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In January 1941, Sheila Shear and her sister were evacuated from east London to the Chilterns and billeted with a bachelor called Harry Mayo. They came from very different backgrounds - the Shears were Jewish, he was Christian - but an affectionate bond developed between them. Weekly visits and holidays with Uncle Harry, as they came to know him, continued long after the war had ended.

When Harry died, Sheila and her mother went to the funeral: "When we got to Chesham, we were treated like the closest members of his family. In fact, in the church - and this was the first Christian funeral my mother and I had ever been to - we were put to sit in the front row, in front of Uncle Harry's nieces and nephews. It was only then, I think, that I really appreciated how much our little family had meant to him - and had gone on meaning to him all his life.

"We returned to London in the knowledge that we would never go back to Chesham again. But the following day we each received a letter from his solicitor containing a cheque. In the envelope was a note that read: "A very small token of my very great affection."

Sheila is a past president of the League of Jewish Women and an energetic organiser at Nightingale House, a Jewish care home in London. Joan Risley lives near Chelmsford. She is a grandmother who learned to swim when she was 60 and keeps fit by line-dancing. Don Bayley ran a pension scheme for a large company in the West Midlands until his retirement a decade ago. These three people are unconnected, but they have one thing in common: the greatest evacuation of children in British history, which began on Friday 1 September 1939.

It was codenamed Operation Pied Piper. Who on earth came up with that name? Not a mother, that is certain. After all, the piper leads the children of Hamelin away from the town, never to return. Over the six years of the war, more than two million children were sent away from their family homes. Most returned, but how they had changed and how the separation affected their relationships with their families is seldom considered.

What must it have been like to be sent away from home at five, 10 or even 14, as some of the older ones were, and then come home months, - or, more often, years - later and have to pick up where you left off? Is it even possible when your life has changed in all other respects? And who were the winners and losers in the whole evacuation project?

Joan Risley is keen to emphasise the good points in her experience. She was evacuated twice. The first time, she went with her sister to Beccles, in Suffolk. They were home by the beginning of 1940 but when an invasion seemed likely, Joan announced that she wished to be evacuated again. None of her brothers and sisters wanted to go too, so she was sent alone, aged nine, to Northamptonshire. She lived there with a childless couple who loved and cared for her as their own. When she returned in 1945 she found it difficult: "I remember sitting on a sofa with a feeling of not belonging. By that time we were really poor. Dad was still ill and unable to work. My family all commented on how I talked different, so I had that strange feeling of not quite belonging yet wanting to be there because they were my family. I soon got used to being with Mum, and she got used to me. But with my siblings it was more difficult. They are my family and I am very fond of them but they never went away like I did, so they don't understand that I have had these two lives."

Two lives. That is what so many children of that generation had and for some it was, in retrospect, a bonus.

But it wasn't a bonus for parents. As a mother, I feel deeply troubled at the thought of being forced to miss out on five or six years of my sons' childhood. I'm profoundly grateful that I have never had to face that dilemma. In Operation Pied Piper, the family suffered but I feel the real losers, as in the legend, were the parents. It was as tough for many as one would expect. Although some wrote of their immense gratitude to the kindly foster parents who had loved and cared for their children, there were far more stories of mothers feeling that they had missed part of their children's lives. Vera Brittain wrote in her memoir: "The small gallant figures which disappeared behind the flapping tarpaulin of the grey-painted Duchess of Atholl have never grown up in my mind, for the children who returned and eventually took their places were not the same; the break in continuity made them rather appear as an elder brother and sister of the vanished pair."

If you ask Don Bayley about his past he immediately talks about his evacuation to Lichfield, just 20 miles from his home in West Bromwich. It changed his life and that of his younger brother, Phil. Mrs Coles, their foster mother, gave them something their own mother could never have done: a love of books and learning. And it was not one-sided. Twenty years after the war, Mrs Coles wrote to Don to say that she felt the children had been sent "to cheer her up".

"I considered that she was proper middle class while we were clearly working class. I learned to appreciate all these different things from Mrs Coles. I learned how to talk to people and to address them properly and with confidence. I developed a different accent, dropping my Black Country slang. In fact, I have to say that Mrs Coles changed me completely and she loved me - I'm ashamed to admit it - more than my mother ever did. She made me feel wanted. She called us My Boys and that really meant something to us."

When the boys went back to West Bromwich after the war, Don was dismayed by his mother's reaction to his new found interest in books and education. She cursed him for being "a bloody big 'ead" and was constantly nagging him to "shift yer bloody books".

Even parents who were delighted that their children had had life-enhancing experiences and opportunities, found it hard to adjust to the changes. Fathers, often forgotten in the evacuation story, also felt they had lost out. In 1944, Ted Matthews wrote to one of his four daughters whom he sent to America in 1940: "Sending you away has been, in some ways, a tragedy. I still think it was the right thing to do, even though events proved different from our fears. But it has been heartbreaking to miss these years of your lives. We shall meet again as almost strangers."

Michael Henderson and his brother, Gerald, were sent to Boston in 1940, aged eight and six. They lived with a loving family and completely absorbed the culture, education and American way of life. Now, as then, it felt like a positive gain on every level. Yet he wrote: "Returning home, it was hard for us to step into the lives of parents who had survived the bombing - and more recently the V1 and V2 rockets - and would jump at any loud noise. Our parents' admonishments were met with, 'We don't do that in America.' Soon America became known in our family as 'We-land'."

It took months for the four Hendersons to re-establish a family relationship - a lot longer, Michael notes wryly, than it took to remove the accumulated dirt they had acquired on the aircraft carrier en route back from the US.

Sometimes children observed their parents afresh and found their way of life different from what they had grown used to with foster parents. John Mare, who had been evacuated to Canada aged seven, was horrified, as only a child can be, by what he found on his return to Bath. He told his friend Penny: "My mother wears lipstick and powder. They drink and smoke, and even the dog is called Whisky!"

The gulf in experience was not just felt between the generations or within families in which some children had been evacuated and others had not. Nigel Bromage and his twin brother, Michael, spent two years of the war on a farm in south Wales. They shared a room, they went to the same school, experienced the same foster family and saw the same sights in the countryside. They were seven when they arrived and nine when they left. Yet they had two opposite responses to their evacuation.

Nigel and Michael's hosts were small farmers at Golden Grove near Llandeilo, in Carmarthenshire. They had 20 cows, all of which had to be milked by hand, and the only aid was a horse. For Nigel, there was no down side. "As I enjoyed my experience on the Williamses' farm so my brother did not. It is not perhaps surprising. We were very different personalities - he an introvert, I an extrovert. He tended to opt out of activities around the farm; I volunteered for everything. I loved every minute of it. I don't think I was particularly aware of Michael's unhappiness at the time, because I was enjoying myself. It was only after he died that my sister told me how homesick and unhappy Michael had been."

Foster parents are often forgotten in the evacuation story, yet their role was vital. For them the war years often brought great delight, though it was only temporary. One wrote poignantly: "Here are your children ... Mother and I have loved them with all our hearts. We ask you to keep alive their loyalty to us as we have kept alive their loyalty to you - may they never forget that they have two homes."

As there was such pressure on rural households to take evacuees, some children were billeted with childless couples and for many a lifelong relationship ensued. These are the good news stories that we don't hear enough about.

Some children became so much a part of their foster parents' lives that the outcome was life-changing for all parties. Gordon Abbott is constantly irritated that people are not interested in his evacuation story as it had a happy ending. He was fostered by a childless couple who farmed in Cornwall. They loved him, cared for him and educated him as if he had been their natural son. He was blissfully happy. When the war was over, he and the couple were devastated that he had to return to London, but there seemed no choice.

Once "home", Gordon felt like a fish out of water. He did not like the city and he was not particularly enamoured of his mother's new boyfriend. She, in turn, realised that he was deeply unsettled and she soon wrote to his foster parents, to ask if he could return to Cornwall. He did and was adopted by them as their son. The war had given him a new family. "I loved them dearly, and thank the upbringing they gave me, which helped me into my adult life.

"There have been many stories written by evacuees about their childhood experiences and the effect it had on their lives. Some were happy, some were appalling and some were just unhappy. I was one of the many happy ones, and my years as an evacuee from London to the West Country were filled with wonderful memories."
When the Children Came Home: Stories of Wartime Evacuees by Julie Summers is published by Simon & Schuster, £18.99. To order a copy for £15.19, with free p&p, go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846. Topics

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In January 1941, Sheila Shear and her sister were evacuated from east London to the Chilterns and billeted with a bachelor called Harry Mayo. They came from very different backgrounds - the Shears were Jewish, he was Christian - but an affectionate bond developed between them.

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Returning to London after the war the train seemed to be saying I'm going home, I'm going home." instead of "clickety clack clickety clack". It wasn't what I'd dreamed it would be: from 1939-1945 I hadn't been home nor was my mother used to having three children to deal with.

John Matthews

To escape the Blitz I was sent to Devon. I was eight years old. There, between the main beach at Paignton and the next, Goodrington Sands, is a headland, which in those days had just a few large mansions on it. I and another boy, about my age, were taken by the billeting officer to one of these houses, inhabited by a wealthy widow and her servants. She refused to come to the door, and the maid who answered, a sour woman dressed in a black-and-white uniform, made it quite clear that they wanted nothing to do with scruffy urchins from the East End. But during the war there was an emergency order that made any spare bedrooms available as army billets or for evacuees, so they were forced to take us.

The result was that we were kept locked in our bedroom when not at school. It was a large room, but we had no toys, games, books or radio. Fortunately it did have a lovely polished wooden floor. We amused ourselves by sliding in our socks up and down, or giving one another rides on a rug. When the old lady had had her evening meal, we were allowed down into the kitchen, where we stood and were given a Marmite sandwich and a mug of cocoa. We never got any cooked meals. When we complained we were hungry we were told to consider ourselves lucky - there was a war on.

On one Sunday afternoon we were allowed out into the back garden, which had a croquet lawn. We had no idea what croquet was, but we bashed the balls around for some time, got bored and then discovered that in the corner was a wooden summer house on a pillar which could be turned. We found out that it could be completely rotated, so we gave one another rides to see how fast we could spin it. I think this must have been seen from the house, because we were abruptly called in and locked in the bedroom again.

After about half an hour, the maid came in and gave us each a sheet of paper and a pencil. She said we should write to our parents. We pointed out that we had no envelopes or stamps. "The mistress will take care of that," she answered. It was obvious that our letters were going to be censored. We wrote the sort of thing one should - "having a wonderful time. Wish you were here" - and then, the following morning I somehow managed to steal an envelope and stamp and wrote a rather more truthful letter home. The gist of it was that if something didn't happen quickly I was going to run away.

I received no answer but, two Saturdays later, the maid came to the bedroom and told me to pack. I threw my clothes into my suitcase and was taken downstairs. There, I found my mother standing outside in the rain. She took me by bus to Torquay, where she went up and down the streets, knocking at doors and asking if anyone would take an evacuee. Nobody was keen.

I cannot remember the name of the couple who took me in or even what they looked like, but I do remember the address: 8 Blyndwyll Road, Chelston. I think they looked after me fairly well, but I was lonely. The irony was that my brother, Peter, was living just around the corner, but I had no contact with him. He was sent to a church hall that had been turned into a school for evacuee children, while I went to a local boys' school.

It was the worst school I had ever attended. The entire staff had joined up and their places were taken by a weird bunch of elderly men and women, none of whom had any experience. My teacher looked like a gipsy. He had a mass of untidy, black hair and two large gold earrings. He told us that he had worked before the war in a circus, and kept us amused with tales of lion taming and acrobats.

I stayed in Torquay for a year, but was brought back to London in time for the doodlebug offensive - my parents evidently did not want me to miss any of the fun.

June Carrington

"In the event of an emergency arising ..." the letter ran. Well it did, and we who would have begun our second year at Victoria Road County Primary Schoool in September, 1939 - and almost every other youngster in Runcorn - ended up on the Fylde coast, away from the Luftwaffe's assumed targets.

As a six-year-old, I had little idea of the meaning of war, except that it would mean separation from my parents and my younger brother.

The letters and label reproduced - I cherish particularly the label, still complete with its original string, which was hung around my neck during the eventful journey to Blackpool - are undated. But my late mother, Mrs Mark Darlington, believed that it was some time in late August, 1939.

I certainly remember walking with my father, the late Mr John Darlington, over Runcorn Railway Bridge to Widnes Central Station. He carried my white cotton kit-bag containing clothing. My gas-mask was slung over my shoulders. Some mums came along as helpers. Those with younger, pre-school age children followed us to Blackpool a few days later. So, there were tearful farewells before we set off on our great adventure.

When we arrived at Blackpool we were taken to a school and given a carrier-bag of "iron rations". There was chocolate among the goodies, and it began to take on something of a party atmosphere. But then began what proved to be the most traumatic part of the experience: finding a bed for the night.

It had been impressed upon me that whatever happened I must stay with my closest friend and his older sister. It could never have occurred to our respective parents what a problem this would create.

We had all been herded on to buses, and were driven around the side-streets, stopping here and there while landladies came aboard and "selected" their diminutive boarders. Most would, albeit reluctantly, take one. Some would take two, but three proved a problem. Each time one or two of our trio was "picked", the others(s) set up a howl of protest. So, it was quite dark and we were the last on the bus when one landlady took pity on us and we were offloaded.

A few days later, my mother and young brother Robin arrived in Blackpool and tracked us down. Rather against her better judgement, I think, my landlady said she could take them in. For a little while, three-quarters of my family was together again. But it did not work out well.

Eventually, our reluctant hostess declared, with a total lack of subtlety: "I don't mind the kids, it's the mothers..." We had every sympathy with her. After all, it was still the high holiday season, and instead of receiving more affluent boarders, they had to put up with a load of evacuees.

Eventually, mum found us more spacious accommodation with two old ladies, whom we later came to call Arsenic and Old Lace - though if anyone deserved medals they did. They lived in a very splendiferous house. Maiden ladies, and sisters as alike as peas in a pod, they had a number of life-size dolls around the house, beautifully dressed, and obviously looked upon as the children they never had. There was also a huge case of butterflies at the top of the first flight of stairs. It was hardly the ideal setting for two lively youngsters and a mum pining for home.

As time dragged on, and Runcorn was neither invaded nor, at that time, bombed, and we and many other families returned home. We had been away less than three months, but it seemed like a lifetime.

Michael Henderson

My life was turned upside down by evacuation, not in 1939 but in 1940. My horizons were narrow, just those of a patriotic young boy at a boarding school in Surrey. Then suddenly a voyage on an ocean liner over the Atlantic in a convoy with other ships, guarded by a battleship and five destroyers and being received by an unknown American family. We were some of the 3,000 British children who enjoyed the amazing generosity freely given by American families.

From school blazer and cap and gartered long stockings to corduroy knickerbockers, dungarees and baseball cap, from boys-only to co-education, from pounds, shillings and pence to the decimal system - there were abrupt changes. But American schools were welcoming. Every morning, American children salute the flag and recite the pledge of allegiance; for us, they thoughtfully placed a Union Jack that we could face. We were soon caught up in American rituals such as Halloween and Thanksgiving and quickly accepted hamburgers and hot dogs.

After three years, my father came on a mission to Washington and phoned up. My comment as I put down the phone was: "Gee, he talks just like in the movies." I can still recite American poetry and sing the college songs we learnt around the campfire in the summer. We returned home on an escort aircraft carrier, and on arrival walked past our mother without recognising her.

Not every overseas evacuee looks back on the time with pleasure. But my younger brother and I, despite the five years family separation, regard the experience as a blessing for which we have always been grateful.

Michael Henderson is the author of See You After the Duration - the Evacuation of British Children to North America (PublishAmerica)

Bill Reeds

I was 13 when I was evacuated from Chiswick. I went with my school to a small town called Little Gadderson, between Hemel Hempstead and Berkhampstead. We walked, a long line of us, from school to the railway station, carrying our luggage and gas masks.

The train took us to Hemel Hempstead, where were all loaded into a coach and driven to a more rural area. Then the bus stopped and we all piled out. There was a crowd of people waiting, and they would select the children they liked the look of. Then the bus, with us aboard again, would go another hundred yards or so and repeat the exercise.

When it was my turn to be selected, I was very fortunate. Jackie Gilbert, a boy I knew quite well, and I were picked by the James people, who owned the local butcher's shop. Along with the husband and wife, there were three daughters, all very friendly, and we were treated exceptionally well, probably a lot better than I had been treated at home.

I had a very good time, doing things that were different from anything I had ever done before. Living in the country was wonderful. The food was quite good - including rabbit pie. It didn't seem as though we were on rations at all.

Extract from Goodnight Children, Everywhere: Voices of the WWII Evacuees by Monica B. Morris (The History Press)

Pam Hobbs

I was 10 when the order came through for us to evacuate. It was just after Dunkirk in June 1940, and we were living in Leigh-on-Sea, 60 miles across the Channel from occupied France. My older sister Iris had brought a letter home from school saying that all local schools were closed, and urging parents to evacuate their children. We had packed our belongings - a change of clothes, a toothbrush and not much else - in a sandbag. In case we got lost, we had a label around our neck.

We were put on a train to Derbyshire, heading for Charbury. When we arrived, we were taken to the village school, and given hot chocolate and biscuits.

I was a nervous child to start with, but the selection process was humiliating, and that stuck with me in later life. We were asked to stand up and turn around for the locals, who had lined up against a wall to inspect us. I looked a mess. I had fallen down a hill during a stop-off in the train journey and had bandages on my legs.

The pretty girls who looked like Shirley Temple and the strongest boys who would be handy on the farms were taken first. My sister and I were among the last four to be chosen. One little boy had a club foot with a built-up boot, and the other had very thick glasses and a shaven head, presumably because he'd had fleas.

We were chosen by the Simpsons, a stern and religious couple. Joe was a miner, and had been working in the pits since he was 12, and Cissy was a good soul at heart. We had to read the Bible and go to church two or even three times on Sunday.

For all the hardship, I loved being in the countryside. There was a farm next door where I went for milk and would look in on the hens. We used to watch piglets being born. I hadn't seen such things before.

The worst time was at Christmas. We received loads of presents from our parents, things such as snakes and ladders, but Mrs Simpson was rather put out that we had so many. She let us open them but not play with them. Uncle Joe had secretly made us a sleigh, too, and he was thrilled with it. I never saw him smile so much.

I was away for two years, and stayed with three other families before returning home in July 1942. I was scared stiff. After the first wail of the siren, I was off down the Anderson shelter. Because I'd been away for the Blitz, I hadn't adapted to life in the war.

Pam Hobbs is the author of Don't Forget to Write (Ebury)

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To mark the 70th anniversary of evacuation, hundreds of people gathered at a service in St Paul's cathedral yesterday. To some, it had been an adventure; to others, a lonely and fearful separation. In these moving testimonies, former evacuees recall the day when their lives were altered for ever.

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There was much more to women's work during World War Two than 'Make Do and Mend'. They built tanks, worked in rescue teams, and operated behind enemy lines. Carol Harris spoke to women of their experiences during the conflict.

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There was much more to women's work during World War Two than 'Make Do and Mend'. They built tanks, worked in rescue teams, and operated behind enemy lines. Carol Harris spoke to women of their experiences during the conflict.

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Public Information Films | 1945 to 1951 | About 1945-1951

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For the first time view complete Public Information films on the National Archives website, featuring a selection some of the most memorable and influential Central Office of Information films from the last 60 years to celebrate the 60th Aniversary of the COI.

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BBC - Higher Bitesize History - Labour governments 1945 to 1951

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A BBC Bitesize secondary school revision resource for Higher History on Labour governments 1945 to 1951: the five giants, the impact of reforms

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Designing Britain - Social Reform 1930-1950

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Up until the outbreak of war in 1939, British society had retained a rigid class structure, with the educated middle and upper classes tending to believe in their own moral and cultural superiority over the working classes.

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Labour and the creation of the welfare state

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Labour and the creation of the welfare state

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Introduction

The outcome of the 1945 election was more than a sensation. It was a political earthquake.

Less than 12 weeks earlier, Winston Churchill had announced the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany. Churchill wanted his wartime coalition to continue until Japan too had been defeated, but was not unduly dismayed when his Labour ministers insisted that the country be offered a choice. The prime minister called the election for early July, confident that the British people would back the greatest hero of the hour. Of all Churchill's colossal misjudgments, that was probably the most egregious.

The voters wanted an end to wartime austerity, and no return to prewar economic depression. They wanted change. Three years earlier, in the darkest days of the war, they had been offered a tantalising glimpse of how things could be in the bright dawn of victory. The economist William Beveridge had synthesised the bravest visions of all important government departments into a single breathtaking view of the future.

The 1942 Beveridge Report spelled out a system of social insurance, covering every citizen regardless of income. It offered nothing less than a cradle-to-grave welfare state.

That was the great promise dangled before the British electorate in 1945. Though Churchill had presided over the planning for radical social reform, though he was a genuine hero of the masses - and though, ironically enough, the Tory manifesto pledges were not all that different from Labour's - the people did not trust him to deliver the brave new world of Beveridge.

There were other factors too. The Labour party had held office only twice before, in 1924 and in 1929-31, but during the war years its leadership had acquired both experience and trust. It now looked like a party of government.

Labour's promise to take over the commanding heights of the economy via nationalisation were anathema to committed Tories, but after nearly six years of wartime state direction of the economy it did not seem nearly so radical as it had before the war - or indeed as it seems now.

Then there was the military vote. Britain had millions of men and women in uniform in 1945, scattered over Europe, the far east, and elsewhere. They, more than any other section of the electorate, yearned for change and for a better civilian life. The military vote was overwhelmingly pro-Labour.

Many students of the 1945 election believe that a key role was played by the Daily Mirror, then the biggest selling paper in Britain, and easily the most popular among the armed forces. On VE (Victory in Europe) Day, the Mirror published an immensely powerful cartoon by the brilliant Philip Zec. It showed a battered, bandaged Allied soldier holding out to the reader a slip of paper marked Victory and Peace in Europe. Under the drawing was the caption "Here you are! Don't lose it again."

The same cartoon was published on the Mirror's front page on the morning of the most remarkable general election of the 20th century. But when the result was announced on July 26 - three weeks after polling day to allow military postal votes to be counted - it was clear that postwar politics had changed utterly.

With 47.7% of the vote, Labour secured a staggering 393 seats in the House of Commons. The Conservatives, with 39.7%, won just 210 seats. The Liberal party, which had governed the country less than quarter of a century earlier, was reduced to 9% of the vote, and just 12 seats. The new prime minister was Churchill's deputy in the war time coalition, Clement Attlee.

On the first day of the new parliament, the massed ranks of Labour members bawled out the socialist anthem, the Red Flag. Tories everywhere were scandalised. (There is a splendid apocryphal story of a lady in a grand London hotel who was overheard exclaiming "Labour in power? The country will never stand for it!")

But stand for it they did, over the next six momentous years.
Clement Attlee
The new prime minister was not obviously cut out for the job. Painfully shy and reserved to the point of coldness, he had the appearance - and often the style - of a bank clerk. Churchill described him, cruelly, as "a sheep in sheep's clothing".

The son of a City solicitor, he was educated at Haileybury College - which specialised in turning out administrators for the British Raj - and at University College, Oxford. Attlee was so far from being a passionate ideologue that his wife Violet once casually observed: "Clem was never really a socialist, were you, darling? Well, not a rabid one."

Yet this essentially herbivorous exterior cloaked a steely determination, and a deepseated devotion to social justice first developed during his voluntary work in London's East End before the first world war. After distinguished service in that war, Attlee entered parliament in 1922, and served in the first two Labour governments. In 1931, he declined to join Ramsey Macdonald's national coalition, preferring to stay with the rump opposition. He became Labour leader in 1935.

Though many on the left opposed Labour participation in Churchill's wartime coalition (at least during the early years when Hitler was allied with the Soviet Union under Stalin), Attlee responded to the national crisis by guiding his party into the national government. He became Lord Privy Seal and, from 1942, deputy prime minister. He was 62 when he entered Downing Street.
Attlee's team
The great tide of new Labour MPs who entered the Commons in 1945 included some eager youngsters who were to make their mark on the party, and indeed the country. They included Denis Healey (who made an impassioned maiden speech urging world socialist revolution), Harold Wilson, Michael Foot, and James Callaghan. But the men Attlee leaned on were of course of Labour's old guard. His principal props were Ernest Bevin, a pragmatic trade unionist who had made his mark during the war as an energetic labour minister, Labour stalwart Hugh Dalton, and Stafford Cripps, an aloof intellectual (Churchilll once remarked of him: "There but for the grace of God, goes God.").

The Attlee-Bevin alliance was particularly important in protecting the administration from some of its own hotter blooded members, who shared the young Healey's enthusiasm for revolution. Their most potent figurehead was Aneurin Bevan, a fiery orator from the Welsh valleys, who constantly urged the government to embrace radical reforms, and bitterly resisted any suggestion of pragmatic trimming of policy. Bevan eventually was to deal the Attlee administration a hammer blow, when he resigned over the reintroduction of NHS prescription charges. For six years, though, his was the voice of radical Labour.
Nationalisation
"The Labour Party is a Socialist Party, and proud of it." The stark sentence is buried in the party's 1945 election manifesto, which promised that Labour would take control of the economy and in particular of the manufacturing industry. The manifesto pledged nationalisation of the Bank of England, the fuel and power industries, inland transport, and iron and steel. And with a majority of more than 150, the party could not be denied.

One by one the key industries of the postwar economy tumbled into the public sector, where they were subject to elaborate planning controls. For the most part the takeovers were highly popular; none more so than the nationalisation of the coalmines. Pit owners still employed a million men, many of them in dire and dangerous conditions. The new national coal board was seen as much as a humanitarian institution as an economic one.

Other nationalisation operations were regarded more cynically. No sooner had British Railways taken over the old regional semi-private networks than jokes began to circulate about unreliable, crowded trains, crumbling stations and that old standby of British comedy, the buffet sandwich.

After the initial euphoria of nationalisation, it wasn't long before doubts began to emerge. The state industries were smothered by bureaucracy and the demands of Labour's economic gurus, both amateur and professional. Their bolder ideas were often subsumed in the delicate balance between principle and pragmatism.

It became clear that the lumbering machinery of economic planning could not deliver what the voters had demanded and Labour had promised: full employment, secure jobs with fair wages, an end to wartime rationing and - above all perhaps - decent homes for all.

It has sometimes been argued that the Attlee government's main disadvantage was that Britain had been on the winning side in the war. British cities and industries had been bashed around by German air raids, but had not suffered the wholesale destruction which allowed the renascent German economy to start from a clean sheet. More importantly, British economic class structures - and bitter enmities - survived the war unscathed, in contrast to those countries which had been traumatised by invasion and occupation (none more so than Germany) into rethinking their economic cultures.

But there were other obstacles in the path of Labour's would-be revolutionaries. The country, to put it brutally, was broke. It had poured its wealth into the war effort and in 1945 was groaning under a mountain of debt. It had pawned many of its most valuable assets, including a huge slice of overseas investments, to service that debt.

And even when the war was finally over, the victorious, impoverished British maintained vast numbers of men and resources tied up in an empire on which the sun was about to set. In Europe, Britain paid for a huge army of occupation in Germany. The dawn of the nuclear age, and British pride, demanded handsome investment in the new terrible weapons which would keep us allegedly a first class power. The disarmament, which some in the Labour party craved, proved illusory as - in Churchill's words again - an iron curtain descended across Europe, and the cold war began.

Speaking of cold, even the weather seemed at times to conspire against Labour. The winter of 1946-47 was one of the most severe ever recorded, causing widespread misery and disruption. One of the few truly cheering aspects of life was the imminent arrival of the Beveridge reforms.
The welfare state
The Attlee government is rightly seen as one of the great reformist administrations of the 20th century. It is a pleasant irony that the impetus for the more durable reforms came from outside the party.

The 1944 Education Act, which had introduced the concept of selection at 11 and compulsory free secondary education for all, was based on the work of a Tory, Richard Austin 'Rab' Butler, who went on to conquer all but the tallest peak of British politics.

The introduction of the welfare state rested very largely on the work of two Liberal economists: John Maynard Keynes, who argued the virtues of full employment and state stimulation of the economy, and William Beveridge.

Beveridge's ideas were culled from every nook and cranny of Whitehall. His formidable task was to put together a coherent plan for postwar social reconstruction. What he came up with extended hugely the framework of national insurance first put in place before the first world war by David Lloyd George. Every British citizen would be covered, regardless of income or lack of it. Those who lacked jobs and homes would be helped. Those who were sick, would be cured.

The birth of the National Health Service in July 1948 remains Labour's greatest monument. It was achieved only after two years of bitter resistance by the medical establishment, with consultants threatening strike action and the British Medical Association pouring out gloomy warnings about bureaucracy and expense.

Alas, those warnings proved to have more than a grain of truth, and the government was forced to retreat from its first grand vision of free, comprehensive health care for all. In the beginning, everything was provided: hospital accommodation, GP cover, medicine, dental care, and even spectacles. But with Britain showing few signs of economic take off, the budgetary burden was enormous. In 1951, chancellor of the exchequer Hugh Gaitskell was obliged to reintroduce charges for NHS false teeth and glasses. Aneurin Bevan, Harold Wilson and junior minister John Freeman stormed out of government, and Attlee's goose was cooked.
Foreign policy
Attlee's government took office in a world changing at bewildering speed. The war had forged new alliances, the greatest and most nebulous of all the United Nations. The USA and the USSR were undisputed superpowers; Britain and France deluded themselves that they were too.

In the far east, the embers of nationalism had been stirred into flame by the brutal advance and subsequent stubborn retreat of Japan. Britain's ignominious surrender of Singapore in 1941 had sent a clear signal to Asia that the daysof European imperialism were numbered.

With hindsight it was a blessing for Britain, as well as for its vast numbers of subjects around the world, that Winston Churchill lost the 1945 election. The old warrior was, at heart, a Victorian romantic, hopelessly in thrall to the so called romance of empire. His antipathy to India's independence struggle, in particular, was well established.

Attlee, on the other hand, recognised that the British Raj was doomed. He had been to Haileybury College, after all, and had paid an official visit to India in 1929. Even if the prime minister had harboured any illusions about Britain's duty to its 300m Indian subjects, he was constantly reminded by Washington that the US would not tolerate the continuance of empire. Wisely, he bowed to the inevitable, and prepared for withdrawal.

But even as it bade farewell, Britain was to visit two disasters on the subcontinent. One was Attlee's appointment of Lord Mountbatten as the last Viceroy. Conceited, impatient, and breathtakingly arrogant, he took to the grandeur and the raw power of the job with unholy relish.

Mountbatten decided that independence would come on August 1947, on the second anniversary of the day he had accepted the surrender of the Japanese in south-east Asia. Nothing was to stand in the way of this vainglory - not even the unresolved issue of Muslim demands for a separate state, and the gathering storm clouds of communal violence.

In a few summer weeks, colonial servants scribbled lines across the map of the mighty subcontinent, carving East and West Pakistan out of Mother India, and sparking a bloodbath so frightful that no one to this day knows exactly how many millions died. The holocaust even consumed Mahatma Gandhi, the father of free India and of freedom movements everywhere, who was assassinated months after independence. Thus ended 300 years of history, and 90 years of Raj. King George VI would be the last British monarch to style himself emperor of India.

There was another colonial retreat, in a way just as disgraceful, on the extreme west of Asia. For just over a quarter of a century British administrators had tried, and on the whole failed, to make sense of their League of Nations (later United Nations) mandate to rule Palestine. They tried partition, appeasement, manipulation and bald coercion. Nothing helped assuage the bloody friction between the rising tide of Jewish immigrants and the native Palestinians.

The end of the second world war brought new waves of refugees from Nazi tyranny to the shores of the holy land, and the conflict became more unholy than ever. Washington was adamant that nothing should stand in the way of the establishment of Israel and when the mandate finally dribbled into the sands of history in May 1948, the new state was born, fighting for its life.

Elsewhere, of course, Britain's imperial might remained intact. The Union flag still flew over huge tracts of Africa, whole archipelagos in the Caribbean and Pacific, jewels of Asia like Singapore and Hong Kong. But there was another much greater reality: British adherence to, and even dependence on, the patronage of the United States. We tagged along with Washington in the occupation of Germany and the establishment of Nato; we acquiesced in the new division of Europe between east and west; we willingly did our bit in the great airlift which saved west Berlin from the Soviet blockade of the late 1940s, and we sent our troops to South Korea to fight for the United Nations - under US direction - against China and the North.

At the insistence of Attlee and the Labour right, we developed our very own nuclear weapons and insisted that they kept us independent. In reality, the north Atlantic connection was the only one which ultimately mattered.
Conclusion
It is tempting to think of the Attlee years as an anti-climax. After the clamour of victory, the peace was a drab disappointment. And after all the fervent promises of a new dawn, British life remained to a large extent grey and grim. At times, food restrictions were even tighter than during the war - bread was rationed for the first time. Class enmities flourished; social and economic inequalities remained palpable. Here and there were little pockets of a new prosperity: television broadcasts were resumed, the first Morris Minors appeared, and British designers were working on the world's first commercial jet, the De Havilland Comet. But of that great universal prosperity which seemed to glow from the 1945 manifestos, there was little sign.

And yet, and yet... Britain in the Attlee years changed more than under any other government, before or since. The welfare reforms, and to a lesser extent the great experiment of state control of industry, had a profound effect on the way the people saw themselves and their country. And what they saw, on the whole, was pleasing.

In 1950, after five exhausting years, it was inevitable that the great electoral tide of 1945 would be turned. But in the general election of that year the Labour vote dipped less than 2%, and it was only the vagaries of the first past the post system that saw the Tories gain 88 seats.

Still, Attlee remained in power, at the head of an increasingly fractious government rent by ideological divisions, and fatally wounded by the illness and withdrawal from public life of men like Cripps and Bevin. When the NHS prescription charge issue finally ripped the party apart, the prime minister was obliged to go to the country again in 1951.

Even then, Labour retained the faith of the people, gaining its highest ever share of the vote: 48.8%. Indeed, it was the closest any party came in the 20th century to achieving a popular majority mandate, but it was still not enough. The key turned out to be the Liberal vote, which suddenly evaporated, leaving the party with just 2.5% support and six MPs. The Conservatives ended up with fewer votes than Labour, but 26 more MPs. Winston Churchill was back in Downing Street.
Useful links
Building the welfare state
Academic analysis of the welfare state
More about Clement Attlee
1945 election manifestos Election results
The 1945 result
The 1950 result
The 1951 result
Results of all general elections since 1945
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1945-51: Labour and the creation of the welfare state

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Introduction The outcome of the 1945 election was more than a sensation. It was a political earthquake. Less than 12 weeks earlier, Winston Churchill had announced the unconditional surrender of Nazi Germany. Churchill wanted his wartime coalition to continue until Japan too had been defeated, but was not unduly dismayed when his Labour ministers insisted that the country be offered a choice.