When Clement left Oxford in June 1904 he had taken the first steps towards a career as a barrister, ‘eating his dinners’ to acquire membership of the Inner Temple. He felt no strong calling to the Bar; it was a gentlemanly profession in which his father’s eminence might help him. Moreover, there was nothing else that he particularly wanted to do. Possibly he envied Tom and Edric Millar who had chosen their careers – Tom as an architect, Miller at the Treasury. Perhaps he envied Bernard for having the calling that he did not. Certainly he envied Hugh Linton, who had a clear purpose thrust on him by his father’s premature death. In Clement’s case, his choice of career would please his father while at first appearing a perfectly acceptable option.

In the autumn of 1904 he began to apply himself to the Law in New Square, Lincoln’s Inn. After Oxford, the environment was familiar, combining the portrait-laden dining hall, the rabbit warren of barristers’ ‘rooms’ (for no lawyer was so vulgar as to call them ‘offices’) and spacious quadrangles. As is the nature of pupillage, it was demanding work, and Attlee later wrote that Gregory was a task-master.1 It was a year of absorbing as much as possible of someone else’s experience, while struggling to garner his own. Experience of precise drafting was a useful, if exacting, skill and, a year later, Clem passed the Bar examination.

Convinced that Clement could succeed at the Bar, Henry did all he could to further his career. This included buying him a share of a shoot organised by the secretary of the Law Society on the Sussex Downs.2 To broaden his experience and understanding of a solicitor’s function, he brought him to work in his office. Barristers and solicitors performed very different and rigidly separated tasks; the offer of work at Druces and Attlee was therefore unusual. Henry’s firm was a depressing anachronism: gloomy, almost pre-Victorian in its working conditions. Typewriters were forbidden on the grounds that they diminished the quality of calligraphy; the telephone was used only to make appointments.3 The filing of documents was an arcane process, understood only by Mr Powell, the clerk.4 Clement sat at a small table in his father’s office, taking notes during interviews with clients. This was not at all the profession that he had thought to have joined.

In time he diplomatically negotiated his release and recrossed the divide between solicitor and barrister to work as a pupil with Theobald Mathew, a well-known ‘character’ at the Inns of Court and long-standing friend of the Attlee family. The son of a High Court judge, Mathew deliberately contained his practice to allow time for writing literary and historical articles related to the law. His most famous work, Forensic Fables, is a delightful miscellany of legal humour, published in 1926. When Attlee was his pupil he was thirty-nine years old, had been a barrister for fifteen years, and was well established at 4 Paper Buildings, a thriving set of chambers.

Attlee, having been called to the Bar in March, enjoyed a year of hard work enlivened by the caustic, iconoclastic wit of Mathew. He worked with Lord Robert Cecil, third son of the Marquess of Salisbury and the King’s Counsel of the chambers, and earned his first fee of ten guineas, drafting a bill for the Licensed Victuallers Association.5 In the following year he worked with Cecil on the celebrated Norfolk peerage case, in which Lord Mowbray claimed the Earldom of Norfolk, a title created and bestowed on his ancestor in 1312, and, ultimately, won his case. On the basis of this success, Attlee was invited to review a book on peerage law which, he recalls, he did ‘with all the assurance of youth’.

Another member of the chambers was Malcolm Macnaghten, who later became a King’s Counsel in 1919 and a High Court judge in 1928. Macnaghten entered the House of Commons as Ulster Unionist MP for North Londonderry in the year that Attlee was elected to Parliament. During Clem’s time with Mathew, an opportunity occurred which, with a different outcome, might have changed British political history. A vacancy came up for a conveyancer on the Ecclesiastical Commission and Philip Gregory recommended Attlee for the job.6 He was a promising candidate – until it became clear that he ‘lacked some months of standing at the Bar’. Had he been offered a permanent job, he might never have left the comfortable profession of the law.

At first undeterred by lack of work, he travelled between the Assize Courts of south-east England and handled just one brief at Maidstone Quarter Sessions. A young barrister was presumed to have private means to support him, as he could not expect to be offered lucrative briefs in his early years. As he still enjoyed an annual allowance of £200 from his father, Attlee felt no financial pressure while he lived at home and persevered at the Bar. His pupillage completed, he joined the chambers of Henry Dickens, son of the novelist, who had taken silk in 1892.

Dickens had achieved fame in 1902 through his spirited defence of Kitty Byron, accused of stabbing to death her alcoholic and violent lover. Despite his reputation, however, very little work trickled down to the juniors. Attlee had time on his hands and he duplicated his Oxford life in agreeable fashion. 7 He spent an unhurried morning after breakfast at Portinscale Road, sometimes walking into chambers, sometimes taking the steamer that had started sailing from Putney to the Temple. Each Wednesday he met Tom, Edric Millar and other Oxford friends for lunch in the Strand;8 he joined a literary society in Putney and attended meetings of a Hazlitt essay club.9 This untaxing existence might have persisted but for what turned out to be a life-changing event one evening in October 1905.

Many leading public schools had founded boys’ clubs in the poorer parts of London and the Haileybury Guild had been founded in 1890 to do what could be done for the diocese of St Albans, particularly in the district known as ‘London over the border’. This euphemism, like ‘London across the bridges’ for south London, referred to those parts of the city close to the docks, heavily overpopulated slums clustered by the marshes beside the Thames. Ten miles separated Putney and Limehouse, where the Guild had founded Haileybury House, but the districts were culturally worlds apart. The East End of London, stretching from east of Tower Bridge to the marshes of Beckton, was terra incognita.

Clement was working at Druces and Attlee when Laurence proposed that they spend an evening at Haileybury House, ostensibly to see how their donations to the Guild were being spent. Together they walked from Billiter Square and took a train from Fenchurch Street to Limehouse. Emerging into a thick autumn fog shrouding the unwelcoming surroundings, the brothers walked to Haileybury House, where Cecil Nussey, an old Haileyburian and a founder of the settlement, greeted them. Nussey, while at Oxford, had become a disciple of the generation of social thinkers that influenced settlements in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, adopting the thinking of Thomas Green, Professor of Moral Philosophy from 1878 until his death in 1882.

Green’s ethical socialism was based on the premise that human self-perfection could only be achieved through society, and that society therefore had the moral obligation to ensure the best conditions for everyone. This entailed for the individual not random and remote acts of charity, but the obligation on the more fortunate to share their fuller lives with the poor. Nearby Toynbee Hall, founded in 1884, put into action Canon Barnett’s principle that ‘little can be done for that is not done with the people’. Haileybury House under Nussey was a similar experiment that immersed Haileyburians as residents rather than as occasional visitors to the lives of the Cockney youth of Limehouse and Stepney.

Attlee was no stranger to the principles of social service. His mother and sisters were active in working with the underprivileged. Rob and Bernard had been involved with boys’ clubs and the younger brothers had helped Bernard, a curate in Hoxton before going to Wolvercote, with his work in the East End.10 While they willingly accepted their social obligations, their arm’s-length experience of social work was very different from the commitment that Nussey made to the Haileybury Guild.

The Guild was founded as a religious organisation, with Old Haileyburians such as Edwyn Hoskyns, Rector of Stepney from 1886 to 1896, and Francis Gurdon, captain of cricket at Haileybury and Rector of Limehouse from 1894 to 1906, among its leading lights. By the turn of the century, however, recognising the deep suspicion of organised religion in the poorer districts, settlements adopted a non-sectarian approach, a reassuring facet for Attlee. As he and Laurence were shown over the premises, seeing the range of activities from drilling of the Cadet Battalion to draughts, bagatelle and boxing, he overcame his initial fear of his surroundings and listened with growing interest to Nussey’s description of his mission.

By the time he left and headed home to Putney he had agreed to volunteer time to Haileybury House. At first he visited once a week; later, spending two or three evenings a week in Limehouse, he found himself increasingly drawn to the boys who at first had seemed to emanate from another world. In a much-quoted passage from The Social Worker, published in 1920, Attlee described his own conversion with poignant simplicity. He described the progress towards socialism of

a boy from a public school knowing little or nothing of social or industrial matters, who decides, perhaps at the invitation of a friend or from loyalty to his old school that runs a mission, or to the instinct of service that exists in everyone, to assist in running a boys’ club.

Gradually, the boy overcomes shyness in this novel environment and finds himself ‘with a new outlook and shedding old prejudices’. The boys, of a type that ‘he always regarded as bounders, become human beings to him, and he appreciates their high spirits, and overlooks what he would formerly have called vulgarity’. After a year or two of acting as referee in their football matches, becoming involved with the boys’ families, discussing the problems of their daily lives, all new to him,

This frank step-by-step analysis of his growing involvement in the boys’ lives led Attlee to the obvious but novel conclusion that settlements were ‘artificial and transitory, as if a worker marries he has to move out’. It was vital to ‘break up the huge collection of people of one class living as it were among the natives and create a more “natural” system’. Training should take place at the settlement but social workers should then move out and live in the district. Settlements must move with the times, he argued. They had rested on the idea that a few ‘well-meaning cultured people could become neighbours to the poor at their discretion’. This bourgeois monopoly of good works was simply out of date.12

The ‘thoughtless schoolboy’ had found direction for his non-specific vocation. He found a means of giving, distinct from the religion he found tedious and irrelevant to daily life. He moved from envy of Hugh Linton’s calling to solid respect for Cecil Nussey’s dedication. In the autumn of 1907, when the manager of Haileybury House resigned, Nussey asked Attlee if he would be interested in taking the job, a residential position with a modest salary. With an alacrity that he could not have imagined on his first visit, he accepted.

Once he moved into Haileybury House he saw the boys more regularly and became more involved in their daily lives, often visiting their homes and talking with their parents. He became, in short, part of the life of the neighbourhood. Five months after he first visited Haileybury House, he took a commission in the 1st Cadet Battalion of the Queen’s London Regiment, becoming a second lieutenant, the junior of three company officers.13 In the summer of 1906 he accompanied twenty-seven of the boys to camp at Rottingdean. He enjoyed the experience and the company received a good report from the senior officer who remarked on their discipline and improved drill.

Thus opened a period of a decade and a half, interrupted by the First World War, in which Attlee, now a resident of the poorest district of London, initially lived a three-cornered life between Limehouse, the Temple and Putney. From his family, who imagined that his residence in Limehouse was temporary, he concealed his growing commitment. Not from fear that his father would impede or forbid him to make such a move, for Henry, in spite of his fixed habits, had a remarkably open mind. But for Clement, the journey to socialism was just beginning and he was content to wait and see in which direction it took him. On the one hand, he knew with growing intimacy and insight the challenges of life in Limehouse; on the other hand, he knew nothing of the theoretical background to ethical socialism. With the thoroughness that characterised his later life, he resolved to learn all he could about the movement that he had joined.

As his description of the schoolboy becoming a social worker made clear, the growing consciousness of the shameful facts of working-class London initiated a parallel growth in his political awareness. The closing decades of the nineteenth century had seen the foundation of the Fabian Society and the Independent Labour Party, the theoretical and practical arms of the growing Labour movement. With typical pragmatism Attlee resolved to learn more about the theoretical base of socialism. However interesting his experiences, however diverting the anecdotes, unless he could see a way to alleviate the harsh conditions of life in Limehouse, he knew that they were merely studies in zoology.

Attlee’s autobiography is terse and truncated concerning many phases of his life. His description of his life in the East End and the path to his becoming a socialist, by contrast, is filled with detail, a miscellany of events that brought into focus all the unquestioned values that he had previously accepted. From cardinal virtues to the smallest convention of good manners, everything was subjected to the East End test. One example will suffice. Attlee discovered that it was considered bad manners among his new neighbours to talk at meals. Without taking a view on the subject, he simply questioned the dictum of etiquette that a man spent the first half of dinner talking to the lady on his right and, after the fish course, turned and began speaking to the lady on his left. Why was this so rigidly observed? Why should Putney be invariably right and Limehouse invariably wrong in matters of etiquette?

The process of conversion, then, was logical and direct. Poverty was an evil to be eradicated. It was not, as he had been taught, a result of moral delinquency. Instead it was an inevitable result of prevailing social conditions. For things to improve, given that the ethics of the East End were not intrinsically invalid, then change was required in the social conditions rather than in the ethics of the poor. And, if change were needed, how could he go about achieving it?

Reverting to the habits of childhood, he began to read voraciously and was amazed by how much had been written on subjects of which he knew nothing. Of particular amusement to him was that he had attended at Haileybury a lecture on William Morris entitled ‘Morris the Poet, Morris the Upholsterer, Morris the Socialist’ and that Morris’s pioneering work with the Democratic Federation, the predecessor of the Social Democratic Federation, had totally passed him by. For further enlightenment he turned to Tom, an admirer of Morris.

Tom, now training as an architect, was helping to run a boys’ club in Hoxton, another depressed district north-west of Limehouse. He had a willing pupil in his brother, desperate to make up for lost time. Morris had maintained that art could only flourish in a society that returned from selfishness to fraternity, from the profit motive to British values of before the Industrial Revolution. Was this not, Tom asked, the goal of the Whitechapel Art Gallery, founded in 1901? Clement must have blushed to remember that he had argued in a Haileybury debate that the ‘lower orders’ would not appreciate art.

Successively he examined the ideals of different proponents of socialist thought. Sidney Webb of the Fabians he rejected as ‘gas-and-water socialism’, dependent on state institutions rather than human idealism; the Charity Organisation Society he saw as employing moral bribes in their charitable gifts; co-partnership he had dismissed as impractical after he and Tom had bought some ill-fitting, poorly made suits from a co-partnership tailor.14 As he rejected, one by one, the theories of contemporary socialist thinkers, he became impatient that his work at the club was treating the symptom and not the disease. Only by street-corner agitation could the mass of the people be stirred to exert their power at the ballot box; only by working within the framework of the state could long-lasting radical reform be achieved.

Which brought him back to the Fabians. The process of edging closer to socialism and rejecting his inherited values took two years, and in October 1907 he was ready to take a significant step and join the movement. He and Tom went to Clement’s Inn to join the Fabian Society. Edward Peace, the secretary, Attlee recalled, ‘regarded us as if we were two beetles who had crept under the door, and when we said we wanted to join, he asked coldly, “Why?” We said humbly that we were socialists and persuaded him that we were genuine.’15

Once admitted, Clement found the proceedings lively but daunting, as his account of a meeting he and Tom attended at Essex Hall revealed. His first impression was that ‘The platform seemed to be full of bearded men – Aylmer Maude, William Sanders, Sidney Webb and Bernard Shaw.’ Clement turned to Tom and whispered, ‘Have we got to grow a beard to join this show?’ As he listened to H. G. Wells, Chiozza Money and Sidney Webb, he was transfixed. ‘They all seemed pretty impressive to a neophyte.’16

Joining the Fabian Society was a step significant but not definitive, as the society embraced liberals as well as socialists. Superficially, he had much in common with the Fabian movement but found the society uncongenial, frivolously referring to Beatrice and Sidney Webb as ‘The Beauty and the Beast’. He was ‘repelled’ by their rigidity and their distance from everyday life, finding them strong on facts but unrealistic and ineffective when it came to dealing with people.17

The Labour Party gained admission to the House of Commons in 1906 and Attlee attributes his conversion to socialism to the 1907 by-elections in Jarrow and Colne Valley that saw Pete Curran, the first Labour MP in the north-east, and the 26-year-old Victor Grayson elected, winning for the Labour movement seats previously held by Liberals.18 In January 1908 he made the decision that linked his work at Haileybury House with a political purpose. One evening, a ‘fiery little Welshman’ named Tommy Williams, a member of the Crane Drivers’ Union, called on Nussey to express his indignation at the iniquity of a decision of the Charity Organisation Society, the charitable group established to promote self-help rather than government intervention to assist the needy. Attlee listened attentively and, when Williams pronounced that he was a socialist, calmly stated, ‘I am a socialist too.’

It was a defining moment. In a single bound Attlee vaulted from socially conscious conservatism, over the middle ground of benevolent liberalism – at a time when Campbell-Bannerman’s Liberal government was hailed as the harbinger of reform – to a position that would have shocked him two years before. His father was a Liberal; he had grown up in a family with a tradition of social work. Without doubting their genuine commitment to reform, he questioned their efficacy. Remote benevolence would not solve the problems of the East End; if real reform required socialism, then he was a socialist.

In that declaration Attlee committed himself to action that extended beyond mere philanthropy. Williams invited Attlee to a meeting of the local branch of the Independent Labour Party, a group of about a dozen people who organised street-corner meetings three or four times a week. Attlee joined the ILP, joined the National Union of Clerks, attended at least one open-air meeting a week of the party and, without fanfare, found himself on the far side of a fundamental social divide.

Until that moment he had hesitated to admit that performance of good works would inevitably distance him from the backstop of life in Putney. His family shared a sense of social duty and thus his initial interest was not out of character. Yet he was as hazy about the nature of a socialist as a country parson who, observing Attlee at a meeting to which he had cycled on a hot day, observed, ‘I suspect that man is a socialist. He wears a soft collar.’19

Initially, in the Victorian ethic of his time, he believed that poverty was a manifestation of moral turpitude, caused by lack of those values – thrift, sobriety, hard work – that the Victorian middle class held dear. Early in his visits to Haileybury House he was shocked to hear that an educated man admired Keir Hardie. He was later to have the opportunity to play back that surprise to an acquaintance. He records with suppressed glee an event in 1911 when he was staying with a local magnate. Asked by the magnate’s daughter if he was a keen supporter of Lloyd George and the Liberals, he denied the charge. The daughter relaxed and concluded that he must be a Conservative. There was ‘a distinct sensation’ when he replied that he was a socialist.20

He began to understand how poverty and insecurity dogged families in Limehouse, where dockers and building workers might earn £1 a week and see perhaps half of that evaporate in rent payment. He saw women exploited, ‘sweated’ as seamstresses, earning as little as seven shillings and sixpence for a week’s labour; he saw two women who worked at trouser-finishing paid a penny-farthing a pair, from which they bought their own thread; he learned from boys how, when they left school at fourteen, they would work twelve or more hours daily for a weekly wage packet of five shillings, only to be dismissed when they were old enough to demand an adult’s wage. He began to understand the communal fear of the landlord, how families would consign their furniture to a neighbour’s keeping and do a ‘moonlight flit’, the only alternative to eviction and distraint of their goods.

As he walked home one day, a small girl whom he knew attached herself to him and asked where he was going. ‘Home to my tea,’ said Attlee. ‘I’m going home to see if there is any tea,’ the girl replied.21 That exchange lingered as a reminder that the next meal was less than assured for many of his new neighbours.

Discovery of such permanent uncertainty and insecurity was accompanied by a discovery of virtues that he had not imagined could coexist with poverty. He encountered fortitude and not shiftlessness in dealing with adversity; generosity, which undermined the middle-class virtue of thrift. He discovered that the boys, uninformed by Oxford standards, were quite capable of forming their own ideas on a wide range of subjects. One discussion in an attempt to define a gentleman particularly struck him. ‘A gentleman’, one boy ventured, ‘is a bloke what’s the same to everybody.’22

Most importantly, he discovered the self-respect that the boys possessed. Church-run settlements that offered coffee and buns to those who attended events were distrusted; Haileybury House charged a half-penny a week for membership and was oversubscribed while church events were ill attended. The boys had a visceral distrust of any organisation that offered something for nothing. By contrast, they trusted Attlee because ‘He came to us as a shy little man. He became our friend because he had lived with us and got to know our problems and because he had no swank.’23

Discoveries about prevailing conditions of poverty and the revelation that it was within his power to effect change, not as an abstract concept for the masses – the Webbs’ approach – but as an individual among individuals, had prompted his response to Tommy Williams. His avowal was a dramatic statement that marks a dramatic change of direction, but it must be construed alongside the young Attlee, comfortable in the company of fellow officers in the Cadet Battalion, professional men like him, Old Haileyburians, Conservatives with a conscience. Admitting that he was a socialist involved no reform of the structure of society, no abolition of the public schools. Attlee’s core values remained essentially conservative, the nineteenth-century values absorbed by every public schoolboy: respect for the monarchy, patriotism, devotion to the British Empire and an obligation to those less privileged. While his social conscience had been awakened and he allied himself firmly with the growing Independent Labour Party, he remained essentially a liberal conservative.

In the first decade of the century, the Labour movement was struggling to find a political foothold. Individuals could not join the Labour Party directly but were required to belong to an affiliated organisation such as a trade union or the ILP. The party, which had grown out of the Labour Representation Committee in 1900, was very much the junior partner in the ‘Lib–Lab’ alliance of 1906. Its objective was to further ‘working-class opinion being represented in the House of Commons’. This was far from revolutionary.

The gulf between the more radical Independent Labour Party and the Liberal Party, the necessary ally of the nascent Labour Party, was vast. Mutual suspicion undermined any collaboration and many working-class areas, including Stepney, had only minuscule groups of committed socialists prepared to overstep more fashionable liberalism. This was realistic politics, as the Liberal Party had won 397 seats in the 1906 election against the Labour Party’s twenty-nine. In the popular vote the Liberal landslide captured two and a half million votes, roughly ten times the support for Labour. Nonetheless, for the Labour movement it was an important election, laying the foundations of a parliamentary party.

In retrospect, the notion of Attlee, painfully shy and quite untrained in politics at street level, committing himself to social change through the instrument of a tiny group of activists seems akin to tilting at windmills. Soon elected branch secretary, he became the lead speaker for meetings held at street corners across the borough. As for overcoming shyness, anecdotes in his autobiography reveal that he learned to swim by being thrown into the deep end. ‘It is not easy to speak to an empty street in order to attract the passers-by,’ he wrote, ‘but I did a lot of it in those days.’24

During his first two years in Limehouse he continued to practise as a barrister despite the lack of work it offered, and had opportunities to travel. In September 1907 he sailed to North America. His sister Mary had travelled to Saskatchewan to help a cousin who was expecting her first child. With time on his hands, Attlee was deputed to escort her home. When he arrived in Montreal, finding that he had three days free, he visited Harvard and New York City, sailing up the Hudson River to Albany to meet Mary at Toronto.25

For ten months in 1908 his compartmentalised life continued as before. He had moved into different chambers, commuting from Haileybury House, and involved himself increasingly in the business of the ILP; at weekends he was involved in football matches and other excursions with his boys. When club activities permitted, he would cross town to Putney on Sunday. His weeks were full, but he remained essentially unemployed. The death of his father in November brought home to him both that he had lost an important bond to his family and, unsurprisingly, that he had no interest in the legal profession. That conclusion had been forming for some time but only after Henry’s death could he publicly announce his changed philosophy. He had become immersed in Stepney affairs and lost interest in a profession bringing him little work. He decided to abandon law and to work for the Webbs on their propaganda in favour of the Poor Law Report.26 Despite his disdain for the ‘Webby’ approach, the Poor Law was a massive obstacle to constructive reform.

In February 1909 the Royal Commission on the Poor Law submitted a majority report and a minority report, both ultimately dismissed by the Liberal government. The majority report, an unadventurous document, perpetuated the doctrine that poverty was a moral condition, recommending that the Poor Law remain in force. The minority report, the product of Beatrice and Sidney Webb, urged the abolition of Boards of Guardians and establishment of local authority organisations; in the breadth of its approach it has been hailed as the foundation stone of the Welfare State.

Ignored by the Liberal government, the Webbs founded what became the National Committee for the Prevention of Destitution and offered Attlee a job as meetings officer, responsible for organising meetings and finding speakers across the country. While the job itself was manifestly temporary, the commitment was permanent. The committee failed to achieve anything and, early in 1910, when Attlee was invited to become secretary at Toynbee Hall, he seized the opportunity. The move was not a success. Dispirited by the tired Liberalism of the settlement, Attlee lasted a short time before, probably by mutual agreement, he left the job at the end of the year. His interest lay more in his own ‘manor’, in Limehouse rather than Whitechapel – and, abidingly, in Haileybury House.

The move from Toynbee Hall deprived him of both job and accommodation. Henry Attlee had left £70,000 to his eight children and Clem’s portion of the inheritance earned him £400 annually, enough to live on. Convinced that settlements were intrinsically artificial, he suggested to Tom that they move together into a council flat overlooking the Limehouse bend in the Thames. For 8/6 a week they occupied four rooms for a year until Tom married Kathleen Medley, a social worker and Labour councillor in Poplar. Yielding his place to Kathleen, Attlee moved back to Haileybury House.

Nearly seven years had elapsed since he came down from Oxford and Attlee was still without gainful employment. He supplemented his private income by occasional lecturing, including a course of weekly lectures on the trade union movement at Ruskin College, the independent college in Oxford, established in 1899 to provide ‘educational opportunities for adults … who need a second chance in education’.

In 1911 the Unemployment and Health Insurance Bill became law. Lloyd George accompanied the Bill with the innovative policy of hiring a number of ‘explainers’ who toured the country, explaining its content and purpose. Once again Attlee took on a job whose duration, he knew, would be short, but of whose purpose he approved. When it came to an end in December, Attlee returned to work for the Webbs at the NCPD.

In April 1912 that elusive job, both allowing him time to pursue his political activities and providing an income, materialised. Sidney Webb, an ardent promoter of the new London School of Economics, secured a large grant from a company in Bombay to establish a social science department. Webb proposed Attlee as a lecturer and tutor, citing his practical knowledge of social conditions. Attlee, for the first time, felt that his future was reasonably secure.27 The pattern of his life became established: the LSE, Haileybury House and an increasing variety of social work, much of it uphill work in the teeth of Poor Law supporters. He recalls a parson who, in accepting the new system of school dinners, proposed that the children be served burnt porridge at inconvenient times and places.28

Suffusing his recollections of that period of his life is his pride at being part of a pioneer movement. He met most of the leaders of the Independent Labour Party – Keir Hardie, George Lansbury, Will Crooks, J. R. Clynes, Philip Snowden – the pantheon of architects of the Labour movement. He was becoming known beyond the borders of Limehouse and Stepney, speaking to public meetings across London at the rate of seventy or eighty meetings each year. He twice stood for election to the National Administrative Council of the ILP, but without success. He strove to ‘regularise’ his status and stood twice for the Stepney Borough Council and twice for the Limehouse Board of Guardians. He started a newspaper, the Stepney Worker, and put out three weekly issues, ceasing publication when a doctrinal issue arose between the ILP and their Marxist partners. His availability to support a host of causes gained him recognition among party leaders and, despite lack of tangible change to his formal status, he enhanced his local and national reputation.

One may speculate how his career might have developed in the second decade of the century if it had continued without interruption. Despite lack of success in local council elections, he was widely respected in the Labour movement and, ever pragmatic, was poised to enter politics as a career. It was the next logical step. His socialism was no longer an abstract theory but a personal conviction.

‘Somewhere about this time’, Attlee recalls, he made his first trip to Italy with Tom, Mig (his sister Margaret), Edric and Winifred Millar.29 Otherwise, two and a half years passed during which Attlee followed much the same course of life.30 The days were spent lecturing and tutoring at the LSE, evenings at the club and in political activities. There would have been an election not later than 1915; Attlee would by then have been very well positioned as a prospective Labour candidate. He was never put to that test, as, on 4 August 1914, while he was on holiday in Seaton with Tom and Kathleen, Britain declared war on Germany.

ENDNOTES

1 As It Happened, p. 25.

2 CAC: ATLE 1/8.

3 CAC: ATLE 1/8.

4 CAC: ATLE 1/9.

5 As It Happened, p. 25.

6 As It Happened, p. 26.

7 CAC: ATLE 1/9.

8 As It Happened, p. 27.

9 CAC: ATLE 1/8.

10 CAC: ATLE 1/9.

11 Clement Attlee, The Social Worker, pp. 211–12.

12 Ibid. The steps described are from pp. 213–21.

13 CAC: ATLE 1/9.

14 CAC: ATLE 1/9.

15 As It Happened, p. 31.

16 As It Happened, pp. 31–2.

17 CAC: ATLE 1/9.

18 CAC: ATLE 1/9.

19 As It Happened, p. 42.

20 As It Happened, p. 42.

21 As It Happened, p. 45.

22 As It Happened, pp. 32–3.

23 A former Haileybury House boy interviewed by Hannen Swaffer in 1945. Daily Express, 23 June 1945.

24 As It Happened, p. 51.

25 CAC: ATLE 1/18.

26 CAC: ATLE 1/8.

27 Another candidate for the job that Attlee was offered was Dr Hugh Dalton, later Attlee’s Chancellor of the Exchequer.

28 CAC: ATLE 1/9.

29 CAC: ATLE 1/9. Winifred was Edric Millar’s mother.

30 CAC: ATLE 1/9.