PRIME Minister Clement Attlee had no shortage of matters to keep him occupied by the time he spoke at Glasgow University in June 1951.

Barely two weeks before he arrived, a major police manhunt had been launched on the Continent for two missing Foreign Office diplomats, Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess. The two Cambridge spies had defected to Russia.

In April, Attlee had lost one of his closest friend in politics, Ernest Bevin, who had died, aged 70, shortly after resigning as Foreign Secretary. There had also been a major Cabinet revolt, including resignations, over Chancellor Hugh Gaitskell’s budget.

To cap it all, a crisis had blown up in Iran, where the government of Mohammad Mossadeq had nationalised the Anglo-Iranian oil company and its oil wells at Abadan.

On June 20, in the midst of all this, Attlee was in Glasgow to take part in Glasgow University’s fifth centenary celebrations.

At St Andrew’s Hall, watched by an audience some 2,600 strong, he received the honorary degree of Doctor of Laws.

In a ceremony the following day at the same venue, he declared that he had never before been in the presence of so many learned people from so many universities who, among them, expressed the whole field of human knowledge.

He went on to say that the universities must never be mere instruments in the hands of a government, a church, or any political or economic group. They had, he added, almost complete freedom to run their own affairs.

Attlee cut his visit short in order to return to London, but he was able to attend an exhibition of industrial power, at the Kelvin Hall, where he signed an autograph (above) for 12-year-old Jean Esval, of Long Island, New York.

Five months later, Attlee called a general election; he lost, to Winston Churchill, the man he had defeated at the polls in February 1950 and July 1945.

Read more: Herald Diary