Attlee and Churchill

Allies in War, Adversaries in Peace

Leo McKinstry

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786495747
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Chosen as a Book of the Year in the Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail 'A masterpiece' Frederick Forsyth 'Beautifully written... unlikely to be surpassed' Simon Heffer 'Superb' Daily Mail, Book of the Week 'Terrific' Observer Throughout history there have been many long-running rivalries between party leaders, but there has never been a connection like that between Clement Attlee and Winston Churchill, who were leaders of their respective parties for a total of thirty-five years. Brought together in the epoch-making circumstances of the Second World War, they forged a partnership that transcended party lines, before going on to face each other in two of Britain's most important and influential general elections.
Based on extensive research and archival material, Attlee and Churchill provides a host of new insights into their remarkable relationship. From the bizarre coincidence that they shared a governess, to their explosive wartime clashes over domestic policy and reconstruction; and from Britain's post-war nuclear weapons programme, which Attlee kept hidden from Churchill and his own Labour Party, to the private correspondence between the two men in later life, which demonstrates their friendliness despite all the political antagonism, Leo McKinstry tells the intertwined story of these two political titans as never before.
In a gripping narrative McKinstry not only provides a fresh perspective on two of the most compelling leaders of the mid-twentieth century but also brilliantly brings to life this vibrant, traumatic and inspiring era of modern British history.

Part One

CONTENDERS

ONE

BLENHEIM AND PUTNEY

THE BELL FROM the nursery rang in the servants’ quarters. Immediately a maid went to the room to find out what was wanted. On her arrival, she encountered a scene of tension between the governess, Miss Hutchinson, and her young charge, Winston Churchill. The maid asked Miss Hutchinson if she had rung the bell, only for Winston to say peremptorily, ‘I rang. Take away Miss Hutchinson. She is very cross.’ ¹

Unable to tolerate Winston’s recalcitrant behaviour, Miss Hutchinson left not only the nursery but also the household. She had been employed by Winston’s father, Lord Randolph, to improve his education, but had found the job impossible. Soon afterwards, she took up a more amenable post as a governess with another family. By a remarkable coincidence, this was the Attlee household in Putney, southwest London, where Miss Hutchinson, it seems, did not actually teach the future Prime Minister but rather his older sisters. Clement, however, always enjoyed the strange fortuity of his childhood link through Miss Hutchinson to Churchill, as he wrote in his autobiography, ‘She could never have thought that the two little boys were destined in turn to be Prime Minister.’ ² In a separate tribute to Churchill in 1965, he cited the role of Miss Hutchinson as evidence that ‘my own fate has been closely bound up with his’.³

Miss Hutchinson herself appears to have left no record of her thoughts about Clem, though she was reported to have described Winston as ‘an extremely strong-willed child’.⁴ Apart from that statement, there is little trace of her and indeed she does not even appear directly by name in the extensive Churchill archive or the more limited Attlee papers. Most histories of Churchill suggest that she must be the ‘sinister figure’ whom he described when recounting his experience of growing up in Dublin in the 1870s, where Lord Randolph temporarily served in the viceregal administration. With his family based in the official residence of Little Lodge in Phoenix Park, Winston claimed to be enjoying his Irish stay until his parents warned him of the impending arrival of his first governess. Such was his anxiety that, on her first day, he ran from the house and hid in the shrubbery that surrounded the Little Lodge.

Yet it is doubtful that the governess at Little Lodge was the Miss Hutchinson who later worked with the Attlee sisters. In the Churchill papers there are two letters, both sent in 1927, from a woman called Jane Graham, then living in the village of Tyrrells in County Westmeath. In them, she states explicitly that she was Winston’s only tutor in Ireland. ‘I lived in Dublin with your mother as nursery governess to you as a small boy and taught you your first lessons at the Private Secretary’s lodge in Phoenix Park,’ she wrote, expressing pride in Winston’s progress in politics.⁵ In the next, she declared that, ‘I was the only Resident Governess you had. You were very fond of history.’ Relations between them cannot have been as fractious as Churchill remembered, since Jane Graham also reminded him how, one night in the nursery, they had both blacked-up and put on fancy-dress costumes. ‘Lady Randolph said that we were like wild Indians.’ ⁶

It seems far more probable that Miss Hutchinson was recruited after the Churchills moved back to London in 1880, when Winston was still five years old. She may have tutored him not just in the family home but also on holiday. One of Winston’s letters to his mother, written at the age of ten from Cromer in Norfolk, reveals exactly the same kind of antipathy that led to his dismissal of Miss Hutchinson from his nursery. ‘The governess is very unkind and strict and stiff. I can’t enjoy myself at all. I am counting the days till Saturday and then I shall be able to tell you all my troubles,’ he wrote.⁷

The timing of Miss Hutchinson’s move to the Attlee family in the mid-1880s makes it likely that she was based in London. Indeed, research through the census records and street directories, as well as the reports of the School Mistresses and Governesses Benevolent Institution, points to the probability that the woman in question was Miss Caroline Hutchinson, who was born in Jarrow, County Durham, in 1857, the daughter of a mechanical engineer called Ralph Hutchinson. In the early 1860s the family moved from the northeast to Putney; and, on reaching adulthood, Caroline began to work as a governess there. Like Attlee himself, she was from a large family as one of eight children; her sister also worked as a governess. In later life, while still living in Putney, Caroline worked for Burke’s Peerage.

Whatever the truth about Miss Hutchinson, it is fascinating that Winston and Clem should have this juvenile connection. The coincidence is all the more arresting because the social backgrounds of the two men were so different. Whereas Clement hailed from the respectable middle class, Winston belonged to the patrician elite. The aristocratic nature of Churchill’s upbringing was illustrated by the fact that he was born, on 30 November 1874, in Blenheim Palace, one of the architectural wonders of England and the family’s ancestral home, built by the first Duke of Marlborough in the early eighteenth century to celebrate his victory over France in the Spanish Wars of Succession. Winston’s father, Lord Randolph, the third son of the seventh Duke of Marlborough, was a brilliant but wayward Tory politician whose charisma was undermined by his rampant opportunism and lack of judgement, two vices of which Winston was often accused. His erratic ascent, which saw him reach the Cabinet in 1885, was helped by his American wife, Jennie, the captivatingly beautiful daughter of the New York financier Leonard Jerome.

These riches and transatlantic exoticism were far removed from the world into which Clement Attlee was born on 3 January 1883. The family home was a nineteenth-century villa in Putney, which was then a much more rural London suburb than it is today. Attlee’s father, Henry, could hardly have been a more different character to Lord Randolph. A devout Christian in the High Victorian tradition, he worked as a solicitor in the City law firm of Druce & Attlee, where he rose to be a senior partner. Again in contrast to the eloquent Tory maverick Lord Randolph, he was an ardent Gladstonian Liberal who once considered standing for Parliament but was deterred by his ‘ponderous’ style of public speaking.⁸

Henry Attlee had to work hard at law in order to provide for the large family that he fathered. Whereas Winston had just one sibling – his younger brother, Jack, who was born in 1880 – Clem had no fewer than three sisters and four brothers, the eight children separated by a uniform two years’ interval. Clem was the second-youngest of the brood. Robert, the eldest, was born in 1871 – almost a year after Henry had married Ellen Watson, the daughter of the secretary of the London Art Union, a commercial organisation that distributed high-quality reproductions and prints to its subscribing members. A warm, gentle mother with a strong Christian faith, she ensured that Attlee’s early life was characterised by security, a quality absent from Churchill’s. Even by the cold standards of Victorian aristocracy, Winston’s parents were unusually neglectful. Randolph was too wrapped up in his politics, Jennie in her role as a great hostess and uninhibited socialite; among her many lovers were the Polish Count Charles Kinsky and the Prince of Wales. Of his mother’s remoteness, Churchill once wrote poignantly, ‘I loved her dearly, but at a distance.’ ⁹

The characters of the two boys were as different as their upbringings. Winston was such a boisterous, energetic boy that he regularly had to be chastised for his poor behaviour. ‘A most difficult child to manage’ was Jennie’s description of him,¹⁰ though his sense of adventure and wild vitality appealed to other young children. ‘We thought he was wonderful because he was always leading us into danger,’ said Shane Leslie, recalling how Winston led bird-nesting expeditions or attacks on makeshift garden forts.¹¹ Attlee was the opposite. Painfully shy, he never ended up in scrapes, never caused trouble. Even his one vice, a quick temper, he learned to control with the aid of his mother. As Clem’s sister Mary remembered, ‘She was so successful that, if he saw her coming, he would bury his head in a chair. This was known as “Clem penting”, or in ordinary language, “Clem repenting”.’ ¹²

Their contrasting natures were also reflected in their schooldays. At the age of seven, Churchill was sent to St George’s School in Ascot, a bleak institution whose boasts of high standards in the classics hid a culture of sexual perversion generated by the sinister headmaster, the Reverend H. W. Sneyd-Kynnersley, who was such a sadist that he would beat pupils until they bled or lost control of their bowels. Winston’s regular misconduct made him a prime target for Sneyd-Kynnersley’s brutal ministrations. ‘How I hated this school and what a life of anxiety I lived there for more than two years,’ he recalled.¹³ This tale of cruelty was later contradicted, however, by one of Attlee’s post-war ministers, Douglas Jay, whose father was a contemporary of Churchill’s at St George’s. ‘My father recorded quite different memories, put most of the blame on the mutinous young Winston and remained an admirer of the headmaster. The clearest memory which my father had of young Winston was his vivid language, reputedly picked up from the stable boys at Blenheim.’ ¹⁴

After a spell in a much less severe preparatory school in Brighton, he went at the age of thirteen to Harrow, as preparation for entry to the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. Contrary to historical myth-making, he was not a failure there. With his natural talent for language and powers of concentration, he excelled at English, and history, even winning a school prize for the tremendous feat of reciting 1,200 lines from Macaulay’s Lays of Ancient Rome. He was also a fine swimmer and a good enough fencer to win the Public Schools Championship, while he revelled in every aspect of the School Rifle Corps, from the smart grey uniform to the mock battles. Despite his pleasure at such activities, Churchill did not enjoy his days at Harrow. His reluctance to submit to authority, combined with his unruliness, meant he was in regular conflict with teachers and fellow pupils. His housemaster Henry Davidson once felt compelled to ask Jennie to reproach her son. ‘His forgetfulness, carelessness, unpunctuality and irregularity in every way have really been so serious that I write to ask you, when he is at home, to speak very gravely to him on the subject.’ ¹⁵ Nor did Winston inspire respect among the older Harrow boys. ‘He was a snotty little bugger, uppity but damn near useless,’ recalled Archie MacLaren, the future England cricket captain, for whom Winston acted as a fag.¹⁶ His troubles at Harrow were worsened by his parents’ continuing remoteness and indifference. Jennie still put her energetic social life before her son’s needs, while Lord Randolph did not even write to Winston until he had been there for three years.

Attlee had a much less oppressive experience. Until the age of nine, he had been taught at home by his mother, partly because he was a shy child with a delicate physique, and partly because Ellen Attlee was an excellent tutor: bright, widely read and knowledgeable in several subjects. But his sheltered life could not last. In the summer of 1892, just as Churchill started on his penultimate term at Harrow, Attlee was enrolled at the preparatory school of Northaw Place in Potters Bar, Hertfordshire. Housed in a seventeenth-century mansion set in extensive parkland, the school was run by a clergyman, the Reverend F. J. Hall, whose two main interests were the Bible and cricket. In contrast to the reported sadism of St George’s, Northaw was gentle and nurturing. The matron was kindly, the food excellent, the healthcare attentive. ‘I certainly had a very happy time there,’ Attlee wrote in his autobiography.¹⁷

In the spring of 1896, he left for Haileybury, the Hertfordshire public school with which his family had strong connections. It was a spartan place, with primitive facilities and mediocre teaching. Attlee excelled at neither his studies nor sports, though he showed an embryonic gift for leadership as a lance corporal in the school cadet force, one contemporary recalling that he ‘ran things with unobtrusive efficiency’.¹⁸ His greater self-confidence in his final period at Haileybury also resulted in his appointment as a prefect. ‘I believe him a sound character and think he will do well in life. His chief fault is that he is very opinionated, so much so that he gives very scant consideration to the views of other people,’ read his final housemaster’s report.¹⁹ Again unlike Churchill, Attlee was rarely in trouble with the authorities. The only time he received a thrashing was when he and most other pupils, defying the orders of the liberal-minded headmaster Edward Lyttelton, held a patriotic demonstration to celebrate the relief of Ladysmith in February 1900 during the Boer War. Unable to cane the entire school for this act of insubordination, Lyttelton picked out seventy-two boys from the upper school, Attlee among them, to expatiate for the sins of the rest. Fortunately for Attlee, the headmaster ‘was tiring when he got to me’.²⁰

On leaving their respective schools, Attlee and Churchill followed very different paths. The thrusting, restless intent that so consumed the latter was entir...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Westminster Hall
• Part One: Contenders
• Part Two: Comrades
• Part Three: Competitors
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Plates