The schoolboy who mocked striking cabbies went on to build Britain's welfare state
In 1899 a teenage Clement Attlee wrote in his school magazine that striking London cab drivers would soon be begging for fares. At Oxford he called himself an old-fashioned imperialist conservative. Less than half a century later he led the government that created the National Health Service.
Born in Putney on 3 January 1883, the seventh of eight children of a wealthy solicitor, Attlee grew up in a villa with a tennis court and servants. An Oxford tutor judged him dependable and sensible but without brilliance. He qualified as a barrister in 1906 but disliked the work. The turning point came that year, when he began volunteering at a club for working-class boys in Stepney run by his old school, managing it from 1907 to 1909. The slum poverty convinced him that charity could never be enough and that the state had to redistribute income. He joined the Independent Labour Party in 1908.
His father's death that November left him £400 a year, and he quit the law. In 1911 the government hired him as an official explainer of David Lloyd George's National Insurance Act, and he spent the summer cycling round Essex and Somerset addressing public meetings. He then lectured at the London School of Economics.
At 31 he was first rejected by the army as too old, then commissioned. At Gallipoli he caught dysentery, talked his way off a homebound ship at Malta to get back sooner, and was the second-to-last man evacuated from Suvla Bay. The campaign left him admiring Winston Churchill as a strategist. In Mesopotamia in April 1916 he was hit in the leg by shrapnel from his own side. His elder brother Tom refused to fight on grounds of conscience and was jailed for most of the war.
Attlee became mayor of Stepney in 1919, entered Parliament in 1922 and led Labour from 1935, serving as Churchill's deputy in the wartime coalition. After the 1945 landslide his government founded the NHS in 1948, nationalised major industries and created the National Parks, while also granting independence to India, Burma and Ceylon. He lost office in 1951 despite winning more votes than the Conservatives.
Source: Clement Attlee
