La disparition de ce grand homme d’état que fut Lord Attlee me cause une peine profonde.1 – Charles de Gaulle, President of France

A terrible wrong in the history of human society was righted and in consequence honourable relations and understanding were established between the people of Israel and the people of Great Britain. – Yigal Allon, Deputy Prime Minister of Israel

His name is inseparably linked with the beginning of the reconciliation between the British and German peoples. – Willi Brandt and Helmut Schmidt

An exceptional democrat who demonstrated admirable loyalty to his country and every human ideal. – Aldo Moro, Prime Minister of Italy

Clement Attlee’s obituary in The Times was perceptive and accurate, addressing cardinal characteristics of the man and his government. Conceding that ‘the absence of superficial qualities’ had ‘contributed to the failure of his party to dispel the air of drabness that settled over post-war socialism’, it focused on his confidence in his own judgement, his pertinacity, his ‘sturdiness of character’ and ‘unwavering resolution’. ‘His integrity’, the writer concluded, ‘was absolute.’2 In a few telling phrases, while remaining objective about his shortcomings, the tribute captured Attlee’s essential qualities: his humanity and his integrity. The last, perhaps, was his most compelling virtue. Lord Longford spoke of his ‘moral authority’; his moral disapproval was ‘frightening to behold’.3

Perhaps because he never was and was never perceived as a ruthless politician, there has been a tendency to see his rise to power as an accident, rooted more in the misfortune of others than in ambition or ability. Such a tendency is wide of the mark.

Certainly his rise was boosted by events. At every critical point in his political career he succeeded in harnessing both public opinion and ethical constancy to his chariot. This called for exceptional skill and an astonishing degree of that quality which Napoleon most valued in a general – good, old-fashioned luck. Attlee would certainly have been a Maréchal in La Grande Armée if luck alone decided promotion.

But the leap from the obvious fact that he was aided by luck to the proposition that he did not seek power is logically false. There was a shrewd political side to his character that enabled him to capitalise on good fortune and benefit significantly from it. When he returned from Washington in December 1950 the popular perception was that he had single-handedly restrained Truman and his bomb-toting generals from launching World War III. Despite the blatant untruth of that view, he was not above allowing it to be the public perception. In July 1945, when Morrison schemed to replace him as party leader, he had no qualms about adducing respect for the monarch as his guiding reason for proceeding quietly to Buckingham Palace and ‘kissing hands’.

When we follow Attlee’s career from 1914 onwards we can identify the points at which Fortune intervened to grant him opportunity. On each occasion he moved with speed and determination to build on that good fortune. To suggest that he was without ambition, a compliant conduit for collective decisions, is to ignore the steely resolution he showed when necessary – for example, his decision that Britain build an atomic bomb in total secrecy.

His daughter-in-law Anne has no doubts about that resolution. ‘He certainly had ambition,’ she recalls. ‘But it wasn’t the kind of ambition that makes you go around, telling lies about people.’ Ambition and integrity co-existed, and his ethical consistency was more than a political cloak. He had no hesitation in joining up when the First War broke out, but, as she points out, ‘he said to Tom that life in the army was only worthwhile if one was in command’.4

His good fortune started with his surviving the First World War. The good luck of being wounded and unable to participate in the assault that wiped out his company possibly preserved him for future office. During the war he learned to lead men in battle, conducting a remarkably successful evacuation at Gallipoli. Once the war was over and the Labour Party was actively seeking candidates more in keeping with ‘the officer type’, the blueprint of Victorian respectability rather than twentieth-century upheaval, he had no scruples about retaining the field rank that he had earned. The handle of ‘Major Attlee’ had the right ring in 1918, evoking qualities of leadership, patriotism, reliability. It should be no surprise that he was still referred to as ‘Major Attlee’ well into the 1930s. The Minutes of the Paris meeting before the fall of France refer to him by his military rank.5

When he was demobilised in 1919 he left the depot in the morning, arranged his employment at the LSE in the afternoon and went to see Oscar Tobin in Stepney the following day. In reply to Tobin’s offer he said crisply, ‘Think it over.’ Tobin assured that he had thought it over, to which Attlee snapped brusquely, ‘No. I’ll think it over.’ As Lady Attlee chuckled, ‘No one pushed Clem around.’

When he was co-opted by Labour colleagues as Mayor of Stepney in 1919–20 he rapidly established himself as the man in charge. Not only did he gain vital experience but he impressed colleagues and constituents with his ability, efficiency and decency. They never forgot.

Moral rectitude, however admirable, is rarely the weapon of choice for aspiring politicians; Attlee was fortunate that this quality shone through at the right time in the right place. First elected to Parliament in 1922, at a time when established values were crumbling and cynicism about Lloyd George’s government was rampant, he had by 1931 accumulated experience as PPS to MacDonald, as Under-Secretary of War, with the Simon Commission in India, as Postmaster General and as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster. As Lord Bridges commented, ‘If a benign and far-seeing providence had wished to give to a future Prime Minister, in his first years in Parliament, experience of a very wide range of government work, the matter could hardly have been arranged more satisfactorily.’6 Such a list of appointments for a relative ‘freshman’ in Parliament, however, suggests something more than good fortune.

He also retained his seat. In 1931, the year in which the Labour Party ‘sustained the most crushing defeat in its history’,7 Attlee was re-elected by a slender margin. Morrison, Dalton, Henderson and Greenwood were less fortunate.

The outcome of the 1931 election is a vital pillar in the construction of the argument that Attlee was more fortunate than deserving. Morrison had been Minister of Transport and Dalton Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office from 1929 to 1931. Greenwood had served as Minister of Health and Henderson had held several posts, culminating in a stint as Foreign Secretary since 1929. All four, clearly, had deeper experience of government than Attlee and, had any one of them been returned to Parliament, the argument goes, then Attlee would not have become deputy leader of the tiny contingent that made up the PLP.

There are many critical moments in history, many roads to Damascus, and the putative course of events from 1931 to 1935, had one or all of the four remained in Parliament, provokes interesting speculation. Only the facts, however, are certain. By 1935 Attlee had established a sufficient reputation with Labour Mps to defeat Morrison and Greenwood with comparative ease. In four years he had demonstrated untiring devotion to the party. Questions concerning Morrison’s candour – specifically that he spoke with forked tongue, was ambiguous about leaving the London County Council and devoting all his time to leading the party – were to recur throughout his political career.

It is an assumption of considerable dimension that, had he been on the Opposition front bench between 1931 and 1935, Morrison would have been the automatic choice of Labour Members. Even if one accepts the assumption, it requires a significant logical leap to assert that Morrison would have been elected leader or deputy leader in 1935. Attlee would have been on the same front bench and would have had room for manoeuvre to establish himself as a claimant if, as happened, there was a leadership election. Four years would have intervened and, if, as Wilson said, ‘a week is a long time in politics’,8 Morrison would have had ample time to lose support and Attlee ample time to gain it. To assert that Morrison – or Greenwood – would have simply supplanted Attlee and maintained that position is the wildest speculation. When those two rivals had the chance to displace Attlee, they were dispatched with relative ease in two rounds of balloting in which Attlee led from the start.

Is there some residual ‘gifted amateur’ squeamishness that prevents us from accepting that ambition and ethical consistency are compatible? Do we, like Marc Antony, see ambition as ‘a grievous fault’? Does it detract from Attlee’s legacy to say that he was ambitious, hungry for the top job, principally so that he could pilot through Parliament the most comprehensive social reforms of any British government?

That he was ambitious is demonstrated by his running for the leadership at all. Between 1935 and 1940 he consolidated his position. Morrison and Greenwood did not simply vanish from view. Greenwood served as Attlee’s deputy, while Morrison remained highly visible with the LCC. When Churchill took over from Chamberlain in May 1940, all three were needed.

The five years as Opposition leader, more than any other period, tested Attlee’s ability to straddle the party left and the electorate, while maintaining a credible Opposition. It is for his performance during those years that he is most criticised. Simply put, the argument is that a more dynamic leader could have succeeded in stimulating defection from the Tory ranks much sooner and that, therefore, he must bear some responsibility for the events that led to war in 1939. Churchill, who since 1932 had given ‘formal warning of approaching war’, charged government and opposition equally for ‘refusal to face unpleasant facts, desire for popularity and electoral success irrespective of the vital interests of the state’.9

Churchill himself, a constant goad to Baldwin over air estimates, failed to change government policy. The Tory government was mired in complacency, failing to grasp Hitler’s true intentions. Attlee was urged by colleagues to make overtures to Sinclair and Churchill to form a Popular Front but he refused to move without a mandate.10 Moreover, it is doubtful that Attlee could have succeeded where Churchill failed to rouse enough Tories to bring Baldwin or Chamberlain down. When Eden resigned over Chamberlain’s dealings with Mussolini, when Duff Cooper resigned after Munich, there was no movement to unseat the Prime Minister. When Churchill delivered a magnificent oration two days later (‘All is over. Silent, mournful, abandoned, broken, Czechoslovakia recedes into the darkness’) he was heckled from the government benches.11 It is hard not to agree with Attlee that it required more than dynamic leadership to reverse government policy. We can point to occasions when he might have scored a few more parliamentary points – when Baldwin confessed his error over German aircraft building, for example12 – but it took the shambles in Norway to make the folly of government policy plain.

From October 1940 Morrison served as Home Secretary throughout the coalition’s time in office. Churchill recognised his value as he recognised the towering presence of Bevin. It helped Morrison not at all, however, that by 1942 Churchill had also learned to respect Attlee’s worth and appointed him Britain’s first Deputy Prime Minister – nor that Bevin stood firmly in support of Attlee. By the end of the war few Britons doubted the dedication, patriotism or ability of Churchill’s deputy. When we mix into that equation a distrust of the Tory Party and a belief that the Labour Party offered a genuinely better future, Attlee’s entry into Downing Street was a foregone conclusion. He had not achieved it by stealth or by misrepresenting the situation. He made no secret of the imminent austerity.

The years of 1922, 1935 and 1945 were of fundamental importance in twentieth-century Britain and in each of them Clement Attlee ran for election. In all three he was selected by a constituency that was aware of the importance of its decision. The first was local, the second partisan, the third national. In the first he defeated a Liberal who had held the seat at Limehouse since 1906 and was running with Conservative support; in the second he was elected over the supposedly superior claims of Morrison and Greenwood. In the third his party ejected from Downing Street the immensely popular Winston Churchill, who was riotously cheered wherever he appeared on his election tour.

Three things, arguably, were inevitable: that Clement Attlee would be elected party leader by the Parliamentary Labour Party in 1935, that he would become Deputy Prime Minister after May 1940, and that Labour would win the 1945 general election. The concatenation of those inevitable events led to a fourth – that Attlee would succeed Churchill as Prime Minister in July 1945; all the indicators suggested that outcome; only the massive stature of Winston Churchill and the relatively new science of polling obscured measured judgement.

Without drama, Attlee took the Labour Party and shaped it into a stronger organism. In later life he chuckled to compare his election as leader with Roosevelt’s nomination as Democratic candidate for the Presidency in 1932. ‘It is interesting’, he wrote to Patricia Beck, ‘to contrast the working of democracy in UK and USA, the huge long jamboree that made Roosevelt the democratic leader and the hour in the committee room in the House of Commons which made me Labour Party leader.’13

That shaping required tact, vision, courage and hard-headed political leadership. A brilliant Cabinet organiser, once he achieved power he was uniquely adept at using it, not for any personal agenda – except in rare instances like India and Abadan – but to establish and implement the will of the majority in Cabinet. Bevin had no illusions about the importance of this executive talent, reflected in the remarkable speed with which Bills were prepared and read. The Times singled out this ability: ‘One of the most important functions of a Prime Minister is to dispatch business. Lord Attlee was a master of this. He could procrastinate when it suited him. Once he had made up his mind that a decision should be reached, he was unstoppable.’14

The clearest example of unstoppability was the granting of independence to India. The announcement of Mountbatten’s appointment in February 1947 reads as though this were a culmination of benevolent policy, long designed to bring democracy to the subcontinent. Considering the speed with which events moved over the following six months, it is incomprehensible that they had limped for so long. It is hard not to see the appointment as the means by which national humiliation could be presented as a triumph. Whether or not the hasty withdrawal caused greater slaughter will never be known – particularly as the estimates of casualties are imprecise, varying from 100,000 to two million. Attlee believed that there was ‘a very good chance’ of avoiding bloodshed if Mountbatten could have remained as Governor-General of both India and Pakistan. This, he wrote, was ‘foiled by the vanity of Jinnah’.15 Attlee describes his decision to appoint Mountbatten as ‘an inspiration’ and this fits the facts. What he does not describe is the exact nature of the problem he was attempting to solve. At root this was a public relations problem, as his mind was already made up. Mountbatten, equipped with his own public relations officer – the first ever to accompany a Viceroy – provided the solution. At that point Attlee was, indeed, unstoppable.

That, in Bevin’s view, he never had a creative idea is unimportant. Like a Hollywood producer, he had the ‘Talent’ around him for that. His continued presence at the top was as inevitable as his progress in reaching it. Equally, after twenty years as party leader and the loss of two elections, his departure was as inevitable as his accession. So great is the congruence between his career and its surrounding events that there is a risk of conflating party and leader.

One biographer asks the question, ‘Would Attlee have succeeded as a leader in the modern day?’ and answers firmly in the negative.16 That conclusion is undeniable, for Attlee was considered an anachronism when he stepped down in 1955. He recognised that the issue of a united Europe, for example, was one that must concern his successors but one that he might avoid. Looking far beyond national boundaries and desperate to find a formula for peace in the atomic age, he referred to a united Europe as outdated. Who, one may ask, was old-fashioned?

To some extent he played the ‘old duffer’, much as Harold Macmillan affected Edwardian mannerisms while Britain hurtled into the moral maelstrom of the 1960s. He certainly played the role to effect. Sir William Hayter told a story of Attlee in Yugoslavia. A friend arrived at Brioni, where he was staying, and Attlee urgently asked him, ‘Have you got the cricket scores? Nobody out here seems to know a thing about them.’17 But behind the assumed façade of amiable grandfather there was a set of fixed Victorian values, an unambiguous moral code and more than a hint of respect for l’ancien régime. He could hold sincere socialist beliefs and at the same time accept, for example, a differentiated school system. Aged fifty-six when the Second World War broke out, he belonged firmly to the pre-war period. Curiously, it was the balance of being ‘the Major’ and a committed socialist that endeared him first to his own constituents, later to the nation.

Perhaps the most astonishing fact of chronology is that a mere eight years passed between Attlee’s stepping down from the leadership and Harold Wilson’s predicting the ‘white heat of this (technological) revolution’ at the 1963 party conference. By 1967 all three major parties were led by men born well into the twentieth century: Wilson and Edward Heath (both born in 1916) and Jeremy Thorpe (1929).

His kindness and decency were legendary. Punctilious in writing ‘thank-you’ notes, solicitous when colleagues were ill or when a family tragedy occurred, he received scores of appreciative letters. One delightful exchange occurred in June 1951. The government was hanging on to its tiny majority, daily besieged, when the Prime Minister received a letter from Ann Franklin, a fifteen-year-old schoolgirl, complaining that she had to wait a year before sitting the new GCE exam. The letter was written in six stanzas of verse, beginning:

Will you please explain, dear Clement,

Just why it has to be

That Certificates of Education

Are barred to such as me.

Instead of passing it to a secretary for a standard reply along the lines of ‘The Prime Minister thanks you for your communication …’ Attlee replied, promising to speak to George Tomlinson, the Minister of Education. Writing by hand on 10 Downing Street writing paper in an envelope embossed ‘PRIME MINISTER’, he joined in the fun:

I received with real pleasure

Your verses, my dear Ann.

Although I’ve not much leisure

I’ll reply as best I can.

I’ve not the least idea why

They have this curious rule

Condemning you to sit and sigh

Another year at school.

You’ll understand that my excuse

For lack of detailed knowledge

Is that School Certs were not in use

When I attended college.

George Tomlinson is ill, but I

Have asked him to explain,

And when I get the reason why

I’ll write to you again.

And he did. On 9 July he wrote again, explaining the reasons for the delay that Ann had to endure. It was a technical explanation that ended on a high note, pointing out that there were three levels at which she could sit the exam and wishing her every success when the time came. They stayed in touch; Ann wrote to tell her of her exam results in 1952 and Attlee replied with ‘congratulations on your success’. In 1957, presumably when she graduated from university, her father wrote to thank him for his kindness. Attlee replied, saying, ‘I am delighted to hear that any action of mine has been helpful. Please congratulate your daughter for me on her many successes and wish her all happiness.’18

Such concern was typical of the man. His manners, dress, courtesy to women, and habitual formality belong to the Victorian era, more conservative than progressive. That essential conservatism is illustrated by issues that his government left unresolved, issues central to a true socialist administration. Especially notable are reform of the House of Lords and of the education system.

Concern for the passage of the Iron and Steel Bill prompted the attenuation of the power of the Lords to delay Bills. That was practical politics but it did nothing to alter the make-up of the second chamber. Attlee worked closely with Addison on plans for reform and between February and April 1948 seven cross-party meetings were held. The government was represented by Attlee, Morrison, Addison, Jowitt and Whiteley; the Tories by Eden, Salisbury, Swinton and Maxwell Fyfe; the Liberals by Samuel and Clement Davies.

The goals were to establish a House in which heredity was no longer a qualification in itself, in which the composition was not such as to give a majority to any one party, and from which peers would be free to resign if they were not interested in governance. Hereditary peers who were Privy Counsellors or who held certain offices, or were in the male line of royal succession, would be members; so too would the ‘Lords Spiritual’ and Law Lords. Other members would be selected by the Crown from ‘commoners of distinction’ to be ‘Lords of Parliament’.19 At the end of the fifth meeting Attlee commented that ‘there was a fundamental difference between the government and the Conservative Party as to what the powers of the Second Chamber should be’. Salisbury agreed; the same comment was made after the sixth and seventh meetings, at which point discussion petered out and proposals for reform were shelved.20

As early as 1941 Attlee and ‘Rab’ Butler, the President of the Board of Education, met to discuss post-war education. To Tom he was quite clear that neither he nor the party wanted to abolish public schools, feeling that many essentially local schools could be absorbed into county secondary schools. Others, the ‘national’ ones, ‘should be brought under control without killing their individuality’. That was about as far as the talks progressed beyond the vague goal that they should have ‘a large proportion of scholars from the elementary schools’21 and Attlee’s view that ‘variety and the maintenance of tradition was to be preferred to ‘dull uniformity’.22

Butler, determined that ‘educationally after the war Britain had to be one nation not two’,23 introduced the Education Act in 1944, creating the tripartite system of secondary education and the Eleven-Plus exam to determine a student’s secondary path – whether to grammar school, technical school or secondary modern. When Labour came to power Ellen Wilkinson, the Minister of Education, was committed to the 1944 Act. The principal bipartisan aim was to raise school leaving age first to fifteen, later to sixteen,24 even though this removed 160,000 people from the work force when they were badly needed.25 Comprehensive education was loosely adopted as Labour policy, which focused on ‘parity of esteem’, the famous phrase of the Butler Act, yet in 1958 Gaitskell wrote to his old housemaster at Winchester that the abolition of public schools was an issue that had no value and ‘that the ordinary man does not disapprove of the Public Schools and, on the whole, does not want much done about them’.26 Nearly ten years later, Labour was still deliberately imprecise about plans for grammar schools.

On two questions, then, Attlee was far from a zealous socialist in pursuing reform. He avoided conflict with friends like the Marquess of Salisbury (‘Bobbety’ Cranborne) and Eden, with whom he would later serve in the Lords. As to education, he would hardly have abolished a source of supply for his government. In one of his many lists he records the public schools whose old boys had served on the Labour front bench. Eton leads the list with seven, followed by Haileybury (five), Winchester (four), Marlborough, Rugby and Saint Paul’s (two) and by Harrow, Cheltenham, Tonbridge, Dulwich, Rugby and Oundle (one each).27 John Colville, speaking with Attlee about Geoffrey de Freitas, an Old Haileyburian, concluded that ‘the old school tie counted even more in Labour than in Conservative circles’.28

Both questions were to become causes célèbres for later Labour administrations, but Attlee clearly had no difficulty in preserving the status quo. Along with a genuine and passionate wish to improve the living conditions of the less privileged co-existed a resolve to leave some symbols of privilege well alone.

One final issue needs addressing. In forging the Atlantic alliance, from 1947 a prime desideratum, Attlee made not one trip to Washington between 1945 and 1950. Unlike Churchill who, in addition to carrying on a voluminous correspondence with Roosevelt, crossed the Atlantic at the slightest opportunity, Attlee made just two visits to Washington. Those visits, together with the Potsdam conference, were the extent of the meetings between the two leaders.

Prime Minister and President were very different in style. Truman enjoyed an evening of poker and bourbon with male friends, while Attlee was shy to the point of being tongue-tied in company. Truman was famous for plain speaking; Attlee was curt, almost monosyllabic in conversation.29 On the surface, at least, they had little in common. But when swift action was called for, as in the Berlin airlift, both moved quickly.

The issue that divided the two and in which both leaders appeared unable or unwilling to understand the other’s position was Palestine. During the last days of the Mandate Attlee and Bevin were impotent without American support, while Truman’s continued pressure was a vehement indictment of British policy. That the entente was allowed to slip is a criticism of both leaders, but, given the facts of the relative power of Britain and America, the onus to take the initiative was on Attlee.

Attlee typically described his government’s achievements in six words during an interview with Honor Balfour in June 1967:

Honour Balfour: What was the greatest achievement of the Labour government?

Clement Attlee: Indian independence.

HB: What was the greatest problem you faced?

CRA: Russia.

HB: What was the West’s most important operation in the face of that problem?

CRA: The Berlin airlift.

To an audience in Oxford he was more expansive. He was proud to have been involved in a unique phenomenon:

All these achievements were in the credit column of his administration before 1951 when the Labour Party was returned to the Opposition benches. His presence after the Bevan–Gaitskell fracas of 1951 was vital. In 1953 he was distressed to note that ‘the trouble in the party has broken out again just when I thought I had got things running smoothly. An article in Tribune upset the apple cart.’31 By the 1955 election he was ready to leave and tried to do so but, he complained, ‘at present they won’t let me go’.32 By December he was able to hand over the reins to Gaitskell reasonably smoothly and take his leave.

So ended twenty years of Attlee’s leadership of the Labour Party. He had taken it over from a leader who could never have been elected Prime Minister, had won two general elections without losing a by-election, shepherded the party through viciously partisan squabbles, and ushered in a man with substantially the same background as himself. Haileybury and Oxford yielded to Winchester and Oxford; Gaitskell had not been his first choice to follow him, but Attlee was satisfied by the time he stepped down that he was the best, even the only possible, successor.

By then he accepted, in words he might have used, that he had enjoyed a long innings and put up his bat in the pavilion. He had stayed on as Labour leader and ensured that the next leader was truly of the next generation, an undeniably ‘post-war’ man. Once he had achieved that transfer of power he was able to withdraw, become an elder statesman, a man of his generation. The challenges after 1955 were very different from those of 1945 and he had no shame in admitting that he could play no useful part in them. Late in life, free of party responsibility, he returned to advocate the great themes of his life: the United Nations, world governance, world peace.

Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice.33 So reads the inscription on a tablet close to Sir Christopher Wren’s tomb in St Paul’s Cathedral. Around the mortal remains of the architect stands the cathedral that best serves as his monument. Clement Attlee’s legacy surrounds every British citizen in the fabric of society created by the reforms of the postwar Labour government. Attlee, to whose name the adjective ‘modest’ is indissolubly joined, would have shied in horror from any grand monument. ‘Too much ego in his cosmos,’ he might have muttered. His pride in his government’s achievements was justifiably great, but it would never have occurred to him to claim personal credit for them. They were necessary reforms, long overdue, that his team brought to fruition in a staggeringly short time. He even infuriated Bevan by suggesting that part of the credit was due to the Tories and the wartime coalition.

It may be appropriate to end his biography with a short anecdote that illustrates his achievements, fame and modesty. After he stepped down from leadership of the Labour Party, he was travelling home – by the Underground, of course – and was accosted by a fellow traveller at Baker Street station.

‘Good Lord!’ said the traveller. ‘Do people ever tell you that you are the spitting image of Clement Attlee?’

‘Frequently,’ replied the 1st Earl.

ENDNOTES

1 ‘The loss of the great statesman that was Clement Attlee causes me a deep pain.’ President de Gaulle had a lingering fondness for Attlee, developed during his time in London as leader of the Free French during the war. In 1955 he wrote, ‘I can still see Mr Attlee coming softly into my office, asking for the assurances needed to relieve his conscience as a democrat, and then, after he had heard me, withdrawing with a smile on his face.’ (de Gaulle, War Memoirs: The Call to Honour 1940–1942).

2 The Times, 9 October 1967.

3 Lord Longford, Reader’s Digest, October 1968.

4 Conversation with Anne, Countess Attlee, 14 October 2013.

5 Weygand, Recalled to Service (1952, New York: Doubleday), p. 415.

6 Lord Bridges, Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, Vol. 14 (November 1968), pp. 15–36.

7 As It Happened, p. 108.

8 In 1964, the year he first became Prime Minister.

9 Churchill, History of the Second World War, vol. 1 ‘The Gathering Storm’, p. 89.

10 CAC: ATLE 1/16.

11 Hansard, HC Deb, 5 October 1938, cols. 359–373.

12 Hansard, HC Deb, 22 May 1935, cols 367–368.

13 Bodleian: MS. Eng. Lett. c.571, Letter to Patricia Beck, 20 August 1958.

14 The Times, 9 October 1967.

15 CAC: ATLE 1/13.

16 Nicklaus Thomas-Symonds, Attlee, p. 272.

17 Recounted by Crossman, The Backbench Diaries, p. 343.

18 The exchange of poems and subsequent correspondence is at Bodleian: MS. Eng. c.7100, fols 108–117.

19 Bodleian: MS. Addison, dep. c.189, fols 119–120.

20 Bodleian: MS. Addison, dep. c.189, passim.

21 Letter to Tom Attlee, 9 August 1941.

22 Bodleian: MS. Attlee, dep. 17, Speech in Leeds, 24 February 1945.

23 R. A. Butler, The Art of the Possible, p. 97.

24 Lord Redcliffe-Maud (formerly Sir John Maud), Experiences of an Optimist, pp. 51–59.

25 Carl Brand, The British Labour Party, p. 246.

26 Gaitskell to Cyril Robinson, 1 July 1958. Cited at Philip Williams, Hugh Gaitskell, p. 467.

27 CAC: ATLE 1/17.

28 Colville, The Fringes of Power, p. 613. Christopher Mayhew, another Old Haileyburian, recalls an occasion when his promotion was blocked by Attlee’s concern that the press was commenting on his liking for the Old School Tie. Time to Explain, p. 95.

29 Attlee was staying at the White House in 1950 when Truman wrote an abusive letter to Paul Hume, music critic of the Washington Post, after Hume’s savage review of a concert by Margaret Truman. According to Crossman, Attlee encouraged Truman to write the letter, saying ‘That’s the spirit’. Crossman speculated that ‘Attlee was almost envying Truman for doing and being all the things he isn’t’. The Backbench Diaries, p. 442.

30 Empire into Commonwealth, The Chichele Lectures, I, May 1960, lines 5–9.

31 Bodleian: MS. Eng. Lett. c.571, Letter to Patricia Beck, 1 February 1953.

32 Bodleian: MS. Eng. Lett. c.571, Letter to Patricia Beck, 31 July 1955.

33 ‘Reader, if you seek a monument, look about you.’ The words are inscribed on a tablet in St Paul’s, placed there by Christopher Wren’s son.