Clement Attlee, UK Prime Minister

One of Britain’s least charismatic but most effective PMs

Clement Attlee was the first British Labour Prime Minister to have an overall majority in the House of Commons. His two governments, from 1945 to 1951, saw the creation of the National Health Service and major strides forward in the creation of the welfare state.

His early life

Clement Richard Attlee was born on 3rd August 1883 in Putney, London, the seventh of eight children born to solicitor Henry Attlee and his wife Ellen. It is somewhat ironic that the future leader of Britain’s most left-wing government should have come from a prosperous middle-class family that offered no hint of deprivation, but that was indeed the case.

He was educated at Haileybury College and moved on to University College Oxford in 1901, leaving in 1904 with a second-class degree in history.

He had no firm conviction about a career, but entered a law firm and was called to the bar by the Inner Temple in 1906. He had no real enthusiasm for the law, or indeed for anything else, and might have continued in this way had he not become involved with an East End boys’ club in October 1905.

This experience appealed to his latent militarism and he took a commission in the Territorial Army so that…