In a touching gesture, Violet Attlee came to the hospital and took Hattie and Roy back with her to stay the night in Downing Street – the only time in his life that Roy slept in Number Ten. The next day they returned to Pontypool by train. The funeral was three days later in St James’ Anglican church, with an address by the Archdeacon of Newport, and Arthur was buried in Trevithin churchyard, even though he (unlike Hattie) was not a believer.fn4 There were 800 mourners in the church and crowds lined the streets outside to pay their respects. Under the headline ‘Romantic Career of a Man of the People’, the Monmouthshire Free Press commemorated ‘A Man Who Had No Enemies’.23 Attlee was unable to attend, but was represented by a junior minister, Lord Henderson.
Roy was not the only one to be devastated by his father’s death. The clearest evidence of how close Tony had grown to both Arthur and Hattie is contained in a remarkable letter that he wrote to Hattie from Oxford on the evening of the funeral. It is a long letter, but worth quoting in full for what it says about all three of them:
Dear Mrs Jenkins,
I didn’t really have a proper opportunity for a talk with you in Pontypool today, so I feel I must write to you and tell you one or two things that are in my mind. This is not just a polite letter of sympathy, but a very special one since as you know I’ve always looked on you as almost a second mother.
Surely you must have been comforted and fortified by the enormous turnout of people at the funeral. It was the most impressive tribute to a man that I have ever seen in my life or ever expect to see. And I couldn’t help noticing that the people in the streets didn’t behave as though they were there out of curiosity – they behaved as though they had lost a real & beloved friend, as indeed they had.
Yet, thinking it over, there is nothing surprising in this spontaneous tribute. Your husband had the most astonishing power of inspiring love and affection, especially in young people – there was something so genuine and generous and sincere about him. I don’t know what his religious convictions were, but the only way I can describe it is by saying that he was a ‘very perfect Christian gentleman’, in the highest sense of the term.
As far as I am concerned, his was one of the dominating influences in my life. I shall never forget as long as I live the profound effect which he had during the first year of the war on my whole attitude to life. I think he liked me, and had confidence in me: I only hope I shall prove worthy of that trust.
When I saw you first this morning, you said how unreasonable such a tragedy seems to be, how cruelly unnecessary: and that is bound to be one’s instinctive feeling. Yet (and I hope you will forgive me for saying this) I wonder whether death may not prove to have been a kind release for him. He had such vitality and joy in life that I am sure he could never have endured living on as a partial invalid or restricted in his activities. If that was the alternative perhaps this was the most merciful way.
But I particularly want to say this. Whether you realise it or not, a large part of his influence with people was due to you. Even if I had not met Mr Jenkins, I should still have got enormous pleasure and benefit from visiting Greenlands and talking to you; and I’m sure this is true of many others as well. You mustn’t mind my saying this: but I’m terribly anxious that you should gradually take up your old life again – meeting people, being active in Pontypool, and helping and encouraging people (as you helped me) by your wisdom and kindness.
I have at least an inkling of how you must feel through having seen my mother go through the same agony when my father died. I know she felt that the whole bottom had dropped out of her life. But bit by bit she took up her old teaching activities again, and I really think has done a lot of good. I know it’s what my father would have wished her to do.
I can’t tell you how much I appreciated you asking me to go with you and your family at the funeral. It moved me very deeply and I shall never forget the honour you paid me by doing it.
I do hope I have said nothing in this letter which may irritate you. If I have, please forgive it, because it was said from a full heart.
Please don’t reply to this letter. I shall be thinking of you often, and I know that you’ll face the next few weeks with the same courage you showed during the ordeal this afternoon.
With very, very much love,
Tony24
The most remarkable thing about this letter is that it makes no mention of Roy whatever.
In her grief, Hattie decided that the best tribute to Arthur’s memory would be for Roy to take over his seat in Parliament. On paper the idea was not unreasonable. He had already fought a seat at the General Election and done well. He was looking for another to contest and was just the sort of bright young man the Labour Party wanted in the Commons. What could be more natural than that he should stand for his home town? The proposal found some support. ‘What better memorial,’ a former chairman of Pontypool council wrote to the local paper, ‘. . . than to send his son to the House of Commons to carry the torch that his father lit nearly fifty years ago on Varteg Hill?’25 But other voices were raised against. Ernest H. Parker of Pontnewydd denied that Arthur would have wanted Roy to follow him:
I know it would not be Alderman Jenkins’ wish that we should, out of sympathy, resuscitate the old practice of hereditary representation. We who knew Alderman Jenkins for many years knew his very decided opinions on that question . . . If Mr Roy Jenkins is to be Member for Pontypool, it must not be because he is the son of an illustrious father.26
Again Roy let himself be led, this time by his mother. ‘At one level of consciousness’, he admitted in his memoirs, he knew quite well that it would be folly for him to try to replace his father.27 For all his cosmopolitanism, Arthur was above all a miners’ MP. As his Times obituary noted, ‘The welfare of miners was always his chief interest’;28 and Hansard bears that out. Roy Jenkins could never have been credible as a miners’ MP. His interests already lay far from Pontypool and he would always have been a poor surrogate for his father. Moreover he would have had his mother, a prominent and controversial local personality in her own right – magistrate, school governor, stalwart supporter of the local hospital, the Red Cross, youth clubs and pensioners’ organisations – forever standing over him: he could never have been his own man. Hattie’s unpopularity in the town has probably been exaggerated. But one local councillor who claimed in 1972 that Arthur wished Roy to succeed him certainly thought her a liability to his cause:
I remember her so well, walking about the town always elegantly dressed, usually in black – a cape and hat, that sort of thing. She wasn’t just Hattie Jenkins. She was Mrs Arthur Jenkins, wife of the MP. She was a good sincere woman, but Arthur’s long years of public service seemed to have left her with a conviction that only a Jenkins could serve the valley.
With all respect to her, I still feel she was a stumbling block to her own ambitions for her son. I still feel that if he had been able to persuade her to go away for a fortnight’s holiday during that fight for the nomination we might have pulled it off for Roy. But with her taking him from door to door I’m afraid his chances were very much reduced.29
Roy went hard for the nomination. He addressed meetings and canvassed influential individuals. Pontypool was a rock-solid Labour seat, so there was a lot of competition. Eventually twelve hopefuls were invited to a selection conference on 29 June, attended by 220 local members. Roy got down to the last two, but in the final ballot he was comfortably beaten (134:76) by Granville West, the local solicitor who had missed out on the Cardiff Central selection in 1944. West duly won the by-election, but subsequently made little impact in the Commons or (when surprisingly ennobled by Gaitskell) in the Lords. For Jenkins it was another fortunate escape. Leo Abse, who followed West in 1959, claimed that he was deeply scarred by his rejection and was ever afterwards ‘almost phobic where Wales was concerned’.30 But this is rubbish. After his parents died he had little reason to go back to Wales, except occasionally to speak as he did in every other part of Britain. H
e always thought it false to make too much of his Welsh identity; but he had no particular hang-up about it and in fact became more attached to it as he got older. He actually continued to bank with Barclays in Pontypool to the end of his life – scarcely the act of a man who was ‘phobic’ about his origins. It was Hattie who felt his rejection most keenly. She continued with her public activities, as Tony had advised, becoming a county councillor in 1949 and chairman of the bench in 1953, and lived long enough to see Roy safely elected for another seat; but she never forgave the local party and was never really happy again. She died in 1953, aged only sixty-seven. All in all she had far less influence on Roy’s career than Arthur did.
His next venture proved more fruitful than his previous efforts. But once again he owed it entirely to Attlee’s patronage. As he himself put it: ‘By acts of almost inexplicable generosity not obviously stemming from his detached character the Prime Minister launched me on a writing career.’31 First Attlee invited his late friend’s son to edit a volume of his speeches between May 1945 and November 1946. Jenkins selected them – twenty-nine speeches or extracts from speeches, grouped not chronologically but under eight headings – and wrote an entirely factual three-and-a-half-page introduction, for which he was paid (by Attlee personally) £50. The book was published by Heinemann in 1947 under the typically vapid title for such collections, Purpose and Policy. Then Attlee gave Roy free access to his papers to write his biography. Despite having been Labour leader since 1935 Attlee was still so little known that there was a gap to be filled, and Heinemann paid Jenkins a very decent advance of £200, with an option on his next two books (which suggests that they saw him as a writer with a future). In fact he found nothing of a personal nature in the papers and wrote an almost entirely public record of the Prime Minister’s career up to May 1945, which added little to public knowledge. He wrote it in the evenings and weekends over twelve months between November 1946 and November 1947. It is unmistakably a young man’s book – earnest and dutiful, in the manner of all those Victorian tombstones he had consumed at Bletchley, but mercifully shorter – with no word of criticism and very few flashes of his mature style, though admittedly Attlee remains to this day a difficult subject for any pen to bring to life, and the tyro author was scarcely in a position to be critical, even had he wished to be. Attlee made a few corrections, but was generally happy with the result.32 Looking back, however, Jenkins thought it a mistake to have tried to write about someone towards whom he was so clearly in ‘a client relationship’; and he never again wrote about a living subject.33, fn5 Nevertheless Mr Attlee: An Interim Biography was ‘not a bad book’, and he still thought it read ‘unembarrassingly’ forty-five years later.38 The reviewers – including George Orwell in Tribune – were generally kind. It sold around 3,500 copies. Above all, it gave him his start as a political biographer.
But his primary ambition was still to get into Parliament as soon as possible; and in 1948 – just before Mr Attlee came out – another opening arose when the Member for Central Southwark suddenly resigned. It was not a prospect which attracted much interest, since the seat was due to disappear at the next election. Comprising a narrow wedge of working-class housing stretching from the Elephant and Castle towards Camberwell, the constituency had been heavily bombed during the war – ‘whole streets were wiped off the canvassers’ lists’39 – and much of its population evacuated. Even on paper the electorate was now only 27,000, and fewer than half that number had voted in 1945, when Labour won by 9,336 votes to 3,654. Thus Central Southwark offered no more than a temporary toehold in Parliament, especially since the Member for North Southwark, the Minister of Labour George Isaacs, had already been promised the new enlarged constituency. Nevertheless Jenkins judged that two years would give him enough time to make a name that would help him to something more secure. Just as he was in very different circumstances thirty-four years later, he was so impatient to find a seat that he was willing to take on anything that came along. He applied for the nomination and was selected (beating a local councillor by twenty votes to eight) on 23 March.
The speech with which he won the backing of the local committee combined a becoming modesty with socialist conviction and a display of economic expertise. It offers the fullest statement, at the moment of his entry into grown-up politics, of how Jenkins presented himself and what he believed, in 1948, the Labour party stood for. After an elegant expression of regret at the passing of the constituency and a tribute to the retiring Member, he began with four personal points. First, he was careful to point out that, ‘although I have been lucky enough to receive a first-class university education’, he was not brought up ‘in an atmosphere detached from the harsher facts of life’. In South Wales he had seen dole queues longer than they had known in South London. Second, ‘I was brought up in a family that had its whole being in Labour politics . . . I know how important a part of an MP’s job lies not in Westminster, but in Pontypool or in Central Southwark or wherever his constituency may be.’ Third, though not strictly a local candidate, he lived only a mile from the Elephant and Castle, ‘and it is a mile which it would be my intention to cover very frequently’; and his wife, ‘who shares to the full my interest in politics’, would be ‘equally willing to play her part’. Fourth, he had already fought one campaign in a difficult area.
These points made, he went on to praise the achievement of the Labour government with characteristic historical perspective. ‘If one compares the legislative record of this Government with that of almost any previous administration one realizes how big is the step towards social equality and a decent ordering of the nation’s resources which we have taken since 1945.’ The social security system, the National Health Service, ‘the rehabilitation of the coal industry’, ‘the reorganisation of the country’s transport’ – each one of these measures would in normal times be sufficient to ensure a government’s claim to reforming fame. Moreover, all this had been achieved at a time of desperate economic stringency. The problem was that the country was living above its income and must now take steps to ‘balance our account’. But that only enhanced the need for a Labour government, not a return to bad old Tory remedies:
If times are difficult and many goods are scarce, it is more than ever essential that the Labour policy of fair shares for all should be supported. If we face a period of possible economic crisis, then let us ensure that it is the socialist solution of increased production and a planned allocation of resources which is applied, and not the old Tory solution. For don’t let us forget that the Tories have a solution of a sort to our present economic difficulties. By creating a certain amount of unemployment, by allowing a slashing of wage rates to follow from this, by applying all the old deflationary methods, by ending scarcity by the illusory method of taking purchasing power from the pockets of the people, they might cut down the volume of our imports, not because people didn’t need them but because people couldn’t pay for them. But we don’t want that. I am pretty sure that the people of Central Southwark don’t want that. I am pretty sure that the people of the country as a whole don’t want it.
If selected, he thought he could fight a successful campaign ‘which would give us a great victory at the polls and which would also make a contribution to the task of educating the people to the facts of our economic situation, and thus strike a blow in the vital battle for production, with which is bound up the whole future of our movement and of our Government’.40 This might have been the Chancellor of 1968 speaking.
A by-election so close to Westminster drew a good deal of coverage in the national press, so once the campaign started his performance came under some scrutiny. ‘Mr Jenkins,’ the Manchester Guardian reported, ‘is a tall young man with a rather shy manner. But he warms up on the platform and has a Welsh flair for oratory.’41 More perceptively, the Observer suggested that soaring oratory was not really his style:
A Labour meeting here is apt to be quiet. The audience appears to listen with polite inattention . . .
In these uninspiring circumstances Mr Jenkins deals soberly with the larger issues, as becomes Mr Attlee’s man. Patiently struggling against a training which inclines him to speak above the local heads, he stands as counsel for the defence of a Government which might be accused of failure and calls for an impressive acquittal.42
He held meetings nearly every evening in the ten days before polling on 29 April. Again the constituency’s proximity to Westminster meant that he was supported by an impressive line-up of Cabinet ministers (Hugh Dalton and James Griffiths), junior ministers (Edith Summerskill and Douglas Jay) and MPs (including Bessie Braddock and the young Member for next-door Bermondsey, Bob Mellish), as well as friends of his own, including his boss at the ICFC, John Kinross. His Tory opponent was a man named James Greenwood who had left school at fourteen and made much of being the local candidate – legitimately, in that he ran an advertising agency based in the constituency and had long been active in local politics; but Jenkins pointed out that he actually lived in Hampstead, six times further away than he himself did! Greenwood tried hard to bring the campaign down to street level, shouting against the trams and asserting that the threatened closure of a local market mattered more to the people of Southwark than the United Nations. Jenkins, by contrast, at his ‘orderly and rather stuffy meetings’,43 kept firmly to the bigger picture, maintaining that the eyes of the country – indeed, the world – were on Southwark, looking for a big vote of confidence in the Labour government. Full employment was his trump card, illustrated in leaflets showing a long queue outside the labour exchange in Walworth Road before the war, contrasted with a recent picture of the same building now with no queue. Other photographs showed the dapper young candidate talking with building workers and pensioners; the back page of his election address featured Jennifer asserting that ‘the housewives and mothers of Southwark stand solidly behind Labour’s policy of fair shares for all’. Repeatedly Jenkins damned the Tories as the party of unemployment who would cut the living standards of the workers: ‘The leopard does not change his spots.’ And in his eve-of-poll speech he ridiculed a Tory poster that showed a tug-of-war – the Labour Party plus Communists plus Fascists against the Conservative party plus the people:
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