The Big Beast that never was - Bill Shebbeare survives WW2

[ShortsBelfast]

Came across William Courtenay Godolphin Shebbeare in my researches. A good short biography can be found online on Winchester College's WW2 Roll of Honour which is available online.
We often posit Evan Durbin as a lost hope of the Labour Party but what of this chap? His Communist Party membership would have been a disadvantage of course but it didn't stop Denis Healey. And quite the prewar record for a young man of 29, editor of Isis, President of the Oxford Union and leader writer for the Daily Herald. And Attlee knew him and would probably have offered him a junior Ministerial post. When Gaitskell died in 1963, Shebbeare would have been 47 and when Wilson stood down in 1976, he would have been 60. A possible prime minister or kingmaker?

 

[Venocara]

I don't know anything about this man so I can't comment on him directly; however if he does grow to become a senior figure in the Labour Party it is possible it could butterfly away Gaitskell's death.

Can I say it's very nice to see threads like this about very obscure figures that never got the chance to realise their potential.

 

[Cevolian]

Came across William Courtenay Godolphin Shebbeare in my researches. A good short biography can be found online on Winchester College's WW2 Roll of Honour which is available online.
We often posit Evan Durbin as a lost hope of the Labour Party but what of this chap? His Communist Party membership would have been a disadvantage of course but it didn't stop Denis Healey. And quite the prewar record for a young man of 29, editor of Isis, President of the Oxford Union and leader writer for the Daily Herald. And Attlee knew him and would probably have offered him a junior Ministerial post. When Gaitskell died in 1963, Shebbeare would have been 47 and when Wilson stood down in 1976, he would have been 60. A possible prime minister or kingmaker?

This is a little inside baseball/needlessly esoteric, but from what I remember of the history of Isis (whose sister publication I edited, for my sins, and whose archives I am fairly familiar with) there was a big scandal in the late 50s about the magazine leaking state secrets, I wonder if that might have had an effect on this chap’s career, if only momentarily?

 

[ShortsBelfast]

This is a little inside baseball/needlessly esoteric, but from what I remember of the history of Isis (whose sister publication I edited, for my sins, and whose archives I am fairly familiar with) there was a big scandal in the late 50s about the magazine leaking state secrets, I wonder if that might have had an effect on this chap’s career, if only momentarily?

I think his CP membership might have been more of a problem, by the late 1950s he wouldn't have been involved with Isis for around twenty years. Hard to see how any case could be made against him by the Tories or the media that wouldn't have looked very, very contrived.

 

[Cevolian]

I think his CP membership might have been more of a problem, by the late 1950s he wouldn't have been involved with Isis for around twenty years. Hard to see how any case could be made against him by the Tories or the media that wouldn't have looked very, very contrived.

Yeah this is true - I more meant would it contribute to the general image of “This man says he’s a moderate Gaitskellite but really he’s a LOONY LEFTY”.

 

[ShortsBelfast]

Yeah this is true - I more meant would it contribute to the general image of “This man says he’s a moderate Gaitskellite but really he’s a LOONY LEFTY”.

I think that Shebbeare had he lived would probably have been rather to the left of Attlee and Gaitskell but apparently was motivated more by a love of humanity and hatred of fascism than by a desire for power or status for its own sake. If he had remained stubbornly loyal to Moscow, he would have languished on the back benches during the Attlee years (Attlee checked his appointments with MI5, somewhat to their consternation to ensure that he wasn't appointing either Communists or Fascists) but, if disillusioned by the fall of the Iron Curtain and fate of Eastern Europe, Shebbeare had left the CP early, he would be hard to present as a loony leftie, he was intellectually capable, could express himself clearly in the written word and would have had a distinguished record of military service, a Major like Dennis Healey. If he had come clean to MI5 about his past CP membership, they would have discouraged any discussion of it (as they largely did with Healey OTL). Assuming that he had been a capable junior Minister during 1945-52, he would be a senior front bencher by the late fifties- big clear out when the old gang retired in 1955 and then Jowitt and Stokes died in 1957. Only Wilson and Gaitskell of all the Attlee Ministers OTL had actually been born in the twentieth century.