The election of October 1931 was, from the outset, a hopeless cause for Labour. Placed in the position of arguing that the previous government had failed to solve Britain’s problems, the party wrestled with the conundrum that it was a Labour government whose record they needed to attack. Moreover, if the Labour leader had concluded that socialism could not offer a remedy without the participation of other parties, how was it tenable to argue that more socialism, rather than less, was the rational approach? Yet this was precisely the tack that the Labour Party took.
Under the heading Labour’s Call to Action: the Nation’s Opportunity the Labour manifesto produced the same arguments that they had adduced in every election since 1918: broadly, that capitalism had failed worldwide and that this was the moment to rebuild the foundations of society. To reaffirm that ‘socialism provides the only solution for the evils resulting from unregulated competition and the domination of vested interests’1 was to repeat doctrine that the charismatic orator MacDonald himself had rejected. To pronounce the party’s ‘faith in the considered principles of its programme of 1929 … when … it made a substantial beginning’2 was to prescribe that although a large dose of the medicine had nearly killed the patient, a larger dose would provide the remedy.
The election was a disaster for Labour. Again led by Henderson, it lost 241 seats including those of all its former Cabinet ministers except Lansbury. The extent of the rout was a shock to Attlee, whose own majority was reduced to just 551. Henderson was defeated and once more the Parliamentary Party needed to elect a new chairman. Attlee, one of the few remaining Members with any government experience, was proposed as Lansbury’s deputy; both nominations were ratified without opposition; Henderson, outside Parliament, briefly continued as party leader. The rump of forty-six Members was left with the task of opposing 554 Members loosely united in the national government. As Raymond Postgate described it, ‘The Nabobs had vanished never to return’. The old guard was gone, ‘as though a huge tide had smashed through a breakwater, sweeping it away and carrying the timber far out into the sea, leaving standing only one tall, stout and solitary stanchion.’3
Attlee’s elevation was a collateral result of Labour’s immolation in the election. Apart from the old guard of Henderson, Clynes and Greenwood, there were younger men with at least equal qualifications. Morrison, Minister of Transport, was the obvious candidate. Hugh Dalton, Under-Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, A. V. Alexander, First Lord of the Admiralty, Tom Johnston, Lord Privy Seal and Tom Shaw, Secretary of State for War all might have staked a claim, had they been re-elected. In the event, Lansbury was the only realistic choice, and Attlee and Cripps the only others with significant experience. Once more, Fortune had smiled at a critical point in Attlee’s career. He now had a unique, though possibly brief, opportunity to capitalise on his windfall.
Aware of both the challenge and the opportunity, he adopted the mood of St Crispin’s Day and wrote to Tom in the vein of ‘We happy few’. ‘We put up a fair show on the address,’ he wrote.
Cripps did very well. He is a tower of strength and such a good fellow. We are a very happy family in the party and some of our fellows will now get their opportunity … We intend to push ahead with the New Fabian and SSIP.4 We want to get the party away from immediates and on to basic socialism. I think the shake-up will be the salvation of the party.5
Lansbury made his room in the House of Commons available to Attlee and Cripps, and this served as a beleaguered headquarters for the Parliamentary Party. After two months in opposition Attlee wrote to Tom, endorsing Lansbury’s leadership, repeating the ‘happy family’ motif and ending with contempt for MacDonald. ‘I fear J. R. M. has completely gone’, he wrote. ‘He revels in titled friends. He will have a rude awakening soon, I think.’6
To demonise MacDonald was mandatory, but Attlee recognised that his ‘betrayal’ of the party was preceded by genuine belief that socialism could not provide solutions to the crisis. Attlee had identified this dilemma when he spoke to Cole before the ‘betrayal’. As chairman of the New Fabian he aimed for ‘constant expansion and adaptation of policy in the light of changing conditions’.7 It is a measure of his quiet competence that over the following decade he was able to re-shape party policy into a close approximation of the manifesto of 1945, a feat that required considerable agility. It also brought about greater visibility for Attlee and a remarkable increase in his stature that could hardly have been predicted in 1931. At no stage was he unaware of the opportunity and at no stage did he fail to capitalise on it.
Francis Williams, Attlee’s press adviser during the Downing Street years, had no illusions about his realistic grasp of the nature of power. ‘He had in fact great self-confidence and a streak of ruthlessness’, he recalled, ‘and although he was an administrator of ideas rather than a creative political thinker he knew exactly what he wanted to do.’ Anyone who assumed that his lack of vanity was due to self-doubt had ‘a rude awakening’.8
The position in which he found himself had a certain irony. At a local level his pre-war work had brought its reward, loyalty from the voters of Limehouse. On the national level his sudden prominence was due to the misfortunes of others. His job in 1931 was to help provide an effective Opposition in the knowledge that if he and his colleagues were successful, it would lead to the return of the very people whose absence had enabled his elevation. Lansbury, twenty-four years older than Attlee, would clearly not be leader for long; Attlee needed to expend maximum effort on behalf of the party while consolidating his position as Lansbury’s natural successor. This called for diplomacy and tact, as well as considerable energy.
As second-in-command in the Parliamentary Party he had stature, but he sought wider visibility in the party as a whole, for which his work with the New Fabianism provided the stage. Between 1932 and 1938 the group published forty-two research pamphlets on subjects ranging from ‘The Machinery of Socialist Planning’ to ‘Studies in Capital and Investment’ and ‘Twelve Studies in Soviet Russia’. During the same period Attlee wrote The Will and the Way to Socialism (1935), The Labour Party in Perspective (1937)9 and Britain’s Shame and Danger (1938). Although no more than ‘a reasonably well-read layman’10 in the field of economics, he became the Opposition spokesman on economic matters, leading for Labour on the debate on Snowden’s emergency Budget in October 1931, criticising the Chancellor for ‘going back’ and for discriminatory taxation. The load was not being evenly shared. Why was there a tax increase on beer but not on imported wine? ‘The country’, he charged, ‘is carrying an inflated rentier class, which it cannot afford.’11
Maintaining a credible presence in the House placed enormous demands on the three leaders. Attlee recalled that ‘The whole work of debate in the House and in committee had to be sustained by scarcely more than thirty men’, as the older members who held safe seats in the mining areas were loyal voters but infrequent speakers.12 He wrote to Tom that he had ‘made ninety-three speeches in this session, second only to Cripps’. He remained remarkably optimistic, confident that the artificial make-up of the anti-Labour coalition would be its undoing. The government had no constructive ideas; the PM was worn out, the government clinging to the ‘miserable economy stunt’. He predicted that ‘as we get deeper into the mire, a change of leadership of the coalition will be called for, and [Lloyd George and Churchill] will come in’.13
Not only did Attlee speak frequently, his speeches filled the columns of Hansard, which, as he pointed out, was remarkable, ‘as I am generally considered to be rather a laconic speaker’.14 He was also required to speak on subjects previously outside his brief: on foreign affairs, on economics, tariffs, on any subject being debated. In the 1931–32 session of the Commons he made 125 speeches, occupying 352 columns in Hansard. For four years his approach was to reject ‘MacDonaldism’ and position himself as spokesman for the speedy return of socialism, fashioning policy and remaining loyal to party doctrine. He imposed a rigorous discipline on himself, handling an almost crippling workload. Lansbury’s daughter, working in her father’s office, dubbed him ‘The White Rabbit’. His industry later received a compliment from an unexpected source in the Commons. In May 1935 Baldwin commented that, after being ‘nearly wiped out at the polls’, the Opposition had ‘equipped themselves for debate after debate and held their own and put their case’.15
Nor was his activity confined to the Commons. He supported Labour candidates at by-elections, made several broadcasts on The Week in Westminster for the BBC, wrote copiously and established contacts with socialist organisations across Europe. In May 1932 he attended a conference in Zürich where he ‘for the last time saw the German Social Democratic party in its full strength’. A year later, at an International Conference of League of Nations Socialists, he commented that the ‘Germans were represented by some very tough-looking Nazis, the first of the breed that I had seen’.16
Lansbury was seventy-two when he became chairman. A pacifist, he could never have survived as Prime Minister in the climate of the 1930s. While Attlee recognised the temporary nature of Lansbury’s position, he had no wish to remain a critic of the government on the Opposition benches. He might have very little time in which to replace Lansbury, particularly if a by-election brought Morrison, Dalton or Alexander back to the Commons. Mindful of the lesson learned in 1923 about the dangers of moving ahead of the party, he needed to be seen as the architect of socialist policy while reinforcing the image of the party as an electable body. The first Labour government had been rendered ineffective by a dearth of ideas of how to govern. There were few policies waiting to be implemented.17 Attlee needed to bring about rapid change.
In October the Labour Party conference was held at Leicester. This was a defining point in the party’s move to the left. In August he had predicted to Tom that the Independent Labour Party would go their own way and lose a big proportion of their membership. The trouble, he felt, was that they had no real ideas on which to work. ‘They talk revolution but Brockway18 has the phrases and Maxton19 the appearance of revolutionaries but nothing more’, he wrote. ‘We anticipate an accession of strength to the SSIP.’20 It required nifty footwork for Attlee to accept a rejection of gradualism and to maintain a centrist position in the eyes of the electorate.
The withdrawal of the ILP from the mainstream led to the creation of the Socialist League at the conference. The adoption of a more radical programme left Lansbury and Attlee as leaders of a party committed to the nationalisation of the Bank of England and determined never again to allow doctrine to be compromised by politics. Lansbury was at the height of his popularity with the party and much of this popularity accrued to his industrious deputy. Early in the following year Attlee described the mood of the party at a demonstration in Hyde Park. Lansbury was hailed as ‘almost a Gandhi’, while ‘Old JRM [MacDonald] is … completely shameless in these days.’21
By the end of 1932 Attlee’s position within the party had altered dramatically. From the status of worthy but unexceptional junior minister he had evolved into a deputy leader, charting the strategic direction of the party. As deputy to Lansbury, whose prestige had never stood higher, he represented progressiveness, mixed with a link to the roots of the early Labour Party. Lansbury already belonged to another era, while Attlee projected a more modern, more worldly approach.
Attlee opened the year of 1933 with a statement of fundamental principles in a letter to his brother. Working from proposals for internationalising civil aviation, he drew an idealistic picture of his vision of international relations. Only a world state, he believed, would be ‘really effective in preventing war’. The question, of course, was who would ‘bell the cat’ in case of need. He proposed first a united navy, later an international air force and an organisation that included the USA, Britain and France. This would bring in Russia and, when they realised they could not compete, Germany and Japan would follow. ‘This may sound very visionary’, he concluded, ‘but I am convinced that unless we see the world we want it is vain to try to build a permanent habitation for Peace and that temporary structures will catch fire very soon if we wait any longer.’22
Visionary it certainly was; it was also prescient. At a time when the Labour Party was looking back at the errors of 1929–31, Attlee was looking forward to the role of a socialist government in Europe of the 1930s. The party was feeling its way toward the overall plan that was ultimately implemented in 1945.
Despite the enormous burden of work – or, perhaps, because of it – this was a thrilling period for Attlee. It was easy to blame MacDonald and Snowden for ‘betraying’ the party, but there was a far wider question to address: if Labour were ever to regain power, what would be their guiding principles? Attlee was taken to task by Lord Eustace Percy in the Commons after one assault on the Prime Minister. ‘I think the hon. Member would have to think out his measures a great deal more,’ Percy reproved him, ‘before he could be said to have an alternative policy, whatever he may be said to have of alternative sentiments.’23
The Leicester conference had demonstrated the determination of the National Executive to prevent another ‘Trojan Horse’ leadership; there would now be more accountability of the PLP to the wider membership. It was incumbent on the parliamentary leaders to tailor the party’s message to fit with the aspirations of both the left and the middle-of-the-road voters that Labour would need to pry from the Liberals if they were to be electable. Thus, while ‘the White Rabbit’ dashed hither and thither to keep the PLP in line, he needed to ensure that the left did not ‘go off the reservation’.
The role was perfect for Attlee. As when in 1918 he had discussed with Tom the direction Britain would take after the war, so now he saw that the party needed to rebuild itself by consensus. It would need both theoretical discussion and swift action to implement decisions in order to be effective. Naturally, he saw himself as central to both establishing policy and the translation of policy into action. Equally naturally, he found time to write to his brother to seek his thoughts.
‘I have just been reviewing Laski’s latest, The Crisis of Democracy,’ he wrote. ‘Amazingly good.’ Discounting MacDonald completely (‘His mind is mainly fog now’), he remarked on the wily Lloyd George moving into the void that Attlee wanted Labour to occupy, and commented on the affection in which Lansbury was held by the masses and in the House of Commons.24 This revealing paragraph, loosely interpreted, sets out Attlee’s immediate goals: to be as influential on party doctrine as Laski; to emulate MacDonald by becoming leader, but to remain faithful; to prevent Lloyd George detaching Liberals from the mainstream Liberal Party and pre-empting Labour; to be held in the same affection as Lansbury. It was an ambitious agenda.
During the next three years the ‘rather diffident committee man’25 increased his stature within the party, in the country, and on the international stage. His untiring work made him indispensable and his increasing personal stamp on policy established his position as a party intellectual. Although he frequently refused to accept that label,26 that perception was a central element of his ascent.
In 1933, however, he was still far from being Lansbury’s obvious successor. Cripps had equal stature within the party; Morrison had enormous, though overwhelmingly local, influence as leader of the Labour Group in the London County Council; Dalton’s credentials as an economist and former Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office were congruent with a contemporary profile of a party leader. Yet each had qualities that mitigated against their becoming the party’s standard bearer. None had a broadly based constituency – and two of them had no seat in the House.
Cripps, with whom Attlee had established a close friendship, was increasingly regarded with suspicion by Dalton and Morrison as he inched to the left. Accused of wanting to introduce what amounted to a socialist dictatorship, he alarmed colleagues at the party conference at Hastings in October. Morrison in particular was doubtful that Cripps would be acceptable to the middle-class voter, the renegade Liberal that the Labour Party needed to capture.27
Cripps came to politics at the age of forty-one after a highly successful career at the Bar, where he was the youngest King’s Counsel of his generation. Appointed Solicitor-General by MacDonald in 1930, he entered Parliament as MP for East Bristol, a safe Labour seat, and declined to join the national government in 1931. Although a brilliant debater – Morrison considered him invincible in private discussions – he had a childlike innocence of politics and was considered by his aunt Beatrice Webb to be ‘oddly immature in intellect and unbalanced in judgment’.28 Nonetheless, for the left wing of the party, convinced that they had been done down by a capitalist conspiracy, Cripps was a worthy champion. Although such a controversial figure might not have been able to lead Labour to victory in a general election, Attlee needed first to ensure that he, not Cripps, had that opportunity.
Fortune once more intervened on Attlee’s behalf in 1933, this time in macabre fashion. Lansbury’s wife Betty, to whom he was devoted, died in March 1933. Lansbury described his loss as ‘inexpressible’ and turned to working intolerable hours, attending meetings up and down the country. At Gainsborough in December, exhausted by his schedule, he fell badly and broke his thigh. He spent the following eight months in hospital in constant pain.29
He was replaced pro tempore by Attlee for nine months. On domestic issues Attlee continued his assault on the government’s handling of unemployment. On foreign affairs he became more vocal, criticising the Tories, particularly Simon, for hypocrisy over the role of the League of Nations and the lack of progress at the Disarmament Conference that had dragged on since 1932. He watched with mounting alarm the rise of the Nazis in Germany. ‘There is so much loose powder lying about’, he reflected, ‘and one cannot tell where the match will be applied.’ Social democracy had been destroyed for a generation in Germany. ‘It raises most difficult problems of policy for our movement. How are we to frame a world plan for socialism with these conditions on the continent?’30
He continued to travel to conferences. In 1934 he was in Prague and Geneva, the latter at the invitation of Konni Zilliacus,31 where he spoke on the need to establish a police force as an arm of the League of Nations. In the face of the growing power of the European dictators he continued to support disarmament in debates in the House, although the party was divided on the issue. That division became clear at the 1934 party conference in Southport when Cripps inveighed against the League, urging withdrawal and the forging of alliances with socialist governments of other countries. Attlee spoke persuasively in favour of collective security and for sanctions in a speech that further established his authority. At this conference he was elected to the National Executive Council, a mixed accolade as he polled substantially fewer votes than Morrison and took third place behind Morrison and Dalton. While he maintained a strong position at Westminster, he still needed to win acceptance as leader from the wider party.
During the early 1930s Gandhi’s campaign of civil disobedience in India laid bare the need to reach some agreement on the future status of the subcontinent. In March 1933 the government published a White Paper with proposals for a new constitution. Attlee, the Opposition member with the greatest experience of conditions in India, led the offensive against the proposals. There was, he charged, no provision for eventual dominion status, no suggestion that the powers of the Governor General be attenuated, no proposals for the ‘Indianisation’ of the Army. There were, moreover, exacting demands for financial prerequisites for federation, demands that ‘no modern state at the present time could possibly get through’. The government, he said, was ‘tied to the forces of privilege and reaction’. Unless the White Paper were substantially revised, he was not optimistic about future peace in India.32
In May 1933 Attlee was appointed to a joint select committee, which in November 1934 presented its recommendations to Parliament. In a broadcast in January 1935 he spoke out for gradual granting of dominion status, stressing the need to ensure that genuine progress was made to improve the quality of Indian life. His principal concern was that the government was behaving hypocritically, substituting Indian vested interests for British vested interests and putting it about that this was reform.33 The proposals in the report, the basis of the 1935 Government of India Act, were essentially the recommendations of the Simon Commission. He was clear in his determination that dominion status was the goal – more than a mere doffing of the cap to the left – but, in terms of tangible achievement, this intermezzo achieved little for India. It did, however, position Attlee as a statesmanlike advocate for Indian democracy in the eyes of both the party and the electorate.
The dominant issue in foreign relations in the first half of the decade was that of disarmament, on which the party was predictably divided. Leslie Hore-Belisha, Minister of Transport,34 commented that the mood of the people until 1935 was such that ‘a parliamentary candidate who advocated increased defence expenditure ran the risk of finishing at the bottom of the poll, if he did not actually lose his deposit’.35 This was borne out by the East Fulham by-election of October 1933. During the campaign Lansbury vowed that he ‘would close every recruiting station, disband the Army, dismiss the Air Force’. The enthusiastic reception of his speech was reflected in the transformation of the Tory majority of 14,521 to a Labour majority of 4,840.
In March 1935 the government published a White Paper on Imperial Defence to ‘establish peace on a permanent footing’. Even before it was presented to the House there was dissent within the Tory Party that it was ‘mealy-mouthed’, shying away from telling the truth for fear of upsetting Hitler.36 After it was presented on 4 March Hitler, contracting a ‘diplomatic cold’, cancelled a meeting with Foreign Secretary Simon in Berlin.37
As Hitler re-armed, Britain looked the other way. Sir Robert Vansittart, Head of the Foreign Office, commented that ‘we had to feel our way with the British, while the Germans strode ahead with their Führer’.38 Moving a Vote of Censure on 11 March, Attlee spoke out against the proposal to increase defence expenditure by £11,000,000, describing it as ‘rattling back to war’.39 Vansittart recorded that it was ‘a rattling bad speech’. Of Cripps he was equally damning, commenting that ‘Stafford Cripps, a grave and ascetic offender against sense, played with the idea of a general strike if we sought to defend ourselves’.40 Austen Chamberlain was more savage:
If war breaks out … and if the hon. Member for Limehouse and his friends be sitting on the government bench while London is bombed, do you think he will hold the language that he held to-day? Do you think that that is the defence he will make? If he does, he will be one of the first victims of the war, for he will be strung up by an angry, and a justifiably angry, populace to the nearest lamp-post.41
Attlee, seeing the issue in purely party parliamentary light, wrote to Tom that the debate had been ‘pretty good’, adding that he thought that the Opposition had the best of it.42 That may have been so, and it may have been that he could have said little else or little more, given the constraints of party loyalty. Just two years later, however, his posture of 1935 was one he would happily have disowned.
In May 1935 George V celebrated his Silver Jubilee and Baldwin, now Prime Minister, requested Lansbury to recommend three names for awards of honours. Lansbury, who disapproved of the honours system, declined, but privately requested that Attlee, who had led the party for most of 1934, should become a Privy Counsellor.43 The congratulations he received from both sides of the House were a source of pleasure and pride. For the Labour Party, however, the Jubilee, inducing a mood of jingoism, was ill timed.
In December 1934 a confrontation occurred at Walwal, close to the Abyssinian border, involving Abyssinian, Somali and Italian forces. The League of Nations failed to achieve settlement; Eden went to Rome to broker a peace agreement with Mussolini but returned empty-handed. The Italian dictator ‘was determined to have his Abyssinian adventure’44. On 3 October Italian forces invaded Abyssinia.
The crisis dominated the news and, when the Labour Party conference opened in Brighton on 1 October, the party’s foreign policy was put to the test. A resolution was proposed to the conference that immediate sanctions should be applied to Italy and that the government should use all necessary measures provided by the League. This provoked furious and divisive debate, culminating in a virulent attack on Lansbury by Bevin.45 Lansbury’s impassioned speech, stating his Christian principles of pacifism, roused Bevin to accuse him of ‘hawking your conscience round from body to body asking to be told what to do with it’.46 The resolution was carried by a margin of over two million votes.
Attlee was pleased by the outcome of the vote; to him a policy of non-resistance was morally indefensible, but was appalled by the chasm that the debate opened in the party. He was certain that this would be exploited by the government and that a general election would be called while the Labour Party was split over so significant an issue.
The Tories correctly assessed that Labour was vulnerable; Abyssinia took attention away from domestic issues. Unemployment had at last fallen below two million. Neville Chamberlain recorded that ‘Labour is torn with dissensions’ and resolved to stress the Tories’ support of the League, the new Conservative defence programme ‘to enable us to perform our task of peace preserver’, and ‘the dangers of a socialist administration’.47 Attlee was right; Baldwin called an election for 14 November.
As soon as Parliament reassembled on 8 October Lansbury offered his resignation and, despite spirited attempts to dissuade him, insisted that in view of the party vote in conference he could not continue as leader. The names of Greenwood, who had re-entered Parliament as Member for Wakefield, and Attlee were considered as Lansbury’s successor. With little hope of winning the impending election, the support of the Parliamentary Party for Attlee was a deciding factor and a motion was put that he be elected temporary leader to shepherd the party through the election. Attlee accepted; Lansbury commented that ‘Clem is well able to handle anything that comes up’.48
1 Labour Party general election manifesto, 1931, section 3, para 1.
2 Ibid, section 4, paras 1–2.
3 Raymond Postgate, George Lansbury, p. 276.
4 The Society for Socialist Information and Propaganda, formed in January 1931 and later merged into the Socialist League.
5 Letter to Tom Attlee, 16 November 1931.
6 Letter to Tom Attlee, 18 December 1931.
7 New Fabian Research Bureau manifesto, 1930.
8 Lord Francis-Williams, Nothing So Strange, p. 219. He added that Attlee had ‘a polite ruthlessness in getting what he wanted’. (p. 221).
9 It is notable as an indication of his increased status that this was written at the invitation of Victor Gollancz.
10 Swift, Labour in Crisis, p. 13.
11 Hansard, HC Deb, 2 October 1931, cols. 705–712.
12 As It Happened, p. 109.
13 Letter to Tom Attlee, 15 July 1932.
14 As It Happened, p. 112.
15 Hansard, HC Deb, 22 May 1935, col. 371.
16 As It Happened, p. 126.
17 See Golant, ‘The Early Political Thought of C. R. Attlee’, Politics Quarterly 40.3, July–September 1969.
18 Former MP for Leyton East, defeated at the 1931 election.
19 MP for Glasgow Bridgton since 1922 and chairman of the ILP from 1926 to 1931.
20 Letter to Tom Attlee, 8 August 1932.
21 Letter to Tom Attlee, 7 February 1933.
22 Letter to Tom Attlee, 1 January 1933.
23 Hansard, HC Deb, 25 November 1932, col. 382.
24 Letter to Tom Attlee, 15 February 1933.
25 Lansbury’s comment on Attlee, quoted by Harris, Attlee, p. 109.
26 Granada Historical Records, Clem Attlee, p. 12.
27 Donoughue and Jones, Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician, p. 187.
28 Both Morrison’s and Webb’s comments are at Pimlott, Labour and the Left in the 1930s, p. 35.
29 Bessie Lansbury’s death and its effect on Lansbury are described sympathetically at Postgate, The Life of George Lansbury, pp. 289–290.
30 Letter to Tom Attlee, 3 April 1933.
31 A left-wing Labour politician who worked for the League of Nations Secretariat until Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia. Later MP for Gateshead.
32 Hansard, HC Deb, 27 March 1933, cols 723–732.
33 Hansard, HC Deb, 10 December 1934, cols. 61–72.
34 Later Secretary of State for War under Neville Chamberlain, 1937–40.
35 Minney, The Private Papers of Hore-Belisha, p. 33.
36 Young, Stanley Baldwin, pp. 193–194.
37 Young, Stanley Baldwin, p. 194.
38 Vansittart, The Mist Procession, p. 508.
39 Hansard, HC Deb, 11 March 1935, cols 35–46.
40 Vansittart, The Mist Procession, p. 509.
41 Hansard, HC Deb, 11 March 1935, col. 77.
42 Letter to Tom Attlee, 12 March 1935.
43 CAC: ATLE 1/14.
44 Jenkins, Mr Attlee, p. 158.
45 Described as of a ‘virulence distasteful to many delegates’. News Chronicle, 2 October 1935.
46 Postgate, The Life of George Lansbury, p. 303. There is uncertainty whether Bevin said ‘hawking’ or ‘taking’.
47 Diary entry for 19 October 1935, quoted at Feiling, Neville Chamberlain, pp. 268–269.
48 Jenkins, Mr Attlee, p. 163.