The laconic reformer who replaced Churchill mid-Potsdam and built Britain's postwar welfare state
After winning the 1945 election, Attlee stood in silence with George VI at Buckingham Palace before volunteering, "I've won the election." The King replied, "I know. I heard it on the Six O'Clock News."
Clement Attlee was the man who replaced Winston Churchill as British prime minister in the middle of the Potsdam Conference, after Labour's landslide victory in July 1945. He had served loyally as Churchill's deputy in the wartime coalition, but voters chose the unassuming reformer over the war hero and his promise of a welfare state. His government created the National Health Service, nationalised major industries, and began dismantling the British Empire by granting independence to India and Pakistan. Abroad, he championed the Marshall Plan and NATO, aligning Britain firmly with the United States as the Cold War took shape.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1935–1955Leader of the Labour Party
- 1940–1942Lord Privy Seal (wartime coalition)
- 1942–1945Deputy Prime Minister (wartime coalition)
- 1945–1951Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
- 1951–1955Leader of the Opposition
Related historical events
- 1945.02–08The Yalta and Potsdam ConferencesBritish prime minister who replaced ChurchillWhen the July 5 general election results were announced on July 26, he replaced Churchill at the Potsdam Conference and, together with Ernest Bevin, continued existing British policy.
- 1947–1948The Marshall Plan and the Cold WarMarshall Plan advocateHe championed the Marshall Plan.
The East End and the turn to socialism
Attlee read modern history at Oxford and was called to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1906, but his path shifted that year when he volunteered at Haileybury House, a charitable club for working-class boys in Stepney in London's East End. Managing the club from 1907 to 1909, he saw the poverty and deprivation of slum children at first hand and concluded that private charity could never relieve poverty, and that only direct action and income redistribution by the state would have a serious effect. That experience set in motion his conversion to socialism. After his father's death in 1908 he gave up his legal career for politics and social work, joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP) that year and became active in local politics. He stood unsuccessfully for Stepney Borough Council as an ILP candidate in 1909, and in Fabian Society circles helped Beatrice Webb popularise the Minority Report on the poor law. In 1911 the government employed him as an "official explainer" touring the country to explain David Lloyd George's National Insurance Act, and from 1912 he lectured on social science and public administration at the London School of Economics. After serving in the First World War and being elected mayor of Stepney in 1919, he set out in his first book, The Social Worker (1920), the case against leaving the care of the poor to voluntary action, an argument that became an intellectual foundation of the welfare reforms his government later carried through.