THE SEVEN PILLARS OF LABOUR: Portraits of Mr. Attlee and Six Colleagues

New Zealand Listener, Volume 13, Issue 320, 10 August 1945, Page 6

THE SEVEN PILLARS OF LABOUR:

Portraits of Mr. Attlee and Six Colleagues

When Mr. Attlee (right) went as one of the British Delegation to San Francisco, Tom Driberg, M.P., gave this picture of him in the "Leader."

Clement Attlee that he should have agreed to take second place to Eden in the British delegation to San Francisco-an_ar-rangement criticised by some members of the Labour Party, who saw in it a slight to their party’s leader, since he is, after all, Deputy Prime Minister. Unassuming . . . retiring . . : modest: none of these conventional adjectives quite conveys Attlee’s singular unobtrusiveness of behaviour. At the root of this -and therefore behind the fact that nonpolitical people in the country are only vaguely conscious of him as a major political leader-lies, his friends insist, the fact that Clem Attlee is, quite simply but intensely, shy. ig is, personally, characteristic of The Game of Snap As is often the case, shyness (combined with great quickness of brain) sometimes makes him seem brusque, almost rude. At question time in the House, there is neither the Churchillian expansiveness and wit, nor the Sinclairian drama, nor the Andersonian methodical thoroughness, about his answers. He sits huddled as though trying to hide behind the dispatch-box; half-rises gingerly from the front bench, his bird-like head slightly on one side; spits out "No, sir," as though he were playing a game of snap; and sinks quickly back as though the game had changed to musical chairs. Mr. Speaker may haye called the next question before the indignant backbencher’s lips have opened for his supplementary. This all saves time. Time is also saved when deputations go to see him. He will have grasped. within a minute or two of their arrival the main points that it will take their spokesmen 20 minutes or so to make. He then doodles; listens; and interjects staccato comments which-even when the subject is one in which he is deeply interested-may give an impression of unforthcomingness. _ Attlee, in fact, is not much of a talker. himself would testify that there is no member of the War Cabinet who works harder, or more effectively. He sleeps four or five nights a week at 11 Downing Street, normally the official residence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer. In the morring, Mr. Finucane, the porter (an uncle of the air ace Paddy Finucane) takes him a cup of tea. The Deputy Prime Minister is always out of bed, and climbing the uncarpeted stairs to his bathroom, by 8 sharp. He breakfasts at his club, the Athenaeum, skimming (and digesting) a number of newspapers at lightning speed. His driver, Mrs. Bird, is waiting to drive him to his office, where his working day usually starts at 9.30. It may continue, off and on, till midnight or after; apart from attendance at the House of Commons, it consists mainly of presiding over, or sitting on, committees, including the Privy Council itself. (Lord President of the Council is Attlee’s official, constitutional title.) On the numerous occasions during the war, totalling nearly a year, on which Churchill has been away from this country, or ill, ‘Attlee has functioned as Prime

Minister; the war effort has not suffered noticeably. Those who have sat in committees with him testify to the strength of his influence. The Litter is Under Control For so neat and mouse-like a man, he keeps a curiously untidy desk. But the litter of papers on it is of the strictly masculine sort-the kind from which its owner can always disentangle the required paper in a flash. Until recently, when he was persuaded to allow a secretary to do it for him, Attlee noted all his engagements himself, in a small pocket diary; this was apt to add to his elusiveness. He types all his speeches himself, composing them as he types. Not only is he a steady and rapid worker; he specialises in streamlining the machinery of governmental work generally. He is no slave to the higher bureaucrats. On the contrary he has often opposed them with success. One notable example of this was in 1931, when he was Postmaster-General. The Post Office was unpopular with the general public. Rude things were always being said and written about it. In the teeth of strong opposition from high-up civil servants, Attlee — this shunner-of publicity for himself-called in the most eminent advertising and sales experts of the day, introduced « night-letter and _ greetings telegrams, and launched a great public relations campaign. Attlee has little time for home life. When he can get to it, he has a comfortable villa at Stanmore; he is married and has four children. He dashed home on the very day that he left for America -to lunch and to look after the packing of his luggage; he wanted to make sure that they hadn’t left out Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, which he has read 17 times; or Trevelyan’s English Social History. To supplement his official reading on the journey, his. Parliamentary Private Secretary, John Dugdale, M.P., also packed a volume or two of Boswell and Proust and some new American novels. Attlee’s taste is what is known as good. He dislikes light musical shows. He likes 18th-century architecture, and fine antiquities generally. When he was last flying over Italy, he made the plane dip low and circle over Assisi, so that he could satisfy himself that little damage had been done. He smokes a pipe, and likes an occasional glass of claret,

J-RNEST BEVIN. (Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs), was described by the BBC in "Radio Newsreel," with | some hesitation, as "a rather large, bulllike man." His face is fairly well-known to most New Zealanders, even to those who did not see him when he spent a week here in 1938. He has been Minister of Labour since 1940. . From humble beginnings as a farm boy he has risen to his present great responsibilities through proven merit as a trade union organiser and adminisnoes Trade Unionism, has been his life. Bevin is a huge man with a voice to match. He has always been a fighter of redoubtable quality, and was once the implacable political enemy of Winston Churchill. Personally, however, they have respected each other, and Churchill once described Bevin as the ablest figure in British industry. His biggest single achievement perhaps was the amalgamation of innumerable separate unions into one huge body called the Transport and General Workers’ Union, a _ task which took him some years of ceaseless fighting. There are now more than half-a-million members in it. Another achievement partly his was the improvement and growth of the Labour paper, the Daily Herald, which was poorly run before Bevin and others took it in hand, and now has one of the biggest circulations in England. He was an orphan from the age of eight and was brought up by a sister, but she was very poor, and in 1894, when he was ten, she sent him to work on a farm, where he got his board and 6d. a week. Soon he left for the city (Bristol) and became in turn page-boy at a restaurant, tram conductor, shop assistant, and van driver. He was dismissed from the trams for making an excited speech at a Sweated Industries Exhibition. In 1920, having had success with his effort to amalgamate the multiple unions, he went to London, and delivered his famous 11-hour speech before the Transport Workers’ Court of Inquiry, which resulted in the dockers receiving a standard minimum wage. Bevin has been assailed both from Right and from extreme Left. In 1933 he received £7,000 damages for libel from the Communist paper the Daily Worker, which had accused him of betraying trade union interests,

ERBERT MORRISON (Lord President of the Council and Leader of the House of Commons) belongs to the people you saw or will be seeing in This Happy Breed. He is a Cockney, and proud of dt. The stocky figure, jaunty quiff, brisk head movements-he moves his head a good deal because he likes to see you and only one of his eyes is any good-all these suggest the London sparrow. But there is a chin on Herbert Morrison, a chin that speaks of the doggedness that brought the errand boy to the Privy Council. He is 57, and there is something exactly right in the fact that this son of a London "Bobby" owes his fame to his leadership of the London County Council. He came up, not through the Trade Union movement but through the secretaryship of the London Labour Party which looks after the election strategy of not only the municipal but also ali the parliamentary seats in the County of London. Morrison did a good job as Minister of Transport in the second Labour administration; he sorted out the tangle of London’s competing passenger services and created the great public utility trust known as the London Passenger Transport Board. Not many people know that when, shortly after Labour went out into the political wilderness, Morrison was offered the job of running Britain’s Central Electricity Board, at about £5,000 a year. He preferred to stay in politics, and in his little semi-detached villa in the suburbs. He continued taking his holidays through the Workers’ Travel Association and buying his navy blue suits at the local Co-op. He does not let himself-or you-forget that he: is where he is because of the workers and for the workers. His great achievements in Housing and the Green Belt round London have now been eclipsed by five terrific years as Home Secretary and Minister of Home Security. For that he needed every ounce of his phenomenal energy and organising drive. When I was working for him before the war, a small group of us used to lunch regularly in his great room at the County Hall, Westminster. He was then running four jobs-Sec-retary of the London Labour Party, Leader of the L.C.C., Member of Parliament for Hackney, and a member of the Council of Labour Party. Few people 1 (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) can have crossed the Westminster Bridge so often in a week. And yet, always on his desk was the latest book on politics or social science. He found time to write and think, and his speeches always said something. And no little job one was able to do for the cause went without a personal note of thanks from him. Morrison is intensely loyal to his friends, and a stickler for party discipline. He distrusts the Conservative Party

Machine and all its works and he is no friend of the British Communists. He believes with the fervour of an old-time radical in the long-term sense of the common man. "You can blackguard your opponents," I have heard him say, "and enjoy yourself no end and get plenty of claps, but what a mature electorate really votes on is what you are going to do. And by God, you’d better not promise what you can’t give them!" getty (Written for "The Listener’ by HOWARD WADMAN) ;

RTHUR GREENWOOD (Lord Privy Seal) is 64. He started out in the world as a teacher, and became a university lecturer in economics. The Labour movement took hold of him, and he was one of the moving spirits in establishing the W.E.A. In the last war he was in London, and Lloyd George made him secretary to the Reconstruction Committee. After the war he could have had a safe and prosperous Civil Service career, but he chose instead to work for Labour, and joined the headquarters staff of the Party. In 1929 the Labour Government made him Minister of Health, a post which gave him scope for social reforms near to his heart. In the thirties he doggedly fought on as one of the Opposition and attacked the Na- . tional Government for not standing up to the dictator countries. The strength of his views caused him to be classified by Hitler with Churchill, Eden and DuffCooper as a "war-monger." He is tall and spare in build, quiet and dignified in manner, and has the look of a scholarly man. Though his origins are modest he has never worked with his hands. He has written some good books on social and educational matters, and is credited with inspiring some of the British Labour movement’s best literature. But he is less interested in scholarly theory than in the practical business of organisation and government. He has an encyclopedic grasp of detail, together with the gift of quickly clearing away the non-essentials in an argument and leaving the important issues clearly defined. His appetite for work is colossal, and he can turn quickly from departmental duties to a rousing platform speech and then back again to the very different type of speech that goes down at Westminster. In the Churchil! Cabinet in this war he was a Minister without portfolio.

De®: HUGH DALTON (Chancellor of the Exchequer), who was Minister of Economic Warfare in the Churchill Cabinet, is 58. He is the son of a Canon of St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, and went to the near-by school-Eton. He studied law, and had just been called to the Bar when the last war began. He was an artillery officer in Italy, and won a medal for valour from Victor Emmanuel. After the war he took a science doctorate and became reader in economics at London University. He got into Parliament in 1924. Well-dressed, speaking in carefully worded phrases, he might have seemed the complete class-conscious Etonian, but he was full of surprises. As a Labour member he urged a capital levy and the abolition of the House of Lords. Dalton became the severest critic of the Baldwin and Chamberlain -governments. Urging sanctions against Italy, he described "Baldwin & Co." as "doddering about in the twilight of fear, shaking like jelly because some Italian dictator has shaken his fist at them." In the first nine months of this war he chafed at the slow methods of the department he knew he could run. "Economic warfare should be waged as if we meant it," he said. Chamberlain and Sir John Simon refused to make drastic cargo and ship seizures. Dalton called them "Britain’s two greatest liabilities. .. hamstringing our blockade with their legal prudery." Mr. Churchill. created this post for him (Economic Warfare) and practically allowed him to define his own powers. In 1938 Dr. Dalton attended a meeting of the Empire Parliamentary Association in Sydney and later came to New Zealand. He has been credited with possessing the deepest voice in England. One of his books on public finance has been used as a textbook in the New Zealand University.

SIR WILLIAM JOWITT (Lord Chancellor), who is,60, was one of those who went into Parliament on a Liberal ticket in 1929 and changed over to Labour immediately. He is a distinguished lawyer and has been both Solicitor-General and Attorney-General. He has been described as "a cool selfpossessed duellist with a mind as keen as a sword blade, wary and nimble-witted, thoroughly sure of his ground. His strokes of wit leave no ugly wounds." He was never truculent or overbearing when taking the case of the Crown against individuals or companies in civil or criminal law. In appearance he lacks the strong features of the popular idea of a successful prosecuting lawyer, having an air of detachment and impartiality. In court and out, he has a charming personality, is even-tempered, and patient. He is the son of a clergyman, and had nine sisters and no brothers. He went to Marlborough and then New College, Oxford. Jowitt entered politics in 1922. He explained his change over from the ranks of the Liberals to become AttorneyGeneral in the Labour administration in 1929 in a letter to Ramsay MacDonald: "Those like myself who have hitherto taken their stand as Radicals must now

consider whether they ought not to render active support to your party as being to-day the only party which is an effective instrument to carry through those reforms which the country desires." However, between 1932 and 1936 the Labour Party would not have him. As Attorney-General he had earned £ 10,000 a year (twice as much as the Prime Minister), but when he resumed private practice it proved even twice as lucrative as his government post. He specialised in difficult and complicated commercial cases, and in one of these he spoke for 17 days running. In 1936 he made his peace with the Labour Party and was re-elected. He gained the reputation of being one of the most unpartisan speakers the House had known, and in May, 1940, Mr. Churchill made him Solicitor-General. He believes in free trade, and in orthodox finance. Before the war, when peace still seemed possible, he favoured arbitration in international affairs rather than. increased armaments. He believes | in an active fight against unemployment, the extension of social services, and improved working conditions,

SIR STAFFORD CRIPPS (Secretary of the Board of Trade), is 56, and has been in Parliament since 1931. He is the son of Sir Alfred Charles Parmoor Cripps, and a nephew of the Webbs. He went to Winchester, and’ left with the intention of being a scientist, read a paper to the Royal Society, and managed a chemical factory in his twenties; earned £30,000 a year at the Bar; drinks no alcohol and eats no meat, and does not live luxuriously, He smokes, and likes the simplicities of country life. He is an outspoken believer in the Christian religion. His early political career was a failuze, ending with his expulsion from the Labour Party, who could not agree with his "Popular Front" policy. But his very failure established his reputation for suicidal honesty, the foundation of his present political fortunes. In 1930 he entered politics’ as Solic« itor-General in Ramsay MacDonald’s second Labour government, was knighted, and with the formation of a National Government in 1931 went into opposition. In the thirties he created a ereat stir in the British political arena. Founder and chairman of the Socialist League within the Parliamentary Labour Party, one of the half-dozen figures in the movement with a national appeal, and often called the party’s best mouth-

piece, he made himself feared almost as much by the Conservative British trade unions as by the Tories; he was described as England’s most courageous fighter against entrenched privilege. He once told a political audience that as a lawyer he had had plenty of opportunities to meet the people of the ruling classes. "They pay me fabulous sums to get them out of their difficulties," he said. "I have no hesitation in saying that the working class of this country are more capable of ruling than they are." When this war began, ‘he contended that a British alliance with Russia would have’ prevented it. When Churchill became Prime Minister, Cripps was listened to, and was sent to Moscow. This assignment was followed by another highly aiectie a one: that of attempting to negotiate a settlement with India. It failed, but the reason for failure did not lie in the personality of Cripps. As the Observer said on his departure for India: "He will walk with the command: ing certitude of a Warren Hastings, yet with a personal modesty and asceticism of life which can compare with that of Mahatma Gandhi."