Prime Minister Clement Attlee: The Mayor and MP of Stepney who founded the NHS

Post-war Prime Minister Clement Attlee saw Stepney as his spiritual home and his horror at the squalor in the East End of the early 20th century framed his belief that led to the foundation of the NHS.

Tower Hamlets inspired post-war UK Prime Minister Clement Atlee’s pragmatic, non-revolutionary socialism driving his government’s historic reforms. 

Often overlooked as a man without ‘fire or fantasy’, overshadowed by his bulldog of a predecessor Churchill, Attlee was in many ways more radical. Emerging in Stepney’s local politics, he served two years as its Mayor, 27 as its MP, and was a key figure in the partition of India leading to the migration of Bangladeshis to the East End. As Labour Prime minister, his government oversaw the foundation of the NHS in 1948, the nationalisation of major industries and the dramatic expansion of the welfare state including the state pension and unemployment benefits. 

His statue now stands on Queen Mary’s University Campus reflecting the area’s role in forming his transformative politics. The statue, unveiled by Harold Wilson on 30 November 1988, was originally installed outside the Limehouse Library on Commercial Road but was removed after being vandalised.

Yet Attlee’s roots were far removed from the East End. A quintessential establishment posh boy he was born in 1883 in leafy, affluent Putney. Educated at a leading private school, as a student at University College Oxford  Attlee was a self-professed good old-fashioned imperialist conservative.  Yet when his brother introduced him to Haileybury House, a Stepney youth club for working-class boys funded by his high school,  he became convinced of the state’s role obligation to its citizens to provide for them in times of need. 

Whilst teaching there Attlee overheard local boys saying not that they were going home for dinner, but that they were going home to see if there was any dinner. Dumbfounded at the level of deprivation, the previously self-confessed. good old-fashioned imperialist conservative joined the Labour Party in 1908 and managed the charity from 1907 to 1909. 

Attlee became convinced that the Victorian, primarily Christian,  tradition of philanthropy was incapable of alleviating the area’s seemingly intractable poverty. Despite coming from a devout Anglican household with one brother a clergyman, and a missionary sister Attlee believed in the ethics of Christianity but not the “mumbo jumbo” as he put it. 

Haileybury House, whose name is given to Haileybury Youth Club on Ben Jonson Road, highlighted the inherent insecurity and inequality of voluntary, often sporadic, charity. 

He believed:  ‘Charity is a cold grey loveless thing, if a rich man wants to help the poor, he should pay his taxes gladly, not dole out money at a whim.’ 

This experience inspired his later introduction of the state pension: ‘A right established by law, such as that to an old age pension, is less galling than an allowance made by a rich man to a poor one, dependent on his view of the recipient’s character, and terminable at his caprice.’

Attlee gradually embedded himself in local grassroots politics. Running unsuccessfully for Stepney’s council in 1909 he engaged with both Stepney’s working class and intellectuals.  He was briefly secretary for notable socialist writer Beatrice Webb and then Toynbee Hall attempting to tackle the causes of hardship. 

He became a pivotal player in the Fabian society touting their moderate socialist ideals at Liberal and Conservative conferences alike. Despite not being known for his eloquence he was briefly employed by the Liberal Prime Minister, Lloyd George as his  ‘explainer’, an often assumed modern mantle for the concise communicator of eloquent ideas. His colleagues reported he was nothing if not straight to the point.

Attlee served in World War One in Turkey and fought in Gallipoli reaching the rank of Major. After the war, he upsticked and moved to Stepney. Elected as Stepney’s mayor in 1919 he waged a new war on the rapacious landlords who were extortionate rents for housing often left in pitiful condition. 

Utilising Charles Booth’s surveys on disease and sanitation, he introduced sanitary inspectors when most people didn’t have toilets in their houses. Infant mortality halved. Stepney Council also found work for unemployed veterans. Attlee’s later goal of full employment with state support was evident even then. 

During his mayoral tenure in 1920  he wrote a book called The Social Worker, outlining the emerging no-nonsense political philosophy that would become so influential. His pragmatic goal-orientated form of socialism with the state providing for those who couldn’t look after themselves is detailed throughout its pages.

A close friend of local boy and MP George Lansbury for Bow and Bromley, Attlee threw his weight behind the controversial  Poplar Rebellion– a campaign of disobedience demanding the sharing of the poor relief burden across councils. 

Moved so profoundly by the plight of Stepney locals he wrote a poem dedicated to them, ‘To Limehouse’ in 1922.

The last two stanzas describe the struggle of residents and his hope for the future: 

In Limehouse, in Limehouse, today and every day
I see the weary mothers who sweat their souls away:
Poor, tired mothers, trying
To hush the feeble crying
Of little babies dying
For want of bread today.

In Limehouse, in Limehouse, I’m dreaming of the day
When evil time shall perish and be driven clean away,
When father, child and mother
Shall live and love each other,
And brother help his brother
In happy work and play.

In November of that year he secured a position as MP for Limehouse, the contemporary Stepney constituency. The fervour for social justice depicted in his poem seems to have seeded a steely determination, propelling him through a remarkable national political career. A feat that surprised even him. 

If Churchill’s oratory still percolates through popular culture, Attlee’s reforms still shape our everyday lives. Before 1945 most of the population had no access to hospital care, maternity care or dentistry. No government since has tried to abolish the NHS. His government built a million homes, many in Tower Hamlets, which had been particularly by German bombs in the war. 

One of the first MPs to argue for Indian independence, his government oversaw Indian independence and the partition of Bengal in 1947. Having visited India in the early 1930’s he had become convinced that British rule was stifling social and economic progress.

 His aversion to Marx meant he opposed the nine-day general strike in May 1926. As chairman of Stepney Borough’s electrical committee, he ensured hospitals had power but cut it off to factories. He was successfully sued for this by local Tower Hamlets residents. 

Replacing George Lansbury as Labour leader in 1933 he played a vital role in replacing Neville Chamberlain with Winston Churchill as MP. With too few seats to command a majority, the Conservatives needed Labour’s support to form a government. Attlee agreed to a coalition government, not unlike Clegg and Cameron in the 2010s, on condition that Chamberlain, who had appeased Hitler was ousted, sussing that Churchill was more suited to wartime leadership. 

During the Second World War (WW2) Attlee served under Conservative Churchill as Deputy Prime Minister under the coalition government. Attlee once said: “Churchill is fifty percent genius, fifty percent bloody fool.”  

The contrasting characters formed a mutual respect, despite contrasting political beliefs. Churchill in turn said: “He’s a modest little man with much to be modest about.”  As Deputy PM Atlee oversaw the ‘home front’ and the transition to a war economy. 

Unassuming Attlee was as shocked as the rest of the country when Labour won 393 seats and 47% of the vote. The pundits, pollsters and press had all banked on the war’s hero Churchill winning with a massive majority. 

Commonly depicted by contemporary cartoonists as a colourless chairman to his more charismatic colleagues he was a nimble political operator.  Labour politician Bevan, his subsequent foreign secretary said: he’s a ‘desiccated calculating machine’. 

Keeping his fractious party together was no mean feat. Attlee hemmed in the Labour’s radical left keeping the party digestible to the mass of the electorate. Academics argue that this prioritisation of pragmatism over dogma was born in Stepney where he rejected hard left ideas in favour of a moderate left-of-centre approach. 

A masterful manager if not orator, his skill at balancing the clashing charismatic personalities in his cabinet is often touted as his greatest strength. As a team, they negotiated previously unimaginable domestic reforms. 

In what famed economist John Maynard Keynes labelled the financial Dunkirk of post-war Britain, crippled with debt with its infrastructure in tatters, Atlee negotiated Marshall aide, a massive loan from the US. This combined with extended national insurance, the nationalisation of the coal, rail, steel and electrical industries helped fund the seismic restructuring of the state. 

This allowed the foundation of the NHS in 1948 and the expansion of the welfare state in 1943, including the state pension, unemployment benefits, as well as education reform. He refused to believe that the country could not afford to provide compassionate care to his citizens – a belief traced back to his autobiographical writings to his time in Stepney.

When being grilled on whether the country could afford the NHS he replied: 

“ I cannot believe … that we can submit to the world that the masses of our people must be condemned to penury.”

He said of the East End community: “They are decent people who have been denied fair opportunities.” 

Attlee argues in his autobiography, ‘As it Happened’ that his politics were an attempt to rectify this injustice.

A middle-class man of means, to his wife’s chagrin he chooses to live in Stepney for 15 years.

Critics have pointed out his role in the partition of Bengal and the violence that ensued during Indian independence. Attlee has been accused of using the Empire to prop up domestic reforms. However, apart from Thatcher privatising the coal, electrical and rail industries most of his reforms still exist in some form today. 

 Still lauded today by the Labour Party and derided by Liz Truss as the founder of the ‘wokeness’, his drive for social justice was formed in Tower Hamlets and orchestrates much of our public care to this day. From the NHS to the principle of welfare, much of his previously unthinkable reforms have become fact, amendable yes but synonymous with Britain.

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