The Quiet Man

Hugh Gaitskell's death caused a seismic shock in the Labor Party, for he alone was responsible for bringing Labor to the point where it could be seriously reckoned as a potential alternative government. When he succeeded Clement Attlee as opposition leader in 1955, he inherited a party rent by dissension and choked by the dogma and tradition of class warfare. But in his seven years of leadership, he had largely healed Labor's divisive internal lesions, trimmed away many of its stifling old Socialist doctrines, and so successfully imprinted his modern ideas on the party that its philosophy came to be known as Gaitskellism.

Future Discovered. Hugh Todd Naylor Gaitskell joined the Labor Party from no sense of downtrodden necessity. Son of a British civil servant in India, he was educated at Winchester and Oxford's New College, did not have his smoldering sense of social justice fully kindled until the general strike of 1926. To an aunt who offered to subsidize an army career, he replied: "My future belongs to the working class." After graduation from Oxford, Gaitskell lectured among coal miners in depressed areas, became an economics don at London University. During the war, he joined the civil service as an economist, in the Labor landslide of 1945 was swept into Parliament.

Gaitskell's rise was meteoric. Within two years, he was appointed Minister of Fuel and Power, was responsible for austerity fuel restrictions. Urging fewer baths to conserve coal, he joked: "Personally I've never had a great many hot baths myself. Anyway, what's underneath isn't seen by anybody." In 1950, he replaced ailing Sir Stafford Cripps as Chancellor of the Exchequer and immediately began slashing welfare expenses to pay for Britain's defense commitments. It was a decision which enraged Labor Firebrand Aneurin Bevan, then Minister of Health, and which began a titanic battle for power within the party.

Rather than turn the party over to the rash and mercurial Bevan after Labor's defeat in the 1951 election, Attlee held on to the leadership and watched the developing struggle between ex-Coal Miner Nye and the middleclass, intellectual Gaitskell, who had never lived in a slum or walked in a picket line. With all the passion and eloquence of his proletarian youth, Bevan raged that Gaitskell was a "desiccated calculating machine." No phrasemaker, Gaitskell did not engage Nye in verbal combat, instead coolly and shrewdly lined up the trade union rank and file behind him. When Attlee finally resigned after the Tory victory in the 1955 election, the party chose the quiet man instead of the angry Bevan to be its leader.

Adhesive Quality. It was a torn and tattered party, which was rent even further by the Tories' 1959 landslide. But when his leadership was challenged, Gaitskell met the test. To the ban-the-bombers, who threatened to take over the party, Gaitskell fumed: "Go tell Mr. Khrushchev to ban his bomb. Go and see what it's like to deal with Soviet tanks and Soviet police like the Hungarian people." Victory over the unilateralists finally made Gaitskell's power absolute, and in the next two years he set out to rally the party behind a unified policy.

He committed Labor to the support of the Atlantic Alliance, weaned the party away from advocacy of further nationalization of industry. Reflecting the deep attachment to the Commonwealth that was a legacy of his childhood in Asia, he opposed Britain's entry into the Common Market--a stand that united the party under his leadership.

Never completely comfortable with old-line trade unionists, Gaitskell surrounded himself with witty, intellectual advisers. Budgeted by his tiny, vivacious wife Dora, he lived modestly within his $8,400 salary in a twelve-room house in Hampstead; unpretentiously, he and Dora entertained Tory peers, businessmen and visiting U.S. intellectuals. Inspired by his daughters, Julia, 23, and Cressida, 20, Gaitskell loved to dance and was a fan of Peggy Lee and Ella Fitzgerald.

Gaitskell's death raised the question whether a personality had been more important to the party than a program. For all of Labor's apparent unity, Gaitskell was the adhesive that held the party together. The top contenders for that leadership have no such value; Deputy Labor Leader George Brown is a rightist pro-European, and Harold Wilson, who was the youngest Cabinet minister of the century back in 1947, is mistrusted by his colleagues for overweaning ambition. But outwardly, all factions are determined to prevent Labor from disintegrating again into a hodgepodge of bickering factions.

Said George Brown: "Hugh Gaitskell got us to recognize that we were a party fighting for a classless society, and if we wish to achieve it, we have to be a classless party ourselves."

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