ABSTRACT
Early Life Clement Richard Attlee was born on January 3, 1883, in Putney, near London. He was reared in a large, late-Victorian, Christian, upper-middleclass family by his father, Henry, an eminent solicitor, and his mother, nee Ellen Watson, a sensitive and affectionate woman. Small and ill as a child, Attlee was shy and loved reading. His conventional upper-middle-class education was at public school (Haileybury) and at University College, Oxford, where he took second class honors in modern history. Influenced by his older brother Tom and by the works of Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, and William Morris, Attlee developed a social consciousness while working at the Haileybury Club, a boys' club in Stepney, in London's East End slums, and he chose to live nearby. Attlee became its manager from 1907 to 1909 and then served a year as secretary at the famous settlement house Toynbee Hall. His education and personal experience helped him become a tutor and lecturer in the Social Services Department of the new, pioneering London School of Economics from 1913 to 1923. With great empathy and respect for the poor, Attlee decided that self-help projects were not sufficient; society itself must be changed. Attlee thus became a Socialist, not from a Marxist or any other theoretical position, but because of his concern for social justice and social efficiency. A volunteer in World War I, he reached the rank of major and served bravely in Gallipoli, Mesopotamia, and France.
