marriage of his first wife, provided Butler with much-needed support for his last political struggle. Macmillan’s sudden resignation in October of 1963 presented Butler with a final opportunity for the premiership. As in 1957, Butler was outnumbered by Macmillan, who gave his support to Lord Home, his foreign secretary, a wealthy Scottish aristocrat. Most of the cabinet opposed Home, and several junior ministers urged Butler not to serve under Home. Ever loyal and having no real policy disagreement with the new prime minister, Butler fulfilled his long-standing desire by becoming foreign secretary. Unfortunately, the Home government lasted less than a year, allowing little time for any new foreign policy initiatives. After the victory of Labour in the 1964 general election, Butler spent a few months in the Conservative shadow cabinet, but when Prime Minister Harold Wilson offered Butler a life peerage along with the post of Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, it was quickly accepted.

Retired from active politics, Butler still held to his progressive views in the House of Lords, openly voting against the Conservatives when the party moved to the political right under the leadership of Edward Heath and Margaret Thatcher. In addition to his academic duties, Lord Butler had the responsibility for supervising the education of the Prince of Wales, an undergraduate at Trinity who became the first member of the royal family ever to receive a university degree. After two terms as Master of Trinity, Lord Butler retired in 1975, but he continued to make public appearances. He died at his home in Essex on March 8, 1982.

Significance

As one of the political giants of twentieth century British politics, Butler held virtually every important office except that of prime minister. Ironically, it was with his work in education, a ministry traditionally lacking in prestige, that Butler made his greatest impact. His 1944 Education Act, often known as the Butler Act, gave England a public secondary-education system comparable to those of other advanced democracies. While critics on the Left saw the new secondary modern schools as maintaining an image of class inferiority, the Butler Act had suggested that these schools could be grouped together in one institution. In fact, this led to the development of comprehensive schools in the 1960’s along the lines of American high schools. More important, the new system of free secondary schools opened the universities to the children of manual workers so that by 1962 almost 25 percent of all students in Great Britain’s universities came from working-class backgrounds, a much higher level than that of comparable Western European nations.

Butler’s other major achievement involved his central role in moving the Conservative Party into an accommodation with the leftward movement of public opinion during and after World War II. Butler had always found himself uncomfortable with the right wing of his party and tried to rekindle earlier notions of noblesse oblige found in Benjamin Disraeli and others. By careful persuasion, he was able to develop a Tory acceptance of the new welfare state and even a measure of nationalization. No mere ideologue, Butler carried out these policies as Chancellor of the Exchequer in the mid-1950’s to such a degree that the Economist coined the term “Butskillism,” an amalgam of Butler and Hugh Gaitskell, his opposite number in the Labour Party, to describe the basic consensus of both chancellors’ economic policies.

Despite Butler’s continued loyalty to six different party leaders, many of the rank and file never trusted him. Perhaps Butler’s political ideology was too openly progressive for a Conservative leader even in the 1950’s, although Macmillan shared many of the same views. More important, Butler’s basic aloof manner kept him from being popular with the backbenchers. Consequently, when he needed support in a contest for the leadership as in 1963, he had few devoted followers. Instead he kept himself close to his work, his family, and his intellectual life, so that he had little time and even less interest in working the hustings or in making an emotional appeal to the party members.

While no political changes are ever permanent, it is obvious that Butler did not like the movement of the Conservative Party to the right under Heath and Thatcher. In the Lords, Butler found the policies of the Conservative New Right distasteful and a repudiation of the progressive policies he had worked most of his life to establish. Despite the changing political climate, Butler’s achievements remain a monument to his intelligent, humane concern for the well-being of all of his fellow countryfolk.

Bibliography

Butler, Richard Austen. The Art of the Possible. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1971. Butler’s elegantly written memoirs deal with all the major political events of his career but tell little about his personal or family life. His defense of his role in the development of the appeasement policy is rather weak.

Cosgrave, Patrick. R. A. Butler: An English Life. London: Quartet Books, 1981. Not a traditional biography, but a mainly favorable study by a former staff member at the Conservative Research Department. Although friendly to Butler, it is critical of his role in appeasement during the late 1930’s.

Hoffman, J. D. The Conservative Party in Opposition, 1945-1951. London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1964. Valuable mainly for its discussion of Butler’s role in the reformation of Conservative Party policy between 1945 and 1951.

Jeffeys, Kevin. “British Politics and Social Policy During the Second World War.” Historical Journal 30 (Spring, 1987): 123-144. Based on primary sources, including Butler’s papers, Jeffeys’ article shows that there was little support for reform among the Conservatives in the wartime coalition, with the major exception of Butler himself.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “R. A. Butler, the Board of Education, and the 1944 Education Act.” History 69 (October, 1984): 415-431. Using the Butler and Chuter Ede papers, the author shows how Butler was able to overcome opposition from all sides to bring about his wartime educational reform.

Lowndes, G. A. N. The Silent Social Revolution. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1969. Provides considerable background on the conditions in English secondary schools prior to 1944 as well as a detailed description of the negotiations and debate of the Butler Act. It was, however, written before the Butler and Chuter Ede papers were available to scholars.

Pearce, Edward. The Lost Leaders. London: Little, Brown, 1997. Includes information on Butler and other British politicians.

Seldon, Anthony. Churchill’s Indian Summer: The Conservative Government, 1951-55. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1981. Using a variety of primary sources, Seldon provides detailed insights into Butler’s role as Chancellor of the Exchequer and how he was judged by his colleagues and the civil servants.

Sparrow, Gerald.“R. A. B.”: Study of a Statesman. London: Oldham Books, 1965. Sparrow’s biography is generally supportive of Butler’s entire career and provides some personal insights lacking in Butler’s memoirs.

Thorpe, D. R. The Uncrowned Prime Ministers. London: Darkhouse, 1980. This brief biographical sketch is valuable for its detailed examination of Butler’s failure to become prime minister in either the 1957 or the 1963 leadership crisis.