(2 of 8)
The seeming contradiction between the gentle Attlee and the frequently ungentle Labor Party could not be explained by brushing Attlee off as a figurehead. In actual power over party decisions, quiet, little (5 ft. 7½ in., 140 Ibs.) Clem Attlee stood head & shoulders above his fellow Laborite leaders. This was true even though he lacked Aneurin Bevan's fiery eloquence, Herbert Morrison's parliamentary skill, Sir Stafford Cripps's brilliance and Ernest Bevin's command of the warm loyalty of millions of unionists. What Attlee did have was political balance and a sense of timing. These faculties were all-important as the Labor Party walked a tightrope with militant socialism on its left and a wary middle class on its right. Labor would need the support of large sections of both groups to survive. If any man could appeal to both, Attlee could.
His political life story throws considerable light on i) what British Socialism is, 2) how it reached power, 3) why it used its power as it did, and 4) how voters may judge it on Feb. 23.
Socialist's Beginning. Clement Richard Attlee was born (1883) into a staid, middle-class family in Putney, a staid, middle-class suburb in the southwest section of London. He was tutored at home until he was nine years old—first by his mother, and later by a governess, a Miss Hutchinson, one of whose earlier pupils she remembered as a "strongwilled child" named Winston Churchill. Attlee went off to boarding school at nine, and he has described his subsequent years in terms remarkably like Churchill's account of his own school days. Wrote Attlee:
"The general arrangements were very rough. Lower boys had to pig it in form rooms or class rooms where there was no privacy and a good deal of opportunity for bullying . . . The games worship was at its height . . . No one was considered anything unless he was good at games, and the result was to create an inferiority complex in the unathletic."
Whether or not poor athlete Attlee had an inferiority complex, the mild popularity he found at Oxford came as something of a surprise. Untainted by university radicalism, he took a modern history degree in 1904. Attlee remembers that he had "fallen under the spell of the Renaissance. I admired strong and ruthless rulers. I professed ultra-Tory opinions."
Attlee studied law, unenthusiastically entered his father's firm prepared to practice a little and to read a lot of history on the side. He might have continued on that placid course but for an old schoolmate who invited him to spend an evening at Haileybury House. This was a settlement house run by Attlee's old school in London's Limehouse district. Attlee began helping out at Haileybury House a few evenings a week. The experience changed his life. "The condition of the people in that area, as I saw them at close quarters, led me to study their causes and to reconsider the assumptions of the social class to which I belonged . . ."
Roy Jenkins, Attlee's official biographer, says: "By the end of 1907 he was a Socialist, in the very practical sense that he wished to devote his life to the improvement of working-class conditions."