WHAT’S THE STORY?

FIFTY years ago tomorrow, on October 8, 1967, Britain’s first post-Second World War prime minister, Clement Attlee, died of pneumonia in Westminster Hospital. His funeral was attended by 2000 people, and warm and generous tributes were paid to him by all political parties, who recognised that he had transformed the UK and arguably a large part of the world.

A BRIEF LIFE STORY BEFORE 1940, PLEASE

BORN into a middle class family in Putney on January, 3, 1883, Attlee attended the minor public school Haileybury College and University College, Oxford, from which he graduated BA with second class honours in Modern History. He trained to be a lawyer and was called to the bar in 1906. However, while doing charity work in Stepney in east London, he was horrified at the poverty he encountered and became a socialist, joining the Independent Labour Party in 1908.

A much better public speaker than he is given credit for being, Attlee learned that trade touring the country explaining the National Insurance Act to the public. He then became a lecturer at the London School of Economics.

During the First World War, Attlee saw action at Gallipoli – he did not blame Winston Churchill for that debacle – and was wounded in Iraq before serving on the Western Front, finishing the war as a major.

He met the love of his life, Violet Millar, who was 12 years his junior, on a holiday in Italy. They were married in 1922 after a whirlwind courtship. They had three daughters and a son, and Attlee always paid tribute to his wife’s devotion and her ability to create an atmosphere at home to which he could retreat from political ferment.

He would need that, for he soon became Mayor of Stepney, wrote his first book, The Social Worker, and in 1922 became MP for Limehouse.

Ramsay MacDonald made Attlee under-secretary for war in the 1924 Government, and he later served on the Royal Commission on India which encouraged him to the view that India should have self-rule.

Despite a brief period in the cabinet in the second Labour government, Attlee refused to join MacDonald’s national government and almost lost his seat before bouncing back to replace George Lansbury as interim Labour leader in 1935. The party prospered under his leadership in that year’s election and he was confirmed as Labour leader and leader of the opposition in December 1935.

At first opposed to rearmament, Attlee was horrified by the rise of Hitler and by 1938 he was firmly committed to attacking appeasement.

When Churchill became PM in 1940, Attlee agreed to the wartime coalition and entered the cabinet as Lord Privy Seal.

In 1942, he became Britain’s first deputy prime minister, a sure sign of the respect in which he was held by Churchill. He and Attlee were the only two men to serve the entire duration of the wartime cabinet.

Then came the 1945 election when the quiet and uncharismatic Attlee led Labour to a majority of 196 in the Commons.

DID HE REALLY CHANGE THINGS?

WITH left-wing policies and a commitment to decolonisation by peaceful means, Attlee and a powerful team of ministers such as foreign secretary Ernest Bevin and Aneurin Bevan as minister of health changed the face of modern Britain in six years. Indeed, between 1945 and 1948 alone, they passed more than 200 Acts of Parliament.

His government’s achievements included setting up the welfare state and the national health service; independence for India and Pakistan; new towns; massive council housing programmes; free secondary education by right; more workers’ rights; and nationalisation of the Bank of England, the coal and steel industries, the railways and energy companies – all this and much more without losing full employment and with low inflation.

Attlee also drove through Britain’s possession of a nuclear deterrent, and sided with the USA in the Cold War.

However, his majority was cut to six in the 1950 election – mainly due to internal splits in the party.

In a snap election in 1951, Churchill and the Conservatives were returned to power. Attlee retired as Labour leader after the loss of the 1955 election.

HOW DID HE GET ON WITH WINSTON CHURCHILL?

THEY were political opponents all their lives, yet formed a real friendship. They could not have been more different, Churchill being effectively a leading actor on a world stage and Attlee the quiet committee chairman who got things done on the home front.

Yet as prime minister and deputy prime minister during the war, they worked well together and Churchill realised the importance of Attlee’s contribution, so that when the Beveridge Report – commissioned by Attlee – recommended the welfare state, Churchill endorsed it, a fact that is often forgotten.

Churchill is famously supposed to have said “an empty taxi drew up outside 10 Downing Street and Clement Attlee got out of it” and that Attlee “was a modest man with much to be modest about”.

Yet Churchill always denied those quotes were his, saying: “Mr Attlee is an honourable and gallant gentleman, and a faithful colleague who served his country well at the time of her greatest need. I should be obliged if you would make it clear whenever an occasion arises that I would never make such a remark about him, and that I strongly disapprove of anybody who does.”

The warm feeling was returned. On Churchill’s 80th birthday during a special tribute ceremony in Westminster Hall after the opening of Parliament in 1954, Attlee was first to rise and acclaim Churchill as “the last of the great orators to touch the heights”.

Attlee got the last laugh on Churchill, in a sense, surviving his old friend and foe by two years, and living long enough to state in 1965, as Earl Attlee in the House of Lords, that Churchill was “the greatest Englishman of our time – I think the greatest citizen of the world of our time.”

DID HIS LEGACY LAST?

THE industries nationalised by Labour under Attlee were nearly all privatised by the Thatcher and Major governments in the 1980s and 1990s. But if only for the national health service alone, Attlee will never be forgotten, and Labour has seldom, if ever, enjoyed the unity it did under him in his golden age between 1945 and 1950.

When he stood down as Labour leader in 1955, he had been in the job for 20 years – more than six years longer than anyone else.

He was garlanded with honours, becoming an earl – there were no life peerages then – and his grandson, the third earl is still in the Lords as a Conservative. He received several awards from the queen, who made him a Companion of Honour, a Knight of the Garter and a member of the Order of Merit, allowing Attlee to pen this humorous limerick:

There were few who thought him a starter,

Many who thought themselves smarter.

But he ended PM, CH and OM

an Earl and a Knight of the Garter.

His coat of arms for the earldom has the motto Labor Vincit Omnia or Labour Conquers All. He got that wrong, but for so much else, Clement Attlee should always be remembered.