Clement Attlee
IN MEMORIAM CHRISTOPHER HOLLIS
Many have written of Lord •Attlee's politi- cal career. It was his extraordinary personal character by which I confess that I was endlessly fascinated. He was to the end essentially a military figure, to whom the highest virtues were the military virtues and the proper code of conduct the military code. A colleague has told me how in his Cabinet days the final objection to any course ofaction, against which there could be no appeal, was, `contrary to military law.' I have myself heard him over the dinner table at the club rebuke a colleague who was airing a personal grievance with, 'Don't talk about your bloody platoon in the mess.'
In the Parliament of 1945 Attlee was the Prime Minister and I was the least distinguished of the occupants of the Oppo- sition back benches. He cannot have known who I was. But some years later I wrote a few light-hearted pieces in parody of his prose style and one or two little bits of verse about him. I hope that they were not unkindly, but they were certainly mildly irreverent, and front bench politicians do not as a rule like being laughed at. I do not know whether Attlee liked being laughed at. I do not know that he even knew he was being laughed at. His reaction was quite different and quite peculiar. We happened to belong to the same club, so, since he was a great clubman, we met fairly often. He never spoke a word to me about anything satirical that I had written about him, but he was always meticulous in congratulating me upon anything satirical that I wrote about anybody else— particularly about any of his colleagues. It was a proud moment for me when one day in a full tea-room he carefully laid down his copy of the SPECTATOR and, walking across the room to me, said, 'I like your verses about Betjeman.'
His affection for Haileybury, his old school, was as intense as his devotion to cricket, and he would talk at length of the deficiencies of Haileybury's cricket team. 'There's no decent left-hand bowler in the Under-Sixteens,' he would explain. 'I don't know what they will do about that in the Eleven in two years' time.' I shared with him his passion for cricket, though I had no connection with Haileybury. Once, when an Australian team was over here, it looked as if the Manchester Test match was going to peter out into an unevent- ful draw. The Australians were put in for a couple of hours' batting at the end of the last day, but to everyone's surprise lost eight ickets for, I think, thirty-five and were very nearly' defeated. Attlee was at the time Leader of the Opposition and I forget by which pre- cise imminent crisis European civilisation was at that moment threatened. But I met him on
the steps of the club. 'Have you seen the news?' I asked. He rushed to the tape and read the score, his little hands shaking with excitement. `That's news. My God, that's news,' he said. When he was in Yugoslavia, he was very angry because none of the Yugoslays could tell him the latest county cricket scores.
There was a brilliant unpredictability about his conversation. Another friend who, along with John Betjeman,shared my affection and ad- miration for Attlee was Malcolm Muggeridge. One evening Malcolm and I went into the Garrick Club about eleven o'clock at night. We found Attlee coming down the stairs and asked him if he would have a drink. He refused, saying that he must be getting on, as was indeed entirely reasonable, but then added—as an afterthought that was to make everything crystal-clear, 'I've got to give away the prizes at a school in South Shields.' It seemed hardly probable that such a ceremony would be taking place some few minutes before midnight.
There are numerous anecdotes about his modesty which are, I think, both true and justified. I doubt if he had any intimate friends. On the other hand, his extraordinary readiness to talk and gossip with persons of no sort of distinction was, in an ex-Prime Minister, a rare and engaging trait. There was nothing of which he was more fond than of telling little anecdotes about Sir Winston Churchill, the whole point of which was that each was exactly the sort of anecdote that everybody tells about Sir Winston Churchill. It had obviously never occurred to him that he had a relation to Sir Winston at all different from that of the man-in-the-street. I can see him now, sitting in an armchair with an enormous waste-paper basket by his side. He had but recently been created an earl. He had with him a gigantic pile of congratulatory letters. He was going through them, putting those which he thought it unnecessary to answer into the waste-paper basket and setting aside those which would receive acknowledgment. The quite over- whelming majority went into the waste-paper basket and, as it overflowed, a Goanese ser- vant was from time to time called up to empty it. Suddenly he looked up from his task of sorting and said across the room to a friend with whom I was sitting and myself, 'Have you heard the latest about Winston?' We had not, and he told us an admirable anecdote, unfortu- nately not -repeatable, about a repartee which Sir Winston had made to a foreign statesman. Then with a chuckle he returned to his sorting.
During his Cherry Cottage days of retire- ment he did not, I think, keep a regular pri- vate secretary, and he used to type out—it is said, with one finger—his correspondence on his own typewriter. He was tolerably good with the letters, but he never could sort out the punctuation marks from the numerals. There was at one time a fairly acid public exchange of letters between him and Mr Grimond as to whether he allowed political favour to play any part in his appointment of judges during his premiership. It ended when Mr Grimond received a letter from him which ran, 'Dear Grimond—This just won't dol.'
I think that he only once came to a SPECTATOR party. Then, I remember, he stood in the middle of the room, and I some- how got delegated by those round the walls io ask his opinion about the questions of thr moment. 'Ask the Earl what is going to happen in Ghana,' they said. So I went and asked him. `They want to know what's going to happen in Ghana,' I said. 'There'll be a bloody row. said Attlee. So I went back with the message. The Earl says there'll be a bloody row. There was.
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