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  Five months later a clumsy attempt to remove Attlee was made by Alfred Edwards, the Labour MP for Middlesborough East, nominating Morrison, Greenwood and Dalton at a PLP meeting on 15 November.52 Attlee stated that he would not resent or regard as disloyal nominations for leader. Yet, Greenwood rose and declined his nomination, saying, according to Dalton’s account, “it would encourage Hitler, if we now had a contest for the leadership”.53 Morrison too declined, reading aloud a letter he had sent to Edwards reluctantly deciding not to stand; it would be neither kind nor generous given that Attlee’s health was still recovering. Dalton then, too, turned down his nomination, adding that Attlee had made it clear from the Chair that if in the future the party desired a leadership contest, no resentment would be felt. Nevertheless, it was extraordinary that with the country at war such an attempt could have been launched.54

  The leadership issue was now settled, ensuring that for the next critical five months Attlee and Greenwood had the unquestioned support of the Labour Party in the country as well as in Parliament. Such uncontested support was necessary to help create the wartime coalition government that stayed in power from 1940–1945 and paved the way for ensuring that a credible Labour Party won a massive victory in the general election of 1945.

  Years later Attlee would sum up this particular short-lived leadership fracas succinctly and, I believe, accurately. “Dalton wouldn’t have backed Morrison. Morrison wouldn’t have backed Cripps, and Cripps wouldn’t have backed Dalton. The Parliamentary Labour Party wouldn’t have let Greenwood go and Greenwood was loyal to me.”55 It is also worth reflecting on the answer Attlee gave on 17 September 1965, two years before his death, which shows, perhaps surprisingly, that he did not claim being Prime Minister from 1945–51 as his greatest achievement.

  Question: What would you say yourself was your biggest single achievement?

  Attlee: Taking the Labour Party into coalition for the war and bringing them out without losing anybody.56

  It says much for Greenwood that he stood in for Attlee to such considerable effect in 1939. Yet he would not have been so effective if Attlee had not trusted him and given him scope to decide day to day on current issues without constant back-seat driving either from a hospital bed or convalescence.

  Immediately after his speech to the Commons in the 2 September 1939 debate, Greenwood went to see Chamberlain in his room behind the Speaker’s chair. Unless the inevitable decision was taken before reassembling, Greenwood said, “neither you nor I nor anyone else on the earth will be able to hold the House of Commons.”57 Greenwood was telephoned at home on Sunday to say the Cabinet would meet at 11.00 am. On Monday 4 September he saw the Prime Minister who was about to go on the BBC to announce that the country was at war. Greenwood made a broadcast after the one o’clock news.

  On 7 September, though Winston Churchill had joined the Government as First Lord of the Admiralty in a flourish of publicity, the newspapers were still being effusive about Greenwood, the new Labour political star in their midst. The Daily Mail, no natural supporter, wrote how it had been so “very fortunate for the country that Greenwood had stepped into the breach caused by Mr Attlee’s illness. But for the latter’s absence, while sick, we might never have discovered what a statesman Mr Greenwood has become and how admirably he can explain Labour’s viewpoint to the world.” The Daily Telegraph wrote “Handicapped as he was by the rules of order, Mr Greenwood won admiration for the skill with which he made a short speech disguised as a series of questions.” Greenwood went on to suggest that, in future, statements should be made on a motion for the adjournment of the House so as to allow for a full debate. This procedure was adopted and later used on 7 May 1940 creating the debate that actually led to Chamberlain’s downfall – an outcome Greenwood had long wanted and which is described in Chapter 2. The Daily Herald on 20 September referred to Labour’s “enhanced effectiveness … admitted on all sides to be due in no small measure to the spirited and statesmanlike way in which Arthur Greenwood has led the Labour Party in recent weeks. He has emerged with a personal authority which extends far beyond the boundaries of the Labour Party and has surprised even some of his closest friends with unexpected reserves of strength and integrity.”

  Greenwood’s drinking problems had been absent or well controlled during the build-up to this crisis and this had an undoubted effect on his overall performance. In his book on Churchill, Roy Jenkins writes of Greenwood “He had as great a propensity to alcohol as Churchill himself, but he held it less well. He did not make an exhibition of himself, but alcohol did not energise him as it did Churchill. He was more of a soak than a drunk. He also had a somewhat diffuse mind which was accentuated by Prime Ministers, first Churchill in 1940 and then Attlee in 1945, giving him posts of high prestige but little hard content.”58 The illness at the end of 1939 that temporarily kept him out of speaking does not appear from sketchy accounts to have been related to drink. Despite all the praise heaped upon him, the evidence points to him never allowing it to go to his head or to change his support for Attlee. It is to the credit of both men that they built such a relationship in the torrid atmosphere of party politics and, by doing so, transformed the Labour Party.

  Roy Jenkins wrote in 1948 an authoritative account of one of the crucial political decisions of 1939, with excellent access to Attlee in great part because Roy’s father, Arthur Jenkins, was a Labour MP and Attlee’s parliamentary private secretary. “In the first few days of the war”, wrote Jenkins, “the Prime Minister had made overtures to Greenwood for the inclusion of Labour representatives in the Cabinet. These had been communicated to Attlee in North Wales and he had been in full agreement with Greenwood’s refusal to join under Chamberlain. The Labour members were wisely determined not to become junior partners in a weak Government, but to maintain their strength intact for a time when they could throw it more decisively into the political balance.”59

  Attlee was back in the Commons on a regular basis from 26 September and at the end of the month spoke out strongly against the consideration of any peace proposals from Berlin. Addressing a Labour Party ‘Peace Aims’ conference, he stressed that there must be a “fight to the finish” until the Nazis were removed from power in Germany and that such action was an essential pre-requisite to any Socialist reconstruction. That position he maintained consistently60 and it was later reflected in particular in the 25–28 May 1940 War Cabinet meetings which are published in full in Chapter 4 and discussed in Chapter 5.

  On 28 September 1939 Greenwood wrote to the Daily Herald, which as a newspaper with Labour leanings he frequently used as a vehicle for his views, on what became a persistent theme of his: that though not formally part of the coalition “Labour must be in on the ground floor”. Stressing that organised Labour must be considered from the beginning, not merely because the question of Labour supply was involved, but because organised Labour had a contribution to make to the wider aspects of the question, an offering of experience which in wartime, and indeed in peacetime, could not be ignored. On 16 October he was critical of the Government saying “Lethargy and excessive caution must be replaced by vigour and courage.” On 6 November “This is not the Government’s war it is the people’s war.”

  On 18 November Greenwood’s doctor said there must be no more speeches until the end of the year because of prolonged work and overstrain but, nevertheless, he spoke in the Commons on 5 December saying, “Why do we fight Labour’s cause.” On 15 January 1940 Greenwood was hammering home his underlying message to party supporters, “Get this thought. We will never be yes-men.” Greenwood was anxious that by supporting the Conservative Government Labour would lose its identity, a potential consequence at times of war when winning on the battlefield was the overriding priority. He had been disillusioned by the spirit of the trenches in 1914–18 not lasting into the 1920s and ’30s. He went on to explain the spirit behind a recent decision to co-operate over any individual constituency by-elections. “Political truce no! A by-election pact ye
s.” On 10 March he told his Yorkshire constituents in Wakefield, “Labour would support every step to secure the successful prosecution of the war, but would continue to criticise inefficiency, wavering and the lack of forethought.” He knew, however, the time was coming when there would have to be a formal coalition, but he wanted it to be on, if not equal terms, honourable terms.

  It happens from time to time in the hothouse atmosphere surrounding Westminster that new stars emerge. But this is most often only temporarily established and a particular speech is soon forgotten in the reporting of Parliament. What was unusual about Greenwood’s speech was that he continued to ‘speak for England’ and that it became the public’s lasting memory of him. When he died on 9 June 1954, an obituary in the Daily Mail wrote about the “peak of his achievement, his shining hour, in the period when Britain was poised upon the brink of the last war, Attlee was ill, and it fell to Greenwood to lead his party in those tense and historic sittings in the House of Commons. In a situation charged with anxiety, and changing almost hourly, he made speeches, marshalled at the spur of the moment, which deserve to rank as parliamentary classics. He was inspired by the urgency of the moment to a performance altogether beyond his usual style and power.” The writer concluded that though he never touched the same heights again “his voice in those days established its right to a place among the memorable voices of Britain.”

  Greenwood continued to be, after Attlee, an important Labour figure, though less powerful than his former rivals Bevin, Morrison, Dalton and even Bevan who was one of the few MPs opposing the Government in the House of Commons throughout the war. After Attlee, Ernest Bevin, through 1940, first in the Cabinet and later the War Cabinet as Minister of Labour, was the most powerful Labour politician. As so often in politics it was pure chance that Attlee’s illness gave Greenwood the opportunity to speak in September 1939, but politics is about taking one’s chances when they arrive. Greenwood capitalised on them and was still contributing when his moment in the spotlight diminished in 1942, though his wisdom and experience still had value to the Labour Party for a decade to come.

  1 Leo Amery, My Political Life: The Unforgiving Years, 1929–1940 (Hutchinson, 1955), p 323–4.

  2 Ed Iain Dale, Memories of the Falklands (Politico’s, 2002), p 179–181.

  3 Leo Amery, My Political Life: The Unforgiving Years 1929–1940, p 324.

  4 Francis Beckett, Clem Attlee: Labour’s Great Reformer (Haus Publishing, 2015), p 219.

  5 HC, Hansard, Parliamentary Debates: Official Report, 1939, Vol. 351, p 281.

  6 HC, Hansard, 2 September 1939, vol. 351, cc 280–6.

  7 Neville Chamberlain, The Neville Chamberlain Diary Letters: The Downing Street Years, 1934–1940. Ed Robert C Self (Routledge, 2005), p 443.

  8 Ibid, pp 466–7.

  9 R.W. Seton-Watson, J. Dover Wilson, Alfred E. Zimmern, Arthur Greenwood, The War and Democracy (Project Gutenberg, 2004).

  10 Francis Beckett, Clem Attlee, p 33.

  11 Francis Beckett, Clem Attlee, p 61.

  12 Matthew Worley, Labour Inside the Gate: A History of the British Labour Party Between the Wars (I. B. Tauris, 2005), p 80.

  13 HC, Hansard, Parliamentary Debates: Official Report, 1931, vol. 250.

  14 Bernard Donoughue, G. W. Jones, Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973), pp 119–120.

  15 Alan Bullock, Baron Bullock, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin: Trade Union Leader 1881–1940 (Heinemann, 1960), p 256.

  16 Robert Skidelsky, Britain Since 1900: A Success Story? (Vintage, 2014), p 207–8.

  17 Oswald Mosley, Last Words (Black House Publishing, 2012), pp 44–5.

  18 Roy Jenkins, Mr. Attlee: An Interim Biography (Heinemann, 1948), p 139.

  19 Clem Attlee, The Granada Historical Records Interview (Panther, 1967), p 12.

  20 Alan Bullock, The Life and Times of Ernest Bevin: Trade Union Leader 1881–1940. pp 256–257.

  21 Francis Beckett, Clem Attlee, p 157.

  22 Greg Rosen, Old Labour to New (Politico’s, 2005), pp 43–50.

  23 Bernard Donoughue, G. W. Jones, Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician, pp 180–183.

  24 Bernard Donoughue, G. W. Jones, Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973), p 47.

  25 Ibid, p 100.

  26 Written by Tom Moult who lived for a time in The Mill House, Finchingfield, Braintree, Essex. There is correspondence attached relating to this manuscript dated 31 January 1951 from Hutchinson & Co to Greenwood about how in May 1949 “we exchanged agreements for a volume of reminiscences to be written by yourself with the collaboration of Mr Thomas Moult” as the work had not reached them. It went on to say they had been forced to the conclusion: “In view of the very greatly changed conditions now prevailing, to cancel the agreement for the book by mutual consent.” An assessment of the biography dated 14 May 1973 says “Large sections of this manuscript are clearly taken from AG’s own writings (both published and unpublished)” but AG had only revised up to Chapter 12 which was called Blueprint for War and Peace. This was preceded by a note in AG’s handwriting “haven’t got any further.” The note assessment continues “no case at all for recognising any copyright by TM.”

  27 Michael Jago, Clement Attlee: The Inevitable Prime Minister (Biteback, 2014), p 100.

  28 Bernard Donoughue, G. W. Jones, Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician, p 234.

  29 Greg Rosen, Old Labour to New, pp 91–111.

  30 Chris Wrigley, John Shepherd, On the Move: Essays in Labour and Transport History Presented to Philip Bagwell (A & C Black, 1991), p 225.

  31 Roy Jenkins, Mr. Attlee: An Interim Biography, p 161.

  32 Francis Williams, Ernest Bevin: Portrait of a Great Englishman (Hutchinson, 1952), p 196.

  33 Ben Pimlott, Hugh Dalton (Jonathan Cape, 1985), pp 203–206.

  34 Francis Beckett, Clem Attlee, p 161.

  35 Roy Jenkins, Mr. Attlee: An Interim Biography, p 162.

  36 Giles Radice, The Tortoise and the Hares: Attlee, Bevin, Cripps, Dalton, Morrison (Politico’s, 2008), p 89.

  37 Bernard Donoughue, G. W. Jones, Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician, p 239.

  38 Hugh Dalton, Memoirs: The Fateful Years, 1931–45 (Muller, 1957), p 82.

  39 Ben Pimlott, Hugh Dalton, p 265.

  40 Report as an appendix to the NEC minutes of 22 June 1938.

  41 David Owen, In Sickness and In Power (Methuen, 2011).

  42 Philip Ziegler, Wilson (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993), p 151, 171.

  43 David Owen, In Sickness and In Power.

  44 HC, Hansard, Parliamentary Debates: Official Report, 1936, vol. 309, p iv.

  45 Zara Steiner, The Triumph of the Dark: European International History 1933–1939 (Oxford University Press, 2011), p 221.

  46 Roy Jenkins, Mr Attlee: An Interim Biography, p 184.

  47 Ben Pimlott, Hugh Dalton, p 243.

  48 Alan Bullock, Ernest Bevin: A Biography (Politico’s, 2002), p 217.

  49 Ibid.

  50 Ibid.

  51 Robert Pearce, Attlee (Routledge, 2014), p 83.

  52 Ben Pimlott, Hugh Dalton, pp 265–6.

  53 Hugh Dalton, The Fateful Years, 1931–1945, p 281.

  54 Hugh Dalton, The Fateful Years, 1931–194, p 281.

  55 Francis Beckett, Clem Attlee, p 217.

  56 Clem Attlee, The Granada Historical Records Interview (Panther 1967), p 54.

  57 Zara Steiner, The Triumph of the Dark: European International History 1933–1939, p iv.

  58 Roy Jenkins, Churchill: A Biography (Pan Macmillan, 2012).

  59 Roy Jenkins, Mr Attlee: An Interim Biography, p 211.

  60 Ibid, p 212.

  2

  In the Name of God, Go!

  When Neville Chamberlain took over from Baldwin as Prime Minister, on 28 May 1937, public opinion responded with some enthusiasm. He was initially a vigorous and active Prime Minister though already sixty-eight years old. Chamberlain�
�s five and a half years’ tenure as Chancellor of the Exchequer, some commentators believed, had been the most successful since Gladstone had been at the Treasury. Chamberlain was seen as competent, decisive, and at ease with figures from his experience in the manufacturing industry in Birmingham. Herbert Samuel, the Liberal leader, had, however, detected a ruthless streak in Chamberlain’s character that was to become much more evident in No. 10: “What he says goes. When he puts his foot down and says something must be done, that decision settles it.”1 Halifax replaced MacDonald as Lord President of the Council. Halifax “greatly admired” Chamberlain, according to his biographer Andrew Roberts, though he would never develop as personal a relationship with Chamberlain as he had with Baldwin.

  On Friday 18 February 1938 a serious rift had developed between Eden and Chamberlain over the projected Anglo-Italian Agreement. On 20 February Eden resigned. Chamberlain and Eden had had a serious row earlier in November when No. 10 briefed the press over the Berlin visit against Eden’s advice; Chamberlain, by way of response, told him dismissively to go home and take an aspirin. Some put the level of Chamberlain’s interference down to the age difference between the two, but 40 years later, when the age difference of Prime Minister Callaghan and the Foreign Secretary was similar, there was no such interference. Halifax, after a five-day wait, was appointed the new Foreign Secretary. Churchill described Halifax as “a man to bear this burden … although I differ from his views”. Morrison denounced him as “a weakling who will merely be the servile instrument of an ignorant and reckless Prime Minister”.2 This was odd to say the least considering the way Morrison wooed Halifax in early May 1939 and seemed, at times, to favour Halifax over Churchill.