British rearmament was a period in British history, between 1934 and 1939, when a substantial programme of rearming the United Kingdom was undertaken. Rearmament was deemed necessary, because defence spending had gone down from £766 million in 1919–20, to £189 million in 1921–22, to £102 million in 1932.
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👉 British re-armament in the context of Clement Attlee
Clement Richard Attlee, 1st Earl Attlee (3 January 1883 – 8 October 1967), was a British statesman who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1945 to 1951 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1935 to 1955. Attlee was Deputy Prime Minister during the wartime coalition government under Winston Churchill, and Leader of the Opposition on three occasions: from 1935 to 1940, briefly in 1945 and from 1951 to 1955. He remains the longest serving Labour leader.
Attlee was born into an upper middle class family, the son of a wealthy London solicitor. After attending Haileybury College and the University of Oxford, he practised as a barrister. The volunteer work he carried out in London's East End exposed him to poverty, and his political views shifted leftwards thereafter. He joined the Independent Labour Party, gave up his legal career, and began lecturing at the London School of Economics; with his work briefly interrupted by service as an officer in the First World War. In 1919, he became mayor of Stepney and in 1922 was elected to Parliament as the Member for Limehouse. Attlee served in the first Labour minority government led by Ramsay MacDonald in 1924, and then joined the Cabinet during MacDonald's second minority (1929–1931). After retaining his seat in Labour's landslide defeat of 1931, he became the party's Deputy Leader. Elected Leader of the Labour Party in 1935, and at first advocating pacificism and opposing re-armament, he became a critic of Neville Chamberlain's policy of appeasement in the lead-up to the Second World War. Attlee took Labour into the wartime coalition government in 1940 and served under Winston Churchill, initially as Lord Privy Seal and then as deputy prime minister from 1942.
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British re-armament in the context of Winston Churchill in the Second World War
Winston Churchill was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty on 3 September 1939, the day that the United Kingdom declared war on Nazi Germany. He succeeded Neville Chamberlain as prime minister on 10 May 1940 and held the post until 26 July 1945. Out of office during the 1930s, Churchill had taken the lead in calling for British re-armament to counter the growing threat of militarism in Nazi Germany.
As prime minister, he oversaw British involvement in the Allied war effort against the Axis powers. Regarded as the most important of the Allied leaders during the first half of the Second World War, Historians have long held Churchill in high regard as a victorious wartime leader who played an important role in defending Europe's liberal democracy against the spread of fascism. For his wartime leadership and for his efforts in overseeing the war effort, he has been consistently ranked both by scholars and the public as one of the top three greatest British prime ministers, often as the greatest prime minister in British history.