Subject: FW: Political titans
It's such a pleasure reading biographies of people who lived in the period before and during when I was born. To read of their social condition and the outlets which led to their education and its effect on their distinctive lives makes me at one with them because, I too was there.
I have three books on the go at the moment all representing my childhood political heroes ( I was raised in a political family).
Clement Attlee, Anuran Bevin and Harold Wilson were icons when I was growing up and whilst the childhood background was very different between the men there is so much which resonates with my own memory.
The social deprivation and from it, a social awareness (in Attlee's case he was middle class but assumed the plight and the inherent strength of the impoverished, both in the trenches and in his humanitarian concern for society at large's after the First World War) was played out in their childhood and there are many occasions when the backcloth under which they grew and gained their political ideals was a snap shot of my own "Boys Own" childhood. We are an indelible print of the period and the characteristic exposure we had when growing up. We absorbed, as if by osmosis our surroundings and the values of the people we cared about and who cared for us. The freedom from the collective view made our own analysis unique and being so, has stayed the course of our lives.
That's not to say we were right but that we were right for our time. We were not brought up on an artificial Twitter feed, the assembly of millions of likes and dislikes, we were recognisable amongst our friends for way we thought and acted.
The books are a delight to read because of each persons individual and formative background. I could for instance never find any affinity with Churchill and his life at Blenheim Palace where he grew up, other than his great talent for language.
The life of patronage belongs to another world, a world in which the outside toilet and tin bath would have been an equal anathema as the class distinctions were to me.
The men described in the books were very different but each had a common thread, the awareness of the inhumanity which pervaded the class who occupied the great houses and enormous estates, and their myopia to see beyond their gated environment.
Attlee and Bevin from vastly different background amalgamated, in the greatest socially aware government this country has ever seen, a social comprehension born of its time and which sets us apart as a nation, even to this day.
That's not to say we were right but that we were right for our time. We were not brought up on an artificial Twitter feed, the assembly of millions of likes and dislikes, we were recognisable amongst our friends for way we thought and acted.
The books are a delight to read because of each persons individual and formative background. I could for instance never find any affinity with Churchill and his life at Blenheim Palace where he grew up, other than his great talent for language.
The life of patronage belongs to another world, a world in which the outside toilet and tin bath would have been an equal anathema as the class distinctions were to me.
The men described in the books were very different but each had a common thread, the awareness of the inhumanity which pervaded the class who occupied the great houses and enormous estates, and their myopia to see beyond their gated environment.
Attlee and Bevin from vastly different background amalgamated, in the greatest socially aware government this country has ever seen, a social comprehension born of its time and which sets us apart as a nation, even to this day.
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