Clement Attlee
Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1945 to 1951 (1883–1967)
Clement Richard Attlee, 1st Earl Attlee (3 January 1883 – 8 October 1967) was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1945 to 1951 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1935 to 1955. Attlee was deputy prime minister during the wartime coalition government under Winston Churchill, and Leader of the Opposition on three occasions: from 1935 to 1940, briefly in 1945 and from 1951 to 1955. He remains the longest-serving Labour leader.
Attlee was born into an upper middle class family, the son of a wealthy London solicitor. After attending Haileybury College and the University of Oxford, he practised as a barrister. The volunteer work he carried out in London's East End exposed him to poverty, and his political views shifted leftwards thereafter. He joined the Independent Labour Party, gave up his legal career, and began lecturing at the London School of Economics; with his work briefly interrupted by service as an officer in the First World War. In 1919, he became mayor of Stepney and in 1922 was elected to Parliament as the Member for Limehouse.
Attlee served in the first Labour minority government led by Ramsay MacDonald in 1924, and then joined the Cabinet during MacDonald's second minority (1929–1931). After retaining his seat in Labour's landslide defeat of 1931, he became the party's deputy leader.
The public source identifies “Clement Attlee” as prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1945 to 1951 (1883–1967). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Clement, Attlee and Prime.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 13, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q129006. VIAF identifies the subject as 36926306. The Library of Congress control number is n82054997. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1883, 1967, 1945 and 1951.
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This entry incorporates text from “Clement Attlee” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.