The Tortoise and the Hares by Giles Radice
Politico’s, £25
THE Second World War ended in 1945 with Britain economically, financially, materially and emotionally exhausted. It then had to face a series of peacetime crises worse than those of the Great Depression – the Cold War, the Berlin airlift and the Korean War – with a people wearied by years of rationing, bombing and high taxation, and they chose to do it with brilliant but elderly Labour politicians themselves physically drained and increasingly ill.
It was not then a country for young men – many of those who attended the Labour conference as the wartime coalition ended did so as servicemen: Denis Healey, fresh from the beaches at Anzio, Roy Jenkins, resplendent in the uniform of the Greenjackets, John Freeman and many others gathered at Blackpool determined, in the words of the party’s manifesto, to Let’s Face the Future.
The Labour leader, Clement Attlee, born in 1881, is the tortoise of the title of Lord Radice’s book, and Ernest Bevin, Sir Stafford Cripps, Hugh Dalton and Herbert Morrison are, incongruously, the hares though the Kilkenny cats might have been a more apt title for them, supervised by an indestructible limpet.
Attlee’s first government inevitably drew on those who had run departments during the war, working at a pace which was almost unsustainable. Twelve members of the cabinet were over 60 and two more were in their 70s. Their peacetime experience was of grim unemployment and poverty such as those today who complain about “relative poverty” could barely dream of in their worst nightmares. The 1930s were dominated by appalling conditions at home and frightful massacres and brutality abroad. It is an understandable failing of Radice’s account, in an otherwise splendidly readable book, that with his background – Winchester and Magdalen College, Oxford – and his age – born in 1936 – he could have no first hand knowledge of the fears which Hitler’s rise invoked or of the misery of day to day living for so many in Britain. From Bevin’s poverty in Somerset to Attlee’s mayoralty in Stepney, Labour leaders knew the harsh reality.
That’s why William Wordsworth’s words, “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!” seemed so right as the 1945 general election results came through. I was a teenager, passionate about politics, with the naivety inseparable from youth. Blissful and heavenly seemed so right to me and my generation.
I suppose there are two kinds of Labour people – the tribal and the socially and intellectually convinced. I belong to the first category. I was born into it; my mother was a member of the party, my aunt was a Bermondsey councillor and the only summer holidays I ever had (two) were at a camp in Dymchurch paid for by that council. My father died when I was two and I have no memories of him. Memories of our circumstances, however, have never faded.
My mother was left with three young children and an income from the state of 18 shillings (90p) a week – 10 shillings for her, five shillings for my eldest sister, two for the next sister and a shilling for me, out of which five shillings (25p) went on the rent. We lived in a gas-lit slum, alive with bugs and regularly fumigated, an outside, unlit lavatory, for which it was my job to cut up The People each week to provide the paper, and no electrical appliances because we had no electricity. Apart from six weeks when I was evacuated and three months when I was 14, formal education ended when I was 11 (schools were either bombed or taken over for reasons of war). Few were better off and many were worse off. Some people think that children in bare feet is a romantic myth of those days. It wasn’t romantic and it wasn’t a myth. I never saw, for example, the children of the Ryan family, who lived nearby, with their feet clad. We were a classless society, in effect, because we were all working class, though the work was often absent. TB was rampant. I lost my father, my grandfather and a cousin through illnesses developed from the backbreaking work in the docks.
It was to the Labour Government that we looked to end all that and, despite every calamity which piled upon them, they did. That Government was a classic Labour mixture. Of the big five, three (Attlee, Cripps and Dalton) went to public schools while Bevin and Morrison attended state schools. Attlee and Dalton were army officers in the First World War – apart from his commander, Attlee was the last officer to leave Gallipoli and Dalton had a “good” war. Morrison was a “gesture” conscientious objector, because the loss of sight in one eye made his call-up impossible. Bevin was already 34 and a prominent trade unionist when war broke out. The differences between the five, to put it mildly, were enormous.
Bevin hated Morrison. Morrison detested Attlee. Attlee thought Cripps a “goose”. Cripps thought he should have been leader (as did Morrison) and they all, at various times, distrusted Dalton. A band of comrades they might have been but a happy band of brothers they were not. Apart from Bevin, Attlee liked none of them as well as he liked Aneurin Bevan.
But, amazingly, it worked, due to the brilliant but untrained mind of Bevin, the brilliant and well-trained mind of Cripps and the lack of vanity of Attlee who managed to shake off the jackals constantly barking at his heels. Dalton’s virtue, politically, was his economic knowledge –wasted to the government when he couldn’t keep his mouth shut about his Budget and gave the main details to a lobby correspondent before he gave them to the Commons – and his sponsorship of young men, particularly if they were handsome young men who later, like Gaitskell, led the party or, like Crosland, dominated its thinking. However, there was never any suggestion, says Radice, that he was homosexual.
It’s too much to recite all the good things the Attlee governments did from the first moment, when to their and everyone else’s surprise they found themselves in office in 1945. But one statistic is enough to show how, after six years of grim austerity, they were trusted by the people. At the general election of 1951, when it finally gave way to the Tories, Labour secured 13,948,605 votes, the highest ever recorded for a political party in Britain. Ironically, Churchill became Prime Minister, proving that we were still a country for old men.
Joe Haines
