Clement Attlee, pipe smoker. Elected Prime Minister 26th July 1945
Clement Attlee was elected Prime Minister 80 years ago. Part of his image was that of a pipe smoker, a reassuring small ‘c’ conservative image arguably.
I’m not sure how widespread pipe smoking was amongst radicals in the nineteenth century, men and women, and more research is needed.
In the twentieth century Raph Samuel noted in the Lost World of British Communism that Stalin who was a pipe smoker, or at least pictured with a pipe, inspired at least some Communists to smoke a pipe. My late father who was a CP member smoked a pipe throughout his life, the Balkan Sobranie tobacco as pungent as cannabis (although it didn’t smell the same). Samuel notes a war time verse written by Hamish Henderson: ‘Hitler’s a non-smoker/Churchill smokes a cigar/but Uncle Joe smokes a workman’s pipe/and he wears a taxi drivers hat.
Nick Thomas-Symonds in his recent biography writes that Wilson switched from cigarettes to a pipe not because of a love of Stalin but because the process of filling and lighting a pipe gave him more time to answer questions and make comments.
In the 1960s Wilson’s pipe smoking, along with his liking for HP Sauce was a symbol that he was a politician in touch with the ‘common man’. Thomas-Symonds recounts how Wilson argued that people who smoked pipes lived longer than those who smoked cigarettes.
However Thomas-Symonds touches on the issue around Wilson and pipe smoking that has caused comment over the years. The statue of Wilson outside Huddersfield station shows him without a pipe. Mary Wilson noted that Wilson’s hand was in his pocket reaching for his pipe. Thomas-Symonds suggests that in private when no journalists were present Wilson might more usually smoke a cigar, his preference. The pipe was important for his public image.
Certainly in the 1960s pipe smoking amongst men on the left was far from unknown, influenced by Stalin, Wilson or simply preference. Eric Hobsbawm is pictured smoking a pipe and Tony Benn was an inveterate pipe smoker.
Attlee then was in a tradition of left-wing pipe smokers, although in 2025 things have changed, rightly so.
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