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{{Infobox Prime Minister| name =The Rt Hon. the 1st Earl Attlee | image =Attlee cropped.jpg | order =[Prime Minister of the United Kingdom | term_start =27 July [ | term_end =26 October [ | deputy =[Herbert Morrison | monarch =[George VI of the United Kingdom | predecessor =[Winston Churchill | successor =[Winston Churchill | order2 =[Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom | term_start2 =19 February [ | term_end2 =23 May [ | primeminister2=[Winston Churchill | predecessor2 =None | successor2 =[Herbert Morrison | birth_date ={{birth date|1883|1|3|df=y--> | birth_place =[Putney, [London, [England | death_date ={{death date and age |1967|10|8|1883|1|3--> | death_place =[London, [England | party =[Labour Party (UK) | spouse =[Violet Attlee | alma_mater =[University College, Oxford | profession =[Lawyer | religion =Raised [Church of England -->

Clement Richard Attlee, 1st Earl Attlee, Order of the Garter, Order of Merit (Commonwealth), Order of the Companions of Honour, Privy Council of the United Kingdom (3 January 1883 – 8 October 1967) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1945 to 1951. The Labour Party (UK) under Attlee won a landslide United Kingdom general election, 1945 victory over Winston Churchill immediately after Churchill had led United Kingdom 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 utility 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 Conservative Party website - the postwar consensus until Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party (UK) 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, Historical rankings of British Prime Ministers as the greatest British prime minister of the 20th century in a poll of professors organised 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 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 Imperial Service College 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 Siege of Kut. He recovered back in England, and was sent to France in 1918 to serve on 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 Interwar period. After the war, he returned to teaching at the London School of Economics.

Attlee met Violet Attlee 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 Attlee, 2nd Earl Attlee (1925-1991) and Lady Alison Elizabeth (b. 1930).

Early political career Attlee became involved in Local government in the immediate post-war period, becoming mayor of the London borough of Metropolitan Borough of Stepney in 1919. At the United Kingdom general election, 1922, Attlee became the Member of Parliament for the constituency of Limehouse (UK Parliament constituency) 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 UK General Strike 1926. In 1927, he reluctantly joined the multi-party Simon Commission, a Royal Commission set up to examine the possibility of granting Self-governance to British Raj. 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 (UK)) 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 United Kingdom general election, 1935 that year. In the post-election leadership contest Attlee was elected, beating out both Herbert Morrison (politician) 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 Motion of no confidence in the government. 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 Neville 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 of the United Kingdom (1942–1945), Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs (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 France capitulation in 1940.

Prime Minister The war set in motion profound social changes within Britain, and led to a popular desire for Reform movement. 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 United Kingdom general election, 1945 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. See, e.g., http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/reprint/8/4/52.pdf

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 Public ownership 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 Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (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 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." (Andrew Pierce, What Queen Mother really thought of Attlee's socialist 'heaven on earth', The Times, 13/5/06, p.9 ) and Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam ConferenceIn 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 Harry S. 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-communism, 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". Morgan, Labour in Power. 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 pact, to several Rolls-Royce Nene jet engines. The Soviets, who at the time were well behind the West in jet technology, Reverse engineering the Nene, and installed their own version in the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 interceptor, used to good effect against US-UK forces in the subsequent Korean War, as well as in several later MiG models. Gordon, Yefim, Mikoyan-Gurevich MIG-15: The Soviet Union's Long-Lived Korean War Fighter, Midland Press (2001)

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. See, e.g., Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour in Power (Oxford, 1984), especially Chapter 6. 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 Army and subsequent handing over of the issue to the United Nations was widely supported by the public.

Attlee's cabinet was responsible for the first and greatest act of decolonisation in the British Empire -- History of 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 Dominion, 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 Standard of living. 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 United Kingdom general election, 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 (UK).

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 United Kingdom general election, 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 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 (UK Parliament constituency) 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 (UK)) 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 Sidney James Webb, 1st Baron 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). Walter L. Arnstein, Britain Yesterday and Today: 1830 to the Present, Chapter 19, p.363 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 List of Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom. 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."Peter Hennessy, The Prime Minister: The Office and its Holders since 1945, Chapter 7, p.150 Even Thatcher herself wrote in her 1995 memoirs, which charted her beginnings in Grantham to her victory in the United Kingdom general election, 1979, 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 War economy to peacetime, tackling problems of demobilisation, shortages of Currency, and adverse deficits in trade balances and Government spending. 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 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 Flag on it." However, the first operational Operation Hurricane 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

Appearance in popular culture "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

Further reading Clement Attlee published his memoirs, As it Happened, in 1954.

Francis Williams' A Prime Minister Remembers, based on interviews with Attlee, was published in 1961.

Attlee's other publications include:

The Social Worker (1920);The Town Councillor (1925);The Will and the Way to Socialism (1935);The Labour Party in Perspective (1937);Collective Security Under the United Nations (1958);Empire into Commonwealth (1961).

Biographies include:



Biographies of Attlee and of his Cabinet can be found in:



The entry on Attlee in Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) was prepared by Maurice Shock, who as a Fellow of University College, Oxford (Attlee's alma mater), came to know Attlee personally in his later years.

Accounts of the period include:

Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour in Power 1945-51, Oxford University Press, 1984;

Greg Rosen, Old Labour to New, Politicos Publishing, 2005.

References

External links

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{{Infobox Prime Minister| name =The Rt Hon. the 1st Earl Attlee | image =Attlee cropped.jpg | order =[Prime Minister of the United Kingdom | term_start =27 July [ | term_end =26 October [ | deputy =[Herbert Morrison | monarch =[George VI of the United Kingdom | predecessor =[Winston Churchill | successor =[Winston Churchill | order2 =[Deputy Prime Minister of the United Kingdom | term_start2 =19 February [ | term_end2 =23 May [ | primeminister2=[Winston Churchill | predecessor2 =None | successor2 =[Herbert Morrison | birth_date ={{birth date|1883|1|3|df=y--> | birth_place =[Putney, [London, [England | death_date ={{death date and age |1967|10|8|1883|1|3--> | death_place =[London, [England | party =[Labour Party (UK) | spouse =[Violet Attlee | alma_mater =[University College, Oxford | profession =[Lawyer | religion =Raised [Church of England -->

Clement Richard Attlee, 1st Earl Attlee, Order of the Garter, Order of Merit (Commonwealth), Order of the Companions of Honour, Privy Council of the United Kingdom (3 January 1883 – 8 October 1967) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1945 to 1951. The Labour Party (UK) under Attlee won a landslide United Kingdom general election, 1945 victory over Winston Churchill immediately after Churchill had led United Kingdom 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 utility 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 Conservative Party website - the postwar consensus until Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative Party (UK) 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, Historical rankings of British Prime Ministers as the greatest British prime minister of the 20th century in a poll of professors organised 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 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 Imperial Service College 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 Siege of Kut. He recovered back in England, and was sent to France in 1918 to serve on 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 Interwar period. After the war, he returned to teaching at the London School of Economics.

Attlee met Violet Attlee 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 Attlee, 2nd Earl Attlee (1925-1991) and Lady Alison Elizabeth (b. 1930).

Early political career Attlee became involved in Local government in the immediate post-war period, becoming mayor of the London borough of Metropolitan Borough of Stepney in 1919. At the United Kingdom general election, 1922, Attlee became the Member of Parliament for the constituency of Limehouse (UK Parliament constituency) 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 UK General Strike 1926. In 1927, he reluctantly joined the multi-party Simon Commission, a Royal Commission set up to examine the possibility of granting Self-governance to British Raj. 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 (UK)) 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 United Kingdom general election, 1935 that year. In the post-election leadership contest Attlee was elected, beating out both Herbert Morrison (politician) 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 Motion of no confidence in the government. 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 Neville 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 of the United Kingdom (1942–1945), Secretary of State for Dominion Affairs (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 France capitulation in 1940.

Prime Minister The war set in motion profound social changes within Britain, and led to a popular desire for Reform movement. 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 United Kingdom general election, 1945 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. See, e.g., http://content.healthaffairs.org/cgi/reprint/8/4/52.pdf

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 Public ownership 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 Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon (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 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." (Andrew Pierce, What Queen Mother really thought of Attlee's socialist 'heaven on earth', The Times, 13/5/06, p.9 ) and Joseph Stalin at the Potsdam ConferenceIn 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 Harry S. 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-communism, 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". Morgan, Labour in Power. 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 pact, to several Rolls-Royce Nene jet engines. The Soviets, who at the time were well behind the West in jet technology, Reverse engineering the Nene, and installed their own version in the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-15 interceptor, used to good effect against US-UK forces in the subsequent Korean War, as well as in several later MiG models. Gordon, Yefim, Mikoyan-Gurevich MIG-15: The Soviet Union's Long-Lived Korean War Fighter, Midland Press (2001)

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. See, e.g., Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour in Power (Oxford, 1984), especially Chapter 6. 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 Army and subsequent handing over of the issue to the United Nations was widely supported by the public.

Attlee's cabinet was responsible for the first and greatest act of decolonisation in the British Empire -- History of 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 Dominion, 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 Standard of living. 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 United Kingdom general election, 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 (UK).

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 United Kingdom general election, 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 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 (UK Parliament constituency) 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 (UK)) 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 Sidney James Webb, 1st Baron 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). Walter L. Arnstein, Britain Yesterday and Today: 1830 to the Present, Chapter 19, p.363 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 List of Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom. 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."Peter Hennessy, The Prime Minister: The Office and its Holders since 1945, Chapter 7, p.150 Even Thatcher herself wrote in her 1995 memoirs, which charted her beginnings in Grantham to her victory in the United Kingdom general election, 1979, 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 War economy to peacetime, tackling problems of demobilisation, shortages of Currency, and adverse deficits in trade balances and Government spending. 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 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 Flag on it." However, the first operational Operation Hurricane 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

Appearance in popular culture "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

Further reading Clement Attlee published his memoirs, As it Happened, in 1954.

Francis Williams' A Prime Minister Remembers, based on interviews with Attlee, was published in 1961.

Attlee's other publications include:

The Social Worker (1920);The Town Councillor (1925);The Will and the Way to Socialism (1935);The Labour Party in Perspective (1937);Collective Security Under the United Nations (1958);Empire into Commonwealth (1961).

Biographies include:



Biographies of Attlee and of his Cabinet can be found in:



The entry on Attlee in Dictionary of National Biography (DNB) was prepared by Maurice Shock, who as a Fellow of University College, Oxford (Attlee's alma mater), came to know Attlee personally in his later years.

Accounts of the period include:

Kenneth O. Morgan, Labour in Power 1945-51, Oxford University Press, 1984;

Greg Rosen, Old Labour to New, Politicos Publishing, 2005.

References

External links

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Clement Attlee
Biography from Encyclopaedia of British History: 1700-1950.

BBC - BBC Four - Audio Interviews - Clement Attlee
Listen to extracts from a BBC interview with Clement Attlee ... Britain's Economic Situation 10 August 1947 BBC Radio Clement Attlee presents

BBC - History - Clement Attlee (1883 - 1967)
Attlee was the British Labour Party leader for 20 years, and presided over the 1945 - 1951 Labour government. This was the most significant reforming administration of 20th century ...

Clement Attlee - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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.

Number10.gov.uk
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British Prime Ministers: Attlee, Clement Richard (1883-1967)
Attlee, Clement Richard (1883-1967) 1st Earl Attlee Of Walthamstow, Viscount Prestwood

The Attlee Foundation - About The Foundation
This was used in part to build Attlee House in the heart of the Spitalfields area, Tower Hamlets where Clement Attlee spent his early years as a Youth cum Social Worker (and ...

The Attlee Foundation - Home
Attlee Foundation, for a society where opportunity is open to all ... The Attlee Foundation was established in 1967 to commemorate Clement Attlee’s life, work and achievements.

Clement Attlee
CLEMENT ATTLEE, 1st EARL ATTLEE. Letter from Clement Attlee to his brother Tom, 18 Dec. 1931, commenting on the four-month old National Government.

Clement Attlee
Biography of Clement Richard Attlee b. 3/1/1883; d. 8/10/1967 1945-51 Labour "Often the experts make the worst possible Ministers in their own fields. In this country we ... ...

 

Clement Attlee



 
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