George
Brown was born on 2nd September, 1914. His father was a lorry driver.
He was also branch secretary of Transport
and General Workers Union and after the General
Strike lost his job and was blacklisted.
After leaving
school he became a ledger-clerk in London.
This was followed by work as a salesman with the John Lewis Partnership.
In
1936 Brown became a full-time union official where he worked under
Ernest Bevin at the Transport
and General Workers Union. His first post involved organizing
agricultural workers, brickyard workers, building trade workers and
canal boatmen.
Brown joined
the Labour Party and as secretary of the
St Albans branch attended the Labour Party National Conference in
1939. Brown impressed Clement
Attlee with
a speech attacking the views of Stafford Cripps
and other left-wing members of the party.
Selected as the parliamentary
candidate for Belper in Derbyshire, Brown entered the House
of Commons following the 1945 General Election.
Clement
Attlee appointed
Brown as parliamentary secretary to Hugh
Dalton, Chancellor
of the Exchequor.
In 1947 Brown was involved
in a plot to replace Clement
Attlee as prime
minister with Ernest
Bevin. Although
the conspiracy was discovered by Attlee he did not sack Brown and
in May 1951 he was promoted to Minister of Works. Brown lost his position
following Attlee's defeat in the 1951 General
Election.
When Hugh
Gaitskell became
leader of the party Brown was appointed shadow spokesman on Agriculture
(1955-56), Supply (1955-59), Defence (1956-61) and Home Affairs (1961-64).
When
Gaitskill died in 1963, Brown was one of the main contenders for the
party leadership but Harold Wilson was
able to defeat his right-wing rival.
Following
the 1964 General Election Brown became Secretary
of State for Economic Affairs. He upset many members of the Labour
Party by establishing a Prices and Incomes Board. His decision
to appoint Aubrey Jones, a Conservative
Party MP, as chairman, also created a great deal of controversy.
In August
1966 Brown became Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. Over the
next two years he led the government's decision to apply for membership
of the European Economic Community. He resigned on 14th March 1968
after a dispute with the prime minister, Harold
Wilson, concerning government decision-making.
Brown was
defeated in the 1970 General Election. He
was created Baron George-Brown but was not an active member of the
House of Lords and in March 1976 left the
Labour Party. He went into business and
worked for Courtaulds (1968-73). He was also a director of Commercial
Credit and British Northrop.
George
Brown died in 1985.
(1)
George
Brown, In My Way (1970)
Dalton used to come back
from No. 10 seething with rage about what he called 'the incompetent
little Prime Minister who just sat there doing nothing to influence
a decision "while I had to sit listening to rambling monologues
from your friend Ernie Bevin".
I didn't share Dalton's
view on Bevin, but I did begin to wonder about Mr Attlee. Everybody
seemed to be talking about Attlee's indifference, and I spent a lot
of time in the tea room of the House of Commons (I've learned better
since!) listening to, and taking part in, the discussions that went
on. At that time Patrick Gordon Walker was Herbert Morrison's P.P.S.,
and he and I had long discussions about what we regarded as the Attlee
problem. Finally we decided that we should have to do something about
it, so we determined to organize a 'putsch' to get rid of Mr Attlee
and replace him by Bevin. Bevin was the only possible strong man to
take his place as Prime Minister. One lot in the Parliamentary Labour
Party wouldn't have Cripps, others wouldn't have Morrison, and nobody
would have Dalton. So Bevin was the only man, and we set out to organize
a revolt by collecting signatures in the tea room to a resolution
demanding the resignation of Mr Attlee and his replacement by Bevin.
I was deputed to be the man to go to Bevin to tell him that we'd got
all this arranged, so would he please put on his best suit and be
ready to go to the Palace at any moment.
(2)
Herbert
Morrison,
An Autobiography (1960)
When Kruschev came with Bulganin on 25 April, 1956, to
that by now famous
dinner with the Parliamentary Labour Party, he appeared at first to
be a quite new type of Russian leader - jolly, ready to laugh and
be friendly, and on the surface perfectly genuine. I suspected that
it was a post-Stalin policy of the Kremlin to choose extrovert, human
personalities for positions of power and public office so long as
they had brains and Communist convictions as well.
At the dinner Kruschev
went through the motions of not wishing to make a formal speech, wanting
to leave the limelight to Bulganin, who was of course Chairman of
the Soviet Council of Ministers and Prime Minister. Bulganin spoke
conventionally and courteously, friendly greetings to Britain and
all that.
Mr. K. did speak, as I
knew he would. He started his speech pleasantly enough with harmless,
friendly material, but the longer he spoke the more he boasted. It
was the usual sort of thing. The Soviet Union had won the war. Britain
had done little. The men who most obviously showed their annoyance
at this were George Brown and Aneurin Bevan. Soon they were making
protests which Kruschev could not pretend he had not heard.
This annoyed Kruschev
very much and he lost his temper. He made it very plain that he disliked
being contradicted and that he was not accustomed to it. He was cross
also when Gaitskell raised the question of the Communist imprisonments
of Social Democrats.
(3)
George
Brown,
In My Way (1970)
Aneurin Bevan was a strange
man. He had great ability and great ambition. He could do the most
contrary things, but you could never call him insincere. He had a
burning faith in whatever seemed good to him at the time but, outside
politics, had no personal faith at all. I have tried to write of what
the Christian faith has meant to me in my approach to the Labour movement
in its widest sense: many others in the Party have likewise come to
Labour primarily because of religious faith - there is a long history
of Christian Socialism in our movement. Others, of whom Ernie Bevin
was one, grew up without religious faith, but acquired faith in such
qualities as the dignity of man; it was a different sort of faith,
but it gave them something that they stood by all their lives. Aneurin,
and certainly his friends, seem to have grown up without faith in
anything. He was a bigger man than his friends, a law to himself,
and he had qualities which set him apart from those who were called
(or called themselves) Bevanites. He certainly saw himself as a potential
Prime Minister, a greater Lloyd George. He was flattered by all the
attention and the publicity he got, but he never commanded that solid
backing in the Labour movement which would have been necessary to
give him the leadership.
Aneurin had great charm.
Some people are naturally made to be bigots and they deliberately
try to turn on charm when it suits them. Aneurin was the other way
round; he was naturally made to be charming, and he had deliberately
to turn on the bile. He was generous in every sort of way, and naturally
kind. Paradoxically, he could also be a bully, but really he only
bullied those who let themselves be bullied. If you stood up to him
he would smile broadly, and accept that you were not going to let
him get away with something. We had tremendous battles - I remember
his describing me at one meeting of the Parliamentary Party as 'Arthur
Deakin's lackey'. And yet, in spite of everything and our wide divergencies
politically, there was a kind of friendship between us which couldn't
be denied.
(4)
Harold
Wilson,
Memoirs: The Making of a Prime Minister, 1916-64 (1986)
I was taking a risk with
George Brown, with his erratic habits. The drink problem was always
with us. It was not that he drank more than anybody else but that
he could not hold it. For a time he was on his best behaviour. He
had high ability and a very sharp mind, enjoyed a solid position of
trade union support in the Party and would I knew face down the Treasury
whenever the occasion arose.
(5)
George
Brown,
In My Way (1970)
The particular incident
which brought things to a head was the Prime Minister's decision to
ask the Queen, at a hurriedly called meeting of the Privy Council
late at night, to proclaim a Bank Holiday in order to meet a request
from America which had to do with arrangements being made internationally
to steady the chaotic gold situation which then existed. No announcement
of this had been discussed among Ministers and no statement had been
made to the House of Commons. The statement that was subsequently
made at 3.20 a.m. on the following morning was only made because of
the events of that night leading to my declared intention to resign.
The point was that the
Cabinet was not consulted. Although I was Deputy Prime Minister, Foreign
Secretary and a member of the Economic Committee of the Cabinet, I
for one knew nothing about it. Other Cabinet Ministers learned by
chance that Mr Wilson Mr Jenkins and Mr Peter Shore had gone to the
Palace to attend a Privy Council to have the holiday proclaimed. We
had no idea what was happening, whether another devaluation was imminent
what on earth was afoot. It was a decision taken by Mr Wilson in the
presidential manner, without consulting us, without even informing
us. That was what made it so important. It was the way in which the
decision was taken, not the decision itself, which seemed to me then
- and seems now - to mark a clear breach in constitutional practice.
(6)
George
Brown,
In My Way (1970)
I became the Labour Party's
spokesman in the House of Commons on defence, and this got me more
and more involved with European colleagues, in NATO, in the Western
European Union, and in an American-European consultative body called
the NATO Parliamentarians. Quite without planning I became a main
spokesman for the Labour Party in all these various bodies, and I
began thinking of Europe on a much wider basis than at Strasbourg.
I began to think deeply about European defence, and about European
and American relationships. Gradually my views changed and I became
a convinced 'European'. That is something much more than being merely
a Common Market man. My belief that Britain should join the Common
Market developed out of my thinking on European integration. Important
as it is, the Common Market in my view is only part of the wider process
of creating a politically integrated Europe, capable of standing up
both to the Russians and the Americans.
Geographically, historically
and in every other way the British are among the leading nations of
Western Europe. I have always quarrelled with Dean Acheson's much-repeated
remark about Britain's having lost an empire and not found a role.
We have a role; our role is to lead Europe. We are, and have been
for eleven centuries since the reign of King Alfred, one of the leaders
of Europe. It may be that Britain is destined to become the leader
of Europe, of Western Europe in the first place, and of as much of
Europe as will come together later on. The little bit of water that
comes between us and the mainland is a help in the sense that it provides
a point from which you can stand back and observe without getting
too involved in the passions of States in the centre of the Continent,
but it is no longer a barrier because wars will never again be fought
in a way that makes the Channel a barrier.
(7)
George
Brown,
In My Way (1970)
There can be no doubt
that Ernest Bevin stands out among all the people I have met. He is
in a place by himself. He was a man with little or no taught advantages,
who relied wholly upon his own brain, his imagination and his capacity
for envisaging things and people. In this capacity he was not surpassed
and I think not even matched by anyone else I have ever met. The Churchills,
the Attlees, and most other leaders, political or industrial, had
all the advantages which their social position and long formal education
can bestow. Bevin had none of these advantages, but I have seen him
in every kind of situation - trade union negotiations round a table,
trade union meetings facing often hostile critics, meetings with industrialists,
with statesmen - and on every occasion it was quite clear that he
was master of the situation. He said that he hated politics, yet in
making politics or in running a political department few could match
him. He had a natural dignity which offset his endowment of determination
and ruthlessness.
It wasn't until the war
that he got his real chance to make a major impact on national history.
His work as Minister of Labour during the war contributed as much
to victory as that of any of the generals and, as Foreign Secretary
in the Labour Government after the war, there were times when he seemed
to hold the Western world itself on his great shoulders.
(8)
Harold
Wilson, letter accepting George Brown's resignation
(15th March, 1968)
You refer to the events
of last night. As you know, unsuccessful efforts were made to get
in touch with you at a critical phase, so that you could be brought
into the immediate decision, which had to be taken with great urgency
if most serious consequences for the nation and for the international
community were to be averted.
(9)
Denis
Healey, The Time of My Life
(1989)
George Brown carried an enormous chip on his shoulder, which
tended to make him jealous of anyone with a university education.
Like many people with an inferiority complex, he could be an appalling
bully. But he did not mind people standing up to him. After being
subjected to a particularly tiresome tirade, his Private Secretary,
a small man called Donald Maitland, pulled himself up to his full
height, looked George in the kneecaps, and said: 'You do not imagine,
Foreign Secretary, do you, that a person of my stature has got where
he is today, by kow-towing to bullies?' George was suitably abashed.
He had a powerful mind
allied with great energy, and could often get to the heart of a problem
faster than anyone else. But he was quite unpredictable, and came
to depend so much on drink that in the end I tried to avoid seeing
him after midday. He was always resigning, sometimes on the most trivial
issues. When our troops in Aden were under particular strain, I decided
to call up a few reservists who were being paid extra specifically
for accepting such a liability - something my predecessors had never
dared to do. George exploded. 'They'll never stand for it in Swadlincote,'
he said. Swadlincote was a small, village in his constituency, always
quoted by George as a touchstone of public opinion. 'There'll be revolution.
The Government will fall.' And he resigned. Next morning only one
newspaper even mentioned the call-up, and that in a single paragraph.
George withdrew his resignation.
In spite of everything,
we managed to work quite well together. But the strain of acting as
a psychiatric nurse to -a patient who was often violent became intolerable.
My patience was finally exhausted when George once again resigned
one evening in March 1968, on the grounds that Wilson had not consulted
him properly about the decision to close the gold market. I was touring
RAF stations in the West country at the time. One of his friends rang
me after midnight to say that George was in the House of Commons drinking
heavily; he had given news of his resignation to a number of lobby
correspondents as well as to any MP who would listen. Would I speak
to him, as so often in the past, and ask him to withdraw his resignation?
I said no, and went back to bed.
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