World: The Egalitarian Example

No country can bury a man with greater pomp and flourish than Britain. Yet all the trappings of power were absent last week at the funeral of Earl Attlee, Britain’s Prime Minister from 1945 to 1951: there were no honor guards or artillery caissons, no press or television, no crush of spectators. Only 150 invited friends and relatives gathered in London’s historic Temple Church for a brief Anglican ceremony in honor of the man who had shaped the political destiny of postwar Britain. Though his ashes later will be interred in Westminster Abbey, the simple funeral fitted Clement Richard Attlee, who died at 84 of pneumonia.

Love of Puttering. Throughout his career, Attlee remained as egalitarian as the Britain he hoped to build. His wife Violet often chauffeured him about in the family Hillman on his political rounds. He wore frayed clothes, smoked a little black pipe and cultivated the Englishman’s love of puttering about a garden. The son of a lawyer, he attended Oxford and was a staunch Tory until he visited a London slum. The squalor turned the young lawyer into a social worker and socialist. When the Labor Party split in 1935 over the issue of pacifism, Attlee, a World War I major and no pacifist, emerged as its leader. He remolded the party into a more pragmatic organization, and fashioned the program of social reform with which it came to power.

Attlee became Britain’s Prime Minister in the startling upset elections of July 1945, when war-weary Britons tossed out Winston Churchill’s Tories and gave Labor an overwhelming 146-seat majority in Commons. Frail and diffident, timid in crowds and a mediocre public speaker, he seemed an unlikely leader for such a challenging moment. He surprised everyone by proceeding to direct a “bloodless revolution” the likes of which Britain had not experienced since the Reform Bill of 1832 created the modern Parliament. Attlee’s Laborites set up an entire social security system and welfare state in Britain, and joggled the underpinning of Britain’s free-enterprise system by nationalizing the huge steel and coal industries, the trucking companies, railroads and airlines.

End to Empire. Attlee also did what his old rival Churchill had refused to do: preside over the dissolution of the British Empire. While his Cabinet argued over what to do about the independence demands of India, Burma and Ceylon, Attlee broke in with his answer: get out. His decision to depart rather than delay avoided ugly anti-British insurrections and enabled him to incorporate all of the former Asian possessions except Burma into the Commonwealth. The cold war, however, put a chill on many of Attlee’s plans. He diverted welfare funds to armaments to help block the Soviet threat in Europe, joined NATO, and ordered British scientists to develop a British nuclear deterrent. When the U.S. went to war in Korea to resist Communist aggression, Attlee sent British troops there too.

At home, his economic program eventually proved too strong a dose for exhausted Britain. The economy failed to bounce back under Labor’s bungling controls. The country became one huge queue of shabby Britons waiting for scarce food, run-down buses and the clothing ration. Britain’s faltering exports forced Attlee to devalue the pound in 1949, a hard blow to the country’s already tattered pride. In the 1950 general election, Attlee’s party returned to office with a bare eight-seat margin in Commons. One year later, it lost out altogether, and the Tories returned to begin 13 years of unbroken rule.

Dismay of Late. Attlee stepped aside as party leader in 1955 in favor of Hugh Gaitskell, accepted a peerage from Queen Elizabeth and took a seat in the House of Lords as Earl Attlee. After his wife’s death in 1964, he moved to a set of rooms in the Temple, the traditional lodgings and offices of London barristers. Two successive strokes impeded his ability to speak, though his mind remained clear and sharp. He wrote articles for the Times of London, criticizing British moves to join the Common Market, and received visitors, scribbling answers to their questions on a pad of paper. He lived to see the Labor Party return to power, but its record of late could hardly have brought him anything but dismay. Even as he lay dying, the Laborites lost a by-election in the London working-class district of Walthamstow West, the seat that sent Attlee to Commons in 1929 and had been considered safe for Labor ever since.