Clement Atlee Life Story

* A Distributed Proofreaders Canada eBook * This eBook is made available at no cost and with very few restrictions. These restrictions apply only if (1) you make a change in the eBook (other than alteration for different display devices), or (2) you are making commercial use of the eBook. If either of these conditions applies, please contact a https://www.fadedpage.com administrator before proceeding. Thousands more FREE eBooks are available at https://www.fadedpage.com. This work is in the Canadian public domain, but may be under copyright in some countries. If you live outside Canada, check your country's copyright laws. IF THE BOOK IS UNDER COPYRIGHT IN YOUR COUNTRY, DO NOT DOWNLOAD OR REDISTRIBUTE THIS FILE. Title: As It Happened Date of first publication: 1954 Author: Clement R. Attlee (1883-1967) Date first posted: Feb. 4, 2020 Date last updated: Feb. 4, 2020 Faded Page eBook #20200207 This eBook was produced by: Al Haines, Howard Ross & the online Distributed Proofreaders Canada team at https://www.pgdpcanada.net As It Happened BY C. R. ATTLEE New York • 1954 THE VIKING PRESS COPYRIGHT 1954 BY C. R. ATTLEE PUBLISHED BY THE VIKING PRESS IN MAY 1954 Library of Congress catalog card number: 54-7570 PRINTED IN U.S.A. BY THE COLONIAL PRESS INC. Contents I. Early Years 3 II. Education 14 III. East London 28 IV. Social Work and Politics 38 V. War Service 56 VI. Local Government Work 66 VII. Marriage and Parliament 76 VIII. Labour in Office 87 IX. Opposition 104 X. Eventful Years 119 XI. Foreign Visits 126 XII. Labour and Defence 136 XIII. War and Downfall of Chamberlain 148 XIV. Wartime Government 161 XV. Wartime Journeys 171 XVI. The End of the Wartime Government 185 XVII. Labour in Power 204 XVIII. Family Life 220 XIX. Work of the Labour Government 226 XX. Foreign Affairs 237 XXI. Commonwealth Relations 249 XXII. The Labour Government of 1950-51 271 XXIII. I Become Leader of the Opposition Again 289 Index 305 List of Photographs Mr. Attlee as a freshman at Oxford “A” Company, South Lancashire Regiment, 1914 Mr. Attlee as Mayor of Stepney, his first public office, 1919 Addressing the crowd at the great Hyde Park rally against unemployment, 1933 Alison and Martin Attlee with their father, 1940 In an air-raid shelter during the war After the twenty-year Treaty of Alliance and Mutual Assistance between Britain and Soviet Russia, signed on May 26, 1942. On the terrace of No. 10 Downing Street: Mr. Molotov, Mr. Attlee (then Deputy Prime Minister), Mr. Lyttleton, Mr. Churchill, and Mr. Eden. With Ernest Bevin and Herbert Morrison after the news of Labour’s victory at the polls Prime Minister Attlee with President Truman and Marshal Stalin before the final meeting at Potsdam. In the back row are Admiral Leahy, Mr. Bevin, Mr. Byrnes, and Mr. Molotov. The Big Three in session at Berlin Conference, July 1945. President Truman is on the left, Mr. Attlee in the center, and Marshal Stalin standing on the right. Mr. and Mrs. Clement Attlee Mr. and Mrs. Attlee returning the waves of voters after successful campaign The Right Honourable C. R. Attlee AS IT HAPPENED I Early Years I was born on January 3, 1883, the seventh child and fourth son in a family of eight. My father was a solicitor of high standing in the City of London. For many centuries the Attlee family have lived in Surrey. The county historians say that the family lived at Effingham, where there is a Great Lee Wood from which our name is derived. For many generations they had lived at Dorking, carrying on business as millers, corn merchants, and farmers. The old mill existed until recently, and the family business still continues. My grandfather, who was born in 1795, had a family of ten children. Two sons succeeded to the family business, two were brewers, and one a clergyman. My father, the ninth child, was articled to solicitors in London when he was sixteen and eventually became head of the firm and president of the Incorporated Law Society. I had many cousins on my father’s side; two were well-known doctors, several girls became missionaries. My mother was the eldest of six girls—daughters of T. S. Watson, secretary of the Art Union of London. My grandmother died young, and T. S. Watson was the only grandparent still living when I was born. Among my mother’s ancestors were a number of doctors, one of whom was a fashionable practitioner in the eighteenth century in Soho. My grandfather went to Westminster School and Caius College, Cambridge. He left a diary of his early life in which this incident is recorded. When he went to Cambridge his father made him promise not to join the Boat Club. Apparently, in the 1830s, these clubs were considered to be dissipated. However, at the instance of a fellow old-Westminster boy, he compromised by not joining the club but rowed regularly in the College Eight. My grandfather lived with four daughters and one son, who were all unmarried, in an old house on Wandsworth Common—The Gables—which formed an important part of the background of my childhood, for my aunts and my uncle were always very kind to all of us. The Gables was an old Queen Anne house of very distinctive character. One part of the house had been made semi-detached and was inhabited by three old ladies, the Misses Bellamy. The family lived mainly in the drawing room, which was furnished with an old gilt tapestried suite which sold very well a few years ago. There were many glass “lustres” on the mantelpiece. The dining room was very dark. We were intrigued by its window, which was placed over the fireplace. The other rooms on the ground floor were rather full of furniture and books and were more in the nature of passage rooms, though one was more or less appropriated to Aunt Edith. Upstairs there were great four-poster beds. Aunt Janet’s room was very jolly—it had a hob grate with Dutch tiles, deep window seats, and a shining mahogany wardrobe; I see it most clearly in the firelight of a Christmas evening when we used to dress up to act a play. There were little closets giving off it, used for washing and pervaded by a general smell of Pears’ soap. I just remember the smoking room in my grandfather’s time. There were no curtains and, I think, no carpet, and there were swords and daggers on the wall. There was a big room upstairs, belonging to Aunts Emma and Edith, which had a very wavy floor and fascinating cupboards that we always thought ran a very long way down into the house. I spent four weeks when recuperating from some ailment in this room—perhaps I was merely in quarantine—but I got to know it well. There was a large smoky garden with a big cedar tree surrounded by a great circle of ivy, a tennis court cut off by an old brown brick wall, and a fascinating greenhouse and sheds. Uncle Alick did a good deal of pottering in the garden. He was, from our point of view, an ideal uncle, as he had a pleasant habit of sending us out to buy his “baccy” with the injunction to spend the change on sweets. Our family lived in Putney, which was then quite an outer suburb of London. Market gardens stretched between Putney and Wandsworth. There were big houses with fields and farms near at hand. We were close to Wimbledon Common and Richmond Park, while the fields began quite close to Wandsworth High Street. This street had still the aspect of a country town with numerous queer little “pubs.” We had a roomy house with a good-sized garden in quiet, leafy Portinscale Road. We were, I think, a typical family of the professional class brought up in the atmosphere of Victorian England. There were eight children in our family, separated conveniently, from the point of view of remembering ages, by a uniform two-year interval. Two boys came first, then three girls, and then three boys. All the boys were educated at Haileybury College, a school of which my father became a governor, and at different colleges at Oxford. The girls, however, were taught at home by a succession of governesses. There was, I think, some prejudice against girls’ schools. Dorothy and Margaret went to Karlsruhe in Germany for a year for a finishing course. We younger boys were brought into contact with our sisters’ governesses. One of them was French, and from her I learned to recite fables of la Fontaine with an admirable French accent, but this, with other nonsense, was speedily knocked out of me when I went to school. Another, Miss Hutchinson, who taught my sisters for many years, had previously been employed by Lord Randolph Churchill to teach his little son, Winston, whom she described as a very determined little boy. She could never have thought that the two little boys were destined in turn to be Prime Minister. A story was current in our family that one day a maid came into the room and asked Miss Hutchinson if she had rung the bell, whereupon young Winston said, “I rang. Take away Miss Hutchinson, she is very cross.” We were a happy and united family. As one of “the little boys,” I was brought up with a great reverence for my seniors, who, it seemed to us, had attained a standard of virtue which we could never hope to approach.

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