Britain in the 1930s
“The Failure of Peace”
Peter Howarth [[email protected]]
Expanded version
November 2018 Abstract
This material looks at Britain in the 1930s, tracing the effect of the international situation as it deteriorated towards war in 1939. Events and associated movements are seen in three overlapping phases. The first focusses on a range of attempts early in the decade to create a lasting peace or at least a set of treaties that would avoid a second war that was increasingly feared as the decade proceeded. These failed attempts included and culminated in appeasement of Hitler. The second part examines the British version of fascism, chiefly the British Union of Fascists launched by Oswald Mosely in 1932. This could also be viewed as another failure, by the time fascist leaders were interned in 1940. The final section looks at British reactions to and involvement in the Spanish Civil War. Once the tide had turned against the Republican government in 1938 the belief that a second continent-wide war was then inevitable had become widespread.
Contents page
Preface Reasons for writing this preface Historic tectonic plates, threats to the human race Migration, populism, nationalism The frivolity of the right, the nostalgia for empire Complexity The 1970s, the shift from the 1970s to the 1980s 2017-17 and the 1930s, comparison of the threats today with the 1930s The press “Make our Planet Great Again”
Introduction Primary sources and their interpretation
Context Contextual background 1919 – 1932 Political conflicts in the UK Female suffrage International relations and treaties Social conditions The press
Peace Disarmament and the League of Nations Anti-French sentiments, British attitudes to France and Germany post-WWI Disarmament and the national press (1932) Party manifestoes (1929-1935) Opinion polls (1937-1939) League of Nations Union (1934-1935) Peace Ballot (1934-1935), public opinion, pacifism Catholic Herald, letters to the editor (1935-1936) Appeasement, German plans to assassinate Hitler prior to 1939
Fascism Fascist views, anti-semitism Supporters, fascist methods Olympia Rally (1934) Press reaction, official reaction
Spain English Catholicism, Catholic attitudes to fascism, Archbishop Hinsley versus pro-Republican Catholics Press reporting, reporters’ experiences in Spain Reporting the outbreak of hostilities in Spain Catholic reporting George Steer of the Times Political reaction, public reaction
Preface
The reason for writing this preface
In 2011-13 I studied for a Masters degree in Modern History, writing a dissertation focussing on Britain in the 1930s, entitled ‘The Failure of Peace’. This concentrated, firstly, on the peace movements in the early part of the decade and, secondly, on British attitudes towards Spain and the Spanish Civil War towards the end, by which point there seemed to be a fatalistic acceptance that a second war could not be avoided. A middle section on British fascism, originally intended as a bridge between the two, was omitted in the submitted version because of the word limit.
In 2016 I started work on expanding the original text and re-instating the section on fascist views, and in 2017 decided to incorporate this lengthy new preface analysing comparisons between the 1930s and the present day. This was prompted by significant events in that year and explicit parallels being drawn in the press.1 In addition, of the intervening decades, the midpoint of the 1970s could be viewed as showing some of the most positive trends and developments for the future. It could be claimed that the state we are in today is the result of subsequent reversal of these progressive movements. As this revised version is not intended for academic assessment, there is less need here to aim at standard academic objectivity, and this preface is a personal view. For this reason, many of the sources are drawn from non-academic publications such as the London Review of Books, though the reviewers quoted have solid academic credentials. Furthermore, some aspects of the 1930s and the present day are impossible to treat entirely dispassionately.
Tectonic plates
To consider a modern metaphor2 for the history of the last century, WWI represented a major tectonic shift (producing earthquakes largely localised in northern and southern Europe). But the tensions released didn't settle for the long term and so further movements could be predicted. After WWI pressure again built up, with minor shocks, indicating subterranean fault lines and there grew a depressing sense of inevitability that a much bigger shock was due at some time.3 There were side shocks in unexpected places such as Spain, East Africa and China, which in themselves did not release enough of the pressure building up to prevent the greatest quake of all within 20 years. Reflecting on current prospects for the future raises the question of how well protected we are from major shocks to come.
Threats to the human race
To understand the serious nature of today’s political uncertainty, it may be useful to set it in a very broad context, and it is not unreasonable to claim that there is no long-term future for the human race without the greatest degree of co-operative effort: the only way to deal with the gravest threats to the whole world. Looking in more detail at the present day, some of the greatest threats or demands on co-operation affecting all populations across the world appear to be:
armed conflict and civil war mass migration (politically significant and warranting the section to itself below) predatory global capitalism4 environmental degradation (e.g. drought, the fashion for powerful cars, conspicuous consumption, using up fossil fuels, climate change and extreme weather)5.
1 For example, Paul Mason, in the Guardian 1/8/2016 ‘Are we living through another 1930s?’ 2 The theory of plate tectonics was established by the early 1960s. 3 See The Morbid Age Richard Overy, 2010. 4 See the inequality index reported in LRB 39/20 19/10/2017 p. 23 review of Walter Scheidel ‘The st Great Leveller: violence and the history of inequality from the Stone Age to the 21 century’ (2017): ‘In 2015 the richest 62 persons on the planet owned as much private net wealth as the poorer half of humanity, more than 3.5 billion people.’; this was restated by Bernie Sanders, Guardian 13/1/2018. 5 Those who deny climate change, for example, or propose migration to another planet once we’ve irrevocably wrecked this one, are indulging in irresponsible fantasy. How do these advocates of jumping ship reckon humans will be able to work together in colonising a new planet when they have mass poverty (relative and absolute); as ever, it is the poorest and weakest who will continue to suffer the most, while the rich and strong will always be able to protect themselves and their families; class conflict terrorism exploitation of minorities, women, modern slavery, people trafficking
These are, of course, inter-linked, and will only become more severe if uncontrolled and accelerate as co-operative institutions are deliberately weakened. Whatever the analysis of these threats to general stability and peaceful co-existence, the notion that the leadership of Trump, Johnson, Farage, Le Pen and others will provide the answer is delusional. These politicians show little inclination to promote collective action on these largely moral issues. Instead, they try to achieve electoral success through a series of populist messages, including competitive trade protectionism and self-sufficiency, which appear to look forward to the survival of the fittest.
Migration
A key factor in the EU referendum and Trump’s presidential victory was migration. The issues of economic migration, refugees from war, asylum seekers and legal or illegal migration have become highly contentious and were deliberately conflated by Farage et al to stir up conflict. These are extremely sensitive and can easily be linked to fears about erosion of national identity, security, public finances and fairness in public services (for example, housing). However, if the British, French, Dutch, US and other imperial powers hadn’t wanted foreigners in their countries, they should have stayed at home and not occupied and colonised innumerable other territories around the world with their own (often surplus) people, who were ‘not the best’ (as Trump calls Mexican immigrants to the USA) the colonising powers could produce.6 It is not hard to make comparisons with the Fascism of the 1930s and its reliance in Germany and Britain on anti-Semitism. Even a British Union (of Fascists) candidate (Charles Wegg-Prosser, who failed to win election in 1937) could make the following criticism. He wrote to his leader Oswald Mosley that anti-Semitism is a ‘smokescreen to cloud thought and divert action with regard to our real problems … You sidetrack the demand for social justice by attacking the Jew, you give people a false answer and unloose lowest mob passion … I tried to interest these people in real problems, unemployment, wages, housing, and so on. I watched with dismay the mentality which said “Get rid of Jews, and you will automatically get rid of unemployment, slums, 7 sweating”’.
Migration issues should be dealt with very cautiously as, firstly, humanitarian requirements by international agreement; secondly, as administrative matters (for example, short-term sanctuary versus longer-term asylum provisions and immigrant labour) and importantly kept out of party-political confrontations as too explosive. Responsible politicians would do this rather than attempt to take personal political advantage from the controversies.
Populism
The fissiparous forces now gaining ground in the US and some European countries, most notably in the UK, depend on a newly-confident populist nationalism. Separatist movements in regions within countries, such as Catalonia and Scotland,8 should be differentiated from international divisions, as should nationalist movements for independence from colonial occupation such as Indian and Irish. ‘Populism’ is treated by left/liberals as a negative approach to electoral politics, a view decried by the right as undemocratic (‘what’s wrong with policies being popular?’) It seems to some that the danger in populism is that it is fraudulent. It gains support by and depends on persuading just enough voters that problems in society and the political state are easy to diagnose and simple to solve. In electoral terms, these are reduced to very simple and generally backward-looking slogans: proved incapable of doing so here? Stephen Hawking advocated exploring other planets for this purpose, descibed by the Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, on Hawking’s death as ‘delusional’. 6 Shashi Tharoor, in Inglorious Empire, describing the British colonial civil servants sent to India writes ‘mediocrities ruled the roost’ p. 51. 7 Stephen Dorril, Blackshirt p. 414. 8 Paul Mason in Postcapitalism says of the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 ‘this was not a nationalist surge but a left-inclined plebian movement … to break away from a neoliberal state committed to austerity for the next decade’. p. 260. Take back control9 10 Make Britain great again: a Fascist slogan of the 1930s, along with ‘Britain First’ Give us back our country Make America great again America First11 Drain the swamp Lock her up Build the wall
These are imperative, quasi-religious chants, like ‘Praise the Lord’, to be repeated by large crowds, inevitably evoking memories of the rallies staged by German National Socialists in the 1930s. Present day populists make a virtue of conflict (as seen in Trump’s treating politics in the same way as aggressive business dealing) and the promotion of political force over diplomatic skill and subtlety. The target of much of their attack is the status quo, however vaguely defined.
Populism is often promoted by men and women with narcissistic personal ambition.12 They appeal to emotions they can fabricate but may not be able to control (an attitude described as ‘deceitful’ by the Archbishop of Canterbury, Christmas 2017). It is the easiest accomplishment of a politician to stir up hatred of foreigners. A responsible leader recognizes the risks and attempts to avoid the worst consequences, knowing the dangers of it getting out of control. In the 1930s, Mosley, like Farage today, could deny personal anti-Semitism, but they cannot deny that their political strength, however temporary (UKIP with a single raison d’être, having won it died), depended on those who were racist, xenophobic and anti-Semitic. Hatred may start with deluded verbal aggression (such as references during the EU referendum campaign to ‘the dictatorship of Brussels’), but lead on to the murder of Jo Cox, Labour MP, and that of a Polish immigrant, Arkadiusz Jóźwik (in the UK perfectly legally) by anti- EU fanatics, just before and a few months after the referendum in 2016, respectively. Douglas Murphy, describing Johnson's role in the Leave campaign, says ‘now they'd won, the fires of 13 xenophobia had been thoroughly stoked, and the UK was driving itself off a cliff’.
Populist winners claim to speak for all the UK or US people, stating that the British people have decided or spoken, though only 37.5% of the electorate voted to leave the EU in 2016.14 Such a major constitutional change should have been supported by a minimum vote, perhaps 66%, as some Leave supporters suggested before the referendum when they assumed they would lose. Some might question whether yes-no, in-out referenda are the appropriate way of determining major international relationships.15 The result of the EU referendum is often attributed to the attitudes of the older
9 Linda Colley in ‘Can History Help?’, LRB 22/3/2018 p. 14 suggests ‘Taking back control sounds alluring. But we need to think hard about who exactly is going to be doing the controlling, and how these potential controllers are themselves to be better controlled’. Over the centuries, ‘the House of Commons, the House of Lords, the monarchy, the pre-eminence of London and certain conventions of political and electoral practice: these things endured’. … ‘Could it be that Britain’s political stability has become too pronounced?’ 10 Today the name of a far-right racist and ultranationalist group formed from the BNP in 2011. 11 The far-right, anti-Semitic and nationalist ‘America First’ campaign in the 1930s was addressed in th Des Moines Iowa by the aviator Charles Lindbergh on 11 September 1941: ‘Their [Jews] greatest danger to this country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our radio and our government. … We cannot allow the natural passions and prejudices of other peoples to lead our country to destruction’. [Quoted in Philip Roth The Plot against America p. 388] 12 LRB 39/23 30/11/2017 letter from Lawrence Rosen p. 5: ‘But where racists feel superior to particular categories of people Trump is something far worse: he imagines himself superior to absolutely everyone’. 13 Nincompoopolis Douglas Murphy, 2017 p. 243 14 In 2016 the margin was 51.9% to leave against 48.1% to remain, with a 72.2% turnout. In the comparable referendum in 1975 the vote to remain was 67.2%, to leave 32.8% with a turnout of 64.5%. 15 It is often forgotten (or conveniently ignored) that the result was advisory, not binding on the government. generation and to the young not voting.16 However, the voting patterns should be seen in relation to education and region, not solely to age.
The dominant attitude of the less politically aware British towards the EU pre-2016 was lack of knowledge and indifference. The Leave campaign was an example of stirring up political antagonism where little had existed publicly pre-2010, outside the Daily Mail, Daily Express, Sun, a minority of Tory MPs and UKIP. Many in the UK never understood the principle of EU membership and financial contributions. “We get back less than we put in!” That was the whole idea of the Union (developing the economies of the poorer members, which would in time benefit all), which, obviously, the Leave campaigners didn’t want to explain, and the Remain side appeared nervous about doing so.
Trump is sometimes described as a demagogue, and in 20th century history a parallel can be found in the behaviour of Oswald Mosley in the 1930s. John Beckett (a former supporter of Mosley) is quoted 17 in Blackshirt as describing the leader of the British Union of Fascists (BUF, later BU): ‘not one person of integrity has remained his associate. … This is the fault of his enormous ego, combined with a peculiar shallowness of judgement and ability to deceive himself. The man who brings him 18 good news is his friend, the carrier of unwelcome tidings slowly becomes his enemy’. In 1937 Mosley sacked a lot of the BU staff, ‘every other man or woman on his staff who had reasoned with or 19 contradicted Mosley or his henchmen’. John McNab (another fascist activist) said à propos William Joyce’s (later to become the Nazi propagandist Lord Haw Haw) expulsion from the British Union: ‘Mosley went livid and thumped the desk and shouted that Joyce was nothing but a traitor; that he 20 would never rest until he had broken him; that he would roll him in blood and smash him’. A.K.Chesterton (cousin of G.K. and editor of a fascist newspaper) said of Mosley ‘Flops were written up as triumphs and enormous efforts were made to “give the impression of strength where there is 21 th weakness, of growth where there is declining influence”’. Writing of 19 century US electoral politics, and making comparisons with the present day, Eric Foner has described ‘the tendency of ordinary th Americans to act on their passions rather than reason’ (in connection with Aaron Burr the 19 century politician). ‘Like then, however, we are surrounded by hyper-partisanship, alternative facts, widely accepted conspiracy theories, demagogic politics and prominent political figures collaborating with 22 foreign governments. Some things never change’.
Nationalism
The nationalism associated with populism is a very superficial attitude.23 A person’s nationality is in most cases an accident of birth or an enforced change through positive choice or negative desperation. Static populations might have their nationality changed; or populations may be forcibly moved across borders: In eastern Europe over centuries borders have moved as a result of occupation, war, treaties etc. So, static populations have often had a new nationality imposed24; Mass enforced migrations, for example, between post-war Germany, Poland and Ukraine, can change populations’ nationality. Populations of German origin were deported to Central Asia by Stalin in the 1930s. Post- communism they had the right to ‘return’ to countries they had never been to and acquired a
16 See the inter-generational divisions stoked by David Willett's blaming baby boomers for the current disadvantages of the young, and Vince Cable blaming those over 65 for ‘crushing the hopes and aspirations of young people for years to come’ by voting to leave the EU. Guardian website 11/3/2018. 17 Stephen Dorril 2007, p. 411-12. 18 Beckett’s falling out with the leader then turning on him is reminiscent of Steve Bannon’s relationship with Trump, as reported by Michael Wolff in Fire and Fury, 2018. 19 Beckett in Blackshirt p. 413. 20 p. 413. 21 p. 433. 22 ‘The embryo Caesar’ LRB 39/24 14/12/2017 p. 24. 23 Patriotism is regarded here as distinct from but often confused with nationalism. It may be an automatic support for one’s country but may be an attachment to a place and culture that is essential when these need to be defended without any sense of superiority or comparison with any other group. 24 See Between East and West Anne Applebaum 1994. new nationality. In due course many chose to return to Kazakstan because the new Germany was not what they had imagined. Some countries allow, others refuse dual nationality.
25 Mrs May stated her belief in a speech to the Conservative Party conference that ‘if you believe you are a citizen of the world you are a citizen of nowhere. You don’t understand what the very word 26 ‘citizenship’ means’. May cannot really be ignorant of the creativity in all areas of life stimulated by 27 people who don’t feel solely tied to a single nationality or state. In today’s world the real ‘citizens of nowhere’ are the stateless: Palestinians, Tibetans, Rohingyas and others, totalling 3.6 million in 2015, according to the UN.
All the above highlights a critical and disturbing range of developments in the 21st century that compels comparisons with earlier periods in modern history to help understand what we are living through and in what direction we are moving.28 One of the most worrying aspects of modern populism is the lack of interest in history, either through ignorance or duplicity. Trump and some of his predecessors ignore the historical background of their most powerful adversaries, especially Iran and North Korea, and previously the Soviet Union and at times China. Trump’s knowledge of some significant history closer to home (for example, the Mexican-US war in the 1840s) is lacking. The complexities of internal politics in Iran are ignored or presented in only the most simplistic terms. This is a danger for the world.29
An understanding is needed of how these nations became powerful; how and when they became regionally dominant; and what accounts for their antagonism towards the USA and the West. The answers to some of these questions lead back to well before WWII, and to a time before the ‘West' existed as a geo-political entity, before the USA had become the dominant power in that region and even to a time before the USA was created. Trump and his followers may be genuinely ignorant of history or don't care; Johnson, Farage and other British populists don't have that excuse. Russians, Iranians and Chinese have long memories and value their distant pasts. Trump refuses to recognize that Iran, Russia, North Korea and China have pride in their histories, culture and language. They have in most cases endured great suffering and survived. The USA, on the other hand, has not experienced major bloody conflict on its own mainland soil since the 1860s, which was self-inflicted.30 Populists also appear ignorant of or prefer to forget the historical consequences of racism, especially anti-Semitism.
Trump and Farage are or masquerade as anti-intellectual, rejecting the deep analysis of complex issues. It is ironic that they should team up with people like Johnson and Gove, who have a high level of elite education. However, Gove attempted to jump on the bandwagon as an anti-expert in the run- up to the EU referendum. Lara Feigel reviewing Enemies within by Richard Davenport-Hines quotes the author saying ‘that when Michael Gove said that the public had had enough of experts, he was stoking the “populist delusion that one person's opinion is as good as any other, and pretending that it is improper to value trained minds and rational expertise higher than instincts, inkling, hunches and 31 overemotional fudge“’. Anti-intellectualism was a hallmark of 1930s fascism. William Joyce wanted fascism to apply ‘the stomach-pump of common sense to the unclean system of English
25 5/10/2016. 26 In response, Vince Cable, leader of the Liberal Democrats, said in 2017 that this sentiment could have come from Mein Kampf, Independent 5/7/2017 27 In Life and Fate Vasily Grossman (a trained chemist) describes the situation in pre-war Berlin: ‘It was these men [Jews who were dismissed as ‘cosmopolitan’] who were responsible for Germany’s advances in dye chemistry and the synthesis of nitrogen, who researched the properties of gamma rays and refined the production process of high-quality of steel. It was to see them that foreign scientists, artists, philosophers and engineers visited Germany. And yet these were the men who were the least German of all. Their home was anywhere in the world’. p. 461. 28 See Linda Colley ‘Can History Help?’ LRB 22/3/2018. 29 Max Hastings reviewing a history of US criminal actions in Vietnam wrote ‘the US ignorance of and disdain for Vietnamese history and culture was a major factor in the atrocities such as My Lai’. ‘Wrath of the centurions’ LRB 25/1/2018 p. 21 30 Chamberlain displayed a shameful and disastrous attitude of ignorance towards Czechoslovakia in 1938; see The Oster Conspiracy Terry Parssinen, 2004. 31 Guardian 13/1/2018. intellectualism. If our intellectuals are still seeking new sensations we have something original [i.e. 32 physically violent] for them’ ‘[they] please their own morbid mentalities … by a propaganda of filth’.
The frivolity of the right
The lack of political responsibility shown by Farage, Trump, Johnson, Cameron and Osborne may be the result of their immunity to any ill effects of the policies they promote (or from which they along with their associates will benefit). This is the legacy of their public school education and culture. In relation to Johnson's background, Douglas Murphy describes the ‘curse of the public schoolboy': ‘no matter how little effort they put in, no matter how little aptitude for something they have, they cannot help but 33 34 succeed anyway’. William Davies supports this view of Tory Brexiteers, among whom ‘ignorance and a lack of effort is taken almost as a mark of distinction- how else to explain David Davis’. This is reminiscent of the frivolity of Edward VIII and his Nazi sympathies. Mosley and the aristocratic supporters of fascism and Hitler (such as Diana and Unity Mitford) could also be seen as lacking responsibility. Men who continued their public school nicknames into adulthood (for example, Mosley’s brother-in-law Fruity Metcalfe) suggest there is a degree of infantilism engendered by deference to the monarchy, the aristocracy and a public school upbringing. Reviewing Johnson's mayoralty, Murphy concludes: ‘Looking back from this point [2017], perhaps the least we could hope 35 for is that someone in a position like that might have taken their job just that little bit more seriously’. The architecture critic Gavin Stamp described Johnson’s involvement in the London Garden Bridge project scrapped in 2017 as the ‘pernicious legacy left by the mendacious, posturing former mayor 36 who has done so much damage to this country’.
Nincompoopolis focusses on the actions of Johnson while Mayor of London (2008-16). He writes à propos Johnson’s behaviour at the Beijing Olympics. ‘As far as Johnson is concerned, this just shows yet again how his conception of his responsibility as the Mayor of a world city barely stretched past 37 the idea of effectively being a sales rep, a gimmick merchant for the tourists’. ‘The frivolous option 38 [was] picked as it would make him look better’. William Davies puzzles over the Conservative Party’s 39 ‘seemingly deliberate demolition of the United Kingdom and its economy [by leaving the EU]’. He writes of the ‘frightening lack of responsibility displayed by its main instigators … [such as] Boris Johnson, a man whose only apparent goal is to make political weather’. ‘Trump has no sense of humour where Johnson sees the funny side of everything. … No doubt men such as Johnson and Trump have always existed, but healthy political systems have ways of keeping them away from the highest echelons of power’. Johnson, Gove, Rees-Mogg and others show a ‘blasé indifference to the impact of policy … Tory Brexitism can have a strange flippancy about it … just another attention- seeking strategy … thanks to the recklessness of individuals who see public life as an opportunity to show off. … Britain’s misfortune is that matters of the greatest seriousness are now in the hands of 40 basically unserious people’.
Colin Kidd also describes Tory right-wingers as childish. Postmodern Britain is ‘a country where super-annuated teenagers in certain walks of life, including journalism and politics, stay in a condition of more or less permanent adolescence from puberty to retirement. Some of those not-so-young poseurs are Gove-like Tory boys nostalgically entranced by a sterile fantasy of this island’s immutable 41 heritage’. There are childlike impulses visible in the behaviour of Farage and Trump (described in exactly this way by Michael Wolff, 2018; Trump’s response was that he was ‘a stable genius’) to destroy what took serious politicians decades to build up. They will not be around for the task of re- building a safer world based on collaboration between states. A clear comparison can be made with
32 Blackshirt p. 401. 33 Nincompoopolis p. 243. 34 ‘What are they after?’ LRB 8/3/2018. 35 p. 251. 36 Quoted in Private Eye, 12-25/1/2018, p. 21. 37 Douglas Murphy, 2017, p. 92. 38 p. 157 39 ‘What are they after?’ LRB 8/3/2018 40 Sometimes the best response to this frivolity is mockery: see Appendix “Destruction is progress”. 41 ‘You know who you are’ LRB 25/1/2018 p. 18. the 1930s and a view of Fascism described in 1936 in relation to Mosley: ‘Fascism has the crudity to 42 destroy; it lacks the subtlety to create’.
‘Make Britain Great Again!’ The nostalgia for Empire
The slogan ‘Make Britain Great Again!’ begs the question ‘When was the period of British ‘Greatness’ that Farage, Davis, Johnson, Duncan-Smith, Rees-Mogg and other Leave campaigners look fondly back on and wish to return us all to?’ Firstly, it was never ‘all’. The height of the British Empire, around 1890-1922, peaking in 1914, was a period of great inequality, poverty, disease, wretched housing and low wages in the United Kingdom. The American writer Jack London immersed himself in the East End of London in 1902, to witness and describe the conditions. ‘[In the hard winter of 1902-3 in London] great numbers of the unemployed formed into processions, as many as a dozen at a time, and daily marched through the streets crying for bread’. Quoting the New York Independent in January 1903 he added ‘The workhouses have no space left in which to pack the starving crowds who are craving every day and night at their doors for food and shelter. All the charitable institutions have exhausted their means in trying to raise supplies of food for the famished residents of the 43 garrets and cellars of London lanes and alleys’. He continued his observations: ‘the sanitation … was wretched. From the imperfect sewage and drainage, defective traps, poor ventilation, dampness, and general foulness … [people] attacked by diphtheria, croup, typhoid, erysipelas, blood poisoning, 44 bronchitis, pneumonia, consumption, and various kindred disorders’ ‘450,000 of these creatures are dying miserably at the bottom of the social pit called London. … the heart of the greatest, wealthiest, and most powerful empire the world has ever seen’. He concluded ‘Either the Empire is a profit to England or it is a loss. If it is a loss, it must be done away with. If it is a profit, it must be managed so 45 that the average man comes in for a share of the profit’.
The wealth that the minority enjoyed in British cities depended on the exploitation of resources and labour of subject territories.46 The benefits did not spread to a larger proportion of the general population in the UK until much later, post-WWII. The popular picture of the Edwardian period of country house building and expensive house parties (financed by the loot from empire), as sold to the modern day public in TV and cinema costume dramas such as Downton Abbey, should be examined alongside the prevalence of poverty and strikes in the docks, mines and on the railways that characterised 1900-1914 (especially the ‘Great Unrest’ of 1910-13). Popular literary myths can be very persistent: London, Orwell and others attempted to dispel them. Secondly, the British Empire started to decline 100 years ago and Britain had lost much of its influence by the post-WWII period, as that of the US grew. It is hard, therefore, to pin down when this greatness was so apparent.47
42 Douglas Jerrold, Catholic supporter of fascism in Italy and Spain, editor of the English Review. Quoted in Dorril p. 400. 43 Jack London The People of the Abyss, first published in 1902, reprinted by the Library of America in 1982. p. 5. 44 p. 20. Lenin contracted erysipelas in London. 45 p. 28-9; p. 48; p. 181. 46 Shashi Tharoor, Inglorious Empire, 2017, provides a detailed and damning account of the economic and industrial looting of India by the British during their 200-year occupation. Quoting the American Will Durant’s 1930s study, he writes: ‘The British conquest of India was the invasion and destruction of a high civilization by a trading company [the British East India Company, “founded on a mixture of outrage (at competition from the French and Dutch) and greed’, Gaskill LRB 2/8/2018 p. 38] utterly without scruple or principle, careless of art and greedy of gain’. p. 1. Later, quoting Richard Gott, he says ‘The British empire was essentially a Hitlerian project on a grand scale, involving military conquest and dictatorship, extermination and genocide, martial law and ‘special courts’, slavery and forced labour, and, of course, concentration camps and transoceanic migration of people’ p. 237. There is a clear parallel between the low-wage, highly taxed economies of the British Empire and the regular attempts by businesses to force down wages in industrial Britain. 47 An associated and persistently visual aspect of British culture, the cities of Oxford and Cambridge, have been described as ‘Oxporn’. Colin Burrow, reviewing Phillip Pullman accuses him of overblown Oxford-based writing. [LRB 4/1/2018 p. 8]. Danny Dorling points out in response that this romantic picture is itself false and that ‘most existing Oxford college and university buildings date from the plunder of the British Empire, not the tithes of the Middle Ages’. [LRB 25/1/2018 p. 4] However, it seems that there are still many in the UK who look back to WWII (subconsciously linked to an Imperial past48) with nostalgic pride. Ian Jack commenting on reports of cinema audiences standing and applauding Dunkirk and The Darkest Hour films released in 2018, considers that ‘these reactions suggest an England congratulating itself on its past – an idealised past, shorn of 49 inconvenient fact’. Tharoor reports the results of a YouGov poll in 2014, which ‘revealed that 59 per cent of respondents thought the British Empire was “something to be proud of”. … An astonishing 34 50 per cent opined that “they would like it if Britain still had an empire”’. Vince Cable, leader of the Liberal Democrats and prominent Remainer, stated that too many older voters (in the 2016 referendum) were driven by ‘nostalgia for a world where passports were blue, faces were white and 51 the map was coloured imperial pink’. Gary Younge considers that this ‘nostalgia for a particular, and peculiar, version of our history long preceded Brexit’. He quotes an academic, Paul Gilroy, on the subject of continuing anti-German football chants that refer to WWII: ‘The boast which the phrase [“Two world wars and one world cup”] gives voice to is integral to a larger denial. It declares nothing th significant changed during the course of Britain’s downwardly mobile 20 century … that the nations 52 which triumphed in 1918 and 1945 live on somewhere unseen, but palpable’.
William Davies writes: ‘The fantasies of hardliners such as Liam Fox, Daniel Hannan and Jacob Rees-Mogg are based on dimly learned lessons from British history. The mantra of “Global Britain” resurrects an ideal of laissez-faire from the era of Manchester cotton mills and New World slavery. Discussing the range of Brexit options at a Tory Conference fringe event in October, the former Brexit 53 minister David Jones concluded: “If necessary, as Churchill once said, very well then, alone”’.
In the 1950s and 60s, there was a widespread British attitude of self-satisfaction. We had the best education system, legal system, health service in the world, and, above all, were the mother of parliaments and the cradle of democracy. These claims were accompanied by no comparative analysis, and were possibly linked to the post-war self-congratulation over being victorious. These claims were fallacious then and now appear a form of crude propaganda or at least a denial of reality. In schools history was often taught without any explanation of why things happened or why they were being studied. (For example, British Imperial rule over the Indian subcontinent was presented uncritically as an assumed good thing.) Much of what is now being looked back to was a period when the middle classes had an easier life than today (with cheap labour to maintain their lifestyle); a good education was available to a small selected minority (often subsidised by the rest), and the great majority of the population did not need to be included in generalised boasts about the quality of British life.
Complexity
Rather than simplify and distort descriptions of social, economic and political life, we need to accept the reality, as is known by the liberal left, that society has always been and is getting increasingly complex, difficult to understand, with increasing numbers of vocal interested parties (as was the case in the 1930s) pulling in their own directions, and any solutions will depend on negotiation among those parties and compromise (a concept which is anathema to populists and dismissed as weakness and incapable of producing the change they somewhat emotionally desire). In March 2017 a survey of the political voting patterns of UK academics reported 88% left- to 12% right-wing. This may be because they are trained to analyse complex situations, an analysis which centre- and left-leaning debates stimulate. This seems less true of the right. Vasily Grossman (a Soviet Jewish journalist) in Life and Fate, published in the 1960s and banned for many years in the USSR, claimed that ‘humanity owes many great books and great discoveries to people who were indecisive and full of 54 doubts; they have achieved at least as much as the simpletons who never hesitate’.
48 This linking is personified by Churchill, whose extreme imperial instincts are expressed in his disdain for Indians and their ambitions for independence. He said that the Mahatma ‘should be bound hand and foot at the gates of Delhi, and let the viceroy sit on the back of a giant elephant and trample [him] into the dirt’. Quoted in Tharoor p. 133. 49 Guardian 27/1/2018, Journal section p. 1. 50 Tharoor p. 214. 51 Guardian website 11/3/2018. 52 Guardian website 3/2/2018. 53 ‘What are they after?’ LRB 8/3/2018. 54 Grossman p. 732.
Complexity is often said to be due to an increase in the influence of technology (which is rapidly changing) in everyday life. There is also an increase in populations, their density and mobility in many parts of the world, which leads to a greater degree of contact between people who are or are perceived to be different from one another, and there are many more factors affecting an individual’s personality, behaviour and attitudes. These all increase the chances of conflict and therefore lead to a greater requirement for compromise and negotiation not less. As modern life becomes more complex, it is precisely now that greater collaboration and co-operation is needed and less competitive rivalry, shows of strength and muscle-flexing.
In contrast to the Leave campaign, the slogans of the Remain campaign were descriptive or aspirational, not simplistic imperatives for action, and mostly forward-looking:
Britain stronger in Europe A brighter future in Europe More jobs and opportunities More jobs, lower prices, workers’ rights
The 1970s
Searching for historical links between the situation today and 80 years ago, the 1970s could be seen as pivotal. This decade is often derided, particularly by those who were not yet born, were too young to remember (i.e. now under 50) or benefited from the subsequent reactionary political reforms. A lot of the ridicule is based on entirely superficial social features (fashion and other aspects of style) though there was genuine concern over some aspects of the economy, such as currency devaluation, focussed on industrial unrest and regularly reprinted headlines reporting three-day weeks, rubbish piled in the streets, the dead unburied and miners on strike (summed up as the ‘winter of discontent’). Much of this at the time and in retrospect is linked to Labour governments and internal Labour conflict (focussed on the Militant Tendency), though Tories were in power for about half of the decade and economic and industrial problems were experienced post-Labour in the 1980s and early 1990s (rises in inflation, unemployment, miners on strike and recessions). In fact, at the time the industrial and social disruption was relatively short-lived and quite easily tolerated by most. In 2017 there are those 55 who reject the label of ‘the failed ideologies of the 1970s’.
In many respects this was a positive decade when a lot of progressive movements were continued from the 1960s and gathered pace. Much of this was slowed down or reversed from 1980 onwards. Johnson’s championing as mayor of the New Routemaster London Bus (from 2012), ‘could be seen 56 as some kind of harkening back to an indeterminately better time’ , but it ‘highlighted the significance of the previous Routemaster bus design [1954-1968]. … [which] is a fragment of a very different view of the UK's history, that of the forward-looking, high-technology egalitarian society that at certain points in the post-war era it looked like the UK might become. ... it appears as an undeniably utopian 57 symbol of the lost promise of the UK, destroyed by Thatcherism and the nostalgia industry’.
Social progress in the 1970s can be seen in: Interest in the environment, the human place in the ecosystem, green politics, small is beautiful, zero growth Concern about uncontrolled capitalism; Tory PM Edward Heath described ‘the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism’ in the House of Commons in 1973 with reference to Lonrho. There was some moral restraint on rampant, ostentatious displays of wealth. Now this is out of control and it is a long time since anyone was made to feel guilty about showing off their affluence. Feminism and the legislation for social equality Membership of the Common Market indicated a willingness to co-operate in key economic/industrial/social areas58
55 Guardian Leader 30/12/2017. 56 Murphy p. 82. 57 Murphy p. 91. 58 It is claimed (e.g. by A.C. Grayling in 2018) that the UK economy has strengthened since the 1970s largely thanks to its membership of the EU and the single market. Trades union rights and attempts at a ‘social contract/compact’ with government Peace, anti-war, CND, anti-apartheid, progressive student politics The 1970s saw the end of the period of de-colonisation, and freedom movements were active in finishing the process Stronger race relations legislation Comprehensive education reforms Overall, there was an emphasis on collective action being essential for the future of humanity and the planet where it lives
The shift from the 1970s to the 1980s
There was a significant reversal after Thatcher’s victory in 1979, mostly with an emphasis on individualism, ‘greed is good’ and ‘no such thing as society’. Thatcher attacked the EU, demonstrating a typically and lasting mercenary interest in membership of the Union. She appeared to have little interest in the position of women and some of the gains of feminism in some ways appeared to be lost.59 Thatcher did what she could to curb trades union rights. She privatised as much that was state- owned as she was able and laid the groundwork for attacks on the welfare state and public services continued by later Tory administrations and Blair’s New Labour. Paul Mason wrote ‘in the last 25 years ... the market destroyed the plan [of the left]; individualism replaced collectivism and solidarity; the massively expanded workforce of the world looks like a ‘proletariat‘ , but no longer thinks or 60 behaves purely as one’.
She denigrated environmentalists and had little interest in preserving the environment, which was mainly there to be exploited, built on and made profitable. She was very much against financial and economic regulation, and along with Reagan promised liberated post-communist countries a future that could not be fulfilled. She promoted deregulation, leading to the financial crash in 2007, following which Cameron and Osborne successfully blamed the previous New Labour government for lax controls, and, bizarrely, claimed the Tories to be the party of tough regulation. She, along with Reagan, promoted acceptance of military force to be used against the USSR and Cuba, and weakened opposition to South Africa and its oppression of non-white majorities in the region.61
Thatcher promoted a low taxation economy, justified by the supposed ‘trickle down’ benefits. Instead, inequality rose. Industrial decline was accepted and accelerated, leading to dependence on the service especially financial sector. This led to a concentration of wealth in the SE of England, now grotesque and damaging in its effects. She promoted competition as the primary motivation not only of business but also of many other human relations. Human relationships became opportunities for people to make money from each other: a ‘nation of shopkeepers’, knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing, a government ‘selling the family silver’ (comments by former Tory PM Harold Macmillan). Wolfgang Streek, reviewing Perry Anderson discussing the post-revolutionary 1970s, suggests it came to a ‘new epoch that could dispense with ideology since capitalist hegemony now “lay in a set of lifestyles, conducts, needs, demands, whose origin and end was in the world of commodities”. Now ... there was ‘no ethos, no directive idea, no concern with the inner life of the individual, which was delivered over to the market and the unconscious’, and no need either for intellectuals and their passionate devotion to ideas. The new era's ‘basic value’ was ‘tolerance, that is, 62 indifference”’. There was irony in the speeches made by Thatcher on her arrival in Downing Street in 1979 (‘harmony in place of discord’), managing to sow greater discord in the subsequent years. This was imitated by Theresa May in 2016, whose first speech in Downing St. suggested she was living in
59 Especially in fashion and some aspects of public behaviour. Feminism seemed to be interpreted by some as the right to be as drunk, loud and loutish as some men. Misogyny since the 1970s seems to have increased to a crisis level and there is a renewed focus on the pay gap in a wide range of occupations. 60 Mason Postcapitalism, 2015 p. xiv. 61 See the Queen's attitude to Thatcherism revealed in December 2017: ‘Such was her anger, the Queen considered scrapping her weekly audience with the prime minister, a Buckingham Palace source told a diplomat. In October [1987] Mrs Thatcher refused to back tighter sanctions against South Africa agreed by 47 other leaders at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting’. Times online edition 30/12/2017. 62 ‘You need a gun’ LRB 39/24 14/12/2017 p. 26. a fantasy world of future harmony that she would engineer, while ineptly trying to manage the UK’s exit from the EU for the benefit of all.
The neo-liberalism promoted by Thatcher, Reagan and others such as Pinochet in Chile, ‘resolved to smash labour’s collective bargaining power, traditions and social cohesion completely’. ‘Neoliberalism’s guiding principle is not free markets, nor fiscal discipline, nor sound money, nor privatization and offshoring- nor even globalization. All these things were by-products or weapons of 63 64 its main endeavour: to remove organized labour from the equation’.
2016-7 and the 1930s
In looking back from 2016-7 to the 1930s the present period can be seen as a retreat to a state of insularity, self-absorption and a loss of concern or responsibility for the welfare of the world or international leadership. The reversal didn't suddenly begin in 2016, but in the UK the political attitude clearly visible now could be seen as the logical conclusion of the shift in political philosophy from the 1970s to the 1980s.
In the first half of the 1930s there were frantic attempts at bilateral and multilateral treaties, and international conferences on peace, limiting warfare, especially in the air, in order to avoid a second world war, which everyone agreed would be calamitous. Now, great efforts are being made to dismantle international organisations (EU), deny their value (NATO), undermine their effectiveness (UN), ignoring Security Council resolutions on Israel, and bullying weak countries into supporting the strong. In 2017 the US threatened to remove aid from countries that didn’t support its position on Jerusalem as capital of Israel. UN support for the invasion of Iraq was achieved in a similar way in 2003.
UKIP and others on the right dismiss out of hand any parallels between the present day and the 1930s, especially that there is anything fascist about the far right in Europe and the USA today.65 However, for parallels to be identified, it is not necessary to claim that Farage and others. have fascist, xenophobic or anti-Semitic beliefs themselves. For the Leave campaign to win, they relied on just enough supporters who are xenophobic. The arguments needed to be reduced to simplistic slogans to appeal to a broad enough set of voters. The coalition of leaders ranged from the purely opportunistic (Johnson, Gove) to the ideologically driven (Rees-Mogg, Redwood, Farage). There were also a number of minor hangers-on who perhaps hoped for advancement if Leave won (Fox, Davis). They also relied on the weakness and incompetence of remainers (Cameron, May). This confusion of attitudes in the ruling party can be seen among the proponents and opponents of appeasement in the 1930s.66
Labour was in a difficult position before and since the EU referendum, as they were in the mid-1930s over Spain. Firstly, they have had to acknowledge the democratic result. However, there has always been a principled opposition from the left to such a multi-national body (Benn, Shore), which has promoted globalisation and competition between public and private providers and suppliers, though whether employment rights would have been advanced outside the EU, especially under Tory administrations, is debateable.
63 Paul Mason Postcapitalism pp. 91-2. 64 Comparisons can be made with Italian fascist theory of ‘corporatism’ in the 1930s, which sought to subject labour to the interests of the state and private business. 65 However, Boris Johnson has compared Vladimir Putin’s use of the World Cup, held in Russia in 2018, with Hitler’s exploitation of the Olympic Games in Berlin in 1936 for their propaganda value. [House of Commons, 21/3/2018] 66 The EU referendum and the vote to leave could be compared even further back than the 1930s: with the protestant reformation. A movement resulting in massive destruction and a national anti- Catholic hatred that lasted for centuries, was motivated, in part, by a demand to ‘Give us control over our church’. ‘Henry VIII’s imperial claims, couched in Thomas Cromwell’s majestic legalese, were introspective, asserting the power of the monarch freed from the constraints of papal rule. The economy was beset by inflation, there were land shortages and there was growing poverty, along with anxiety about the balance of payments and the value of sterling’. [Malcolm Gaskill ‘Dining with Ivan the Terrible’, review of Stephen Alford: ‘London’s Triumph’ LRB 8/2/2018 p. 37] The 1930s and 2010s share some additional characteristics: Weak governments and coalition; ineffective opposition Electoral mistakes by prime ministers (May and Baldwin) Dealing with the aftermath of economic crises A government distracted from important domestic reforms by an overwhelming foreign policy problem (the EU now; Germany then) Governing parties internally very divided Divisions ultimately bringing down the Tory leader (Cameron and Chamberlain) The US was isolationist and focussed on domestic problems and very divided A lack of strong internationalist leadership
Comparison of the threats today (see above) with the 1930s
Looking back at the list of threats to today’s world, it can be seen that none of them is new and all can be observed in the 1930s:
armed conflict and civil war: for example, in Abyssinia, Manchuria and Spain migration: refugees from war, such as the Spanish republicans who fled Spain post-Civil War to France; Jews and others from Germany capitalism: Wall St crash; the Great Depression 1929-33; strikes in the UK against reductions in wages 1900 - 1930s; General Strike 1926 environment: considerable pollution in industrial areas, though there was possibly less general awareness of the future global impact poverty everywhere: in the US, the UK (see Orwell’s descriptions of the north of England), in British colonies; class warfare terrorism: in Palestine, anarchists in US and Europe exploitation of minorities: everywhere, in European empires, in the southern US states
Paul Mason in his 2016 Guardian article, warns against making too direct comparisons, and considers that today we have the benefit of a globalized world to protect us from some of the worst threats. However, he claims that ‘The problem is, politically, we have in one sense gone beyond the 1930s. … When Franco’s troops took Badajoz, and put 2,000 of its inhabitants against the wall in the early days of the Spanish civil war, the Wehrmacht’s military observer was so disgusted that he advised German troops should never be allowed to serve alongside Franco’s lest they become “brutalised”. Today, an entire generation of humanity has been brutalised – whether it experiences mass slaughter, rape and torture firsthand, or whether it simply sees the pictures and hears the stories [of ISIS atrocities and massacres in Syria and elsewhere]. If you read any memoir from the 30s and the war years, there is almost always a moment of realisation: what a cadaver looks like; that prisoners can be shot; that the Geneva conventions may be flouted. Sadly, in sheer brutality, we are past the 1930s – and in the 67 struggle between governments and civilian populations the Geneva conventions do not apply’.
In his book-length study Postcapitalism (2015), he also states ‘In this scenario [the consensus breaking down], lip-service to international law evaporates; torture, censorship, arbitrary detention and mass surveillance become the regular tools of statecraft. This is a variant of what happened in the 68 1930s and there is no guarantee it cannot happen again’.
Class is associated with most of the above threats. Class warfare was explicit in the 1920s and 30s. Today it is not so associated with the working class (perhaps more with activist groups such as Class War), whose interests the much weakened trades unions attempt to defend. Whenever a mildly socialist point of view is put forward by the Labour Party or a trades union, for example in advocating higher taxes for the wealthy, a mansion tax or on non-domiciled individuals, it is dismissed as ‘the politics of envy' by the Tory right and the right-wing press. Slogans from the Tories and press, such as ‘hard-working families’, ‘strivers versus skivers', ‘benefit cheats’ (prominent in press campaigns in the 1979 and again in 2010 elections) eventually have some effect and become unanalysed ‘facts’. As a
67 Guardian online 1/8/2016: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/aug/01/are-we-living- through-another-1930s-paul-mason. 68 Mason p. x. result, the public have been encouraged to denounce benefit ‘cheats’ and ‘illegal’ immigrants (infamously by May’s billboards towed around the country when she was Home Secretary).
The Press
It may be true that the print media are far less influential today than they were in the 1930s. They are no less anti-Labour, but perhaps younger voters don't read the Mail, Express, Sun, Telegraph or Times.69 However, if they get more of their news, information and opinion from social media and other online sources, it is not clear that these are any less biased or partisan. There has been a growth of pressure groups organised largely online (‘Stop the War’, ‘Occupy’, etc.) and these have perhaps had some alternative effect on large-scale opinion and action.
One further point of comparison with the 1930s is the vitriolic language used by some of the right-wing press and political commentators. Post-referendum, the Daily Mail in a front-page headline described the judges who ruled in favour of a case brought by a Remain supporter (Gina Miller) as ‘Enemies of 70 the People’. This newspaper was notorious in the 1930s for its support for Fascism, culminating in 71 the unambiguous headline ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’. William Joyce in 1935 attacked the supporters of the India Bill (which proposed a degree of self-rule) as ‘one loathsome, fetid, purulent, 72 tumid mass of hypocrisy’. Other reactions to the Remain side of the EU argument came from ConservativeHome, a ‘centre-right political blog’, which described the BBC as unpatriotic for reporting warnings about negative effects of leaving the EU. In 2017 Tory MP Nadine Dorries demanded that Tory ‘rebels’ against May’s exiting the EU legislation should be punished: ‘Tonight, the Tory rebels have put a spring in Labours [sic] step, given them a taste of winning, guaranteed the party a weekend of bad press, undermined the PM and devalued her impact in Brussels. They should be deselected and never allowed to stand as a Tory MP, ever again’ … ‘I’ve been a rebel myself, but 73 never when a Marxist government was knocking at the door’. The Daily Mail website, following the conviction of the driver responsible for the Finsbury Park terrorist attack in June 2017, commented: “TODAY, the Daily Mail accuses Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and Diane Abbott, the troika who could run the next government, of being unashamed apologists for terror, who have devoted their lives to befriending the enemies of Britain while undermining the very institutions that keep us safe in 74 our bed ... [Corbyn] is ‘the man who loves terrorists around the world’. In general, partisanship in politics, sport and entertainment today has become more aggressive and abusive, because an individual’s views can more instantly be communicated to many more people and become noticed and in some fora remain anonymous.
"Make Our Planet Great Again!": President of France Emmanuel Macron, reported by CNN 12/12/2017
Writing about a cigar-shaped cosmic object sighted in the sky in October 2017, Nick Richardson comments ‘There are so many signs that we're on the cusp of a new dark age. Religion is on the rise, as are the numbers of believers in astrology and conspiracy theories, and average IQ is falling’. ‘Get it wrong and we'll forever be the dunces of the universe, pointed at and mocked by aliens as they pass 75 through in their cigars on their way to somewhere more sophisticated’.
69 The combined circulation of 5 of the most popular daily newspapers published in both 1939 and 2017 shows a decline from 6.6 million to 3.1 million, while the UK population rose from 47.5 million to 65.6 million in the same period. This equates to a drop from 1 in 7 to 1 in 21. 70 Daily Mail 4/11/2016. 71 Daily Mail 19/1/1934. 72 Dorril p. 348. 73 Quoted in the New Statesman 14/12/2017. 74 Quoted in Private Eye 1463 9-22/2//2018 p. 8. 75 ‘From a distant solar system’ LRB 39/24 14/12/2017 p. 36. General introduction
This study will focus on British popular and political attitudes towards some of the key movements in Europe that led to the Second World War, as reflected in such contemporary sources as journalism (from a range of political standpoints), diplomatic correspondence, political documents, public opinion and personal accounts. In particular, it will examine the part played by the Spanish Civil War in shifting or confirming British opinion towards political extremism and towards the fear that political conflict would degenerate into a renewed violent confrontation between national armed forces. It will attempt to assess how public opinion towards these somewhat alien forces influenced the state of Britain in the late 1930s.
The context for these events is seen as the political instability of the post-WWI years, leading to the rise of Fascism, the growing external influence of Communism and the eventual eruption of total war across the continent. With the benefit of hindsight and knowing the catastrophic consequences by 1939, the attempts at defending democracy in many parts of the region might seem to have been doomed to failure in the face of these overwhelming and competing anti-democratic forces. Additionally, the Catholic Church played an influential, though ambiguous, role as a third force in some parts of the continent. The study will examine how events in the rest of Europe were seen from the British perspective and how they affected the policies of political parties of the left and right, official inter-government relations (for example, through the League of Nations) and popular attitudes. Domestically, there is a further trinity of shifting forces: Fascist alignment with Nazism, pacifist appeasement and calls for re-armament. The way in which these movements competed for political and popular influence could be seen as determining how Britain stood in 1939. In Europe the most dramatic and alarming indication of the failure of peace efforts was the Spanish Civil War, where the forces of Communism (and other leftist groupings such as anarchists) confronted Fascism and the Catholic Church. This conflict will be used as a focus for illuminating British attitudes and policies.
Almost uniquely among major European nations, Britain entered the second half of the 1930s as a moderate democratic state, though to what extent it was truly politically stable is open to question, considering such confrontations as the pitched battles between political adversaries seen in London in the middle of the decade. Historians have debated how close Britain came to embracing (or being embraced by) Fascism, and there is extensive documentation of top-level government concern over the threat of domestic unrest.76 At the contrasting level of individual responses to these dangers, much is known about how high-profile British intellectuals and working-class activists involved themselves in Spanish events and helped to publicise the threat posed by international Fascism to world peace.
The organisation of the arguments that follow will be based on key events and political and public reactions to them covering 1932-1938. These cover, firstly, the peace movements 1932-1935 (including the League of Nations, disarmament and the Peace Ballot), secondly, the activities of the British Union of Fascists in the middle of the decade, and thirdly, events surrounding the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), by which time hope of a peaceful resolution to European diplomatic conflicts were abandoned and peace appeared to have definitively failed. In each section primary sources will be examined for evidence of contemporary views in Britain alongside modern historians’ analysis of their significance.
Richard Overy wrote in 2009: ‘The impact of the Spanish Civil War on British opinion has seldom had the attention it deserves,77 but its role as a catalyst in shaping British attitudes towards contemporary crisis was direct and substantial’. The present study aims to explore this relationship. ‘The Spanish crisis even more than anti-Fascism, with which it was closely connected, was appropriated by important areas of British society as prologue to a terrible drama in which they too might be forced to 78 play a leading part’. Among these ‘important areas of society’ are the political parties, government departments, journalists, press owners and the public in general, whose views are found in the
76 e.g. The Public Order Act, December 1936, brought in to ban para-military uniforms. 77 But see, for example, Tom Buchanan, The Impact of the Spanish Civil War on Britain: war, loss and memory (2007). 78 Richard Overy, The Morbid Age: Britain between the Wars p. 319. sources that this study will examine.79 Its principal aim is to identify significant interconnections and to explore features of both settings that can illuminate the context for the European war that in some quarters was viewed as inevitable by 1936 (and in the opinion of some people earlier than that).80 A major question will be posed: in the light of the attempts to secure international peace, to what extent and how did the tumultuous events in a not so far-off country impinge on domestic affairs at political and popular levels of society?
Two contemporary commentators, committed politically to the opposing sides in Spain, provide contrasting pictures of British attitudes. George Orwell, in Homage to Catalonia, published in 1938, wrote ‘during the first year of the war the entire British public is thought to have subscribed to various ‘aid Spain’ funds about a quarter of a million pounds – probably less than half of what they spend in a 81 single week on going to the pictures’. Peter Kemp, who published his memoir of fighting for the Nationalist cause in 1957, wrote of the ‘initiative and vitality of Republican propaganda in Britain ... the Spanish Civil War aroused in ordinary Englishmen an intensity of interest and [pro-Republican] 82 partisan feeling unusual in a people notoriously indifferent to the affairs of other countries’. Neither writer can be used as a dispassionate authority on British public opinion, but in their own way each highlights a moral response, either sadly lacking or misguided. Their diametrically opposed views will be seen to typify the whole debate.
Primary sources
The aim of the analysis of primary data is to provide a picture of how British public and political opinion interacted with international events in the 1930s, which appeared deeply fractured though they ultimately united to defend the country successfully against Fascism.83 For this purpose, a variety of contemporary sources need to be examined to build up a deeper picture than can be achieved by any single type of evidence, such as print journalism: official documents, records of political debate, news reports from a range of print sources and expressions of public opinion. Wherever possible, sources will be identified that can offer a multiple perspective: for example, news reports that reflect public opinion as well as the proprietor’s or editor’s viewpoint. It is recognized that each has its strengths and limitations as historical evidence, which will be considered in the following analysis.
A first source will be identified from the very sizable archives of official documents from a variety of governmental organizations, such as the Foreign Office. Secondly, sources of political opinion include Hansard, which provides a very large online archive, easily searchable for parliamentary debates on key issues of the day, such as major events in Spain and political party general election manifestoes in 1929, 1931 and 1935. Thirdly, news reports will be taken from the mainstream British national newspapers of the period, which vary in the ease and method of access:84 for example, The Times, The Manchester Guardian, the Daily Mirror, and the Daily Express. Publications with a more restricted circulation include the Daily Worker (Communist), Blackshirt, Action and The Fascist Week (British Union of Fascists) and the Catholic Herald.85 One of the most specialist and relevant titles is the Fighting Call, published very briefly by British left-wing supporters of the Spanish Republican cause.
A final source, possibly the most difficult to acquire systematically from primary data and analyse reliably, is the expression of public opinion. This is also hard to distinguish from press reporting or political speeches, as these may claim authority derived from what the population at large (or their supposed audience) think or say on a particular subject. A strong case may be made for ‘Letters to
79 A small number of literary sources will also be quoted as evidence of a mood rather than as authoritative commentary. 80 ‘War is coming soon … The electric drills in our streets presage the rattle of machine guns. ... Only a little while before the aeroplanes come. Zoom, bang! A few tons of TNT to send our civilization to hell where it belongs’. George Orwell, Keep the Aspidistra Flying, (1936), p. 246. 81 George Orwell, Homage to Catalonia, (1938), p. 212. 82 Peter Kemp, Mine Were of Trouble, (1957), pp. 201-2. 83 Charles Mowat, Britain between the wars 1918-1940, (1955), p. 578. 84 Some are available free online (e.g. The Times); some for a fee (e.g. the Daily Express); some can be read in specialist libraries. At the time of writing those held at the British Newspaper Library at Colindale (e.g. the Daily Mail) were in the process of being digitized and were unavailable. 85 The Church of England’s principal organ, the Church Times, although first appearing in 1863 and still issued today, was not published between 1889 and 1939. the editor’ being authentic public opinion, which can be found in most news publications. Among the range of journalistic genres the editorial or leader column may be the most ambiguous, claiming to present, as it often does, the voice of the people, particularly in the popular press. For example, while editorials in the most polarized newspapers (Daily Worker or Blackshirt) may be indistinguishable from their news reports, the Daily Mirror can make a case by appealing to a wide range of opinion: ‘disarmament commends itself … to the whole mass of unthinking and easy-going people whose 86 children may be born only to be massacred’.
However, the attempt to gauge public opinion should not be dismissed as futile in understanding British attitudes towards events in Europe. In 1937 Harold Nicolson provided a useful analysis of how public attitudes towards foreign policy were shaped and should be understood in the mid-1930s. Having identified the British establishment’s ‘legend’ of ‘the sound political instincts of the British 87 people’ (derived from native ‘tolerance’, ‘trustfulness’, ‘patience’, ‘good temper’, ‘caution’ and ‘sense of humor’), he suggested that, in the face of ‘the whole principle of democracy … being challenged’, 88 some were claiming that ‘the whole theory of democratic instinct is a Whig fantasy’.
He set this pessimistic view against the opposite tendency of self-satisfactory complacency in the context of the specific foreign policy issues of interest here: firstly, in response to the Peace Ballot of 1934-35. While recognizing the numerical strength of the response, he highlighted the ambiguity of the results and what they indicated about public attitudes towards war. Did the Ballot confirm support for the League of Nations covenant and its commitment to the defence of member states or was it ‘a demonstration that the British people were overwhelmingly pacifist’? Quoting electoral campaign literature of 1935, he pointed out the ‘self contradictory nonsense’ of lobbying both for the League covenant’s collective security (i.e. commitments to military action) and at the same time avoidance of ‘any entanglements in Europe’. The ambiguity arose, in his view, from an inability to distinguish 89 between ‘what people wanted to happen; it didn’t express what people were prepared to do’.
Secondly, in relation to the Spanish Civil War, his analysis identifies no firm basis for consensus. On the Left Marxists saw the issue as Imperialism/Fascism against their Republican comrades in Spain. The far Right equally hoped for a final reckoning between the two extremes. Between them the fundamentalist positions destroyed the ‘old unity’ based on patriotism. Even though the ‘most ardent Tory’ dreaded the expansionism of Germany and Italy, any middle ground proposed by the British Government was easily dismissed by the ‘LEFT’ and Centre as appeasement of Fascism. In conclusion, Nicolson, even as late as 1937, was ‘confident that in a few years we shall recapture our former equanimity’ and that public opinion would be driven ‘back into our natural habit of compromise, 90 gradualness, and the middle path between extremes’.
The final source of public opinion, opinion polls, first came into use in Britain during this period. The data from monthly Gallup Polls, published in the News Chronicle, are available from January 1937, though with a small sample of only 1,000 adults and based initially on very few questions.91
Interpretation
Clearly, these diverse sources have to be treated with some care in building up a reliable picture of the period. Firstly, in terms of partiality and bias, a contemporary analysis of the press and radio reporting of the Spanish Civil War published in 1937, pointed out that ‘it ranges all the way from a 92 scrupulous effort to be impartial and quieting to deliberate provocations to participation in the war’. Many claims of impartiality need questioning. British Catholic expressions of support for Franco and
86 Daily Mirror, 01/02/1932, UK Press Online
Secondly, queries surround the balance that might be sought among unequal volumes of usable data. Should the public and political material studied be of similar quantities, or political documents weighted against press reports? Sampling will inevitably be necessary, but to do this by any quantitative measure is hardly likely to prove effective, as individual documents are of very different lengths and significance. A letter to a newspaper may be very short (a couple of paragraphs), while the transcript of a House of Commons debate on the same topic will cover several pages. However, the former might provide more of an insight into public attitudes than the debate does of a political standpoint.
The four categories of primary sources overlap and can be regarded as a continuum. At one end of the scale, official government documents can be seen as the most authoritative, the result of lengthy discussion and debate (for example, legislation). To the public they may be factual records to be taken at face value. Secondly, records of political debates (in either house of parliament, for example) may be produced by members of the government, so there is overlap in the dramatis personae. The third category, newspaper reports or editorials, have a clear and in some cases direct connection with party politics, and the proprietor may have a strong identification with a party or even have a role in government (e.g. Lord Beaverbrook of the Daily Express). Finally, the link between public opinion and the press hardly needs elaboration: with letters to the editor published in most papers and reference to what the people say or think used as the basis for editorial positions. In the most politically- committed press (e.g. the Fighting Call on the left or the Blackshirt on the right) there is hardly any attempt to demarcate between news reporting, editorials and diaries or letters to the editor; all would be printed to re-enforce the standpoint of the publisher on any subject. For this reason, strict or balanced sampling of these different sources (which would not be achievable in any case) is not regarded as essential in providing an overall picture or political and public opinion.
The solution to most of these issues is to triangulate material, supporting an argument with evidence from a range of differing and independent sources that can corroborate or contradict each other, an ‘attempt to map out, or explain more fully, the richness and complexity of human behavior by studying 93 it from more than one standpoint’. This multiple perspective helps to identify bias and propaganda. However, coverage will continue to be partial, since not all opinions will be represented in every case.
The discussion above of primary sources raises the issue of the extent to which historical judgements can be based on such ephemera as daily newspapers aimed at a popular, miscellaneous readership. The approach taken here follows the views expressed by Adrian Bingham.94 He focusses on the increased accessibility in recent years of newspapers through the digitization of archives and at the same time recognizes the ‘widespread scepticism’ over their value and ‘doubtful accuracy’. Although in the past ‘scholars working on the central themes of modern British history have rarely used newspapers as a significant source’, following ‘”the cultural turn” and the increasing scholarly interest in language, representation and meaning, there are few who deny the value of newspaper content for understanding politics, culture and society’. However, he points out that ‘digital archives only provide us with newspaper content: they do not offer information about the production of newspapers or about their reception by actual readers’. To understand their significance, it is necessary to consider ‘the 95 political, social and cultural contexts that the newspapers were operating in’. For this reason, it is desirable, where possible, to read the broader content of newspapers over and above the digitally searched and excerpted extracts. In this respect, we are more interested in newsprint as cultural and political artefacts rather than as corpora for textual analysis, and consider the connections between the various genres on a single topic.
Referring to an earlier historical setting, John Robertson commends Franco Venturi’s volumes of research on the European Enlightenment (published between 1969 and 1990) for their broad scope
93 Louis Cohen and Lawrence Manion, Research Methods in Education, (2000), p. 254. 94 Adrian Bingham, 'The Digitization of Newspaper Archives: Opportunities and Challenges for Historians', Twentieth Century British History, 21.2 (2010), 225-31. 95 Bingham, pp. 225, 226, 225, 230. and the sources used. One type ‘consists of the journals and newspapers through which Italians were 96 informed of events elsewhere in Europe’. These sources ‘provide … the “prism” through which the crises and struggles of others are observed and comprehended’. However, he warns that this prism is 97 ‘perhaps also a dangerous one, for the light that emerges from the prism is decidedly variable’. Evidence is partial and usually second-hand. Although it is not possible to compare directly Venturi’s sources with those used in the present study, there is a similar range and we can perhaps see the Mass Observation file reports, for example, as modern-day versions of the personal journals of the eighteenth century, and diplomatic dispatches can be seen as valuable sources in both periods.
Where Bingham refers to a ‘cultural turn’, Raphael Samuel speaks of the ‘deconstructive turn in contemporary thought’, which ‘put all of history’s taken-for-granted procedures into question’ and 98 ‘invites us to see history … as an invention, or fiction, of historians themselves’. One result of this conception of history is to see social class (along with other ‘fabricated’ categories) as a ‘chimera’. However, it does not seem reasonable to deny the significance of class (as interpreted at that time) in interwar Europe. Not only was there explicit, and publicly conducted, class warfare in British society, the Spanish Civil War itself has been seen as an instance of class struggle on an international scale, again waged in very explicit terms on both sides. What is useful in this fundamental scrutiny of the nature of history from a cultural angle is the notion of ‘history from below’, which Samuel applauds for ‘rescuing the poor from the “enormous condescension of posterity” … [and for offering] a much wider field to explore’. Samuel presents the contrasting methods of ‘fact-grubbers’ (empirical historians), on the one hand, and ‘mind-readers’ (discourse analysts and semioticians), on the other. His conclusion is valuable for the present study.99
For good or ill, history is idiographic, excited by, even if not limited to, a ‘specific place, a definite time, a particular situation’. It must concern itself with ‘befores’ and ‘afters’ as well as ‘now’ and ‘then’. It would be extremely unfortunate if, in deference to current intellectual fashion, historians were to become shamefaced about the pursuit of knowledge. Getting up stuff is what we are good at.100
Among the ‘stuff’ to be examined in this study are the views from below of participants in political strife and the places, times and situations that provided the context.
96 John Robertson, 'Franco Venturi's Enlightenment', Past and Present, 137 (1992), 183-206 (p. 193). 97 Robertson, p. 194. 98 Raphael Samuel, 'Reading the Signs: II. Fact-Grubbers and Mind-Readers', History Workshop Journal, 33 (1992), 220-51 (p. 220). 99 Samuel, pp. 221, 227. 100 Samuel, p. 246. 1. Contextual background 1919 - 1932
The background for the study that follows focusses on the social milieu of the interwar years, and the social atmosphere of the period is given some prominence. This was a mood influenced by fresh memories of the immediate past, by some strongly-voiced views about the current state of affairs and by fear of the future.
One of the most pertinent, recently-published accounts of the social and public life of interwar Britain, Overy’s The Morbid Age, subtitled ‘Britain and the crisis of civilization, 1919-1939’, with its first chapter called ‘Decline and Fall’, is an evocative and detailed picture which forcefully demonstrates that this was a period when there was a genuine and, as it transpired, justified fear for the future of civilization.
This predominant mood is also described as ‘pathological’ and ‘neurotic’, with strong images of disease, defectiveness and perversions. These terms applied to a general public mood, to a physically-defective population, to the state of capitalism in the West and to a moral bankruptcy. This introspective analysis of the state of the nation was partly stimulated by an increase in interest in psychology, and ‘neurosis was accepted as a reality of modern life’. Of all the fears expressed, that of war was the greatest anxiety, especially in the light of technological development in the direction of modern mass warfare. As early as 1934 there was reference to a Second World War, and, as attempts to use science and psychoanalysis to understand, explain and thus avoid war failed, the gloomy inevitability grew. Overy details the frantic activity of anti-war groups, which will be a major focus of this study.101
The attempts to avoid future armed conflict were hindered by the deep divisions within British society, making the country ill-equipped to reach a conclusion on interpreting national and international shifts and balances [see Preface above] and find a consensus on finding a future direction.
These divisions encompassed: - political conflicts between national parties: new parties of the right; the state of Europe; suffrage - international relations: treaties post-Versailles; Britain and France interwar - socio-economic conditions; industrial conflict; class; social conditions - the press
1.2. Political conflicts in the United Kingdom
In George Dangerfield’s The Strange Death of Liberal England, written from the near perspective of 1935, Paul Johnson’s introduction describes ‘the mid-thirties, when the scars of the Great War were 102 still unhealed and the shadow of a new one already visible’. To state the case in simple electoral terms, the Liberal party won a landslide victory in 1906 (49% and 400 seats); by the 1922 election (at the end of the Lloyd George coalition) they received 17.5% of the vote and won 54 seats. The Liberals, though morally and culturally sympathetic to labour and social welfare, could not attack employers over such key issues as a minimum wage for miners. The Great Unrest of 1910-1913 left them caught and destroyed between capital and labour (when groups of workers in Wales and 103 elsewhere fought both employers and their old-fashioned unions’ authority to go on strike ). They were also in a quandary over women’s suffrage and Ireland. The Tories in opposition were happy to take advantage of the Liberals’ perceived weakness, especially in Ireland, where they supported a rebellion of army officers (the Curragh Mutiny, March 1914), who refused to implement Home Rule in Ulster. They also used the House of Lords to further their own goals, culminating in political warfare. Dangerfield claims that the pre-war conflicts could have destroyed parliamentary democracy in 1912 104 and ‘England approached revolution and civil war. World War I saved democracy’. There was an assumption, at this point, that Britain was finished as a great power.105 This assessment is repeated in
101 Richard Overy, ‘Morbid Age’ p. 3-4, 168, 114, 53, 144, 168, 175, 195, 10, 223 102 p. 10. 103 p. 223. 104 p. 10. 105 p. 323. 106 Blake’s The Decline of Power 1915-1964, who states that the British Empire reached a territorial peak in the immediate post-war period and started to decline immediately.107
This significant change in Liberal fortunes presaged the 20-year period of inter-war political instability.
1916-1922 coalition government led by Lloyd George 1922-1924 Conservative government led by Bonar Law 1922-23 led by Baldwin 1923-24 Jan-Nov 1924 Labour minority government led by MacDonald Nov 1924 - 1929 Conservative government led by Baldwin 1929-1931 Labour minority government led by MacDonald 1931-1935 National government led by MacDonald108, in which there were National Labour, Independent Labour, Liberal National, Liberal and Independent Liberal 1935-1940 National government led by Baldwin 1935-1937 led by Chamberlain 1937-1940
1.3. Female suffrage
A significant factor in the political changes in the post-WWI era was the agreement on giving women the vote, finally passing into law in 1918. Prior to 1914 attempts had been made by Asquith’s Liberal government in the fractious House of Commons of 1912. Women’s suffrage was generally opposed by the Tories and the debates often focussed on the age and financial status of women. The 1918 Representation of the People Act, while introducing universal male suffrage over the age of 21, awarded the vote to women over 30 who owned £5 of property (or who had husbands who did). ‘Equality with men was never seriously considered as it would have enfranchised 14,000,000 women 109 and would have outnumbered the number of men able to register’. In the event 8.4 million women were able to vote for the first time. After failing to do so every year from 1919, in 1928 an Act was passed to introduce equality in voting age. Many Tory MPs were concerned about the ‘flapper vote’ and advocated reducing the age only to 25, but the age of 21 was finally agreed on.
1.4. International relations
The rapid fall from power of the Liberal party in the UK was rather sedate in comparison with much of the rest of Europe at the outset of Hobsbawm’s ‘Age of Catastrophe (1914-1945)’. ‘All across the Western world, mainstream politicians had to face the possibility of revolution’. What they feared in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1917 were ‘workers’ republics [which] sprang up in Bavaria and Hungary. Germany headed off a socialist revolution only through far-reaching reforms at the outset of the Weimar Republic … 1919 saw the seizure of factories in Italy, strike action bordering on 110 insurgency in both France and Scotland, general strikes in Seattle and Shanghai’. ‘Survivors from the nineteenth century were perhaps most shocked by the collapse of the values and institutions of 111 the liberal civilization whose progress their century had taken for granted’. ‘In 1918-20 legislative assemblies were dissolved or became ineffective in two European states, in the 1920s in six, the 1930s in nine, while German occupation destroyed constitutional power in another five during the Second World War. In short, the only European countries with adequately democratic political institutions that functioned without a break during the entire inter-war period were Britain, Finland 112 (only just), the Irish Free State, Sweden and Switzerland’. ‘The forces overthrowing liberal- democratic regimes were … against social revolution … authoritarian and hostile to liberal political institutions … tended to favour the military and foster the police [whose] support was essential for the
106 1985 107 th See Gary Younge’s reference to ‘Britain’s downwardly mobile 20 century’ (Guardian website 3/2/2018) 108 described by Blake as a government of individuals not a coalition of parties. 109 House of Commons Research Paper 13/14 2013 p. 45. 110 Paul Mason, Postcapitalism, 2015, p. 63-4. 111 Eric Hobsbawm Age of Extremes, 1994, p. 109. 112 p. 111. right to come to power. And all tended to be nationalist, because of resentment against foreign states, 113 lost wars or insufficient empires’.
The most significant foundation of this interwar period that fostered the resentment, reminded the losers of the lost war and stripped them of their colonial possessions was clearly the Treaty of Versailles and its various clauses, finally signed in the Hall of Mirrors in June 1919. Its chief architect, UK prime minister David Lloyd George (the ‘Welsh Wizard’) saw himself as the prime mover in the victory in 1918 over the German nation and largely responsible for bringing the victorious powers together to bring lasting peace to the continent.
Any consensus in 1919, which would have consequences for the next two decades (and for far longer, it could be argued), was hard-won and required all of his wizardry and subterfuge. His main adversary among the victors was the French delegation, led by Georges Clemenceau. They naturally wanted to ensure that Germany would be contained geographically and militarily by binding international agreement guaranteed by the major powers, chiefly Britain and USA. They needed assurances that Germany would never again be in a position to threaten its neighbour, with conditions which included the removal and sharing out its colonial territories, chiefly in Africa, and those of the other defeated combatants, such as the Ottomans.
Lloyd George’s own position as prime minister of a coalition government in 1916-1922 found him 114 caught between the promises he had made in the election of 1918 ‘to make Germany pay’, his need to keep the French sufficiently content to sign the treaty and his belief that ‘you may strip Germany of her colonies, reduce her armaments to a mere police force and her navy to that of a fifth- rate power; all the same, in the end, if she feels that she has been unjustly treated in the peace of 1919, she will find means of exacting retribution from her conquerors’.
Finance was a major concern for the main participants, though each had a different viewpoint. The British had incurred crippling debts to the US in waging the war, which President Wilson was unwilling to waive. If these were not recovered from Germany then they would ‘be in a more favourable position for commercial competition than Great Britain’. The arguments over German financial liability (for example, France and Belgium wanted payment for the full costs of the damage they had incurred) consumed several months of the negotiations. Lloyd George eventually persuaded the French of future British guarantees (which included a proposal to build a tunnel under the Channel to facilitate British military support). The Americans were not themselves concerned with reparations from Germany, as they had profited from the war through loans to the allies, and would benefit from the UK’s much weakened position in world trade. Lloyd George, to placate the French and divert them from their insistence on occupying the Rhineland, offered an Anglo-French treaty and persuaded Wilson to sign a parallel Franco-American treaty. The former stipulated that ‘Great Britain agrees to come immediately to her assistance in the event of any unprovoked movement of aggression against her being made by Germany’. Very soon the limitations of British commitment appeared: the length of time the guarantee would last, whether what was meant by ‘Britain’ included the Empire, would Britain be the sole arbiter of what was ‘unprovoked’. It also transpired that the Anglo-French guarantee depended on the ratification by the US senate of the Franco-American treaty. The final draft included the additional word ‘only’: ‘The Anglo-French alliance would come into force only when the latter is 115 ratified’. The US senate rejected the alliance and ‘Britain would not be bound to do anything’.
This diplomatic sleight of hand soured UK-French relations for the future: the French were persuaded to accept the status quo in the Rhineland and Britain had an agreement that committed them to very little. The critical relationship between Britain and France between the wars was therefore not built on mutual trust from the beginning and focussed on differing attitudes towards Germany’s future relative power. ‘How strong could Germany be permitted to become without menacing the vital interests of the 116 two countries?’ French security was seen to depend on limiting Germany to the strengths set out at Versailles. Britain, on the other hand, saw an advantage to itself in Germany regaining its pre-war forces, ‘satisfying Germans to a reasonable extent, … might prevent a great explosion which would
113 p. 113. 114 Antony Lentin Lloyd George and the Lost Peace: from Versailles to Hitler, 1919-1940. 2001. p. 12. 115 Lentin p. 10, 14, 48, 54, 55, 58, 59 116 Arnold Wolfers Britain and France between Two Wars: conflicting strategies of peace from Versailles to World War II. 1940. p. 381. carry Germany beyond permissible limits’. Furthermore, while France was concerned to protect Poland and Czechoslovakia from any German eastwards expansion (a pro-Slav solution to ‘the age- old conflict between Teuton and Slav in Eastern Europe’), Britain’s attitude was that ‘the East was an 117 ideal place for making concessions to Germany’. These differences set the scene for 20 years of an almost balletic series of alternative alliances and treaties (each involving a different configuration of Britain, France, Belgium, Italy, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Germany, the Soviet Union, the USA and Japan), which seemed to recognize that Versailles had not brought in a peace that would last.
1.5. International treaties 1919-1932
If the Treaty of Versailles did not provide lasting diplomatic post-war calm, nor did its establishment of the League of Nations in 1920 provide a neutral, safe forum for the resolution of conflict. Instead, a series of bilateral and multilateral pacts, treaties, plans and protocols were entered into to tackle specific worries among the major European powers, the USA and Japan. There was little foundation for strong alliances. ‘Since the Allied victory in 1918, the US had retreated into isolationism, Britain had turned its attention to safeguarding its empire, the Soviet Union was immersed in revolution, and Germany was bent on revising the Treaty of Versailles. France had been left to uphold the postwar 118 order virtually alone’. Some pacts attempted to promote security through disarmament: for example, the Washington Naval Treaty of 1922, by which the USA, Britain, France, Italy and Japan agreed to limit the size and strength of their navies, the Geneva Protocol of 1925, prohibiting the use of chemical weapons, the Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, when 45 countries, including Germany, agreed never to use war as an instrument of national policy119, and the 2nd Geneva Naval Conference in 1932. These multinational agreements demonstrated a lack of commitment to the League of Nations and to the notion of collective security that would become critical in Britain in the 1930s. The limitations of these agreements was the lack of any mechanism for enforcement and the number of conditions and exceptions that individual countries introduced. Some were only formally ratified decades later, if at all.
A second group of treaties concerned borders, the most significant and complex was the series of seven Locarno treaties signed in 1925. These covered, firstly, the ‘Western’ territories of Belgium, France and Germany, guaranteed by Italy and Britain. The ‘Eastern’ agreements covered the borders of Germany with Poland and Czechoslovakia. Disputes or modifications were to be resolved by arbitration (i.e. with no guarantees). On the signing of the system Germany was admitted to the League of Nations, and it had a positive effect on international relations up to 1930. It was a major target of Hitler’s dissatisfaction with the post-WWI settlement and he quickly repudiated it when he invaded the Rhineland in 1936.120 Both Poland and Czechoslovakia felt unprotected from future German expansion, with no strong commitment from the West. Indeed, they were expected to hand over peacefully territories claimed by Germany.
A third group of plans (mostly put forward by the USA) focussed on economic and financial arrangements for reconstruction and dealing with the payment of German reparations: Genoa Conference 1922, Rapallo Treaty 1922, Dawes Plan 1924, Young Plan 1929 and the Hoover Moratorium, 1931. Clearly most of these arrangements were overtaken by events after Hitler came to power in 1933.
Social conditions
This domestic and international political situation formed the background for the social unease and sense of gloom that Overy describes. There was a dissatisfaction with social conditions121 and an awareness of radical solutions to economic problems in other parts of Europe. There was some
117 Wolfers p. 381-2, 383 118 Isabel Hull ‘Anything can be rescinded’. Review of ‘The Internationalists and their plans to outlaw th war’ by Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro. In LRB 40/8 26 April 2018. p. 25. 119 ‘Kellogg realised he could satisfy [US] opinion … without abandoning isolationism if the agreement were general in its language, devoid of enforcement mechanisms and universal, rather than bilateral’. Hull p. 25. 120 The Eastern agreement was also weakened by the Franco-Soviet Treaty of Mutual Assistance signed in 1935. 121 Overy, p. 288. 122 admiration for the USSR, and ‘many saw the potential of development and planning’ along Soviet lines. J.B.Priestley’s comment on the provision of decent living conditions for factory workers at 123 Bourneville was ‘What has been promised in Russia … has been actually performed here’. On the other hand, there were admirers of Hitler in the early part of the 1930s, though the vast majority of the population were anti-Fascist, and early opinion polls showed that a much larger proportion of respondents in Britain were more pro-Soviet than pro-German.124 The British Fascists, while making a big enough noise to concern the government, peaked in support early in the decade and anti-Fascist demonstrators easily outnumbered Blackshirts by the middle years.
Debates over political solutions to economic malaise focussed attention on class, with a seemingly growing intolerance and hardening of attitudes, and Ross McKibbin portrays class warfare on a level of explicitness that later generations would find shocking. The middle class, caught between the power of capital and the unions, developed an anti-labour mythology concerning the comforts enjoyed by the unemployed on the dole.125 Dean Inge provided some of the most forceful instances of this prejudice, reported by George Orwell, who commented that ‘the Rev. W.R.Inge … accuses miners of 126 gluttony’. ‘I remember articles in the Sunday papers about beggars who have two thousand pounds 127 sewn into their trousers’. H.G.Wells was the butt of Dean Inge’s venom (as a socialist and social 128 liberal) and what Wells called his (Inge’s) ‘downward class hatred’. Inge accused Wells of being ‘permanently embittered with the genteel classes, at the sight of real ladies, deer parks, the stately homes of England and the clergy. … He [Inge] is saturated with animus against common people and against any legislation or any social forces that seem likely to diminish to any degree their inferiority to 129 himself’.
Middle class hostility to organised labour was clearly tinged with fear of Soviet-inspired revolution. ‘There is no disguising the fact that the country is in a state of chronic civil war, and that the forces of law and order are on the defensive against anti-social organizations which have no aim except to 130 wreck the State and destroy our existing civilization’. Christopher Isherwood remembered ‘how deeply entrenched the class system was. ... The Poshocracy had won, as it always did, in a 131 thoroughly gentlemanly manner’. Other commentators regarded self-interest as the strongest reaction: ‘the public’s hostility to being inconvenienced outweighed much of the sympathy they might 132 have felt for the miners’ plight’.
Although the General Strike in 1926 only lasted nine days, from 3rd to 12th May, it had an impact at the time and for decades later in Labour and trades union history (or perhaps mythology) way beyond its brevity. Partly this was because of its place as the climax after 20 years of industrial disputes (with a hiatus from 1914 to 1918), including the Great Unrest of 1910-1913. The focus had been on the three great employee groups: miners, dockworkers and railwaymen, who had become strongly unionised in recognition of their national economic strength. The growing power of coalmining landowners, ship owners, made wealthy through trade with the colonies, and railway companies made their workforces vulnerable to recessions and exposure to international competition though they would generally not benefit when the competition was in the UK’s favour. The major points of conflict during this period, especially between private mine owners and miners, were over an agreed minimum wage (in order to even out incomes during fluctuations in the price of coal) and, the corollary, the refusal to accept wage reductions when prices went down. 133
122 p. 283. 123 J.B.Priestley, English Journey, p. 97. 124 see Gallup poll results below. 125 Ross McKibbin, p. 58. 126 George Orwell, Road to Wigan Pier, p. 35. 127 George Orwell, Down and Out in Paris and London, p. 114. 128 The Common Sense of War and Peace, p. 37 129 p. 38. 130 Dean Inge, England, 1927, p. 261. 131 Christopher Isherwood, Lions and Shadows, 1938, p. 111. 132 Susan Pedersen 'Triumph of the Poshocracy', London Review of Books, 35/15 (2013), p. 20. 133 There was a fear that cheap coal imports from Germany, as part of their reparations, would undermine the UK coal industry. [Margaret Morris, The General Strike, 1973, p. 91.] When one industrial group was hard hit, solidarity could increasingly become effective in supporting all. This group could naturally be interpreted or portrayed by the government, employers and other classes (for example, in the Tory press) as politically (i.e. Bolshevik) motivated. In reality, the 1926 strike was engaged in by very few with a revolutionary motive,134 though £1 million was donated by Soviet miners.135 The short-lived action highlighted some of the prevailing social policies of the time. The financial relief paid to the families of strikers was in the form of a loan (under the 1834 poor law). Some miners were still paying this back until the debt was abolished by the Labour government in 1948.136 632 miners were imprisoned, a sizable proportion of Communist Party membership. In the end, after the strike was called off, there was victimization, and some workers were blacklisted or accepted back on worse terms and lower wages. Memories of the strike were long and divisions could still be felt at the time of the 1984-5 miners strike.
Although there were serious discussions about forming a People’s Front government in 1936 and 137 what McKibbin calls ‘folk-Marxism in factories’, not all commentators take this gloomy view of interwar society. Susan Pedersen refers to the political culture ‘prioritis[ing] social harmony, even if 138 that meant differences were swept under the carpet’. She quotes Beatrice Webb’s diary: ‘”What a sane people the British are” ... the ‘British workman’ could never be turned into a ‘Russian Red’, or the ‘British businessman and country gentleman into an Italian Fascist’. British culture was immunised 139 against the Continental viruses of open class antagonism and political extremism’, though as we shall see it was quite severely tested.
1.6. The press
The divisions outlined above were reflected in and made more contentious by a polarised press. There is no attempt here to resolve the eternal debate over the direction of cause and effect. However, the fact that a sizeable proportion of the British national daily and Sunday press was owned by a small number of owners (mostly with legislative rights in the House of Lords), with strong personal political preferences, and some (such as Max Aitkin, Lord Beaverbrook) with direct involvement in government, suggests that they were not merely followers of public opinion in this period but had an interest in directing it. The list of newspaper owners in the 1910-30 period with titles of various kinds is impressive: Northcliffe, Rothermere, Harmsworth, Beaverbrook, Southwood, Astor, Camrose, Kemsley, Iliffe, Riddell and Pearson. The Harmsworth clan was the most extensive. Alfred Harmsworth (1837-1889), a barrister, had 14 children, five of the seven sons acquired titles of some degree. The three most prominent were the Lords Rothermere, Harmsworth and Northcliffe, whose main possessions were the Daily Mirror and Daily Mail. Northcliffe also owned The Times until he sold it to Lord Astor, and he passed on the Daily Mail to brother Rothermere on his death in 1922. The 140 ‘Report on the British Press’ reported in 1938 that ‘The two largest combines, the Harmsworth and Kemsley groups, own between them 10 morning, 19 evening, 8 Sunday and 12 weekly newspapers in 141 Great Britain’.
The political allegiances of the major national dailies analysed in the report were The Times, Telegraph, Express - Conservative; Mail – right-wing Conservative; Daily Herald, News Chronicle – Labour, Left or radical; Daily Mirror – anti-Fascist; Daily Sketch – Independent. The report describes the last two as ‘giving little space to politics’. It also comments that ‘The entry of a new competitor in the national daily and Sunday Press is a very rare event. Except for the Daily Worker (1930), no new 142 143 national daily has appeared since 1919’.
134 Morris p. 92. 135 ibid p. 91. 136 ibid p. 90. 137 Ross McKibbin, p. 139. 138 Susan Pedersen, p. 19. 139 ibid. 140 published by the thinktank ‘Political and Economic Planning’ 141 p. 96. 142 p. 112. 143 The report also states that ‘There are at present no British newspapers under foreign ownership, and only a few periodicals, such as Mr Hearst’s Good Housekeeping and the Condé-Nast Vogue’. p. 113. The most controversial example of the political partisanship of the press at this time (overshadowed by their support for British Fascism in the 1930s, see a later chapter) was the Daily Mail’s publicity at the time of the 1924 election for the Zinoviev Letter, ‘a provocative forgery purportedly written by the 144 head of the Communist International to British activists – in a bid to discredit the Labour Party’. On the other hand, Beaverbrook together with Rothermere attacked Baldwin on the basis of their championing of Empire Free Trade. ‘They used their papers to launch and support a United Empire 145 Party which put up opponents against Conservative party candidates’.
Northcliffe told the Daily Mail staff in 1919 ‘that too much space was being devoted to the post-war peacekeeping conferences: what the public wanted this morning was more of the horses. They are not talking about St Germain, but about Epsom’. Readers ‘found foreign politics to be one of the least- liked categories of news’. Bingham charts the methods of the Daily Mail and other organisations in th the early 20 century to promote ‘the belligerent patriotism and casual racism that have been recurring features of much of the popular press’ which ‘are a direct consequence of this reluctance to offer detailed reporting from abroad or to examine the complexities of foreign affairs’. ‘As a result many newspapers underplayed the deepening international crisis’.
1.7. Conclusion
The substance of the following study moves towards the catastrophe that erupted in 1939, via British attempts to avoid war, the conflicts stirred by the British version of fascism and finally Britain’s attitude to events in Spain. As this study hopes to demonstrate, these strands of British public life eventually had to confront what Overy calls ‘the last chance to save civilization or there would be a second world 146 war’ : the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. He links Spain with the ‘complex ideas of war, peace and civilization’ that are his major themes, in particular ‘whether the fear of war might provoke 147 it’. Rather than look solely at British involvement in the war by either journalists or volunteers on both sides, this study will focus on what effect events in Spain had on British public and political opinion.
Since the focus of memories post-1945 has been to a great extent and particularly more recently on the fate of European Jews, it is instructive to look at the work by Eva Hoffman, ShtetlI (1998). This examines the history of a small predominantly Jewish town in Poland, Brańsk, which culminates in the interwar period leading to its destruction. She focuses on Polish-Jewish relations and portrays Polish anti-semitism in a quite subtle way. She concludes her history by saying ‘In recent decades, we have seen repeatedly how quickly and unexpectedly dormant ethnic tensions can be inflamed into hate and violence. Moral ideas about prejudice seem to evaporate in the heat of ideological passions’. However, ‘the more hopeful lesson of Polish-Jewish history may be that when conflicts of interest are not exacerbated or extreme, when fanatical notions are not wilfully fanned, the instinct of tolerance, 148 surely as basic as that of prejudice, can find breathing space’.
144 Adrian Bingham, 2005. 145 Bingham 146 p. 316. 147 p. 318. 148 p. 254, 256 2. Striving for peace
Introduction
Overy’s ‘last chance to save civilization’ is epitomised by the frenetic activity to avoid war in the first part of the 1930s among a variety of peace movements, both formal associations and ad hoc groups. Evidence for these concerns can be found in a variety of sources. Firstly, the way in which the British press reported the Geneva Disarmament Conference in 1932 reveals something of the attitudes to an internationalist approach to collective security. The major political parties declared their positions in their election manifestoes between 1929 and 1935. The relationship between these official statements and public opinion can be gauged in the embryonic polling system that began in 1937. A major initiative to further test public views of peace and the threat of war can be seen in the Peace Ballot of 1934-35, instigated by the League of Nations Union (formed in 1918). The Peace Pledge Union split from the LNU over the failure of the League to act effectively. Further insight into social attitudes to these anti-war efforts can be found in letters to the press, most instructively for this study from a Catholic standpoint. Finally, this section will look at the policy of appeasement.
2.1. Disarmament and the League of Nations
After its creation in 1920, British diplomacy for a while looked to the League of Nations to keep the peace. It didn’t and perhaps couldn’t succeed in this as it was flawed from the outset. Although proposed by Woodrow Wilson, the USA never fully joined and the Soviet Union was admitted late and was a member fairly briefly. Two of the nations seen as potential belligerents in any a future conflicts, Germany and Japan, left the League in 1933, once they felt the need for a free hand, as did Italy (in 1937) and Spain (in 1939). No collective action was taken against Japan over Manchuria (1931-2), Italy over Abyssinia (1935-6) or Germany over its re-occupation of the Rhineland in 1936. Its weakened economy, a willingness to trust Germany and public opinion led to Britain’s ‘unilateral disarmament post-WWI, a rapid and drastic demilitarization of the large land and air forces … to 149 approximately the pre-war level and further reductions every year’ . British defence forces fell from being the strongest air power in 1918 to the 5th or 6th by 1932. It therefore had a long way to go once Germany’s rearmament became apparent. Conservative governments were particularly conscious of keeping public spending low to relieve taxpayers who were still paying for the last war. The arms race on the continent was seen by some as the cause of war. There was for a while a trust in collective security and in the machinery of peace dispensing with the need for war. The disarmament conference in 1932 failed to prevent German rearmament, but Britain failed to realize the consequences and didn’t listen to warnings. Some in Britain were happy that France would be weakened by the Convention and its superiority over Germany reduced. Churchill argued against this attitude, exclaiming ‘The awful danger, nothing less, is that we go on perpetually asking the French to weaken themselves … there is nothing to be said for weakening the Power on the Continent with 150 whom you would be in alliance’. France wanted guarantees of security to compensate, but Britain was unwilling. Germany left both the Disarmament Conference and the League of Nations in Autumn 1933. The British, in public and political opinion, had ambivalent attitudes towards the League. Many, such as Attlee, believed it was the best hope of avoiding war, but felt strongly the dilemma over whether it should use military force to enforce its mandated authority.151 This was a logical and moral contradiction that bedevilled debate in the 1930s. He saw Britain as a champion of the League, an arbiter among factions and a progressive leader of a new western alliance. However, there was a deep-rooted ambivalence among political leaders and the public when surveyed. This could be presented as a continuum: pacifism (anti-war in any event) > a range of conditional anti-war positions > appeasement of Germany (as the best way to avoid another war) > sympathy for the German position > tolerance of Nazism (based on anti-Semitism) > British Fascism It is hard to overstate the breadth of contentiousness and depth of divisions among European states and their dependencies prior to 1939. These brought into conflict and required governmental consideration:
149 Wolfers 365 150 House of Commons debate 14th March 1934, in Wolfers p370 151 Bew 176 France (over German occupation of the Rhineland in 1936) Germany and its ambition to recover its colonies Germany and Czechoslovakia (over Sudetenland in 1938) Poland (over the German/Soviet pact in 1939) Italy (over its invasion of Abyssinia in 1935) Japan (over its invasion of Manchuria in 1933) USSR (its pact with the Nazis and its invasion of Poland 1939) India (over the British desire to protect it from German and Japanese threats and to continue to supply and sustain Britain) Spain (German and Italian support for the Nationalists; Soviet support for the Republican government; Britain and France over non-intervention, 1936-39) British Dominions (over British need for support) Britain had to develop a view on all of these actual or potential conflicts.152
2.2. Anti-French sentiments
The weakness of the League of Nations forced major non-Axis European powers to look for bilateral and multilateral alliances outside the League153, but this was largely confined to Britain and France, and therefore a great deal of attention was focussed on their relationship. Even as the main victors on the continent in 1918 and the most active in drawing up the Treaty of Paris, their mutual distrust made a firm and fruitful alliance very difficult to create and sustain. France was the only nation available to Britain, but while Britain was willing to fight to protect France (especially from Germany), she was not willing to join France’s alliance with eastern European nations (chiefly Czechoslovakia) nor to aid France in attacking Germany in support of the Czechs.154 Additionally, France distrusted Britain over the latter’s naval agreement with Germany (signed in 1935), which she saw as abetting Germany to break the conditions of Versailles. The post-WWI animosity towards France (conceivably a continuation in renewed form of centuries- long suspicion) dated back to Lloyd George’s experience of negotiating with France at Versailles. The two countries developed very different approaches to keeping Germany within the limits set by the Treaty. The French policy was ‘to grant no concession whatever without proof from the Germans of a 155 genuine change of heart’. ‘The official British point of view is that the German nation were not 156 responsible for the war, … that the German government should be supported , that German industries should be revived and that, generally, the Germans should not be regarded with suspicion’. Lloyd George ‘was persuaded that German uncooperativeness derived ultimately from French 157158 intransigence … [his] antipathy to the French was very marked’.
2.3. Attitudes to Germany and France continued
Post WWI, there were British leaders such as Lloyd George concerned that Germany should not be replaced by France in the European balance of power. Lord Curzon, Foreign Secretary (1919-1924), 159 subjected the French ambassador, Paul Cambon, ‘to a tirade of almost unbridled ferocity’, concerning French demands over Rhineland. The British chargé d’affaires in Paris reported that ‘a marked hostility towards us is frequently evident. … The Versailles treaty has laid the foundation of a very great French power for the future’. ‘There was, he claimed, not the slightest military danger to France from Germany in our life-time at any rate. … A French occupation of the Ruhr would have
152 Significantly, the USA played no major part in these conflicts between November 1918 and December 1941. 153 see section 1.5 of the Context chapter 154 Blake 183. 155 Lentin 65. 156 The nature of the German governments 1918-1933 is seldom mentioned in the British accounts quoted here. They were completely distinct from Imperial 2nd Reich before and the eventual Nazi 3rd Reich regime after, and were characterized by social and political revolution, which is possibly why people such as Lloyd George felt they deserved external support. 157 Lentin 65. 158 The two countries had also had very different experiences of the war, with Britain, for all its loss of life, barely touched on its own soil, and France being the scene of massive destruction. 159 Lentin 64. Germany at their mercy for all time; and then, as sure as winter follows summer, they, feeling 160 themselves absolute masters of the Continent, will turn round on us’.
2.4. Disarmament in the national press (1932)
An event that formed an early focus for public debate in the progress towards war was the World Disarmament Conference that opened in Geneva on 2nd February 1932, under the auspices of the League of Nations. There appeared, however, to be a very narrow basis for consensus in the British press.
The Daily Mirror’s editorial of the day before proclaimed its support: ‘The object of a Disarmament 161 Conference is to secure disarmament: in other words, to prevent other wars’. It criticised the Archbishop of York for his reference to ‘war guilt’: ‘If we are to succeed with the new task, it cannot help us to go on wrangling about past sins. The case for disarmament now can be separated from 162 history’. This paper, believing ‘that civilization will not survive another war’, followed this up with an editorial a week later praising the British representative Sir John Simon’s ‘impressive appeal [advocating] the scrapping of submarines, of gas and chemical warfare, of bombs dropped from 163 above, and of land guns “above a certain calibre”’. The portentous opening remarks from the Conference chairman, Arthur Henderson, claimed ‘it is the most impressive gathering since the world 164 war. It opens up new and glorious prospects for humanity’. It got off to a shaky start, however, as the formal opening was postponed for a few hours to allow the Council of the League to hold an emergency meeting to discuss the situation in China.
The conflict in Manchuria gave the Daily Worker its angle to attack the conference: ‘Thus once again the League of Nations, which consists of the representatives of the world Powers, is talking about 165 peaceful measures at the very moment when these same Powers are carrying on war’. This condemnation was in spite of the League’s call for cessation of hostilities in Shanghai, the establishment of a neutral zone and negotiations. This was an early example in this debate of those with a committed political standpoint rejecting neutrality as tantamount to support for their opponents. The later conflict in Spain would become a starker and more immediate case. A more detailed argument was printed a few days later: ‘The utilisation of the capitalists and the Social-Democrats of the workers’ desire for peace, to fight war by petitions to the League of Nations, is actually disarming 166 the workers in their struggle against capitalism’. Further scepticism towards calls for peace was reported by the Daily Express, quoting the Spanish delegate, anticipating the Civil War by warning against the Soviet Union’s demand for total disarmament, ‘so that he [the Bear] might take them all 167 into his loving embrace’.
The Manchester Guardian gave lengthy coverage to a sermon preached by the Archbishop of York, Dr Temple, on the significance of the imminent Disarmament Conference. ‘The control of armaments … is essential ... to counter a conception of national sovereignty which is politically pernicious and to the Christian an abomination … Let us concentrate our prayers upon the establishment of the great 168 [revolutionary] principle itself’ that mutual agreement is possible.
This somewhat optimistic view of the Conference was countered by the paper’s editorial two days later: ‘If there were a general determination to make the best of it quite a lot could be done. But there is no reason to expect any such general determination’. The article’s overall opinion was clearly stated: ‘It is tolerably certain that nobody now alive will see a world of disarmed nations, but, if
160 Lentin 64 161 Daily Mirror, 1 February 1932. 162 Ibid. 163 Daily Mirror, 9 February 1932. 164 Daily Express, 3 February 1932, UK Press Online
2.5. Party manifestoes (1929 – 1935)
It is clear that attitudes towards maintaining peace, the League of Nations, disarmament and collective security were opportunities for identifying degrees of difference among the political parties. A very specific genre of political discourse is represented by their election manifestoes. There were general elections in 1929, 1931 and 1935, though statements of policy were complicated by the formation of Coalition or National governments.
1. 1929
Conservative171
This lengthy document, with long sections on the Empire and agriculture, dealt with ‘Peace Abroad’ in its final pages. The party was confident of ‘an early advance towards disarmament (the prime object of its foreign policy)’, with the armed forces (including the new RAF) being lower in strength than before the war. Whenever possible this policy had ‘shown our desire and our ability to settle differences and promote friendly relations’.
Labour172
Under the heading ‘International Peace’ the manifesto in 1929 accused the Tory government of obstructing the work of the League of Nations and International Labour Organisation and Disarmament in particular. Labour promised ‘the largest possible measure of political ... co-operation amongst the nations’. It claimed that ‘a drastic reduction of armaments is long overdue’. It also promised to ‘re-establish diplomatic and commercial relations with Russia’.
Liberal173
Dismissing the achievements of the Tory government, the Liberal manifesto paid minimal attention to security, a single item in the final list of ‘Liberal watchwords’: ‘international peace by the substitution of arbitration for force, and all-round reduction of armaments’.
2. 1931
Conservative174
With the creation of the National Government that year, the party’s manifesto was very brief, focussing on Baldwin’s reasons for calling an early election. Briefer still was its discussion of foreign policy, mentioning war debts, reparations and disarmament as matters calling for statesmanship, without detailing solutions.
Labour175
169 Manchester Guardian, 3 February 1932. 170 Times, 9 February 1932,
Two years later Labour was calling for Socialist reconstruction of the economy, as it re-affirmed its principles that had been so difficult to implement as a minority government, in the face of ‘class- conscious hostility of the House of Lords ... and business interests’. It considered the use of emergency powers to get its democratic way. The Disarmament Conference planned for the following year would be an opportunity for Britain to re-enforce its ‘moral leadership of the world’.
Liberal176
This ‘address to the Nation’ began by explaining the circumstances in which the party joined the National Government, to maintain ‘a strong and stable Government’. Among its prime purposes were the commitments to peace through the League of Nations and the Disarmament Conference, but there was a strong impression that the party was struggling to maintain its independent voice.
3. 1935
Conservative177
This manifesto was a joint statement by Baldwin, MacDonald and Simon, leaders of the National Government. The opening passages on ‘The League of Nations’, ‘Peace and Defence’ and ‘Limitation of armaments’ illustrated the new prominence given to future threats as opposed to the backward- looking references to war reparations and defence levels in 1931. ‘Our attitude to the League is dictated by the conviction that collective security by collective action can alone save us from a return to the old system which resulted in the Great War’. ‘All the world knows that Britain will never use her forces for any aggressive purpose’. By this mid-way point in the gloomy decade the number of those who applauded the final statement were, perhaps, equalled by those who lamented it.
Labour178
After four years, the ‘National’ Government, which had obtained a majority through ‘fraud, misrepresentation and panic’, had ‘terrible responsibility’ for the present international situation, characterised by Japanese aggression, a weakened League of Nations and a wrecked Disarmament Conference and a re-started arms race. More than half of the document was devoted to issues relating to avoidance of war, abolition of air forces and the private arms trade.
Liberal179
By 1935 the relationship was under stress. ‘No party supports the present Government except the Conservative’. Liberals could establish their credentials not so much by calling for support for the League of Nations, but by promoting democracy domestically against ‘Fascists or Communists or others in other parties who set small store by liberty’, clearly a reference to right-wing pro-Fascist Tories.
2.6. Opinion polls (1937-1939)
While these statements of principle make little or no reference to what the electorate thought or said, as manifestoes might do today, by the mid-1930s the results of regular testing of public opinion began to be published. Much use has been made of this innovation by later historians: for example, Frank McDonough reports that ‘in July 1937 71 per cent of the British public favoured support for the League
176 Liberal Party manifesto 1931
The only British public opinion poll, in a form that would be recognised in the modern period, was the Gallup Poll, which was published in the News Chronicle from January 1937. It was presented in the form of a few short questions with a percentage given for ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ responses, with the figure for those who expressed no opinion or didn’t know. In other words, the ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ responses added up to 100% of those who gave a view. Later, the three options together added up to 100%.
The data of most interest to this study were collected from January 1937 to December 1939: seven monthly reports in 1937, six in 1938 and 12 months in 1939 and from then onwards. They are analysed in order to judge what value this source of public opinion can have for an understanding of how domestic and international events affected public attitudes. The data are minimal compared to opinion polling later, and were derived from ‘1,000 interviews conducted in person, in the home, in 182 approximately 100 sampling points’. Although mention is made of a variety of sampling methods, it seems probable that at the outset it was fairly random rather than demographically sampled.
Looking at the 25 months of interviews in 1937-9, a very crude analysis identifies a distinction between ‘war-’ and ‘non-war-related’ questions:
Non-war War 1937 (29 questions) 17 (59%) 12 (41%) 1938 (39 questions) 25 (64%) 14 (36%) 1939 (91 questions) 40 (44%) 51 (56%)
Even from these bald figures it is possible to deduce that, after the fears of war in 1937, the hopes that war might be averted or postponed in 1938 were encouraged (because of such negotiations as Munich), to be dashed as 1939 progressed.
Looking in more detail at the war-related questions, there is no surprise in their dominance in 1939 (a majority from June onwards). The earlier period is possibly of more significance in giving an impression of fears and tensions leading up to declaration of hostilities, with 99% of respondents having a view. In 1937 a typical question is headed ‘Neutrality’:
May 1937 “If another major European war breaks out, do Yes: No: No opinion: you think Great Britain will be drawn into it?” 83% 17% 1%
Other questions more directly relate to preparation for or avoidance of war: ‘Military training’, ‘Armaments’, ‘Disarmament conference’ and ‘League of Nations’. By 1938 these topics are no longer hypothetical, and ‘the present situation’ is mentioned in asking for views on how re-armament should be paid for or whether the respondent had yet volunteered for national service.
One of the few direct political questions (apart from those measuring approval ratings for individual politicians, such as Neville Chamberlain), headed ‘Fascism or Communism’, provides some stark data:
November 1937 “If you had to choose between Fascism: Communism: No opinion: Fascism and Communism, which 49% 51% 46% would you choose?”
Conceivably, the 46% who would not commit to either ideology can be compared with the much smaller minority responding in this way when asked a parallel question two years later, ’Russia – Germany’:
180 Frank McDonough, Neville Chamberlain, appeasement and the British road to war, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), p. 127. 181 It is quite feasible to analyse exhaustively all of the questions and responses for the three years of most interest here, 1937-1939. 182 George Gallup, The Gallup International Public Opinion Polls: Great Britain 1937-1975, Volume 1 1937-1964, (New York: Random House, 1976), p. v.
December 1939 “Which do you think is the more Russia: Germany: No opinion: dangerous to us- Soviet Russia or 24% 57% 19% Nazi Germany?”
These data, therefore, are not presented here to provide a reliable picture of British public opinion. Of most interest are the fact that attitudes were being measured at this time183 and the questions that appeared to be most worth asking. These are possibly more significant than the quantitative results.
2.7. League of Nations Union (1934 – 1935)
During the interwar years peace activism became woven into the fabric of British public life, as a consequence of reactions against the violent experience of war, the establishment of the League of Nations and a growing sense that the continuing fragile state of international relations threatened a new armed conflict. Helen McCarthy describes the public ritual associated with support for the League 184 185 from 1919, with ‘lavish pageants’ and a range of ‘symbolic displays’. The League of Nations Union (under whose auspices the Peace Ballot was managed in 1934-35), held a core set of beliefs, underpinned by a commitment to peace: global inter-dependence, international government, friendship between nations and their peoples, while maintaining ‘Britain’s status as a liberal imperial 186 power’.
187 In a review of McCarthy’s 2011 book , Susan Pedersen points out Robert Cecil’s (one of the leading lights of the LNU) experience (as wartime minister of naval blockade) of attempting to use pressure on a civilian population to influence a country’s foreign policy, a practice causing starvation across Central and Eastern Europe in 1916-17. An individual rogue state (in that case Germany) ‘would be brought to reason through collective action by the rest ... through the ‘economic weapon’ of sanctions 188 ... to drive people to force their government into line’. Cecil believed that the public should take responsibility for foreign policy. The LNU attracted 400,000 members at its height and remained staunchly apolitical until 1938, when Chamberlain abandoned the League’s Covenant, and once the LNU openly opposed the Conservatives ‘the illusion that it was above party crumbled. With battle 189 lines hardening, the Herbivores [meaning do-gooders and signers of petitions] fled’. The activists were not only aspirationally pro-peace, but also anti-military in a practical way, protesting against the popular tattoos and RAF air-shows.190
As the League’s ineffectiveness became apparent over Abyssinia in 1936, ‘many pacifists were 191 prompted to defect to the newly-founded Peace Pledge Union’. This movement was initiated by the Reverend Dick Sheppard following a letter published by three national daily newspapers in October 1934, though its first meeting was not held until May 1936. This letter acknowledged the dominant role of women in the great range of peace associations of the period, addressed as it was to ‘a vast number of male citizens who do not belong to any peace society ... only waiting an opportunity to declare ... that they have done with wars of every kind [and the] ever-increasing dependence on 192 excessive force [that the extremist movements demonstrate]’. The Peace Ballot, launched at
183 Britain closely followed the USA, where George Gallup had set up the first polling company in 1935. 184 Helen McCarthy, ‘The League of Nations, Public Ritual and National Identity in Britain, c.1919–56’, History Workshop Journal, 70, (2010),108-132 (p. 108). 185 McCarthy, p. 110. 186 McCarthy, p. 112. 187 Helen McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations: Democracy, Citizenship and Internationalism, c.1918-45 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2011). 188 Pedersen, p 18. 189 Pedersen, p. 19. 190 McCarthy, ‘The League of Nations’, p. 117. 191 McCarthy, ‘The League of Nations’, p. 125. 192 Manchester Guardian, 16 October 1934. exactly this moment, intended precisely to count those willing to stand up, though what proportion of the respondents were male is not recorded.193
David Lukowitz attributes this split between pacifists of the PPU and the League to the latter’s philosophy of ‘collective security’, which the former saw as ‘simply a euphemism for war’ (and, in practice, impossible to implement). It was moral authority in preventing war that was needed from such a body.194 The danger of this purist approach to the avoidance of war (especially as it appears in hindsight) was its logical consequence: appeasement of Germany. PPU literature advocated giving Germany what they were ‘justly’ demanding, including ‘a surrender of the African territories taken’ from them at Versailles. How much these British writers could or should have known about the pre- Nazi genocidal racism of German colonists in South-West Africa (1904-8) is hard to tell but highly pertinent. There were ‘machine-gun massacres, starvation, poisoning, and forced labor in Germany's 195 first concentration camps’. This attitude could also lead to charges of anti-Semitism, and it was too much for some former supporters of the PPU. Rose Macaulay is quoted by Lukowitz: ‘Occasionally, when reading some letters in Peace News, I (and others) half think we have got hold of the Blackshirt by mistake’. There was a serious charge in the Daily Telegraph of Peace News being used as ‘a channel for Nazi propaganda’. Lukowitz concludes that ‘there was too much sympathy for the German position, often the product of ignorance and superficial thinking’, seeing any compromise with Hitler as 196 ‘infinitely preferable to a general European war’.
Returning to the role of women in the peace movements, McCarthy shows that women’s associations were at the forefront, along with ‘churches, educationalists, and organised youth’, which would have included a lot of women in their number. Political leaders were deemed powerless to prevent war, so 197 it was up to ‘ordinary people’, who could ‘create relations between people’. McCarthy identifies a shift from ‘a deliberative [to] a demonstrative model of citizenship’, which ‘was viewed as especially 198 attractive to the new female electorate’ (resulting from expanded suffrage since 1928), who flocked to join ‘Women’s Institutes, Townswomen’s Guilds’ etc. Martin Pugh suggests that women were regarded suspiciously by the Right of being more Left-leaning, though it is clear from photographs and newsreels of Fascist meetings and marches that many women identified with that form of political expression, and might have amounted to a quarter of the BUF membership.199
The prevailing government view of the looming threat to European peace was, of course, cautious. While paying lip service to the League and collective security (as their opponents saw it), Stanley Baldwin abandoned economic sanctions against Italy, a move opposed by the Labour leader, Clement Attlee, who demanded in 1938 ‘a return to League principles ... as the only way to maintain peace’. In that year numerous calls were made for pacts, alliances and blocs to replace the overall security treaty or covenant signed by members of the League, increasingly seen to be a failed strategy.200
2.8. Peace Ballot (1934-1935)
If manifestoes and peace movements were responding to growing public fears over collective security, a more direct measure of public sentiment was provided by the Peace Ballot. This was
193 Helen McCarthy provides a list of organisations supporting the Ballot, many of which were of women, in ‘Democratizing British Foreign Policy: Rethinking the Peace Ballot, 1934–1935’, Journal of British Studies, 49, (2010), 358-387 (p. 371). 194 David Lukowitz, ‘British Pacifists and Appeasement: The Peace Pledge Union’, Journal of Contemporary History, 9, (1974), 115-127 (p. 120). 195 Jeremy Sarkin-Hughes, Colonial genocide and reparations claims in the 21st century, (London: Praeger Security International, 2008) 196 Lukowitz, pp. 123, 124, 126. 197 McCarthy, ‘Democratizing British Foreign Policy’, pp. 361, 364, 361. 198 Helen McCarthy, ‘Whose democracy? Histories of British political culture between the wars’, Historical Journal, 55, (2012), 221-238 (p. 231). 199 Martin Pugh, Hurrah for the Blackshirts!: fascists and fascism in Britain between the wars, (London: Pimlico, 2006) p. 142. 200 Andrew Stedman, ‘A Most Dishonest Argument?: Chamberlain's Government, Anti-Appeasers and the Persistence of League of Nations' Language Before the Second World War’, Contemporary British History, 25, (2011), 83-99 (p. 86). launched in October 1934 by the League of Nations Union, in the form of five questions (sometimes described as six questions, the fifth being split in two). It produced a response from nearly 12 million people by June 1935, an indication of the strength of feeling in the population.201
1. Should Great Britain remain a Member of the League of Nations? 2. Are you in favour of all-round reduction of armaments by international agreement? 3. Are you in favour of an all-round abolition of national military and naval aircraft by international agreement? 4. Should the manufacture and sale of armaments for private profit be prohibited by international agreement? 5. Do you consider that, if a nation insists on attacking another, the other nations should combine to compel it to stop: (a) by economic and non-military measures (b) if necessary, military measures
The Daily Mirror, while supporting the objectives of ‘that untiring advocate of Peace, Lord Cecil’, proposed its own summary question: ‘Do you want another war? ... Almost all thinking and feeling 202 inhabitants of the United Kingdom would answer, emphatically no!’
The Manchester Guardian supported the aims as urgently needed:
‘The sceptic may suggest that the people of this country are not thinking of peace and war at all but 203 only of next Saturday’s football match and how, in the meantime, to live on their income; ... [and that] half the trouble in Europe to-day is caused by the people who think too much of peace and war. On both counts the sceptic would be wrong. ... the evidence that the ordinary man in the street is deeply anxious over the storm-clouds lowering on the continent is wide and increasing. What, in the opinion of the country, should our own Government do? What is the policy for Britain? These, at this 204 late hour, are the questions the League of Nations is trying to have answered’.
However, opposition to the Ballot was soon being voiced. The Daily Express reported at length the sermons of clergymen: ‘the New Testament teaches that the Church in its corporate capacity should have nothing to do with politics’, which would inevitably lead to a brawl. ‘Christians ... should leave the 205 continent alone’. A Tory MP ‘advised his supporters to have nothing to do with the alleged peace 206 ballot to demonstrate their aversion to “foreign entanglements”’. Industrialists were also against, 207 and Lord Beaverbrook was quoted by the Daily Worker as saying ‘Tear up the ballot papers’.
The Daily Worker’s own stance on the Ballot was in support of peace, though, naturally, portraying it as a class struggle. ‘The best means of postponing the outbreak of war is the development of the mass anti-war movement of the workers ..., while the only complete safeguard is the abolition of the 208 capitalist order of society, which breeds Fascism and war’.
The results, reported eight months later, indicated a 38% turnout and demonstrated overwhelming support for the League’s policies:
Yes No 1 11,090,387 355,883 2 10,470,489 862,775 3 9,533,558 1,689,786
201 As a comparison, approximately 20 million voted in the 1931 general election. 202 Daily Mirror, 23 October 1934. 203 In this view George Orwell would qualify as a sceptic ‘Hitler, Locarno, Fascism, and the threat of war aroused hardly a flicker of interest locally in Yorkshire, but the decision of the Football Association to stop publishing their fixtures in advance flung all Yorkshire into a storm of fury’. Road to Wigan Pier, p. 80. 204 Manchester Guardian, 9 October 1934. 205 Daily Express, 29 October 1934. 206 Daily Express, 30 October 1934. 207 Daily Worker, 14 November 1934. 208 Ibid. 4 10,417,329 775,415 5a 10,027,608 635,074 5b 6,784,368 2,351,981
This was applauded by both the Daily Mirror and Daily Worker, which proclaimed: ‘Anti-War Vote Sets 209 All-Time Record’. The Manchester Guardian quoted Cecil as concluding that ‘it was for those who represented the signatories in Parliament and in the Cabinet to carry their wishes into effect and that he hopes members, Ministers, and candidates would not be allowed to forget that a general election 210 was near at hand’. Pouring cold water on the popular support for peace, the Daily Express asked Lord Cecil: ‘By the way, are you in favour (1) of fine weather, (2) more money, (3) a better time all 211 round?’ The only mention of the Ballot in the Fascist press dismissed its central commitment to the League of Nations and the latter’s condemnation of Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia: ‘A daily Peace ballot 212 could not really convince our people that every war ought to be a World War’.
The Manchester Guardian ran its own summary of negative press reports of the Ballot:
‘One method was to ignore the whole thing and keep the ugly little secret dark. The “Daily Mail” performed this evolution so successfully that no mention either of the figures or the Albert hall demonstration [proclaiming the results] is detectable in any of its issues we have seen. The “Daily Express” gave twenty lines on an inside page which omitted the voting on all questions except the 213 last, the last containing the maximum number of hostile votes and abstensions’.
That the Peace Ballot could be so divisive of opinion seems to be due to the combining in its questions a strong belief in peace and disarmament on the one hand with a commitment to collective security and going to war in the interests of mutual defence on the other. In the mid-1930s this inevitably identified one or more states as the enemy and potential trouble-maker, who would always find supporters in Britain on the Left or Right.
Two letters to the Times provided rather critical views of the Ballot. The first highlighted this problem of confusing major issues in the set of questions and suggested that the interviewers should make it easy for the respondent to ‘confine his replies to the first three … The one essential is to get the biggest vote in favour of the League of Nations- that is, an affirmative reply to Question 1’. The second dismissed the whole basis of the Ballot: ‘In organising a “National Ballot” the League of Nations Union is trespassing outside the province of its hitherto useful functions’, though the writer did not state what that remit was or should be.214
The Times reported the prime minister’s response to Robert Cecil’s deputation to present the results. ‘I am glad to know that I correctly interpret your sentiments when I say that the object of the Ballot was by no means to criticize the Government [who] intend to persist in the policy … that the League 215 of Nations remains … the “sheet anchor of British policy”’.
2.9. Public opinion, pacifism
The results of the Peace Ballot reported in 1935, while showing a large majority of the 12 million voters in support of the League of Nations, revealed, as Blake (1985) says, a fundamental contradiction in the questions, all of which were answered in the positive. Taken together, questions 2 to 4 indicated strong support for reductions in national armaments and opposition to the armaments industry. That is consistent with a broadly anti-war view widely reported in the first half of the decade. For example, Wolfers writes of ‘the deeply ingrained popular aversion to anything connected with war 216 and militarism’. However, the fifth question in the Ballot raised the issue of a collective response to
209 Daily Worker, 28 June 1935. 210 Manchester Guardian, 28 June 1935. 211 Daily Express, 28 June 1935. 212 Blackshirt, 19 July 1935, UK Press Online,
2.10. Catholic Herald Letters to the editor (1935 – 1936)
In the search for additional direct information about social attitudes towards major tensions of the 1930s, letters to newspapers are among the most accessible to researchers today. While lacking even the minimal quantitative basis of the Gallup Polls, they give a much greater degree of nuance. Readers of the British weekly Catholic Herald in the mid 1930s appear to have been prolific contributors to serious debate and analyses in the first two years of its publication, from its launch on 16 February 1935 to the end of 1936. The editor saw the role of their readers to promote the paper to every Christian ‘who refuses to be dictated to as to what his “religious” interests are by a non-religious 217 or anti-Christian world’.
The issues of the day were covered, with a moral viewpoint explicitly linking the broadly humanitarian218 to the doctrinal.
‘SIR,—In view of what is happening in Spain, I predict three coming conflicts among the human beings who call themselves Christians: belief against unbelief; youth against age; and those who have got all they want in the way of money and goods against those who have nothing. The coming great war will be God and Heaven, against the devil and Hell. So all Roman Catholics from 7 to 80 years 219 old must learn their catechism off by heart so that they will know what is right and what is wrong’.
Attitudes towards Italy, Italian Fascism, Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia, linked to the role of the League of Nations and the Vatican provoked a great debate in late 1935. Some took the side of the ‘victim’ and referred to the ‘un-Christian war-mindedness on the part of the Italian Catholic press and 220 clergy’, while others took the opposite view: ‘Let the truth prevail, and let English Catholics realise that the Amharic ruling race has at last drawn down on itself … the just retribution of Italian invasion, 221 to put an end to a long series of aggressions against Italian-protected territories’.
The fundamental issues of war, peace, pacifism and armament exercised many writers: ‘Nowadays it seems as though some newspapers had become mere viewspapers for armament barons and big 222 business generally’. ‘Catholic subjects would be conscientious objectors on the grounds of these 223 Catholic principles’.
‘SIR,—In your "Notes and Comments' what do you mean by the term ‘pacifism’? Until one knows that, it is impossible to decide whether you are right in regarding pacifism as an expression of the ‘prevalent defeatist mood’, along with birth control and sterilisation, or whether you are merely trying to discredit something by giving it a vague name, and then associating that name with notoriously bad 224 company’.
Finally, a letter that presents the nub of many of these issues: ‘Can modern war ever achieve good 225 end? … Saving civilisation by course to war, seems to me a contradiction in terms’.
217 Catholic Herald, 16 February 1935
These views encapsulate the stark dichotomies and contradictions facing political leaders, and no examination of attitudes towards peace in the 1930s can ignore the doctrine of appeasement, especially in the light of the subsequent condemnation of this position and the description of its advocates as ‘the guilty men’ blamed for British military weakness in 1939. Distinct from the various pacifist and other peace movements with their assortment of activists from all walks of life, appeasement was government policy and appeasers can be identified in the highest levels of the establishment.
The traditional view of these men has been as displaying ‘a combination of calculated deception, amoral principles, flawed judgement, diplomatic ineptitude and poor military planning’, and ‘the quite remarkable attempt by the exceptionally strong-willed and obstinate Neville Chamberlain to prevent war will always be controversial’. Coupled with the personal character of Chamberlain was an effective strategy of news management, especially of the print media and the BBC. In response to Hitler’s very sensitive reaction to British press criticism, correspondents (for example, Norman Ebbut, the Times’ man in Berlin until 1937) were given a hard time both in Germany and by their editors in London. Halifax told Hitler in November 1937 ‘His Majesty’s government would do everything in their 226 power to influence our press to avoid unnecessary offence’.
This is a position which Alexander Anievas sees as part of an ‘institutional bias against conflict with 227 Germany (Nazi or otherwise)’. He understands appeasement in terms of domestic priorities to maintain the status quo and social order. He describes the policy as a form of ‘crisis strategy’: ‘the central perceived threat in Europe by the key British policymakers was not German territorial expansion, but the social threat of Bolshevism abroad and the emergence of a strong Left in domestic 228 politics’. For many British elites ‘fascism was not an unmitigated evil, but an effective weapon against communism and socialism’. McDonough analyses Chamberlain’s view somewhat differently and identifies the time when the policy altered from a positive to a negative response to events in Europe: ‘Appeasement was originally not a policy of fear but a policy of hope [backed up with strength] … [however] the version of appeasement which developed from 1937 onwards was infected with a mood of fear and was accompanied by an awareness of military weakness … a high-risk 229 strategy’.
By 1939-40, of course, the policy or philosophy of appeasement had been totally discredited, and frantic rearmament had begun. Clarity had finally been achieved after a decade (since the arrival of the first Fascist government on the continent) of prevarication, perhaps wishful thinking in the political debates over defence in Britain. In 1944 Victory Books, a series of short books published at great speed by Victor Gollancz, issued Guilty Men under the anonymous authorship of ‘Cato’, Michael Foot, left-wing Labour MP, and Frank Owen, radical Liberal MP, being two of the authors. They looked back on and named 15 men they held responsible for the disastrous policy of appeasement, from prime ministers MacDonald, Baldwin and Chamberlain to senior ministers Simon, Hoare and Halifax to a range of civil servants. At that point in the war, they regarded the ending of the policy in 1939 as having been too late. Much of the authors’ focus was on central and eastern Europe. They advocated an alliance 230 ‘embracing nations on both German fronts’. Having abandoned Czechoslovakia, Chamberlain st surprisingly promised support for Poland (on March 31 1939): ‘Poland was certainly threatened by Nazi power. It was also, like Czechoslovakia, a far-away country of which Mr Chamberlain, it seemed, knew nothing. It was a country ruled by a degenerate crew of landowners and old soldiers … They had intrigued with the Nazis up to as late as March 1939. They had joined the Nazis in the plunder of 231 Czechoslovakia’. The one major power Chamberlain and Conservative governments for the previous 20 years had been unwilling to treat with was the USSR.
226 McDonough, pp. 153, ibid, 118, 124. 227 Alexander Anievas, ‘The international political economy of appeasement: the social sources of British foreign policy during the 1930s’, Review of International Studies, 37, (2011), 601-629 (p. 606). 228 Anievas, p. 603. 229 McDonough, p. 154. 230 Cato, p. 69. 231 p. 70. The complexity of the moral and political debates over armaments can be seen in Wolfers’ analysis. He presents the dilemmas not just between government ‘traditionalists’ (spending on arms depending on the state of the economy and estimates of current threats) and largely opposition ‘collectivists’ (advocating strategic collective security via League of Nations commitments), but also within these major approaches. In particular, among collectivists, who were ‘wanting to be anti-militarist and anti- government, while at the same time urging the government into a stronger and more militant stand against the “Fascist aggressors”’. Defence spending became a key issue in the middle of the decade: ‘the unwillingness of the collectivists to consent to the program of rearmament which the government advocated expressed suspicion of the intentions which lay behind the policy of the government. Strong armaments, it was feared, would be made to serve the policy of ‘appeasement’ by making Britain more capable of striking imperialist deals with the dictators’, thus undermining collective security and mutual defence alliances with nations such as the USSR. He sums up this ‘curious paradox’ in which ‘those who called for resistance to ‘Fascist aggressors’ opposed vigorous rearmament, while those who were accused of condoning these aggressors [e.g. by agreeing to the lifting of sanctions against Italy] were eager to have Britain make a maximum effort at rearmament, directed unmistakably against the 232 powers with which they were assumed to be sympathizing’. John Bew, in Citizen Clem, his 2016 biography of Clement Attlee, notes the Labour leader’s dilemma as a collectivist. He believed that the League of Nations was the best hope for avoiding war, but should it use military force to enforce its authority? ‘He was torn between a faith in peaceful international arbitration and a growing recognition that institutions such as the League of Nations were noble endeavours, but ultimately useless without the threat of force (‘collective security’) behind them’. He was also a leading figure of a party divided over its analysis of the European threat and the political solution. Attlee saw the danger as the spread of totalitarianism (i.e. including communism) through the continent, which must be stood up to by the forces of liberal democracy. Stafford Cripps and the Socialist League, on the other hand, saw the conflict as between left and right, and therefore advocated a Popular Front, which would include all parties of the left, including communist, and follow a pacifist route to maintaining peace.233
To return to the League of Nations Union, discussed above, this movement, and its Peace Ballot in particular, has also been seen as a guilty party. A contemporary view was that ‘Britain’s unpreparedness for war and unwillingness to face it were entirely due to the peace propaganda and 234 activities of the LNU’. Along with the government’s appeasement policy ‘it spread the impression … 235 abroad that England was for peace at any price’. A very clear example of this uncompromising stance can be found in the views of a writer who would have had considerable public recognition though perhaps not political influence, A.A. Milne in 1934: ‘If, then, we are to avoid another war, we must give one entirely new thought the right of entry into our minds. It is this: Preparations for defence are as dangerous to the cause of peace as preparations for aggression. Until we are accustomed to 236 this thought, there will be no security for civilization’.
However, the Union is also described as ‘a centre of opposition to the National Government’s 237 appeasement policies’, and the relationship between the two is clearly complex, if not confused: ‘were they also to be indicted, along with others in the peace movement, for blocking rearmament and sapping the public’s will to fight?’, Birn asks, and how much influence did public opinion have in the argument against re-armament? He suggests that ‘the Peace Ballot shaped the rhetoric but not the 238 reality of British policy’.
The LNU did not support disarmament, but focussed on collective security, while still opposing re- armament. Birn points out the essential difference between its internationalist stance and pure pacifism. The League was seen by the Union as the safest bulwark against Fascism and a second
232 Wolfers p. 377, 379. 233 Bew p. 184. 234 Violet Bonham Carter in 1940, quoted by Donald Birn, The League of Nations Union 1918-1945, (1981), p. 142. 235 Birn, p. 150. 236 A.A. Milne, Peace with Honour: An Enquiry into the War Convention, (1934) p. 124. [italics in the original]. 237 Birn, p. 4. 238 Ibid. war, and found considerable public endorsement in the Ballot. In relation to government policy, McDonough claims that ‘the very policy that Chamberlain moved away from as prime minister, namely 239 support for the League of Nations, was by far the most popular policy among the British public’.
Finally, as we will see later, the Spanish Civil War helped to seal the Union’s fate. It had tried to keep the support of its minority Catholic membership in promoting its brand of anti-war internationalism and had enlisted Archbishop Hinsley as a vice-president. However, he used his position to keep the Union from taking a pro-Republican stand and resigned on the issue of the Union’s association with the International Peace Campaign, which he saw as Communist-inspired: another example of how by 1937 positions were hardening and escape routes were being blocked.
Birn draws the conclusion that ‘their [the Union’s] failure was in a sense complete … [they] submerged all other considerations to building mass support. This tactic could only be justified by results, and these never came’. Even the bombing of Guernica could not elicit a firm line from the Executive. They proposed a fact-finding mission and to ‘collect milk money for Spanish refugee children’. It became clear that collective security meant sanctions backed up with armed force, and pious hopes of prohibiting air warfare240, for example, through international agreements would be 241242 fruitless: ‘if you want peace, you must be prepared to fight for it’. Towards the end of the period covered by this study ‘Churchill declared himself a “convert” to collective security, having disparaged the League on a number of occasions. As embodied by Churchill and Attlee, respectively, the predominant ‘realist’ and ‘idealist’ approaches to foreign policy began to converge, in a pincer movement on the appeasers in the middle’. In the summer of 1940 ‘Attlee handed over control of [his] garden to the local allotment committee, of which he was chairman, before digging it up and replanting it with potatoes. … Yet sharing of 243 allotments would not go far in countering the clunking fist of the German war machine’.
2.12. German plans to assassinate Hitler prior to 1939
One of the most significant consequences of British appeasement policy were the missed opportunities to assassinate Hitler before his military plans could be implemented. Of the historical accounts of German opposition to Hitler in the 1930s, chiefly among senior military men, four will be reported here. None was written from the political left, perhaps because very few remained in Germany to witness events close-up or survived suppression of their views. The military men knew the most about the Nazi plans and saw the inevitably of war and eventual destruction of Germany as they had known it and to which they felt a strong loyalty. They had a better chance of surviving and in some cases did survive, though some spent the war in camps and were only executed at the very end by their Nazi captors.
The most personal and anguished of these, is the Diary of a Man in Despair, written by a wealthy, minor aristocratic writer, who witnessed with dismay the spreading vulgarity and violence in and around Munich in the 1920s and 1930s. Looking back on events, he remembers being in the same room as Hitler in 1932, with a pistol in his pocket and, in retrospect, having had the opportunity to kill him. His, like the other accounts, worried about the destructive influence of nationalism, the effects of propaganda and the systematic creation of the Nazi mythology.
He, like the others, looked to England as an exception to the continent-wide descent into barbarism and most able to counter this evil. At the end of his diary, in August 1943, he looks forward to the retribution Nazi leaders will face: ‘The wood for the gallows on which I hope to see Hitler, Göring, Goebbels, Papen et al, hung has already been thoughtfully put aside’. His final lament points a finger at British appeasement: ‘Do people really go so far as to accuse unarmed German intellectuals of
239 McDonough, p. 160. 240 ‘Either man will put an end to air war or air war will put an end to mankind’. Wells 1940, p. 71. 241 Birn, pp. 229, 187, 229. 242 ‘I think it is well also for the man in the street to realise that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through’. Stanley Baldwin, House of Commons, 10/11/1932. 243 Birn, p 220, 243. lethargy when, during the first two years of the Hitler regime, at least, the British Cabinet, with every 244 possible weapon at its disposal, was itself too indolent to smoke the brown rats out of their holes’. Joachim Fest also lamented British lack of action and its attitude to the German plotters against Hitler. The UK Foreign Office official, Robert Vansittart, ‘felt called upon to point out during their first conversation [with Goerdeler, a conspirator trying to elicit British support in 1938] that what his visitor was doing amounted to nothing less than high treason’. He gives a flavour of an outsider’s perspective of the British debate over Munich: ‘when Winston Churchill denounced the Munich agreement as the ‘first foretaste of a bitter cup’, he was shouted down by indignant members of 245 Parliament’.
In the prologue to his Defying Hitler (written in approximately 1940, and published by his son Oliver in 2002), Sebastian Haffner (pseudonym of Raimund Pretzel) looks forward to the future of the world after the inevitable war. ‘The chances for mankind in Germany … are pretty slim. They need not have been quite so hopeless if the outside world had intervened. It is still in the world’s interest, I believe, for these chances to be improved. It is too late to avoid a war, but it might shorten the war by a year or two. Those Germans of goodwill who are fighting to defend their private peace and their private 246 liberty, are fighting, without knowing it, for the peace and liberty of the whole world’.
Terry Parssinen presents particular details of a specific plot, the Oster Conspiracy in 1938, involving senior military officers and diplomats. Although they saw war as inevitable by then, given what they knew of Hitler’s strategic geographical ambitions, they knew it was unwinnable by Germany. He recounts numerous attempts to warn British leaders of the reality of Hitler’s plans and of the dictator’s comforting belief that Britain and France had written off Czechoslovakia. The conspirators, planning an assassination in 1938, whose success depended on Britain (and France) standing up diplomatically to Hitler and thereby protect them from a backlash from the German population, but all they achieved were feeble warnings to the regime, one of which was then withdrawn by Halifax, the Foreign Secretary, as too bold. Again, the official British line was to dismiss the actions of the plotters. ‘Chamberlain … wrote to Halifax [in August 1938] “I take it that Von Kleist [one of the conspirators] is violently anti-Hitler and is extremely anxious to stir up his friends in Germany to make an attempt at his overthrow. He reminds me [through his public school education, no doubt] of the Jacobites (British traitors) at the Court of France in King William’s time and I think we must discount a good deal of what he says” … He was, in Chamberlain’s view, a traitor pure and simple’. Parssinen’s final comments, once the Prime Minister had appalled the plotters by proposing a meeting with Hitler in Munich (September 1938), and thereby wrecking their plans: Erich Kordt wrote ‘The Munich Conference prevented the coup d’état in Berlin’. Another plotter, Grisevius was even more blunt: ‘Chamberlain 247 saved Hitler’.
2.13. Conclusion
Looking back at this period from no further than the Spanish Civil War at the end of the decade, all of these peace initiatives appeared to be advancing optimistically up a cul de sac. However, the divisions in British society exposed by that conflict had their origins in the earlier part of the decade and can partly be understood through the peace activism, however futile it proved to be. Among the developments prompted by the outbreak of war in 1936 was what has been seen as a political cross- over. ‘Non-intervention and pacifism crossed over from the opposition to the government: “no war” 248 became the slogan, not of the left, but of the right’. ‘A great reversal was beginning. Pacifism ceased to be fashionable; it was no longer the hallmark of liberalism, of opposition to Baldwinism and 249 Chamberlainism. Many who had taken the “Peace Pledge” formally revoked their signatures’.
The attention of British political and public opinion across the wide range of Left and Right, whether promoting pacifism, appeasement or rearmament, was focussed on a single troublesome foreign state. What distinguished these positions was whether that was treated as the nation of Germany on
244 Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, 1947/2000, p199. 245 Fest, 1996, p. 73, 97. 246 Haffner, p 4. 247 Parssinen, 2004, p.74, 172. 248 Mowat, p. 578. 249 Alfred Havighurst, Britain in Transition: the Twentieth Century, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,1985), p. 262. the one hand, with territorial ambitions, debateable international rights or as a long-standing military rival, or, on the other, as the major proponent of an evil international ideology, Fascism, to be opposed at all costs.
One of the key principles at the heart of the mainstream British peace or anti-war movements in the first half of the 1930s (e.g. the League of Nations Union) was to support international attempts to sustain European democracy in the face of anti-democratic forces from the Left and Right in some parts of the continent. The predominant solution proposed was forms of collective protection and internationally-agreed constraints on governments’ action.
Viewed from a British point of view such explicit rejection of all armed force had become untenable by 1936-38, with the Spanish Civil War forcing a hardening of opinion, with strong support voiced for both the Government and rebel sides. In addition, the conclusion from many political groups favoured non-intervention and arms blockades of the whole peninsula.
A significant social and political factor in British life in the mid-1930s could be seen as lying between the height of the peace movements of the early part of the decade and their definitive failure by the end: the principal British variant on European Fascism, Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists or Blackshirts.250 The history of British Fascism can be traced back to the 19th century and comprises several named movements and groups, with a variety of leaders, political allegiances and social characteristics. For the purpose of this study the focus will be on the BUF, with its clearly identifiable span of existence, from its foundation on the 1st October 1932 to its proscription in May 1940 and the internment of several hundred of its members.
250 See the list of coloured shirts associated with fascist groups around the world in the Appendix 3. British fascism
Introduction
A fundamental challenge for historians examining the Britain of the 1930s is whether or how to present an even-handed, objective or neutral analysis of fascism. Although in the 1920s and 30s the term could be and was used in polite society and government circles, indicating that it was uncontroversial for many251, by the outbreak of war when hundreds of fascists were interned this was no longer the case. Baker, in his 1996 study of the ‘extreme anti-semite’ A.K.Chesterton (second cousin of G.K. and Cecil) suggests that ‘the sheer horror of … the Holocaust … still makes it difficult for historians to deal objectively with the great taboo subjects of the twentieth century, fascism and political anti-Semitism’. He quotes the Italian historian, Benedetto Croce, writing in 1946: ‘I have not written it [a history of Italian fascism], nor shall I write it, because I hate Fascism so much that I forbid myself even to attempt to think about its history’. Even Chesterton, who put so much effort into promoting it and could proudly call himself a fascist in the 1930s, could claim by 1947 ‘it is impossible even to mention the word without invoking … what its deadliest enemies intended people to believe it 252 to have meant’ rather than ‘what its adherents meant when they used it’.
It is hard to see fascist activities as requiring an even-handed treatment. It was unarguably an evil creed, and fascists convict themselves with their own recorded and largely unretracted words, not open to misinterpretation or excused as being taken out of context. Fascism can be contrasted to its major competing creed, communism, which advocated an equal degree of violence against its enemies. Communists (to put it very crudely) aimed at the destruction of capitalist exploiters of the working classes, but these could be seen as oppressors through choice and might, in theory, mend their ways. Many extreme fascists wished the destruction of Jews as a people, who were so by birth and could only escape their fate by conversion to christianity, though even then they could be suspected of doing so fraudulently and insincerely and still be condemned.
Although universally anathematised today by historians, British fascism is still capable of stirring professional controversy. Two of these will be mentioned below: firstly, events surrounding the Olympia Rally in June 1934 and, secondly, the analysis of fascist and anti-fascist activities, especially in London’s East End, presented by the modern historian Robert Skidelsky.
British fascism was characterised by personalities, organisations, mass assemblies in halls and on marches, secret meetings and societies, journals and uniforms. It was not a creed accessible to open public debate through detailed policies, published manifestoes or programmes. In the absence of rationally argued documents, the student of fascism tends to focus on events, public reactions to them and key individuals, such as Mosely, Chesterton and Ramsay. Desmond MacCarthy, the contemporary drama critic, described these as ‘colossal egotists, who go so far because they do not 253 know where they are going’.
3.1. Fascist views
Like other far-right movements in Britain at that time, one of the main features of British fascism was its reactionary nature, partly defining itself by what it was against and by what it wanted to return the country to. The Britons (founded by Henry Hamilton Beamish in 1919), for example, ‘did not bother with a detailed political programme based on a profound analysis of the complexities of modern society … [but aimed] at a revival of the glorified past, the imperial tradition’ via the restoration of the Act of Settlement of 1700.254 Some fascists such as A.K.Chesterton looked back more specifically to the ‘lost generation of 1914-18’. Fascism was to ‘enshrine in Britain the values of the dead’. However, as Baker points out ‘the England with which he had fallen in love hardly existed outside the very 255 special circumstances of Brightlands [the prep school Chesterton attended]’.
251 Maguire in Copsey and Renton, 2005, pp. 18-19. 252 Baker, 1996, p. vii, 1, 189. 253 Dorril, 2007, p. 89. 254 Lebzelter in Lunn and Thurlow, 1980, p. 48. 255 Baker, p. 154, 37. These views led some to strongly favour hereditary leadership, the monarchy, to denigrate democracy and espouse dictatorship. Chesterton described ‘the still unbroken men and women of our race who cling to a vanishing life … [in] a nation which has lost its sap and become lice-ridden with maggots of 256 Financial Democracy in the last obscene depravities of life’. Even non-fascists such as Harold Nicolson could write that the economic crisis had to be treated with ‘on undemocratic lines’. ‘Democracy for Mosley was dead- and so it is for me. The people must be treated humanely but firmly’. The fascist faction of Mosely’s New Party ‘was disappointed at the slow progress [towards 257 fascism] and the refusal to commit to a “definite policy of dictatorship”’.
It has been noted that their background in the colonies of some fascists helps to explain their lack of commitment to democratic institutions. Beamish settled in South Africa after involvement in the Second Boer War (until returning to the UK when he found South Africa too much under the influence of Jews). Chesterton spent early childhood and early adult years in South Africa, where he acquired 258 habits of ‘racial paternalism’ and his embryonic ‘fascist thinking’. The colonial imposition of order on subject populations might also lead to fascist admiration for Nazi Germany as a ‘model 259 organisation’.
Chesterton’s reference to a ‘lost generation’ was not only a nostalgic tribute, it also symbolized that ‘fascism was a phenomenon tied to the First World War … [It] was conceived in the mud and blood 260 and brotherhood of the frontlines’. Such experiences created a bond between people like Chesterton and Mosely. The former adopted ‘a fascist creed that offered the chance to reunite the 261 soldier and the civilian in one citizen in order to achieve a political state based on “spiritual values”’.
Chesterton’s mention of spiritual values reflects his and Mosely’s explicit emphasis on emotion over thought. ‘Mosely launched the BUF with the slogan “I have finished with those who think; henceforth I shall go to those who feel. … There are two approaches to National Socialism- the path of feeling and the path of thought … The first approach is by far the most vital, in that instinct is swifter than logic, and the emotional comprehension of a truth immeasurably more compulsive than the most efficient 262 mental process”’. ‘The substance of Mosely’s rhetoric was permeated by a concern that had 263 nothing to do with reason’. Nicolson said of Mosely ‘he cannot keep his mind off shock troops, the arrest of MacDonald and Thomas, their internment on the Isle of Wight264, and the roll of drums 265 around Westminster. He is a romantic. That is a great failing’.
The emotions most easily stimulated in 1930s Britain and most evident in reports and recordings of fascist speeches and marches were anger, fear and hatred, apparent as extreme nationalism and, of course, most particularly as anti-semitism.
3.2. Anti-semitism
As it was socially acceptable in some circles in the 1920s and 30s to call oneself a fascist, so it was uncontroversial to be anti-semitic and openly admit to disliking Jews as a people not just individually. It seems possible to present anti-semitic attitudes on a scale of degree from the weakest to the strongest. Rather than comment on each level of this prejudice, this section will provide quotations from modern sources and contemporary writers and speakers.
1. ‘Casual’ or ‘Social’
‘Some individuals within this elite [of the political establishment] shared in the casual, non- theoretical antisemitism which was present in Britain’. [Holmes, p. 125]
256 Baker, p. 167. 257 Dorril, p. 155, 160, 173. 258 Baker, p. 204, 166. 259 Dorril, p. 173. 260 Dorril, p. 34. 261 Baker, p. 51. 262 Baker, p. 178. 263 Nicolson in Dorril, p. 95. 264 the base of the Nazi occupation of the UK in C.J.Sansom’s counterfactual novel Dominion. 265 Dorril, p. 193. ‘We need to place [it] within the culture in relation to the Jews, which has been defined as “social antisemitism”’. [Griffiths, p. 11]
2. Cultural dislike, fabrication
‘Ada Chesterton [Cecil’s widow] … complained of Geilgud’s performance as Shylock: “this study of a Hebrew should include authentic gestures … eager, thrustful, as though to clutch the wealth even of the air”’. [Lunn, p. 35] ‘The penetration into our great English people of a vast Asiatic horde- the Jewish race was compared to a fatal virus’. [Lebzelter, p. 49] ‘To go to a swimming pool anywhere near London … is as efficacious as baptism in the Jordan; one becomes positively anointed with Semitic grease’. [Chesterton in Baker, p. 139] ‘Ramsay “had it on best authority that the ‘Daily Mail’ now belonged to Mr Israel Moses Sieff”’. [Griffiths, p. 100]
3. aliens and refugees
‘The dislike and mistrust of aliens led inexorably, from 1933 onwards, to rejection of refugees, or “refu-Jews” as they came to be called. The authorities’ concern with the effect of Jewish immigration was evidence not only of the impact such immigration was having but also of the underlying British anti-Semitism which could be fanned into flames if such immigration was allowed to continue’. [Griffiths, p. 21]
4. Jewish responsibility
‘[In local politics in London] Jews play too prominent a part. They should keep in the background … and leave it to Gentiles to fight for them’. [Herbert Morrison in Dorril, p. 397] ‘The Jew himself created anti-semitism … Even Hitler was not an anti-Semite before he saw a Jew’. [Mosely in Dorril, p. 397] ‘The growing atmosphere of anti-Semitism in Britain in 1939 … was in large part based on the propaganda which blamed the Jews for the prospect of war’. [Griffiths, p. 27] ‘The Duke of Westminster said that if there was a war it would be entirely due to the Jews and [the anti-German] Duff Cooper’. [Griffiths, p. 31] ‘The British public was perpetually having waved before it the concept that the Jews, in revenge for the treatment of their fellow-Jews in Germany, were hell-bent on a “War of the Jews’ Revenge”’. [Griffiths, p. 27]
5. Conspiracy theories
“the Judaic-Bolshevik Soviet slave-state” [Chesterton in Baker, p. 141] “the Jew-Red conspiracy” [Chesterton in Baker, p. 142] “international Judaeo-Bolshevik plot” [Griffiths, p. 16] ‘Bolshevism was the German-Jewish-Masonic plot to destroy the world as we knew it’. [Nesta Webster in Griffiths, p. 23]
6. Solutions
‘What shall we do with our Jews? … Jews should be Jews and conspicuous as such … have Jewish-sounding names … clearly defined Jewish areas … a distinct and separate identity to be imposed’. [Vivian Carter in Lunn, p. 29] ‘Beamish sponsored the idea of a Jewish reservation in Madagascar … They were to be treated like criminals or lepers with whom one had to avoid contact at any cost … When advocating Zionism, he thought of a Jewish national home as a ghetto. “Madagascar, being an island, would make the problem of complete segregation a simple one”’. [Lebzelter, p. 45] ‘Expulsion … seemed adequate enough provided it was strictly enforced and irreversible … “Any attempt to evade this essential stipulation must be met with the death penalty of [sic] landing on our shores”’. [Lebzelter, p. 53]
7. Extermination
‘Arnold Leese [of the Imperial Fascist League] disagreed with “the Jewish Extermination Policy being labelled as an Abomination or a fearful Atrocity”. Instead he actively supported it; “We believe that as long as the destruction was done in a humane manner, it was to the advantage of everyone”’. [Morell in Lunn, p. 70] ‘The sooner we get rid of the largest number of them and break their financial stranglehold the better it will be for the future greatness of the English people’. [Chesterton in Baker, p. 143]
‘This dismal catalogue of prejudice represents the very worst of his [Chesterton’s] attacks on Jews. As Mandle says: “What Fascist, after reading Chesterton … could not find grounds for dislike in the epitome of evil that was the BUF image of the Jew?”’ [Baker, p. 143]
These anti-semitic sentiments cannot be completely separated into discrete categories, as it is shown above that they merge and overlap. Individual speakers and writers might choose to emphasise one aspect over another on particular occasions and for specific purposes or audiences. Presenting such views as a scale perhaps demonstrates the escalation in language and attitudes that occurred. The most widely-held ‘low-level’ prejudices became the assumptions on which the more extreme forms could feed and build. It would not require much effort for a movement to persuade some potential followers that there was a problem of aliens in their midst and then to draw the conclusion that a solution was needed.
3.3. Supporters
Looking at the accounts of Griffiths, Dorril and others, it is hard to identify any group in British society in the 1930s that was entirely immune to some form of fascist attraction. Some might be regarded as passive supporters: those who heard the rhetoric of the BUF on the streets or in public meetings and found that it responded to something in them and their lives. Lancashire cotton mill workers or residents of London’s East End could be stirred into resentment against whoever might be blamed for their conditions of unemployment or poor housing. ‘Lancashire was again the centre of attempts to revitalize the movement … Mosley attacked the government’s recent report on India … for its failure to tackle sweated labour and for allowing Japan to swamp Indian markets with cheap, cotton goods, the cause of unemployment in Lancashire’. Mick Clarke (BUF organizer in the East End) ‘said it was time the British people knew that East London’s big pogrom is not very far away now. … Mosley is 266 coming every night of the week in future to East London and by God there is going to be a pogrom’.
Others seemed actively to seek a movement that would represent their existing political and social views: for example, Catholics. ‘Mosley’s foreign affairs adviser, Robert Gordon-Canning, was involved with leading Catholic Mosleyites, MI5 friends and Spanish Fascists in the clandestine transfer of Generalissimo Francisco Franco to Morocco’. ‘The BU … had the backing of a large number of Catholic members; 12 per cent of its leading officials were Catholics. The Catholic Herald and the 267 Tablet were among the few journals which sympathetically reported on Mosley and the BU’. ‘The percentage of Catholics in the BUF was much higher than in the population as a whole’. ‘Catholics we had in large numbers, beside many Church of England ministers and laity, because they supported our stand against atheistic communism mostly’. ‘There were so many Catholic members in the Leeds 268 area that Mosley’s nickname there was “The Pope”’.
Woodbridge suggests that Mosely ‘failed to win the support of the aristocratic reactionaries who supported Fascism because of their pre-WWI experience of ‘socialist’ reform and their fear of a 269 socialist government, as he was tainted by his pre-Fascist Labour past’. However, the upper echelons of society seem to be disproportionately represented in fascist-leaning organisations. Lords and Dukes abound in Griffiths’ studies. He lists a few of the most active: Lord and Lady Redesdale, Lord Lymington (Earl of Portsmouth), Duke of Westminster, Lady Delamere, Lord Brocket, Duke of Buccleugh, Lord Mount Temple, Lord Arnold.270 Unity Mitford (daughter of the anti-semite Lord
266 Dorril, p. 326, 295. 267 Dorril, p. 379. 268 Rawnsley, pp. 161-2. 269 Woodbridge, p. 495. 270 Griffiths, p. 36. Redesdale) was one of the most wilfully blinkered and gushingly supportive of the Nazis. She wrote to her sister Diana (Mosely’s wife) to commiserate over the latter missing the notoriously violent Olympia 271 Rally through illness: ‘Too awful for you. It does sound such heaven’. She acquired a flat in Munich with Hitler’s help: ‘it had belonged to a Jewish couple who had decided to leave’. She also wrote to Lady Mosely expressing sympathy for Hitler after his purge of the SA. She felt ‘terribly sorry for the Führer. It must have been so dreadful … when he arrested Röhm himself. … Then he went to arrest Heines and found him in bed with a boy. Poor Hitler’. King Edward VIII’s friendship with Nazis encouraged fascists to see him as a hero and to attack Baldwin over the abdication crisis in December 1936. According to Special Branch, 500 fascists were among those who chanted outside Buckingham Palace: ‘One two three four five we want Baldwin dead or alive!’ Diana Mosely claimed, 272 ‘if the King and my husband had been in power, there would have been no war with Hitler’.
A rung below the aristocracy, Mosley’s nationalistic and initially non-populist form of fascism originally attracted right-wing Conservatives, including MPs who could operate in both organisations, seeing fascism as ‘a more virile expression of Toryism’, and Tory sympathisers of fascism were not barred 273 from office. The Tory MP, Thomas Moore, wrote in the Daily Mail that there were ‘no fundamental 274 differences of outlook between Blackshirts and their parents, the Conservatives’. On the other hand, whatever Mosley’s personal views on race, the BUF inevitably attracted racists and those who admired Nazi physicality, and Jew-baiting marches took place around the country. Mosely had to attempt a careful balance: not to alarm his middle-class Conservative supporters by too much violence and paramilitarism, while at the same time to demonstrate his fascist credentials and meet the expectations of his mass followers.
The attitude and behaviour of the police was at best ambiguous. At the time of the Battle of Cable Street in the East End (in October 1936), ‘an eyewitness recalled three bus loads of police arriving, some giving ‘Hitler salutes’ and shouting ‘Jew bastards”’. ‘BU speakers felt they had little to fear from the police, who were regarded as their natural allies since many were ex-army men who were 275 “extremely patriotic” and, therefore, agreed with their views’.
Age was also a factor, with fascism presenting itself as a battle for the future by the young against the elderly, failed politicians of the past and present, especially by those who had fought as young men in the Great War. ‘These young Germans have discovered, as the young men and women of England 276 are discovering, that it is no good trusting to the old politicians’. ‘Against the old who ran Britain, there was a ‘curious cult of hatred’, George Orwell noted. Their dominance was ‘held responsible for every evil known to humanity … Throughout the whole nation there was a revolt of youth versus 277 age’. ‘Fascism appeals … to those elements among the younger minded middle class who are 278 conservative by temperament and strongly nationalist in spirit’.
Possibly some of the most surprising adherents were former suffragette feminists, and women can be seen prominent in marches and holding senior positions in the BUF. ‘There existed within the BUF a strand of “Fascist feminism” which attracted former suffragettes to the possibility of a carefully controlled revolution, opening new fields of activity to women but avoiding social and class 279 dislocation’. Mary Richardson (ex-suffragette prisoner) ‘saw in the Blackshirts the “courage, action, loyalty, gift of service, and ability to serve which I had known in the suffrage movement.” [Norah Elam] argued that “Fascism is the logical, if much grander, conception of the momentous issues raised by 280 the militant women of a generation ago”’.
Although fascists such as Chesterton loathed pacifism, connections were also made between fascism and elements of the peace movements. ‘In July 1939 there was a plan by some fascist leaders “to
271 Dorril, p. 298. 272 Dorril, p. 461, 303, 406. 273 Pugh, 2006, p. 12, 148. 274 25/4/1934. 275 Dorril, p. 391, 395. 276 George Ward Price, editor of the Daily Mail, on behalf of Rothermere in Dorril, p. 147. 277 Dorril, p. 227. 278 fascist supporter quoted in Rawnsley, p. 150. 279 Dorril, p. 281. 280 Dorril, p. 282. amalgamate all the parties who think the same on foreign policy”. The Catholic Times, Catholic Herald and Peace Pledge Union all came out against the government’s war policy, and there was talk of an 281 alliance with the ILP whose journal, Forward, attacked the “Jewish control of British foreign policy”’.
Nor was the mainstream Labour Party immune. Conflicts surrounding fascism, communism and anti- semitism in the East End posed dilemmas for the Labour Party, with its desire to distance itself from the Communist Party. ‘Many Stepney Jews … “even those who were social democrats ideologically, were thoroughly disillusioned by the official Labour Party representation” which failed to express their deep feelings of outrage against Fascism and Nazism. Some went so far as to accuse the party of 282 harbouring anti-Semites’.
Further public support came from elements of the right-wing press, naturally in the vanguard in jumping on the bandwagon of a current populist cause. The Daily Mail became the most notorious, voicing its proprietor Lord Rothermere’s fascist views in 1934. Ironically, there was a risk to the BUF in this advocacy, which could turn it into a mainstream party and no longer an alternative voice to the establishment.283 This is what Rothermere aimed at: to make the BUF an adjunct of the Conservative party, thus pulling it to the right away from the moderate National Government of his arch-enemy Baldwin. However, ‘even the Daily Express was shocked’ after Hitler’s Night of the Long Knives in June 1934. ‘There has never been anything quite like it in the history of the world. Jews are still murdered in the concentration camps; they are still beaten in the streets. But from this week the screw tightens. There is nothing they can do except run around helplessly in circles until they die’.
In 1947 A.K.Chesterton (Mosley’s former close companion), after renouncing fascism at the outbreak of the war, provided a final perspective on the true extent of support for Mosely’s brand of fascism:
‘What did lend colour to the suggestion that Mosley was leading a great mass movement were the packed meetings he addressed. The explanation was that when he spoke, say, in Lewisham, adulating followers from every part of London and the Home Counties would rush to hear him and if he spoke the next week at Hackney or Ealing there would be the same rush by the same people. … Why, then did Mosley appear to be marching to the sound of thunder during the six years before the war? The answer is simple – nine-tenths of the thunder was provided by his enemies. Had they not counter-demonstrated in thousands – on one occasion in hundreds of thousands – his marches would have been about as spectacular and exciting 284 as the progress of a troop of bedraggled Boy Scouts on a rainy day’.
3.4. Fascist methods
With such a broad spectrum of society having some degree of sympathy for fascism of some kind, but having failed to attract more than minimal support for his parliamentary route via the New Party, Mosley focussed on a narrow range of methods to gain attention. These methods could not be called subtle. As an extra-parliamentary movement, the support received by the BUF for its principles was strongly associated with the methods it employed to communicate its message.
The rhetoric of the leader and his companions can be seen in the BUF journals (Action, Blackshirt, Fascist Week) and in the speeches delivered at rallies and on the street. ‘Mosley admitted they had failed “both as a party and as a paper [Action] to arouse the people to any sense of their necessities”’. “Better the great adventure, better the great attempt for England’s sake, better defeat, disaster, better far the end of that trivial thing called a political career than strutting and posturing on the stage of Little England, amid the scenery of decadence … We shall win, or at least we shall return upon our shields”’. On the other hand, in a debate at the Cambridge Union, Clement Attlee thought ‘he talked 285 pretty fair rot. It is really Mosley and nothing more’.
In the year before the formation of the British Union of Fascists, 1931, Mosley spoke of ‘establishing a body of young men who could give “physical support ... and protect [the New Party’s] meetings ... the
281 Dorril, p. 282. 282 Griffiths, p. 17, quoting Srebrnik. 283 Pugh, 2006, p. 151. 284 from London Tidings, quoted in Baker, p. 188. 285 Dorril, p. 191, 226. 286 only methods we shall employ will be English methods. We shall rely on the good old English fist”’. Pugh suggests that violence, including the ‘elimination of the weak’ was central to the Union’s philosophy. Violent force could be justified if the government of the day was deemed illegitimate, a view promoted by Spanish fascists later in the decade. Clearly, the paramilitarism of the BUF, emphasised in its own propaganda films, had an implication of violence, and Mosley boasted that he 287 had the ability to meet a crisis not with words ‘but with Fascist machine guns’.
This more physical type of communication with potential followers focussed on provocation against their enemies in order to stimulate a reaction, the so-called ‘English methods’. ‘There must be a fight 288 in Reading to secure the mastery of the Blackshirts over all others’. Any anti-fascist retaliation could then be blamed for the public disorder that might follow, while the BUF itself could claim to stick within the bounds of the law. The blaming of a range of scapegoats for the social, political and economic ills in the country was aimed at aliens, immigrants and communists, though all of these categories could be seen as alternative labels for their main target, Jews, always abetted by the Jewish press.
The questions surrounding fascist marches especially in London’s East End with its large Jewish population, counter-demonstrations by Jewish and communist anti-fascists and the provocations on both sides are the focus of a debate centring on the modern historian, Robert Skidelsky. In his 1975 biography of Mosley, he presents a picture of public disorder and its causes which is somewhat at variance with the majority of accounts. ‘To represent Jewish and communist opposition as having come along to hear an argument and then being goaded beyond endurance by the speaker’s insults is misleading. Opponents came along to prevent the speaker from saying anything. For much of the East London campaign [in 1936] speakers were subject to organised opposition which coincided with the maximum disturbances’. He quotes from police reports describing the ‘persistent and organised heckling, singing, shouting of slogans, jeering at the speaker … actively conducted by the opponents of Fascism’. ‘Breaking up opponents’ meetings was not a tactic of the B.U., whereas it was of the 289 Communist Party’.
Dorril quotes Skidelsky’s original conclusion ‘A Jewish malaise of this time was to be obsessed by fascism’. ‘Skidelsky claimed violence occurred because of “the attitude of the Jews themselves, and they must take a large share of the blame for what subsequently happened.” Following criticism he 290 changed “a large share” to “some”’.
In his chapter in Lunn and Thurlow (1980), Skidelsky recognizes that in his biography he had not been aware of some of the evidence beyond the police reports. In particular, he refers to the autobiography of Joe Jacobs, an East End communist. ‘One important fact that I had not gathered from the police records was the extent to which East London fascists were prepared to break up communist meetings’. Additionally, ‘I would concede that my summary of Mosley’s anti-semitism as 291 “intellectual and moral carelessness” was seriously inadequate’.
A related tactic of Mosely’s BUF was to obey the law. Skidelsky says ‘on this evidence it cannot be claimed that the B.U. in East London contravened the law as it then stood. Mosely insisted that the law be obeyed, which aroused great opposition from militant B.U. anti-semites … who were urging a 292 policy of courting arrests and imprisonment to “intensify antagonism towards Jews”’. However, although it may not have been Mosely’s policy, ‘the B.U.’s East End campaign saw an increase in attacks on Jews by young Fascist hooligans. The breaking of shop windows, the desecration of Jewish cemeteries and synagogues, and the spread of anti-Semitic graffiti led to a highly charged 293 atmosphere’.
286 Copsey, p. 469. 287 Pugh, p. 14, 135. 288 Mosley quoted in Dorril, p. 229. 289 Skidelsky, 1975, p. 402, 403. 290 Dorril, p. 237. 291 Skidelsky, 1980, p. 89, 81. 292 Skidelsky, 1975, pp. 399-400. 293 Dorril, p. 395. In the end these methods produced a lot of noise, a few broken bones, a lot of column inches in the national and local press over a period of seven years, but next to nothing in the goal of creating a mass fascist movement.
3.5. The Olympia Rally
Griffiths’ ‘decisive moment’, which he identifies with ‘mid-1934’, is narrowed down by many historians to the evening of June 7th, the occasion of what became known as the Olympia Rally. Some have seen this as a significant crisis in the fortunes of the BUF, as a result of the very widely publicized violence associated with the event and the subsequent arguments and action this provoked. This response can be seen in press reporting, public opinion, politcal debate and legislation, but firstly it is useful to examine the way in which historians have interpreted the event. Essentially, the controversy centres on whether the rally was a true turning point against the BUF or not.
The modern-day discussion was initiated by Martin Pugh, who aimed to reassess ‘the significance of 294 the … rally for the fortunes of the British Union of Fascists’. The centre of the contemporary controversy was the question of how much the violence caused a reaction against the BUF and helped turn the tide against public support for British fascism. At that time there was parliamentary debate about curtailing political meetings of this kind that led to violent confrontation with protesters, about risks to public order and about banning the blatant display of paramilitary force. Prominent among these arguments was the extent to which Tory politicians, some of whom had lent respectability to the BUF (along with the Tory-supporting press), had withdrawn support and distanced themselves from such public displays of fascism. Pugh claims that in the aftermath of the rally, several Conservative MPs continued to believe that BUF strong-arm tactics were justified in maintaining freedom of speech. Furthermore, he points out that government prohibition of political uniforms (in the Public Order Act of 1936) did not come into force until 1937 (three years after the rally), by which time public support for fascism was much diminished, and thus should not be interpreted as a direct result of Olympia.
In response to this ‘revisionist’ account, Jon Lawrence claims that ‘revulsion at Fascist violence played an important part in the failure of Mosley and British Fascism. …the furore over blackshirt violence at Olympia in 1934 served to alienate Conservative opinion from Fascist ‘extremism’ both in 295 parliament and in the press’. This dispute over attitudes to and the strength of British fascism in the 1930s has continued in a number of further articles, which provide a great deal of useful detail of parliamentary and press debate and add depth to our understanding of British public and political views. Griffiths, taking a similar line to Lawrence’s, claims that the Olympia Rally had a great effect on Tory and middle-class support296 and led to Mosley attempting to broaden his appeal, specifically to working-class xenophobia and anti-Semitism. This could backfire, as in Leeds, with a large Jewish population, where membership of the BUF dropped off after 1934.
3.6. Press reaction
th On May 25 1934 Fascist Week ran an advertisement for the ‘Blackshirt Rally’ to be held in London th on 7 June, promoting the event as ‘the most momentous political gathering held in Britain since the war ... applications for tickets have been received from all parts of Western Europe’.
The Left press saw the Rally as significant in stimulating anti-fascist opposition and ‘burst the bubble’ 297 of BUF popularity. On the morning of the rally the Daily Worker described it as ‘an impudent threat and a challenge to the whole working-class movement’. Its call for an anti-fascist counter demonstration was responded to by trades union branches ‘in the print shop of the Fascist “Daily 298 Mail”’ and other groups of workers ‘in a great front action against Mosley’. The scene was set for a major political confrontation.
294 Martin Pugh, 'The British Union of Fascists and the Olympia Debate', The Historical Journal, 41.2 (1998), 529-42. p. 529. 295 Jon Lawrence, 'Fascist Violence and the Politics of Public Order in Inter-War Britain: The Olympia Debate Revisited', Historical Research, 76.192 (2003), 238-67. p. 238. 296 Griffiths, 1980, p. 105. 297 Pugh, 2006, p. 161. 298 7/6/1934.
One of the earliest and most detailed accounts of the Rally was printed in the Daily Express the following day. The focus was on the degree of violence, with very little reporting of the political content of speeches: ‘The next forty minutes were in the ratio of one minute speaking to four minutes 299 fighting’. The report emphasized Mosley’s attempts at restoring order once the protests began, especially for the benefit of ‘hundreds of women in evening dress’: ‘Sir Oswald’s voice, amplified through twenty-four loudspeakers could be heard crying for calm. “Keep your seats! Please keep your seats!” The women were reassured and sat down. Others, of bolder spirit, were standing on chairs watching the fighting through opera glasses and laughing with excitement’. In reality, the violence seemed to be far from a laughing matter and not, as Mosley (“a remarkable blackshirted figure”) called them, “small interruptions”. There was ‘hand-to-hand fighting’ and ‘vicious blows’, “razor blades, knuckle-dusters and bludgeons were freely used”. There were baton-charges from 1,000 mounted police, “kept busy until midnight”, dealing “severely with Blackshirts and Communists alike”.
The Manchester Guardian presented more of a chronological narrative, though equally dramatic. Using a rather jocular tone, its report describes the scene as ‘an entertainment which Mr Bertram Mills might at once have envied and deplored ... Sir Oswald Mosley had nothing of theatricalism to learn 300 from either Hitler or Mussolini’. The incident described in most detail was the shouting of anti- fascists from the roof and the attempt by Blackshirts to remove Communists from 150 feet above the crowd. The end of the meeting saw ‘a general stampede of the audience, who had plainly grown tired of Sir Oswald’s two-hour monologue’. The Guardian had a remarkably even-handed view: ‘It is not easy to apportion blame for the disturbances’, but noted that for the anti-fascist groups ‘the mounted policeman seems to be regarded as the most provocative’.
The Rally soon became notorious, with the reports of violent clashes within and outside the hall. The Daily Worker reported a confrontation in a café in East Ham, where ‘it was obvious their [Blackshirts 301 in uniform] intention was to use “Olympia” methods on local comrades’. This paper reported defections from the fascist cause: ‘Following the Olympia Rally ... as he handed his uniform to the comrade the ex-Storm Trooper said, “Here you are, it’s first blood to the Communist Party and you’ll certainly get a great many more as the chaps realise what the Blackshirts really stand for”’.
Such was the general public reaction against the scenes of violence that by the following month there was an attempt to set the record straight: ‘Assistant Propaganda officer, Chester branch … dealt with the alleged Blackshirt brutalities. Having attended the Olympia Rally he was able effectively to deal 302 with the lies and exaggerations published by the opponents of the Movement’. An ‘Ex-sixth-former’ wrote to the Blackshirt to complain of the discrimination he had experienced at school when ‘certain members of staff of my school discovered that I was an active member of the B.U.F., and had taken 303 part in the Olympia Rally’.
In a lengthy ‘Open Letter to Westminster’ two years later, the editor of the Blackshirt, A.K.Chesterton, accused the democratic opponents of the Movement of provoking violence. ‘In this great struggle for the soul of Britain, members of the House of Commons, you have almost to a man, been on the side of the alien thug and the half-witted Red razor slasher … these elements came by the hundred determined (and subsidised) to turn the huge Olympia rally into a murderous riot … the grand young Blackshirts met them with bare fists … you tried to exalt the ruffianly gangsters at the expense of 304 authentic young British manhood’.
305 The Times gave a dispassionate account of the evening’s events, though it is hard to avoid the impression that a factual, supposedly neutral report of ‘military precision’ and Mosley being ‘saluted in the Fascist manner’ sounds admiring and lends support to the cause, as anti-fascists might claim and became a characteristic feature of polarised discourse throughout the period. In its leader column of the same day, however, the Times, while focussing on the clash of extremes on the night,
299 8/6/1934. 300 8/6/1934. 301 27/6/1934. 302 Blackshirt, 3/8/1934. 303 Blackshirt, 14/12/1934. 304 Blackshirt, 18/7/1936. 305 8/6/1934, p. 16. emphasised its theatrical ‘tinsel’, which could not live up to its ‘more fiery prototypes’ in Italy and Germany. ‘Whatever Fascism may be elsewhere, it will remain superficial here until it is at least proved that the collective common sense of the country … has failed to provide for its livelihood and 306 its security’.
3.7 Official reaction
Initially, official reaction, in the form of parliamentary debate and govenment statement, was mixed and cautious. This is partly because the Government still saw communism as a bigger threat than fascism,307 though there was a clear difference of opinion between the Home Secretary and the Police Commissioner and among MPs. In a House of Commons debate on June the 11th (four days after the rally) The first question to the Home Secretary illustrated the level of political concern over fascist activity, when Mr Thorne asked if he was aware that the BUF had ‘an air defence force and an armoured-car section’ and that ‘the uncrowned king of the Fascist movement ... is prepared to meet the situation with machine guns’. Michael Beaumont defended the BUF, claiming that their ‘air force’ ‘is a flying club on all fours with other flying clubs in this country’. Other MPs urged the Home Secretary and the Prime Minister to ‘take measures to avert this menace to public order and political good will’, in the light of the Olympia Rally a few days earlier.
The Home Secretary answered all the questions with a prepared statement on the Government’s and the Police Commissioner’s policy towards the fascist rally. The police were warned in advance of the rally, the proposed counter-demonstration inside and outside the hall and that the fascists ‘did not require the assistance of the police’ in maintaining order. 760 police were deployed outside, and the events, as he saw it, were very much as reported in the press. While recognizing that police powers might need to be reviewed, he was ‘not concerned to-day to apportion blame between the Fascists and Communists’. It perhaps suited the Government to portray the conflict in such black and white terms (ignoring all the non-communist anti-fascist groups) and a later exchange in the debate re- enforced this line: ‘Mr Thorne: The Fascists were armed with some very dangerous implements. [HON. MEMBERS: Oh! What about the Communists?]’
Not until two years later in 1936, after continued confrontation between BUF supporters and the far more numerous anti-fascist demonstrators, was action finally taken, in the form of the The Public Order Act 1936. The Act, as brought into law on 18th December 1936, was brief and focussed on two measures against 1) ‘Prohibition of uniforms in connection with political objects’ and 2) ‘Prohibition of quasimilitary organisations’. The former outlawed the wearing of uniforms in a public place ‘signifying his association with any political organisation or the promotion of any political object’. The latter identified associations ‘organised or trained or equipped for the purpose of enabling them to be employed in usurping the functions of the police or of the armed forces ... or ... for the use or display of physical force in promoting any political object’, and made criminal the act of organising, training etc. The gravity of such an offence and the problem of definition meant that any prosecution had to be approved by the Attorney-General.
In spite of the Public Order Act being passed in Parliament explicitly as a political response to counter the growing paramilitary character of British fascism, such as the wearing of uniforms on public display and the associated violence of the Olympia Rally in 1934, the Daily Worker reported its introduction negatively, as it ‘places limitations on the workers’ rights to demonstrate, and gives added power to the police … making the leaders responsible for the actions and words of individual 308 members (e.g. “insulting words and behaviour”)’.
The response of the B.U.F. was to attempt to bring a test case to court over the definition of ‘uniform’, nd (reported very objectively in the Daily Mirror of January 2 1937). ‘Counsel, whom the British Union had consulted, had expressed the opinion that an ordinary shirt of black colour worn with a tie under 309 ordinary suits of normal and diverse pattern was not a uniform within the meaning of the Act’.
306 8/6/1934, p. 15. 307 Pugh, 2006, p. 154. 308 28/12/1936. 309 Blackshirt, 9/1/1937. A letter to Action showed a rather broader support for the Fascist standpoint: ‘I am not a Fascist … I have been a Conservative all my life … The last straw was when they [the Baldwin government] stooped to hitting below the belt by passing – with the unanimous approval of the other parties – the Public Order Act … there are … tens of thousands [of] hitherto Conservatives, who are prepared to 310 change over to the British Union’. This writer, perhaps typical of those supporters of the extreme extra-parliamentary movements, seems to miss the point about the democratic process in complaining about political unanimity.
th The Manchester Guardian announced the “Prohibition of Political Uniforms” on 30 December 1936, with a specifically local angle. Emphasising, as the Daily Worker had not, that the purpose of this legislation ‘is to check the quasi-military Fascist activities’, the report pointed out that ‘Stripping the Fascist of his uniform and his semi-military swagger is a device that was first tried within the limits of its powers by the Manchester Corporation’, which required marchers to dress in ‘the garb of ordinary peaceful citizens … The new Act has adopted Manchester’s method of dealing with the objectionable features of Fascist propaganda, which has been borrowed from abroad’.
The Times of the following day quoted from correspondence between the London Commissioner of Police and the organiser of the Independent Labour Party’s Guild of Youth (Fenner Brockway) concerning their dress, confirming that their ‘red shirts and red blouses’ was a uniform under the terms of the Act. Brockway claimed that these clothes ‘are worn mostly on rambles, for sport purposes, and on week-end outings. The members … do not drill or carry through any physical exercises similar to those practised by the Fascists’. The matter would be taken up with the Home Secretary. The BUF, on the other hand, ‘whose policy [in their own view is] to obey the law of the land’, was quoted as stating ‘the Backshirt uniform, therefore, will not be worn by members in any 311 public place or at any public meeting’.
Conclusion
The ignominious end of the BUF saw 747 fascist leaders and members interned in 1940. It could be claimed that where Chamberlain rescued Hitler in 1938 at Munich, the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia finished off British fascism in 1939. Although some regarded fascism as an inevitable failure, there was ‘a widespread hostility to the prospect of fighting another war with Germany, which enabled Mosely to draw 20,000 people to a peace rally at Earl’s Court in July 1939 … a reminder that 312 the British were closer to fascism that they often care to acknowledge’. It is worth examining some of the main features of this defeat, looking at the anti-fascist opposition and the wider social and political environment.
The degree of anti-fascist protest is most associated with Cable Street in October 1936. This was previewed a month earlier at the Battle of Holbeck Moor in Leeds, when ‘forty Fascists were injured in an ambush mounted by anti-Fascists, who rained down rocks on Fascists’. The event was ‘one of the things which inspired dread of what was going to happen in Cable Street’. This and the aftershocks of Olympia led some ‘to fear a Fascist revolution and make arrangements to go into hiding. Such views 313 were not uncommon’. ‘By 1935 the membership of the BUF had been drastically reduced from the high level in the spring of 1934. The more violence and anti-semitism were seen as central to the 314 movement, the more people drifted away’. This suggests that the anti-fascist, Jewish and communist opposition had the desired effect in the long run.
The BUF failed to win any seats in the East End in the London County Council election in 1935, at a time when a Gallup poll indicated a 49% to 51% of respondents were in favour of fascism versus communism. By the end of 1939 this had shifted to 24% to 57% believing Russia rather than Germany posed the greater danger. It could be claimed that an anti-German feeling in the country was stronger than any fascist-inspired anti-war sentiments. ‘For many [admirers of Germany] in March
310 9/1/1937. 311 31/12/1936. 312 Pugh, 1998, p. 542. 313 Dorril, p. 390, 275. 314 Rawnsley, p. 157. 1939 the Hitler they had trusted had turned out to be a power-mad aggressor whose word was no 315 longer to be believed’.
Turning to national politics, Overy suggests that in spite of the broad range of small groups promoting one version of Marxism or fascism or another, with fellow-travellers of both left and right, and ‘a remarkable level of engagement [of the public] with both ideologies, [throughout] the 1930s electoral allegiance continued to be given to the three main political parties’. ‘The existence of a nominally National Government … masked the reality of surviving political and class differences and undermined the appeal of extremism’. The National Government was set up in 1931 in response to the economic crisis. ‘The absence, even at the height of the slump, of a serious collapse of the 316 economic system … clearly played a part in sustaining the conventional parliamentary system’.
Holmes compares these political consequences with those in Germany. ‘Whereas in Germany the world crisis and depression led to the National Socialist dictatorship which had anti-semitism built into its programme, Britain survived the consequences of the crisis under Baldwin’s Government … the essential political structure of British society remained intact’. ‘The BUF movement was operating in a diminished context for the advancement of a fascist or anti-semitic campaign’. ‘The British failed to 317 see its relevance to them’. Unlike its appeal to Italians and Germans, authoritarian forms of leadership did not attract them. Pugh suggests that the forms of government Britain experienced in the 1930s, involving explicit compromise among the major parties and implying a degree of consensus, protected the country from extremism.
Baldwin’s personal role in maintaining moderation seems significant. ‘[For him] Fascism threatened to provoke “a real class war” … since communism, unlike fascism, drew its support overwhelmingly from among “the very poor”, this meant that “the very poor are being singled out for being hit on the head 318 [which] creates a spirit that is very dangerous”’. ‘The unemployed voted for Labour’s reformism rather than radical solutions [both fascism and communism remained politically marginal]. The 319 depression blunted rather than sharpened the edge of social discontent’.
A.K.Chesterton himself provides a first-hand perspective on the failure of Mosely’s brand of fascism to attract mass support. ‘The Fascist edifice which he … [Mosely] constructed was about as stable as a house built of cards. Its organization was a joke … Outside East London, there was no branch which had an active membership of more than a few dozen high-spirited young men. … Outside East London, again, Fascists who stood for election to local councils polled, on average, about 25 votes 320 apiece’.
Baker concludes from his study of A.K.Chesterton ‘Unfortunately for Chesterton and his fellow fascists, British liberalism survived the onslaught of the world slump … the consensus on liberal values held firm (at least against fascism), and British fascism remained a beleaguered and marginal 321 force’. Even though, therefore, it was not a serious threat to stability and democracy, arguments surrounding British fascism set the scene in the mid-1930s for the debate over responses to the much larger anti-democratic forces elsewhere in Europe. It provoked public displays of anti-fascism but also its fractious and factional nature, as elements of the Left (Labour, ILP and CPGB) disputed the credit for providing the most effective defence against fascism.322
315 Griffiths, 2010, p. 66. 316 p. 298. 317 Holmes, p. 123, 124. 318 Lawrence, 2005, p. 5. 319 Dorril, p. 314. 320 Baker, p. 188. 321 p. 211. 322 Copsey, pp. 470-2. 4. Britain and the Spanish Civil War
Introduction
In understanding how the Spanish Civil War impinged on British attitudes to the threats to their peace and stability, it is useful to consider some parallels in the immediate historical background from the early 1930s, when, according to Paul Preston, civil war in Spain had already been declared.323 Firstly, as we have seen, a degree of class warfare existed in Britain, with denigration of the working class, the poor and those dependent on the state. This hostility was even more extreme in Spanish society, where landowners and other employers used organs of the state to repress workers, and ‘rebel leaders regarded the proletariat ... as an inferior race’. During the right-wing repression of democratic rights in 1934-36 miners in Asturias were described as ‘putrefaction, scum, the dregs of humanity’. Secondly, in both societies left-wing political groups were well developed in defence of workers’ rights, anti-capitalist and anti-fascist in rhetoric. Again, in Spain these had become more extreme and uncompromising in the form of anarchist and Trotskyist revolutionary and internationalist organisations. Thirdly, while British fascists called for cleansing and purification, Spanish Falangists called for extermination, especially of leftists and liberals, who were regarded as non-Spanish and barely human. From its inception, the Right was intent on eradicating the Republic: ‘[the Right] hated 324 the Republic for being democratic long before it was able to denounce it for being anti-clerical’.
A fourth connection was the presence of British individuals (volunteers and journalists), who made direct contact with events in Spain. While the reporters’ experiences have received a lot of attention, the impact of their reports on British opinion, as Overy has pointed out, has been less closely examined, and will form the bulk of the next section of this study.
A final element in Spain formed a link between the social and political: a powerfully influential and reactionary Catholic Church. Though this was lacking in British society, its presence in Spain provided a focus for conservative British opinion and guaranteed a channel for pro-Nationalist supporters. In Spain the Church and the Catholic party CEDA warned that ‘Spain has ceased to be Catholic’, and rd 325 would be destroyed by ‘a secret alliance of Jews, Freemasons and Communist 3 International’, a fear that easily found an echo among the British Right, especially in the person of the Archbishop of Westminster, Arthur Hinsley.
4.1. English Catholicism
Adrian Hastings writes about the social and political split in the 1930s between the English Catholic elites, including the upper class and aristocratic families and intellectual converts, on the one hand, and the chiefly northern and Irish working class Catholics on the other. He sees the Spanish Civil War as ‘a decisive catalyst in the parting of contemporary loyalties ... it placed almost all vocal English 326 Catholics, clerical and lay, emphatically on Franco’s side’. The upper level of the hierarchy ‘was proving itself an easy bedfellow with fascism’. The socially elite Catholics followed Belloc’s ‘dream of some sort of righteous populist dictatorship’, with his ‘sneers at liberal democracy and anti-semitic jokes’. Even in February 1939 the Tablet could state ‘No sane and instructed man would hesitate to 327 prefer Fascism to Communism’. Hastings’ conclusion damns this mentality:
‘The almost criminal blindness to the evils of Fascism [was] stimulated by an all engrossing opposition to Communism. The fondness for Fascism derived not only from an ‘enemies of ones enemies are ones friends’ logic but also from two other sources- a natural sympathy for Catholic southern
323 Anthony Beevor in The Battle for Spain, 2006 suggests: ‘Any possibility of compromise had been destroyed by the revolutionary uprising of the left and its cruel repression by the army and Civil Guard. The depth of feeling was too strong on either side to allow democracy to work’. p. 38. 324 Paul Preston, The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain, (London: Harper Press, 2012), pp. xii, 90, 9, 14. 325 Preston, pp. 9, 4. 326 Adrian Hastings, ‘Some reflexions on the English Catholicism of the late 1930's’, in Bishops and Writers: aspects of the evolution of modern English Catholicism, ed. by Adrian Hastings, (Wheathampstead, Hertfordshire: Anthony Clarke, 1977), 107-125 (p. 118). 327 Hastings, pp. 115, 118, ibid. Europeans from Italy to Portugal and decades of Bellocian indoctrination about the fraudulency of 328 western democracy and the perils of semitic influence’.
Not all prominent Catholics followed the official line. Eric Gill said ‘”between Communism and Fascism I’m all for Communism”’, for which he was reprimanded by Archbishop Hinsley, ‘though Catholics who 329 associated with Fascists would surely not have been so treated!’
4.2. Catholic attitudes to Fascism
In the run-up to the Spanish Civil War, seen by some Catholics as the inevitable violent confrontation between faith and the anti-Christ, the Catholic Herald carried a large number of reports on international affairs and statements from Church authorities relating to fascism at home and abroad, the position of Catholicism and other faiths in Germany and above all the Church’s attitude to Bolshevism in the USSR and its influence elsewhere. Being avowedly partisan in these debates, there is naturally in most cases an explicit statement of opinion determined by commitment to the faith or following papal encyclicals or other authoritative guidance.
The impression given by these reports is that, while all forms of communism and the Left were treated fairly homogeneously as evil, the attitude towards fascism was more ambiguous. Franco’s Spanish ‘crusade’, being pro-Catholic, had to be supported and any violations committed by his forces against human decency should be denied, overlooked or excused: ‘[the actions of anarchists] elevated the 330 Nationalist cause to the status of a real religious crusade against atheism and materialism’. The attack on Bolshevism was unquestioning, based on events in Mexico (‘an immense pyre in which all 331 the monuments of our history are reduced’) and the duplicitous shift in Comintern policy towards supporting Popular Front movements: ‘This change of tactics is so momentous that extraordinary 332 vigilance is demanded in order to cope with the menace’.
However, German fascism persecuted Catholics as well as Jews: ‘The anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish campaigns are closely associated … they attack the Church by bringing up allegations against converted Jews, claiming that by converting a Jew and accepting him into the Christian fold the 333 Church is betraying Germany’. Although there was also an anti-Bolshevik motivation behind many of the Nazi actions, Catholics could in all conscience oppose Hitler. One might see, therefore, in its pages an attempt to distinguish Franco from Hitler. The approach to Mussolini was less hostile, and inevitably made greater reference to the Pope’s position living on the dictator’s doorstep. ‘Without pronouncing on any question of fact or attempting to judge finally whether Italy is right or wrong, he 334 [Pius XI] exposed the principles on which such a judgment must proceed’. Reporting of British fascism was also somewhat ambiguous. The language seems to have been chosen to tread a fine line, to avoid identifying themselves with either the anti-fascist protesters (Left-inspired) or the Blackshirts (clearly anti-democratic).
4.3. Archbishop Hinsley versus pro-Republican Catholics
An exchange of correspondence and meetings between Catholic trades union leaders and Archbishop Hinsley and his representatives at the end of October 1936 illustrate the other side of 335 Hastings’ Catholic social divide. This debate was initiated by a set of mildly expressed criticisms of the Church’s position in Spain, focussing largely on the Spanish Church’s association with the economically privileged, the landed and the reactionary classes in oppressing the poor and working
328 Hastings, p. 122. 329 Hastings, p. 121. 330 ‘Reasons for siding with General Franco’, Catholic Herald, 4 December 1936. 331 ‘Horrible limits of Bolshevism’, Catholic Herald, 8 June 1935. 332 ‘New Soviet Policy’, Catholic Herald, 17 August 1935. 333 ‘New anti-Semitic campaign’, Catholic Herald, 13 September 1935. 334 ‘The Pope declines an opportunity’, Catholic Herald, 6 September 1935. 335 ‘Spain and the Catholic Church. Report of interview between the Archbishop of Westminster and some Catholics associated with the Labour and trade union movement: inter-departmental correspondence’, 4 November 1936,
At the same time a pamphlet was compiled by A. Ramos Oliveira and published in London by the 338 National Council of Labour. In its introduction it aimed to present ‘examples of how a very important section of conservative and Catholic Spain thinks and acts ... It is only just that Catholic declarations in support of the Spanish Government in its struggle to defend democratic rights ... should be made 339 available in this country’. It reported the ‘painful impression [produced by] the words with which the 340 Pope has recently blessed the rebels’. The accusation that Pius XI and his Cardinal Secretary of State, Eugenio Pacelli, prior to his election as Pius XII in March 1939, had more than appeased fascist regimes, is the core of John Cornwell’s damning account, Hitler’s Pope. ‘Pacelli was, of course, hardly unaware of the atrocities being committed on Franco’s side, but the Caudillo had 341 declared that “Spain shall be an empire turned toward God”’. A particularly vocal critic of the Catholic church and Pope Pius XII was H.G.Wells. In Crux Ansata, published in 1943, he states that ‘the teaching of the Roman Catholic Church puts Faith before any other social or political consideration. … The Catholic Church has worked for the destruction of that very liberalism which restored it to political influence’. He especially accused Pope Pius XII of being ‘the open enemy of everything creative and reconstructive in the world, .. and tied himself irrevocably to the Axis’ and ‘it is necessary to insist on his profound ignorance and mental inferiority’. He is ‘at once puerile, perverted and malignant’. He also sought to expose the false statements of Dean Inge (a conservative Anglican theologian) that ‘one quarter of the priests and nuns in Spain have been murdered’, supporting the Bishop of Chelmsford who had challenged Inge. The latter replied ‘it is really rather horrible to find a bishop championing men who, acting on instructions from Moscow to exterminate the middle class, 342 have slaughtered, at a low estimate, 200,000 helpless and harmless people’.
Wells’ portrayal of Catholic culpability is in stark contrast to the pro-Vatican accounts, such as that by Alden Hatch and Seamus Walshe, which appears rather naïve as it compresses the key events into a few breathless lines:
‘Civil war broke out in Spain, while France teetered on the verge of a state socialism with strong totalitarian tendencies. The Holy See recognised the Spanish Republic. Then, as radicals got hold of the Spanish Government, it turned against the Church ... From behind the impenetrable walls of the Kremlin the atheistic masters of Russia malevolently exploited every area of human misery for the 343 purpose of their crusade against the Cross’.
The significance of the British pamphlet is that it provided evidence of Spanish Catholic support for the Republic and highlighted the active involvement of priests: ‘the priest ... whose hands might appear stained with blood. ... the memories of the peasants murdered by the legionaries and of the 344 women violated by the Moors ... [form] an insurmountable barrier between religion and the people’. Preston supports this view: the clergy urged congregations to fight and many priests were among the
336 The Spanish Civil War, Penguin 1977, p695. 337 ‘Spain and the Catholic Church’, p. 2. 338 A. Ramos Oliveira, Catholics and the Civil War in Spain, (London: The Labour Publications Department, 1936) 339 Oliveira, p. 1. 340 Oliveira, p. 3. 341 John Cornwell, Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII, (New York: Viking, 1999), p. 175. 342 Wells, p. 83, 84, 85, 92. 343 Alden Hatch and Seamus Walshe, Crown of Glory: the Life of Pope Pius XII, (London: Heinemann, 1957), p. 105. 344 Oliveira, p. 3. first to join the rebels ‘cartridge belts slung over their cassocks, rifles in hand, they joyfully set off to kill 345 reds’.
The debate over British Christian responses to the war was not confined to Catholics. A visit to Spain by the Anglican Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury, labelled the ‘Red Dean’, with his membership of the board of the Daily Worker, provided the occasion for yet more vituperation from partisan commentators. He wrote to the Times on the 5 May 1937 recounting the co-operative treatment he had received from the Government for his journey from France through Spain. He explained that he had received no such invitation from ‘the insurgents’, in order to counter accusations of ‘wearing 346 blinkers’. In response, Arthur Bryant wrote: ‘As at the present time there is no other way of travelling to Madrid from Toulouse except via Gerona [etc.], it would be interesting to know what the 347 Dean means to convey to impartial British readers by this statement’. It is possible that what 348 provoked the Right was Johnson’s praise for the Times’ report from Guernica shortly after he himself had witnessed the bombing of Durango.
4.4. Press reporting
Judging from its responses to the peace movements, it is tempting to expect the response of the British press to the Civil War to be entirely partisan and predictable. The key political forces exerted during the first half of the decade had produced, if not a totally polarised society, one with a tendency to take sides. This could be said of many democratic societies at any time in modern history, but at this time and place the stakes were perceived to be particularly high. Supporters of Franco were a small minority, but given their social and political prominence their impact was significant.349 This was a time when bulwarks were needed, against ‘rising tides’ of Bolshevism, anarchy, fascism, Nazism, militarism or godlessness, and defensive modes of thought found in the Spanish Civil War food for the anti-fascist or pro-Republican Left, the pro-Franco Right and the pro-Franco Catholic press. It is harder to identify a clear middle ground, which appeared to be squeezed into obscurity.350
4.5 Reporters’ experiences in Spain
British reporters in Spain received very different treatment from the two sides. In rebel-held areas there was little freedom of movement and almost total censorship of critical reports. Even the Conservative Daily Express had its reporter expelled by the Nationalists for reports that were 351 ‘insufficiently favourable’. On the Government side there was much greater access to real action and senior politicians, even when it resulted in accounts of civilian deaths. However, it is hard to make a balanced comparison, as numerically the great majority of journalists were ideologically pro- Republic.
Judith Keene gives us a deeper analysis of the conditions under which British visitors experienced the Nationalist side, contrasting the largely Catholic and partisan travellers with the professional journalists reporting back to their employer newspapers. Lay travellers lapped up the stories they were given of Republican atrocities and were easily influenced by Anglophile Spanish aristocrats. Visitors’ prejudices found support in Spain, and none of the English Catholic propagandists seemed ever to have visited the Republican side, though they ‘invariably contrasted Republican violence with 352 the orderly Christian spirit that prevailed in Franco’s Catholic state’. Arnold Lunn ‘made a distinction between the “inevitable casualties of modern warfare” and the “deliberate massacre of innocent women and children”’, and he was not optimistic about democracy at home, either, ‘”if the sort of 353 intellectuals favoured by the Left Book Club ever achieved power”’.
345 Preston, Spanish Holocaust, p. 182. 346 Historian, Hitler apologist and co-founder of the Right Book Club. 347 Times, 7 May 1937. 348 Written by George Steer, see 3.8 below. 349 Judith Keene, Fighting for Franco: International Volunteers in Nationalist Spain during the Spanish Civil War, 1936-39, (London: Leicester University Press, 2001), p. 47. 350 The Times is consistently regarded as providing the most objective reporting of the Civil War. 351 Paul Preston, We saw Spain die: foreign correspondents in the Spanish Civil War, (London: Constable, 2009), p. 115. 352 Member of the Friends of Nationalist Spain. 353 Keene, pp. 52, 62.
All foreign reporters were mistrusted by the Nationalist press officers, who attempted total control over what they saw and wrote. ‘Certain topics were absolutely forbidden ... no word at all of the presence of foreign soldiers ... or the execution of prisoners; or of terror behind Nationalist lines. ... Moors ... were to be described always as devoted God-fearing soldiers’. Press officers were free with their political opinions. Captain Rosales stated that ‘the masses need a touch of the whip for they are like dogs and will only mind the whip’. He ‘pointed out that Spain must be cleansed of the industrial proletariat and that the streets of Madrid would run with their blood’. It was not only franquista censorship and the Nationalist atrocities that chafed; the demands of employers could also prove too much for professional journalism. The journalist Frances Davis ‘less and less … “liked the stuff the Daily Mail likes”. The paper’s editorial policy was always to refer to Franco’s army as the “Patriots” 354 and the Republic as the “reds”’. She left Lord Rothermere’s employment.
4.6. Reporting the outbreak of hostilities
The first focus for news reporting was, naturally, the initial rebel uprising, and the following survey gives a picture of the range of British published opinion. On 20 July 1936 the initial action in mainland Spain and its colonies began to be reported in the British press. The ‘revolt’ by ‘rebels’ stationed in north Africa was perhaps unexpected by the British public, and, as a consequence, the early reports were underplayed, confused and reasonably objective. The Daily Express referred to activity in Spanish Morocco and throughout the mainland. Some activists were described as ‘Red militia’ supporting ‘Spain’s Republican Government’ against the ‘rebellion’ led by General Francisco Franco.355 On the same day the Daily Mirror, reflecting the uncertainty over what was unfolding militarily, began its report with a personal story: ‘English Bride Is Wounded By Rebels’, mention of British warships standing by at Gibraltar to evacuate Britons being secondary.356
Perhaps better prepared for the wider political implications, the Daily Worker on the 20 July could immediately describe the insurgency as ‘the Fascist attempt at seizure of power through a military revolt’ and to suggest that it would soon be put down: ‘the rebels were still holding out at various 357 places as troops declared themselves strongly for the Republic’. By 23 July positions in the press had already become more strident, presenting their respective entrenched standpoints. According to the Daily Worker’s analysis, quoting phrases from the Daily Herald, ‘the Spanish Socialists are now carrying out a ‘revolutionary policy’ and have abandoned their ‘faith in the democratic approach to Socialism’ … and there is no other way forward in the present conditions in Spain except through 358 armed struggle’.
Sarcasm seemed to be the preferred response for the British fascist press. ‘When we were hearing about the “workers” being driven out of Barcelona I could not help thinking about the Workers’ “Olympic” Games … and one or two of them have probably broken records for everything from the 359 100 yards to the Marathon in their efforts to get out of Barcelona and indeed out of Spain’. Providing ‘The Truth from Spain’, Action described the setting up of a provisional government, or ‘military directory’, by the Nationalist forces, with quotations from its manifesto: ‘Spain, face up to Marxism, Confront anarchy with law, and fill up the hateful abyss which separates Spaniard from 360 Spaniard, with the fruits of reconstruction by solid Government work’. Mixing an ideological riposte to such fascist rhetoric with counter-accusations of brutality, the Daily Worker filled its front page with dramatic reporting and appeals for solidarity. ‘If ever Fascism betrayed its extreme bestiality it is doing so now in Spain. Against the Spanish People’s Front Government, elected in accordance with their 361 democratic will and vote is arrayed the brutal and degenerate Moroccan army’.
354 Keene, pp. 69, 72, 71. 355 Daily Express, 20 July 1936. 356 Daily Mirror, 20 July 1936. 357 Daily Worker, 20 July 1936. 358 Ibid. 359 Action, 23 July 1936, UK Press Online,
The Times saw from the start the danger to the government, ‘fighting for its life against a wide military 365 revolt led by a “turncoat General”’. A pro-government optimism was, however, apparent in its leader the next day. ‘What hope is there of the future? The revolt may succeed, though that is hardly likely unless the civilian population of the Right takes a strong hand in it. More probably, it will be 366 suppressed, especially, as most soldiers in the ranks are said to incline to the Left’. By 23 July the situation looked grim for the government, with more reliable reports from the first eye-witness accounts from ‘Our Barcelona Correspondent’, who had got across to France. He reported ‘heavy 367 loss of life’, ‘burning of churches’ and ‘insurgents … moving on Madrid’.
Established later that year, the Fighting Call ran to two issues in October and November 1936. Its busy masthead lists several organisations responsible ‘in confederacy’: the C.N.T. – F.A.I. in Spain, the Freedom Group in London, the Anti-Parliamentary Communist Federation, Glasgow. Two slogans appear: ‘All Social Administration to the Communes’, ‘All Social Economy to the Workers’. Given its provenance, the content is largely predictable, with calls for workers’ support and optimistic news about how close the fascists were to defeat. ‘When this happens [taking key towns], the Fascists will 368 have lost the war’. A set of rules, with ominous implications, were printed for volunteer members of the battalions: ‘The Militiaman is a volunteer but once joined up, his work as Soldier of the Revolution, is to take his place and do his duty’. Anyone failing to do so ‘will be called to account by his 369 battalion’.
The Fighting Call, as well as directly condemning fascists, also portrays the Church as complicit, as were British newspapers such as the Daily Mail for their stories of atrocities. They reported the Generalitat of Catalonia stating that ‘the two special correspondents of the “Daily Mail” have completely repudiated the account of atrocities alleged to have been committed by Spanish Government troops … Such stories are deliberately fabricated in an office which sees in Hitler and 370 Mussolini the hope of humanity’.
This publication, along with the Daily Worker on the Left and the fascist press on the far Right, illustrate the problem in treating these extreme, politically committed sources as anything resembling the mainstream papers. A straightforward indication of this is that it is inconceivable that there would be any deviation from the party line between such sections as news reports, editorials and letters to the editor and not simply because only the committed would read and write to these papers. As we will see, the Catholic press, though equally committed to an ideology, does not conform entirely to this stereotype.
362 Manchester Guardian, 20 July 1936. 363 Manchester Guardian, 21 July 1936. 364 Manchester Guardian, 22 July 1936. 365 Times, 20 July 1936. 366 Times, 21 July 1936. 367 Times, 23 July 1936. 368 Fighting Call, October 1936,
The Spanish Civil War itself was heralded in the Catholic Herald from April 1936, with reports of anti- Church violence and the forced closure of Catholic schools.371 Retrospectively, the election results that brought the Republican government to power in February 1936 were questioned.372 Once hostilities had begun, the line taken largely focussed on alleged atrocities committed by Republican- aligned forces373 and followed a predictable path of anti-Communist rhetoric. One of the most significant and lengthy reports gave great prominence and authority to a speech from Franco, which announced ‘We will apply this social justice lovingly, with understanding, and if necessary with a firm 374 hand … [at the end of] a war in defence of Christian civilisation’.
Broader perspectives were provided by reference to the plight of Protestant clerics375 and support given to Franco by Moroccan Muslims,376 in spite of a previous report claiming that the communist threat to Europe was the greatest since the Moors in the eighth century.377 There was, however, questioning of the treatment by Nationalist forces of defeated Republicans. ‘The cold-blooded slaughter which followed it [the taking of Madrid] must disgrace the memory of the patriots' rising for all time … between hanging on to the bitter end and summary execution, if captured, against all the 378 conventions of war, there can only be one choice for the defeated’.
James Flint379 describes English Catholic views of the Spanish conflict through the words of a range of Catholic newspapers. These vary from the most traditional, conservative publications (and publishers) to more liberal views, and we see how divided the Catholic community was over the fundamental moral questions they faced. At one end of the scale, the Nationalist cause was seen simply as defending the interests of the Church. The principal criterion to be applied in taking sides was a government’s willingness to guarantee the Church’s freedom to practise and to educate its flock. From this standpoint, a communist-supported regime, however democratically elected, clearly would not do so, and the example of the Soviet Union was seen as instructive. On the other hand, there were supporters of the Republican cause among prominent English Catholics, who recognized that the Spanish government was attempting to introduce long-needed social reforms in a country bedevilled by centuries of vested, landed interests. In this argument, the concept of ‘social justice’ could have different interpretations: narrowly defined by Catholic self-protection or more broadly to encompass all humanity, Catholic or not.
4.8. George Steer of the Times
In the reporting of specific events (such as Guernica in April 1937 or the anti-POUM action in May of that year), the Spanish Civil War has become known through the writings of individual British participants, George Orwell being the best known, crossing the line between volunteer, journalist and political activist. Less well known, but given prominence in Paul Preston’s We Saw Spain Die, was George Steer of the Times, strongly committed, though in an less conventional way, and in some respects more effective an advocate than Orwell.
Preston describes Steer as ideologically devoted to the Basque people, who were anti-Spanish and thus somewhat neutral between the Republican cause and the Nationalists’. Bilbao was open to supporters of Left and Right, providing freedom of movement and a degree of calm. However, whatever the Basque point of view, Steer was also strongly anti-fascist (having reported on Italian action in Abyssinia) and saw ‘journalism as a vehicle both to expose and thus combat the horrors of fascism’, ‘a journalist must see that truth prevails’. Steer was instrumental in ensuring that the truth
371 ‘Spanish Catholic schools’, Catholic Herald, 29 May 1936. 372 ‘The election of 1936’, Catholic Herald, 28 August 1936. 373 ‘Unspeakable horrors- Ear cut off and eaten’, Catholic Herald, 18 October 1936. 374 ‘Spain for the Humble’, Catholic Herald, 9 October 1936. 375 ‘Order in recovered Spain’, Catholic Herald, 11 December 1936. 376 ‘Moorish chief interviewed- Mahomet wants Christ to reign over Spain’, Catholic Herald, 25 October 1936. 377 ‘Greatest danger since Islam’, Catholic Herald, 7 August 1936. 378 ‘A scene more telling than atrocities’, Catholic Herald, 21 August 1936. 379 James Flint, '"Must God Go Fascist?": English Catholic Opinion and the Spanish Civil War', Church History, 56.3 (1987), 364-74. about Guernica became known, and his report in the Times on 27 April 1937, reprinted in L’Humanité, was read by Picasso in Paris two days later and led to him starting his painting on 5 May, exhibiting it in June. Such direct political impact was also felt in British government circles, when Steer attempted to influence a change in policy over protection for British shipping. The pro-Francoist British ambassador in Madrid, Sir John Chilton, had warned against navy involvement on the basis that Spanish ports were mined. Steer wrote to Philip Noel-Baker to contradict this claim.380
4.9. Political reaction
The British government’s official position vis à vis the events in Spain was non-intervention, a policy Chamberlain promoted strongly in European circles through the Non-Intervention Committee, set up in September 1936, and clearly in line with the general approach of appeasement. However, many of the British representatives on the scene were less detached. Their immediate reaction can be seen in diplomatic correspondence from Madrid and Barcelona. The chargé d’affaires in the capital, George Ogilvie-Forbes, himself a Catholic and formerly posted to the Holy See, painted a very negative picture of the situation, partly it seems to encourage British residents to leave Spain. He described a 381 382 rd ‘reign of terror’ and ‘aristocrats being hunted and killed’. A letter was printed in the Times on 3 August 1936, which rather muddied the waters: ‘Thirteen intellectuals have signed a manifesto saying that in the struggle they are on the side of the Government of the Republic and of the people, who, 383 with exemplary heroism, are fighting for liberty’. Ogilvie-Forbes’ formal report to London stated: ‘A reliable British informant tells me recent letter of Spanish intellectuals in “Times” was written at the 384 point of the pistol’.
At precisely the same time the British vice-consul in Barcelona, Edgar Vaughan, presented a more balanced picture. On the one hand, he emphasised the political and economic revolution caused by the workers’ takeover of industry: ‘Many employers have been assassinated, others have fled the country, and the remainder are in hiding, for they are powerless to resist their employees who are 385 armed to the teeth’. However, he was also able to analyse the wider political consequences: ‘The army rising of the 19 July in Barcelona has been a tragedy for Catalonia. The Catalan Government restored to power following the Left victory at the elections of February were gradually establishing their control over the administration of the country ... In spite of their revolutionary past they showed 386 signs of trying to maintain order and the rights of property’. However, the heart of top-level British diplomats was clearly with the Nationalists. The ambassador, Sir John Chilton’s ‘contact with Franco’s headquarters went well beyond the conventional cordiality of foreign representatives abroad ... [he 387 was] intransigently opposed to the loyalists .. [and] habitually referred to [them] as “Reds”’. Keene 388 considers this fact, along with the position of the Duke d’Alba in London, as de facto British government recognition of Franco’s regime early in the conflict. Lewis H. Mates, while claiming that the various unofficial Aid Spain campaigns ‘prevented the British government from more open support of Franco, short of actually supporting Franco militarily, it is difficult to imagine how the British government could have been more pro-Franco, given how the sham of non-intervention effectively 389 supported his forces and weakened the Republic’.
More evidence of British political reaction to events in Spain can be seen in a number of parliamentary debates, one of the most revealing taking place in the House of Lords on 26 November
380 Preston, We saw Spain Die, pp. 319, 310, 322, 321. 381 W.N.Medlicott and Douglas Dakins, Documents on British foreign policy, 1919-1939, 2nd series (1929-38), (London: HMSO, 1979), p. 107. 382 Medlicott and Dakins, p. 106. 383 Times, 3 August 1936. 384 Medlicott and Dakins, p. 107. 385 Anthony Adamthwaite, British Documents on Foreign Affairs: reports and papers from the Foreign Office confidential print: Part II, Series F, Volume 27: Spain, July 1936 - January 1940, (USA: University Publications of America, 1993), p. 9. 386 Adamthwaite, p11. 387 Keene, p. 47. 388 Official representative of the Nationalists in London. 389 Mates, p. 136. 1936390 on a motion tabled by Lord Snell, with a pro-Republican slant. Lengthy contributions were made from both sides, and, while some were legalistic, high-minded and intellectual, half-way through the debate the basic divisions and partisanship became apparent.
There was a fundamental disagreement over the legitimacy of the Madrid Government and the duty of the UK Government to support it. Lord Snell said ‘I am no Communist in social philosophy, and I am equally not a Fascist, but I do feel that the legal Government of Spain has been receiving very bad and shabby treatment’. The Marquess of Crewe recalled his schooldays (in 1871) and the sympathy at that time for the Communards in Paris. Lord Farringdon objected to the Republicans being labelled as ‘Red’ and to the epithet ‘Russian pit’. On the other side, Lord Newton pointed to the illusion that members of the Spanish government were people like themselves. The motivation of the rebels was, above all, their revulsion ‘at the idea of turning Spain into a Bolshevist state’, and Lord Strickland considered the Government as ‘also technically rebels’. Both sides accused the other of talking nonsense and brought in the action of the church (Farringdon: ‘priests have been shot but priests have also shot other people’.) While there was support for non-intervention, the most forceful speech was made by Farringdon (who called it a ‘farcical’ policy). ‘I do take sides in this matter; it seems to me that there is a right and a wrong’. ‘The whole of this trouble is due to the fact that the Government have had no policy at all, that they never had a foreign policy ... and that the foreign policy ... has been run by a reactionary permanent official in the Foreign Office’.
Lord Newton’s dismissal of Spanish Republicans as people ‘not like us’ is reminiscent of the Francoist view of Leftists as a class or even a race apart. Associated with this perspective on events in Spain was the ‘Friends of Nationalist Spain’. This organisation was made up of politicians from both Houses, religious leaders, Anglican as well as Catholic, military men and British fascists. Their public statements were an amalgam of the core beliefs of all of these groups, and were reported in the Catholic press, for example the Catholic Herald of 10 December 1937. Nationalists were ‘fighting the forces of anti-God’; Franco had the support of the majority of Spaniards; the reason that the Republic had gained so much support in Britain was solely due to their plundering of the nation’s gold reserves to spend on propaganda, while ‘Franco had no money at all to spend in this way’. Concentrating on the kind of evidence used by observers on both sides, General Groves contrasted the ‘clean houses, clean people, happy people, order and tranquillity’ with villages in Government hands ‘disordered and dirty, slatternly people’. Six months later (17 May 1938) a meeting of the Friends in Scotland passed the following resolution:
‘This meeting records its heartfelt sympathy with fellow Christians who are suffering such prolonged martyrdom, declares its firm conviction that there will be no peace in Spain or the Western Mediterranean until the forces of anarchy, tyranny and Communism are crushed, and expresses its earnest hope and confidence that the great majority of Spaniards now supporting the Nationalist cause will gain an early triumph for unity, order, liberty and religious freedoms for which they are 391 striving with such heroism’.
A related organisation, the Basque Children’s Repatriation Committee, targeted charities that helped to evacuate children away from the dangers of warfare. ‘One member, the Tory MP Sir Nairn Stewart 392 Sandeman, urged the public not to contribute any money to the “little Basque devils”’.
On the opposite side of British politics, within the Labour party were set up pro-Republican committees, whose discussions and differences are recounted by C. Fleay and M.L. Sanders.393 They highlight the gulf in attitude and ambitions between the party leadership, cautious and wary of the motives of mavericks such as Cripps, and the rank-and-file members, who felt instinctive soldarity with Republicans and a strong desire to do something. The Left as a whole had greater difficulty than the Right in establishing a unified position. They struggled to reach an anti-fascist consensus, with
390 House of Lords Debate 26 November 1936,
Mates examines the grassroots activity in the Nort-East of England, describing the Spanish Medical Aid committees that were set up in the region, the strike by the crew of the SS Linaria (who refused to deliver nitrates to the Nationalists), the Basque Refugee Children’s hostel in Tynemouth and the Tyneside foodships. He emphasises the separation of these initiatives from official Labour or other organisations, that they were far more motivated by humanitarian rather than political feelings, not necessarily pro-Republican or even anti-fascist. There was an attempt at neutrality when appealing 396 for funds, medical supplies and clothes for ‘the sufferers among the civilian population’. However, there was political significance in relation to the Popular Front in these attempts to assist Spain, which ‘all the local co-operation [i.e. among Labour, Communist and anti-fascists] to help Spaniards has proved it to be possible’. ‘The Aid for Spain Campaign was the nearest thing to a People’s Front that 397 came about in Britain’.
4.10. Public reaction
Wingate claimed that there was in fact a popular majority in support of the Republican cause, citing the Gallup polls in 1938 and 1939. However, as we have seen, these data cannot support strong claims, based as they are on 1,000 interviews. There is an almost contradictory trend in terms of the specific focus on Spain. In 1937 there was one question; in 1938 three and none in 1939. It is perhaps fanciful to draw general conclusions from this (for example, that 1938 saw the culmination of the civil war and by 1939 the result was sealed and British concerns had moved on), but the details of the questions are of interest and provide an insight into contemporary attitudes. The use of the word ‘piracy’ might be regarded as rather loaded.
January 1937 “Do you consider that Franco’s Junta Yes: No: No opinion: should be recognized as a legal Spanish 14% 86% 6% government?” February 1938 “Are you in favour of direct retaliatory Yes: No: No opinion: measures against Franco’s piracy?” 78% 22% 32% March 1938 “In the present war in Spain are your Government: Franco: Neither: sympathies with the government, with 57% 7% 36% Franco, or with neither?” October 1938 “In the present war in Spain are your Government: Franco: No opinion: sympathies with Franco or with the 57% 9% 34% government?”
It is true that a clear majority of those who had an opinion was with the Republic and virtually no sympathy for Franco can be identified, but 570 expressions of concern still do not amount to a popular mandate. Fleay and Sanders conclude that all the work of the Labour Spain committees ‘had failed to 398 increase that support between March and October 1938’, by which time it was, anyway, too late.
394 Fleay and Sanders, pp. 195, 194. 395 Lewis H. Mates, 2005 p. 137. 396 Mates, p. 120. 397 p. 130. 398 Fleay and Sanders, p. 195. Conclusion
‘Never since the French Revolution has there been a foreign question that so divided intelligent British 399 opinion as this [the Spanish Civil War]’. As has been shown, there were striking divisions among political parties, organs of the press, associations and individuals willing to take a public stand on one side or the other, making uncompromising public statements of these positions. Much of the debate in the first half of the 1930s (both pacifist and fascist) looked back to the immediate post-WWI past, but in the Spanish Civil War it was now dealing not with hypothetical struggles over the future of civilization but with actual real-life deaths and consequences very close at hand. These were brought closer to home by the immediacy of press reporting, travel and personal experiences: unique, perhaps, in British history, because the impact on the country was not the result of state-endorsed involvement in a foreign war, but bottom-up movements motivated by moral principles in support of both sides. The events in Spain formed a significant transition between the frantic anti-war activity of the early 1930s and the acceptance, almost welcome by some, of an all-out European war in 1939. From the diverse sources examined here, we can see how much the Civil War infiltrated into the consciousness of the British population, unlike any previous conflict on foreign soil. It has been shown that clear interconnections existed between the channels of communication (news reports, parliamentary debate and diplomatic correspondence) that tended to reinforce entrenched views. Although direct evidence of public opinion in the form of polls is not extensive, it is discernible throughout the ballots, newspaper editorials and letters to the editor. Much prominence has been given to the Catholic viewpoint, and this is partly due to the coherence and clarity of the connections among the Catholic sources emanating from official statements, the press and its readers. ‘The pivotal figure ... was Archbishop Hinsley ... devoted to Franco’s victory ... [and] almost all the English Catholic pro-Franco groups operated under Hinsley’s aegis ... [who] maintained a constant and 400 vigilant eye promoting Franco’s side’.
Given press circulation at that time, almost no one could have remained unaware of the events in Spain as they unfolded. ‘By the end of the 1930s, about 70% of the population regularly read a daily 401 paper, and almost everyone saw a Sunday paper’. After the hardening of attitudes during the 1930s, British opinion was confronted with real war in Spain producing a realisation that appeasement, the League of Nations, pacifism and other anti-war stances counted for very little. On the other hand, the BUF was soon to be proscribed and its leaders interned and any admiration for fascist solutions evaporated. ‘On both sides [of the political divide] there was a similar intensity of feeling for what was seen as a fateful struggle between good and evil, and a shared conviction that 402 neutrality was impossible’.
‘For such groups [political minorities] ... the Civil War offered a cause that sustained them through a time of frustration and deadlock in domestic politics. Spain … provided an opportunity for activists to throw themselves into a bout of campaigning unparalleled in inter-war Britain for its intensity and creativity, and not only using traditional forms of political protest such as demonstrations but also 403 exploring the newly politicised field of large-scale humanitarian endeavour’. British supporters of Franco were a minority (a clear majority of the population consistently supported the Republican 404 cause), but ‘their political impact ... was far from insignificant’. The debates among supporters of both sides in the Spanish conflict helped the British population to see the key issues that mattered.
‘[The war] transformed public opinion because it awoke people to political consciousness who had 405 been indifferent to politics before’. By 1938, once the Spanish Republican cause was seen to be lost, the Civil War was no longer a distraction from the real business of confronting Germany. However, it is arguable that the hostilities in Spain (physical and verbal) had prepared the British people for the realities of modern warfare and the language that would be used to marshal the
399 Havighurst, p. 260. 400 Keene, p. 51. 401 Adrian Bingham, ‘Monitoring the popular press: an historical perspective’, History and Policy, (May 2005)
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Appendix 1. Fascist/far-right organisations operating between the wars [see also a description of ‘Pro-Nazi and Anti-Semitic Groups, up to 1939’ in Griffiths, 2010 pp 34-65]
BUF Imperial Fascist League League for Clean Government British Empire Union Independent Political Association New Witness League The Britons British Brothers’ League Eugenics Society Loyalty League Navy League Vigilantes Society British Fascists British Fascisti Fascist League National Socialist League National Socialist Workers Party Anti-Socialist Union January Club Right Club National League of Airmen Nordic League Militant Christian Patriots United Christian Front British People’s Party The Link Anglo-German Fellowship British Vigil British Council for a Christian Settlement in Europe British Council against European Commitments
2. International political shirts [from wikipedia]
In the 1920s and 1930s, fascists wore different coloured shirts:
Black shirts were used by the Italian fascists, and in Britain, Finland and Germany and Croatia. Brownshirts were worn by German Nazis of the SA. The Blueshirts was a fascist movement in Ireland and Canada, and the colour of the Portuguese Nacional Sindicalistas, the Spanish Falange Española, the French Solidarité Française, and the Chinese Blue Shirts Society. Green shirts were used in Hungary, Ireland, Romania, Brazil and Portugal. Camisas Doradas (golden shirts) were used in Mexico. Red shirts were worn by the racist and antisemitic Bulgarian Ratniks. Silver Shirts were worn in the United States of America. Grey shirts were worn by members of the Fatherland League in Norway.
Roderick Spode, P.G.Wodehouse’s parody of Mosley, adopted black shorts as a uniform because, as Gussie Fink-Nottle says, "by the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left." [Wodehouse, 1938, The Code of the Woosters, chapter 3, p. 67.]
“Destruction is Progress.” So, let’s smash everything up.
Once upon a time there were some children who lived with their parents in a comfortable house in Engerland. It wasn’t perfect, but nice enough. However, like a lot of teenagers, as they grew up they started to complain about where they lived. They said they didn’t like the multi-coloured bricks- too many brown, yellow and orange ones. They only wanted white bricks. They also thought that their parents were paying too much rent to the Council and the children weren’t getting as much pocket money as they wanted. They also read in history books that in their grandparents time the house had been much bigger and there had been much more space to run around in, play and do what they liked. They didn’t have to pay rent to anyone (in fact, other people had to pay rent to them) and were looked after by lots of foreign servants. (Their grandparents hadn’t liked foreigners, though they weren’t sure they’d ever met any.) But before they were born parts of the land at the bottom of the garden had been sold off or even given away.
So they got crosser and crosser and some of their friends started to encourage them to do something about it. Eventually, they were so cross that they decided to smash the house down (because they and their friends didn’t know how to improve the house any other way). They hoped to persuade just enough children and their friends to agree to help. A lot of them had never thought there was much wrong with where they lived but getting more pocket money sounded a good enough reason to smash the house down.
The children were too young to understand (or take any interest in) what the Council was or how it worked; they just knew that it was boring and they didn’t like it. It tried to stop them doing whatever they wanted, like eating lots of sweets and drinking fizzy drinks. They had loads of aunties and uncles who always made things sound so complicated it gave the children a headache. Leaving things to the children made it all simpler, because it was obvious to them what was right and wrong, or black and white (they liked white things and stuff they didn’t like was mostly black). Afterwards, they were very pleased with what they’d done, though they weren’t sure what they’d do about having a comfortable house, even though they hadn’t liked it much. But they were sure they’d get more pocket money. Then they’d be able to spend it on things like going to the doctors more often and the dentist to get their decayed teeth fixed because of all the sweets and fizzy drinks they’d consumed with their fat friends behind the bike sheds where the grown-ups couldn’t see them.
Their parents, Mother May and Father Phil (who didn’t really know what he was doing and doesn’t count), were of course not very happy and were quite embarrassed at what their children had done (what would the neighbours think?). They didn’t want to shout at the children in public, but they knew that something had to be done to show they weren’t pleased with this sort of behaviour. If anyone was going to make major alterations to the house it would be the grown-ups. They sent little Michael off to his bedroom and said he’d have to stay there for a very long time with no pocket money at all and think about about how silly he’d been. If he wanted some pocket money he would have to become a paperboy like his girlfriend, Sarah Whine. Then he could write out “I must not annoy Mother May again” 10,000 Times. Boris was sent away to boarding school, where some of the foreign children started bullying him because they couldn’t understand what he was saying and they laughed at his funny hair. In the end he decided it was best to stop talking altogether, though he wasn’t used to keeping quiet and wasn’t sure how long he could keep it up. David and Liam were told they had to stay and help clear up the mess they’d made and couldn’t go out to play until it was all neat and tidy. They’d have to work out how to do that for themselves. Their friend from round the corner, Nigel, was told he couldn’t come round to play with their children any more. They said he was a bad influence and they didn’t approve of his underage drinking and talking loudly all the time. All the children were told that they would only get brexfast all day every day (Weetabrex, Readibrex, Rice Brexies), with no lunch or tea at all. And certainly no sweets or pocket money until the house was rebuilt. A lot of the other children were shocked that the house had been smashed up without Boris and his brothers having a clue what would happen next or where everyone would live.
What was a bit surprising was that there had been quite a lot of attractions in the multi-cultural local council. Young Boris tried to persuade the pretty Portuguese au pair girls to give him a bath. Mother May enjoyed going to French restaurants, getting dressed up in her kitten heels (which showed off her lovely legs very prettily, much more attractive than her cousin Fishface’s) and smiling at the waiters. They had lovely holidays in Italy, and the children were taken to villas in Tuscany where they could run around being rude to the locals in an amusing way. Lots of parents had German cars, which the children thought were cool. They also employed Polish builders, and the children found it very funny to laugh at them when they didn’t understand the children’s swearing. But there were annoying Council rules such as paying people for the work they did. Mother May thought parents should be able to pay nannies whatever they wanted. Why did they need employment rights, when they’d come here voluntarily? And if the Portuguese nannies didn’t like it, we could employ Filipinas, who were far more appreciative of the opportunities. (And that would be much more ‘multicultural’.)
Surprisingly, Mother and Father quickly got used to living in a tumbled down house and felt it might be a blessing in disguise. It had been in need of a lot re-decorating, and it was probably easier to start again from scratch. Insurance usually covered re-building, they thought, though they weren’t sure of the terms of the policy (was there a clause about self-destruction not being covered?) nor where the documents were- they might have got lost in the rubble. They hadn’t looked at them for a long time, not thinking they’d ever need to claim from the Council. Perhaps they could borrow some money from their friends and neighbours. Little Liam was quite good with figures and they hoped he’d come up with a plan, eventually.
Living in other parts of the house were some of the children’s cousins, and those in the North wing weren’t at all happy about the demolition. They said that even though their rooms were now a bit damaged they wanted to carry on living there. They could grow their own in what was left of the garden. They were used to living off vegetables (they particularly liked thistles and oats) and would see what more they could find that was usable underground if they dug deep enough.
In the West wing some of their young relatives had been quite happy for the house to be demolished, but they started to worry about the supply of sweets in the future. They used to get quite a lot from the Council sweet shop. They were also concerned that Mother and Father didn’t seem particularly bothered about what happened in that part of the house. So they just sat around looking glum and singing to keep their spirits up.
Beyond the West wing there was a pond and another part of the house and more cousins. They were a bit different and the children couldn’t always understand what they were saying. These cousins had been quite keen on the big house staying upright. Now that much of it had gone (and the unstable parts might need to be demolished as being unsafe for human habitation), they found that their remaining part of the building was leaning against a neighbour’s house, where they were used to popping in and out for a jug of milk or a can of petrol. They weren’t sure what it would be like just living in a lean-to against the neighbours. They thought it best to carry on praying for the best, but they also considered asking if they could knock through to next door, so they could live in a proper house again.
Things looked decidedly uncertain until they suddenly got a lot worse. They hadn’t expected another branch of the family, on the other side of a big lake, to notice what had happened in Engerland and decide that it would be very amusing to have a go at smashing up their own house. This is not what Mother and Father had wanted, because they’d been depending on these cousins to lend them all the money they’d need for the re-build in case the Council insurance didn’t come through. They’d never met these relatives (Donnie, Mel, Ivy, Steve, Mickey and Sean- what a lot of them there were!) and weren’t at all sure how they’d be able to communicate. However, Mother May thought she’d better go and find out. It was even worse than she’d feared, when Donnie pinched her bottom and invited himself over to stay for a while. She had no idea what would happen when he came: he might make a horrible mess everywhere and she didn’t know how to stop him coming.
He was really happy with his demolition work and was planning not to live in a house at all, but to hide behind an enormous wall, with just his friends and family invited to live with him; the rest would have to look after themselves somehow. It was their own fault for not friending him or being his followers on Twitface. One of the many things his friends hated was a boggy area near the house, where some of these awful people lived, which he promised to drain to make nice and dry, just for his friends. He also promised that some of these terrible people who did terrible things would end up in bars. (Or was it behind the bars? He wasn’t sure what he’d said.)
Nigel, now that he didn’t have any friends in Engerland, decided he’d be happier living with Donnie, who seemed to take him more seriously and let him say what he wanted without worrying about ridiculous politeness and sensitive people, who ought to stop getting offended by what he said about them, which he always thought was quite witty.
The Council then asked Engerland to pay all the council tax arrears they owed. The children had never realized that this might happen and they they would need to pay their debts (they didn’t really understand all these complicated family finances). They suggested to the grown-ups that they could just run away and hide so the Council tax collectors couldn’t find them.
Some children hadn’t thought it was a good idea to smash everything up, especially before they knew where they were going to live. Mother May told them to shut up and they’d have to accept that it was the right thing to do in the circumstances, though she didn’t explain what those circumstances were.
Mother May then suddenly decided to call for an election of the Conservation Society Committee, which she wanted to take over to make sure no more children could run around making a nuisance of themselves. There was a Working Party that tried to make the area better, but she decided that most people had lost interest and it should be scrapped, which she said would be a jolly good thing. Her plan was to leave the Council and manage the Committee herself, so it was important that everyone in Engerland agreed that it should be run by Mother May. The local council was too multi-cultural, with neighbours jabbering away in foreign languages, and you never heard English on the buses. Things would be much better when they could just speak in English without having to shout. The Committee would then be entirely composed of people like herself so they could easily discuss important things like getting the bins emptied and having lots of solar panels installed (paid for by the Council or other foreigners like the Chinese restaurant owners association). During the election she talked a lot about living in a stable, though some of the children couldn’t understand what that meant. Some of their parents had stables, but they always seemed rather smelly places. Some of the children who’d helped with demolishing the house started to get a bit worried.
However, it seemed that not everyone had given up on the Working Party that wanted to make the area pleasanter to live in, and lots of people didn’t want Mother May to chair the Conservation Society. So, in the end she didn’t know what to do with the children, rebuilding the house or anything else for that matter. To make matters worse, Father Phil woke up and said he didn’t agree with her plans, though he wasn’t sure what they were any more.
Fortunately, in the end some of the grown-ups remembered that there had been a great big fight in the neighbourhood some years ago. (Though the children had studied it in history, they thought it was very boring and had forgotten about it). At that time everyone had hit everyone else until the Council told them to stop. The grown-ups didn’t want another fight to break out, so they all got together to quickly re-build the house, told the Council they were very sorry for making such a mess and they wouldn’t do it again. (The Council agreed that they wouldn’t.) And they all lived happily and quietly ever after.