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Clement Attlee Facts & Worksheets

Clement Attlee was elected the first Prime Minister of the Labour Party after World War II. Attlee was the longest-serving Labour Party leader.

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Clement Attlee was elected the first Prime Minister of the Labour Party after World War II. At the start of World War I, Attlee lectured at the London School of Economics after being admitted to the bar in 1906. He served as Winston Churchill’s deputy prime minister during World War II and was the leader of the opposition twice, from 1935 to 1940 and 1951 to 1955. Attlee was the longest-serving Labour Party leader.

See the fact file below for more information on Clement Attlee, or you can download our 25-page Clement Attlee worksheet pack to utilize within the classroom or home environment.

Key Facts & Information

EARLY LIFE

  • Attlee was the seventh child of eight and was born on January 3, 1883, into an upper-middle-class family in Putney, Surrey. 
  • His father was Henry Attlee, a solicitor; his mother was Ellen Bravery Watson, daughter of Thomas Simons Watson, secretary for the Art Union of London.
  • In addition to being a senior partner in the law firm of Druces and serving a period as president of the Law Society of England and Wales, Attlee’s father, a Liberal politician, had inherited family interests in milling and brewing.
  • Attlee was transferred to Northaw Place, a boys’ preparatory school in Hertfordshire when he was nine. He went to Haileybury College in 1896, where he was a mediocre student, following his brothers. 
  • He was influenced by his housemaster naturalist Frederick Webb Headley’s beliefs on evolution, and in 1899 he wrote an article for the school journal that attacked striking London cab drivers and predicted they would soon have to beg for their fares.
  • After completing his lawyer training at the Inner Temple, Attlee was admitted to the bar in March 1906. 
  • He briefly worked for Druces and Attlee, his father’s law company, but he did not enjoy the work and had no specific aspirations to become a successful lawyer.
  • Additionally, he played football for Fleet, a non-league team.

EARLY CAREER

  • He volunteered at Haileybury House in Stepney, in the East End of London, in 1906; from 1907 to 1909, he was the club’s manager. Haileybury House was a philanthropic organization for working-class boys run by his old school. His political stance had been more traditional up to that point.
  • But after being shocked by the suffering and poverty he witnessed while working with the slum children, he believed that only government intervention and economic redistribution could alleviate poverty.
  • This experience began a process that led to him embracing socialism. Later, in 1908, he joined the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and got involved in local politics. 
  • He ran for Stepney Borough Council as an ILP candidate in his first election, which he lost.
  • Before working as a secretary for Toynbee Hall in 1909, he also spent a short time working as a secretary for Beatrice Webb. 
  • He participated in Webb’s campaign to popularise The Minority Report because he was active in Fabian Society circles. 
  • He would visit numerous political organizations, including Liberal, Conservative, and Socialist ones, to explain and popularise the ideas and recruit lecturers suitable for the campaign.
  • He traveled the nation in 1911 as an “official explainer” for the government, explaining the National Insurance Act of Chancellor of the Exchequer David Lloyd George. 
  • He cycled around Somerset and Essex that summer, presenting the Act in front of crowds. He started teaching social science and public administration as a lecturer at the London School of Economics the following year.
  • Attlee applied to enlist in the British Army in August 1914, just after the start of the First World War. His application was initially denied because he was deemed too old at 31; nevertheless, on September 30, 1914, he was finally appointed as a temporary lieutenant in the 6th (Service) Battalion, South Lancashire Regiment.
  • Attlee fell after fighting in Gallipoli for a while due to sickness and was put aboard a ship headed for England to heal. 
  • He requested to be taken off the ship in Malta, where he stayed in a hospital to heal because when he woke up, he wanted to get back to work as quickly as possible. 
  • His hospitalization happened when several fellow soldiers were killed at the Battle of Sari Bair.
  • He devoted the majority of 1917 to instructing soldiers at several English locales. He served as the interim commanding officer (CO) of the Tank Corps’ newly formed L Battalion at Bovington Camp, Dorset, from July 2 to July 9.

EARLY POLITICAL CAREER

  • In the immediate post-war period, Attlee returned to municipal politics and was elected mayor of the Metropolitan Borough of Stepney, one of London’s most impoverished inner-city districts, in 1919. 
  • When he served as mayor, the council took action against slum landlords who demanded high rents but wouldn’t spend money maintaining their properties.
  • The Poplar Rates Rebellion, a movement of civil disobedience to equalize the cost of poor relief across all of London’s boroughs, was started in 1921 by George Lansbury, the Labour mayor of the adjoining borough of Poplar and future head of the Labour Party. 
  • Attlee, a close personal friend of Lansbury, enthusiastically backed this.
  • Attlee was elected the Member of Parliament (MP) for Stepney’s Limehouse seat in the 1922 general election. 
  • He supported Ramsay MacDonald at the time in the Labour Party leadership contest because he admired him.
  • During the brief 1922 parliament, he worked as MacDonald’s Parliamentary Private Secretary. 
  • In the brief first Labour government led by MacDonald, he served as Under-Secretary of State for War in 1924, giving him his first experience of ministerial office.
  • Attlee disapproved of the 1926 General Strike because he thought labor unrest shouldn’t be utilized as a political tool. 
  • He didn’t try to undercut it when it happened, though. He presided over the Stepney Borough Electricity Committee at the time of the strike.
  • He was appointed to the multi-party Simon Commission in 1927, a royal commission established to look into granting India self-rule. 
  • Attlee was initially denied a ministerial position in the Second Labour Government, which took office after the 1929 general election, due to the time he had to dedicate to the commission.
  • Labour was deeply divided after Ramsay MacDonald established the National Government. Long a friend of MacDonald, Attlee now felt deceived, as did most Labour politicians. 
  • Later that year, the Labour Party suffered a crushing defeat in the 1931 general election, losing almost 200 seats and sending only 52 MPs back to the House of Commons. 
  • Senior party members, including Arthur Henderson, the party’s leader, lost their seats.
  • Attlee was influenced by Stafford Cripps, who was then on the party’s radical wing during the years 1932–1933. 
  • Attlee initially toyed with radicalism before retreating from it. He temporarily belonged to the Socialist League, an organization founded in 1932 by ex-members of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) to resist the ILP’s disaffiliation from the main Labour Party.
  • He agreed with Cripps’ contention that incremental reform was insufficient and that a socialist government would need to enact an emergency powers act, allowing it to rule by decree to overcome any resistance from vested interests until it was safe to restore democracy.
  • Oliver Cromwell’s brutal leadership and deployment of powerful generals to dominate England was something he admired. Attlee backed off from his radicalism and distanced himself from the League after looking closely at Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and even his former colleague Oswald Mosley, head of the new Black Shirt fascist movement in Britain.

ATTLEE AS DEPUTY MINISTER

  • When World War II started in September 1939, Attlee was still serving as the leader of the opposition. The disastrous Norwegian campaign would bring about a motion of no confidence in Neville Chamberlain. 
  • Even though Chamberlain survived, his administration’s standing was so severely and publicly damaged that it was apparent a coalition government would be required.
  • Attlee would never have been able to take Labour with him, even if he had personally been willing to serve under Chamberlain in an emergency coalition government. 
  • As a result, Chamberlain tendered his resignation, and on May 10, 1940, Labour and the Conservatives formed a coalition government under the leadership of Winston Churchill. On May 12, 1940, Attlee was appointed Lord Privy Seal and joined the Cabinet.
  • Attlee and Churchill decided that Labour should hold slightly more than one-third of the coalition government’s posts and that the War Cabinet would be made up of three Conservatives and two Labour members.
  • From the time the Government of National Unity was established in May 1940 until the election in May 1945, only Attlee and Churchill remained in the War Cabinet. 

ATTLEE AS PRIME MINISTER

  • In July 1945, Clement Attlee accepted King George VI’s invitation to establish the Attlee cabinet in the United Kingdom, taking over as Prime Minister from Winston Churchill. 
  • After sweeping to victory in the general election of 1945, the Labour Party went on to implement the objectives of the so-called post-war consensus, including creating the welfare state and nationalizing some industries.
  • After World War II, the country’s National Health Service (NHS) was established, along with other post-war austerity measures, the bloody suppression of communist and pro-independence movements in Malaya, the grant of independence to India, and participation in the Cold War against Soviet Communism.
  • The second Attlee cabinet was established after Attlee won a slim majority of five seats in the general election of 1950. 
  • Attlee called a further election for October 25, 1951, just 20 months later, to secure a more significant majority. Still, he was barely beaten by the Conservative Party, forcing Labour into 13 years of opposition.

RETURN AS THE OPPOSITION

  • Attlee remained in charge of the party as Leader of the Opposition after the 1951 defeat. However, his final four years as leader are seen by many as the Labour Party’s least successful.
  • Internal conflicts within the Labour Party between its right wing, led by Hugh Gaitskell, and its left, led by Aneurin Bevan, dominated the period. Following the 1951 election, many Labour MPs believed that Attlee should have stepped down as party leader in favor of a more youthful candidate.
  • In the summer of 1954, Bevan urged him to resign openly.
  • Attlee, now 72 years old, ran against Anthony Eden in the 1955 general election, which saw Labour lose 18 seats and the Conservatives gained more seats. After twenty years as party leader, he stepped down on December 7, 1955, and Hugh Gaitskell was chosen as his replacement on December 14.
  • He joined other signatories in calling for a global constitution convention. 
  • As a result, a World Constituent Assembly met for the first time in human history to create and approve a Constitution for the Federation of Earth.

DEATH AND RETIREMENT

  • After retiring from the Commons, he was made Earl Attlee and Viscount Prestwood on December 16, 1955, and he took his place in the House of Lords on January 25, 1956. At the age of 84, Attlee died from pneumonia while asleep in Westminster Hospital on October 8, 1967. 
  • In November 2000, many people attended his funeral, including the Queen’s representative, the Duke of Kent, and former Prime Minister Harold Wilson. His remains were cremated and interred at Westminster Abbey.
  • After his passing, his son Martin Richard Attlee, 2nd Earl Attlee, who switched parties from Labour to the SDP in 1981, received the title. John Richard Attlee, 3rd Earl Attlee, the grandson of Clement Attlee, currently holds the title. 
  • An amendment to Labour’s House of Lords Act 1999 allowed hereditary peers to keep their seats in the Lords, and the third earl—a Conservative Party member—was one of them.

Clement Attlee Worksheets

This fantastic bundle includes everything you need to know about Clement Attlee across 25 in-depth pages. These ready-to-use worksheets are perfect for teaching kids about Clement Attlee. Attlee was the longest-serving Labour Party leader.

Complete List of Included Worksheets

Below is a list of all the worksheets included in this document.

  1. Clement Attlee Facts
  2. I am Clement
  3. Timeline
  4. Emojis at Work
  5. A Leader Should Be..
  6. The NHS 
  7. Legislative Impact
  8. Current Economy 
  9. Source Analysis
  10. Attlee in a Note
  11. Cultural Depiction

Frequently Asked Questions

Who was Clement Attlee?

Clement Attlee, full name Clement Richard Attlee, was a British politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1945 to 1951. He was a prominent figure in the Labour Party and played a crucial role in post-World War II British politics.

What is Clement Attlee best known for?

Clement Attlee is best known for his leadership as Prime Minister in the immediate aftermath of World War II. His government implemented a range of important social and economic reforms, including the establishment of the National Health Service (NHS) and the nationalization of key industries and services.

What significant reforms were enacted during Attlee’s tenure?

During Clement Attlee’s time as Prime Minister, his government introduced a series of transformative reforms, collectively known as the “Attlee reforms.” These included the creation of the NHS, nationalization of coal, steel, railways, and public utilities, as well as the implementation of welfare state measures to address poverty and inequality.

How did Clement Attlee contribute to international relations?

Attlee’s government played a significant role in shaping the post-war international order. He was a key participant in the establishment of the United Nations and played a role in the creation of NATO, both of which aimed to maintain global peace and security after the war.

What is Attlee’s legacy?

Clement Attlee’s legacy is marked by his leadership during a pivotal period in British history. His government’s policies laid the foundation for the modern British welfare state and had a lasting impact on society. His commitment to social justice, economic equality, and international cooperation continues to influence political discussions and policies in the United Kingdom and beyond.

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