The next
UK government will inherit a mess, but not as bad as Clement Attlee did in 1945. Yet the Attlee government not only coped. It made Britain better.
Meanwhile his Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, played a key role in forging the
Western security framework that has endured to this day. Who were these men,
and what were they really like?
 |
| Attlee takes power in 1945 (Leslie Priest/AP) |
When Labour
came to power in July 1945, Britain was broke. Much of its gold reserves had
been spent on the war, and the US had insisted, as part of its postwar loan
agreement, that sterling be convertible within a few years. This was a huge
financial bomb waiting to go off. Meanwhile the occupation of the British Zone
of Germany was also costly; it was in a terrible state, not least because of
Britain’s own bombing.
At home, labour shortages in the mines restricted coal
supplies and would immiserate everyone in the awful winter of 1947. There was a
huge housing crisis; about 2 million houses had been destroyed or badly damaged
across Britain, and an estimated 750,000 new houses were needed – quickly;
according to the Royal British Legion, a staggering 4.2 million service
personnel were to be demobilised by December 1946. Meanwhile there were about
400,000 German prisoners in Britain, and large numbers of Polish
and other servicemen whose countries were about to come under Stalinist
occupation. It was becoming clear that they would not be able to go home.
Abroad, India
was ready to explode but the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, could not get Indian
politicians to agree a path to independence. Britain was also still fighting in
Greece, where left-wing forces could have taken the country into the Eastern
bloc along with its neighbours. There was armed conflict in Palestine, which
was still under the British mandate. In 1948 the emergency in Malaya would
start.
Not all
these problems would be solved. Some, especially Palestine, would leave a toxic
legacy. The houses wouldn’t all be built. But in six years, Attlee would build
a social democracy in which people’s basic needs mostly would be met. Abroad,
despite some failures, his remarkable Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, would play
a leading role in the postwar global order and in forging the Atlantic
alliance. At home, he would guard Attlee’s back against rivals in Cabinet and keep
it stable.
Who were these
men?
***
Francis
Beckett’s biography Clem Attlee was originally published in 1997 but
reissued in an updated edition in 2015. It’s not alone; there are a number of well-regarded
Attlee biographies, notably John Bew’s Citizen Clem and Michael Jago’s Clement
Attlee: The Inevitable Prime Minister. But I think for most people
Beckett’s will be all the Attlee they need.
Clement
Attlee was born into a large middle-class family in Putney in 1883. His father
was a Liberal barrister and Attlee himself went into the law after Oxford. But
it bored him. One night in 1906 his younger brother took him to visit a club
for disadvantaged boys in Stepney, then a very poor part of London where he
would not normally have gone. The visit transformed his life and he ended up
living in the East End as a social worker and campaigner, becoming involved in
left-wing politics. In 1914 he joined the army and served with some distinction
in the Gallipoli campaign and in the Middle East. In the former, he caught
dysentery and was almost the last Allied soldier to be evacuated. In the Middle
East he was badly wounded. Beckett says he felt strongly that the army and navy
had mismanaged the Gallipoli campaign but that Churchill’s strategy had been
sound. This would matter in 1940, when Attlee would bring Labour into
Churchill’s wartime coalition.
Beckett
obviously covers Attlee’s part in the wartime coalition and his subsequent
premiership. He takes a broad-brush approach. I don’t think that’s a bad thing;
the minutiae of long-ago governments do not always tell us much. Beckett does show
that Attlee played a crucial role from the beginning, backing Churchill against
Chamberlain and Halifax, who wanted to negotiate with Hitler. He also
demonstrates that Attlee could restrain or influence Churchill, and did – but
tactfully; he would have ‘a word with the PM’, rather than row with him in
Cabinet. Beckett quotes several examples, not least Attlee’s defence of de
Gaulle, who Churchill and Roosevelt loathed – not always without reason. But
Attlee realised they had no right to remove him. At the same time Attlee
quietly chaired the main committees concerned with postwar reconstruction,
which helped him set the agenda for the government he would soon lead.
He was not
to regret his part in the coalition. He later acquired the original of Low’s
famous 1940 cartoon (“All behind you, Winston!”) and according to Beckett it
was on the wall of his living room when he died in 1967.
***
Beckett
takes the same broad brush to the postwar government. Here a little more detail
might have been welcome, and there are some omissions, or matters covered
briefly. The latter include the fuel problems that beset Britain in the very bad
winter of 1947, and the constant plotting of Attlee’s rivals for the leadership
– they are there but not in depth. Beckett may be right not to get into the
weeds. Still, he could have said more about the pension and social security
reforms, which were to have a huge positive impact, and their prime mover the
Minister of National Insurance, Jim Griffiths. A Welshman who had left school
at 13, he is largely forgotten now. But his work in that Attlee government had
a positive and lasting impact on millions. He seems also to have been a
likeable and capable figure.
 |
Ellen Wilkinson
(Bassano Ltd./National Portrait Gallery) |
What
Beckett does bring out is Attlee’s magnanimity in government. Besides
leadership rivals like Morrison and Dalton, he also brought in Aneurin Bevan,
who had been a fierce critic throughout the war years, and Ellen Wilkinson, who
was apparently Morrison’s mistress and had been involved in multiple plots
against her new boss. (Beckett says she had a Damascene conversion about Attlee
as soon as she was in government.) These decisions have sometimes been seen as
wily plots to neutralise opposition. The reality, according to Beckett, was
that Attlee felt all the best people were needed in government whether he liked
them or not. And for the most part they did well. This was especially true of
Bevan, although he could be difficult; and of Wilkinson, who implemented the
important 1944 Education Act. Beckett covers her role fairly well. But he says
little about her death in office in 1947, possibly by her own hand but more
likely of an accidental overdose. This was a poignant episode; a charismatic
woman with a gift for friendship, she was mourned on both sides of the House.
Morrison did not attend her funeral.
There is
one episode of Attlee’s premiership that was very grave, and about which
Beckett is perhaps a little generous to him. This was India.
By 1945 it
was clear that Britain could not keep control in India much longer. There was a
Secretary of State for India and Burma; this was a Cabinet-level position in
its own right, occupied by Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, a long-time Labour
figure. However, he was by then 76 and besides, Attlee seems largely to have
directed India policy himself – a legacy perhaps of his service on the Simon
Commission in India in the 1920s. Early in 1947 he sacked the Viceroy, Lord
Wavell, who had tried hard but failed to get Indian politicians to agree with
each other on the shape of the transition to independence. Attlee replaced him
with Lord Mountbatten, telling him to get the British out quickly and leave
India as a single nation if possible but if not possible, to partition it.
Mountbatten was given plenipotentiary powers to this effect. He chose
Partition, and brought the date forward to just six months hence. Attlee let him do it. Should he have done? It
led to a huge, unplanned exchange of populations – something that might have
been predicted. This left a million dead and is a difficult part of Attlee’s
legacy.
Beckett is
with the defence. By 1947, it is argued, Britain could not keep order and any
delay would make things worse. This might be true. But perhaps Attlee should
have given the same authority to Wavell when he came to power two years
earlier. Wavell’s diaries were published in the 1970s and they do suggest that,
given the same freedom of action as Mountbatten, he might have negotiated an agreed
path to a united India.
But history
is full of what-ifs; in the end they take you nowhere, and maybe Attlee was
right. His support of partition may have sprung from his realisation, decades
before others, that the Western model of democracy could not always be
exported. In May 1943 he had circulated a remarkable paper to Cabinet in which
he argued that in certain situations – Palestine, Ireland, South Africa – two
groups might so distrust each other that one would oppose governance by the
other under any circumstances, at least without an outside referee. Perhaps
Attlee believed that in such a scenario the two parties must go their separate
ways altogether. If so, Partition was the logical step. But the price was high,
and it was not the British who paid it.
***
Attlee
shaped Britain as no other single person has in modern times. But what was he
like?
He lived
quietly – and modestly; when he went to the Palace to kiss hands in 1945 it was
in an eight-year-old Hillman 14 driven by his wife Violet, and the couple used
the same car in the 1950 election campaign. For 1951 they had upgraded to a
Humber Hawk, but Beckett says this was still prewar (other sources do say it
was new). His wife Violet usually drove him on his election campaigns. He was
moderate in his personal habits. The family home was a semi in Stanmore,
north-west London, and he returned there whenever he could during the war
years. He had married at nearly 40; the marriage seems to have been a devoted
one, and lasted until Violet’s death in 1964. They had four children.
Outside the
home, Attlee was a quiet, undemonstrative man. He was also almost weirdly calm
and self-controlled. His years in government, as deputy and later Prime
Minister, were the most crisis-ridden in modern British history, but he seems
to have been completely unflappable (even when chauffeured by Violet, which is
said to have been terrifying). He was also quite able to detach himself when
the day’s work was done however crisis-ridden it had been, and read a book or
write letters. He was concise to the point of abruptness; he never used two
words where one would do and never used one word when he could grunt instead.
He had little small talk. Ministers who did not perform were dismissed perhaps
not rudely, but certainly without ceremony. One imagines that Ministers and
civil servants might have respected rather than loved him.
There was
however a more jocular face to Attlee’s government. This was his closest ally: his
Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin. He, too, is now the subject of an accessible
and absorbing biography – by a more recent Labour minister, Lord Adonis.
***
Ernest
Bevin was born in Somerset in 1881. His mother was a widow; his father’s
identity has never been known (though Adonis has evidence he was a local
farmer). His home was very poor but not unhappy; however, his mother died when
he was eight and at 11 he left school and worked as a labourer. By the age of
13 he had had enough of this, and went to Bristol, where he became a drayman
and, in time, a Baptist lay preacher and union organiser.
 |
Bevin: a 1945 portrait by
Thomas Cantrell Dugdale |
In the
latter role he did well and his influence grew. He started to travel, building
links with trade unionists in Europe and elsewhere. During the First World War
he visited the USA, where he had a cordial meeting with the powerful labour
leader Samuel Gompers, who had helped found the American Federation of Labor. Eventually Bevin founded Britain’s own first
‘super-union’, the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU). By 1940 he had
for some time been the country’s most important union figure. Distrustful of
Labour intellectuals after 1931, he decided that Labour’s taciturn and business-like
new Deputy Leader, Attlee, was the horse to back. The two men were a contrast;
Attlee a silent ascetic to whom many found it hard to relate– and Bevin, big,
bluff and sometimes a bully, forged in the furnace of labour negotiations and
union politics. He was genial and ruthless.
In 1940
Attlee and Churchill found Bevin a seat and brought into the wartime coalition
as Minister of Labour, believing this to be the best way of mobilising the
workforce behind the war (wisely, they seem to have realised this was not a
given). As wartime Minister of Labour, he played a key role in uniting the labour
movement behind the war effort – something Churchill, no friend of the unions,
could not have done without him. Finally, as Foreign Secretary from 1945, he
was at least partly responsible for forging the US-European alliance against
the USSR. Bevin was thus the father of the modern British union movement, a key
pillar of Attlee’s reforming government, and a key architect of the postwar
global security settlement.
Given that
these three legacies are now under threat, a new look at Bevin is timely. It arrived
in 2021: Ernest Bevin: Labour's Churchill, by Andrew (Lord) Adonis, a
strong New Labour figure and himself a Minister in the 200s. I have some
reservations about this book (not least the title). But it is well worth
reading. It isn’t the first Bevin biography; there are several, including Alan
Bullock’s mighty three-volume account. For the casual reader, there’s Mark
Stephens’s short book Ernest Bevin, written to mark Bevin’s centenary.
However, Bullock’s would probably be too much for most readers. Stephens’s book
is concise, but it was published by the T&G itself and is not especially
critical (though it’s not a hagiography – and it is very well-written). Adonis’s
book is short and lively enough to be readable. And it’s even-handed; Adonis
clearly admires Bevin, but he is sometimes very critical, especially of
Bevin’s period as Foreign Secretary.
The book is
mostly not based on primary sources. Adonis draws heavily on the previous
biographies (including Bullock’s) and other books germane to the period. I
think that’s fine. He’s clearly trying to project a readable image of Bevin,
not find out what he had for breakfast on a given day. Now and then he does
rely rather heavily on one source. One chapter is partly an extract from the
memoirs of Nicholas Henderson, who worked for Bevin at the Foreign Office and
was later Ambassador to Washington. Adonis will certainly have sought
permission for this, and it does add important background. But although he is
scrupulous about quoting sources, they are sometimes hard to check as there is
no reference list – an odd oversight.
Adonis also
states that Bevin stiffened Western resistance to Stalin more or less alone,
getting – he says – little help from a rather supine Truman administration.
There is probably much truth in this. Truman’s Secretary of State was James F.
Byrne, a Southern Democrat who had had a long and ambivalent career. He had
been a segregationist in his native South Carolina but had also crossed swords
with the Klu Klux Klan, and would do so again as the State’s Governor in the
1950s. He had also been a New Dealer and had opposed isolationism in the 1930s.
But he was indeed ‘soft’ on Stalin; other sources also confirm this. In fact,
Truman himself was worried about this himself, and sacked him in January 1947.
Still, Adonis is very persuasive in arguing that Bevin helped forge a united
Western front against Stalinism. He argues that Bevin’s background in union
activism greatly influenced the way he saw Hitler in the 1930s and later saw Stalin,
as his international union contacts meant he could see what fascist governments
did to unionists in the 1930s. But was also keenly aware of communist tactics
in the union movement, and loathed those as well.
I wonder if
Bevin’s instant distrust of Stalin was also just native shrewdness. Bevin was
no fool and knew a stinker when he met one. Also, Adonis doesn’t really discuss
the poor relationship between the UK and the US immediately after the war and
the US dislike and distrust of British imperialism. But they were important
context for what happened in 1945-48. Even so, I think Adonis is on the money.
Not all Labour MPs were happy with what they saw as Bevin’s warmongering, but
his contribution to Western peace and security was immeasurable.
But Adonis
is hard on Bevin in some respects, noting again that he did not like
opposition. He is also very critical of some aspects of Bevin’s tenure at the
Foreign Office. He takes a rather black-and-white view sometimes. Thus he is
merciless in judging Bevin’s handling of Palestine. It is true that, on Bevin’s
watch, Britain’s mandate over Palestine ended very badly. People in the region
are still paying the price. But it is not always clear what Adonis thinks Bevin
should have done. After all, the problem preceded Bevin and has not been
solved since.
Adonis is also
highly critical of Bevin’s imperialism. It’s true that Bevin regarded the
colonies as an ongoing resource and neither he nor Attlee was interested in
decolonisation. In Africa it would take a remarkable Conservative Colonial
Secretary, Iain Macleod, to force the pace some years later. Again, I think
Adonis has a point here. The Secretary of State for the Colonies, Arthur
Creech-Jones, was a Cabinet minister in his own right and had a long-standing
interest in colonial affairs. It may be that he would have liked to move faster
and that Attlee and Bevin frustrated this. (Bevin did not have responsibility for India.)
.jpg) |
The Potsdam Conference, 1945; Attlee and Bevin had taken over
from Churchill and Eden during the conference itself.
Front row, Attlee, Truman and Stalin; at rear,
Truman's Chief of Staff, Admiral Leahy; Bevin; Secretary of
State Byrne; and Stalin's Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov
(US National Archives/NationalMuseumof the US Navy) |
Last but
not least, Adonis deprecates Bevin’s lack of interest in the nascent European
Union, in the shape of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) formed in 1950.
It is true that Bevin was negative towards British participation, partly
because he wanted to protect Britain’s own coal and steel. But as he left the
Foreign Office early in 1951 and died a few weeks later, he may be excused for
not understanding just how consequential the ECSC would be. One could in fact argue
that Britain’s absence from Europe was not culpable until its failure to attend
the Messina Conference in 1955, a decision made by Anthony Eden’s Tory
government, not by Bevin. And as Adonis himself records, Bevin had close
contacts with European as well as American labour movements and travelled
widely in Europe in the 1930s. But Adonis is right; Bevin failed to understand
how Europe would develop and how important it was to be at its heart.
So did
Attlee. He did not want Britain involved, then or later. Shortly before he died
in 1967, he gave a brief speech in support of anti-Marketeer Douglas Jay. “The
Common Market,” he said. “…Very recently this country spent a great deal of
blood and treasure rescuing four of ’em from …the other two.” These attitudes
were common in Britain then and have not disappeared. There is a contrast here
with the graceful pragmatism and foresight shown by France and the Benelux
countries, who understood the need to bury the hatchet forever. To be sure,
Adonis – angry perhaps, like a lot of us, about Brexit – is judging Bevin from our
own time; things looked different then. But his criticism is at least partly
fair.
***
I would
have liked Adonis to convey more of the private man. The chapter drawn from
Henderson is quite vivid, and now and then Adonis does give us a glimpse into
Bevin’s family life. We do learn that he lived for many years in suburban
contentment in Golders Green – but didn’t mind a little luxury and some good
booze. And Adonis quotes a splendid comment by a contemporary that Bevin, a
very large man, both looked and dressed like an overstuffed sofa (pictures
suggest this was accurate.) But something about the man is elusive here. His
wife Flo appears in the book very little, although they had a long marriage.
Neither do we really learn much about Bevin’s siblings, who like him were born
working people and unlike him remained so. Still, Bevin came from a time when
one’s private life was not on display, and maybe his remains hidden.
Adonis does
tell us what Bevin was like to work with. His ally Attlee was decent to others
but as we have seen he never dissembled, and used very few words, even in
public; one imagines he could be a strain. Bevin, by contrast, was bluff,
friendly and fun, fond of a good glass of wine and capable of great warmth and
kindness. To be sure, he was ruthless with those who crossed him. But those who
didn’t do so liked him, and his civil servants thought him a fine minister.
***
These books
are both worth reading. They do contain some odd omissions, and Adonis is too
swift to judge in some areas. But Beckett’s is a readable and thoughtful
portrait of Attlee. He shows us clearly why Attlee succeeded where others might
have failed. As for Adonis on Bevin, he provides an accessible picture of a
remarkable man, and his book should be essential reading for anyone interested
in Labour history.
And both
books are a window into one of the most effective governments that Britain has
ever had – one we should all try to understand. For all its flaws, it steered
the country through one of the hardest periods in its modern history, played a
key role in building postwar global institutions, and left the British with universal
healthcare, social security and proper pensions for all. They had had none of
these before. One of the most moving passages in Beckett’s comes in his
discussion of Attlee’s Minister of Education, Ellen Wilkinson, who introduced
free milk and school meals.
Before
the war, private school children were noticeably taller, better built,
healthier and stronger than state school children, because they were properly
fed. …In the Fifties this was no longer the case, due to the provision of free
school meals and school milk.
These were not
perfect men, but they had the courage to make things better. It seems now we
are too scared to try.
Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now
available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.
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