🪴 GoDeep
Search
← University Challenge
Portrait of Clement Attlee

Prime Ministers · 20th century

Clement Attlee

1883–1967 · British

Labour

In office: 1945–1951

Clement Attlee led the Labour Party from 1935 to 1955 and served as Churchill's deputy in the wartime coalition before winning a landslide in 1945. His government created the National Health Service, built the welfare state on the Beveridge Report, and nationalised coal, railways, electricity and the Bank of England. Abroad it granted independence to India, Pakistan, Burma and Ceylon and helped found NATO.

How to spot them

  • ▸1945 Labour landslide; the NHS and the welfare state
  • ▸Nationalisation of coal, rail, electricity, gas and the Bank of England
  • ▸Indian independence and partition (1947)
  • ▸Quiet, laconic 'Clem'; Churchill's wartime deputy; MP for Limehouse
  • ▸Social work at Toynbee Hall; Mayor of Stepney

In office

National Health Service launched on 5 July 1948 (1948)

Created by the NHS Act 1946 under Aneurin Bevan

Nationalisation of the Bank of England and the coal industry (1946–1947)

The National Coal Board took over the mines on 1 January 1947

Independence and partition of India and Pakistan (1947)

Under the Indian Independence Act, with Mountbatten as last Viceroy

New Towns Act (1946)

Led to new towns such as Stevenage, the first designated

Founding membership of NATO (1949)

North Atlantic Treaty signed in April 1949 (Bevin as Foreign Secretary)

National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act (1949)

Allowed the creation of National Parks and AONBs in England and Wales

The Festival of Britain (1951)

National exhibition on London's South Bank, centred on the Royal Festival Hall

Key ideas

  • Implementation of the Beveridge Report's attack on the 'five giants': Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness
  • The post-war consensus: mixed economy, full employment and welfare state
  • Secret decision (1947) that Britain should build its own atomic bomb

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born in Putney; educated at Haileybury and University College, Oxford
  • •Served at Gallipoli and was wounded in Mesopotamia in the First World War
  • •First Mayor of Stepney (1919)
  • •Became the first person formally titled Deputy Prime Minister, in 1942
  • •Took over from Churchill at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945
  • •Created Earl Attlee in 1955
  • •A put-down about 'a modest man who has much to be modest about' is attributed to Churchill, who reportedly denied it

Drill it — 7 cards

1 / 7new card

Sources