The sequence of events that led to the declaration of war in 1914 ultimately yielded in importance to one action: the invasion of neutral Belgium. German strategy was based on the Schlieffen Plan, the outflanking of the French Army through Belgium rather than through the forests of the Ardennes. Until the Germans crossed onto Belgian soil, the ultimate cause of the war, the assassination of an Austrian Archduke in Serbia, was too remote to fan patriotic fires in Britain. The ‘rape’ of Belgium provided all the propaganda necessary to arouse British feeling against ‘the Hun’.

Labour’s initial policy, to prevent a capitalist war by international worker solidarity, was reasonable, if imprecise, as kings and emperors squared off after the murder of one of their own. Once the proximate cause for action by Britain was presented as a reprisal for the ‘violation’ of Belgium, with all the usual attendant atrocities, the party’s position changed.

That change resulted in the resignation of Ramsay MacDonald, pacifist chairman of the Parliamentary Labour Party. Succeeded by Arthur Henderson, MacDonald paid the price for pacifism, suffering almost a decade of vilification. The British war propaganda machine was swift and fierce in discrediting dissenters. There was a rush to the Colours; Labour leaders supported the defence of Belgium. To have opposed the government’s call for war credits of £100 million would have done possibly terminal damage to the emerging party. After all, the popular view proclaimed, the war would be over by Christmas.

In 1914, unlike his experience twenty-five years later, Attlee was uninvolved in the formulation of the party’s policy. In Seaton, he and Tom discussed the war in terms more immediate to themselves. For Tom, the decision was simple. As a Christian he was unable to participate. At that stage, as enlistment was entirely voluntary, there was no legal stigma in his position; that would come later.

For Clement, thirty-one years old and single, the choice was equally simple. Britain’s cause was just; the German aggressor must be stopped; he, who had trained at Haileybury and in Limehouse, had a duty to fight. He understood but could not subscribe to Tom’s pacifism. As a socialist, he opposed war, but as an unmarried man, he felt it was immoral to stand by while others made the sacrifice.1

On 6 August he returned to London and attempted to join up, only to be turned down as the upper age limit was thirty. A further attempt to enlist in the ranks was blocked as he already held a volunteer commission in the Cadet battalion. Undeterred, he joined the Inns of Court regiment but, as he drilled recruits in the quadrangle of Lincoln’s Inn, he seemed to be making no progress towards the ‘real’ army. Determined to ‘do his bit’, he asked a former student from the LSE to intercede with her brother-in-law, who commanded a battalion in Kitchener’s new all-volunteer army.2 In due course he was ordered to report to the 6th South Lancashire Regiment at Tidworth. Tom attempted to dissuade him; socialist colleagues in the East End argued violently with him, but Attlee was convinced of his duty and determined to serve, not merely drilling men in Lincoln’s Inn but at the front.

At many points in Attlee’s life it seems that, by unrelated accident, he had recently been engaged in activities that prepared him for the job in hand. This was the first of those occasions. A second lieutenant with six years of experience in the reserves, with administrative and organisational experience of a thoroughly practical nature, was a rare bird. He was promptly given temporary command of a company, commanding seven officers and two hundred and fifty men, ‘mostly from Wigan, Warrington and Liverpool … excellent material’.3 When the adjutant, Captain Marsh, was posted to France in March 1915, Attlee was appointed to replace him and promoted to captain.4 In a very short time he had found a position for which he was eminently qualified.

In April, Marsh returned to his post as adjutant and Attlee took over B Company permanently.5 After training in Hampshire and Surrey, maps of France were issued to officers and the regiment seemed destined for the Western Front, where British and German forces were locked in a stalemate after the Second Battle of Ypres. When tropical kit was issued, however, Attlee surmised that they were destined for either Mesopotamia or Gallipoli. He was correct; embarking the Ausonia at Avonmouth, the regiment sailed via Alexandria to Gallipoli and joined British forces already at the Gully Ravine.

The Gallipoli campaign, the controversial brainchild of Aristide Briant and Winston Churchill, then First Lord of the Admiralty, was designed to open the Dardanelles for supplies to Russia, to bring Greece, Romania and Bulgaria into the war, and to relieve the stalemate in France. In Attlee’s view, it was an innovative piece of strategy that ultimately failed because the Allied High Command, myopic in its concentration on the Western Front, failed to allot necessary forces in timely fashion.6 During July the 29th Division, including the South Lancashires, joined what had become a battle from entrenched positions and prepared for a massive assault on Turkish positions.

Attlee’s memories of the Gallipoli campaign highlight its static nature. Night watch duty he found particularly tedious:

It was very boring on night watch. The only way to keep awake was to get a good talk going with the sergeants. I remember a long discussion on industrial and craft unionism with my CSM of the NUR and a platoon sergeant of the NUVW. We agree very well.7

The image of the company commander keeping himself and his non-commissioned officers awake by talking what his fellow officers would have considered seditious propaganda beside the Hellespont, 2,000 miles from England, constitutes one of the absurdities of war.

Conditions were appalling. Unburied corpses from both Turkish and Allied lines attracted swarms of flies; water was in short supply; dysentery was rife – as Attlee commented, ‘a complaint for which our diet of bully beef, biscuit and tea without milk was not very suitable’. At the end of July, Attlee too contracted dysentery and was carried unconscious to the beach to be embarked on a hospital ship. Given the choice of going to England or Malta, he chose the latter, fearing that he would be posted out of the regiment if he returned to England. He was admitted to hospital at Hamrun, close to Valletta harbour.

Attlee was spared by his illness from participating in the Anzac assault between 6 and 8 August 1915. His division suffered enormous casualties and he wrote to Tom from the officers’ convalescent centre in the Scicluna Palace that his company had caught the worst of the attack. Five officers had been killed and ‘a dozen or so’ wounded. His immediate concern was to avoid being sent back to England and to rejoin his regiment.8

He succeeded, and by late September was on his way back to Gallipoli. At Alexandria, knowing that Bernard had joined the Royal Navy as a chaplain and sailed to join the Gallipoli campaign, he asked if a Chaplain Attlee was among those present. To his delight, he learned that Bernard had arrived half an hour before, and the brothers had a chance to spend time together before both went to Gallipoli, Bernard to Helles, Clem to Suvla.

Rejoining his battalion in early October, Attlee found that the failure of the August assaults had drained all momentum from the campaign. As heavy rain and, later, snow made any operations difficult, his principal responsibility was to keep his men in shape. By regular exercise and ‘fairly frequent issues of rum’, he ‘bullied’ his company to stay alive while dysentery, frostbite and drowning decimated other companies.9 It was only a matter of time before evacuation was ordered; on 28 December the Lancashires prepared to withdraw the five miles from the front line to the beaches. As the withdrawal began, Attlee looked around him, fixing images of the territory he was about to yield – ‘the beauty of Samothrace standing up all white out of the sea’, ‘a very jolly terracotta statuette of a seated goddess about a foot high, very stately’10 – images of civilisations on which the twentieth century had superimposed this carnage. They were brief moments as he worked with General Maude to save the battalion.

By the morning of 8 January 1916 the last Allied soldiers were evacuated. Attlee, in command of the rearguard, and Maude were the last to embark. The campaign had failed and Attlee had distinguished himself as a leader of men and an officer under fire. Many of his colleagues felt that he deserved a mention in dispatches.

In later years Attlee never wavered in his belief that Churchill had been right in urging the assault at Gallipoli, that its failure was not one of planning but of disastrously mismanaged execution – a case of too little and too late.11 Contrafactual history, particularly of military events, is a dangerous subject, but Attlee, perhaps because of his later wartime association with Churchill, maintained that the campaign could have succeeded if it had been pursued with energy, pre-empting the Turkish concentration of force under Mustafa Kemal. As it was, it was a grisly bloodbath from which he and his regiment were fortunate to escape. It also caused Churchill’s departure from the Admiralty.

Meanwhile, losses on the Western Front were mounting horrifically and in January 1916 the Military Service Act was passed, introducing conscription for single men aged between eighteen and forty-one. Tom, a married man of thirty-five, was not eligible until May, when the Act was extended to include married men. Thereafter, conscientious objectors were tried by courts martial and those who, like Tom, refused any form of service, for example as stretcher bearers, were imprisoned.

After refitting and training at Port Said, the South Lancashires sailed to Mesopotamia. Attlee recalls shipboard evenings of bridge with his superior officer, Colonel Vigne, a ‘cheery old gunner colonel … one of the world’s worst bridge players’. He rejoiced in the colonel’s description of him to the CO: ‘a charmin’ feller, just going to play bridge with him, but a damned democratic, socialistic, tub-thumping rascal’.12 An officers’ mess during the Great War was hardly the most receptive audience for socialist doctrine.

Once again, Attlee’s part in the campaign was to be short, to end in his being shipped out, after an injury that possibly saved his life. When the regiment attacked at El Hanna on 5 April he carried a red flag to guide artillery fire, but was hit from behind in ‘friendly fire’, punched into the air, and carried from the field. In subsequent attacks General Maude’s division was badly mauled and, once more, Attlee was fortuitously absent.

From Basra he was shipped to hospital in Bombay, where he wrote to Tom, describing his condition:

A medical report from Bombay of 30 April14 describes his injuries vividly. There were three distinct wounds: one to his left thigh, described as ‘severe – not permanent’, one to his right buttock and one to his groin, both described as ‘slight – not permanent’. Collectively they were enough to incapacitate him for six months and Lieutenant Heathcote of the RAMC commented that he should be shipped to Britain for six months of recuperation as ‘a change of air is absolutely necessary for his recovery’.15

On 2 May Attlee, barely able to walk, embarked at Bombay for England. The summer was spent in slow convalescence. On 5 June he was given a prognosis of six months before he would be fit for active duty. By 17 July he could not ‘walk any distance without becoming lame’. By September he was described as ‘fit for light duties’16 and he was posted to a ‘not very lively’ training battalion in Shropshire.

To his delight, by 11 October he had largely recovered; a medical board determined that he was ‘much improved’, reporting that he could ‘ride a cycle for ten miles and march eight miles’.17 Agitating to rejoin the action in France, he was posted to a tank battalion under the command of a South Lancashire colonel in Dorset; the appointment brought promotion to the rank of major and took him twice to the Western Front. On the second occasion he was involved in preparations for the Battle of Poelcapelle, a three-army assault launched in October 1917 during the second phase of the Passchendaele campaign. Back in England, he was initially left in Dorset to form a tank battalion but returned to the infantry when a new colonel took command.

The last year of the war began with Attlee at a training camp in Barrow-in-Furness. With time on his hands, he renewed his correspondence with Tom, still imprisoned as a conscientious objector. His thoughts ranged over his experiences, Tom’s imprisonment, and the future of socialism. He longed to ‘pick up the threads of happenings and thoughts’.18

Stuck in the north of England, Attlee realised that he was a southerner;19 he enjoyed Dorset, the county of Thomas Hardy and Tolpuddle, where he ‘did pious respect to the memorial of the martyrs’. Meanwhile he was ‘kicking his heels waiting to rejoin the fighting but stuck in this godforsaken hole’.20 He was optimistic that Tom would soon be released as there had been motions for the release of conscientious objectors in both Houses, but ‘they break down before the mass of British stupidity … strongly entrenched in the Cabinet’.

Throughout 1917 a series of revolutions had toppled the Russian Tsar and by October the Bolsheviks had overthrown the provisional government and taken control, leading to the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and Russia’s withdrawal from the war. Attlee, already a committed enemy of communism, was sceptical about the ability of the Bolsheviks to govern, writing to Tom, that he ‘should like to have a long talk … and discuss all sorts of things’. The ‘Russian debacle’ he found ‘rather appalling but quite explicable’ as he imagined a country ‘run by the Whitechapel branch of the SDP’.21

As to the future of socialism in Britain, he speculated how the war would affect community and private affairs. Deprived for four years of the chance to explore socialism with Tom, he longed to discuss the looming ‘after the war’. Toying with guild socialism, he read Orage and Hobson’s book which advocated trade-based guilds, rather than trade unions or governmental control, as the means of regulating industry. He concluded that he had ‘never read a reasonably good case so badly put – the arguments puerile, mostly of the non sequitur type and the book infused throughout by petty malice’. The war, he felt, had given him ‘slightly more catholicity’ and dissipated the pre-war rigidity that made his and Tom’s views unacceptable to the general public. His socialism had lost its middle-class veneer, and he wondered how Tom’s values had evolved. ‘I do not see how your principles can be applied in practice in the actual carrying on of the community,’ he wrote. ‘Doesn’t this logically lead to anarchic individualism?’22

Tom expressed general approval of guild socialism, and Clement replied, accepting its potential but decrying its ‘tendency to erect all such schemes into complete social systems’. He was struggling to find a basis for socialism. ‘The Webbs’, he wrote, ‘with their local government bias tend to base everything on the locality and the local authority – the industrialists on industry and so on – the difficulty lies of course in the demarcation.’23

On differences between their positions regarding responsibility of the individual to fight to defend society, Clement was adamant that a debt to society was a valid debt, whatever the principles of the individual. Only if the state threatened to diminish the quality of life could the debt be avoided. The issue of war, moreover, was a red herring as sacrifices were made in peacetime too.

Of particular annoyance to him was a comment by Bishop Weldon in The Times, arguing that the German attack during Holy Week was one of the most tragic events of the war. Clem exploded at the ‘absorption of the church in non-essentials’. As to personal responsibility, he continued:

My point is that I don’t like the work but the community calls on me … and my particular objections to doing the work cannot weigh with me if the work has to be done … your antithesis between the state existing to make life better and fuller and asking you to take it is a false one. The true antithesis must be that the state asks you to make life less good and less full. Now despite the sacrifice of life in the war … life under German dominance would be less good and less full. If the Persians had not been defeated at Salamis would life have been fuller and better for the Greeks or if Attila had not been stopped at the Catalaunian Fields would life have been fuller and better for the province of Gaul? … your objection to taking life is fallacious in that it is at times necessary … I do not think that death is the worst evil or that taking life is the worst crime.24

Attlee was feeling his way towards a clear definition of the individual’s responsibility to the state and Tom was the ideal sounding board for his inchoate ideas, expressed in his letters with great honesty. His idealism of pre-war days had not only persisted but had been made more acute by his wartime experiences. While he saw that certain of his pre-war positions were too theoretical and doctrinaire (‘Webby’), he was the more convinced of the individual’s obligation to extend the benefits of a good society to all members. To ignore the opportunity and the obligation to do so was to suffer a defeat on the scale of Salamis or to have stood by while Attila rolled past Chalons-sur-Marne into France in AD 451. Totally objective about his military service, he glorified it not at all; he had merely followed his conscience with the same conviction as Tom had followed his. That conscience had led the brothers in opposite directions was not a matter for reproach but an inevitable fact; conscience entailed action. The question was already what action would be necessary after the war.

Indeed, conscience still pressed. Instead of waiting the war out in Barrow-in-Furness, Attlee lobbied to be sent back to the front. In April, General Ludendorff had launched an attack on Givenchy-lès-la-Bassée between Béthune and Lille, an assault repulsed at heavy cost by the 55th (West Lancashire) Division. In August he was posted to the 5th Territorial Battalion of the 55th and took part in their advance through Artois in the final stages of the war. His commanding officer, Lieutenant General Sir Hugh Jeudwine, commended him when he heard Attlee’s troops singing as they advanced to the line, a rare occurrence.

Jeudwine instilled powerful regimental pride in his officers and Attlee recalled an occasion when he saw this at work. Commenting on how many officers had been promoted from the ranks by 1918, he wrote of a young subaltern, a former miner who had been asked during an officer’s course for a tactical appreciation. ‘Dost think Ah’m Douggy ’aig, lad?’ the man replied. He was reported as being unfit to be an officer, and this infuriated Jeudwine, who asked for Attlee’s opinion. Attlee commended the man as an excellent officer, a good disciplinarian, whom the men would follow anywhere. The general was delighted and gave the school commandant ‘a raspberry’ for suggesting that one of his officers was unworthy of his rank.25

For Attlee, the final offensive of 1918 once more saw him carried from the battlefield when falling timber struck him as he led an attack near Lille. He left his unit on 6 October, returning to England three weeks later, where he ‘celebrated the Armistice in hospital … suffering from some painful boils, which seemed to get no better. A Canadian brought in some champagne to cheer us up.’26 Despite a recurrence of dysentery,27 he was determined to be home for Christmas. He filled in a pass, managed to get an unwitting surgeon to sign it, and left the hospital where his brother Rob was waiting outside in a taxi. So ended Major Attlee’s wartime service.

Attlee’s record of the war is sparse in the extreme. He devoted a mere ten pages of his autobiography to the war years; the fragments preserved in Churchill College are also uninformative, written principally to chart his war service for his children. Slightly more revealing is the record he wrote for himself, but even there he avoids any personal involvement in the action around him.28 He remains objective, dispassionate, logical. His memory of the events is detailed; his chronology precise. Only in his relations with fellow officers and with the men under his command does the reader have a sense of his humanity. The ‘Roll of South Lancs Regiment’, listing officers by company and their fates – ‘Wounded El Hanna’, ‘Killed Sari Bair’ – is eloquent in its baldness.

He was horrified by the senselessness of the carnage. Belgium, the cause of Britain’s entry into the war, was overrun; the Gallipoli campaign, which, properly supported, might have broken the deadlock, was grossly mishandled. Fellow officers in the 6th Battalion believed he would receive a decoration after the evacuation from Gallipoli; Attlee himself never mentions it. He describes himself as ‘the only amateur company commander’; he writes of suffering from dysentery with the dispassion of someone experiencing a mild headache. A seam throughout the record is his responsibility – to his men whose lives depended on him and to his fellow officers. On the high command he is silent. It was not until March 1923 that he aired his feelings about the ‘stupid’ and ‘class-based’ army that he had served in for four years. Meanwhile the Lancashire roll survived: ‘Killed Sunn I Yat’, ‘Died from wounds Mudros’, ‘Killed France 1918’.

Officially demobilised on 16 January 1919 and finally gazetted out on 16 February,29 Attlee promptly set out for the East End to reconstruct his life on pre-war lines: a place to live, a job and local politics. In the first of these he was disappointed, as Haileybury House was closed, its staff having been lost, one by one, to the war. Fortunately, Toynbee Hall was able to offer temporary accommodation, which he accepted for its location alone. Employment was easier to arrange, as the LSE had expanded its Department of Social Science, and Professor Urwick was happy to take him back on the staff. With those two fundamentals arranged, he surveyed the political and social landscape.

It has become a cliché to say that the Great War changed Britain fundamentally. Much was altered by the war and much evolved of its own force during the war years; for Attlee, a committed socialist returning to the East End with a distinguished wartime record, the social and political changes combined to offer prospects radically different from the options open to him in 1914.

The most far-reaching change was a questioning of the old order. This was not a narrow political movement but a universal recognition that relations between the governing class and the masses were anti-quated and based on indefensible assumptions. Over seven million men had served in the British Army and 750,000 had died. Until the Representation of the People Act in February 1918, some 40 per cent of adult males – and all women – were ineligible to vote. The passing of the act almost tripled the size of the electorate and granted the vote to most women over thirty. The previous year had seen the toppling of the Russian Tsar, followed by full-blooded revolution nine months later. The prospect of several million returning British soldiers with no right to vote prompted the government to rapid reform.

The Liberal Party had split in 1916, and Herbert Asquith, triumphant winner of the 1906 election, now led a group of Liberals opposed to the war while David Lloyd George headed a Conservative–Liberal coalition. In spite of Lloyd George’s immense popularity as ‘the man who won the war’, there had been a Liberal migration to the Labour Party as the only credible party to oppose the coalition.

In Ireland, the Easter Rising of 1916 had led to the establishment of the first Irish Parliament in Dublin. The adherence of Irish voters to the Liberal Party that had championed Home Rule was thus dramatically eroded. The seventy-three Sinn Fein members elected to the new Parliament disdained to take their seats at Westminster.

All these trends were evident in the general election of November 1918, which returned Lloyd George and the coalition to power but saw the Labour Party win more of the popular vote than either Lloyd George’s or Asquith’s party. Despite winning only fifty-seven seats, the Labour leaders rightly identified a movement that would establish their party as the authentic voice of progress.

Within the Labour Party itself there had also been significant change. The heterogeneous nature of the party allowed differing views to coexist during the war. The overwhelming majority of members believed that German nationalism should be checked, accepting the government’s position that the only solution was through victory. On the left there had been calls for a negotiated peace, but once war was declared most branches of the party supported the national effort. The international aims of the party were at first unaffected, as contempt for the ‘capitalist’ nature of the war entailed support for German workers rather than jingoism. This support diminished as the war dragged on.

While the party generally co-operated with the government, they demanded a plain statement of war aims from Asquith. When a Cabinet reshuffle took place in May 1915, Arthur Henderson joined the Cabinet as president of the Board of Education in a broader national government. Almost immediately, the fissures in the party once more became evident over the issue of conscription.

The split in the Liberal Party posed another threat to Labour unity but, once more, support for government policy overcame visceral distrust of Lloyd George. The fall of Asquith was considered regrettable but the party was heavily in favour of joining the coalition in the interests of national unity, provided that Labour could retain some measure of independence. Demands for clarification of war aims intensified; concern that the end of the war should bring a just and lasting peace fanned criticism of the relentless fighting. By the end of 1917 the Labour Party was more vocal in its criticism of Lloyd George; Henderson resigned from the Cabinet; the party set out its desiderata clearly: a world ‘safe for democracy’, elimination of imperialism, and the foundation of the League of Nations.

After three years of war the Labour Party’s position was widely welcomed and Lloyd George was forced to respond. Labour was gaining ground as a responsible national party, a development reflected in the general statement of policy, Labour and the New Social Order, drawn up in January 1918 and adopted at the party conference in June.

Starting from the principle that ‘what has to be reconstructed after the war is not … this or that piece of machinery; but, so far as Britain is concerned, society itself’,30 the paper condemned ‘reckless profiteering and wage-slavery’. The Labour Party would ‘do its utmost to see that it is buried with the millions whom it has done to death’.31 After this ritualistic condemnation of capitalism, the paper assumed a more sober theme, speaking of a ‘deliberately planned co-operation in production and distribution for the benefit of all who participate by hand or by brain’. It moved towards a responsible and rational statement of policy, ‘whether in opposition or in due time called upon to form an Administration’.32

By the time the general election was held in December, the Labour Party had achieved a position unimaginable four years before. Thanks to tireless work by Henderson, smoothing out differences between the wings of his party, a system of local Labour parties was in place. The party’s status was confirmed by its winning over 2 million votes, more than 20 per cent of the turnout – a result better than that achieved by either branch of the divided Liberal Party. Although this resulted in disproportionately low representation in the House of Commons, it established the party’s credentials as never before.

Such was the situation when Attlee, demobilised in January 1919, ‘went to Stepney to see how things were moving’.33 The era of utopian dreaming was over; the party was impatient to gain power. Dismissive of its history of spotless idealism on the fringes of British politics, its leaders scented the real possibility of displacing the divided Liberal Party in the mainstream. Major Attlee, 35-year-old war veteran, college lecturer and practical social worker, could hardly have been more congruent with the revitalised party organisation. Every wartime development of the party added to his electability to political office; the enlarged franchise most affected boroughs such as Stepney and Limehouse. The timing of his return to the East End, moreover, was opportune, for local elections to the London County Council were to be held in March.

Standing as a candidate in the Limehouse division, Attlee was defeated by a narrow margin – a mere eighty votes – but he succeeded in establishing his local reputation. Having failed to keep out a coalition Liberal in the 1918 general election and conscious of the vulnerability of the Lloyd George coalition, the local party needed a strong candidate for the next battle; they selected Attlee. He had won the respect of two local political bosses who controlled very different groups within the party: Oscar Tobin,34 a Romanian Jew, and Matt Aylward, an Irish trade unionist. Neither Jewish nor Catholic, Attlee, with the support of these two respected leaders, was a unifying figure in the Limehouse party.

To establish residency in his prospective constituency, he took a lease on Norway House, a large, dilapidated house in Limehouse with fine features such as classical eighteenth-century Adam fireplaces. He made extensive repairs and moved into a flat on the first floor, letting two other flats in the house to members of the Labour Party and converting the ground floor into a Labour club. Behind the house were stables, one of which he let to a socialist coal merchant; the other, at a higher rent, to a Tory butcher. To help run the house he hired Charlie Griffith, a local ex-service lad. ‘Griff’ became his trusted and admiring factotum and a lasting friend.

The following three years gave Attlee a rapid but thorough apprenticeship in local government. In April the elections for the Boards of Guardians were held. Attlee did not stand but was co-opted to the Limehouse board when Labour won twelve of the sixteen seats. From this base he served as chairman of the children’s home and the Limehouse representative on the Metropolitan Asylums Board. Fortunately, a light schedule of lectures and tutorials at the LSE allowed him ample time.

In November he managed the local Labour campaign for election to the borough councils. Adopting the root-and-branch slogan of ‘Sack the Lot’, a phrase used by Admiral John (‘Jackie’) Fisher in a letter to The Times on government overmanning and overspending,35 he had the satisfaction of seeing Labour win forty-three of the sixty local seats, including all fifteen in Limehouse.

Despite not having won an election, Attlee was now a highly visible and respected figure in Stepney and Limehouse. As an organiser and a hands-on social worker he had enhanced and broadened his pre-war reputation. The strength and value of that reputation was rewarded when the newly elected, inexperienced councillors appointed him mayor of Stepney. At the age of thirty-six, the youngest mayor in Stepney’s history, he had been given a platform on which to build his reputation across the constituency.

It is hard to imagine a more favourable vantage point from which to fight a parliamentary election than that which Attlee occupied for the year from November 1919. Suddenly, and quite unexpectedly, he was elevated to an executive position that would give him valuable experience and wider visibility. From being a trusted and reliable operative he became one of a group of Labour Party notables. George Lansbury, an iconic figure in the movement, was mayor in neighbouring Poplar and in 1920–21 Herbert Morrison became mayor of Hackney. The appointment was a rite of passage for an aspiring London politician.

Attlee undoubtedly had aspirations at this point, but he had been shrewd enough to maintain a low personal profile while being active in borough work. His sincerity as a socialist was established; his ability as an organiser was becoming recognised. When he was elected chairman of the group of fifteen London Labour mayors he demonstrated his most enduringly famous skill: the ability to determine the majority view amid dissent, and to implement it. Looking ahead to an election that needed to be held before December 1923, he could envisage himself entering Parliament at the age of forty with solid administrative and executive experience to his credit.

His year as mayor of Stepney was, to say the least, active. Using all the powers at his disposal, he set about reform with zeal to create what his daughter-in-law describes as ‘a small welfare state within the borough’.36 His first priority was housing – the lack of it and the physical condition of such housing as was available. Appointing surveyors to inspect buildings, he served some 40,000 notices to property owners to bring properties up to standard. Moreover, he ensured that, as far as possible, these were enforced. He set about reducing the shocking infant mortality rate, appointed sanitary inspectors and health officers. The cost to the borough was considerable and the local rates soared to over twenty shillings in the pound. As this cost fell upon landlords and local businesses, to the benefit of the less affluent tenants, he was unperturbed. While it was impossible to eradicate the evils of slum properties in a single year, the progress made was remarkable.

Of his achievements as mayor, Attlee was proudest of reducing Stepney’s infant mortality rate to one of the lowest in London. When a vote of thanks was to be made to the chairman of the Public Health Committee, he suggested that this achievement be recognised. To his consternation, the proposer congratulated the borough on ‘a great increase in the birth rate, mainly due, as we all know, to the personal efforts of the chairman’.37

Because the work of a borough involves several inter-related committees, he ensured that he sat on those that were central to progress, chairing the Valuation Committee; he was also the council representative on three Joint Industrial Councils, a member of the committees of three hospitals and of the governing boards of four schools.

In addition to these strictly local responsibilities, he was invited to act as chairman of the Association of London Labour Mayors, a group formed by Morrison as secretary of the London Labour Party. He called a national conference of mayors and civic leaders in Shoreditch to address the issue of rising unemployment. This démarche gained attention from the press and the twenty-eight London mayors were invited to the Mansion House, where the Lord Mayor, James Roll, ‘was proposing some mild measures’ to reduce unemployment in London. Breaking with protocol which dictated that the assembled company listen respectfully to the Lord Mayor and then go away, Attlee responded with ‘a forcible appeal for more vigorous measures’, which was echoed by the other Labour mayors, ‘rather to the consternation of the City Fathers’.38

Realising that no constructive action could be expected from the Mansion House, Attlee and his colleagues resolved to stage a peaceful demonstration. A deputation of London mayors went to Downing Street for a meeting with Lloyd George. At several visible points along the Embankment and in Westminster stood assembled groups of unemployed men, awaiting the return of the mayors. The peaceful demonstration threatened to turn ugly when a number of activists called for bolder action. When the mayors emerged after an inconclusive meeting with the Prime Minister, Attlee foresaw a violent outcome, located his group from Stepney and led them home in military style. The image of the mayor, a Pied Piper leading a group of potentially violent men away from trouble, can only have contributed to his growing reputation as a committed but moderate leader.

There remained one dimension that Attlee needed to add to this political persona. As a young party, Labour had few prepared positions that it would implement if elected. The party effectively divided into the ‘cloth cap’ members from the trade unions and the ‘intellectuals’ who discussed doctrine – in Attlee’s view, in a vacuum removed from realities of social work. He was distrustful of doctrinaire (‘Webby’) solutions and, while he would have shivered at being termed an intellectual, he recognised the need for practical answers to theoretical questions. He needed to make his impression on party thinking.

Towards the end of his tenure as mayor, he published The Social Worker, a statement of his own experience and his journey from complacent Victorian middle-class charity to social work that ‘bothers to find out what the problems are before applying remedies’.39 Once arrived in the latter position, he argued, the social worker acquires the perception that ‘the root of the trouble is an entirely wrong system altogether, a mistaken aim, a faulty standard of values, and we shall form in our minds more or less clearly a picture of some different system, a society organised on a new basis altogether’.40

Foreshadowing his later career, he differentiated between what can be achieved at the local level and issues that require the intervention of central government. He stressed the limitations of imposed theory, as:

The social reformer must beware of trying to act as God and making man in his own image … the failure of many well-intentioned schemes has been due to people giving to the poor what they thought would be good for them, without studying the psychology of those for whom they were going to cater.41

He perceptively described the limitations of religious organisations, quoting the Bishop of Southwark, who confessed that ‘we clergy, with our public schools and universities behind us, lack the imagination to see all it means for those who are suffering from social injustice … we, as a whole, instinctively sympathise in our hearts with the employers.’42 The settlement movement he characterised as well-intentioned, but remote from the problems it sought to solve. Addressing broad theoretical issues facing social reformers, The Social Worker is a concise work that proposes solutions, based not on abstract theory but, as the reader grasps from the first pages, on Attlee’s own experience.43

In a single year Attlee added enormous substance to his stature in the Labour Party. It was a tiring year, however, and when Edric Millar suggested that they make a tour of northern Italy together, he jumped at the offer. It would be his first holiday since his trip to Italy with Edric in 1912 and, absent any signs of an impending election, he could afford the time. A few weeks before they left, Edric asked Attlee if he might invite his mother and younger sister to accompany them. Attlee, who had already met both mother and sister, readily agreed.

The four set off from Victoria Station toward the end of August on a five-week itinerary to Tuscany, Umbria and Lake Como. There would be no politics for five weeks, and Clement Attlee had no idea how the trip would alter his life.

ENDNOTES

1 CAC: ATLE 1/11.

2 As It Happened, p. 57; CAC: ATLE 1/11.

3 As It Happened, p. 57.

4 CAC: ATLE 1/11, War account, p. 5.

5 Ibid., War account, p. 6.

6 The Observer, ‘The Churchill I Knew’, in ‘Churchill by His Contemporaries’, p. 15.

7 CAC: ATLE 1/11, War account, p. 10.

8 Letter to Tom Attlee, 27 August 1915.

9 CAC: ATLE 1/11, War account, p. 15.

10 CAC: ATLE 1/11, War account, p. 15.

11 As It Happened, p. 60.

12 As It Happened, pp. 61–2.

13 Letter to Tom Attlee, 19 April 1916.

14 TNA: WO 339/10870.

15 TNA: WO 339/10870.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Letter to Tom Attlee, 20 March 1918.

19 CAC: ATLE 1/18.

20 Letter to Tom Attlee, 20 March 1918.

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.

23 Letter to Tom Attlee, 2 April 1918.

24 Letter to Tom Attlee, 2 April 1918.

25 As It Happened, pp. 63–4.

26 Ibid., p. 65.

27 TNA: WO 339/10870.

28 Unpublished record in the possession of Anne, Countess Attlee.

29 Ibid.

30 Attlee, Labour and the New Social Order, p. 3.

31 Ibid., p. 4.

32 Ibid., loc. cit.

33 As It Happened, p. 66.

34 Attlee was equivocal about Tobin’s morals, recording that he ‘possessed great energy and considerable organising ability. He had unfortunately other qualities, a tendency to intrigue and a promiscuity in his marital relations which led to his changing the sphere of his political activities from time to time in the course of his political career.’ Overcoming any ethical doubts he may have had, Attlee recognised the importance of a charismatic local boss in boosting his own political career. CAC: ATLE 1/11, Post War, p. 1.

35 The Times, 2 September 1919.

36 Anne, Countess Attlee, conversation with the author, November 2013.

37 As It Happened, pp. 71-72.

38 As It Happened, p. 73.

39 Attlee, The Social Worker, p. 9.

40 Ibid., p. 10.

41 Ibid., p. 141.

42 Ibid., p. 172.

43 The book was favourably reviewed but sold only 600–700 copies. Attlee estimated that he made about £25 from the entire venture – £850 in today’s money. (CAC: ATLE 1/25).