Attlee and the Giant Evils

Clement Attlee was born in London and went on to lead the Labour Party into government after the Second World War. His government set out to defeat what the Beveridge Report called society's five Giant Evils: Want, Disease, Ignorance, Squalor and Idleness.

Rebuilding the country after the war needed more workers than Britain had at home, and the government looked further afield to find them. In 1948, workers from the West Indies were invited to come and work in Britain, and in the years that followed firms went looking for workers in India and Pakistan too.

Away from politics and labour, this same period of British history also produced one of its best-known poets. Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet and writer, is remembered for his poems and plays. His radio play Under Milk Wood and Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, the poem he wrote for his dying father, remain his two most famous works.