Clement Attlee

Attlee managed a boys' club in Stepney and lived at Toynbee Hall in the East End before the First World War, then taught social administration at the London School of Economics. He served at Gallipoli, where he was among the last to be evacuated, and in Mesopotamia, where he was wounded, and was mayor of Stepney before entering Parliament in 1922. His government's welfare reforms drew on what he had seen of poverty first-hand. The soldiering shaped a terse, practical style of leadership.