Above: NAZI GERMANY & ITS ALLIED/ OCCUPIED TERRITORIES IN 1945

The Aftermath of the Ardennes Offensive:

The German army’s losses in 1944 were immense, adding up to the equivalent of more than a hundred divisions. Nevertheless, during this period Hitler managed to scrape up a reserve of twenty-five divisions which he committed in December to a re-run of his 1940 triumph in France, an offensive in the Ardennes, the so-called Battle of the Bulge. For a few days, as the panzers raced towards the Meuse, the world wondered if Hitler had managed to bring it off. But the Allies had superior numbers and the tide of battle soon turned against the Germans, who were repulsed within three weeks, laying Germany open for the final assault from the West. For this, the Allies had eighty-five divisions, twenty-three of which were armoured, against a defending force of twenty-six divisions. Rundstedt declared after the war:

I strongly object to the fact that this stupid operation in the Ardennes is sometimes called the “Rundstedt Offensive”. This is a complete misnomer. I had nothing to do with it. It came to me as an order complete to the last detail. Hitler had even written “Not to be Altered”.

In the Allied camp, Montgomery told a press conference at his Zonhoven headquarters on 7 January that he saluted the brave fighting men of America:

 … I never want to fight alongside better soldiers.  … I have tried to feel I am almost an American soldier myself so that I might take no unsuitable action to offend them in any way.

However, his sin of omission in not referring to any of his fellow generals did offend them and further inflamed tensions among the Anglo-American High Command. Patton and Montgomery loathed each other anyway, the former calling the latter that cocky little limey fart, while ‘Monty’ thought the American general a foul-mouthed lover of war. As the US overhauled Britain in almost every aspect of the war effort, Montgomery found himself unable to face being eclipsed and became progressively more anti-American as the stars of the States continued to rise. So when censorship restrictions were lifted on 7 January, Montgomery gave his extensive press briefing to a select group of war correspondents. His ineptitude shocked even his own private staff, and some believed he was being deliberately offensive, especially when he boasted:

General Eisenhower placed me in command of the whole northern front. … I employed the whole available power of the British group of armies. You have this picture of British troops fighting on both sides of American forces who had suffered a hard blow. This is a fine Allied picture.

Although he spoke of the average GIs as being ‘jolly brave’ in what he called ‘an interesting little battle’, he claimed he had entered the engagement ‘with a bang’, and left the impression that he had effectively rescued the American generals from defeat. Bradley then described Montgomery to Eisenhower as being all out, right-down-to-the-toes-mad, telling ‘Ike’ that he could not serve with him, preferring to be sent home to the US. Patton immediately made the same declaration. Then Bradley started holding court to the press himself and, together with Patton, leaked damaging information about Montgomery to American journalists. Montgomery certainly ought to have paid full tribute to Patton’s achievement in staving off the southern flank of the Ardennes offensive, but the US general was not an attractive man to have as a colleague. He was a white supremacist and an anti-Semite, and his belief in the Bolshevik-Zionist conspiracy remained unaffected by the liberation of the concentration camps which was soon to follow. Whatever the reasons for Montgomery’s dislike of Patton, as Andrew Roberts has pointed out:

The British and American generals in the west from 1943 to 1945 did indeed have a special relationship: it was especially dreadful.

Despite their quarrelling, by 16 January, the Allies had resumed their advance as the British, Americans and French gradually forced their way towards the Rhine. The German order to retreat was finally given on 22nd, and by 28th there was no longer a bulge in the Allied line, but instead, a large one developing in that of the Germans.

The Oder-Vistula Offensive & Hitler’s ‘Bunker’ Mentality:

Meanwhile, the Red Army had burst across the Vistula and then began clearing Pomerania and Silesia. The 12th January had seen the beginning of a major Soviet offensive along the entire front from the Baltic Sea in the north to the Carpathian mountains in the south, against what was left of the new German Central front, made up of the seventy divisions of Army Group Centre and Army Group A. The Red Army first attacked from the Baranov bridgehead, demolishing the German Front of the Centre sector. Planned by Stalin and the ‘Stavka’, but expertly implemented by Zhukov, this giant offensive primarily comprised, from the south to the north, as shown on the map above: Konyev’s 1st Ukrainian, Zhukov’s 1st Belorussian, Rokossovsky’s 2nd Belorussian, Chernyakovsky’s 3rd Belorussian, Bagryan’s 1st Baltic and Yeremenko’s 2nd Baltic Fronts, so no fewer than two hundred divisions in all.

Faced with this onslaught, wildly outnumbered and outgunned, the Germans conducted an impressive fighting retreat of almost three hundred miles, losing Warsaw on 17 January and leaving isolated garrisons at Thorn, Poznan and Breslau that had no real hope of relief. The Polish territories which remained under occupation were lost, as was Upper Silesia with its undamaged industrial area and Lower Silesia east of the Oder. Almost one million German citizens were sheltering in or around the city of Breslau in Lower Silesia, which was not a fortress in the conventional sense despite attempts following August 1944 to build a defensive ring at a ten-mile radius from the city centre. On 20 and 21 January, Women and children were told through loudspeakers to leave the city on foot and proceed in the direction of Opperau and Kanth. This effectively expelled them into three-foot snowdrifts and temperatures of -20 Celsius. The babies were usually the first to die, the historian of Breslau’s subsequent seventy-seven-day siege recorded. Ammunition and supplies were parachuted in by the Luftwaffe, but these often fell into the Oder or behind the Russian lines. The city did not surrender until 6 May and its siege cost the lives of 28,600 of its 130,000 soldiers and civilians.

During the first two months of 1945, Hitler was living in a world of self-delusion, while continuing to direct operations from his bomb-proof bunker deep beneath the Chancellory in Berlin. His orders were always the same: stand fast, hold on, shoot any waverers and sell your own lives as dearly as possible. It’s impossible to tell, even from the verbatim reports of Hitler’s briefings of the Reich’s most senior figures, when exactly he realised that he was bound to lose the war, and with it his own life. It possibly came at the end of the ‘Battle of the Bulge’ at the close of 1944, or in the first week of 1945, for on 10 January he had the following conversation with Göring over the problems with the production of secret weaponry:

HITLER: It is said that if Hannibal, instead of the seven or thirteen elephants he had left as he crossed the Alps … had had fifty or 250, it would have been more than enough to conquer Italy.

GÖRING: But we did finally bring out the jets; we brought them out. And they most come in masses, so we keep the advantage.

HITLER: The V-1 can’t decide the war, unfortunately.

GÖRING: … Just as an initially unpromising project can finally succeed, the bomber will come too, if it is also –

HITLER: But that’s still just a fantasy!

GÖRING: No!

HITLER: Göring, the gun is there, the other is still a fantasy!

Although there were often up to twenty-five people in the room during these Führer-conferences, Hitler usually had only two or three interlocutors. It was after one such conference in February that Albert Speer tried to explain to Admiral Dönitz how the war was certainly lost, with the maps there showing a catastrophic picture of innumerable breakthroughs and encirclements, but Dönitz merely replied with an unwonted curtness that he was only there to represent the Navy and that the rest was none of his business. The Führer must know what he is doing, he added. Speer believed that if Dönitz, Göring, Keitel, Jodl, Guderian and himself had presented the Führer with an ultimatum, and demanded to know his plans for ending the war, then Hitler would have had to have declared himself. Yet that was never going to happen, because they suspected, not without justification as it turned out, that by then there was soon only to be a rope at the end of it. When Speer approached Göring at Karinhall soon after he had spoken to Dönitz, the Reichsmarschall readily admitted that the Reich was doomed, but said that he had:

… much closer ties with Hitler; many years of common experiences and struggles had bound them together – and he could no longer break loose.

By the end of January, the military situation both in the west and the east was already quite beyond Hitler’s control: the Rhine front collapsed as soon as the Allies challenged it, and leaving the last German army in west locked up in the Ruhr, the British and Americans swept forward to the Elbe. Hitler’s dispositions continued to make Germany’s strategic situation worse. Guderian recalled after the war that the Führer had refused his advice to bring the bulk of the ‘Wehrmacht’ stationed in Poland back from the front line to more defensible positions twelve miles further back, out of range of Russian artillery. Disastrously, Hitler’s orders meant that the new defensive line, only two miles behind the front, were badly hit by the Soviet guns, wrecking any hopes for a classic German counter-attack. A historian of the campaign has remarked that this was an absolute contradiction of German military doctrine. Hitler’s insistence on personally authorising everything done by his Staff was explained to Guderian with hubristic words:

There’s no need for you to try and teach me. I’ve been commanding the Wehrmacht in the field for five years and during that time I’ve had more practical experience than any gentlemen of the General Staff could ever hope to have. I’ve studied Clausewitz and Moltke and read all the Schlieffen papers. I’m more in the picture than you are!

A few days into the great Soviet offensive in the east, Guderian challenged Hitler aggressively over his refusal to evacuate the German army in Kurland, which had been completely cut off against the Baltic. When Hitler refused the evacuation across the Baltic, as he always did when asked to authorise a retreat, according to Speer, Guderian lost his temper and addressed his Führer with an openness unprecedented in this circle. He stood facing Hitler across the table in the Führer’s massive office in the Reich Chancellery, with flashing eyes and the hairs of his moustache literally standing on end saying, in a challenging voice: “It’s simply our duty to save these people, and we still have time to remove them!”Hitler stood up to answer back: “You are going to fight on there. We cannot give up those areas!” Guderian continued, “But it’s useless to sacrifice men in this senseless way. It’s high time! We must evacuate these soldiers at once!” According to Speer, although he got his way, …

… Hitler appeared visibly intimidated by this assault … The novelty was almost palpable. New worlds had opened out.

As the momentum of the Red Army’s Oder-Vistula offensive led to the fall of Warsaw later that month, three senior members of Guderian’s planning staff were arrested by the Gestapo and questioned about their apparent questioning of orders from the OKW. Only after Guderian spent hours intervening on their behalf were two of them released, though the third was sent to a concentration camp. The basis of the problem not only lay in the vengeful Führer but in the system of unquestioning obedience to orders which had been created around him, which was in fundamental conflict with the General Staff’s system of mutual trust and exchange of ideas. Of course, the failed putsch had greatly contributed to Hitler’s genuine distrust of the General Staff, as well as to his long-felt ‘class hatred’ of the army’s aristocratic command. On 27 January, during a two-and-a-half-hour Führer conference, starting at 4.20 p.m., Hitler explained his thinking concerning the Balkans, and in particular, the oilfields of the Lake Balaton region in Hungary. With Göring, Keitel, Jodl, Guderian and five other generals in attendance, together with fourteen other officials, he ranged over every front of the war, with the major parts of the agenda including the weather conditions, Army Group South in Hungary, Army Group Centre in Silesia, Army Group Centre in Silesia, Army Group Vistula in Pomerania, Army Group Kurland, the Eastern Front in general, the west and the war at sea. Guderian told Hitler that our main problem is the fuel issue at the moment, to which Hitler replied, who replied: That’s why I’m concerned, Guderian. Pointing to the Balaton region, he added:

… if something happens down there, it’s over. That’s the most dangerous point. We can improvise everywhere else, but not there. I can’t improvise with the fuel. 

The Sixth Panzer Army, reconstituted after its exertions in the Ardennes offensive was ordered to Hungary, from where it could not be extracted. ‘Defending’ Hungary, or rather its oilfields, accounted for seven out of the eighteen Oder-Neisseanzer divisions still available to Hitler on the Eastern Front, a massive but necessary commitment. In January, Hitler had only 4,800 tanks and 1,500 combat aircraft in the east, to fight Stalin’s fourteen thousand tanks and fifteen thousand aircraft. Soon after the conference, Zhukov reached the Oder river on 31 January and Konyev reached the Oder-Neisse Line a fortnight later, on the lower reaches of the River Oder, a mere forty-four miles from the suburbs of Berlin. It had been an epic advance but had temporarily exhausted the USSR,  halting its offensive due to the long lines of supply and communications. On 26 February, the Soviets also broke through from Bromberg to the Baltic. As a consequence, East Prussia was cut off from the Reich. Then they didn’t move from their positions until mid-April.

Below: The Liberation of Europe, East & West, January 1944 – March 1945

About twenty million of the war dead were Russians by this stage, together with another seven million from the rest of the USSR, rather more of them civilians than Red Army soldiers. The vast majority of them had died far from any battlefield. Starvation, slave-labour conditions, terror and counter-terror had all played their part, with Stalin probably responsible for nearly as many of the deaths of his own people as Hitler was. However, the Nazis were guilty of the maltreatment of prisoners-of-war, with only one million of the six million Russian soldiers captured surviving the war, as well as millions of Russian Jews. Yet despite their exhaustion, the proximity of Stalin’s troops to the German capital gave their Marshal and leader a greatly increased voice at the Yalta Conference in the Crimea, called to discuss the ‘endgame’ in Europe, and to try to persuade the Soviets to undertake a major involvement in the war against Japan.

The ‘Big Three’ at the Yalta Conference, 4-11 February:

Franklin Roosevelt and Josef Stalin met only twice, at the Tehran Conference in November 1943 and the Yalta Conference in February 1945, although they maintained a very regular correspondence. Roosevelt’s last letter to the Soviet leader was sent on 11 April, the day before he died. By the time of Yalta, it was Roosevelt who was making all the running, attempting to keep the alliance together. With the Red Army firmly in occupation of Poland, and Soviet troops threatening Berlin itself when the conference opened, there was effectively nothing that either FDR or Churchill could have done to safeguard political freedom in eastern Europe, and both knew it. Roosevelt tried everything, including straightforward flattery, to try to bring Stalin round to a reasonable stance on any number of important post-war issues, such as the creation of a meaningful United Nations, but he overestimated what his undoubted aristocratic charm could achieve with the genocidal son of a drunken Georgian cobbler. A far more realistic approach to dealing with Stalin had been adopted by Churchill in Moscow in October 1944, when he took along what he called a naughty document which listed the proportional interest in five central and south-east European countries. Crucially, both Hungary and Yugoslavia would be under ’50-50′ division of influence between the Soviets and the British. Stalin signed the document with a big blue tick, telling Churchill to keep it, and generally stuck to the agreements, the exception being Hungary.

In preparation for the conference, Stalin tried to drum up as much support as he could for his puppet government in Poland. It was a subject, for example, that had dominated the visit of General de Gaulle to Moscow in December 1944. It was against the diplomatic background of this meeting with De Gaulle and in the knowledge that the war was progressing towards its end, that Stalin boarded a train from Moscow for the Crimea in February 1945. He had just learnt that Marshal Zhukov’s Belorussian Front had crossed into Germany and were now encamped on the eastern bank of the Oder. In the West, he knew that the Allies had successfully repulsed Hitler’s counter-attack in the Ardennes, and in the Far East that General Douglas MacArthur was poised to recapture Manila in the Philippines, the British had forced the Japanese back in Burma, and the US bombers were pounding the home islands of Japan. Victory now seemed certain, though it was still uncertain as to how soon and at what cost that victory would come.

The conference at Yalta has come to symbolise the sense that somehow ‘dirty deals’ were done as the war came to an end, dirty deals that brought dishonour on the otherwise noble enterprise of fighting the Nazis. But it wasn’t quite the case. In the first place, of course, it was the Tehran Conference in November 1943 that the fundamental issues about the course of the rest of the war and the challenges of the post-war world and the challenges of the post-war world were initially discussed and resolved in principle. Little of new substance was raised at Yalta. Nonetheless, Yalta is important, not least because it marks the final high point of Churchill and Roosevelt’s optimistic dealings with Stalin. On 3 February, the planes of the two western leaders flew in tandem from Malta to Saki, on the flat plains of the Crimea, north of the mountain range that protects the coastal resort of Yalta. They, and their huge group of advisers and assistants, around seven hundred people in all, then made the torturous drive down through the high mountain passes to the sea.

The main venue for the conference was the tsarist Livadia Palace, where  FDR stayed and where the plenary sessions took place. The British delegation stayed at the Vorontsov Villa Palace overlooking the Black Sea at Alupka, twelve miles from the Livadia Palace. The Chiefs of Staff meetings were held at Stalin’s headquarters, the Yusupov Villa at Koreiz, six miles from the Livadia Palace. Churchill, who had cherished the hope that the United Kingdom would be chosen as the site of the conference, was not enthusiastic about the Crimea. He later described the place as ‘the Riviera of Hades’ and said that…

 … if we had spent ten years on research, we could not have found a worse place in the world.

But, as in so much else, the will of Stalin had prevailed, and none of the Western Allies seemed aware of of the bleak irony that his chosen setting was the very location where eight months previously Stalin his own peculiar way of dealing with dissent, real or imagined, in deporting the entire Tatar nation. Yet it was here in the Crimea that the leaders were about to discuss the futures of many nationalities and millions of people. One of these leaders, President Roosevelt, had, according to Churchill’s doctor, Lord Moran, gone to bits physically. He doubted whether the President was fit for the job he had to do at Yalta. Hugh Lunghi, who went to the military mission in Moscow, remembers seeing the two leaders arrive by plane, and he too was surprised by the President’s appearance:

Churchill got out of his aircraft and came over to Roosevelt’s. And Roosevelt was being decanted, as it were – it’s the only word I can use – because of course he was disabled. And Churchill looked at him very solicitously. They’d met in Malta of course, so Churchill, I suppose, had no surprise, as I had – and anyone else had who hadn’t seen Roosevelt previously – to see this gaunt, very thin figure with his black cape over his shoulder, and tied at his neck with a knot, and his trilby hat turned up at the front. His face was waxen to a sort of yellow … and very drawn, very thin, and a lot of the time he was sort of … sitting there with his mouth open sort of staring ahead. So that was quite a shock.

Roosevelt was a dying man at Yalta, but whether his undoubted weakness affected his judgement is less easy to establish, with contemporary testimony supporting both sides of the argument. What is certain, though, is that Roosevelt’s eventual accomplishments at Yalta were coherent and consistent with his previous policies as expressed at Tehran and elsewhere. His principal aims remained those of ensuring that the Soviet Union came into the war against Japan, promptly, once the war in Europe was over and gaining Soviet agreement about the United Nations. The intricacies of the borders of eastern Europe mattered much less to him. Addressing Congress in March 1945, Roosevelt reported that Yalta represented:

… the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balance of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries, and have always failed.

This was an idealistic, perhaps naive, way to have interpreted the Yalta conference, but it is quite possible that Roosevelt believed what he was saying when he said it, regardless of disability and illness. Whilst Roosevelt’s physical decline was obvious for all present to see, just as obvious was Stalin’s robust strength and power. As the translator at the Conference, Hugh Lunghi saw him:

Stalin was full of beans … He was smiling, he was genial to everyone, and I mean everybody, even to junior ranks like myself. He joked at the banquets more than he he had before.

In his military uniform, Stalin cut an imposing figure, and, in the head of the British Foreign Office, Sir Alexander Cadogan’s words, he was quiet and restrained, with a very good sense of humour and a rather quick temper. But, more than that, the Allied leaders felt that Stalin at Yalta was someone they could relate to on a personal level and could trust more than they had been able to do previously. Certainly, Churchill and Roosevelt remained anxious to believe in Stalin the man. They clung to the hope that Stalin’s previous statements of friendship meant that he was planning on long-term co-operation with the West. By the time of Yalta, Churchill could point to the fact that the Soviets had agreed to allow the British a free hand in Greece. In any case, the future peace of the world still depended on sustaining a productive relationship with Stalin. The two Western leaders remained predisposed to gather what evidence they could in support of their jointly agreed ‘thesis’ that Stalin was a man they could ‘handle’. At the first meeting of all three leaders, in the Livadia Palace, the former holiday home of the imperial family, Roosevelt remarked:

… we understand each other much better now than we had in the past and that month by month that understanding was growing.

It was Poland which was to be the test case for this assertion, and no subject was discussed more at Yalta. Despite the protests of the Polish government in exile, both Roosevelt and Churchill had already agreed that Stalin could keep eastern Poland. What mattered to both leaders was that the new Poland, within its new borders, should be ‘independent and free’. They knew only too well, of course, that only days after Hitler’s ‘brutal attack’ from the West, the Soviet Union had made their own ‘brutal attack’ from the East. It was the results of this ‘land grab’ that Churchill now agreed, formally, to accept. But he also explained that Britain had gone to war over Poland so that it could be “free and sovereign” and that this was a matter of “honour” for Britain. Stalin pointed out that twice in the last thirty years, the USSR had been attacked through the “Polish corridor”, and he remarked:

The Prime Minister has said that for Great Britain the question of Poland is a question of honour. For Russia it is not only a question of honour but also of security … it is necessary that Poland be free, independent and powerful. … there are agents of the London government connected with the so-called underground. They are called resistance forces. We have heard nothing good from them but much evil.

Stalin, therefore, kept to his position that the ‘Lublin Poles’, who were now in the Polish capital as ‘the Polish government’ had as great a democratic base in Poland as de Gaulle has in France and that elements of the ‘Home Army’ were ‘bandits’ and that the ex-Lublin Poles should be recognised as the legitimate, if temporary, government of Poland. Unlike at Tehran, where he had remained silent in the face of Stalin’s accusations about the Polish resistance, Churchill now made a gentle protest:

 I must put on record that the British and Soviet governments have different sources of information in Poland and get different facts. Perhaps we are mistaken but I do not feel that the Lublin government represents even one third of the Polish people. This is my honest opininion and I may be wrong. Still, I have felt that the underground might have collisions with the Lublin government. I have feared bloodshed, arrests, deportation and I fear the effect on the whole  Polish question. Anyone who attacks the Red Army should be punished but I cannot feel the Lublin government has any right to represent the Polish nation.

As Churchill and Roosevelt saw it, the challenge was to do what they could to ensure that the government of the newly reconstituted country was as representative as possible. So Roosevelt sent Stalin a letter after the session that he was concerned that people at home look with a critical eye on what they consider a disagreement between us at this vital stage of the war. He also stated categorically that we cannot register the Lublin government as now composed. Roosevelt also proposed that representatives of the ‘Lublin Poles’ and the ‘London Poles’ be immediately called to Yalta s that ‘the Big Three’ could assist them in jointly agreeing on a provisional government in Poland. At the end of the letter, Roosevelt wrote that:

… any interim government which could be formed as a result of our conference with the Poles here would be pledged to the holding of free elections in Poland at the earliest possible date. I know this is completely consistent with your desire to see a new free and democratic Poland emerge from the welter of this war.

This put Stalin in something of an awkward spot because it was not in his interests to have the composition of any interim government of Poland worked out jointly with the other Allied leaders. He would have to compromise his role, as he saw it, as the sole driver of events if matters were left until after the meeting disbanded. So he first practised the classic politicians’ ploy of delay. The day after receiving Roosevelt’s letter, 7 February, he claimed that he had only received the communication ‘an hour and a half ago’. He then said that he had been unable to reach the Lublin Poles because they were away in Kraków. However, he said, Molotov had worked out some ideas based on Roosevelt’s proposals, but these ideas had not yet been typed out. He also suggested that, in the meantime, they turn their attention to the voting procedure for the new United Nations organisation. This was a subject dear to Roosevelt’s heart, but one which had proved highly problematic at previous meetings. The Soviets had been proposing that each of the sixteen republics should have their own vote in the General Assembly, while the USA would have only one. They had argued that since the British Commonwealth effectively controlled a large number of votes, the Soviet Union deserved the same treatment. In a clear concession, Molotov said that they would be satisfied with the admission of … at least two of the Soviet Republics as original members. Roosevelt declared himself ‘very happy’ to hear these proposals and felt that this was a great step forward which would be welcomed by all the peoples of the World. Churchill also welcomed the proposal.

Then Molotov presented the Soviet response on Poland, which agreed that it would be desirable to add to the Provisional Polish Government some democratic leaders from the Polish émigré circles. He added, however, that they had been unable to reach the Lublin Poles, so that time would not permit their summoning to Yalta. This was obviously a crude ruse not to have a deal brokered between the two Polish ‘governments’ at Yalta in the presence of the Western leaders. Yet Churchill responded to Molotov’s proposal only with a comment on the exact borders of the new Poland, since the Soviet Foreign Minister had finally revealed the details of the boundaries of the new Poland, as envisaged by the Soviets, with the western border along the rivers Oder and Neisse south of Stettin. This would take a huge portion of Germany into the new Poland, and Churchill remarked that it would be a pity to stuff the Polish goose so full of  German food that it got indigestion. This showed that the British were concerned that so much territory would be taken from the Germans that in the post-war world they would be permanently hostile to the new Poland, thus repeating the mistakes made at Versailles in 1919 and forcing the Poles closer to the Soviets.

At this conference, Churchill couched this concern as anxiety about the reaction of a considerable body of British public opinion to the Soviet plan to move large numbers of Germans. Stalin responded by suggesting that most Germans in these regions had already run away from the Red Army. By these means, Stalin successfully dodged Roosevelt’s request to get a deal agreed between the Lublin and London Poles. After dealing with the issue of Soviet participation in the Pacific War, the leaders returned once more to the question of Poland. Churchill saw this as the crucial point in this great conference and, in a lengthy speech, laid out the immensity of the problem faced by the Western Allies:

We have an army of 150,000 Poles who are fighting bravely. That army would not be reconciled to Lublin. It would regard our action in transferring recognition as a betrayal. 

Above: Stalin & Churchill at Yalta 

Churchill acknowledged that, if elections were held with a fully secret ballot and free candidacies, this would remove British doubts. But until that happened, and with the current composition of the Lublin government, the British couldn’t transfer its allegiance from the London-based Polish government-in-exile. Stalin, in what was a speech laced with irony, retorted:

The Poles for many years have not liked Russia because Russia took part in three partitions of Poland. But the advance of the Soviet Army and the liberation of Poland from Hitler has completely changed that. The old resentment has completely disappeared … my impression is that the Polish people consider this a great historic holiday.

The idea that the members of the Home Army, for example, were currently being treated to a ‘historic holiday’ can only have been meant as ‘black’ humour. But Churchill made no attempt to correct Stalin’s calumny. In the end, the Western Allies largely gave in to Stalin’s insistence and agreed that the Soviet-Polish border and, in compensation to Poland, that the Polish-German border should also shift westward. Stalin did, however, say that he agreed with the view that the Polish government must be democratically elected, adding that it is much better to have a government based on free elections. But the final compromise the three leaders came to on Poland was so biased in favour of the Soviets that it made this outcome extremely unlikely. Although Stalin formally agreed to free and fair elections in Poland, the only check the Western Allies secured on this was that ‘the ambassadors of the three powers in Warsaw’ would be charged with the oversight of the carrying out of the pledge in regard to free and unfettered elections. On the composition of the interim government, the Soviets also got their own way. The Western Allies only ‘requested’ that the Lublin government be reorganised to include ‘democratic’ leaders from abroad and within Poland. But the Soviets would be the conveners of meetings in Moscow to coordinate this. It’s difficult to believe that Roosevelt and Churchill could have believed that this ‘compromise’ would work in producing a free and democratic Poland, their stated aim. Hugh Lunghi later reflected on the generally shared astonishment:

Those of us who worked and lived in Moscow were astounded that a stronger declaration shouldn’t have been made, because we knew that there was not a chance in hell that Stalin would allow free elections in those countries when he didn’t allow them in the Soviet Union.

This judgement was shared at the time by Lord Moran, who believed that the Americans at Yalta were ‘profoundly ignorant’ of ‘the Polish problem’ and couldn’t fathom why Roosevelt thought he could ‘live at peace’ with the Soviets. Moran felt that it had been all too obvious in Moscow the previous October that Stalin meant to make Poland ‘a Cossack outpost of Russia’. He saw no evidence at Yalta that Stalin had ‘altered his intention’ since then. But on his first observation, he was wrong in respect to Roosevelt, at least. The President no longer cared as much about Poland as he had done when needing the votes of Polish Americans to secure his third term. He now gave greater priority to other key issues, while paying lip-service to the view that the elections in Poland had to be free and open. He told Stalin, …

… I want this election to be the first one beyond question … It should be like Caesar’s wife. I didn’t know her but they say she was pure.

Privately, the President acknowledged that the deal reached on Poland was far from perfect. When Admiral Leahy told him that it was so elastic that the Russians can stretch it all the way from Yalta to Washington without ever technically breaking it, Roosevelt replied: I know, Bill, but it is the best I can do for Poland at this time. The ‘deal’ was the best he could do because of the low priority he gave to the issue at that particular time. What was most important for Roosevelt overall was that a workable accommodation was reached with Stalin on the key issues which would form the basis for the general post-war future of the world. He did not share the growing consensus among the Americans living in Russia that Stalin was as bad as Hitler. Just before Yalta, he had remarked to a senior British diplomat that there were many varieties of Communism, and not all of them were necessarily harmful. As Moran put it, I don’t think he has ever grasped that Russia is a Police State. For the equally hard-headed Leahy, the consequences of Yalta were clear the day the conference ended, 11 February. The decisions taken there would result in Russia becoming …

… the dominant power in Europe, which in itself carries a certainty of future international disagreements and the prospects of another war.

But by the end of the conference, the leaders of the Western Allies and many of their key advisers were clearly putting their faith ever more firmly in the individual character of Stalin. Cadogan wrote in his journal on 11th that he had …

… never known the Russians so easy and accommodating … In particular, Joe has been extremely good. He is a great man, and shows up very impressively against the background of the other two ageing statesmen.

Churchill remarked that what had impressed him most was that Stalin listened carefully to counter-arguments and was then prepared to change his mind. And there was other evidence of a practical nature that could be used to demonstrate Stalin’s desire to reach an accommodation with the West – his obvious intention not to interfere in British action in Greece, for example. But above all, it was the impact of his personality and behaviour during the conference that was crucial in the optimism that prevailed straight after Yalta. This was evident in the signing of the ‘somewhat fuzzy’ Declaration on Liberated Europe, which pledged support for reconstruction and affirmed the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live. There was, at least in public, a sense that the ideological gap between the West and the Soviet Union was closing, with renewed mutual respect. Drained by long argument, the West, for now at least, took Stalin at his word. At the last banquet of the conference, Stalin toasted Churchill as the bravest governmental figure in the world. He went on:

Due in large measure to to Mr Churchill’s courage and staunchness, England, when she stood alone, had divided the might of Hitlerite Germany at a time when the rest of Europe was falling flat on its face before Hitler. … he knew of few examples in history where the courage of one man had been so important to the future history of the world. He drank a toast to Mr Churchill, his fighting friend and a brave man.

Verdicts on Yalta & Reactions in Britain and the USA:

In his ‘ground-breaking’ TV series on ‘the Cold War’, Jeremy Isaacs considered that:

The Yalta Conference represented the high-water mark of Allied wartime collaboration … But Yalta was also the beginning of the post-war world; the divisions between East and West became apparent. …

Stalin was apprehensive that the new United Nations might be controlled by the United States and Britain, and that the Soviet Union would be outnumbered there. It was agreed that two or three Soviet republics would be admitted as members and that each of the great powers should have a veto over resolutions of the Security Council.

However, the Western powers might have bargained differently and more effectively at Yalta. The Americans never used their considerable economic power to try to pressurise the Soviets to be more accommodating. The Soviets wanted a $6 billion line of credit to buy American equipment after the war, as well as an agreement on the amount of reparation they could take from Germany to pay for the conflict. They saw this partly as compensation for the vast destruction caused by the Nazis, partly as a means of punishing the German people for following them and partly as a symbol of victor’s rights. Britain and the United States were opposed to reparations; they had caused havoc after the First World War and could now hinder Germany from recovering following the Second. Eventually, after Yalta, they did agree to them, and Roosevelt compromised on a figure of $20 billion, to be paid in goods and equipment over a reasonable period of time. Neither of these issues was properly discussed at Yalta, however, not least because most people involved thought that there would be a formal peace conference at the end of the war to resolve all the key issues once and for all. But such a conference would never take place. According to Jeremy Isaacs, …

Yalta revealed cracks in the Grand Alliance. Only the common objective of defeating Hitler had kept it together; that and the personal trust, such as it was, among the three leaders.

After Yalta, the relationship between Roosevelt and Stalin would be the key to co-operation. With victory in sight, on 12 April, having defused another dispute with Stalin, the president drafted a cable to Churchill: I would minimise the general Soviet problem. Later the same day, and a little over two months after Yalta, Roosevelt collapsed, and a few hours later he was dead.

For the most part, the three statesmen were pleased with what had been accomplished at the Yalta Conference. As well as the agreements on Poland, albeit without the consent of the Polish people themselves or the Polish government-in-exile, the demarcation zones for occupied Germany had been fixed, with the French being granted an area of occupation alongside the British, Americans and Soviets. Yet, notwithstanding the discussions of the subject at the conferences held at both Tehran and Yalta, there was no unified conception of the occupying forces regarding the future treatment of Germany before its surrender. What was ‘tidied up’ on the conference fringe were the military plans for the final onslaught on Nazi Germany. It was also agreed that German industry was to be shorn of its military potential, and a reparations committee was set up. Also, major war criminals were to be tried, but there was no discussion of the programme of ‘denazification’ which was to follow. Neither did Stalin disguise his intention to extend Poland’s frontier with Germany up to the Oder-Neisse line, despite the warnings given by Churchill at the conference about the effects this would have on public opinion in the West.

However, the initial reactions in Britain were concerned with Poland’s eastern borders. Immediately after the conference, twenty-two Conservative MPs put down an amendment in the House of Commons remembering that Britain had taken up arms in defence of Poland and regretting the transfer of the territory of an ally, Poland, to ‘another power’, the Soviet Union; noting also the failure of the to ensure that these countries liberated by the Soviet Union from German oppression would have the full rights to choose their own form of government free from pressure by another power, namely the Soviet Union. Harold Nicolson, National Labour MP and former Foreign Office expert, voted against the amendment: I who had felt that Poland was a lost cause, feel gratified that we had at least saved something. Praising the settlement as the most important political agreement we have gained in this war, he considered the alternatives. To stand aside, to do nothing, would be ‘unworthy of a great country’.   Yet to oppose the Russians by force would be insane. The only viable alternative was ‘to save something by negotiation’. The Curzon Line, delineated after ‘a solid, scientific examination of the question’  at the Paris Peace Conference was, he claimed, ‘entirely in favour of the Poles’. Should Poland advance beyond that line, ‘she would be doing something very foolish indeed’. Churchill and Eden came in for the highest praise:

When I read the Yalta communiqué, I thought “How could they have brought that off? This is really splendid!”

Turning the dissident Conservatives’ amendment on its head, Harold Nicolson revealed Yalta’s most lasting achievement. Russia, dazzled by its military successes, revengeful and rapacious, might well have aimed to restore its ‘old Tsarist frontiers’. It had not done so and instead had agreed to modify them permanently. Harold Nicolson spoke with conviction in the Commons, but then to salute Stalin’s perceived altruism in the Polish matter rendered his reasoning contrived and decidedly off-key. The truth, as Churchill would tell him on his return from Yalta, was much more prosaic. Stalin had dealt himself an unbeatable hand, or, as two Soviet historians in exile put it: The presence of 6.5 million Soviet soldiers buttressed Soviet claims. But then, Churchill’s own rhetoric was not all it seemed to be. Although in public he could talk about the moral imperative behind the war, in private he revealed that he was a good deal less pure in his motives. On 13 February, on his way home from Yalta, he argued with Field Marshal Alexander, who was ‘pleading’ with him that the British should provide more help with post-war reconstruction in Italy. Alexander said that this was more or less what we are fighting this war for – to secure liberty and a decent existence for the peoples of Europe. Churchill replied, Not a bit of it! We are fighting to secure the proper respect for the British people!

Nicolson’s warm support of the Yalta agreement rested on the rather woolly ‘Declaration on Liberated Europe’ promising national self-determination, of which he said:

No written words could better express the obligation to see that the independence, freedom and integrity of Poland of the future are preserved.

He also thought that Stalin could be trusted to carry out his obligations since he had demonstrated that he is about the most reliable man in Europe. These sentiments, to a generation born into the Cold War, and especially those brought up in the ‘satellite’ states of eastern-central Europe, must sound alarmingly naive, but at that time he was in good company. On returning from Yalta, Churchill reported to his Cabinet. He felt convinced that Stalin ‘meant well in the world and to Poland’ and he had confidence in the Soviet leader to keep his word. Hugh Dalton, who attended the Cabinet meeting, reported Churchill as saying:

Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don’t think I’m wrong about Stalin.

Opposition to Yalta was muted, confined mainly to discredited ‘Munichites’ who now sprang to the defence of Poland. In the Commons on 27 February Churchill continued to put the best gloss he could on the conference, and said he believed that:

Marshal Stalin and the Soviet leaders wish to live in honourable friendship and equality with the Western democracies. I feel also that their word is their bond.

When the Commons voted 396 to 25 in favour of Churchill’s policy, the PM was ‘overjoyed’, praising Nicolson’s speech as having swung many votes. Churchill’s faith in Stalin, shared by Nicolson, proved right in one important respect. The ‘percentages agreement’ he had made with Stalin in Moscow by presenting him with his ‘naughty document’, which had been signed off at Yalta, was, at first, ‘strictly and faithfully’ adhered to by Stalin, particularly in respect of Greece.

Roosevelt’s administration went further. In Washington, the President was preceded home by James Byrnes, then head of the war mobilization board and later Truman’s Secretary of State, who announced not only that agreement had been reached with at Yalta about the United Nations, but that as a result of the conference, ‘spheres of influence’ had been eliminated in Europe, and the three great powers are going to preserve order (in Poland) until the provisional government is established and elections held. This second announcement was, of course, very far from the truth which was that degrees or percentages of influence had been confirmed at Yalta. Roosevelt had wanted the American public to focus on what he believed was the big achievement of Yalta – the agreement over the foundation and organisation of the United Nations. The President, well aware that he was a sick man, wanted the UN to be central to his legacy. He would show the world that he had taken the democratic, internationalist ideals of Woodrow Wilson which had failed in the League of Nations of the inter-war years, and made them work in the shape of the UN.

The ‘gloss’ applied to the Yalta agreement by both Roosevelt and Byrnes was bound to antagonise Stalin. The Soviet leader was the least ‘Wilsonian’ figure imaginable. He was not an ‘ideas’ man but believed in hard, practical reality.  What mattered to him was where the Soviet Union’s borders were and the extent to which neighbouring countries were amenable to Soviet influence. The response of Pravda to Byrnes’ spin was an article on 17 February that emphasised that the word ‘democracy’ meant different things to different people and that each country should now exercise ‘choice’ over which version it preferred. This, of course, was a long way from Roosevelt’s vision, let alone that of Wilson. In fact, the Soviets were speaking the language of ‘spheres of influence’, the very concept which Byrnes had just said was now defunct. Stalin had consistently favoured this concept for the major powers in Europe and this was why he was so receptive towards Churchill’s percentages game in October 1944.

But it would be a mistake to assume that Stalin, all along, intended that all the eastern European states occupied by the Red Army in 1944-45 should automatically transition into Soviet republics. What he wanted all along were ‘friendly’ countries along the USSR’s border with Europe within an agreed Soviet ‘sphere of influence’. Of course, he defined ‘friendly’ in a way that precluded what the Western Allies would have called ‘democracy’. He wanted those states to guarantee that they would be close allies of the USSR so that they would not be ‘free’ in the way Churchill and Roosevelt envisaged. But they need not, in the immediate post-war years, become Communist states. However, it was Churchill, rather than the other two of the ‘Big Three’ statesmen, who had the most difficulty in ‘selling’ Yalta. That problem took physical form in the shape of General Anders, who confronted Churchill face to face on 20 February. The Polish commander had been outraged by the Yalta agreement, which he saw as making a ‘mockery of the Atlantic Charter’. Churchill said that he assumed that Anders was not satisfied with the Yalta agreement. This must have been heard as a deliberate understatement, as Anders replied that it was not enough to say that he was dissatisfied. He said: I consider a great calamity has occurred. He then went on to make it clear to Churchill that his distress at the Yalta agreement was not merely idealistic, but had a deeply practical dimension as well. He protested:

Our soldiers fought for Poland. Fought for the freedom of their country. What can we, their commanders, tell them now? Soviet Russia, until 1941 in close alliance with Germany, now takes half our territory, and in the rest of it she wants to establish her power.

Churchill became annoyed at this, blaming Anders for the situation because the Poles could have settled the eastern border question earlier. He then added a remarkably hurtful remark, given the sacrifice made by the Poles in the British armed forces:

We have enough troops today. We do not need your help. You can take your divisions. We shall do without them.

It is possible to see in this brief exchange not only Churchill’s continuing frustration with the Poles but also the extent to which he felt politically vulnerable because of Yalta. His reputation now rested partly on the way Stalin chose to operate in Poland and the other eastern European countries. To preserve intact his own wartime record, he had to hope Stalin would keep to his ‘promises’. Unfortunately for the British Prime Minister, this hope would shortly be destroyed by Soviet action in the territory they now occupied. Anders (pictured on the right after the Battle of Monte Casino) talked to Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, Chief of the Imperial General Staff. In his diary entry for 22 February, the latter recorded what Anders told him, explaining why the Polish leader takes this matter so terribly hard:

After having been a prisoner, and seeing how Russians could treat Poles, he considered that he was in a better position to judge what Russians were like than the President or PM. … When in a Russian prison he was in the depth of gloom but he did then always have hope. Now he could see no hope anywhere. Personally his wife and children were in Poland and he could never see them again, that was bad enough. But what was infinitely worse was the fact that all the men under his orders relied on him to find a solution to this insoluble problem! … and he, Anders, saw no solution and this kept him awake at night. 

It soon became clear that Anders’ judgement of Soviet intentions was an accurate one, as Stalin’s concept of ‘free and fair elections’ was made apparent within a month. But even before that, in February, while the ‘Big Three’ were determining their future of without them and Churchill was traducing their role of in the war, the arrests of Poles by the Soviets continued, with trainloads of those considered ‘recalcitrants’ sent east, including more than 240 truckloads of people from Bialystok alone.

The Combined Bombing Offensive & the Case of Dresden:

Meanwhile, from the beginning of February, German west-to-east troop movements were being disrupted at the Russians’ urgent request for the Western Allies to bomb the nodal points of Germany’s transportations system, including Berlin, Chemnitz, Leipzig and Dresden. But it was to be the raid on Dresden in the middle of the month that was to cause the most furious controversy of the whole Combined Bomber Offensive (CBO), a controversy which has continued to today. During the Yalta Conference of 4 to 11 February, Alan Brooke chaired the Chiefs of Staff meetings at the Yusupov Villa the day after the opening session when the Russian Deputy Chief of Staff Alexei Antonov and the Soviet air marshal Sergei Khudyakov pressed the subject of bombing German lines of communication and entrainment, specifically via Berlin, Leipzig and Dresden. In the view of one of those present, Hugh Lunghi, who translated for the British Chiefs of Staff during these meetings with the Soviets, it was this urgent request to stop Hitler transferring divisions from the west to reinforce his troops in Silesia, blocking the Russian advance on Berlin that led directly to the bombing of Dresden only two days after the conference ended.

The massive attack on Dresden took place just after ten o’clock on the night of Tuesday, 13 February 1945 by 259 Lancaster bombers from RAF Swinderby in Lincolnshire, as well as from other nearby airfields, flying most of the way in total cloud, and then by 529 more Lancasters a few hours later in combination with 529 Liberators and Flying Fortresses of the USAAF the next morning. It has long been assumed that a disproportionately large number of people died in a vengeance attack for the November 1940 ‘blanket bombing’ of Coventry and that the attack had little to do with any strategic or military purpose. Yet though the attack on the beautiful, largely medieval city centre, ‘the Florence of the Elbe’, was undeniably devastating, there were, just as in Coventry, many industries centred in this architectural jewel of southern Germany.

The 2,680 tons of bombs dropped laid waste to over thirteen square miles of the city, and many of those killed were women, children, the elderly and some of the several hundred thousand refugees fleeing from the Red Army, which was only sixty miles to the east. The military historian Allan Mallinson has written of how those killed were suffocated, burnt, baked or boiled. Piles of corpses had to be pulled out of a giant fire-service water-tank into which people had jumped to escape the flames but were instead boiled alive. David Irving’s 1964 book The Destruction of Dresden claimed that 130,000 people died in the bombing, but this has long been disproven. The true figure was around twenty thousand, as a special commission of thirteen prominent German historians concluded, although some more recent historians have continued to put the total at upwards of fifty thousand. Propaganda claims by the Nazis at the time, repeated by neo-Nazis more recently, that human bodies were completely ‘vaporised’ in the high temperatures were also shown to be false by the commission.

Certainly, by February 1945, the Allies had discovered the means to create firestorms, even in cold weather very different from that of Hamburg in July and August of 1943. Huge ‘air mines’ known as ‘blockbusters’ were dropped, designed to blow out windows and doors so that the oxygen would flow through easily to feed the flames caused by the incendiary bombs. High-explosive bombs both destroyed buildings and just as importantly kept the fire-fighters down in their shelters. One writer records:

People died not necessarily because they were burnt to death, but also because the firestorm sucked all the oxygen out of the atmosphere.

In Dresden, because the sirens were not in proper working order, many of the fire-fighters who had come out after the first wave of bombers were caught out in the open by the second. Besides this, the Nazi authorities in Dresden, and in particular its Gauleiter Martin Mutschmann, had failed to provide proper air-raid protection. There were inadequate shelters, sirens failed to work and next to no aircraft guns were stationed there. When Mutschmann fell into Allied hands at the end of the war he quickly confessed that a shelter-building programme for the entire city was not carried out because he hoped that nothing would happen to Dresden. Nonetheless, he had two deep reinforced built for himself, his family and senior officials, just in case he had been mistaken. Even though the previous October 270 people had been killed there by thirty USAAF bombers, the Germans thought Dresden was too far east to be reached, since the Russians left the bombing of Germany almost entirely to the British and Americans. Quite why Mutschmann thought that almost alone of the big cities, Dresden should have been immune to Allied bombing is a mystery, for the Germans had themselves designated it as a ‘military defensive area’.

So the available evidence does not support the contemporary view of Labour’s Richard Stokes MP and Bishop George Bell as a ‘war crime’, as many have since assumed that it was. As the foremost historian of the operation, Frederick Taylor has pointed out, Dresden was by the standards of the time a legitimate military target. As a nodal point for communications, with its railway marshalling yards and conglomeration of war industries, including an extensive network of armaments workshops, the city was always going to be in danger once long-range penetration by bombers with good fighter escort was possible. One historian has asked: Why is it legitimate to kill someone using a weapon, and a crime to kill those who make the weapons? However, Churchill could see that the ‘CBO’ would provide a future line of attack against his prosecution of the war, and at the end of March, he wrote to the Chiefs of Staff to put it on record that:

… the question of bombing German cities simply for the the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed. Otherwise we shall come into control of an utterly ruined land. We shall not, for instance, be able to get housing materials out of Germany for our own needs because some temporary provisions would have to be made for the Germans themselves. The destruction of Dresden remains a serious query against the conduct of Allied bombing … I feel the need for more precise concentration upon military objectives … rather than on mere acts of terror and wanton destruction, however impressive.

This ‘minute’ has been described as sending a thunderbolt down the corridors of Whitehall. ‘Bomber’ Harris, who himself had considerable misgivings about the operation because of the long distances involved, was nonetheless characteristically blunt in defending the destruction of a city that once produced Meissen porcelain:

The feeling, such as there is, over Dresden could be easily explained by a psychiatrist. It is connected with German bands and Dresden shepherdesses. Actually Dresden was a mass of munition works, an intact government centre and a key transportation centre. It is now none of those things.

One argument made since the war, that the raid was unnecessary because peace was only ten weeks off, is especially ahistorical. With talk of secret weaponry, a Bavarian Redoubt, fanatical Hitler Youth ‘werewolf’ squads and German propaganda about fighting for every inch of the Fatherland,  there was no possible way of the Allies knowing how fanatical German resistance would be, and thus predict when the war might end. The direct and indirect effects of the bombing campaign on war production throughout Germany reduced the potential output of weapons for the battlefields by fifty per cent. The social consequences of bombing also reduced economic performance. Workers in cities spent long hours huddled in air-raid shelters; they arrived for work tired and nervous. The effects of bombing in the cities also reduced the prospects of increasing female labour as women worked to salvage wrecked homes, or took charge of evacuated children, or simply left for the countryside where conditions were safer. In the villages, the flood of refugees from bombing strained the rationing system, while hospitals had to cope with three-quarters of a million casualties. Under these circumstances, demoralisation was widespread, though the ‘terror state’ and the sheer struggle to survive prevented any prospect of serious domestic unrest.

The Reich fragmented into several self-contained economic areas as the bombing destroyed rail and water transport. Factories lived off accumulated stocks. By the end of February, the economy was on the verge of collapse, as the appended statistics reveal. Meanwhile, German forces retreated to positions around Berlin, preparing to make a last-ditch stand in defence of the German capital.

 

Statistical Appendix: The Social & Economic Consequences of the Bombing Campaign in Germany:

Sources:

Published in 2008, by BBC Books, an imprint of Ebury Books, London.

Andrew Roberts (2009), The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War.  London: Penguin Books.

Norman Rose (2005), Harold Nicolson. London: Pimlico.

Colin McEvedy (1982), The Penguin Atlas of Recent History. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Herman Kinder & Werner Hilgemann (1978), The Penguin Atlas of World History, volume two. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Richard Overy (1996), The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Third Reich. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Jeremy Isaacs & Taylor Downing (1998), Cold War: For Forty-five Years the World Held Its Breath. London: Transworld Publishers.

How comparable is Labour’s defeat of 2019 to that of 1935?

The electoral facts have shown that, at the end of 2019, the Labour Party in Britain suffered its worst defeat since 1935, yet those who led the Party to this are still refusing to accept responsibility for the debacle. They tell us that, had it not been for ‘Brexit’, they would have persuaded the British electorate to back Jeremy Corbyn’s ‘marvellous manifesto’ stuffed full of uncosted radical policies which would have transformed Britain, including widespread nationalisation without compensation, massive tax increases for private companies and entrepreneurs, and trillions of additional expenditure. Watching the daily parade of uncosted spending pledges, I was reminded of the tactics of the Militant-controlled Liverpool Council in the 1980s which followed the Leninist tactic of making impossible ‘transitional demands’ in order to take over the public agenda and sow the seeds of continual chaos. However, as a historian of the inter-war period, I’ve been re-discovering the parallels between Labour’s current crisis and the one it had to claw its way out of from 1931-36 and the ‘devils’ are ‘legion’.

Francis Beckett, a fellow historian of the Labour movement, has just published an article in the ‘New European’ pointing to a curious figure from the left’s past who seems to have inspired the party’s calamitous current state. He argues that the cause of the calamity was not Brexit, nor even the incompetence of Corbyn, McDonnell and the ‘Shadow Cabinet’, but the sectarianism of those who advised Corbyn, principally Seumas Milne and Andrew Murray, who are the modern equivalents of one of the strangest figures in Labour movement history, Rajani Palme Dutt. Beckett continues:

Dutt was the leading theoretician (that was the word they used) of Britain’s Communist Party, from the 1920s until he died in 1974. In the 1930s Dutt … pioneered a Moscow-inspired policy called ‘Class against Class’ which required communists to reserve their first and most deadly fire for their rivals on the left, who would divert the working class from the true path of socialism. … In the 1980s Murray and Milne ran Straight Left, the monthly journal associated with the ‘Stalinist’, pro-Soviet, anti-Eurocommunist faction of the Communist Party. This group was ruthlessly and bitterly sectarian, in the spirit of Class against Class. After the miners’ strike of 1984-5, they reserved their bitterest abuse for anyone on the left who criticised Arthur Scargill (disclosure: I was the target of some of this).

This author had a similar, albeit local, experience to this when, after teaching in a Lancashire comprehensive, I tried to re-join the Labour Party in Coventry in 1986. By then, the ‘Militant Tendency’ and the ‘hard Left’ had taken control of the constituency party my grandparents had helped to found. Even the testimony of the local councillor my grandmother had worked alongside for half a century wasn’t enough to guarantee me entry. Apparently, I was in the wrong teachers’ union, although I discovered later there was no such rule about belonging to a TUC-affiliated union. They had obviously spotted that I might be a threat to their hegemony and weren’t interested in Labour heritage. The following year, two of the Militant/ hard-Left group, David Nellist and John Hughes were elected as two of the three Coventry MPs, but they only survived one term before they were expelled from the party. Though they were replaced by ‘mainstream’ parliamentary candidates, Labour lost its fourth general election in succession in 1992, largely because it still seemed to be rent with divisions, at least until John Smith took charge. I went into self-imposed exile in Hungary, then undergoing its transition to democracy. There I learnt what ‘revolutionary socialism’ had really been about; Hungarians told me that they had really experienced Orwell’s dystopia in real life at exactly the time he had been writing about it in his Hebridean hermitage. Five years later, I returned to Britain just in time to witness a ‘Social-Democratic’ Labour Party finally win power in 1997, holding onto it until 2010 and achieving much in the first twelve of those thirteen years.

The Drive to Municipal Socialism in Coventry:

In order to understand the relationship between Socialism and the recovery of the Labour Party in Britain between the wars, we need to understand the growth of the local parties in municipalities like Coventry and their rise to power in the Thirties. What happened to the constituency parties in Coventry in the 1980s was largely a reaction of the ‘revolutionary socialists’ to the dominance of municipal socialism as the Party’s main creed since the mid-1930s. In some ways, it appears strange that it took Labour until 1937 to gain power in so working-class a city, and this may be the result of the party’s concentration on gaining and sustaining representation in parliament through what was, after all, a coalition of national and regional political groups, unions and societies. At the local level, the ‘shopocracy’ was left to preside over Coventry’s industrial and social revolution long after its social base had ceased to be dominant. The ‘shopocracy’ was an uneasy coalition of different forces, seldom able to achieve united and disciplined action. Yet it succeeded in holding up the Labour advance for decades. Finally, in 1937, Labour gained power almost by default.

In its drive for municipal power, Labour was in a fight not with the big companies that controlled the economic life of the city and its workers, but with a political anachronism that remained in power until it was virtually exhausted. The political expression of the ‘shopocracy’ were the Liberal and Conservative parties. In the late 1920s, they had come together to form a coalition. Of all its councillors and aldermen whose occupations can be identified in the inter-war period, one third were dealers or retailers, mostly shopkeepers. Only just over a fifth were manufacturers, mostly associated with the older-established trades such as watchmaking, silk-weaving and clothing manufacture. A further fifth was from the professions, including lawyers and doctors, alongside builders, publicans and commercial agents. Only a very small number were associated with big engineering companies, including a few senior managers, who did not stay politically active for very long.

Throughout the inter-war years, almost all the figures on comparative expenditure by county boroughs show Coventry lagging behind the majority, in particular on libraries, houses, schools and poor relief. Consequently, Coventry was low on in the list of rates levied per head. This may have encouraged more industrial concerns to move into the city, but the extension of the city and lower than average rates of unemployment allowed a policy of inactivity to survive. With a gradual improvement in the Labour vote in the 1930s, it was clear to the Coalition that its days were numbered unless drastic action was taken. It decided on a new initiative, therefore, and launched the ‘Progressive Party’. There were two reasons for this change; one was to improve organisation, and the other was to draw in support from Coventry industrialists. For years, the Coalition had won elections because of the weakness of the Labour Party rather than because of its own strength. An editorial in the Midland Daily Telegraph complained of the fact that the Labour Party had a central organisation, did political work throughout the year, had developed a policy for the city, whereas the Coalition had done none of this.

In 1935, when the City Council agreed to promote a Parliamentary Bill to extend its powers, Labour saw this as a victory for socialism. The Bill was necessary in order to deal with the new lands that the City had taken over in view of its expansion. It sought to acquire powers to drill water wells, acquire land for roads, set out an airport and parks, and close private slaughterhouses.  It was not controversial and George Hodgkinson, Labour leader on the Council declared at the meeting which agreed to it, We are all socialists now. He made it clear that Labour was supporting the Bill because it was a socialist measure. There were opponents, still wedded to a policy of non-intervention, who were uneasy about the growth in the authority of city departments. Coalition parsimony tended to encourage Labour to overemphasise the collectivist aspect of extending local government services. Certainly, these services had to be planned, and this was the worst charge that Labour could throw at the Coalition, that it had failed to plan municipal enterprises.

The early failures of the trade unions in the industrial struggle pushed the Coventry Labour Party into seeking its salvation in the municipal strategy. Labour projected itself as the party of ‘planning’ in which municipal enterprise would combine with co-operative ideals to create socialism. Many of Labour’s local leaders were also active in the co-operative movement which embraced the whole city, including the new working-class suburbs. Their vision of socialism – large, generous and undefined, included public ownership which, if properly handled, could provide the key to realising that vision. This was a very different vision of socialist values than that held by many in the trade union movement, expressed through the Trades and Labour Council which had been established a full decade before the Labour Party in the City. It had been founded before the First World War and besides co-ordinating support for major strikes at the local level, it also took up local issues on behalf of the trades unions.

What is of interest in Coventry is that for a number of years the number of people voting Labour greatly outnumbered the number of people joining trade unions. Increasingly, the unions were concerned with money, while Labour was concerned with social justice for all. The irony, of course, was that the decision by Labour to concentrate on municipal politics made it more likely that workplace politics, in turn, would become narrower in focus. From about 1934 onwards, trade union membership began to improve, very slowly at first but speeding-up from 1937.  The vehicle and aircraft industries did well for most of the Thirties, with higher pay for pieceworkers, and this stimulated many craft workers to re-join their unions to try to overtake the pieceworkers. As elsewhere in the country, the trade union revival offered scope for radical politics and the hardening of the divide between workplace politics and municipal politics, which once again made it possible for the Communist Party (CPGB) to spread its influence. It had survived the ‘lean’ years by going through a period of decline and sectarianism, which characterised its role and activities for the remainder of the decade.

But the inter-war period as a whole had seen a shift from socialism based on workshop power in Coventry to socialism as a municipal enterprise. A key factor in this shift was the existence of two distinct ruling groups within the City, the manufacturers and the ‘shopocracy’. The Coalition, with its hands growing increasingly shaky on the economic and social levers of power, and with its narrow-minded neglect of municipal duties, was an obvious target for the Labour Party. This concentration on attacking the Coalition meant that it had comparatively weak links with the trade union movement, and perhaps an over-emphasis on the road to socialism through municipal planning. But the emphasis on ‘planning’ was clearly needed to overcome the financial problems which could follow from the increase in municipal enterprises. Some traditional working-class members of the early Labour Party had a horror of borrowing instilled in them; T. J. Harris, the first Labour Mayor of Coventry could seldom be restrained from preaching against its evils, though his views were not altogether shared by some of his younger party colleagues. Nevertheless, he remained a major influence on the party throughout the inter-war period, as did the values of ‘thrift’. Fear of getting into serious debt remained a great handicap to a Council that needed to spend money. Labour hoped that the modern language of ‘planning’ and ‘intervention’ could get round the problem.

Of course, the danger of a local study, however brief, is that it might lead to an overemphasis on special local conditions and the playing down of national politics. Throughout most of the inter-war years, despite some notable ‘hiccups’, Labour succeeded in establishing itself as a major Parliamentary force, and for a few years, as a party of government. The habit of voting Labour gradually spread among working people and no doubt national developments affected voting patterns in Coventry in a similar way as they did in other parts of the country. Even before Labour came to power in Coventry, George Hodgkinson was urging the Council to look forward to the day when … property would be required by the Corporation for laying out the centre of the city on the lines followed by continental cities. Such planning was not just for a better city in the near future; it was a long-term investment that would yield funds for social spending beyond current horizons.

Planning for the People:

Coventry had quickly become a city whose economic life was dominated by large factories, and factory life was also important to shaping social and cultural activities in the city. Labour policies had little impact on factory experiences; its appeal was based on the improvement of living conditions, and the standard and the general quality of life rather than on people’s working lives. Working people were beginning to measure this, especially in Coventry, by the extent of their access to leisure activities and facilities. The local Labour approach was to take the political passivity of the working class as a given. Labour developed a socialist programme that meant acting on behalf of working people rather than bringing them into power. Its retreat from the workshops, necessary in order to clearly establish its own identity, left a gulf in working-class politics that the Communist Party sought, in vain, to fill. The Labour Party both nationally and locally was still fully committed to the replacement of capitalism with Socialism. But in 1935 it lacked a strategy for working-class power at a national level. It saw its programme of municipal socialism in Coventry and other corporations as a means of securing a broader victory.

In retrospect, A. J. P. Taylor (1970) saw the Thirties as a period of paradox with politicians attempting to strengthen the weakened and declining remnants of industrial greatness, while the more prosperous part of the population was buying the ‘new’ industrial products. This, he argued, was a good example of a ‘disconnect’ between politicians and the people. Taylor wrote that September 1931 marked ‘the watershed’ of English history between the wars. He defined this by reference to a number of events and longer-term developments. The end of the gold standard on 21 September was the most obvious and immediate of these. Until that point, governments were hoping to restore the unregulated capitalist economy which had existed (or was thought to have existed) before 1914. After that day, they had to face their responsibility to provide conscious direction at least as far as the banks and money markets were concerned. Taylor went on to highlight the key themes of the Thirties compared with the preceding decade:

Planning was the key word of thirties; planned economy, plan for peace, planned families, plan for holidays. The standard was Utopia. …

Politicians strove to revive the depressed areas; the inhabitants left them. Public policy concentrated on the staple industries and on exports. Capital and labour developed new industries which provided goods for the home market. … The individual spent his money on domestic comforts – indeed with the growth of hire-purchase, spent other people’s money also. … the English people were ‘more planned against than planning’. …

The nineteen-thirties have been called the black years, the devil’s decade. It popular image can be expressed in two phrases; mass unemployment and ‘appeasement’. No set of political leaders have been judged so contemptuously since the days of Lord North. … The members of the National Government … would hesitate at nothing to save the country, to save the pound. The result of their courage was that the children of the unemployed had less margarine on their bread. After this resolute decision, ministers dispersed to their warm, comfortable homes and ate substantial meals. Such was ‘equality of sacrifice’. 

Yet, at the same time, as Taylor himself also pointed out, most English people were enjoying a richer lifestyle than any they had previously known: longer holidays, shorter hours and higher real wages. They also had motor cars, radio sets and other electrical appliances (many of them made at the GEC in Coventry). This other aspect of the Thirties, less dramatic than the narrative of the ‘depressed areas’ and the hunger marches, has no place in song and story. But standards of living were actually rising in that black decade. In the Thirties, if you had a job, and particularly one in the new light industries, you were not badly off, and your parents’ way of life could seem dismally restricted and archaic. Except for the trough of the economic crisis which, unfortunately for Labour, coincided with their time in government, from October 1929 to September 1931, it was only the old-fashioned heavy basic industries, the ones which had made Britain’s fortune, which were now derelict: in the new industries based on electricity or petrol instead of steam, and consumer goods rather than iron and steel, there was a genuine and rising prosperity.

It was the mass unemployment of ‘the Slump’, more than anything else, which gave the Thirties their distorted image as a ‘long weekend’. Britain’s exports were almost halved between 1929 and 1931 and not only did the depressed industries of the Twenties now have to face, according to Cook and Stevenson (1977) an economic blizzard of unprecedented severity, but the slump also affected every branch of industry and business. Unemployment continued to rise through the winter of 1931-32, reaching a peak in the third quarter of 1932 when there were almost three million people out of work in Great Britain. The National Government’s response was to implement further economy measures, including cuts in unemployment benefit. Financial orthodoxy and economic conservatism remained the dominant features of its strategy to cope with the slump.

Pomp & Pageantry – A Monarch for the Masses:

George V photographed circa 1935.

The mass of the people, middle class and working class, who had fought in the war and still hoped for a ‘Merrie England’, lined up solidly behind the Pageant of History’s living representatives, the Royal family. George V commanded massive popularity. He was gruff, solid and sensible. He made sensible remarks, and his Christmas radio broadcasts in which, after a round-up of voices from all over the Empire, he spoke with great simplicity to his people, made him a father figure. His image was greatly enhanced by the fact that his Hanoverian origins had given him a classless accent. Of a member of MacDonald’s Government with whom he became friendly, he said If I’d had that man’s childhood I should feel exactly as he does. The King’s relations with MacDonald and the other Labour ministers formed an important chapter in his Kingship. According to Churchill, he was determined from the outset to show absolute impartiality to all parties in the Constitution and the workings of Parliamentary Government, irrespective of their creed or doctrine, who could obtain a majority in the House of Commons. Indeed, if the balance were to be swayed at all, it must be on the side of newcomers to power, who needed help and favour by the Crown. Never, Churchill wrote, did he need fear the British Democracy:

He reconciled the new forces of Labour and Socialism to the Constitution and the Monarchy. This enormous process of assimilating and rallying the spokesmen of left-out millions will be intently studied by historians of the future. … the spectacle was seen of the King and Emperor working in the utmost ease and unaffected cordiality with politicians whose theories at any rate seemed to menace all existing institutions, …

In 1935, George V had been on the throne for twenty-five years and the nation decided to give him a party. The Jubilee celebrations were marked by a genuine warmth of feeling, which came as a surprise to the King himself. When they toured the poorer parts of the capital, the King and Queen received an overwhelmingly affectionate and enthusiastic welcome. He is supposed to have said, I am beginning to think they must like me for myself. In the photo above, vast crowds cheer the procession as it returns to the Palace. The King wrote later that this was the greatest number of people in the streets that I have ever seen in my life. 

Below: A Jubilee street party in May 1935. All over Britain, workers decorated their houses and streets, and made the most of the occasion with a spirit that must have dismayed ‘true socialists’. In his speech, the King made reference to the unemployed, saying ‘I grieve to think of the numbers of my people who are without work’.  The Stockport Chamber of Trade recommended a public holiday to mark the Jubilee but left it to the employers to decide whether or not to pay their workers.  As a result, only one mill gave the day off with pay, so that thousands of workers celebrated the Jubilee with a reduced pay packet.

Below: Earlier in the Jubilee year, Alderman F. Bowler, the leader of the local Labour Party, had led a protest march to the Town Hall (on 6 March) to fight inside the Council against the rate reduction of threepence in the pound, and for more jobs. The Labour group put down a motion urging the Council to ‘respond to the Prince Of Wales’ appeal to employers to engage an extra one per cent of men on permanent employment’. The photograph shows protesting men forming a cordon around the Town Hall. 

Why did so many workers vote Tory in December 1935?

Besides producing a different kind of factory worker, the new industries greatly augmented the middle class at its lower-paid end; it was these people, together with the old middle class of independent shopkeepers and small tradesmen and small businessmen, with the professional upper-middle class, the new financial and managerial upper class and the remnants of the land-owning aristocracy, who could have been expected to vote solidly for the National Government and stability. In the event, they were joined by at least half the old working classes who were in such dire straits, and this was a straight vote for tradition: ‘in the crisis’ they thought, as was often the case with British workers, that we shall be saved, if at all, by those who are used to ruling and governing according to well-tried formulae which in the past have put us on top. That was the reason for the huge parliamentary majorities for MacDonald, Baldwin and Chamberlain. René Cutforth summed up the British attitude as follows:

Put lucidly the proposition before the British nation in the 1930s would run something like this:

“In the last war nearly a million British men, in the younger half of the population, laid down their lives for King and Country/ Civilisation/ Freedom. Take your pick. Since we are not at this moment, as we sometimes feared we would be, a bankrupt German province, it can be said that their sacrifice saved us. We are now in the position of having to be saved again. It seems that the sacrifice required this time is that a further one and a half million, the permanently unemployed, lay down their lives, not abruptly and in violence like the soldiers: they will not even have to stop breathing, but ‘lives’ in the sense in which we want to preserve them in these islands, they cannot have. If this is what has to be, amen.”

Put like that, I don’t believe the proposition would have won a single vote, but in fact that is the way we voted and that is what happened. 

At the beginning of October 1935, Harold Nicolson, career diplomat and diarist, was offered a ‘safe’ seat in the National Labour interest at Leicester West in the November General Election. He jumped at the offer since he had been regarded as ‘damaged goods’ since his ill-starred flirtations with Beaverbrook and Mosley earlier in the decade. He was certainly not a socialist in any meaningful sense of the word, admitting himself that such socialism as he owned was ‘purely cerebral’ and that he did ‘not like the masses in the flesh’. So of course, Real Labour was out of the question, and Nicolson really saw himself as an Asquithian Liberal, but they were now extinct as a parliamentary organism. He had, therefore, wandered aimlessly along the political spectrum, from the New Party to National Labour, stopping off along the way to check out the Conservatives or the Liberals, without ever ideologically coming to rest at any one particular point. In his attempt to identify this point in public, he wrote a pamphlet for National Labour which took the form of an imaginary conversation between himself and a fellow passenger on a train journey between London and Leicester, published as Politics in the Train. He told his sceptical companion that how much he disliked sectional parties and bureaucrats, those that place their own interests or theories above the interests of the country as a whole. 

Although he favoured the concept of an organic state, he did not believe in rendering Britain a totalitarian State; in fact, he abhorred all forms of ‘isms’ and ‘dictatorships’. National Labour, he argued, represented ‘the future point of view’: it would base its policy on ‘Internal Reorganisation’ and ‘External Peace’. He believed in National Labour because he believed ‘in reality’ and Labour because he believed ‘in idealism’. He sympathised completely with the plight of the poor and thought of himself as belonging to a ‘progressive left-wing’. Although he considered Eton ‘the most perfect education system in all the world’, he deplored the class system in education and the division between public and council schools. Favouring equal education for all, he wanted people of any class to enjoy the privileges of the capitalist class, aiming at bringing Eton to the masses. These views were perhaps not so far removed from those emerging from George Orwell’s pen. But when Nicolson was writing in his diaries, he stated that while he had ‘always been on the side of the underdog’, he had also always believed in the hereditary principle. Once he sensed that his aristocratic values were under threat, he revealed his true colours.

But, knowing little of domestic politics and having nothing in common with the middle-class and working-class voters he sought to win over, he flinched from the cut and thrust of electioneering. The hustings held no appeal for him, especially when having to face working men and women lowing in disgust and hatred. He wrote in his diary after a campaign meeting in the constituency that he loathed every moment of the Election. His mood was not improved by the Liberals deciding at the last moment to enter a candidate, making it a much closer-run race.  When voting took place on 14 November, the contest could not have been more tightly fought.  After a recount, Nicolson sneaked in with a majority of just eighty-seven, much to the delight of his supporters. As he told his wife Vita later, I put all my philosophy of life into that Election. Yet it was a philosophy expressed by an Asquithian Liberal disguised as a National Labourite, propping up a National  Government controlled by the Conservatives led by Baldwin with the rump of National Labour trailing behind, led by an ailing Ramsay MacDonald, its eight members swallowed up in another huge Tory majority. MacDonald offered him a job as his Parliamentary Private Secretary, but he refused, explaining to Vita that:

… I fear that Ramsay is a vain and slightly vindictive old man … somewhat like King Charles I addressing the Cavaliers from the Whitehall scaffold. ‘You eight people … are at the seed-bed of seminal ideas. The young Tories are on your side. Work hard; think hard; and you will create a classless England.’ 

MacDonald also championed the idea of a ‘Tory Socialism’ which  Harold Nicolson must have considered to be almost as absurd as the notion of ‘a classless England’. It was fortunate for him that foreign affairs came to dominate the new Parliament as well as public opinion. On these matters, he was able to speak with authority and from experience not given to many MPs. His first opportunity to do so came sooner than he planned. On 19 December 1935, he rose from the backbenches to deliver his maiden speech at a dramatic moment, just after the Foreign Secretary, Samuel Hoare, had resigned over his role in the Hoare-Laval Pact which was designed to end the Ethiopian war which had been raging since October. The war in Abyssinia had already cost the Labour opposition its leader.

Despite the overwhelming victory of the ‘National Government’ at the General Election of November 1935, though now essentially a Conservative one, the recovery of the Labour Party under Clement Attlee’s leadership was evident in it gaining 154 seats, making it the major party of opposition to the Tories. George Lansbury, a committed pacifist, had resigned as the Leader of the Labour Party at the 1935 Party Conference on 8 October, after delegates voted in favour of sanctions against Italy for its aggression against Abyssinia. Lansbury had strongly opposed the policy and felt unable to continue leading the party. Taking advantage of the disarray in the Labour Party, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin, who had replaced MacDonald as PM in June of that year, announced on 19 October that a general election would be held on 14 November. With no time for a leadership contest, the party agreed that Attlee, as Deputy, should serve as interim leader, on the understanding that a leadership election would be held after the general election. Attlee, therefore, led Labour through the 1935 election, which saw the party stage a partial comeback from its disastrous 1931 performance, winning 38 per cent of the vote, the highest share Labour had won up to that point. Although numerically the result can be compared with the result of the 2019 Election, that is where the similarity ends. In historical terms, Labour was back on the road to its 1945 victory. Contemporaries also saw the result as a harbinger of things to come for Labour, as the letter written by the Liberal Marquess of Lothian to Lloyd George shortly after the election shows:

The Labour Party … is the party of the future; it proclaims that Socialism is the central issue of the century as democracy was of the last, and individual rights of earlier times, and has a vague, and largely unpractical programme of reform; it has behind it the interests of the Trade Unions and the co-operative movement reinforced by a steadily growing body of young intellectual Socialists. … The practical choice is between letting the Liberal Party die and encouraging liberally-minded people to join the other two parties in order to liberalise them and compel them both to be faithful to essential liberal tradition.

The Liberals won only twenty-one seats, losing eleven seats to Labour and four to the Tories. In fact, though, both the (by then) main parties benefited from the Liberal decline and, given the Conservative dominance after 1931, it was perhaps the Right rather than the Left which gained most in the long-term. More importantly, perhaps, the 1935 Election set the pattern for the post-war political system as a two-party rather than a multi-party democracy, especially in terms of governments.

Attlee Arrives, two Kings Depart. …

Attlee (pictured above in 1935) stood in the subsequent leadership election, held soon after, in which he was opposed by Herbert Morrison, who had just re-entered parliament in the recent election, and Arthur Greenwood: Morrison was seen as the favourite, but was distrusted by many sections of the party, especially the left-wing. Arthur Greenwood meanwhile was a popular figure in the party. Attlee was able to come across as a competent and unifying figure, particularly having already led the party through a general election. He went on to come first in both the first and second ballots, formally being elected Leader of the Labour Party on 3 December 1935. Writing in 1954, S. Haffner was clear about the significance of his two victories in Attlee’s career:

... As a statesman, Attlee’s formative period undoubtedly began in 1935. His party had been crushed at the 1931 election after the MacDonald ‘betrayal’; and Lansbury had proved quite ineffective as a parliamentary leader. So Attlee – one of the few Labour candidates to have survived the landslide – was told to act as leader until after the next election.

The Labour Party was in an almost hopeless mess – utterly defeated, and divided into quarrelling factions. Attlee, loyal, modest, impartial, clear-headed, capable of decision, and with the courage of his personal detachment, had precisely the qualities needed. In reuniting his broken party he added to those qualities a volume of experience in political management – so that he has quietly led the party ever since. It was at this time that the loyal Attlee learned to stomach disloyal colleagues. …

In his Memoirs (1964), the Earl of Kilmuir wrote that no-one could underestimate the strength of Attlee’s leadership. His contemporaries had tended to write him down as an amiable little man, but the Conservative peer regarded him as a shrewd, reasonable, and practical man … closer to the aspirations and difficulties of ordinary people than contemporary political leaders.

At five minutes to midnight on 20 January 1936, King George died at Sandringham in Norfolk. The public had been well prepared for the death of the King and a few hours earlier the BBC’s chief announcer had told the country; The King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close. He was sincerely mourned as the representative of tradition, stability and ‘the good old days’. At the end of January, vast crowds once more stood on the streets of London, some having waited all night to watch the King’s funeral procession.

The new King, Edward VIII had a very different image from his father’s and already, as Prince of Wales, he had become something of a hero among the unemployed in his role as patron of the National Council of Social Service. Having already toured the depressed areas in 1928, he had already irritated Stanley Baldwin as Prime Minister and other members of his cabinet, who at the beginning of 1936 were now in charge of the National Government. Later in the year, on touring the South Wales Coalfield once more, now as monarch, he had been heard to utter Dreadful! Something will be done about this! which was misreported as Something must be done! The first phrase might have been regarded as a promise of a re-doubling of efforts by charitable agencies, but the Government took umbrage at a time when Baldwin and the King were already protagonists in the abdication crisis. With that one misreported utterance, his reputation among ministers as ‘irresponsible’ was sealed together with his fate as King. Little wonder then that there were rumours of a march to London of South Wales miners to restore him as King, following his forced abdication.

The Radical Writers on the Left:

Another growing class in the Thirties was ‘a strange and disorderly mob’ according to René Cutforth. The Left referred to it as the ‘intelligentsia’, made up of intellectuals and artists and included a fair number of the rich and fashionable and their ‘hangers-on’. Cutforth commented that in the Thirties this layer of the population went violently Red almost overnight. This new mood was born at Oxford University and led by its young poets, Wyston Auden, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day Lewis and, a little later, Louis MacNeice. They were called the ‘Auden Group’ but all they had in common was a frame of mind – outrage at the plight of the poor and the ‘smugness’ of the rest. They launched the revolutionary movement which was to create the most characteristic intellectual climate of the time, and from the start, Auden’s was the voice of the decade. What they were after was a Bolshevik-style revolution. It was to arrive with ‘the death of the Old Gang, the death of us’. Auden always sounded as if ten thousand revolutionaries were fighting to snatch his words from the press as they appeared. In fact, the audience was so small that it often seemed that these poets were writing for each other.

It was just possible in the early Thirties to believe that social justice was flowering in the Soviet Union and that mankind was on its way to the millennium via Moscow, but even then only to addicts of Communist belief who were the Thirties’ most characteristic academic product. For these, the Soviet Union was the sacred cow, and any word of criticism of it was no mere disagreement or even heresy, but rank blasphemy. Most of the intellectuals on the Left were far too ‘committed’ to bother to get the facts right, and later plenty of them dismissed Stalin’s terror brightly as ‘necessary for the creation of the new order’. The Thirties was the great age of illusion in which intellectuals could believe anything they wanted, regardless of the available evidence to the contrary, and frequently did.

The Marxists expected the Revolution ‘any week now’. Capitalism was supposed to be on its last legs, to have at most a few tottering years to run. One good push would topple it over, and then the road to socialism would be found out of the ensuing chaos and catastrophe. C. Day Lewis wrote:

Drug nor isolation will cure this cancer.

It is now or never the hour of the knife,

The break with the past, the major operation. 

In many ways, he was speaking for his time. The idea of the ‘necessary chaos’ was the notion underlying all the art of the Thirties. The revolution was seen by Auden as making the artist’s private sensibility an irrelevance; the revolutionary poet should remain absolutely detached, like a surgeon or a scientist. He believed, therefore, that poetry should reflect this by being classical and austere:

Financier, leaving your little room

Where the money is made but not spent, …

The game is up for you and the others,

Who, thinking, pace in slippers on the lawns

Of College Quad or Cathedral Close, …

Seekers after happiness, all who follow

The convulsions of your simple wish,

It is later than you think.

The last line of Auden’s poem might well have been an apt motto of his whole ‘group’. Throughout the decade, however, George Orwell maintained a critical view of the group in particular and the orthodox Soviet-worshippers in general, whom he regarded as divorced from humanity: they had never met anyone outside their own social class, he said, annoying them greatly because they knew he was right. Even if they were intellectually exciting and were genuine poets, they were most genuine when least political, and their political achievements were very limited. Far more effective politically was Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club, established in May 1936 with forty thousand readers who each received a book a month, chosen by Gollancz and two other Marxist intellectuals, John Strachey and Stafford Cripps, to revitalise and educate the ‘British Left’. It was not necessary to be either a Marxist or even a Socialist to be on ‘the Left’ in the Thirties. There was also a large, somewhat vague area of opinion which called itself ‘anti-fascist’, and it was to those of this opinion that the Left Book Club addressed itself. The use of the word ‘Left’ was known from the nineteenth century due to the adversarial nature of parliamentary seating according to the Speaker’s position in the Commons, but it was not ‘common’ as a general description before the 1920s. The Left Book Club helped to make it a synonym for ‘Socialist’ since it became a key left-wing institution of the late 1930s and the 1940s, with over sixty thousand readers. According to Cutforth, the Left Book Club exerted a strong influence on the mind of the decade.

‘The Autobiography of a Miner Working in South Wales’, London: Gollancz, 1939.

Perhaps this is best exemplified by its best-known book, written in 1936 and published the following year, written by the most influential author of the Thirties and Forties, if not the century. Three days after the King’s funeral at the end of January 1936, George Orwell left London by train on the beginning of a journey of journalism, investigation and self-discovery. Victor Gollancz had commissioned him to write a book on Britain’s ravaged industrial north, and for this purpose, Orwell wanted to see the effects of unemployment and experience the British working class ‘at close quarters’. At that time, he was a contributor to the left-wing literary journal, The Adelphi. George Orwell was the first writer to travel to the north to report on the horrors of poverty and deprivation to be found there. J. B. Priestley had already journeyed around Britain in the Autumn of 1933, and his best-seller, English Journey, had drawn attention to the awful conditions to towns in the Midlands and the North. Priestley, the bestselling novelist and playwright, used his journalistic skills to write a travelogue about his ‘sojourns’ in various towns and cities in the previous year. It seems to describe England in accurate, realistic terms, contrasted with Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier of a year later, which was written with the main aim of filling the English middle classes with guilt and so exaggerated some of the evidence gathered to gain that effect. The spectre of Bolshevism which he also used to great effect, later became one of the facets of the mythology of the Thirties, and Priestley provided a useful corrective to a view which, as Orwell later admitted, emphasised the worst rather than the improving features of British society. Orwell’s view was as bleakly pessimistic as it could be; Priestley was ever the optimist.

There was also a growing sense, felt especially keenly on the left, that while much was known about the British Empire, the experience of the working classes at home had been hidden for too long. To put this right a number of groundbreaking novels were published on the subject, one or two of them written by working-class authors. The most successful of these was Walter Greenwood’s Love on the Dole, a moving account of an unemployed family in Salford, where the author grew up. It was a best-seller, later made into a play (in which this author played a leading role in the early eighties) and a film. Left-wing film-makers, led by the pioneering producer John Grierson, were using the new medium of the documentary film in the hope of creating a new perspective on a Britain, in which at least two nations existed in parallel realities.

At the beginning of 1936, Britain was still a class-bound and divided nation, split between a rapidly modernising and growing ‘south’ and the impoverished peripheral regions of south Wales, northern England and central Scotland.  For Priestley, the ‘two nations’ view of the Thirties was greatly oversimplified. There was certainly depression and appalling human suffering but it was localised rather than general as the Thirties progressed. Equally, in parts of the Midlands, there were ‘blackspots’ of high unemployment among the generally prosperous  ‘new industry towns’ as Orwell had also noted in his diary on his journey, partly on foot, through the Midlands from Coventry to Birmingham to Cheshire before taking the train to Manchester. Priestley wrote of how he had seen England:

I had seen a lot of Englands. How many? At once, three disengaged themselves from the shifting mass. There was first, Old England, the country of cathedrals and minsters and manor houses and inns, of Parson and Squire, guidebook and quaint highways and byways England … But we all know this England, which at best cannot be improved upon in the world. …

Then, I decided, there is the nineteenth-century England, the industrial England of coal, iron, steel, cotton, wool, railways, of thousands of rows of little houses all alike, sham Gothic churches, square-faced chapels, Town Halls, Mechanics’ Institutes, mills, foundries, warehouses, refined watering-places, Pier Pavilions, Family and Commercial Hotels, … This England makes up the larger part of the Midlands and the North and exists everywhere; but it is not being added to and has no new life poured into it. To the more fortunate people it was not a bad England at all, very solid and comfortable. …

The third England, I concluded, was the new post-war England, belonging far more to the age itself than to this island. … This is theEngland of arterial and by-pass roads, of filling stations and factories that look like exhibiting buildings, of giant cinemas and dance-halls and cafés,  … You could almost accept Woolworth’s as its symbol. … In this England, for the first time in history, Jack and Jill are nearly as good as their master and mistress. … Most of the work  … is rapidly becoming standardised in this new England, and its leisure is being handed over to standardisation too. …

Here then were the three Englands I had seen, the Old, the Nineteenth-Century and the New; and as I looked back on my journey I saw how these three were variously and most fascinatingly mingled in every part of the country I had visited. …. 

North of Manchester:

George Orwell was just one of a host of journalists, economists, sociologists, medical experts and nutritionists who produced reports in 1936 that were to be seminal in the envisioning and formation of the welfare state in the next decade. But Orwell was different. He scorned journalist such as Priestley for their ‘middle-class writing’. He didn’t wish to study the poor and then go off to a comfortable hotel to rest and recuperate. He wanted to plunge into people’s lives, albeit briefly, and experience working-class life at first hand. In his desire to immerse himself in poverty and discomfort an urge for self-punishment and a degree of voyeurism, a tradition in English literature of slum-visiting that went back to Mayhew and Dickens. Orwell had first become familiar with the world of poverty (of a different kind) by becoming a tramp in order to describe this world in Down and Out in Paris and London. Denys Blakeway has recently written of the impact on him of his journey north:

Orwell, the former Imperial policeman who had served in Burma, had never been to the North of England before; he had never seen the smoking chimneys and satanic mills of the industrial areas that had given rise to to Britain’s wealth and that were home to its worst oppression. Like a latter-day Engels, he experienced an epiphany, as what he saw changed him from a sceptical liberal into an unorthodox but nevertheless committed socialist, ready later in the year to fight for the cause in Spain.   

Arriving in Manchester, Orwell was put in touch with Jerry Kennan, an activist and unemployed coal miner in Wigan who took him to the town’s market square, where every weekend a series of political meetings took place. These were attempts, mostly unsuccessful, to engage workers in radical action, much of which took place outside of the sterile world of the coalition government in Westminster. According to Kennan, that Saturday afternoon there were several meetings going on in the square, held by the ILP, the Communist Party, the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, and various religious bodies. The NUWM was much mistrusted by the authorities as a Communist front, but by the jobless, it was widely regarded as the most effective organisation working on their behalf. It had been responsible for many hunger marches and protests against the Means Test that had helped to raise awareness of the suffering of unemployment through the years of depression. Kennan and his guest headed for the NUWM shelter, a dreadful, ramshackle place, he wrote, although he acknowledged that it was warm and welcoming. When the men there learned about his mission, they immediately offered help with finding information and, more importantly, lodgings. To his discomfort, however, his southern origins and background could not be hidden, and the men insisted on calling him ‘Sir’. In 1936, his class could not be easily disguised, and Orwell’s public school accent would have been unmistakable, however scruffy he may have appeared after days and nights spent on the road to Wigan.

On the first evening in Wigan, Orwell went as a guest of the NUWM to Wigan’s Co-operative Hall to hear Wal Hannington, a veteran activist, one of Gollancz’s authors, and the leader of the Movement. He was also one of the founding members of the CPGB, which made him an object of state suspicion and police surveillance. Stanley Baldwin saw activists such as Hannington as real dangers to the security of the realm. The CPGB and the NUWM had been behind numerous strikes, sit-ins and hunger marches during the previous five years, and within the establishment, there was genuine fear of revolution. Orwell dismissed Hannington as a ‘poor speaker’ who used all ‘the padding and clichés of the socialist orator’, but was impressed by the audience’s response and ‘surprised by the amount of Communist feeling’. At the time, the CPGB had only 11,500 members in Britain compared with the 400,000 members of the Labour Party, but its popularity and influence extended far beyond its membership. When Hannington told his audience that, in a war between Britain and the USSR, the latter would win, he was greeted with ‘loud cheers’. The Soviet Union under Stalin was revered by many, from founding members of the Labour Party, like Sidney and Beatrice Webb, the authors of Soviet Communism: A New Civilisation; like H. G. Wells and G. B. Shaw; like the young Oxbridge intellectuals mentioned above and like the ‘working-class radicals’. such as B L Coombes (see his book cover above).

George Bernard Shaw, the other ‘ancient’, was still writing, though he had nothing much to contribute in the Thirties. He enjoyed showing off in the newspapers and, together with Wells, both of them committed socialists, made a trip to Moscow and came back with a rose-tinted view of Soviet life. Bertrand Russell meanwhile, committed to the pursuit of the truth, also went to the Soviet capital and reported that Stalin was indeed a cruel man and that life in Russia was indeed Red but far from rosy. But most intellectuals were still more influenced by ‘Victorian’ liberal writers, like W. B. Yeats, one of whose verses from ‘The Second Coming’ seemed to fit the times and was always being quoted:

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

As 1936 progressed, the call for action for Priestley’s nineteenth-century Britain to have new life poured into it, for something to be done, became stronger. As L. J. Williams (1971), the economic historian, pointed out, although the size and nature of the unemployment problem changed comparatively little over the two decades of the inter-war period, there was, with the flood of writing, research and social heart-searching on the topic, a much greater awareness of the basically localised and structural nature of the unemployment problem. With the publication of Keynes’ General Theory, 1936 became the key year for advancing (but not implementing) modern economic solutions to the problem of unemployment. By this time, it was clear that the British economy had recovered from its low point at the beginning of 1932, and was growing rapidly compared with its European rivals, and even compared with the USA. At the same time, to the government’s great embarrassment, a number of studies of unemployment and poverty were revealing the causal link with poor health. Orwell’s publisher, Victor Gollancz, commissioned one of these studies from the Medical Officer of Health for Stockton-on-Tees, whose research showed that an appalling ninety-four per cent of children in County Durham schools had signs of rickets as a result of poor diet. In March, the future PM and Conservative MP for Stockton,  Harold Macmillan, published Sir John Boyd Orr’s massive study, Food, Health and Income. This was an act of rebellion by a Conservative MP representing a northern industrial constituency. The government had done its best to suppress the study, which revealed the devastating fact that:

… one third of the population of this country, including all the unemployed, were unable, after paying rent, to purchase sufficient of the more expensive foods to give them an adequate diet.

Moreover, Boyd Orr calculated that that half the population did not eat ‘up to the modern health standard’. Rural poverty was also shown to be rising rapidly. Ted Willis, a young socialist in 1936, recalled how his mother used to go out and buy four pennyworths of scrag end of lamb and with that, she would make a big stew which would last us two or three days. On one occasion, he came home to find his mother putting a lid on the stew and taking it out of the house.  When he protested at her taking it to a neighbour’s house, his mother slapped his face, saying You’re hungry, but they’re starving!  In 1934 a National Assistance Board had been created, which set a uniform rate for ‘unemployment assistance throughout the country.’ In general, benefits to the unemployed were cut by about ten per cent in the 1930s. In South Wales, Central Scotland and the North of England, unemployed people were much more reliant on means-tested and discretionary benefits than insurance. This was because periods of unemployment in these areas were longer, forcing unemployed workers onto ‘the dole’ when their insurance benefits ran out. This fuelled the sense of shame and anger among the unemployed and their families. René Cutforth commented on the continuing plight of the unemployed throughout the decade:

To the end of the decade about a million and a half workers were relegated to limbo and their lives laid waste. But not without a struggle. 

Fighting back; Marching on …

The unemployed ‘struggled’ against their condition by marching, organising rallies and engaging in rent strikes. Led by Wal Hannington of the CPGB, the NUWM had around twenty thousand members by 1932, with the active support of at least twice that number. Their most famous actions were the ‘Hunger Marches’ of 1932, 1934 and 1936. There were also protest marches against the introduction and operation of the means test, particularly from Scotland and South Wales. The photographs below show Wal Hannington and Harry McShane leading the Scottish marchers and contingents from Teeside and Sunderland crossing the Tyne Bridge in 1932.

The pictures of the 1934 March on the left below are two of those taken of the women’s column which marched to London from Derby. They capture the feeling of comradeship and purpose that existed between the marchers on their wintry trek to London. The shots of the first aid treatment of blistered feet demonstrate the determination of the women, either unemployed themselves or having out-of-work husbands. The marchers all depended on the goodwill of local labour organisations to provide nightly accommodation during the journey. The picture on the right shows heads turning in the crowd that gathered in Trafalgar Square on 3rd March, as they watched the approach of the marchers. 

The picture of Trafalgar Square shows all heads turned as as section of the audience see the approach of the marchers.

The March Council had requested a meeting with the PM, Ramsay MacDonald in a letter supported by a number of Labour MPs, but they did not succeed in putting their case to the House of Commons, though they had the support of a large number of MPs including Sir Herbert Samuel, leader of the Liberal opposition. Clement Attlee also spoke up for the marchers, saying that they were …

… fair representatives of the unemployed. The injustice from which these men and women suffer is very widely known in all parts of the House and the feeling in the country is now tremendous … there is no reason why these men should be refused a hearing by the cabinet.

The marchers sent a delegation to Downing Street, led by two ILP MPs, Maxton and McGovern, and the two Communist leaders of the NUWM, Hannington and McShane. He was ‘not at home’, but, in an outburst in the Commons, asked, …

… Has anybody who cares to come to London, either on foot or in first-class carriages, the constitutional right to demand to see me, to take up my time whether I like it or not? I say he has nothing of the kind! 

However, the most successful march was not organised by the NUWM and in fact, eschewed any involvement from it and other sectarian organisations. In fact, ‘The Jarrow Crusade’ of October 1936 owed that success to the determinedly non-political and cross-party organisation of its leaders, most notably that of the town’s Labour (and ILP) MP, Ellen Wilkinson with the official support of Jarrow’s Mayor, Bill Thompson, who was a Labour man, but insisted that it should have the backing of all parties. It was an entirely bipartisan, peaceful march for jobs, approved by the whole Council, which also enjoyed the support of many local and regional Church leaders, including the Bishop of Sheffield, though (infamously) not the Bishop of Durham. It involved two hundred carefully-chosen, relatively fit unemployed men. Jarrow was one of the worst-hit areas in England, largely because of the closure of its shipyard, with eighty per cent of its workers on the dole. The ‘crusaders’ carried over eighty thousand signatures to Parliament, asking the House of Commons to realise the urgent need that work should be provided without delay. They achieved little in the short-term by way of economic relief but did draw widespread public attention to the plight of the unemployed ‘left behind’ in the older industrial areas as the economy as a whole recovered in 1936, due to the expansion of newer industries and the beginnings of rearmament.

The Labour Party, together with the TUC, was fearful of the taint of Communism that went with hunger marches and instructed local branches to reject requests for help from the crusaders as they passed. Some delegates at the Party conference in Edinburgh that October attacked Ellen Wilkinson directly. One of them, Lucy Middleton, criticised her for sending hungry and ill-clad men on a march to London, advocating the making of propaganda films about the distressed areas instead. This ‘stab in the back’ from her own party was one which would rankle for years to come. Though hailing from one of the poorer areas of Coming from metropolitan Manchester herself, Wilkinson soon discovered that, in a tight-knit community such as Jarrow, where almost all were workless, the highly-skilled man, the ambitious young foreman, the keenest trade-unionists provided the leadership for the unemployed. One such man was David Riley, the Council leader, a hefty Irishman with an iron will. He volunteered to lead them on the road to London and it was he who insisted that this would be a ‘crusade’, not another hunger march. An appeal for signatures for the petition and funds was made under the Mayor’s name and Thompson used his civic position to gain the support of the many Conservative town councils along the route south. Paradoxically, it was the Conservative councils who most often held out the hand of friendship to the crusaders. Following Thompson’s request, and joint letters from the Conservative and Labour agents, they offered food and lodging at every Tory-controlled town and village through which the men passed, including Harrogate, Leeds and Sheffield.

Ellen Wilkinson (pictured above, leading the Crusade) had described herself, on more than one occasion, as a ‘revolutionary socialist’, and had needed a great deal of persuasion not to raise the issues of party politics during the Crusade. She was the moving spirit in Jarrow, a small, slight, red-haired ball of fire, the year before, during the General Election campaign, she had led a march to ‘beard’ Ramsay MacDonald in his constituency of Seaham, fifteen miles away. In the event, all that march achieved was a bleating admonition from the cornered statesman:

Ellen, why don’t you go out and preach Socialism, which is the only remedy for all this?

On 5 October, the two hundred men set out under a banner, ‘Jarrow Crusade’ to march to London, three hundred miles away, as an official delegation to Parliament. Everybody turned out to watch them go. The Mayor and Mayoress led them for the first twelve miles and, after that, Ellen Wilkinson. David Riley insisted on the removal of any socialist banners that appeared with sympathisers along the route. One marcher was sent home for expressing ‘communistic beliefs’ and another was threatened with expulsion. It was an effective policy since other marches were ignored, whereas the Crusade received widespread friendly attention from the press, and the march became a long-running national story. The government became alarmed by its popularity, as the Manchester Guardian reported that there could be no doubt that the march was an abounding success – the organisation seems well-nigh perfect. The Cabinet issued a statement in a parliamentary democracy, processions to London cannot claim to have any constitutional influence on policy.  No deputations would be received by ministers.

This response might have been expected, but the crusaders’ reception by the Labour town council in Chesterfield was surprising, considering the welcome they had just received from the Sheffield Tories. The pleas for assistance were turned down, forcing the marchers to rely on the charity of local businessmen, mainly Tories, for food and blankets. Ellen Wilkinson recalled how they weighed in with hot meals and a place to sleep. A clear pattern was emerging, with the Conservatives welcoming and Labour shunning, a pattern which continued to the end of the trek, to the enduring bitterness of all the crusaders. In Leicester, however, the Co-op worked all night mending their boots. Bedford, in the suspect south, rallied to their support. They arrived in London in a cloudburst with their mouth-organ band playing ‘The Minstrel Boy’. On their final evening in London, they had hoped to be addressed by the London Labour leader, Herbert Morrison, together with an audience of influential Londoners. In the event, he did not show up, probably on the orders of the national leadership, and had to be replaced by Canon Dick Sheppard as the keynote speaker (pictured below).

The next morning the crusaders went to the House of Commons, dressed in smart suits specially bought for the occasion with funds raised during the march. They were expecting to deliver the petition, but Stanley Baldwin, with the support of Neville Chamberlain (pictured above) refused to allow the men to come to the bar of the House to deliver the petition in person. To avoid any ugly scenes, Ellen Wilkinson gave them a guided tour of Westminster and then packed the majority of the men onto a River Thames pleasure-boat for a sightseeing cruise. It was a deception cooked up with Sir John Jarvis, a Surrey MP with longstanding charitable connections to Jarrow. Only a few of the men were allowed to watch from the Strangers’ Gallery while Wilkinson went through the solemn procedure of presenting the petition to the Speaker. She spoke tearfully of their plight, but Runciman, who had said earlier that Jarrow must work out its own salvation, refused to answer a question because it was not on the order paper, although he did say that his information was that the situation in Jarrow was improving. Baldwin refused to say anything, and that was it. When they arrived back in Jarrow by train, the speakers at the Town Hall put a brave face on the obvious failure of the crusade. The goal of the march was to get the National Government to overturn the decision to close down the shipyard, not to put up a new steelworks, as Jarvis had proposed at the last minute, looking like a ‘fairy-godfather’, but in reality, simply trying to help save the Conservative Party from an electoral wipe-out in a region devastated by economic malaise.

Nevertheless, the crusaders had aroused a sympathy throughout the country which compels the Government to act, as David Riley told them. By rejecting class-based politics and appealing to broader social sympathies, the Jarrow Crusade had touched the hearts of many for whom talk of the distressed areas had meant nothing until they saw it in person or on the newsreels. With its military discipline, and containing in its ranks many veterans of the First World War, it harked back to that conflict, evoking in the onlooker feelings of compassion and guilt. The Crusade was also one of the foundations of a new consensus that was emerging and would solidify after the Second World War. The country came to agree almost unanimously that such extremes of poverty should never be allowed to return. A new, very British idea of social justice was emerging and a collective opinion-forming that would eventually give rise to the welfare state. Jarrow was the classic march, but even while it was going on, other marches were in progress. Four hundred Scotsmen from Glasgow, for instance, were marching south to join up with other contingents from South Wales and elsewhere to protest against the means test, as seen in the photos below. Marching became an epidemic in the Thirties in Britain.

The NUWM had no difficulty in raising a Welsh contingent of eight hundred men and contingents of women for the biggest and most united of the hunger marches against the means test in November 1936. The two postcard-size photographs below came from South Wales. When the eight hundred marchers, carrying their Keir Hardie banner from Aberdare, reached Slough, they were greeted by eleven thousand compatriots, because by that time Slough had become known as ‘little Wales’ peopled by migrants from the valleys. 

The photograph below shows some of the Welsh marchers lining up outside Cater Street School, Camberwell, where they were to spend the night, prior to the march to the Hyde Park rally. Among the speakers were Aneurin Bevan MP and Clement Attlee. The former said that ‘The hunger marchers have achieved one thing. They have for the first time in the history of the labour movement achieved a united platform. Communists, ILPers, Socialists, members of the Labour Party and Co-operators for the first time have joined hands together and we are not going to unclasp them.’ The latter moved the resolution that ‘the scales (of unemployment benefit) are insufficient to meet the bare physical needs of the unemployed. …’

From the Threat of Revolution to the Promise of Reform:

Politicians of all the parliamentary parties began to fear a revolution by the end of 1936, not least because there were Fascists as well as Communists marching. The Church became involved with William Temple, the Christian Socialist Archbishop of York commissioning a scientific inquiry into long-term unemployment, Men Without Work, based on the experiences of the jobless for twelve months up to November 1936 as its evidence. Researchers were sent out across Britain as a whole to immerse themselves in the areas of greatest poverty, staying in the households of the workless. Besides being a national survey, those sent by Archbishop Temple were experts, unlike Orwell. They were economists, psychologists and social scientists, funded by the Pilgrim Trust and supervised by the Director of the London School of Economics, Sir William Beveridge, who advised them to study in detail the lives of a thousand long-term unemployed men, and their families; their health, living conditions and physical environment. Beveridge was able, from 1942, to use their findings to provide the evidential basis for the creation of the post-war Welfare State.

One of these researchers was a young Jewish refugee, Hans Singer. A brilliant economist, he had moved to Britain to study under his hero, John Maynard Keynes. Having escaped from Nazi Germany, Singer found him himself the victim of anti-Semitic abuse as a professor at Istanbul and moved to Cambridge. After two years, Keynes recommended him to Temple because of his interest in unemployment. His detailed research papers, archived at the LSE, are essential sources for social historians of the period. Many of these, along with the Pilgrim Trust Report in full, were not published until 1937, by which time the argument for ‘Planning’ had already been won. But the devil still remained in the detail of the implementation, in which the Labour Party had little if any official responsibility, except on a local basis. However, together with a more united and progressive Left, they did have increasing influence over public opinion nationally and regionally.

Sources:

René Cutforth (1976), Later Than We Thought: A Portrait of the Thirties. Newton Abbott: David & Charles.

Norman Rose (2005), Harold Nicolson. London: Pimlico.

Bill Lancaster & Tony Mason (ed.) (n.d.), Life & Labour in a Twentieth-Century City: The Experience of Coventry. Coventry (University of Warwick): The Cryfield Press.

Richard Brown & Christopher Daniels (1982), Documents & Debates: Twentieth-Century Britain. Basingstoke: Macmillan Education.

Denys Blakeway (2011), The Last Dance: 1936 – The Year Our Lives Changed. London: John Murray (Publishers).

Michael Clark & Peter Teed (eds.) (1972), Portraits & Documents: Twentieth Century, 1906-1960. London: Hutchinson Educational.

John Gorman (1980), To Build Jerusalem: A Photographic Remembrance of British Working Class Life, 1875-1950. London: Scorpion Publications.

Joanna Bourke et. al. (2001), The Penguin Atlas of British & Irish History. London: Penguin Books.

 

The Royal Oak & the Graf Spee; Orkney to Montevideo:

Above: HMS Royal Oak at anchor in 1937

Eighty years ago, On 14 October 1939, HMS Royal Oak was anchored at Scapa Flow in Orkney, Scotland, when she was torpedoed by Lieutenant-Commander Günther Prien’s submarine U-47. It got through a fifty-foot gap in the defences of Scapa Flow and fired seven torpedoes at the 29,000-ton battleship, of which three hit the ship, capsizing it. After the sinking of HMS Courageous the previous month, this was an almost equally spectacular symbolic success for the Kriegsmarine. Of Royal Oak‘s complement of 1,234 men and boys, 835 were killed, 810 in only thirteen minutes that night, the others dying later of their wounds.  While the loss of the outdated ship, the first of the five Royal Navy battleships and battlecruisers sunk in the Second World War, did little to affect the numerical superiority enjoyed by the British navy and its Allies, the sinking had a considerable effect on wartime morale. The raid made an immediate celebrity and war hero out of Günther Prien, who became the first German submarine officer to be awarded the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross. Before the sinking of Royal Oak, the Royal Navy had considered the naval base at Scapa Flow impregnable to submarine attack, and U-47‘s raid demonstrated that the German Navy was capable of bringing the war to British home waters. The shock resulted in rapid changes to dockland security and the construction of the Churchill Barriers around Scapa Flow.

One task of the U-boats was to place magnetic mines in the sea-lanes around the British Isles; this could be done by low-flying Heinkel He-IIIS and by E-boats (motor torpedo boats, shown in the painting on the right) and destroyers. Lacking a large surface fleet, the German Navy used small vessels for fast hit-and-run attacks.

By the end of November, these had sunk twenty-nine British ships, including the destroyer HMS Gipsy and had also put the brand-new cruiser HMS Belfast out of action for three years. Through the immense bravery of bomb-disposal experts Lieutenant-Commanders R C Lewis and J. G. D. Ouvry, who removed the two detonators, one of which was ticking audibly, from a mine spotted in the Thames Estuary, the secrets of the steel-hull activated device were discovered. Within a month, Admiralty scientists had discovered ways of counteracting the mines by fitting electric cables around ships’ hulls, to create a negative magnetic, or ‘degaussed’ field. Soon afterwards a means of blowing up the mines, using wooden-hulled trawlers towing buoyant electrical cables, was also invented.

The map above shows the early stages of the Battle of the Atlantic, from 1939 to 1941, with the green line showing the areas of severe U-boat impact. While in the U-boat Germany had deployed a potentially war-winning weapon and it also had three purpose-built ‘pocket-battleship’ commerce raiders and two powerful modern battleships, the Bismarck and the Tirpitz, launched early in the war, there were always too few to challenge the Royal Navy directly. Instead, as in the First World War, Germany was once again made use of its limited naval resources to attack Britain’s sea communications. Its formidable capital ships were used as raiders against British commerce. Tracking down and destroying these threats severely stretched British resources. It was the spotting, disabling and forced scuttling of the German pocket battleship the Admiral Graf Spee that was the RN’s greatest victory during the so-called Phoney War. Operating off South American coast, Captain Hans Lansdorff’s ship had enjoyed considerable success at the beginning of the war, sinking ten ships totalling more than fifty thousand tons. The term ‘pocket’ battleship is somewhat misleading, however, since although a limit of ten thousand tons had been imposed on German warships by the Treaty of Versailles, once the Graf Spee was loaded up with her six eight-inch, eight 5.9-inch and six 4.1-inch guns, as well as ammunition and stores, she weighed more than half as much again.

In the Battle of the River Plate on 13 December, off the coast of Uruguay, the German ship took on the eight-inch guns of the cruiser HMS Exeter, along with the six-inch guns of the light cruisers HMS Ajax and the New Zealander-crewed HMS Achilles, badly damaging the first two ships. However, she was eventually outfought by the three British cruisers and was forced into the harbour of Montevideo, capital of neutral Uruguay, on 15 December by the pounding she had received. Langsdorff then magnanimously released the Allied sailors he captured from ships he had sunk, who reported they had been well-treated. Then, mistakenly trusting to BBC radio broadcasts about the imminent arrival of the aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal and the battlecruiser HMS Renown, and unable to hire a small plane to see whether this was in fact so, Langsdorff then sailed the Graf Spee to the entrance of Montevideo  harbour just before dusk on Sunday, 17 December and scuttled her. The explosions were watched by over twenty thousand spectators on the shore and heard on the radio by millions around the world. In fact, only the cruiser HMS Cumberland had managed to reach Montevideo; the BBC had patriotically participated in releasing a giant ‘fake news’ story. Five days later, Langsdorff shot himself.

Back to Europe: Poland, the Baltic States & Finland:

Meanwhile, in Poland, by 5 October, resistance to the Nazi-Soviet Pact forces had ended; 217,000 Polish soldiers taken captive by Soviets, 619,000 by Germans; up to 100,000 escaped via Lithuania, Hungary and Romania to join Free Polish forces under General Wladyslaw Sikorski, Prime Minister in exile in Angers, France. Seventy thousand Polish soldiers and twenty-five thousand civilians had been killed, and 130,000 soldiers lay wounded. A hundred thousand Poles in the Russian ‘sector’ were arrested by the NKVD and sent to concentration camps, from which hardly any returned. Adolf Hitler travelled to Warsaw by special train to visit victorious troops. Then, on 10 October, Admiral Erich Raeder urged Hitler to consider invading Norway as a way of protecting the transportation of iron ore from northern Sweden to Germany and establishing U-boat stations along the fjords, especially at Trondheim. Hitler ordered the OKW to start planning for an invasion in January 1940. At that point, Hitler did not want to divert troops from the attack he was planning in the west and was persuaded to do so only by signs that the Allies were planning to invade Norway themselves, possibly using aid for Finland as a cloak for their actions.

Political Reaction to the Polish War in Britain:

Even at the very late hour of August 1939, there were some ministers who publicly argued for the continuation of the appeasement policy. War is not only not inevitable, said Sir Thomas Inskip, the Minister for Defence Co-ordination, seeking to reassure the British public, but it is unlikely. R A (Richard Austen) Butler, later responsible for the 1944 Education Act, then Under Secretary of State at the Foreign Office, praised Harold Nicolson’s Penguin Special book as a work of art and perfectly correct. As the Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax sat in the Lords, Butler was the Government’s spokesman in the Commons, valiantly defending its policy. An enthusiastic Chamberlainite, he regarded Munich not as a means of buying time but as a way of settling differences with Hitler. An unrepentant appeaser down to the outbreak of war, Butler even opposed the Polish alliance signed on 25 August, claiming it would have a bad psychological effect on Hitler. Critics of Chamberlain’s post-Prague policy for ignoring the necessity of encirclement thus found common cause with the ardent appeasers, though Butler himself remained loyal to Chamberlain, even after his final fall from grace. He blamed the Prime Minister’s demise and ultimate disgrace on the growing influence of Sir Horace Wilson at this time, as, for different reasons, did Nicolson.

However, even the tiny window of ‘encirclement’ was soon shut and shuttered by the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. For those on the Left of British politics, both inside Parliament and out,  this represented an unthinkable nightmare and spelt the immediate decapitation of the idea of a Popular Front with communism against the Fascist threat. In particular, Nicolson’s argument for an alliance with the Soviet Union was suddenly invalidated. When he heard of it, Harold Nicolson was, like Drake at the time of the Spanish Armada, on Plymouth Sound. He rushed back to London, to hear Chamberlain’s statement to the House. The PM was like a coroner summing up a murder case, Harold suggested. Although sympathetic to Chamberlain’s hopeless plight, he agreed with the verdict of Lloyd George and Churchill that the PM was a hopeless old crow… personally to blame for this disaster. 

As Hitler wasted no time in crossing the border into Poland at daybreak on 1 September, the moral and diplomatic disaster became a military reality. Later the same day, Churchill was asked to join a small War Cabinet, a sign to all that Chamberlain had finally accepted that reality and now meant business. When the PM addressed the House that evening, visibly under tremendous emotional stress, he read out the allied dispatch sent to Berlin. This contained the familiar words that unless Germany gave a firm pledge to suspend all military activities and to withdraw its troops from Poland, Britain would instantly honour its obligations. However, there was no time limit attached to the word ‘instantly’ at this stage, so the dispatch could not be read as anything more than a warning. It was not an ultimatum. Apparently, this was largely due to the procrastination of the French Government, which, even at this late hour, was hoping for another Munich Conference to be held within 48 hours.

When the House met again the next evening, Chamberlain’s statement was still loosely-phrased.  Was there to be another Munich? was the unspoken question in everyone’s mind, if not on their lips. When the opposition spokesman, Arthur Greenwood, rose to speak, there were shouts from the Tory benches urging him to Speak for Britain. Chamberlain turned around to his own backbenches as if stung. The House adjourned in indescribable confusion and the Cabinet reconvened in Downing Street on what, by all accounts, was literally a very stormy night. The Cabinet decided to present the ultimatum at nine in the morning in Berlin, to expire two hours later. Chamberlain ended the meeting with the words Right, gentlemen..this means war, quietly spoken, after which there was a deafening thunderclap.

As Chamberlain himself remarked soon afterwards, no German answer to the allied ultimatum was forthcoming before 11 a.m. on the third. Harold Nicolson attended a gathering of the Eden group. At 11.15 they heard Chamberlain’s announcement. For them, as for the masses of British people listening, it seemed like the present did not exist, only the future and the past. What could any of them, with all their grandness and wealth, do now? In a strained and disgusted voice, Chamberlain told a benumbed British people that, after all, they were now at war with Germany. As if a harbinger of the nine-month ‘phoney war’ which was to follow, the air-raid siren sounded the last of the Thirties’ false alarms. In the chamber of the House of Commons, an ill-looking Prime Minister made a ‘restrained speech’. As Nicolson drove out of London towards his home at Sissinghurst in Kent, a convoy of evacuees overtook them. From one of the trucks, an elderly lady accompanying the children leaned out, shook her fist, and shouted, it is all the fault of the rich.  There was a real sense in which both the war itself and its aftermath, became a class war in which the aristocratic control of politics which had helped to cause it, was jettisoned by the British people.

British diplomats were even less enthusiastic about the prospect of conflict with the Soviet Union than the politicians. In a secret telegram to the Foreign Office, the British ambassador to Moscow, Sir William Seeds, wrote:

I do not myself see what advantage war with the Soviet Union would be to us, though it would please me personally to declare it on M. Molotov. …the Soviet invasion of Poland is not without advantages to us in the long run, for it will entail the keeping of a large army on a war footing outside Russia consuming food and petrol and wearing out material and transport, thus reducing German hopes of military or food supplies.

In a public statement on 20 September, however, the British Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain spoke to the House of Commons about the Soviet invasion of eastern Poland:

For the unhappy victim of this cynical attack, the result has been a tragedy of the grimmest character. The world which has watched the vain struggle of the Polish nation against overwhelming odds with profound pity and sympathy admires their valour, which even now refuses to admit defeat. … There is no sacrifice from which we will not shrink, there is no operation we will not undertake provided our responsible advisers, our Allies, and we ourselves are convinced that it will make an appropriate contribution to victory. But what we will not do is to rush into adventures that offer little prospect of success and are calculated to impair our resources and to postpone ultimate victory.

Fine words, but not matched by action. After the signing of the German-Soviet border treaty in Moscow a week later, Sir William revised his opinion in a telegram of 30 September:

It must be borne in mind that if war continues any considerable time, the Soviet part of Poland will, at its close, have been purged of any non-Soviet population or classes whatever, and that it may well be consequently impossible, in practice, to separate it from the rest of Russia. …our war aims are not incompatible with reasonable settlement on ethnographic and cultural lines.

On the face of it, this was an incredible suggestion. The Soviet Union had just invaded and was subjugating the eastern territories of a nation to which Britain had given its pledge of protection, yet a senior diplomat was privately suggesting that this aggression should be immediately rewarded. Back in London, another senior diplomat, Sir Ivone Kirkpatrick endorsed Seeds views in a report produced on 1 October to which he appended a sketch map of Poland, pointing out that the new Soviet-imposed border mostly followed the ‘Curzon Line’ proposed by the British Foreign Secretary in 1919, which had been rejected by both the Poles and Bolsheviks at the time.

The picture on the right shows German officers discussing with a Soviet officer (far left) the demarcation line between their various pieces of conquered territory after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact and the invasion of Poland from west and east. 

Nevertheless, there were many among the general population in Britain who were bemused as to why their country had not declared war on the Soviet Union. If the British treaty to protect Poland from aggression had resulted in war with the Germans, why hadn’t it also triggered a war with the USSR? What they were not aware of was that it was not only the Nazi-Soviet pact which had a secret clause, but also the 1939 Anglo-Polish treaty. That clause specifically limited the obligation to protect Poland from ‘aggression’ to that initiated by Germany.

The ‘Phoney War’ and the War at Sea:

The sixth-month hiatus between the end of the Polish campaign in October 1939 and Hitler’s sudden invasion of Denmark and Norway on 9 April 1940 is known as ‘the Phoney War’. With little going on in the West on land and in the skies, the British and French publics were lulled into thinking that the war was not truly a matter of life and death for them in the way it obviously was for the Poles, and their daily existence was carried on substantially as usual, in all its bureaucracy, inefficiency and occasional absurdity. The National Labour MP Harold Nicolson recorded in his war diaries that the Ministry of Information censors had refused to publish the wording of a leaflet, of which two million copies had been dropped over Germany, on the grounds that… We are not allowed to disclose information that might be of value to the enemy.

The map below shows the full details of the war at sea, 1939-45:

There was nothing phoney about the war at sea, however. It was perfectly true that the British Air Minister Sir Kingsley Wood made the asinine remark that the RAF should not bomb munitions dumps in the Black Forest because so much of it was private property, but at sea, there were no such absurdities. As early as 19 August, U-boat captains were sent a coded signal about a submarine officers’ reunion which directed them to take up their positions around the British Isles in readiness for imminent action. Within nine hours of the declaration of war, the British liner SS Athenia was torpedoed on its way from Glasgow to Montreal, with 1,400 passengers on board, the captain of U-30 mistaking the ship for an armed merchant cruiser. Had they hit the radio mast, and the SOS signal not been transmitted, many more than the 112 passengers would have perished. A Czech survivor recalled:

There was a column of water near the ship and a black thing like a cigar shot over the sea towards us. There was a bang, and then I saw men on the submarine turn a gun and fire it.

above: a poster recruiting for the German submarine service. Submarine attack was the main activity of the German Navy during the war, and it succeeded in reducing allied tonnage substantially. Submariners were often absent for up to eighteen months and returned weather-beaten and bearded. Casualties were very high. Some seventy per cent of all submariners were killed.

Neither side was prepared for sea warfare in 1939, but neither could ignore the lessons of the 1914-18 sea war: the German High Seas Fleet had remained largely inactive, while the U-boats had brought Britain perilously close to catastrophe. In the U-boat, Germany had deployed a potentially war-winning weapon, and there was no reason not to attempt to use it more decisively in a second war. For Britain, the Battle of the Atlantic was the longest and most critical of World War Two; defeat would have forced Britain out of the war and made US intervention in Europe impossible. Airpower was also crucial in the battle of the Atlantic. German spotter aircraft could locate convoys and guide U-boats to their targets, while land-based air patrols and fighters launched by catapult from convoy ships provided essential protection. While Germany had entered the war with a number of particularly capital ships, including three purpose-built ‘pocket battleship’ commerce raiders and two powerful modern battleships, there were always too few to challenge the Royal Navy directly. Instead, Germany was once again to use its limited naval resources to attack Britain’s sea communications. The capital ships were used as raiders against British commercial vessels. Nevertheless, tracking down and destroying these threats severely stretched British naval resources. The pocket battleship Graf Spee enjoyed considerable success at the beginning of the war.

Just as in the previous war, however, it was the U-boat that was to provide the greatest danger to Britain’s supply lines, causing Churchill intense anxiety as First Lord of the Admiralty. Had Hitler given first priority in terms of funding to his U-boat fleet on coming to power in 1933, rather than to the Wehrmacht and Luftwaffe, he might have built a force that would have strangled and starved Britain into surrender. As it was, the navy was the weakest of Germany’s armed services when war broke out. Against the twenty-two battleships and eighty-three cruisers of the French and British navies, Germany had only three small ‘pocket’ battleships and eight cruisers. Early in the war, the German Navy under Admiral Erich Raeder recognised that the submarine offered the only effective German action at sea. In 1939 there were only 57 U-boats available, and not all of these were suitable for the Atlantic.  They had limited underwater range and spent most of their time on the surface, where they were vulnerable to Coastal command bombers. However, under Admiral Karl Dönitz the submarine arm expanded rapidly and soon took a steady toll of Allied shipping. To Dönitz, as commander of the U-boat fleet, it was a simple question of arithmetic: Britain depended on supplies that were carried by a fleet of about three thousand ocean-going merchant ships, and these could carry about seventeen million tonnes. If he could keep sufficient U-boats at sea and sink enough of this tonnage, Britain would be forced to capitulate. He had devised tactics to overcome the convoys, based on the simple concept of overwhelming the escorts. Dönitz introduced a new tactic to undersea warfare, with the ‘wolf packs’ hunting at night linked by radio, often attacking on the surface and at close range. But Dönitz simply did not have enough boats to launch sufficient attacks in groups.

above: Convoy with escorts, seen at sunset in the Atlantic in July 1942. The adoption of the convoy system was a key element in defeating the U-boat threat.

At the same time, the British had made very few preparations. The first of hundreds of Atlantic convoys left Halifax, Nova Scotia, on 15 September. Learning the doleful lessons of the Great War, the convoy system was adhered to rigidly by the British between 1939 and 1945, even for ships moving along the coastline between Glasgow and the Thames. Destroyers, frigates and corvettes used an echo-sounding device called ASDIC (named after the Allied Submarine Detection Investigation Committee) to try to track U-boats, while the convoys’ merchantmen sailed together within a protective cordon. But although it was initially seen as a complete solution to the U-boat threat, it proved less than perfect and was only really effective at ranges of two hundred to a thousand metres, when most U-boats were operating on the surface in any case. Britain’s escort fleet had been allowed to run down to such an extent that Churchill was prepared to trade valuable bases in the West Indies and Newfoundland in return for fifty obsolete American destroyers. Perhaps even more damaging was the misuse of resources: the Royal Navy insisted on largely futile attempts to hunt down U-boats instead of concentrating on escorting convoys.

above: a depth charge explodes astern of a Royal Navy ship hunting for a submerged U-boat. Dropped from surface ships, depth charges could cause fatal damage to a submarine, but they had a limited effective range.

The convoys also adopted a zig-zagging route, the better to outfox their submerged foes. Overall the system was another success, but when a waiting U-boat ‘wolf-pack’ broke through, the losses among the huddled merchantmen could be correspondingly high, and on one occasion as many as half of the vessels were sent to the bottom. The Royal Navy started the war with only five aircraft carriers and so merchant shipping lacked essential air protection out at sea. RAF Coastal Command was left critically short of aircraft because of the priority given to Bomber Command, and the flying boats it received did not have enough range – there remained a gap in the central Atlantic where no air patrols were possible; the ‘Greenland gap’, where U-boats could congregate in relative safety. This was the period that the Germans referred to as the ‘happy time’ when their losses were slight and successes high. In a desperate attempt to extend the range of Britain’s air patrols, Churchill offered the Irish government unification with Northern Ireland in exchange for the use of bases in Lough Swilly, Cobb and Berehaven, but it insisted on maintaining its strict neutrality in the war.

above: as in the First World War, German leaders gambled on knocking Britain out of the conflict by a submarine blockade. The map above shows the details of the first phase of this.

On 17 September the veteran HMS Courageous was sunk in the Western Approaches by two torpedoes by two torpedoes from U-29, which had already sunk three tankers. She slipped beneath the Hebridean waves in less than fifteen minutes, with only half of her thousand-strong crew being saved, some after an hour in the North Atlantic, where they kept up their morale by singing popular songs of the day such as ‘Roll out the Barrel’ and ‘Show Me the Way to Go Home’. One survivor recalled that the sea was so thick with oil we might have been swimming in treacle.

Why Britain was at War:

After motoring home to Sissinghurst with Victor Cazalet on 3 September, Harold Nicolson found his sons waiting for him. Ben, aged twenty-five, thought the news ‘a tragedy’, an unwelcome interruption to his studies; Nigel, three years younger, who had just ‘come down’ from Oxford, ‘was immensely exhilarated’. Both were of an age to serve in the army; and both did, until final victory in the spring of 1945. In a symbolic act for what lay ahead, the flag flying above the Elizabethan Tower in the Sissinghurst garden was lowered. No sooner had the war started than Harold Nicolson was asked by Allen Lane, head of Penguin Books, to explain to the nation Why Britain is at War. He wrote the fifty-thousand-word Penguin Special in three weeks. Michael Sadleir, Harold’s regular publisher, called it ‘a masterpiece’. An instant success, it soon sold over a hundred thousand copies. Harold denied that the iniquities of the Versailles treaty had propelled Hitler to power, as so often presumed, claiming that by 1922 a majority of the German people had reconciled themselves to the treaty. By recklessly occupying the Ruhr in 1923, against British advice, French President Poincaré’s adventurism had galvanised German nationalist fervour, destroyed the German middle class and paved the way for the rise of Hitler. These arguments took little account of the first German economic miracle of the mid-twenties or the devastating effects of the world economic crisis of 1929. Nor was it prudent to reproach past leaders of Britain’s only ally in its war of survival against Nazi Germany, even if it was partly blameworthy.

Harold was on firmer ground when he moved away from contemporary German history to justifying Britain’s motives for going to war. He wrote of a small island nation dependent for its survival not only on protecting the sea lanes to its imperial possessions but also on preserving the balance of power on the European mainland. Germany, then and now, threatened to violate these immutable principles. Britain’s reaction by going to war was prompted by a sound biological instinct … the instinct of self-preservation. By vividly contrasting the savage nature of the Nazi dictatorship, its ‘ruthless nihilism’, with the British conception of ‘decency and fairness’. Harold introduced a moral dimension to the conflict:

We entered this war to defend ourselves. We shall continue to, to its bitter end, in order to save humanity. … Only by imposing a just peace, one that does not outrage their pride or drive them to desperation can we guarantee thirty years to establish a new world order so powerful that even Germany will not dare to defy it.

But what kind of ‘new world order?’ It turned on rectifying the defects of the League of Nations, of organising its own armed forces and the need for its members to sacrifice a degree of national sovereignty. Harold looked forward optimistically to a ‘United States of Europe’, but whether Britain would play an active part in it remained a moot point. On one point, however, Harold was crystal clear: a social revolution was pending. Whatever the outcome of the war, we can be certain that the rich will lose … Their privileges and fortunes will go. His premonition that the war would generate ‘class warfare’, that the prerogatives of his class would be severely eroded, if not entirely swept away, haunted him throughout the war. Nicolson’s critique of Chamberlain’s diplomacy, and in particular the ruinous influence of Sir Horace Wilson may have found praise from R. A. Butler as wholly valid. But Butler remained loyal to Chamberlain, even after the PM’s downfall, describing Churchill as the greatest political adventurer of modern political history. Harold may have felt flattered, temporarily, by Butler’s words, but he would gain a more lasting satisfaction from knowing that his record of Britain’s misguided diplomacy had struck a sympathetic chord in hundreds of thousands of readers.

Harold wanted to find a wartime job commensurate with his talents. The Foreign Office, impressed by the success of Why Britain is at War, was keen that he should strengthen its Political Intelligence Department. Halifax was enthusiastic to make the appointment, but it was opposed by Horace Wilson, whom Nicolson had identified as a ‘chief sinner’ in the failure of British diplomacy. Nor did Harold make a significant impact in Parliament, where he had been elected as a National Labour MP in 1935. Apart from occasional questions about the activity of German propagandists in Britain, he remained silent. The Eden Group made up of Conservative dissidents, but with Harold in constant attendance, still functioned, usually over dinner at the Carlton Club. The general feeling of the company as autumn progressed was that Chamberlain had to be removed and replaced by Churchill. It remained an ineffectual group, however, which would only act when exceptional circumstances left it no option. Like many of his associates, Nicolson was in despair at Chamberlain’s lacklustre leadership. When urged to attack ‘these people at the helm’, he wavered, unwilling to disrupt national unity at that stage. Even so, no-one could deny that the war was going badly. Poland had fallen in less than a month, partitioned along the old Curzon line between Germany and the Soviet Union. In the west, the Allies were reluctant to take offensive action and Nicolson grew increasingly gloomy about the prospects of Britain, with France, emerging victorious from the conflict. However, even Harold could not help but be encouraged by immediate British successes at sea. He prematurely recorded that we have won the war at sea.

Appendices:

Historical Interpretation: Why was British resistance to Hitler left so late?

The historian Arthur Marwick emphasised the assumption, made by Chamberlain and others, that, regardless of their hateful ideologies and propaganda, Hitler and Mussolini were basically rational men who would keep their word, provided their main grievances were met. This assumption was not finally shaken until the occupation of Prague in March 1939. Borrowing a phrase from A J P Taylor’s Origins of the Second World War, he suggests that the Western statesmen believed that once the cloud of phrases which enveloped Fascist policy had been pushed aside there would be a foundation of goodwill on which a modus vivendi might be built. Both the dictators and the Western statesmen moved in the fog of their own beliefs and systems so that there was little fundamental understanding of each side’s position and precious little real communication. Sooner or later, therefore, a collision was almost inevitable. Arnold Toynbee, who had himself met Hitler, summed up this psychological gulf between the dictators and the Western statesmen:

An English observer who paid frequent visits to Germany during the span of six and three-quarter years that intervened between Hitler’s advent to power in Germany…and the outbreak of war…had the uncanny impression, as he made the short physical journey…that within these narrow limits of space and time, he was travelling between two worlds which were momentarily both in existence side by side, but which could not go on thus co-existing because they were morally so far apart as to be incompatible in the long run.

At the same time, the democracies were themselves divided between Left and Right just at the time when national unity was most needed in Britain and France. Although after the Prague coup the Pacifist tide was in sudden retreat, it is impossible to overestimate its significance prior to that event. The revulsion felt towards war was so strong that not even the series of German and Italian successes from 1935 onwards was enough to bring about the fundamental division in European opinions which manifested itself after the occupation of Prague. These divisions, especially in France, help to explain why there was no real attempt to resist Nazi Germany until 1939, and further encouraged Hitler in his belief that the Western powers were too weak to resist him. Added to this, the ideological conflict in Spain had served to distract attention from Hitler’s designs in central and eastern Europe in the previous three years.

Partly as a result of the Spanish conflict, a strategic alliance with the Soviet Union was not seen as a realistic possibility until after Hitler’s Prague coup of 14-15 March. Prior to this turning point, Soviet communism was still viewed as the greater of the two ideological evils. Hence Neville Chamberlain’s persistent attempts from May 1937 onwards to woo first Mussolini and then Hitler. Direct bilateral negotiations with the dictators seemed to be the only way to break the diplomatic deadlock. To resurrect the traditional alliance system, including Russia, would, it was argued, play into Hitler’s hands by allowing him to claim that Germany was being encircled again. However, it was this fear that actually played into his hands, because it enabled him to isolate and deal separately with his potential opponents. Moreover, it was the rumours of war which followed Prague, of impending German action against Poland and Romania, now entirely believable, which helped to reinforce the sea-change in mood which hardened and grew firmer throughout the summer of 1939.

It is also arguable whether, after the Munich Agreement, the rump Czechoslovak state was at all viable, never mind defensible. Relations between Czechs and Slovaks, who had never had more than the similarity of their languages in common, had reached a low point. The harsh reality was that the experimental state of Czechoslovakia, brought into being at Versailles out of the ruins of the Hapsburg Empire, had to be written off. The only consolation for Chamberlain was that he had been able to demonstrate to important non-European opinion, that he had gone to the limits of reasonableness in pursuing the course that they had wanted, that Europe should work out its own salvation without calling on them to intervene, either diplomatically or militarily. After the Prague coup, the attitude of the British Dominions also began to change from the detachment shown six months earlier. This was crucial, as Britain could not go to war with the rearmed Reich without its Empire, especially at sea.

Despite the evidence of his critics, after the Prague debácle, Chamberlain became more defiant and determined in public, and his Cabinet was less nervous at the prospect of war than they had been at the time of the Munich Crisis. The military and intelligence reports were more encouraging and the Anglo-French relationship was better and more active than it had been.  At the end of 1936, Lord Vantissart had written, privately, that it was the job of the Foreign Office to hold the ring until 1939. They now felt confident enough to give a guarantee to the Polish government. This was a remarkable reversal of an attitude to central Europe held by all previous British governments. Perhaps it was given because, unlike Czechoslovakia, the Polish corridor meant that Poland was not land-locked and was therefore of direct interest to the British Empire, over which it now gained a measure of influence. However, there was little more, in reality, that Britain could do to preserve the independence or integrity of Poland in the event of a German attack. Moreover, the guarantee was not given in order to preclude German-Polish negotiation, but as a general warning to Hitler that Britain intended to make a stand. This warning was still vague enough for Hitler to believe that when it came to a crisis, Britain would back down, just as it had done over the Sudetenland.

If Britain and France had not pursued appeasement so vigorously for so long, there might have been some chance of an Anglo-French-Soviet alliance, though the price demanded by the Russians might have been too high.  Nevertheless, one further step Chamberlain had authorised after Prague was the opening of negotiations with Moscow.  All his instincts had previously recoiled from this step, both because of his dislike for the Soviet state and a belief that ‘encirclement’ would be counter-productive. The Anglo-Soviet discussions were slow and protected over the summer. There were sticking points, among them the status of the three independent Baltic republics and Polish concerns about Moscow’s intentions. A greater sense of urgency might have brought success, but the effort came to a dramatic halt on 23 August with the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in Moscow.

Until that point, Stalin and Molotov were still prepared to consider a treaty of mutual assistance with Britain and France. But there were problems from the very start, since – in contrast to the attitude of Ribbentrop – the Western Allies were perceived as dawdling through the process of negotiations. The Soviet Ambassador to London had asked whether British Foreign Secretary, Lord Halifax, would go to Moscow that summer to discuss matters directly with Molotov, but the British despatched a minor official and an obscure admiral instead who left England on a merchant ship at the beginning of August which took four days to arrive in Leningrad. Once the British delegation arrived in Moscow, the Soviets soon found evidence to confirm their London ambassador’s report that the delegates will not be able to make any decisions on the spot. … This does not promise any particular speed in the conduct of the negotiations. In fact, before he left for Moscow, Admiral Drax had been specifically told by Chamberlain and Halifax that in case of any difficulties with the Soviets he should try to string the negotiations out until October when winter conditions would make a Nazi invasion of Poland difficult. The British hoped that the mere threat of an alliance with the Soviet Union might act as a deterrent to the Germans.

Laurence Rees (2003) has suggested that it is not hard to see what caused the British to take their lackadaisical approach to negotiations with the Soviets. In the first place, British foreign policy had been predicated for years on the basis that a friendly relationship with Germany was of more value than an accommodation with the Soviet Union. Not only did many British loathe Stalin’s régime on ideological grounds, but there was also little confidence, in August 1939, in the power and utility of the Soviet armed forces. Moreover, the question of Poland was an obstacle in itself to the British reaching any kind of comprehensive agreement with the Soviet Union, as it was to in 1944. The British knew that for any military treaty to have meaning, the Soviets would have to be given permission to cross the Polish border to fight the Germans if, as looked likely, the Nazis decided to invade. But the Poles themselves were against any such idea. In the face of this impasse, the British delegation adopted the understandable, but ultimately self-defeating tactic of simply ignoring the subject whenever the question of Poland and its territorial integrity came up in discussion. When the Soviet Marshal Voroshilov asked directly on 14 August if the Red Army would be allowed to enter Poland in order to engage the Nazis, the Allied delegation made no reply.

However, Rees has also argued out that we must not run away with the idea that Stalin and the Soviet leadership were somehow driven into the hands of the Nazis by British and French misjudgment. Ultimately, the Western Allies had very little to offer the Soviets at the bargaining table. Stalin had no motivation for the Red Army being ‘drawn into conflict’ to help out other, unsympathetic régimes out of their self-created difficulties. He was just as much opposed to Britain and France, dominated by big business and oppressing the working people, as he was to Nazi Germany. On the other hand, the Nazis could offer something the Western Allies never could – the prospect of additional territory and material gain. So the meeting between Ribbentrop and Schulenberg for the Germans, and Stalin and Molotov for the Soviets whilst not a meeting of minds, was certainly a meeting of common interests. 

Through the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Germany succeeded in bringing the Soviet Union into the European conflict, thereby giving Hitler the assurance of Soviet neutrality in an attack on Poland. The Pact lifted an enormous burden from Hitler. He was free to attack Poland if he wished and British support was likely to be of little assistance to the Poles. There was some suspicion that Britain and France might decide, after all, not to go to war. However, the British hesitation in declaring war resulted more, in the event, from Chamberlain’s desire to act in concert with France than by any doubt about honouring its obligations. Chamberlain was forced by his Cabinet to declare the war he had consistently tried to avoid since 1937. Even after its outbreak, there was no anticipation of protracted conflict and he still hoped that there might be a place for negotiations, even if they must take place in the context of war.

That is not to suggest that Chamberlain’s psychological understanding and tactical methods were without blame. He did not understand either the nature and dynamics of the Nazi régime or the beliefs and practices of National Socialism. However, even Churchill displayed considerable naivety in this respect, describing Hitler as an old-fashioned patriot, determined to restore his country following its defeat. Lloyd George’s analysis of Hitler’s mind and intentions was no better.  Another set of men in power, or in power earlier, may have made some difference to the policies which were followed, but this would probably not have been vastly notable. Moreover, it was possible for many British people simultaneously to suffer anguish at the prospect of another war and to feel intense remorse at what they believed to be their leaders’ callous indifference to the plight of Czechoslovakia. However, Chamberlain and his colleagues, in common with the majority of British public opinion, supposed that it was quite reasonable to believe in a world in which there was an underlying harmony between nations. It was surely unbelievable that governments would set out deliberately to use force. After 1939, world politics evolved in a way that few observers could have predicted with confidence, even projecting from the events of 1938-1939.

Keith Robbins has argued that the policy of appeasement in Europe needs to be seen in the context of the decline of the British Empire in the thirties. However, the anxiety about the state of the Empire might have been excessive, in turn accelerating its decline. Certainly, Churchill saw signs of defeatism in government policies and believed that a display of resolution and self-confidence would bring its own reward. It is also possible that a greater willingness to threaten intervention might have deterred Hitler, at least in the short-term. In the longer term, however, Robbins concludes that it seems entirely likely that Hitler would have gone to war in circumstances which might have been as favourable as those of 1939.

In his diaries, at the beginning of November, Edmund Ironside reflected ironically on the military machine of command which was the War Cabinet. Men like Kingsley Wood and Belisha, together with Chamberlain, Halifax and Hoare had no military conception of any sort, even lacking ‘general knowledge of how to fight a campaign. Whilst the Army was under French command, the Air Force was not, and the Cabinet loved directing its operations, rather than allowing the Chief of Staff to do so. Later the same month, he admitted to being ‘perturbed’ at the lack of a plan in Cabinet. The ‘wait and see’ attitude to events in Europe, the lack of any plan for the Middle East, and the long and tedious discussions upon all and sundry, all added to the sense of inertia which stemmed from the leadership of the weary old man who dominated the ‘mediocrities’ around him who were supposed to bear the responsibilities of war government with him. Only Churchill, as First Lord of the Admiralty, revealed any talent for the task, partly because he was managing the worse things that by then were happening at sea…

Documents:

A. Parliamentary Debates, House Of Commons (fifth series), vol 351 cols 293-4 (1939):

The Prime Minister’s Announcement of War:

‘…we decided to send our Ambassador in Berlin instructions which he was to hand at 9 o’clock this morning to the German Foreign Secretary and which read as follows:

‘Sir, In the communication which I had the honour to make to you on the 1st September, I informed you… that unless the German Government were prepared to give… satisfactory assurances that (it) … had suspended all aggressive action against Poland and were prepared promptly to withdraw their forces from Polish territory, His Majesty’s Government would, without hesitation, fulfil their obligations to Poland.

‘Although this communication was made more than twenty-four hours ago, no reply has been received but German attacks on Poland have continued and intensified. I have… to inform you that, unless not later than 11 a.m. British Summer Time today, 3rd September, satisfactory assurances… have been given… a state of war will exist between the two countries from that hour.’

‘This was the final note. No such undertaking was received by the time stipulated, and, consequently, this country is at war with Germany.’

B. Francis Marshall,  London West (1944) 

Recollections of the first days of the war:

Entering London from the Great North Road the day after war had been declared, was rather like entering a besieged city. Terrible air attacks had been expected and London was considered the most likely target.

The barrage balloons overhead emphasised the difference between London and the country; notice boards at Hendon and Mill Hill giving notice of air raids seemed to mark the entrance. The motor coaches filled with evacuated children and occasional cars filled with luggage, all going in the opposite direction, added to the impression of impending danger…

Air raid shelters, sandbags and barrage balloons were, of course, already familiar, but the War Rescue Police came as a surprise. They wore ordinary clothes, and a blue tin hat, armlet and service respirator was their only uniform. Everybody was busy doing little odd jobs, sticking brown paper tape on windows, collecting precious papers and valuables together with a first-aid kit, and some spare clothes in a suit-case, just in case… When they had finished work and made their simple preparations, they walked out in the brilliant sunshine that seemed to have accompanied the outbreak of war, and tried to realise that this was it. But however short a walk they took, the gas marks were inevitably with them, uncomfortable and a nuisance, but from Prime Minister to charwoman everybody carried one.

We expected air raids on the H G Wells’ scale after nerving ourselves to expect Apocalypse after dark, felt almost disappointed when day brought the usual round of milkmen, newspaper boys, and the ordinary routine…

I found myself circling a church at 4 a.m. in the dark, vainly trying to find the way in to relieve the warden on duty inside. When I got in, I found him in the crypt sitting on a coffin reading a thriller… 

C. René Cutforth, Later Than We Thought (1976)

A Journalist’s personal account of the final year of the thirties:

Oddly enough, this great tide of woes seemed to put a new spirit into the British people. The news was so bad that none of the old attitudes was relevant any more. Peace Pledge Unions and Popular Fronts were now beside the point, like a man on the scaffold deciding to mount a ‘No more Hanging’ movement. The illusions of the Thirties gradually melted away, and there had been many. In the new cold light, the ‘committed’ could be seen as the self-licensed liars and con-men so many of them had become, whether Left or Right, whether Hitler’s ‘new manliness’ had held them mesmerised or Stalin’s ‘workers’ paradise’.

The last to go were the illusions about the power of Britain in the world. We might survive, we now knew, and that was all. Conscription came in on 1 July. In August there was a trial blackout and, since the whole world had now gone mad, the Russians signed a non-aggression pact with Germany.  If you felt like being funny. it was a bit of a joke to listen to the Communists trying to find something nice to say about their new ally. 

The present seemed not to exist, we only had a past and a future. Works of art were being stored in the caves of Derbyshire and the mine shafts of Wales. From Canterbury, we evacuated the stained glass and from our great cities the children. We’d ‘bought it’ as the phrase then was, and at eleven o’ clock on 3 September, we heard Mr Chamberlain, speaking in a strained and disgusted voice, tell us that we were at war with Germany. We were surprised by how little we felt. A minute later, the air-raid siren sounded. It was the last of the Thirties’ false alarms.

On 3 September, Chamberlain made his famous broadcast to tell the British nation that it was at war with Germany. An air-raid siren sounded in earnest for the first time, though it was a false alarm; a Royal Proclamation was issued calling up the Reserves and Churchill was at last brought in. (Picture: Radio Times Hulton Picture Library, published in Cutforth’s book).

D.  September 1, 1939, by W. H. Auden

A British poet reflects on a ‘low, dishonest decade’ from New York:

Wystan Auden was the leader of a group of poets named after him, but all they had in common was a Marxist frame of mind which characterised the ‘new voice of the period’ (Cutforth). They launched the revolutionary movement which was to create the intellectual climate of the time, and from the start, Auden’s was the voice of the decade. They wanted to bring on the death of the old gang, the death of us. He always sounded as if ten thousand revolutionaries were fighting to snatch his words from the press as they appeared. In fact, their audience was so small that it often seemed that they were writing to each other. Auden’s line, It is later than you think, might have been the motto of the whole group. George Orwell criticised their slavish worship of the Soviet Union, and regarded them as divorced from humanity: they had never met anybody from outside their own social class, he said, and this annoyed them greatly because he was right. Auden himself had left Britain with Christopher Isherwood for China in 1938 (pictured above, with Auden on the right), and was in New York in September 1939 when he wrote his famous and often misused poem on the outbreak of war. It begins in despair:

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-Second Street

Uncertain and afraid

As the clever hopes expire

Of a low dishonest decade:

Waves of anger and fear

Circulate over the bright

And darkened lands of the earth,

Obsessing our private lives;

The unmentionable odour of death

Offends the September Night.

And ends in hope:

Defenceless under the night

Our world in stupor lies;

Yet, dotted everywhere,

Ironic points of light

Flash out wherever the Just

Exchange their messages:

May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame.

Sources:

René Cutforth (1976), Later Than We Thought. Newton Abbot: David & Charles.

Matthew Hollis & Paul Keegan (2003), 101 Poems Against War. London: Faber & Faber.

Richard Overy (1996), The Penguin Historical Atlas of the Third Reich. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

Laurence Rees (2008), World War Two Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West. London: BBC Books (Ebury Publishing).

John Swift, Asa Briggs (ed.) (2001), The Penguin Atlas of British & Irish History. London: Penguin Books (chapter on ‘The Atlantic War, 1939-45’).

Michael Clark & Peter Teed (eds.) (1972), Portraits & Documents: Twentieth Century, 1906-1960. London: Hutchinson Educational.

Andrew Roberts (2010), The Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War. London: Penguin Books.

Keith Robbins (1997), Appeasement (Historical Association Studies). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers

Norman Rose (2006), Harold Nicolson. London: Pimlico.

 

Thirty Years After the Fall: Is Socialism Dead?

Júlia Tar’s recent piece on the Hungarian government’s online media outlet, Hungary Today, points out that 2019 is the anniversary of not one, but three remarkable events of the 20th century: NATO’s 70th anniversary; Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic’s 20th anniversary since joining NATO, and the thirtieth anniversary of dismantlement of the Iron Curtain and of the Berlin Wall. According to Eugene Megyesy, the former Senior Advisor to the Prime Minister of Hungary and a Member of the Board of Trustees of the Friends of Hungary Foundation, publisher of Hungary Today, we might not have learned from these historical events. 1956 was a significant year for Hungary because of its revolt against the Soviet Union and dictatorial communism. The revolt was followed by the Prague Spring in 1968 and the Polish Solidarity movement in the early 1980s. Then,

Hungary opened the Iron Curtain toward Austria, allowing East Germans to flee the oppression of the Utopian socialist system, thereby rendering the Berlin Wall obsolete.

This was on 11 September 1989 (not June, as stated), when a courageous decision was taken at the urging of leading Socialist reformers in the government like Imre Pozsgay, and in spite of threats of invasion from Berlin. By November, the Berlin Wall had itself been destroyed. In summarising Megyesy’s ‘view’, Tar claims that…

… socialism was always built on the promises of a Utopian system, equality and the ability to solve all social problems (“heaven on earth”).

Eugene Megyesy warns that this is happening again in some countries:

Sadly, there are politicians and bureaucrats in Washington and Brussels, supported by ivory tower academics, media pundits and Hollywood luminaries, who believe socialism is viable.

Megyesy urges today’s generation to look back and think about whether socialism was ever successful. It may have been, but only for a limited period of time. He cites the unsustainability of the capitalism-backed socialistic systems in the Scandinavian countries as an example. In Cuba, North Korea and Venezuela, it is even worse and only serves to highlight the gap between the poor and the leaders living in luxury, Megyesy explains. Before socialism, Venezuela was one of the richest countries; now it’s one of the poorest. According to Megyesy, socialism means…

… control over all means of production and the redistribution of wealth by the government.

Definitions and Debates:

But not every ‘socialist’ today would agree with this definition, and especially the idea that public control means control by the central or federal government. Neither does this interpretation match those of the multifarious strands of socialism in western Europe which developed from the middle of the nineteenth century. To define socialism and understand its roots, a longer and broader view is necessary, not just one which draws conclusions based on events since the spread of Stalinism across eastern Europe, or which focuses on recent events in North Korea or Venezuela for evidence of the failings of the Utopian Socialist system. Many of the twentieth century’s ‘dystopias’ may have had their origins among the nineteenth century ‘isms’, as in previous centuries they were often the product of misguided Christian millenarianism, like ‘anti-Semitism’, but that does not mean that we should simply discard the thinking of the philosophers and political economists who developed their detailed critiques of capitalism any more than we should reject two millennia of Christian theology. After all, as Marx himself noted, philosophers only interpret the world: the point is to change it. 

In seeking to change its own world, each new generation must produce its own reinterpretation of the ideas handed down to it from past generations and come up with its own solutions to its own moral dilemmas and social problems. That is, in essence, what socialism means to me. We should neither rely on theories from posterity nor reject them out of hand as if all who came before us were thieves and robbers. We can only learn from the past by giving it a fair hearing, remembering as the novelist J P Hartley famously wrote, the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there. We are solely responsible for our own ‘country’ in equity

the ‘present’, and for not learning from our own mistakes in its past. In this context, and according to the eminent ‘man of letters’ of the twentieth century, Raymond Williams (1983), ‘Socialist’ emerged as a philosophical description in the early nineteenth century. In that century and beyond, it could be used in two ways, which have had profound effects on the use of the term by radically different political tendencies. Of course, social was the merely descriptive term for a society in its now predominant sense of the system of common life; a social reformer wished to reform this system. But ‘social’ was also …

… an emphatic and distinguishing term, explicitly contrasted with ‘individual’ and ‘individualist’ theories of society.

Naturally, there has always been a great deal of interaction and overlap between these two meanings, but their varying effect can be seen in the beginning in the formation of the term. In the first sense, it was viewed as an extension of ‘liberalism’ as it referred to radical political reform of the social order, in order to develop, extend and secure the main liberal values for all members of society; political freedom, the ending of privileges and formal inequalities, social justice (conceived as ‘equity’ between different individuals and groups). In the second sense, it was seen as the ‘enemy’ of competitive, individualist forms of society, specifically industrial capitalism with its system of wage-labour. Truly social forms depended on practical co-operation and mutuality, which in turn could not be achieved while there was still private (individual) ownership of the means of production. Real freedom could not be achieved, basic equalities could not be ended, social justice (conceived as a just social order rather than simply ‘equity’ between individuals) could not be established unless a society based on private property was replaced by one based on social ownership and control.

H. G. Wells, writing his well-known book in 1922, A Short History of the World, expressed the dichotomy in the following terms:

On the one hand are the individualists, who would protect and enlarge our present freedoms with what we possess, and on the other hand the socialists, who would pool our ownerships and restrain our proprietary acts. In practice one will find every graduation between the extreme individualist, who will scarcely tolerate a tax of any sort to support a government, and the communist, who would deny any possessions at all. The ordinary socialist of today is what is called a collectivist; he would allow a considerable amount of private property, but put such affairs as education, transport, mines, land-owning, most mass production of staple articles, and the like, into the hands of a highly organised state. Nowadays there does seem to be a gradual convergence of reasonable men towards a scientifically studied and planned socialism.  

The resulting controversy among the many groups and tendencies all calling themselves ‘socialist’ has been, long, intricate and frequently bitter. Each main tendency has developed alternative, often derogatory terms for the others. But until circa 1850, the word was too new and too general to have any predominant use. The earliest known use in English is in Hazlitt’s On Persons One Would Wish to Have Seen (1826), in which he recalls a conversation from 1809 in writing those profound and redoubted socialists, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. There is also a contemporary use in the 1827 Owenite Co-operative Magazine. Its first recorded political use in French dates from 1833. However, ‘socialisme’ was first used in 1831 in the more generic meaning, and Owen’s New Moral World also contains a similar use. Given the intense political climate in both France and England in the 1820s and 30s, these references provide a sense of the period in which the word came into ‘common coinage’. It could not have been known at that time which meaning of the word would come through as dominant. It was a period of very rapid developments in political discourse, and until well into the 1840s there were a number of alternative words for ‘socialist’, some of which were in more common usage: co-operative, mutualist, associationist, societarian, phalansterian, agrarian, radical. As late as 1848 Webster’s (AmE) Dictionary defined ‘socialism’ as ‘a new term for agrarianism’. By that time in Europe, especially in France and Germany, and to a lesser extent in Britain, both ‘socialist’ and ‘socialism’ were common terms.

One alternative term, Communist, had begun to be used in France and England by the 1840s, but the sense of the word varied according to particular national contexts. In England in the 1840s, communist had strong religious associations, dating back to the Puritan sects of the seventeenth century. Thus its use was distinct from the secular word ‘socialist’ as used by Robert Owen, which was sometimes avoided for that reason. ‘Communism’ before Marx meant the primitive form practised in the early church when the followers of Jesus ‘held all things in common’. The ‘True Levellers’ or ‘Diggers’ of the English Commonwealth similarly wanted to abolish private property and social distinctions altogether. In the nineteenth century, their ideological ‘descendants’ believed this could only happen if a democratic state was to own all property. The French ‘anarchist’ philosopher Proudhon wrote that all property is theft. But the development of political ideas in France and Germany were different; so much so that Engels, in his Preface of 1888, looking back to the Communist Manifesto which he and Marx had written in 1848, observed:

We could not have called it a ‘Socialist’ manifesto. In 1847, Socialism was a middle-class movement. Socialism was, on the continent at least, respectable; Communism was the very opposite.

For a time, the stresses between employers and employees led to the worldwide dissemination of the very harsh and elementary form of communism which is associated with Karl Marx in particular. However, we need to view Marx’s political economy in its proper context as an integral shift in thinking about how to interpret the new industrial world which had grown up ‘like Topsy’ around the common man. It was only as the nineteenth century developed, according to H. G. Wells, that:

… men began to realise that property was not one simple thing but  a great complex of ownerships of different values and consequences … that there is a very great range of things, railways, machinery of various sorts, homes, cultivated gardens, pleasure-boats, for example, which need each to be considered very particularly to determine how far and under what limitations it may come under private ownership, and how far it falls into the public domain and may be administered and let out by the state in the collective interest. 

Socialism and Communism in Europe, 1871-1918:

Across the continent, the relative militancy associated with the word communist was further strengthened by the very visual effect of the Paris Commune of 1871 (depicted below), though there was a significant argument as to whether the correct term to be derived from the event was Communist or Communard. For at least a ten-year period, the word Syndicalist became at least as important across Europe as a whole. It described the development of industrial trades unionism as a revolutionary force which would overthrow the capitalist system through the use of the General Strike and revolutionary violence in general. The word appeared in French in 1904 and in English in 1907; but it went through varying combinations with anarchism (in its stress on mutuality) and socialism, especially with Guild Socialism and Cooperative movements, emphasising the important interests of the consumer in economic models for the future.

The decisive distinction between ‘socialist’ and ‘communist’ came with the renaming, in 1918, of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party as the All-Russian Communist Party (the ‘majority’ or Bolsheviks). From that time on, a distinction of ‘socialist’ from ‘communist’, often with supporting terms and adjectives such as ‘social democrat’ or ‘democratic socialist’ came into common currency, although it is significant that all ‘communist’ parties, especially in the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and its ‘satellite’ states, continued to describe themselves as ‘socialist’ and dedicated to ‘socialism’. This is one reason why, in central-eastern Europe, socialism is still viewed by many as synonymous with communism in contrast to the use of the word throughout the rest of Europe. That does not mean, however, that the history of socialist and social democratic parties in southern, western and northern Europe can simply be tarnished with the same brush of the ‘Stalinist’ past, as Medgyesy and other politicians have attempted to do in the run-up to this year’s European Parliament elections. Even Jean-Claude Junker, President of the European Commission and a member of the conservative European People’s Party has been characterised as a ‘socialist’ in the Hungarian press and media.

The First Hungarian Republic, the ‘Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ & the Horthy Era, 1918-44:

The Proclamation of Mihály Károlyi as President of the new Republic of Hungary.

Elsewhere on this site, I have written about the roots and development of liberal democracy in Hungary, and of how both of these have been fractured by various forms of authoritarianism and dictatorship, more recently of a populist variety. Yet even in Hungary, we can trace the origins of socialist movements back to 1907, when a series of strikes and disturbances among both the urban and rural workers. But the promise of electoral reform, for which a crowd of a hundred thousand demonstrated for a second time on ‘Red Thursday’, 10th October 1907, came to nothing when Andrássy’s modest bill expanding the suffrage was rejected by the Hungarian parliament. Seven years later, the Social Democrats, as elsewhere in Europe, supported the patriotic war effort, perhaps hoping for democratic concessions in return. Following the Revolution of November 1918, with the establishment of a republic ruled by a National Council, the Károlyi government embarked on the programme of social and political reforms it had announced. These were badly needed, given the explosive atmosphere in the country. There was no political force in Hungary at the time that would have been able to answer all of the conflicting interests and expectations of these turbulent times. Although the elections to the new national assembly were conducted on the basis of a franchise including half the population, second only those in Scandinavia at that time, the effects of progressive social legislation, including the introduction of unemployment benefit and the eight-hour working day, the abolition of child labour and the extension of insurance schemes, could not yet be felt. The political scene became polarised, involving the appearance of radical movements both on the Right and the Left.

The streets, for the time being, belonged to the political Left. Appeals of moderate Social Democratic ministers to order and patience evoked the contrary effect and served to alienate the disaffected masses from them. Their new heroes were the Communists, organised as a party on 24 November 1918 and led by Béla Kun. He was a former journalist and trades unionist, who had recently returned from captivity in Russia, where he had become convinced of the superiority of the system of Soviets to parliamentary democracy.  Communist propaganda also promised an end to all exploitation through the nationalisation of property, as well as international stability through the fraternity of Soviet republics which were prophesied to arise all over Europe. Within a few weeks, this attractive utopia, underpinned by well-designed social demagogy, had earned the Communists a membership of about forty thousand. Their supporters, several times that number, mobilised among the marginalised masses and the younger members of the intelligentsia, susceptible to revolutionary romanticism. By January 1919, a wave of strikes had swept across the country, in the course of which factories, transport and communication installations were occupied; in addition, land seizures and attempts to introduce collective agriculture marked the communist initiative, which also included the demand not only to eradicate all remnants of feudalism, but also the proclamation of a Hungarian Soviet Republic, and a foreign policy seeking the friendship of Soviet Russia instead of the Entente powers.

While the radicals on both the Right and the Left openly challenged the fundamental tenets of the Károlyi government, his Independence Party evaporated around him. Unhappy with the reform projects which Károlyi embraced and seemed too radical for them, most of the Independent ministers left the government, leaving the Social Democrats as the main government party. But they were struggling helplessly to tame their own radical left, who effectively constituted an internal opposition to the government, and gravitated towards the Communists. On 21 March 1919, the Social Democrats accepted the invitation to take sole responsibility for the government, but only to accelerate and conclude negotiations with the imprisoned Communist leaders about forming a united workers’ party. A new government, the Revolutionary General Council, presided over by a Social Democrat but in effect led by Béla Kun, was formed on the same day, with the declared aim of establishing a Leninist ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’.

Certainly, the measures introduced by the Revolutionary government went beyond anything attempted in Soviet Russia at that time. The counterpart of these measures in the administrative and political reorganisation of the country was the replacement of old local, municipal and county bureaucracies with soviets of workers, peasants and soldiers. A ‘Committee of Public Safety’ was organised to put pressure on the civilian population where it was needed in order to maintain the dictatorship of the proletariat, its head, Tibor Szamuely travelling in his ‘death train’ to trouble spots in order to preside in summary courts, assisted by the notorious ‘Lenin Boys’, created to supplement the ‘Red Guard’, which took over the ordinary functions of the police and gendarmerie. Besides common murders of actual or alleged enemies by the ‘élite detachments, some 120 death sentences were meted out by the tribunals for political reasons.

The great momentum of the changes was partly intended to convince people that the realisation of the ‘socialist utopia’ was imminent. Social policy measures, the expected alleviation of housing shortages through public ownership of accommodation in a country flooded by refugees, the nationalisation of large firms, improved educational opportunities, the more effective supply of food and consumer goods through rationing and supervised distribution met with widespread approval, especially among the urban population. The intellectual élite, who had applauded the democratic reforms of the autumn of 1918, was initially also allured by the attractive goals of the Soviet Republic. They not only included known Marxists like György Lukács, the writer, who became People’s Commissar for Education, but also members of the Nyugati (Western) Circle, who held positions in the Directorate for Literature, and Bartók and Kodály, who became members of the one for music. Gradually, however, these figures became disaffected, as did the intelligentsia and middle classes in general and the leaders of the October 1918 democratic revolution, some of whom emigrated the following summer. By then, the historian Gyula Székfű, who was appointed professor at the University of Budapest, was already at work on his highly influential Three Generations (1920), in which he was hostile not only towards the communist revolution but also towards democracy and liberalism, which he blamed for paving the way for Kun’s régime.

The revolution and the village were unable to come to terms with each other. Despite the steady urbanisation of the previous half-century, Hungary still remained a largely agricultural country, especially after much of its towns were taken away by occupation even before the Treaty of Trianon of 1920. Besides being economically unsound the amidst the shortage of raw materials and fuel to supply machinery supposedly more efficient large-scale co-operatives than in smallholdings, the nationalisation scheme embittered not only the smallholders themselves, who actually lost land, but also the landless peasants, domestic servants and the agricultural labourers whose dreams of becoming independent farmers were thwarted by the same urban revolutionaries who had formerly encouraged land seizures. Decrees regarding the compulsory delivery of agricultural surplus and requisitioning further undermined whatever popularity the government still enjoyed in the countryside. It blamed the food shortages on the peasantry, which exacerbated the already existing rift between town and country, and served as a pretext for further central control of the economy. The anti-clerical measures taken by the government also annoyed the traditionally devout peasants, concerned about the security of ‘the family hearth’.

All of this made the communists more susceptible to counter-revolutionary propaganda, which did not fail to emphasise the foreign (that is, Jewish) character of the revolution (over half of the commissars were indeed of Jewish ethnicity). An ‘Anti-Bolshevik’ Committee was set up in Vienna in April by representatives of nearly all the old parties led by Count István Bethlen, and a counter-revolutionary government was set up at Arad on 5 May, later moving to Szeged. Paradoxically, the Soviet Republic was maintained in power for over four months, despite the increasingly dictatorial means it employed, mainly by the temporary successes it scored on the nationalities’ issue; it collapsed not in the face of internal counter-revolution but when its military position against the allies of the Entente in the region became untenable. The Entente powers, gathered at the Paris Peace Conference, sent General Smuts, the prime minister of South Africa, to Budapest, mainly to obtain reliable first-hand information about the situation there in April 1919. Smuts concluded that Hungary truly had a government of Bolshevik character, which gave weight to the French Prime Minister Clemenceau’s proposal to suppress German revanchist designs as well as the spread of Soviet communism into Western Europe by a cordon sanitaire established out of the new states of Central Europe. Harold Nicolson, the young British diplomat who accompanied Smuts on the train leaving Paris on April Fools’ Day, wrote about these concerns about the Germans turning to Bolshevism in a letter to his wife Vita (pictured below, together in Paris):

They have always got the trump card, i.e. Bolshevism – and they will go the moment they feel it is hopeless for them to get good terms. 

Small wonder, therefore, that Béla Kun’s strike for communism triggered many anxious moments for the Supreme Council. The negotiations were conducted from the wagon-lit of Smuts’ train at the Eastern Station in Budapest, so as not to imply recognition of the régime, encircled by Red Guards with ‘fixed bayonets and scarlet brassards’. They centred on whether or not the Hungarian Bolsheviks would accept the Allies’ armistice terms, which would commit them to accept considerable territorial losses. As they hesitated, Harold decided to explore Budapest, a city he had grown up in before the war. He was alarmed and saddened by what he saw:

‘The whole place is wretched – sad – unkempt.’ He took tea at the Hungaria, Budapest’s leading hotel. Although it had been ‘communised’, it flew ‘a huge Union Jack and Tricoleur’, a gesture of good intent. Red Guards with bayonets patrolled the hall, but in the foyer what remained of Budapest society ‘huddled sadly together with anxious eyes and a complete, ghastly silence’, sipping their lemonade ‘while the band played’. ‘I shudder and feel cold,’ Harold remarked. ‘We leave as soon as possible. Silent eyes search out at us as we go.’

Kun desperately needed allied recognition of his government, but he inserted a clause into Smuts’ draft agreement that the Romanian forces should withdraw to a line east of the neutral zone established by the 1918 Armistice, in effect to evacuate Transylvania. Smuts would not countenance this, however, and the Bolsheviks were ‘silent and sullen’. Nicolson wrote that they looked like convicts standing before the Director of the Prison. Smuts concluded that ‘Béla Kun is just an incident and not worth taking seriously’. This proved to be only too true, as on 10 April, only a day after Harold’s account to Vita, a provisional government was set up in Budapest seeking to reinstate the old ruling Hungarian cliques. On 1 August, Kun fled the capital in the face of invading Romanian armies. He ended his days in Russia, dying in 1936, ironically as the victim of one of Stalin’s innumerable purges. The world revolution that was expected to sweep away the corrupt bourgeois politicians of the peace conference and their allies spluttered to a halt. The Bavarian Soviet Republic, proclaimed on 7 April, hardly survived into May and the communist putsch planned by Kun’s agents in Vienna on 15 June also failed. Meanwhile, General Deniken’s counter-revolutionary offensive in Russia thwarted hopes of help from across the Carpathians.

Facing an ever more turbulent domestic situation marked by widespread peasant unrest and an uprising of the students of the military academy in Budapest, the Revolutionary government, after heated debates, decided to give in to the demands of the Peace Conference, withdrawing Hungarian forces from Slovakia behind the demarcation line at the end of June. Aurél Stromfeld, who as Chief of the General Staff led the Red Army into Slovakia which led to the short-lived Soviet Republic proclaimed there on 16 June, resigned in protest against the ‘capitulation’. Some of his generals now started to join the National Army, organised by the counter-revolutionary government in Szeged, under the command of Admiral Miklós Horthy, the last commander-in-chief of the Austro-Hungarian navy. When the Romanians refused to retreat behind the neutral zone as envisaged, the Red Army launched a surprise offensive along the River Tisza. The initial advance was aborted, however, and ended in a disorderly flight of the Red Army. On 1 August, with the Romanian forces threatening to occupy the Hungarian capital, the commissars handed back power to the Social Democrats on the advice of trade union leaders that the creation of a government acceptable to the Entente powers was the only way to avoid complete foreign occupation. The next day, a government led by the trade unionist leader Gyula Peidl, who had refused to accept the creation of a united workers’ party, took office.

Although it promised to end the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ while at the same time defying a conservative restoration, the new government was still regarded as crypto-Bolshevik not only by conservatives but also by Liberals, peasant democrats and Christian Socialists. It also failed to gain support from the Entente. Assisted by the Romanian army, occupying Budapest, a coup forced the government to resign on 6 August. The government headed by István Friedrich, immediately set about annulling all the measures associated with the Soviet Republic, especially the nationalisation process. It also dismantled all the major social reforms of the democratic revolution, including those associated with individual civil liberties. Revolutionary tribunals were replaced by counter-revolutionary ones, packing prisons with workers, poor peasants and intellectuals, and by the beginning of 1920 it had passed roughly as many death sentences as had the lackeys of the ‘red terror’, the ‘Lenin Boys’. The intellectual élite of the country suffered a serious blow. Bartók and Kodály were prosecuted, Móricz was imprisoned and several dozen left the country, including Lukács, Mannheim and Korda. Horthy’s ‘National Army’, now transferred to Transdanubia, controlled and gave orders to local authorities and its most notorious detachments were instruments of naked terror. In three months, they may have killed as many as two thousand suspected former Soviet members, Red Army soldiers, and ordinary Jews who were in no way associated with the proletarian dictatorship. Besides executions and lynchings, about seventy thousand people were imprisoned or sent to internment camps during these few months.

Despite the protests of the Social Democrats and other left-wing forces, the occupying Romanian forces were replaced by Horthy’s National Army in Budapest. His speech before the notables of the capital stigmatised it as ‘the sinful city’ that had rejected its glorious past, Holy Crown and national colours for the sake of red rags. This suited an atmosphere in which most of the remaining adherents of the democratic revolution as well as the communist one were neutralised in one way or another. The returning conservatives promised to heal the country’s war-wounds by returning it to order, authority and the mythical ‘Christian-national system of values’. Sir George Clerk, the leader of the Peace Conference’s mission to Budapest in October 1919, abandoned his initial insistence that the Social Democrats and the Liberals should have an important role in a coalition government. As Horthy commanded the only troops capable of maintaining order and was ready to subordinate them to government control, it had to be acceptable to Horthy personally and the military in general. As a result, the cabinet formed by Károly Huszár on 24 November 1919 was one in which the Christian National Unity Party and other conservative-agrarian groups prevailed over those of the Independent Smallholder Party, the Social Democrats and the Liberals. Even though the great powers insisted that voting should take place by universal and secret ballot, the circumstances were unfavourable to fulfilling any illusion of a democratic outcome. Terrorist actions by detachments of the National Army and the recovering extreme right-wing organisations, designed to intimidate the candidates and voters for the Social Democrats, Smallholders and Liberals, led to the former boycotting the elections of January 1920 and withdrawing from the political arena until mid-1922.

On 1 March 1920, the army occupied the square in front of the Parliament building, and, accompanied by his officers, Horthy entered and, according to medieval precedent, was ‘elected’ Regent, with strong Presidential powers. This signalled the end of Hungary’s own short experiment with democratic socialism, following its even briefer experience of home-grown communism. Count Pál Teleki and Count István Bethlen, the dominant political figures of inter-war Hungary, both from Transylvanian aristocratic families, argued that the immediate post-war events had shown that the country was not yet ready to graft full democracy onto the parliamentary system. They advocated a limited ‘conservative democracy’, guided by the landed gentry and the aristocracy, as the proper response of the region to the challenges of the democratic age. They opposed all endeavours aimed at the radical extension of the liberal rights enshrined in the parliamentarism of the dualist. Liberal democracy seemed to them a mechanical application of the majority principle, undermining political responsibility and stability. They despised communism and were suspicious of social democracy because of its antipathy to private property. But they also opposed the right-wing radical and fascist trends epitomised by Gyula Gömbös and other ‘protectors of the race’ who thought that the parliamentary system had outlived its usefulness and ought to be replaced by an authoritarian rule which would facilitate a redistribution of economic functions in favour of the Hungarian Christian middle classes and away from the ‘foreign’ bourgeoisie (in other words, the Jews).

The fundamental character which the political system of the country retained until the German occupation of 1944 had emerged by 1922 as a result of Bethlenite consolidation. Hungary became a parliamentary state with strong elements of authoritarianism and a hegemonistic party structure, in which the institutions inherited from the liberal era were operated in an anti-democratic fashion. The government acknowledged a lawful political opposition, consisting on the left of Social Democrats, bourgeois liberals and, after 1930 a rejuvenated Independent Smallholder Party; and on the right of different groups of Christian Socialists as well as right radicals. One of the most important developments in the intellectual life of the Horthy era was the development of ‘populist’ writers, predominantly young and of peasant origin, who wrote ethnographically-based pieces revealing the economic and intellectual poverty of life in rural Hungary and drawing the attention of the ruling classes to the need for change. In ideological terms, some of them, most notably László Németh, advocated a ‘third way’ for Hungary between East and West, or between Soviet collectivism and capitalist individualism. Some, including Gyula Illyés and Ferenc Erdei, sympathised with socialism. Their top priority was the improvement in the lot of the poor peasantry through a genuine redistribution of land among them. But their willingness to engage with both the extreme Left and the extreme Right, as well as their emphasis on the ‘village’ as the root of ‘Hungarianness’, with its anti-Semitic overtones, led it into conflict with more cosmopolitan democrats and ‘urbanist’ intellectuals. This was symptomatic of a broader and longer-term division among Hungarian progressives which survived the attempts of even the Soviet communists to homogenise Hungarian society as well as the post-1989 transition to democracy and is resurgent in the propaganda of the current right-wing populist era.

The Second Hungarian Republic & The Eras of Rákosi & Kádár, 1945-1989:

The second Republic of 1945 was equally as brittle as that which followed the First World War, ending in a Soviet-style government which lasted more than forty years. By the time of the elections of November 1945, the communist vanguard, which had numbered only three thousand a year before, had managed to create a mass party of half a million members as a result of an unscrupulous recruiting campaign. Unlike the Social Democrats, they did not mention socialism as being even their strategic goal, and their rhetoric concentrated mainly on the pressing tasks of reconstruction combined with reform. Their avowed programme was essentially the same as the Independence Front; however, they did not refrain from occasionally playing nationalist tunes. Workers and smallholding peasants out of conviction, intellectuals out of idealism, civil servants out of fear and opportunism, all augmented the party ranks; the surviving Jews of Budapest joined out of gratitude to their liberators and their search for a new experience of community. Besides boasting an ever-growing influence on its own, the Communist Party was also able to manipulate the other parties of the Left. The Social Democratic Party, whose 350,000 strong membership possessed a powerful working-class consciousness, found it increasingly difficult to resist the call of the Communists for working-class unity. Together with the National Peasant Party, the Social Democrats chose to join the Communists in the Left-Wing Bloc on 5 March 1946, following the elections of the previous November which was won by the Smallholder Party, who collected fifty-seven per cent of the votes, with both the Social Democrats and the Communists polling seventeen per cent each, and the National Peasant Party a mere seven percent.

‘Forward to Peace & Socialism!’ The Young Pioneers’ Congress.

The elections themselves, by secret ballot and without a census, were the freest ever to be held in Hungary until 1990. Cardinal Mindszenty, the head of the Hungarian Catholic hierarchy, had condemned the ‘Marxist evil’ in a pastoral letter and called upon the faithful to support the Smallholders. Whatever the voters made of this intervention, the verdict of 4.8 million of them, over ninety per cent of the enfranchised, clearly showed their preference for the return of parliamentary democracy based on support for private property and the market economy over socialism with state management and central economic planning. But then the Smallholders gave in to Soviet pressure for the formation of a ‘grand coalition’ in which the communists were able to preserve the gains they had already secured and to secure a firm base from which they were gradually able to bully their way to power by 1949. After the tribulations of the Rákosi dictatorship, it was not surprising that, in 1956, what was initially a struggle between ‘reform’ communists and orthodox within the party, set off by and adjusting to changes in Moscow, and in the meantime itself triggering off a growing ferment among the intelligentsia, became a national anti-Soviet uprising. The events which began, from 20 October onwards, with meetings and demonstrations at the universities in Budapest and the provinces, culminating with a peaceful demonstration in support of Gomulka’s reforms in Poland on 23rd, became a ‘revolution’ when the crowd successfully laid siege to the radio station and fighting began the next day between Soviet tanks and young working-class ‘guerillas’ whom even the restored Prime Minister referred to as ‘counter-revolutionaries’ at this stage.

All the insurgents agreed about was their desire to return national sovereignty and to put an end to arbitrary rule. They did not call for a reversal of nationalisation or a return to the pre-1945 order.  As fighting continued, by 28 October, Nagy had dropped the label ‘counter-revolution’ and started to talk about a ‘national democratic movement’, acknowledging the revolutionary bodies created during the previous days. The Hungarian Workers’ (Communist) Party was reformed as the Hungarian Socialist Workers’ Party (MSZMP) and the old coalition parties became active again, including the Social Democrats. After his initial uncertainty, the PM kept pace with developments on the streets, closing the gap between himself and the insurgents step by step. His changes culminated in the formation of a new multi-party cabinet on 2 November, including reform Communist, Social Democrat (Anna Kéthély, below), Smallholder and Peasant Party members.

However, this consolidation of power by a now avowedly ‘Revolutionary Government’ involved the collapse of the whole system of institutions of the party-state on which the cohesion of the Soviet bloc rested, and this was unacceptable for the Moscow leadership, Khrushchev included. It could not afford to lose a country of Hungary’s strategic location and mineral wealth from among its satellite states. But it was the radicalisation of the revolution in Budapest which made it impossible for a compromise deal to be struck. After announcing the formation of the MSZMP, also declaring himself to be in favour of neutrality and willing to fight in the streets, János Kádár left Parliament on 1 November for the Soviet Embassy. He quickly found himself in Moscow where he became the latest figure selected by the politburo to steer Hungary on a course acceptable to them. Having accepted this assignment, he entered Budapest with his cabinet in Soviet tanks on 7 November.

Although the pockets of armed resistance had been mopped up by 11 November, the most peculiar forms of the revolution, the workers’ councils, started to exert their true impact after 4 November, with an attempt to organise a nationwide network. Initially set up as strike committees, their basic idea was self-management in the factory, owned principally by the workers. On the initiative of the workers’ councils, a massive wave of strikes lasted into January 1957. The intellectuals, rallying mainly in the Writers’ Association, the students’ committees and the Journalists’ Association, founded the Revolutionary Council of the Hungarian Intelligentsia, chaired by composer Zoltán Kodály, which demanded the restoration of the country’s sovereignty and representative government. These movements marked out the Revolution as more than simply a defeated National Uprising. They were clearly socialist in their aims and membership. Kádár, on the other hand, did not have a clear policy to cope with this situation. The government programme which he drafted while still in Moscow, included promises of welfare measures, workers’ self-management and policies to aid the peasantry and small-scale enterprises. But these were clearly not the reasons for his ‘appointment’ by his Moscow patrons. To begin with, he was too busy organising special police forces for the purposes of retaliation and repression to spend time setting out policies. Although he negotiated with the leaders of the Budapest Workers’ Council on 22 November, on the previous day the special police squads prevented the creation of a National Workers’ Council and in early December, two hundred members of the movement were arrested on the same day that saw the abduction of Nagy and his associates.

The revolutionary committees which had been set up were dissolved, and the police shot dead nearly a hundred demonstrators in Sálgotorján, Miskolc and Eger. The ideological justification for these actions and the continuing repression and the impending campaign of retaliation was created at a party conference which identified the causes of the October Uprising as the mistakes of the Rákosi-Gerő faction on the one hand and, on the other, the undermining of the party by ‘Nagy circle’ leading to a capitalist-feudal counter-revolution of Horthyite fascism… supported by international imperialism. Given the trauma created by the revolution, its repression and the retaliation which followed in 1956-58, it is not surprising that Hungarian society was in the mood for Kádár’s Realsozialismus, based on his personalised creed that the ‘little man’ was interested simply in a decent living, instead of the great political issues of the day. He used the scope created by the ruins of the revolt on which he built his power to buy the complicity of Hungarians by unorthodox methods. In November 1962, Kádár somewhat pompously announced that the foundations of socialism in Hungary had been laid and that the construction of socialism was an all-national task, dependent on co-operation between Communists and non-party members, irrespective of personal convictions. There was to be no ‘class war’; this was what became known as the ‘Kádár doctrine’. These were the foundations of the ‘Hungarian model’, often referred to as ‘Gulyás communism’ in the 1970s, which was a far cry from utopian models. With characteristic persistence, Kádár managed to earn legitimacy, retaining it until it became apparent in the 1980s that Realsozialismus was not a functioning system, but merely ‘the longest path from capitalism to capitalism’.

Conclusion: The End of ‘Class-War’ Socialism?

Marx House (Memorial Library) in London.

Marx (before ‘Marxism’) based his theories on a belief that men’s minds are limited by their economic circumstances and that there is a necessary conflict of interests in our present civilization between the prosperous and employing classes of people and the employed masses. With the advance in education necessitated by the mechanical revolution, this great employed majority would become more and more class-conscious and more and more solid in antagonism to the ruling minority. In some way the class-conscious workers would seize power, he prophesied, and inaugurate a new social state. The antagonism, the insurrection, the possible revolution are understandable enough, but it did not follow that a new social state or anything but a socially destructive process would ensue. Marx sought to replace national antagonism by class antagonisms, but it is interesting to see how the two lines of thought, so diverse in spirit, so different in substance as this class-war socialism of the Marxists and the individualistic theory and socialist theory have continued to be part of a common search for more spacious social and political ideas and interpretations. In the long history of socialism in western Europe, as contrasted with the seventy years of Soviet-style Communism, the logic of reality has usually triumphed over the logic of theory.

Sources:

László Kontler (2001), A History of Hungary. Budapest: Atlantisz Publishing.

H. G. Wells (1922, 1946), A Short History of the World. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

  

Part Two; June – December:

The British Delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, including (in the centre),

Arthur J Balfour & David Lloyd George, Foreign Secretary & Prime Minister.

This is not a peace. It is an armistice for twenty years.

(Marshal Foch at Versailles)

Victory Celebrations in London & Paris:

In the victory celebration parade that took place in London in July 1919 units of every ‘race and creed’ from Britain’s worldwide empire marched in symbolic unity. Men in their millions, latterly conscripted, had responded to the call to uphold the glorious traditions of the British race. 

Below: British sailors march through Whitehall in July 1919 to celebrate ‘Victory’.

Two weeks after witnessing the humiliating scenes in the Galerie des Glaces, Harold Nicolson watched the Allied victory procession make its way through the Arc de Triomphe. Perched high on the roof of the Hotel Astoria, he was overcome by a wave of patriotic fervour as he applauded the British Grenadiers and behind them hundreds and hundreds of British regimental flags – stiff, imperial, heavy with gold lettering, “Busaco”, “Inkerman”, “Waterloo” – while the crowd roared with enthusiasm. Cries of “Good Old Blighty” were heard. Harold wept at the spectacle of the most glorious, the most democratic and the most final of Britain’s victories. For Nicolson, these three months in Paris, despite his private agony and professional frustration, ended on an emotional high. But this sense of relief and elation at the coming of peace did not last long, either in Paris or London. The Treaty of Versailles did not deal, except incidentally, with the problems arising out of the liquidation of the Austro-Hungarian empire, nor with the two other ‘enemy’ powers, Turkey and Bulgaria. Four further treaties were required to deal with these: St. Germain, concluded with Austria in September 1919; Neuilly, with Bulgaria in November 1919; Trianon, with Hungary in June 1920, and Sévres, with Turkey in August 1920, though later replaced by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923.

Above: At the Peace Conference at the Quai d’Orsay, by Sir William Orpen.

Unfinished Business – Break-up of the Austrian Empire:

The most spectacular change in the post-war map of Europe was the disappearance of the Hapsburg Empire, which for seventy years had been saved from collapse by its dynastic rulers. There was no unity between the different nationalities. Czechs, Slovaks, Ruthenians, Poles, Croats, and Slovenes were dominated by German and Magyar masters; yet because one dynasty had linked together in its chain of bondage a huge territory in Central Europe, centring on the Danube Basin, certain economic advantages accrued to its million inhabitants. There was free trade within the vast empire; a unified railway and river transport system and an outlet to the Adriatic Sea assisted the national trade and commerce. But the empire had already collapsed and its former territories were already split into seven territories before the conference started. Austria and Hungary were both reduced to the status of minor states before the treaties of St. Germain and Trianon were signed and sealed. The fragments of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy were in a dire condition. Austria was reduced to one great city and a narrow arc of productive land around it which could never form an economic unit by itself, and Hungary, recovering from Bolshevik Revolution was also bankrupt, confused and impotent. The map below illustrates the areas, races, population, and economic resources of the partitioned empire. A comparative study of the four sketch-maps reveals the different characteristics of these divisions:

From the ruins of the old Hapsburg Empire there emerged the small republic of Austria, mostly a mountainous territory in the Alps, with its huge capital, Vienna, retaining all that was left of its former greatness. Reduced by disease and starvation, its very existence threatened, Austria was one of the first states whose difficulties engaged the attention of the European statesmen. As a result of the Peace Settlement, there were many more small states than there had been in 1914. The League of Nations gave them their opportunity to co-operate and thus influence the decisions of the Great Powers. The frontiers of the countries in the Danube Basin were settled upon national lines. As a result, a group of aggressively national states was brought into being intent on securing economic as well as political independence, a situation dangerous alike to the prosperity and peace of Europe. Jealous of their neighbours and fearful of their former ruling peoples, the Germans of Austria and the Magyars of Hungary, they immediately began strengthening their military resources. At first, the ‘Peace’ appeared to be a decisive victory for democracy, as the autocratic empires of the Hohenzollerns, Hapsburgs and Romanovs were replaced by democratic republics. But the rival doctrines of Communism and Fascism began to undermine their stability almost as soon as they were created, and in these ideological positions, there was little room for representative institutions.

The Economic Consequences of the Peace:

While the Austrian and Turkish Empires were broken up, the German Empire was not drastically partitioned, as we saw in the first part of this article. This was chiefly because except at its eastern edges there were fewer national minorities under its sovereignty. However, it did lose all its overseas colonies and many thousands of German-speakers were placed under the rule of the new neighbouring states. These territorial losses alone were enough to create a sense of injustice in the minds of many Germans, but the effect of the economic provisions of the Treaty of Versailles was to convince them that the Allies were bent on their total ruin. The prosperity of Germany depended on her industrial and commercial development. The territorial annexations had taken away from her valuable mineral resources as well as fully grown industrial enterprises, e.g. textile-mills in Alsace. Not content with this, the Allies proceeded to imperil what remained by demanding reparations in the form of coal, the cession of railway stock, and its mercantile shipping; they interfered with her control over her navigable rivers and took away the special rights it had obtained in Morocco, Egypt and China. The reparations were to be paid in recompense for damage done to civilians in the Allied countries where the fighting had taken place.

The overall effect of these arrangements was to ruin Germany economically, and since all nations were, to some extent, mutually dependent on trade with each other, they caused economic distress throughout Europe. Germany had been at her last gasp before she surrendered, but surrender did not break the fortitude of its people. They crushed a communist attempt to follow the Soviet Russian model and produced, even while starving and bewildered, some semblance of a national Government. They received the harsh conditions of Versailles with protests but with dignity, and then they set themselves against desperate odds to rebuild their economy and society. The Allied blockade was continued well into the second half of 1919, and it was only the protests of the British soldiers on the Rhine that forced the Allies to attend to their duty of provisioning a starving population. A huge proportion of this, children especially, were suffering from malnutrition. There was an extreme shortage of raw materials, and there was no money to purchase these abroad, nor were there ships to import them. The highly developed agricultural system was in ruins and yet the country was saddled with a huge but yet undetermined debt. The new republic had to quickly improvise a new social order and governmental system, threatened by anarchy at home and Bolshevism from both within and without.

For a moment, but only for a moment, after the signing of the treaties, there was a sense of peace and stability. Then everywhere came unsettlement and confusion, economic or political, or both, except in the United States. Britain, desperately busy with setting her own house in order, was compelled to lend a hand in straightening out the world’s tangle which, of course, it had been party to creating. On the peace and prosperity of the globe depended its export trade, vast system of overseas lending and its position as a financial centre, as well as its hope of building up a new and better society and thereby winning something  from the sacrifice of war; and the interests of its Empire was vitally engaged in this ‘project’. The background to any picture of inter-war Britain must, therefore, be, as John Buchan put it in 1935, the vast shifting kaleidoscope of the world. By then, J M Keynes’ damning contemporary indictment of the French attitude at the Paris Conference had helped to develop the policy of ‘appeasement’, often confused with the ‘policy of fear’ of 1937-39. Appeasement had a coherent intellectual foundation with a high moral tone, as in Keynes’ famous book, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, which he published soon after the signing of the Treaty of Versailles:

In this forecast, he found support from Lloyd George and Winston Churchill among other leading politicians and thinkers in the early twenties. Although particularly critical of the French attitude at Paris, Keynes understood clearly enough its economic motives for this:

In spite … of France’s victorious issue from the present struggle … her future position remained precarious in the eyes of one (Clemenceau) who took the view that European civil war is to be regarded as a normal, or at least a recurrent, state of affairs for the future. … Hence the necessity of ‘guarantees’; and each guarantee that was taken, by increasing irritation and thus the probability of a subsequent ‘Revanche’ by Germany, made necessary yet further provisions to crush. Thus … a demand for a Carthaginian peace is inevitable. … By loss of territory and other measures (Germany’s) population was to be curtailed; but chiefly the economic system … the vast fabric built upon iron, coal, and transport, must be destroyed. … 

It is evident that Germany’s pre-war capacity to pay annual foreign tribute has not been unaffected by the almost total loss of her colonies, her overseas connections, her mercantile marine, and her foreign properties, by the cession of ten per cent of her territory and population, of one-third of her coal, and three-quarters of her iron ore, by two million casualties amongst men in the prime of life, by the starvation of her people for four years, by the burden of a vast war debt, by the depreciation of her currency to less than one-seventh of its former value, by the disruption of her allies and their territories, by Revolution at home and Bolshevism on her borders, and by all the unmeasured ruin in strength and hope of four years of all-swallowing war and final defeat.

Al this, one would have supposed, is evident. Yet most estimates of a great indemnity from Germany depend on the assumption that she is in a position to conduct in the future a vastly greater trade than ever she has had in the past. …

We cannot expect to legislate for a generation or more. … We cannot as reasonable men do better than base our policy on the evidence we have and adapt it to the five or ten years over which we may suppose ourselves to have some measure of prevision. … The fact that we have no adequate knowledge of Germany’s capacity to pay over a long period of years is no justification … for the statement that she can pay ten thousand million pounds.

If we aim deliberately at the impoverishment of Central Europe, vengeance, I dare predict, will not limp. Nothing can then delay for very long that final civil war between the forces of Reaction and the despairing convulsions of Revolution, before which the horrors of the late German war will fade into nothing, and which will destroy, whoever is victor, the civilisation and the progress of our generation.

(1924 edn.)

According to Gilbert, writing in the mid-1970s, Keynes destroyed British faith in Versailles by opening the ‘floodgates of criticism’. For the following twenty years, the Treaty was ‘assailed by means of his arguments’. But he may have underestimated the difficulties of peacemaking in 1919. The task of the Allied statesmen was indeed difficult, because they had to take into account the views of the peoples of Europe, not just their leaders, in re-drawing the map of Europe. In the former treaties in Vienna in 1815, for instance, they only had the claims of the rulers to consider.

Lines on the Map of Central Europe:

In the main, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Romanians, Serbs and Greeks had every reason to be satisfied with the treatment they received. Though divided for a century, the Poles had never ceased to resist their conquerors, and they speedily asserted their independence on the collapse of their oppressors. They were generously supported at the conference. Clemenceau welcomed the renaissance of Poland as a bulwark against Germany and Russia, and Wilson had proclaimed at the outset that it was the duty of European statesmen to assist the Poles. The Czechs were a cultured people long oppressed who had resisted their Austrian masters in the nineteenth century. France realised that the position of their land gave the northern Slavs a strategic position in Central Europe, forming a barrier against potential Austrian and Hungarian aggression. President Wilson was impressed by the Czech leaders, who welcomed the setting-up of the League of Nations enthusiastically.

Czechoslovakia was, both industrially and politically, the most important of the new states which emerged out of the ruins of the Austrian empire. It consisted of Bohemia, a rich industrial and manufacturing region, with a fertile and intensively cultivated soil, densely populated with a literate people, the Czechs; Moravia, another important area, with a strategic position between the plains of the Vistula and the Danube, and the mountainous area in the Carpathians, Slovakia, where the cultivable areas were few and the minerals unimportant. The population there was sparsely distributed and illiterate; communications were difficult. Czechoslovakia, therefore, inherited from the Austrian Empire industrial wealth and fertile land which enabled it to be self-supporting. However, it still had large numbers of minorities along its frontiers, including Germans, Magyars and Ruthenians, which created internal difficulties in administration and led to unfriendly relations with Germany, Austria and Hungary, which surrounded it. These negated the advantages of its position in central Europe.

Romania had taken advantage of the weakness of Hungary to seize Transylvania, and the preoccupation of Russia with its civil war to take possession of Bessarabia; at the Peace Conference, it successfully asserted its claims to these on the grounds that Romanian people were in the majority. In many parts of these new territories, the ethnicities were very mixed, and the problem of achieving a fair division of the territories proved insoluble. In Southern Dobruja, however, there was unquestionably a Bulgarian majority, but this territory was left in Romanian hands. As a result of the Treaty of Neuilly in November 1919, Bulgaria was also forced to cede Western Thrace to Greece. The northern boundaries of Serbia and the Southern Slavs, what became the new state of ‘Yugoslavia’, were finalised under the Treaty of Trianon with Hungary in June 1920, but before that, Wilson supported the claims of the Southern Slavs against Italy, to whom the Allies had promised the lands along the Dalmatian coast, which was peopled by Slavs. Clemenceau agreed with Wilson, not because he was interested in the idea of satisfying the national aspirations of the Slavs, but because it afforded a practical method of detaching the provinces from Austria without the dangerous necessity of transferring them to Italy.

For the first time in modern history, Europe was divided along national lines, yet there were many injuries and injustices to minorities, especially to those who lived in the defeated countries. People of different nationalities, especially in the south-east of Europe, were inextricably intermingled; a great number of different solutions to the problems, apparently equally just, was possible. Frontiers which would enable nations to have a chance of economic existence had to be devised. To ensure this alongside satisfying national demands, the Allied statesmen were faced by an almost impossible task. Harold Nicholson’s views on the ‘mistakes’ and ‘misfortunes’ of the treaties scarcely changed over the years. He would argue that Britain’s freedom of action had been severely limited by its war-time treaties with Italy, France and Romania, and with the Arabs, in the short run beneficial but in the long run positively harmful. He would further argue that democratic diplomacy, being captive to narrow, partisan, democratic pressures, was ‘irresponsible’, and that the fundamental error of Versailles was the ‘spirit not the letter’ of the treaty. He blamed the peacemakers. They had not combined to elaborate a ‘formal procedure’, nor had they settled upon an ‘established programme’, the upshot being that their deliberations were ‘uncertain, intermittent and confused’.

The Allied Powers were in every case deliberately antagonistic to the claims of the defeated and it became obvious that decisions reached were frequently the result of other considerations than that of satisfying nationalities. Lands were transferred on the grounds that they were strategically important for the security of the new states, e.g. the Southern Tyrol, peopled by Austrians, was handed to Italy, while the German minorities of Bohemia, once in the Austrian Empire, were still included in the new northern Slav state of Czechoslovakia. Attempts were made to solve some of these difficult problems of satisfying nationalities by the use of ‘plebiscites’ where there was a doubt about to which state territory should be transferred. With the creation of the League of Nations, some states pledged to treat alien populations fairly and to respect their rights. The League undertook the responsibility of supervising the care of such governments towards their minority subjects. The map below illustrates the boundaries which were adjusted on the decision of the Allied statesmen as well as the principal areas where plebiscites were arranged:

The new Austria comprised a large area of the Eastern Alps, of little economic importance except for its forests, alpine pastures and scenic attractions, and a small plain along the Danube surrounding Vienna and along the Hungarian border (Burgenland). A third of the country’s population lived in the old capital, previously one of the most important cities in Europe. It had thus attracted in pre-war days large numbers of officials engaged in government, banking, insurance, transport and administration. These professionals were no longer required in such large numbers by 1919, as Vienna no longer supplied the needs of so large an empire; neither were its newspapers, clothes and furniture required in great quantities any more. The luxury-manufacturers of the city were excluded from the new countries which surrounded it by their imposition of high tariffs, and Austria could not easily export goods to buy the food that its people could not grow for themselves. The satisfaction of the national aspirations of the various peoples included in the old Austrian Empire created economic problems which affected the prosperity of all the states. Each tried to be self-supporting and erected tariff barriers against the others. Though they came to realize the folly of these restrictions on trade, attempts to form a Danubian Trade Federation proved unsuccessful.

Germans in Austria were forbidden to unite with Germany under article eighty of the Treaty, despite being entirely German in language and culture. This was confirmed in the Treaty of St. Germain, by which Austrians in the Tyrol, Galicia and Bohemia were also left under alien rule. Control of Galicia, a wealthy area across the Carpathians, passed to Poland. Its soil was fertile and productive, with coal, iron, zinc, salt and petroleum resources also contained beneath its earth. The western part of the region was inhabited by Poles, but in the eastern part, the people were Ruthenians, creating a difficult minorities problem. Attempts made by these people to unite with their fellows in sub-Carpathian Ukraine (then part of the USSR) were frustrated by the Polish Government, and an insurrection was ruthlessly crushed by Pilsudski (see below) in 1919. South Tyrol and Trentino were both Alpine territories. In the latter the majority of the population was Italian, but in South Tyrol, the Germans were in the majority, and the union of both provinces to Italy created grave dissatisfaction.

The Peace Settlement also disappointed Italy, however. The Allied offers made in the Secret Treaty of London by which Italy entered the war in 1915 were not fulfilled. Having acquired Trieste under this treaty, Italy now wished to consolidate its control over the northern Adriatic, including the entire Dalmatian coast down to, and including Albania. Meanwhile, the break-up of the Austrian empire had left the lands to be claimed by the Italians in the hands of the Serbians with the creation of Yugoslavia out of the south-western provinces of Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia. They were largely mountainous areas of little economic importance. Their people were largely Slav in identity and so united with the Serbs to form the new Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes, which soon became known as Yugoslavia. Although a large country, its economic resources were limited and undeveloped. Its population also included large Magyar, German and Albanian Muslim minorities, within a country already combining Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians. From the beginning, the Croats resented the greater influence of the Serbs and therefore grew closer to their coreligionist Germans.

Italy failed to secure what it had been promised in 1915, the Dalmatian Coast, including Istria, and a Protectorate over Albania (see the map above). It did not even secure the port of Fiume, ‘the jewel of the Adriatic’, which had a large Italian population and had become a symbol of Italian nationalism and at the centre of Italy’s demands. In August 1919, Harold Nicolson attended an Allied meeting in Paris convened to sort out these problems. Italy put forward a series of transparent formulas designed to mask its true aims. The Italian delegate, M. Scialoga, suggested that Fiume and its hinterland should be recognised as a ‘free state’, but the island of Cherso, which dominated and effectively blocked the Gulf of Fiume, should be annexed to Italy, as should the high ground surrounding the port. The railway system, extending from Fiume island, should also be under Italian control. Abandoning all claims to Dalmatia, Scialoga nevertheless insisted that the Dalmatian coast must be neutralised, and called for Italian sovereignty over certain key areas; the zone of Zara, for example. Lastly, he put in a claim for a mandate over Albania.

By these means, Italy hoped to achieve mastery of the Adriatic, but their strategies failed to gain support from the British and the Americans, though the French were prepared for a deal ‘on any terms’. Nicholson backed the American delegate, Major Johnson, in repudiating Italian claims to Fiume and Istria. Eventually, it was agreed to set up Fiume as ‘a free city’, an arrangement ultimately accepted by both Italy and Yugoslavia. Bitterly disappointed, however, the Italians turned on their government, and there was great discontent throughout the country. This manifested itself in September 1919, a month after the Paris talks, when a group of soldiers, led by D’Annunzio, an admired national poet, attacked and seized Fiume. Nicholson considered him a fine poet, but a political dimwit, barnstorming out of ‘sheer swank’. D’Annunzio’s posturing proved him right. The Allies forced the Italian Government to expel them, and they returned to Italy indignant and disgusted at the weakness of their government.

Polish leaders realised that the War provided them with an opportunity to gain their freedom, though at first they did not anticipate complete independence and struggled only for self-government. Though the mass of the Poles fought in the Russian armies, an influential group, led by Pilsudski, supported Austria. In 1918 a group of Poles organised a National Committee in Paris and raised an army which fought on the Western Front. The Allies in return promised the Poles to complete independence. The independent Polish state was proclaimed at Warsaw and in Galicia immediately after the collapse of the Central Powers. The new state was represented at the Peace Conference, and its independence was recognised. The western frontier was agreed upon, with the provinces of Posen, West Prussia and Galicia to be included in the new Poland. The eastern frontier was settled provisionally, with the disturbed state of the Soviet state giving the Poles an opportunity to secure a more favourable frontier than they had had to begin with.

President Wilson had promised that Poland should have access to the sea. This involved adding to the indisputably Polish territory an area along the coast west of the Vistula delta in which there was a mixed population of Germans and Slavs. Germany strongly objected because East Prussia would be cut off from the rest of Germany; when the German President wished to visit his family estates in East Prussia he would have to cross a foreign state. In spite of the fact that its population was overwhelmingly German, the Poles claimed that the city of Danzig was the ‘natural outlet’ of the Vistula basin (see map above left). A compromise resulted in the creation of the tiny independent state of the ‘Free City of Danzig’, under the supervision of the League of Nations. Neither Germany nor Poland was satisfied with this arrangement, however. The fate of Upper Silesia was eventually settled by plebiscite (see map above right).

The division of the former Austrian territory of Teschen, an area with valuable coal-mines and the centre of a major railway network, on the Polish-Czechoslovak border, was arranged by the Allied Statesmen. How many members ever heard of Teschen? Lloyd George asked the House of Commons, disarmingly admitting that until recently he had not. Teschen presented the peacemakers with an intriguing problem: whether to honour the sacrosanct principle of national self-determination; or whether to secure the prosperity of a model, democratic state emerging in central Europe. Edvard Benes, then Foreign Minister of Czechoslovakia, told Nicolson, who had been charged with producing a report, that the fate of Teschen depended on the attitude adopted by the British Delegation. The territory was ethnically Polish by a ratio of two to one, but it was considered essential to Czechoslovakia’s economic well-being. In early 1919 fighting had broken out between the rival parties, a ceasefire being imposed by the Allies with some difficulty. Nicolson set out the options for the delegation: either appeasing Polish nationalism or, more precisely chauvinism, as he saw it, or allowing Czechoslovakia some economic breathing space. There was considerable friction between Poland and Czechoslovakia over this; the final settlement, reached after strong French pressure, effectively partitioned the region: the Czechs acquired the coal mines and most of the industrial basin of approximately 1,300 square kilometres; the City of Teschen was divided into Polish and Czechoslovak quarters, with the latter containing the invaluable railway station.

Policies of Punishment & Appeasement – Britain & France:

For the following ten years, Gilbert claimed, appeasement was the guiding philosophy of British foreign policy. British official opinion doubted whether a secure Europe could be based upon the treaties of 1919, and had strong hopes of obtaining serious revisions to those aspects of the treaties that seemed to contain the seeds of future conflict. With the disintegration in 1918 of the Russian, Turkish, German and Austro-Hungarian Empires, the final stage had been reached in a process that had begun in Europe during the Napoleonic wars – the evolution of strictly national as opposed to dynastic or strategic frontiers. Post-1918 diplomacy was geared towards securing the final rectifications of frontiers still not conforming to this principle. Most of these frontiers were the result of the Versailles boundaries which had been drawn to the disadvantage of Germany. Thus there were German-speaking people outside, but contiguous to the German frontier with Poland and Czechoslovakia. Many Germans lived in the frontier provinces of Alsace-Lorraine and Holstein, which were also lost to Germany. Germans in Danzig and Memel were detached from their mother country. The claims of Poland were preferred to those of Germany in the creation of the Polish Corridor to the sea and the in the division of the Silesian industrial area.

There were other national ‘inequalities’ which were also part of the Versailles Treaty, and which were equally prone to the ‘egalitarian touch of appeasement’. The German Government could only maintain itself against communist and nationalist opponents by a continuing protest against the impossible severity of the reparations clauses of the Treaty. They docilely submitted to the disarmament provisions at first. The problem of the next few years was how to square what France regarded as her rights and necessities with the hard facts of the difficult and dangerous situation Europe was in. For France, the War had ended in anxiety and disappointment. Germany had been defeated, but that defeat had not been the victory of France alone; without the help of Britain and America, the French leaders knew that they would have been beaten to the ground. The glory which was due of their soldiers’ heroism was revealed as tarnished and insubstantial. With a population of forty million, France had to live side-by-side with a population of sixty or seventy million who were not likely to forget Versailles. As John Buchan put it, …

She was in the position of a householder who has surprisingly knocked out a far more powerful burglar, and it was her aim to see that her assailant was not allowed to recover freedom of action. Therefore her policy … must be to keep Germany crippled and weak, and to surround her with hostile alliances. The terms of the Treaty, both as to reparations and disarmament, must be interpreted according to the strict letter. No one can deny that her fears were natural. It is easy for those who live high above a river to deprecate the nervousness of one whose house is on the flood level.

To Britain, it seemed that, with every sympathy for French anxiety, it was impossible to keep a great Power in perpetual tutelage, and that the only hope for France, as for the world, lay in establishing a new international system which would give political security to all its parts. Lloyd George, while he remained in power, strove honourably for this end. The disarmament of Germany, while France rearmed, was a German grievance which could either be met by disarming France or allowing Germany to rearm. Both alternatives were considered by British policy-makers, and when the first proved impossible to secure, the second became logically difficult to resist. A further ‘inequality’ was the exclusion of Germany from the League of Nations. British policy worked for German inclusion and looked forward to a time when the differences between the ‘Allied’ and ‘Enemy’ Powers, as embodied in the Treaty would disappear. The policy of appeasement, as practised from 1919, was wholly in Britain’s interest, of course. Britain’s policy-makers reasoned that the basis of European peace was a flourishing economic situation. Only by success in this policy could Britain avoid becoming involved, once again, in a war arising out of European national rivalries and ambitions.

At Paris, the British diplomats had vacillated between the Americans, who contended that under the League of Nations all international disputes would be settled by ‘sweet reasonableness’ and the French, who, obsessed with their own security, suffered from no such illusion. Harold Nicholson took his reasoning a step further by suggesting that if only the British had wholeheartedly supported either the American or the French perception of peace, a golden age of worldwide tranquillity and harmony might have been inaugurated for a century. Nicholson also remained consistent in his view that war-torn Paris was clearly the wrong venue for a peace conference. Geneva, he wrote, would have been a more judicious choice. In addition, given the circumstances, with passions running high among both public and politicians, he would have preferred to see an initial treaty followed by a final one, after a suitable cooling-off period. With the Congress of Vienna still in mind, he argued that it was a grave mistake to have treated Germany as a ‘pariah state’: the stability of Europe would have been better served by inviting it to participate in the conference, particularly as Bolshevism threatened to despoil the defeated country further. He damned the reparations clauses as patently absurd. As a result of the infamous ‘war guilt’ clause, the peace which emerged was unjust enough to cause resentment, but not forcible enough to render such resentment impotent. Summarising his overall disillusionment, Nicholson wrote (in 1933):

We came to Paris confident that the new order was about to be established; we left it convinced that the new order had merely fouled the old. We arrived as fervent apprentices in the school of Woodrow Wilson; we left as renegades.

If he had had to choose a hero at Paris, he would surely have chosen Lloyd George, fighting valiantly for a moderate peace, with Venizelos, the Greek Prime Minister, and Smuts running a close second and third. Until the end of 1919, Nicolson was based mainly in Paris, working for Sir Eric Drummond, a senior Foreign Office mandarin and designate Secretary-General of the League of Nations. He was supremely confident that the League was a body which was certain to become of vital importance. … a great experiment. He was also putting the finishing touches to the treaties with Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Turkey. Lloyd George and Balfour had left Paris to immerse themselves in Westminster politics. Much committee work was delegated to him, particularly on those bodies dealing with the Czechoslovak and Greek questions. He scored a minor success regarding the vexed question of Teschen, and continued his involvement with the Austrian and Bulgarian treaties and delineating Albania’s frontiers in the face of Yugoslavia’s demands. He clashed with Lloyd George over the Italian policy, arguing for a tougher line in view of Italy’s recent mischievous behaviour. Lloyd George responded angrily: The Foreign Office always blocks me in whatever I wish to do. But as the year drew to a close, the most pressing issue was how to meet British commitments to Greece, an undertaking that was slowly but relentlessly unravelling.

Independence Struggles & Imperial Designs:

Above: (Unofficial) President Eamon de Valera inspects an IRA unit of ‘levies’

Refusing to sit in the British Parliament, the Sinn Féiners continued to meet in the Dublin Dáil (parliament), where they had declared the Republic of Ireland earlier in the year (see part one of this article). Eamon de Valera was elected President of the Republic and the MPs also elected their own ministers, set up their own law-courts and disregarded the authority of the Crown and the British Parliament altogether. Although severe measures were taken against them and the Dáil was suppressed, British law and order could not be restored. After the failure of the appeal to the Peace Conference in Paris, and amid the growing repression of Republicans, a more coherent campaign began for independence began, leading to the outbreak of a brutal war between the levies of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) on the one side and the police on the other, enlarged by the “Black and Tan” auxiliaries, a part of the British army. James Craig, the Ulster Unionist MP and founder of the protestant paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force, who became the first Prime Minister of Northern Ireland in 1921, was already preparing for ‘partition’ in 1919:

From 1919 to 1921 the IRA killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers, and the police and ‘black and tans’ killed hundreds of IRA men in retaliation. In Dublin, there were IRA men and women everywhere, but it was hard for the British to find them. Michael Collins, the IRA leader, was known to the British authorities as a prisoner after the 1916 Uprising, but they didn’t even have a photo of him.

Meanwhile, another imperial dream came true in 1919 when Cecil Rhodes’ ‘Cape to Cairo’ scheme came into fruition when Britain took Tanganyika (now Tanzania) from Germany, completing that chain too. The Union of South Africa took over the administration of South-West Africa from Germany, and the spoils in the south Pacific were divided between Australia and New Zealand. With Britain’s existing Dominions and colonies, this all meant that the British Empire in 1919 was more extensive than it had ever been. But in fact, while the war had added new colonies to Britain’s ‘collection’, it had also weakened her grasp in her old ones. In the self-governing dominions, the co-operation with Britain which imperialists gloried in was misleading. That they had co-operated in wartime did not necessarily signify that they wished to be shackled in peace. The Great War was a European war which Britain only just won, with their support and at great cost in lives, especially for the ANZACs. Gallipoli had been just one of many defeats along the way; in itself, this had damaged the prestige and authority of the ‘mother country’. She had had to issue ‘promissory notes’ of ‘self-determination’ to the Egyptians, the Palestinian Arabs and the Indians, which they expected her to honour. The war had therefore provided an opportunity for a more vigorous assertion of nationalism with a harder edge than before.

The overthrow of the Turkish armies in 1918 was complete; all the provinces from the Mediterranean to the Persian Gulf were overrun, and the great cities of Baghdad, Jerusalem, Damascus and Aleppo were captured. The Turks were forced to acknowledge defeat and signed an armistice at Mudros in October 1918. Allied troops occupied Constantinople. However, it soon became apparent that settling the conflicting claims of the victorious powers would prove very difficult. By secret treaties made during the war, promises of Turkish territories had been made to Russia, Italy, France, Greece and to the Arabs. The Allied statesmen postponed the settlement of the difficult issues until they had settled the more urgent needs of Europe. They permitted the Greeks, however, to occupy the port of Smyrna in 1919 and supported the occupation with an Allied fleet. This action aroused indignation among the Turks.

The ‘Greek question’ had begun on a high note, with a virtual agreement between the British and American delegations in meeting most of the Greek Prime Minister Venizelos’s territorial goals. These included Smyrna and its hinterland, roughly corresponding with the Ottoman vilayet of Aydin, some form of international régime over Constantinople, and the whole of western and eastern Thrace up to the vicinity of the Turkish capital, claims that, if realised, would have given the Greeks control over the Straits. Harold Nicolson was, initially, among the many who fell for Venizelos’s charm, but he soon recognised, as did the Americans, that the Greek PM’s extravagant empire-building heralded disaster. Harold was instructed to inform Venizelos that there would have to be a compromise regarding the future of Thrace. Then the Smyrna landings were besmirched by Greek atrocities against the local Turkish populace, which sparked off the Turkish national revival under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk).

In the British Empire, the support and the opportunity for colonial aggrandisement were both there; consequently, the main result of the war for Britain was a considerable augmentation of its empire. The middle east was divided up in accordance with the secret war-time Sykes-Picot agreement (see map above, showing the division into ‘A’, for France, and ‘B’ for Britain). The Arabs were given the Arabian desert, Britain took for herself Palestine, Transjordan, the Persian Gulf states and Iraq: which together with its existing protectorates in Egypt, Cyprus and Aden made up a tidy little middle-eastern empire. Of course, Palestine and the other middle-eastern territories were not ‘annexations’ or even ‘colonies’. They were called ‘mandated’ territories (see the map below), which meant that they were entrusted to Britain and France by the League of Nations to administer in the interests of their inhabitants with a view to their eventual independence. Nevertheless, this award almost fulfilled Curzon’s old dream of a continuous belt of influence or control between the Mediterranean and India, which was completed in August 1919 when the final link in the chain, Persia, was secured by means of a one-sided, widely resented treaty.

In India, General Dyer’s violent massacre of the crowds at Amritsar considerably increased the natives’ resentment and united Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs against the British ‘Raj’. ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi continued to mount his campaign of ‘passive resistance’, encouraging his mainly Hindu followers to refuse to co-operate with the British Government. Dyer’s unnecessary action was the child of the British mentality then dominating India. Jallianwalla Bagh quickened India’s political life and drew Gandhi into politics. In his evidence to the Hunter Committee Appointed by the Government of India to Investigate the Disturbances in the Punjab, given in November, he re-articulated his commitment to passive resistance and non-violence, Ahimsa, without which he said that there would be confusion and worse. He stated:

All terrorism is bad, whether put up in a good cause or bad. Every cause is good in the estimation of its champion. General Dyer (and he had thousands of Englishmen and women who honestly thought with him) enacted Jallianwalla Bagh for a cause which he undoubtedly believed to be good. He thought that by one act he had saved English lives and the Empire. That it was all a figment of his imagination cannot affect the valuation of the intensity of his conviction. … In other words, pure motives can never justify impure or violent action. …

Gandhi had always resisted political involvement. After his return to India, he had attended annual sessions of the Congress, but his public activity at these assemblies was usually limited to moving a resolution in support of the Indians in South Africa. But on the other hand, he was not simply interested in building a mass movement. In his November testimony, he commented:

I do not regard the force of numbers as necessary in a just cause, and in such a just cause every man, be he high or low, can have his remedy.

In Gandhi’s non-cooperation campaign, his followers boycotted British goods, refused to teach in British schools and ignored the British courts. They were imprisoned but offered no resistance. Gandhi’s programme included a number of ‘self-improvement’ elements:

• the development of hand-weaving in the villages;

• the prohibition of drugs and spirits;

• the granting of increased freedom to Hindu women;

• the co-operation of Hindus and Muslims;

• the breaking down of the ‘caste system’ as it affected the ‘Untouchables’, the lowest class of Hindus, who had been debarred from the communal life of India (they were banned from the temples and were not allowed to use the drinking-wells in the villages.

These points were also the key elements in his Satyagraha, his struggles with truth or the ‘spiritual force’ of non-violent resistance to British rule which dominated the next the next three decades in the campaign for Swaraj, the ‘self-rule’ or Independence of India.

Race Riots and Reconstruction in Britain in 1919:

As 1919 progressed, civil strife in Britain continued, principally among the miners, shipbuilders, railwaymen and farm workers, that is, in the declining sections of the economy. The standard of living had improved dramatically during the war, and the working-classes were determined to resist any diminution in their wages when it came to an end. There were also mutinies among those awaiting demobilization in the armed forces which reminded the upper classes uncomfortably of the Russian Revolution; they were followed by a series of strikes which led The Times to proclaim that this war, like the war with Germany, must be a fight to a finish (27 September 1919). The railwaymen, miners and transport-workers formed themselves into a ‘triple alliance’ in which they agreed to support each other in disputes.

The ‘showdown’ did not begin in earnest until 1921 and came to an end five years later, but in 1919 comparisons were drawn with the unforgiving bitterness of class war on the continent. The social divisions within Britain, however, were always mitigated by a number of factors: a common heritage of what it meant to be British; reverence for the monarchy; a residual common religion and national churches; the instinctive ‘communion’ of sport and a saving, self-deprecating humour.

This popular myth of social integration in Britain was exposed as somewhat fraudulent when it came to matters of ‘race’, ‘colour’ and ethnicity, however. The Cardiff ‘Race Riots’ of 1919 were an attack on the black and coloured community of Cardiff living in districts adjoining ‘the Docks’ when certain boarding-houses occupied by them were attacked. At 10.15 p.m. on the night of Wednesday 11 June, disturbances broke out in Butetown, as a result of an earlier incident involving black men and their families returning from a picnic. Some white women accompanied by coloured men had been passing in carriages through one of the main streets of Cardiff (possibly St Mary’s Street, see map above). When uncomplimentary remarks were made by people in the street, the coloured men left the carriages and an affray took place in which a number of white men and Police were injured. Some five minutes later, a white man named Harold Smart was killed. This escalated events as crowds were formed and began a more serious assault on Butetown, where the black population lived. The next day a prolonged storm restricted the disturbances until it cleared in the evening. About eighty soldiers were held in readiness, but the police and stipendiary magistrate deemed it unnecessary to use them. The Chief Constable’s report of the disturbances provides a clear statement of the distribution of ethnic settlements in 1919 and the effect of this on policing:

The coloured men comprised principally West Indians, West Africans, Somalis, Arabs and a few Indians. They live in boarding houses kept by coloured masters in an area bounded in the north by Bridge Street, the east by the Taff Vale Railway not very far distant, on the West by the Glamorganshire Canal, and on the South by Patrick Street. Some of the Arabs and Somalis live in the northernmost portion of this area but the majority, particularly the West Indian negroes, live in the southern portion. The area is divided by a junction of the Glamorganshire Canal which has two bridges, one in Bute Street and one at East Wharf.

The riots ripped through Cardiff’s Docklands. Credit: British Pathe

At first, the violence centred on the multi-ethnic neighbourhood of Tiger Bay. But it quickly spilt over to other parts of Cardiff. The police concentrated their attention on the southern portion of the area and, having secured this, they proceeded to clear the northern area, although they failed to prevent damage being done there. That evening many of the attacks were concentrated in that zone, while the police continued to defend the southern area, which had long been seen as the proper place for black minorities, known as early as 1907 as ‘Nigger Town’. The police decision to defend that area may have owed something to their view of what the proper social geography of the city was. The Northern district became a ‘no go’ area for blacks during the riots, and some black families had to move out of their homes, though they returned afterwards. Physical boundaries between, for example, the blacks and the Irish, were very important, and the policing of 1919 played its part in strengthening them. The Police claimed that they had done their best to cope with the Riots. After the turbulence had subsided, the Chief Constable observed:

The coloured races, the majority of whom were practically segregated in their own quarter in Bute town, are showing a tendency to move more freely in that portion of the city where the disturbances took place. … The police made strenuous efforts and succeeded in keeping the white population from the Southern portion by guarding the bridges as otherwise if they had penetrated into that area the black population would have probably fought with great desperation and inflicted grave loss of life.

Below – A newspaper report from June 1919:

Credit: ITV/Glamorgan Archives

What were the causes of the riots? They were sparked by racial tensions during a period of acute unemployment. In Cardiff’s docklands, servicemen who had returned from the war found themselves competing for jobs with a local workforce of largely black and Asian men, who were also desperate to make ends meet. The Chief Constable summarised the grievances of the black population as follows:

The coloured men resent their inability to secure employment on ships since the Armistice as they are being displaced by white crews; 

They are dissatisfied with the actions of the Government;

They regard themselves as British subjects;

They claim equal treatment with whites and contend that they fought for the British Empire during the war and manned their food ships during the submarine campaign.

By June, unemployment was a serious problem among the black community. According to the Chief Constable, the number and ‘nativity’ of the coloured seamen who were unemployed and living in the port were as follows:

Arabs – who claim to belong to Aden:  400

Somalis:  200

Egyptians:  50

Portuguese; Indians, Cingalese and Malays:  60

West Africans – Sierra Leone: 100

West Indians:  400

Roughly a half of these were seamen of different grades and the other half consisted of different men who had no experience as seamen until the war made it necessary to recruit them to man British Merchant shipping. Four of the principal Arab and Somali boarding masters met the Chief Constable in the middle of June to ask him to make representations to the Government on their behalf, as they had a large number of men ‘on their hands’ who were in debt to them and wholly dependent on them for subsistence. Some of these men had been unable to get a place on a ship for the past six months. This was, in part, due to the imposition of a ‘colour line’ on the engagement of crews.

The race riots of 1919 brought bloodshed to Cardiff. Three men died and hundreds more were injured. That same summer, the South Wales docklands of Newport and Barry also experienced brutal outbreaks of racial violence. The effects of the riots rippled throughout the Empire. From the start, the police felt that the answer lay in repatriation and this suggestion was made to the Home Office in a telephone conversation after the first two nights of the riots. However, the scheme which was introduced offering financial inducements failed to have an impact, unable to tempt people out of their established homes and relationships. Some were married to white women and so could not be repatriated; for other married men, the terms were simply impracticable. The funds available covered only a fraction of the costs involved and proved impossible to administer fairly. By August of 1919, some six hundred men had been repatriated. The voyages did not prove to be plain sailing either. The SS Orca which sailed from Cardiff on 31 August with 225 black mercantile ratings on board experienced what its owner described as a mutiny, exacerbated by the fact that the seamen went on board with arms, including revolvers, in their possession. The mutiny was instigated by a group of eighty prisoners who were boarded at Le Havre, but the mercantile ratings joined in what became a ‘general uprising’.

Nor did discontent end when they arrived in the West Indies. One group of repatriated men sent a complaint about their treatment to the Acting Governor of Jamaica. This took the form of a petition, dated 1 October 1919, in which they claimed that there had been an undercurrent of hostility towards blacks in Britain for some time before the riots began:

… there was a premeditation  on the part of the whites which savoured of criminality that before the mob started the race riot it was published in a newspaper in England that the Government must deport all the coloured people in England. … it was also further published that if the Government did not deport the coloured they the whites would take the law in their hands and see to it that they be got rid of;

… as we heard the cry of riot in the streets knowing that we were and are still loyal British subjects we kept in our houses but this did not deter the whites from their wanton and illegal attack for on the following day our houses were attacked… and we were compelled to hide ourselves in our houses as the rioters (whites) outnumbered us in the ratio of 100 to 1… and as we had no intention of rioting we had to lock ourselves in all the time and at one o’clock in the night we were taken out of our houses by the Government Black Maria and there locked up for days before we let out. … while the Government was taking out some of us the rioters… were setting fire to some of the coloured lodging houses; 

… on the following day a detective was detailed and sent round to all the houses taking statements of our entire debts and after receiving same he told us that the Government would give us the amount of money to pay same and when we arrived at our native home (British) we would receive ample compensation for our ill-treatment as we were bound to leave on the first ship; if we didn’t worst trouble would come on us.

… the riot by the whites on us was going on for fully eight days before the Authorities there could cope with it and attempted to take any proceedings to stop it.

… we have no monies; we are in a state of almost want and destitution having to move away so quickly all our belongings goods and chattels were left behind all we have to subsist on is the 25/- which was given to us by this Jamaica Government and this is a mere trifle as the high prices of food stuffs and the high cost of living, food, clothing etc. make it hard to live on.

In response to the allegations made in the petition, the police claimed that they were not aware that racial feeling was incited by the publication of articles in the press. Welsh Labour historian Neil Evans has suggested that this more general atmosphere of hostility was partly in response to racial clashes elsewhere in Britain and stemmed from the general mood of chauvinism engendered by the war. The authorities in Cardiff denied that any houses were fired during the riots, but reported that some furniture had been burned. They also denied the claim that ‘refugees’ were taken from their houses by night and conveyed in a “Black Maria”. The repatriation scheme was in place before the riots under the administration of the Board of Trade. Apparently, the Treasury arranged for payment of a re-settlement gratuity of six pounds per man on his arrival in his colony of origin. The Town Clerk of Cardiff claimed that the Riots only lasted for two days and were intermittent rather than continuous.

The Corporation had agreed on compensation claims to two of the boarding-house keepers and twelve other claimants, who had left Cardiff without leaving a forwarding address. But when some of the repatriated men arrived in Trinidad, the stories of their mistreatment in Cardiff played a part in the upheavals on the island in December 1919. One particularly gruesome story circulated there that a crowd in Cardiff had stopped the funeral of a black man, decapitated him and played football with the head. There is no documentary evidence of this, but references exist, apparently, in Colonial Office Papers. Eye-witnesses asserted later that the press had not told the full story of the riots, and that many violent incidents associated with the outbreak had not been reported to the police. Some of this testimony has only recently come to light. Leslie Clarke’s family found themselves caught up in the conflict. Leslie’s mother and grandparents were living in a quiet terraced street in the Grangetown area of the city, near where this author used to live as a student in the early eighties.

                           Above: Somerset Street in Grangetown. Credit: ITV Cymru Wales

Leslie’s grandmother was white; her grandfather was from Barbados: “A thousand people came rioting down the street looking for black people,” Leslie explained in a 2018 interview for HTV Wales.

                         Above: Leslie’s grandmother, Agnes Headley. Credit: Leslie Clarke 

“So my grandmother persuaded my grandfather to go out the back way and to climb over the wall and go and hide. She reckoned that nobody would hurt her.

“But they did. They beat her up. They beat her really badly.

“My mother was only nine at the time and she was terrified. She hid behind my grandmother’s skirts.”

Above: Leslie’s mother, Beatrice Headley. Credit: Leslie Clarke

 

The family home was looted. Rioters doused the downstairs rooms with paraffin, planning to set the building on fire. All that stopped them lighting the fuse was the discovery that the house was rented, owned by a white man. Leslie’s grandmother never recovered from the incident:

“She changed from then onwards. From being a bright, confident woman she became very withdrawn and quiet. She suffered a lot.”

Quite clearly, much of this oral testimony of the victims of the riots was not shared at the time because of fear of further reprisals. Even in recent years, white supremacists and extremists have continued to publish propagandised versions of the Riots. Despite the claims and counter-claims, the black ratings’ petition provides further evidence of such incidents and is a rare example of black victims’ viewpoint of racial violence, which would otherwise be hidden from history. In modern-day Cardiff, you won’t find any reminders of those riots. No memorial, no marker. They’ve become a forgotten chapter in the city’s history.

The promised post-war economic ‘Reconstruction’ of Britain was, however, not quite the ‘myth’ that some historians have made it out to be. In the economics of heavy industry, ‘war socialism’ disappeared as Lloyd George always meant it to, and with it went the sense, in the Labour movement at least, that an activist government would do something to moderate the inequities of the old industrial system. The coalition government, largely Conservative and Unionist in composition, was determined to dismantle as quickly as possible the state control of raw materials, manufacturing, communications, wages and rents. Demands by the trade unions for the nationalisation of the coal industry, the docks and the railways were swiftly swept aside. The termination of ‘war socialism’ and the restoration of monetary orthodoxy became synonymous with post-war ‘reconstruction’ in Britain. Tory traditionalism trumped any idea of the development of social democracy along continental lines. But there was still room for a continuation and perhaps completion of the ‘new Liberal’ reforms which had led to a nascent ‘welfare state’ before the crises of 1910-1914 and the impact of the World War.

The liberal historian and president of the Board of Education, H. A. L. Fisher raised the school-leaving age to fourteen, a small act, but one of immense significance, and wages and salaries were standardised throughout the country. Old-age pensions were doubled, and unemployment insurance extended to cover virtually the entire working population of Britain. Through the extended Unemployment Insurance scheme, which began to operate at the beginning of 1920, the state became involved in the ‘problem’ of unemployment in a way it had never been before the First World War. This was to lead, through all the stumblings of a stubborn mule, into unparalleled intervention in the social conditions of working-class communities throughout the nations and regions of Britain. Mass unemployment was to become a new phenomenon in the inter-war years, and one which had not been properly quantified before the War. The pre-war trade union figures had revealed an annual rate of under five per cent between 1883 and 1913, never getting above eight per cent. Between 1912 and 1914 London had the highest level of unemployment with an average of eight per cent, whereas south Wales had the lowest level at under three per cent. In the decade following the end of the war, these positions were entirely reversed, and average unemployment increased by as much as tenfold in certain regions and ‘black spots’.

Party Politics, ‘Pacifism’ & Foreign Policy:

During the war, party politics had been discarded, and the Coalition Government was set to continue under Lloyd George. In 1918-19 the Liberal Party was in a grave condition due to its internal divisions and the Labour Party had taken its place as the main party of opposition. It appeared that the party structure might change profoundly. In one way or another, it can be argued that the ‘challenge of Labour’ after the war confronted all the politicians who had come to prominence before 1914. Their uncertainty moving forward was to be compounded by the major extension of the franchise, among all adult males and partially among females in 1918. Lloyd George was convinced that he could govern through a combination of sheer charisma and tough political muscle. The coalition faced little opposition in parliament, where there were only fifty-nine Labour MPs and a withered ‘rump’ of ‘pure’ Liberals led by Asquith, who had never got over Lloyd George’s ‘coup’ against him in 1916. The prime minister rarely put in an appearance, preferring to preside instead from Downing Street, which became headquarters for a circle of cronies. Honours were up for sale and insider commercial favours were expected in return. Under the leadership of J. Ramsay MacDonald (pictured below), the Labour Party had adopted a Socialist programme in 1918; so for the first time, the party system had to adapt to the two opposition parties, Labour and the Asquithian Liberals, holding fundamentally opposite views. It failed to do so.

As early as 1919, it was evident that the relationship between the new democracy, based on universal suffrage, and foreign policy, might have to be worked out afresh in an international environment which was still far from stable. During the war, a group of intellectuals, publicists and politicians, both Liberal and Labour, had formed the Union of Democratic Control. In the view of this group, the outbreak of war had shown the futility and inappropriateness of existing diplomatic procedures and assumptions. Secret diplomacy belonged to a bygone era and it was time to involve ‘the people’ in policy-making, or at least to ensure that there was democratic control over decision-making. However, when it came to details, there was little unanimity about how either ‘democratic control’ or the League of Nations was to work. For some, the former concept went beyond parliamentary control and there was talk of plebiscites and referenda. Others concentrated on trying to devise mechanisms whereby the executive would be subject to scrutiny and restraint by various foreign policy committees of the House of Commons.

There was another popular post-war myth, that ‘the British people’ were inherently pacific and had only been involved in wars by the machinations of élites who initiated conflicts for their own ends. These views enjoyed some support and bore some influence on policy-makers. They blended with the contempt for secret treaties displayed both by Vladimir Lenin on the one hand and Woodrow Wilson on the other. They also related, albeit awkwardly, to the enthusiasm for the League of Nations on the centre-left of British politics. The more these matters were considered, however, the more difficult it became to locate both ‘foreign policy’ and ‘public opinion’. A similar range of views surrounded the League of Nations. Some supporters saw it as an embryonic world government, with ‘effective’ military sanctions at its disposal, whereas others believed that its essential purpose was to provide a forum for international debate and discussion. Enthusiasts supposed that its creation would render obsolete the notion of a specific British foreign policy. But, at the end of 1919, supporters of these new concepts and structures were still four years away from truly coming to power.

Sources:

John Buchan (1935), The King’s Grace, 1910-1935. London: Hodder & Stoughton.

Irene Richards, et. al. (1938), A Sketch-Map History of the Great War and After. London: Harrap.

Norman Rose (2006), Harold Nicolson. London: Pimlico.

J. M. Keynes (1919, 1924), The Economic Consequences of the Peace. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Neil Evans (1983), The South Wales Race Riots of 1919: a documentary postscript. Llafur (The Journal for the Study of Welsh Labour History), III. 4.

ITV REPORT, 3 November 2018 at 9:00am, https://www.itv.com/news/wales/2018-11-03/one-thousand-people-came-rioting-down-the-street-reliving-a-notorious-chapter-in-cardiffs-past/

A Pictorial Appendix – These Tremendous Years:

Below: Piccadilly in 1919. Note that it is not a roundabout, and there was still room to move at walking pace across Piccadilly Circus. Note also: The “Old Bill” type bus, on what is now the wrong side of the street; as many men in uniform as not; “As You Were,” on at the London Pavilion; the ageless violet seller installed on the steps of Eros.

Above: The Summer of 1919 was very hot. The grass was burnt yellow, and the cricket ball dropped like a cannonball on the cracked earth. Victory weather, just right for a summer of Peace parades and celebrations. And just right for those who had to sleep out: the returning warrior found London short of houses.

 

Lady Astor, the first woman M.P., went to the House of Commons dressed as above. She was elected member for Plymouth in a by-election. Her speech after the declaration of the poll began: “Although I cannot say that the best man has won…” This first woman M.P. took the oath in the House sponsored by Lloyd George and Balfour. “I wish to be regarded as a regular working member,” she said, “not as a curiosity.”

Part One – January-June: A Tale of Five Cities.

The Winding Road to World Peace:

The New Year’s Eve of 1918 that hiccupped a welcome to the first year of peace began a long procession of almost hysterically happy crowds which took possession of London on every possible excuse. Life was not yet back to normal (it never got back to whatever ‘normal’ was): food was only beginning to be de-restricted – meat, sugar and butter coupons were no abolished until August; five million men were taking time to demobilize and were not finding jobs easily, and money was short. Any spare money was needed by the country, as the photograph of Trafalgar Square at the top of this article shows. The Victory, or “Peace and Joy” loan brought in forty million pounds in three days, and the smallest amount that could be invested was five pounds. The total collected was seven hundred million. By November 1919 there would be just 900,000 still in ‘khaki’ uniforms. The wounded, like those photographed above, later in the year, were given blue uniforms. More than two million were wounded, and in January one man died as a result of a bullet wound received in 1918.

At the beginning of 1919, “Hang the Kaiser!” was the cry in Britain. The newspapers discussed who would be his judges when he was brought from Holland to the Tower of London, and what they would do with him. Those who suggested that his life should be spared were considered unpatriotic, unless they also argued that, like Napoleon, he should be sent to St. Helena for the rest of his life. Despite an application for his surrender, he remained in the Netherlands. A Daily Express reporter who had first seen him at close quarters before the war said that over the previous four years, his hair had turned completely white.

At 11 a.m. on 3 January, Harold Nicolson (pictured below), a thirty-two-year-old diplomat at the Foreign Office, left Charing Cross station for Paris. He arrived at the Gare du Nord twelve hours later and drove without delay to the Hotel Majestic on the Avenue Kléber, where the British delegation to the Peace Conference was due to be housed.

Alwyn Parker, a Middle East specialist who had been made responsible for the well-being of the British delegates, had instituted a security-conscious, home-cooking environment consistent with sound British standards. Staffed by British domestic servants and reinforced by nameless security agents, the catering standards were, apparently, tasteless in the extreme.

 

Overworked and underpaid, Nicolson served as a technical adviser on the committees that were drawing up the new maps of central Europe and the Balkans. Sketching in fresh boundaries for Czechoslovakia, Romania, Yugoslavia, Hungary, Greece and Turkey consumed his working hours. Although he found the work ‘passionately interesting’, it was not all plain sailing. His letters reveal how at times he was conscience-stricken by the burdens imposed on him:

How fallible one feels here! A map – a pencil – tracing paper. Yet my courage fails at the thought of people whom our errant lines enclose or exclude, the happiness of several thousands of people. … Nobody who has not had experience of Committee work in actual practice can conceive of the difficulty of inducing a Frenchman, an Italian, an American and an Englishman to agree on anything.

Harold Nicolson & Vita Sackville-West at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919.

These committees were not concerned with constructing the framework of the newborn League of Nations, President Wilson’s obsessive brainchild. Still, they stood at the heart of the conference’s deliberations, dealing with the fate of national minorities, reconciling the all-too-often conflicting and exaggerated claims of the great and the small powers. It was approvingly noted that the French Premier, M. Clemenceau, always audible, was equally rude to both. And as the plenary sessions of the conference, the politicians had neither the time nor the knowledge to challenge the recommendations of the ‘experts’, they became, in effect, the arbiters of these disputes, the final court of appeal. It was a responsibility that Harold Nicolson could have done without. Interminable committee meetings, drafting endless position papers, irregular hours, hurried meals, late nights and competing with closed-minded politicians, all put Harold under an intolerable strain. Exhausted, he had reached the point when he found himself reading sentences twice over. He sought advice from Arthur Balfour, the Foreign Secretary, whom he usually found languid in his habits, usually draped over a chair, ‘always affable and benign’, at his apartment in the rue Nitot. Balfour told him to…

… return at once to the Majestic – arrived there, you will go to bed. For luncheon you will drink a bottle of Nuits St George and eat all you can possibly swallow. You will then sleep until four. You will then read some books which I shall lend you. For dinner you will have champagne and foie grás – a light dinner. You repeat this treatment until Sunday at three, when you drive alone to Versailles and back. In the evening of Sunday you dine – again alone, that is essential – at Larue and go to a play. By Monday you will be cured.

He did as he was told and on Monday he noted in his diary that he felt again a young and vigorous man. Refreshed, he returned to his duties which, of course, included faithfully serving Balfour’s needs. Harold worked in close tandem with Allen Leeper, an Australian graduate of Balliol College, Oxford with a working knowledge of French, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Flemish, Russian, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Serbo-Croatian and Ladino. In keeping with the Zeitgeist, he was in favour of creating compact nation-states, to unite the Poles, Yugoslavs, Romanians, the Arabs and the Greeks, a process which would pave the way for the demise of the old, discredited system ruled by the Great Powers and lead to a new era regulated by the League of Nations and Wilsonianism. To Nicolson, at the time, these ideas were admirable, but later, writing in 1935, he thought they might appear utopian, but added even then that to many of us it still remains the most valid of all our visions.

Thirty nations met at Paris to discuss the post-war world. Bolshevik Russia and the defeated Central Powers were excluded. On the fifth anniversary of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo on 28 June 1914, the Treaty of Versailles was signed. Each of the other four which were signed subsequently was also named after an area or landmark of Paris. The Conference opened officially on 18 January 1919 at the Quai d’Orsay. Raymond Poincaré, the French President, greeted the delegates, but his Prime Minister, Georges Clemenceau soon took command in his typical high-handed, machine-gunning fashion:

“Y a-t-il d’objections? Non? … Adopté!”

Harold Nicolson continued to be absorbed by the minutiae of the territorial commission’s deliberations, niggling questions that at a distance seem esoteric to an extreme, but which at the time took on grave importance. He explained to Balfour why the Italians should not be awarded Fiume, a judgement that was upheld by Wilson and Lloyd George. He was also considered something of a Czech expert and was impressed by Benes, the Czech Foreign Minister (pictured right), whom he described as altogether an intelligent, young, plausible little man with broad views. Benes based his case not so much on securing national rights as on sustaining the stability of central Europe. Nicolson agreed with this view and confidently told the Supreme Council that the historical border of Bohemia and Moravia needed to be respected, in spite of the fact that many Germans would be included. Teschen, Silesia, Oderburg were to be included in the new Czechoslovakia, along with Hungarian Ruthenia.

All the Allies were invited to the Peace Conference which met at Paris in January 1919, but the important decisions were made by the ‘Big Four’, pictured below. The German government had accepted the terms of the Armistice of 11 November 1918 because the Allies made a solemn promise that the principles which US President Woodrow Wilson had set out in the ‘Fourteen Points’ of his War Aims (see the map above) which he, and they, thought would form the basis of the peace settlement.

The ‘Four Big Men’ were (left to right), the British Prime Minister, Lloyd George; the Italian Prime Minister, Signor Orlando; France’s Premier, M.Clemenceau; and Woodrow Wilson, President of the USA. They were the big figures at the Paris Peace Conference.

Wilson’s ideas were, therefore, the hope of victors and vanquished alike, and he was sincerely anxious to carry out his promises. But he lost influence because he had few practical plans to offer upon which his ideas of a just settlement could be built. By the time John Buchan published his account of these events in 1935, many histories of the Peace Conference had already been written in detail in many volumes. Its work had been bitterly criticised, and on it had been blamed most of the later misfortunes of Europe. But, as he observed, …

… it is probable that our successors will take a friendlier view, and will recognise more fully the difficulties under which it achieved. Its position was very different from that of the Congress of Vienna in 1814. Then the victors held most of Europe and had armies ready and willing to carry out their commands: now they were so weary that the further use of force was almost unthinkable. Then a little group of grandees, akin in temper, met in dignified seclusion. Now a multitude of plenipotentiaries sat almost in public, surrounded by hordes of secretaries and journalists, and under the arc-lamp of suspicious popular opinion. 

The difference in the complexity and scale of the two conferences is shown by the resulting treaties. The hundred and twenty articles of the Treaty of Vienna were signed by seventeen delegates; the Treaty of Versailles contained 441 articles and seventy signatures. The business was so vast that the mechanism was constantly changing. At first, the main work was in the hands of a Council of Ten, representing the five great Powers; then it fell to the US President and the European Prime Ministers; at the end, the ‘dictators’ were Wilson, Clemenceau and Lloyd George. Had the three ‘architects of destiny’ been fully in agreement, or had they been men with broader personalities and more open minds, both the peace process and its products might have been better. To be fair to them, however, all three had to take different circumstances into consideration besides the merits of each case.

Wilson, who had been detached from the actual conflict, might have been expected to bring a cool and dispassionate mind to the deliberations, as well as a unique authority. But he found himself, quite literally, on unfamiliar territory, and his political mistakes in his own country had made it doubtful that Americans would ratify his conclusions. In diplomatic skill, he was not the equal of the other statesmen. Because he believed that the establishment of the League of Nations was the only hope of permanent world peace, he soon had to compromise on matters where the views of the practical statesmen conflicted with the ideals of his fourteen points in order to secure their acceptance of the Covenant. Moreover, he had the support of only a small minority of his fellow Americans; those who upheld the traditional policy of non-intervention in European affairs were hostile to him. This hostility back home also weakened his prestige at the Conference. Eventually, the Senate of the USA refused to ratify his work in establishing the League of Nations so that the country did not join the organisation, and at the election following the treaties, he failed to be re-elected. It soon appeared to John Buchan, that Wilson’s was …

… the voice of one crying in the wilderness, and not the creed of a great people. His self-confidence led him to cast himself in too high a part, and he failed to play it … The framers of the Treaty of Vienna a century before were fortunate in that they were simpler men, whose assurance was better based, and who were happily detached from popular passions: “There are times when the finest intelligence in the world is less serviceable than the sound common sense of a ‘grand seigneur’.” (F.S. Oliver, The Endless Adventure: III, 109.)

Georges Clemenceau (left), French Premier & Woodrow Wilson, President of the USA.

As Chairman of the Peace Conference, Georges Clemenceau was a realist and had no faith in Wilson’s ideals. He was also an intense nationalist, whose policy was to give absolute priority to the security of France, and he translated every problem into the terms of an immediate and narrowly conceived national interest. He worked for the interests of France and France alone. He knew exactly what he wanted, which was to crush Germany while he had the chance. He regarded Franco-German hostility as natural and inevitable and wanted revenge not just for the Great War but also for the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71 in which Paris was occupied and Alsace-Lorraine was surrendered. Had Germany won, he believed, France would not have been spared destruction. Now that Germany had been utterly defeated, he had the opportunity he had desired, to destroy its power to threaten the security of France. He dominated the conference and his uncompromising attitude earned him the epithet, ‘Tiger’.

David Lloyd George (above) was subtler and more far-sighted, taking broader views, but his power was weakened in his colleagues’ eyes by the election he had just fought and won on intransigent terms. Nevertheless, he recognised the need for a peace settlement that would help restore German prosperity as an important trading partner. He, therefore, favoured more moderate terms, but gave only limited support to Wilson’s ideals because Britain was bound by treaties concluded during the war for the satisfaction of her Allies at the expense of the defeated powers, and he was bound by his election pledge by which he had promised to ‘Make Germany Pay’, demanding penalties from the enemy. At least 700,000 British servicemen had perished in the Great War, and a million and a half had been wounded. Another 150,000 were lost to the influenza pandemic of 1918-19. Some 300,000 children had lost at least one parent. One in ten of an entire generation of young men had been wiped out. By 1919, the euphoria of victory was tempered with the reality as ex-servicemen returned to the fields and factories to seek their old jobs. If anything, As Simon Schama has put it, …

… this had to be the moment, perhaps the last, when the conditions that had produced the general massacre were removed. Away with the preposterous empires and monarchs and the tribal fantasies of churches and territories. Instead there would be created a League of Free Nations … This virtual international government, informed by science and motivated by disinterested guardianship of the fate of common humanity, must inaugurate a new history – otherwise the sacrifice the sacrifice of millions would have been perfectly futile, the bad joke of the grinning skull. 

Above: The Menin Road (detail), by Paul Nash, 1919

Fit for Heroes? – Boom-time Britain & the ‘Bolshevists’:

Britain was experiencing a post-war boom in trade, evidenced by the fact that the number of trade unionists rose to an unprecedented figure of almost eight million. As the unions flexed their muscles, thirty-five million days were lost by strikes and lock-outs, the highest figure since 1912. Trade unionists in Belfast and Glasgow fought bravely to reduce the working week to help absorb the demobbed servicemen. In Scotland, their demonstrations, which included (for the first time) serious demands for Home Rule, were viewed as ‘riots’ by the authorities. The demands were fuelled in part by the astonishingly disproportionate numbers of Scots casualties in the War: over a quarter of the 557,000 Scottish servicemen had been killed, compared with a rate of one in eight among the rest of the British army. Ironically, it was the long tradition of being the backbone of the imperial army, from the American Revolution to the Indian Mutiny, that had resulted in them being put in front line positions during the Great War, often in the ‘vanguard’ of some suicidal lurch ‘over the top’.

Despite this contribution, in Glasgow, an eighth of the population was still living in single-room accommodation and the Clydeside economy was especially vulnerable to retrenchment in the shipyards. As men were demobilized, unemployment rose and the unions responded with demands for a shorter working week, to spread the work and wages available as broadly as possible. The campaign for a 40-hour week, with improved conditions for the workers, took hold of organised labour. They also demanded the retention of wage and rent controls. When they were met with stark refusal, a forty-hour general strike was called, culminating on 31 January in a massive rally, organised by the trade unions, which took place on George Square in the city centre of Glasgow. Upwards of ninety thousand took part. A red flag and calls were made, for the first time, for the setting up of a separate Scottish workers’ republic. The police read the ‘Riot Act’ and their lines charged the demonstrators and, mindful of having been caught by surprise in Dublin by the Easter Rising of 1916, the government claimed that the demonstration was a ‘Bolshevist’ uprising, sending twelve thousand troops and six tanks (pictured above) to occupy what became known as ‘Red Clydeside’.

Many of these ‘Red Clydesiders’ soon found themselves ‘victimized’, out of work and on the road to England and its ‘new’ engineering and manufacturing centres. By 1919, for example, Coventry’s population had continued to grow from 130,000 in 1918 to 136,000, partly due to the delayed expansion of the British motor industry, inhibited during the War as manufacturing industry turned its attention to meeting wartime demand. As soon as hostilities were over the production of motor vehicles was again embraced with enthusiasm as both old and new contenders entered the market amongst the heavy competition. In 1919 and 1920 at least forty new car producing firms emerged. Many of these firms later failed and their names disappeared or were taken over by companies like Singer in Coventry, but in 1920 the President of the City’s Chamber of Commerce reflected on its recent growth:

Few towns and cities can point to a growth as quick and extensive as that which has been the lot of Coventry in the last two decades … The way Coventry has moved forward is more characteristic of a new American city fed by immigrants, than of one of the oldest cities in Great Britain.

Growth and immigration were beginning to have an effect on local politics. In 1919, as the city enjoyed its boom, so the fortunes of the Labour movement also prospered, with Labour capturing a third of the seats on the City Council. The short but strong national economic boom funded some, at least, of  Lloyd George’s promise to make ‘a country fit for heroes to live in’. Christopher Addison, the minister of reconstruction, oversaw the building of 200,000 homes, effectively marking the beginning of council house construction in Britain. Again, in 1920, the Coventry Chamber of Commerce was keen to advertise the fact that the Corporation had already, since the war, built a thousand houses for its workers at rates varying from six to ten shillings per week which were regarded as ‘comparatively low’.

Lloyd George’s only obvious rival was Winston Churchill. Having banged away in the 1918 election campaign about making Germany pay through the nose, Churchill then made appeals for greater flexibility and leniency, opposing the continuation of the naval blockade. But his calls to strangle the Russian Revolution at birth seemed to spring from a deep well of sentimental class solidarity with the Russian aristocracy and the Tsars which marked him out, in the view of many, as an aristocratic reactionary himself. Churchill was reckless as well as tireless in calling for a commitment of men and money to try to reverse the communist revolution in Russia by supporting the pro-Tsarist White Army, which was certainly no force for democracy. But if he was deliberately goading British socialists by harping on about the Bolsheviks as dictatorial conspirators, it turned out that his diagnosis of what had actually in Russia in October 1917 was exactly right. There was ample reason to feel gloomy about the fate of liberty in the new Soviet Russia. By 1919, anyone could see that what had been destroyed was not just the Constituent Assembly but any semblance of multi-party democracy in Russia. After the war, British, as well as American troops, occupied parts of Russia. There was disagreement within the Cabinet as well as in the country as to what the British attitude toward Russia ought to be. Lloyd George felt that the perpetuation of the civil war by foreign intervention would give the revolutionary leader, Vladimir Lenin, the perfect pretext to institutionalize his police state and find reinforcements for the Red Army, and he wrote to Churchill pointing this out to him in February 1919:

 Am very alarmed at your… planning war against the Bolsheviks. The Cabinet have never authorised such a proposal. They have never contemplated anything beyond supplying armies in anti-Bolshevik areas in Russia with necessary equipment to enable them to hold their own, and that only in the event of every effort of peaceable solution failing. A military enquiry as to the best method of giving material assistance to these Russian armies is all to the good, but do not forget that it is an essential part of the inquiry to ascertain the cost; and I also want you to bear in mind that the War Office reported to the Cabinet that according to their information intervention was driving the anti-Bolshevik parties in Russia into the ranks of the Bolshevists. 

The Empire – Nationalists Strike Back:

With the evaporation of the authority of the US President in Paris, and the limited tenure of the French wartime prime minister, his fellow peacemakers, it was Lloyd George who grew in stature as the future arbiter of the European settlement and world statesman. While France sought military security, Britain sought naval and commercial superiority through the destruction of the German Empire. The British Empire, as Curzon had boasted the previous year, had never been so omnipotent. But despite Curzon’s complacency, all was not well in the far-flung imperial posts. First of all, however, and closer to home, trouble was brewing again in Ireland. Following the 1918 general election, in which the old Nationalist party disappeared and Sinn Féin won most of the Irish seats. The members of Sinn Féin who had been elected to the Westminster parliament decided to set up their own Irish parliament, called Dáil Éireann, in Dublin, which first met in January 1919. It declared the Irish Republic in defiance of the British Crown for a second time. Eamon de Valera, who had escaped from an English jail, became its President and the King’s writ ceased to run in Ireland. At the same time, the Irish Volunteers, who now called themselves the Irish Republican Army (IRA) became increasingly violent.

In themselves, the pledges Britain made on imperial matters during the war did not determine anything that happened afterwards. Britain gave no one self-government simply because it had promised it to them. If it kept its promise, it was because the promise had raised expectations that could not be denied, making the plaintiffs stronger and even more resolute claimants. But if it had not had this effect, and if Britain could prevaricate or break a promise with impunity, it would. The colonial settlement when it came after the war, and as it was subsequently modified, was determined much more by the conditions of that time; the interests, strengths and weaknesses of different parties then, than by pledges and declarations made, cynically or irresponsibly, in the past. The conditions of 1919 determined that, initially, Britain would get a great deal out of the war for itself. In the first place, the fact that there were outright winners and losers meant that there were, suddenly, a large number of colonies ‘going begging’ in the world, with only Britain, France, Italy, the United States and Japan in a position to ‘snaffle them up’. Japan was satisfied with controlling the north Pacific, America didn’t want colonies and Italy, whose contribution to the Allied victory was seen as negligible, was not thought to deserve any. That left the German colonies in Africa and the Turkish territories in the Middle East as ‘gift horses’ for the British and the French if they wanted them, which they did.

Any British government of that era, of any colour, would probably have wanted its share, but the fact that the coalition government in 1919 was basically the same as the one that had fought the war and was full of imperialists made it even more probable. Balfour, Curzon and Milner (as Colonial Secretary) were not the kinds of men to look gift horses in the mouth and exercise colonial self-restraint, and neither were the Dominions which had fought, represented by Smuts in the Cabinet. Lloyd George himself was not much bothered about the empire either way and put up little resistance to his imperialists’ accepting extra colonies. If he had any qualms, Leopold Amery quieted them by writing to him at the end of the war, that whereas they had fought it over Europe, they would also…

… find ourselves compelled to complete the liberation of the Arabs, to make secure the independence of Persia, and if we can of Armenia, to protect tropical Africa from German economic and military exploitation. All these objects are justifiable in themselves and don’t become less so because they increase the general sphere of British influence. … And if, when all is over, … the British Commonwealth emerges greater in area and resources … who has the right to complain?

In 1919, the British empire seemed secure enough from external threats, but it was more vulnerable than ever to attacks from within. It might be able to deal with one at a time, but what if it were challenged by nationalists on three or four fronts simultaneously? The first of these opened up in North Africa in March, when Egyptian nationalists, inflamed by Britain’s refusal to allow them to put their case for independence to the Paris peace conference and by the arrest and exile of their leaders, began a series of demonstrations, riots, acts of sabotage, and assassinations of British army officers.

M. K. Gandhi

Meanwhile, in India, there was a series of boycotts, walk-outs and massacres led by the lawyer and hero of the campaign against the ‘pass laws’ in South Africa, M. K. Gandhi, who had recently arrived ‘home’. Nearly a million Indian troops had been in service, both in the ‘barracks in the east’ in Asia itself, on the Western Front, and, earlier in the war, in the disastrous campaign in Mesopotamia. Before the war, there had been violence and terrorism, but mainstream colonial nationalism had been represented by Gokhale’s Congress; moderate in its aims, not embracing absolute national independence, and in its aims, which were constitutional. ‘Mahatma’ Gandhi’s movement, however, worked unconstitutionally, outside the system. His distinctive contribution to the nationalist struggle was ‘non-cooperation’. This spelt danger for the empire: danger which even in peace-time it might not be able to contain. In April there was a rash of rebellions in Punjab serious enough to convince General Dyer that the Indian Mutiny was about to be repeated: which persuaded him to open fire on a crowd of unarmed Indians in a public square outside the Sikh ‘Golden Temple’ in Amritsar, and to continue to firing into their backs until his ammunition ran out, killing at least 380 and wounding 1,200. Also in April, the first serious Arab-Jewish clash occurred in Palestine. In May, Britain was at war with Afghanistan, and about to go to war again, it seemed, with Turkey.

Towards the Treaties – The Big Three & The Council of Ten:

As the Paris conference moved forward, Harold Nicolson became increasingly depressed by the self-centred, ill-informed, arrogant behaviour of the world’s leaders who had gathered in Paris.

Ion Bratianu, the Romanian Prime Minister was a bearded woman, a forceful humbug, a Bucharest intellectual, a most unpleasing man who aspired to the status of a Great Power; the Baron Sidney Sonnino, the Italian Foreign Minister, emerged as the evil genius of the piece, obstructing everything with a breathtaking obstinacy and malevolence, while Signor Vittorio Orlando (pictured right), the Italian Prime Minister, was never able to rise to the level of his own intelligence. When the Italians decided to leave Paris in protest at their allies’ refusal to meet them half-way on their demands, Nicolson waved them off with a hearty “good riddance”, but they returned a fortnight later.

During the rest of the conference, Orlando remained interested only in securing an expansion of Italy’s territory and in discussions which concerned the satisfaction of these ambitions. Nicholson soon concluded that the conference was proceeding in a rather irresponsible and intermittent way. For this sorry state of affairs, ‘the Big Three’ were culpable, as far as he was concerned, especially Wilson. Hampered by his spiritual arrogance and the hard but narrow texture of his mind, he appeared conceited, obstinate, nonconformist … obsessed, in fact no better than a presbyterian dominie (schoolmaster/ pedagogue). Nicolson was not alone in this opinion: Wilson’s traits were soon picked up on by the Parisian press. Bitter at these public assaults on his character, Wilson contemplated moving the conference to Geneva, where he hoped to benefit from the more Calvinistic, sober and sympathetic Swiss. Paris was an unfortunate choice for a peace conference, as passions among the people were inflamed by close contact with the War and its miseries. Statesmen could not free themselves from the tense atmosphere that prevailed.

Wilson, Nicolson believed, was also responsible for what he and others regarded as a totally impracticable agenda and timetable. The three main subjects were territorial adjustments, reparations, and the provision of machinery to ensure peace. Under the first, the map of Europe was to be redrawn, and some parts of the map of the world. The Conference did not, of course, with a clean slate; the Austrian Empire had collapsed and fallen into pieces, and Poland and Czechoslovakia had already come into being. A number of treaties, not just that of Versailles, would be needed to lay down the new boundaries – St Germain, Trianon, Neuilly and Sévres. Mandates dealing with territories taken from enemy states were to be settled later by Allied Ministers sitting in the Supreme Council. But instead of giving top priority to the main purpose of the conference, the peace settlement with Germany, Wilson kept his colleagues busy playing word games in drafting the Covenant of the League of Nations, his pet cause, and by fiddling with the maps of central and eastern Europe and Asia Minor.  In this way, the German treaty was effectively put on hold until the end of March, nine weeks after the conference had opened.

David Lloyd George, British Prime Minister in 1919, at the height of his power, the man who won the war. As the head of the Conservative-Liberal-Labour wartime coalition, his government was returned at the General Election in December 1918, with an overwhelming majority of more than three hundred in the House of Commons. The majority in the total of votes was strangely less marked – five million for the government and 4.6 million against.

Neither did Lloyd George escape Nicolson’s criticism. Dressed in a bedint grey suit, the British PM hadn’t the faintest idea of what he is talking about, Nicolson complained. He tried to prime Balfour to protest against his Premier’s ‘madcap schemes’, but Balfour proved ‘infinitely tiresome’ and fobbed him off: Yes, that’s all very well, but what you say is pure aesthetics! But before long, Nicolson came to appreciate Lloyd George’s uphill struggle at the conference against those who were more extreme: Quick as a kingfisher, in Harold’s view, as he saw Lloyd George fending off excessive Italian or French demands, not always with complete success. He fought like a Welsh terrier, he told his father, as Lloyd George strove to modify the ‘punitive’ terms of the German treaty. Invited to attend meetings of ‘the Big Three’ in his capacity as an expert, Nicolson witnessed their capricious handling of affairs, which he recorded in his letters to his wife Vita:

Darling, it is appalling, those three ignorant and irresponsible men cutting Asia Minor to bits as if they were dividing a cake, and with no one there except Hadji … Isn’t it terrible – the happiness of millions being decided in that way?

When he politely protested, Nicolson was condescendingly put down by Clemenceau: “Mais, voyez-vous, jeune homme … il faut aboutir.” But there were opportunities to advise and influence, or educate the three men, usually over a huge map on the carpet of a nearby study. Already dispirited at the way the conference was, or rather was not, proceeding, by mid-February Nicolson was beginning to despair, as he wrote to his father:

The Council of Ten are atrophied by the mass of material which pours in upon them … We are losing the peace rapidly and all the hard work is being wasted. The ten haven’t really finished off anything, except the League of Nations, and what does that mean to starving people at Kishinev, Hermannstadt and Prague? It is despairing.

In a similar vein to Oliver’s statement above, Nicolson added that What we want is a dictator for Europe and we haven’t got one: And never will have! As the conference ‘progressed’, both Europe and the Middle East continued in a state of confusion. The old empires had fallen; new nations had already set up governments. Starvation and disease aggravated the horrors resulting from war. The statesmen were forced to act quickly. They had to consider not only what they believed ought to be done, but also what their electorate demanded. On April Fool’s Day, Harold Nicolson and Leeper left Paris on a special mission headed by General Jan Smuts, the South African member of Britain’s War Cabinet. They were bound for Budapest where Nicolson had spent part of his childhood during his father’s diplomatic posting there and where, on 21 March, a communist revolution led by Béla Kun had taken place; their assignment was to investigate its ramifications. For the world’s leaders gathered in Paris, the spectre of Bolshevism was truly haunting Europe: it threatened widespread starvation, social chaos economic ruin, anarchy and a violent, shocking end to the old order. Harold wrote to his wife, Vita, about how the Germans made use of this threat:

They have always got the trump card, i.e. Bolshevism – and they will go Bolshevist the moment they feel it is hopeless to get good terms.

This was one of the main themes of Lloyd George’s cogently argued but largely ignored Fontainebleau memorandum. Small wonder, then, that Béla Kun’s strike for communism in Hungary registered many anxious moments for the Supreme Council. I have written more about Smuts’ mission to Budapest elsewhere on this site. During Nicolson’s absence from Paris, the prospects for a settlement based on Wilson’s new world order had receded. The French put forward extreme ideas that would extend French sovereignty or influence into the Rhineland. Lloyd George and Wilson hotly opposed these demands, seeing in them the seeds of another war. Eventually, a compromise was worked out that called for an allied occupation of the Rhineland with staged withdrawals, backed by an Anglo-American guarantee of the French frontiers. But Nicolson and many others harboured a ‘ghastly suspicion’ that the United States would not honour the signature of its delegates: it became the ghost at all our feasts, he wrote. From mid-May to mid-June the German treaty hung on a razor’s edge. Word reached Paris that the German government was prepared to sign it but that public opinion would not allow it without allied concessions. Nicolson agreed with the German public:

The more I read (the treaty), the sicker it makes me … If I were the Germans I shouldn’t sign for a moment. … The great crime is the reparations clauses, which were drawn up solely to please the House of Commons.

The peace treaties which resulted reflected the spirit of the conference, in which were represented opposing forces demanding, on the one hand, the rewards of victory, and on the other, the magnanimous settlement of conflicting claims designed to secure permanent peace. The result was a decisive triumph for the victors, but the influence of the need for a permanent peace was not entirely lost. On the one hand, there was no open discussion, and the main points of the settlement were secretly decided and imposed by the ‘Big Three’. The defeated Powers were disarmed, but the victors maintained their military strength.  On the other hand, it may be claimed that the map of Europe was redrawn to correspond with national divisions, to some extent at least and that the ‘Covenant of the League of Nations’ seemed to be a definite step towards the preservation of international peace. It formed the first part of each treaty, followed by territorial changes and disarmament clauses, such as the following from section one of the Treaty of Versailles:

By a date which must not be later than 31 March 1920, the German Army must not comprise more than seven divisions of infantry and three divisions of cavalry. 

By this article, the German Army was limited to a hundred thousand men and committed to the maintenance of order within the territory and to the control of frontiers. The long list of other restrictions included the prohibition of German use of submarines, tanks and poison gas. The disarmament of Germany was to be strictly enforced, but it was combined with a solemn pledge by the other nations themselves to disarm, which promised trouble in the future. In spite of Wilson’s principles, penal clauses were added to the treaties. The penal proposals, which had played so great a part in the ‘khaki’ election in Britain, were reduced more or less to the matter of reparations. Reparations were to be exacted from Germany alone; she had to undertake to pay the cost of the War, as her Allies were bankrupt. John Buchan commented on the futility of this exercise:

No victor has ever succeeded in reimbursing himself for his losses, and a strange blindness seemed on this point to have overtaken the public mind. 

While rich in capital wealth, this could not be ‘extracted’ for its creditors, and its exportable surplus had never been great and was now likely to be very small. It could only pay large sums by borrowing from one or other of the Allies. At Paris, there was no agreement on the total sum of reparations to be paid, but there was much talk about what items should be included in the reparations bill. Smuts, whom Harold Nicolson considered a splendid, wide-horizoned man, now showed that his character, though ‘simple’, was also exceptionally ‘intricate’. Concerned that the bulk of the reparations would go to France, he concocted a creative formula to include separation allowances for soldiers’ families, as well as pensions for widows and orphans. His prescription effectively doubled the potential bill, however, and would not have been to Nicolson’s liking. Yet a special committee of solemn ‘pundits’ in Britain had fixed its capacity to pay at the preposterous figure 24,000 million pounds sterling. The Conference reduced this sum to less than half, and in 1921 a special allied commission whittled it down to 6,600 million, then to two thousand, and in 1932 further payments were dropped. But more unfortunate still was the clause which extorted from Germany a confession of her sole responsibility for the War. This was article 231 of the Treaty, the notorious ‘war guilt’ clause, that compelled Germany and her allies to accept full responsibility for…

… causing all the loss and damage to which the Allied and Associated Governments and their nationals have been subjected as a consequence of the war imposed on them by the aggression of Germany and her allies.  

It was not, Buchan suggested in 1935, …

… the business of any conference to anticipate the judgment of history, and to force a proud nation to confess that her sacrifice had been a crime was a breach of the human decencies. 

The Final Week – Scuttling Ships & Salvaging the Settlement:

Could anyone salvage something from this mess? Surprisingly, perhaps, Nicolson looked to Lloyd George for this. Hitherto, he had been quite critical of Lloyd George’s policies, especially in Asia Minor, which eventually to lead to his downfall. As he sought to scale down the reparations bill, which he saw as ‘immoral and senseless’; to revise the territorial settlement in Silesia to Germany’s advantage; and to grant Germany membership of the League of Nations, Nicolson’s admiration grew, particularly as he fought alone. The French were, quite naturally, furious at him for what they considered to be a betrayal of their interests. By contrast, Wilson’s passivity infuriated Harold, who couldn’t understand why the US President would not take the opportunity to improve the draft treaty. He wrote again to his father, voicing the view of the younger generation of British diplomats:

There is not a single person among the younger people here who is not unhappy and disappointed at the terms. The only people who approve are the old fire-eaters.

After much hesitation, and under the threat of renewed force, the German government accepted the treaty. Despite his disappointment with its terms, Harold Nicolson breathed a huge sigh of relief that there would be no return to hostilities. Exactly a week before the treaty was due to be signed, however, there was a dramatic turn of events when Admiral von Reuter ordered the scuttling of the German fleet blockaded at Scapa Flow off Orkney, eight months after its surrender. This is shown in the pictures above and below. Of the seventy-four warships interned, forty-eight sank within an hour when the German sailors opened the sea-cocks on the Admiral’s order. He said that he was obeying the Kaiser’s orders, given to him before the war, that no German battleship should be allowed to fall into enemy hands, and denied that he was in breach of the Armistice terms, since he had had no notice of its extension beyond 21 June, the day of expiry. The German sailors risked their lives in carrying out von Reuter’s orders. At noon on the 21st, the German ensign was run up, the battleships began to settle, and their crews crowded into boats or swam for it. Some of the British guardships, uncertain of what was happening, opened fire, and there were over a hundred casualties.

The treaty was signed on 28 June 1919 in the Galerie des Glaces (‘Hall of Mirrors’) at the palace of Versailles, where half a century before the German Empire had been founded on the degradation of France. Harold Nicolson witnessed the occasion and recorded it in careful detail. The ‘Galerie’ was crowded, with seats for over a thousand. Clemenceau, small and yellow, orchestrated the proceedings. “Faites entrer les Allemands,” he called out. Dr Hermann Müller and Dr Johannes Bell, heads held high, eyes studying the ceiling, one looking like “the second fiddle” in a string ensemble, the other resembling “a privat-dozent“, were led to the table to sign the treaty. No-one spoke or moved. Having committed Germany to the treaty, they were escorted from the hall “like prisoners from the dock”. Over the “breathless silence”, Clemenceau rasped: “Messieurs, la séance est levée.”  Outside, salvoes were fired, while a squadron of aeroplanes flew overhead. Crowds cheered and yelled, “Vive Clemenceau … Vive l’Angleterre.” After the ceremony Clemenceau, with tears in his eyes, was heard to say: “Oui, c’est une belle journée.” Exhausted at the end of an extraordinary day, Nicolson lamented that it has all been horrible … To bed, sick of life.

General Smuts signed the Versailles Treaty only on the grounds that something of the kind, however imperfect, was needed before the real work of peace-making could begin. But, according to John Buchan, the Treaty proved to be a grave hindrance in that task. For John Maynard Keynes, the British economist, the ‘peace’ was a ‘Carthaginian’ imposition. In The Economic Consequences of the Peace, first published in 1919, he wrote a damning indictment of both the process and product of the Treaty:

Moved by insane delusion and reckless self-regard, the German people overturned the foundations on which we all lived and built. But the spokesmen of the French and British peoples have run the risk of completing the ruin. … Paris was a nightmare. … A sense of impending catastrophe overhung the frivolous scene. … Seated indeed amid the theatrical trappings of the French Saloons of State, one could wonder if the extraordinary visages of Wilson and Clemenceau, with their fixed hue and unchanging characterisation, were really faces at all and not the tragi-comic masks of some strange drama or puppet-show. …

For John Buchan, the hopeful element in what had been signed lay in its prefix – the Covenant of a new League of Nations, the one remnant left of Wilson’s dreams; the hope was that the reaction against the horrors of war might result in an abiding determination for peace. Machinery was provided to give a system to fulfil this desire. Membership of the League was open to any self-governing state which accepted its principles; it required its members to refrain from war until the quarrel had been submitted to its judgement and to take corporate action against any breaker of the peace. It was not a super-state with a military force as its sanction, but a league of states whose effectiveness in a crisis would depend upon how far its members would be prepared to act collectively. There was no abandonment of sovereign rights, except to a very minor extent. It began as a league of the victorious and neutral Powers, but the defeated Powers were given the right of delayed entry.

 

Above (Right): a facsimile of some of the signatures on the Treaty.

Concluding Versailles – A Toothless Treaty? The Covenant & Council of the League of Nations:

From the start, the League was handicapped by the facts that it was widely regarded as the caretaker of the Peace treaties and therefore suspect to those who found them difficult to come to terms with, and by the fact that the USA refused to join, thereby weakening any chance of collective action. But it was the best that could be done at that juncture by way of international cooperation, and even its flawed and modest beginnings were soon seen as an advance in peacemaking and peacekeeping in the world. It was often said in the 1920s and ’30s that a fundamental weakness of the League of Nations that it ‘lacked teeth’, that it was not prepared to threaten potential and actual aggressors with military force. However, the original clauses in the Covenant contradict this contention. They state that in the case of aggression or threat of aggression, the Council of the League should advise upon how this threat should be met: military action was not excluded. Moreover, if any member of the League did resort to war, the Council would recommend to the governments concerned what effective military, naval and air force the members of the League should contribute. Members of the League were expected to permit the passage through their territories of the armed forces of other members of the League. These articles, therefore, totally envisage the possibility of military action by the League in order to deter aggression. Although the requirement of unanimity on the part of the Council could effectively negate these provisions in certain circumstances, the ‘teeth’ were there, if only the principal Powers were willing to put them to work. In his course notes for the Open University, prepared in 1973, Arthur Marwick pointed to the scope of the problems facing the peacemakers in 1919:

A war on such an unprecedented scale obviously left problems of an unprecedented nature. Insulated as we have been in these islands, we can easily forget the immense problems involved in the collapse of old political frontiers, from the mixing of races in particular areas, from the reallocation of territorial boundaries, and from the transfer of populations…

The Treaty of Versailles altogether consists of 440 articles and it takes up 230 pages of Volume LIII of the ‘Parliamentary Papers’ for 1919. From the document itself, we can see the very real complexities and difficulties which faced the peacemakers. From the detail in some parts of the Treaty, we can see what peacemaking is really like, as distinct from the brief text-book accounts which merely summarise the broad principles; we can see what is involved in putting those principles into practice. The Treaty of Versailles expressed certain intentions about settling the map of Europe. But, as with all historical documents, we do learn things from it about the fundamental assumptions of the men who drafted it. And throughout the entire Treaty, there is a good deal of ‘unwitting testimony’ about the political events, social conditions and cultural attitudes in Europe in 1918-19. A rapid glance at the map below will show that a serious attempt was made in 1919 to arrange the frontiers of the states so that the main boundaries coincided with the national divisions of the European peoples. As a result of the treaties, only a small minority, about three per cent, was still under the subjection of other nationalities. In many cases, the peoples themselves had taken the initiative and proclaimed their independence and the peacemakers simply had to accept what had already been accomplished. Their task was ‘simply’ to fix the new boundaries of these ethnic groups. But in doing so, they were responsible for some gross injustices, as the map also shows.

(to be continued).

Jan Christiaan Smuts (1870-1950), pictured above, was a South African statesman and member of the British Imperial War Cabinet from 1917 to 1919. In June 1917, as a colonial prime minister, he joined the ‘new imperialists’ – Curzon, Milner and Balfour – in the cabinet, giving his view of the development of the British Empire and Commonwealth as he saw it:

The British Empire is much more than a State. I think the very expression ‘Empire’ is misleading, because it makes people think as if we are one single entity, one unity, to which the term ‘Empire’ can be applied. We are not an Empire. Germany is an Empire, so was Rome, and so is India, but we are a system of nations far greater than any empire which has ever existed; and by using this ancient expression we really obscure the real fact that we are larger and that our whole position is different, and that we are not one nation, or state, or empire, but we are a whole world by ourselves, consisting of many nations and states, and all sorts of communities under one flag…

I think that this is the fundamental fact which we have to bear in mind – that the British Empire, or this British Commonwealth of Nations, does not stand for unity, standardisation, or assimilation, or denationalisation; but it stands for a fuller, a richer, and more various a life among all the nations that compose it. And even nations who have fought against you, like my own, must feel that they and their interests are as safe and as secure under the British flag as those of the children of your household and your own blood. It is only in proportion as that is realised that you will fulfil the true mission that you have undertaken. Therefore, it seems, speaking my own individual opinion, that there is only one solution, that is the solution supplied by our past traditions of freedom, self-government and the fullest development. We are not going to force common Governments, federal or otherwise, but we are going to extend liberty, freedom and nationhood more and more in every part of the Empire.

T E Lawrence was one of those who took Smuts’ vision of Empire at face value. He became closely identified with this new strategy of ‘extending liberty’ by inciting an Arab Revolt against Turkish rule, under the leadership of the Sharif of Mecca, Husain Ibn Ali. Lawrence was an Oxford historian turned undercover agent, an archaeologist, a linguist, a skilled cartographer and an intuitive guerrilla fighter, as well as a masochist who yearned for fame, only to spurn it when it came. He was the illegitimate son of an Irish baronet and his nanny; a flamboyant Orientalist who delighted in wearing Arab dress. His affinity with the Arabs was to prove invaluable. His aim was to break the Ottoman Empire from within, by stirring up Arab nationalism into a new and potent force that he believed could trump the German-sponsored jihad against the British Empire. Turkish rule over the deserts of Arabia had been resented for centuries and sporadically challenged by the nomadic tribes of the region. By adopting their language and dress, Lawrence set out to turn their discontent to British advantage. As liaison officer to Husain’s son Faisal from July 1916, he argued strongly against deploying British troops in the Hejaz. The Arabs had to feel they were fighting for their own freedom, Lawrence argued, not for the privilege of being ruled by the British instead of the Turks. His ambition, he wrote, was…

…that the Arabs should be our first brown dominion, and not our last brown colony. Arabs react against you if you try to drive them, and they are as tenacious as Jews, but you can lead them without force anywhere, if nominally arm-in-arm. The future of Mesopotamia is so immense that if it is cordially ours we can swing the whole Middle East with it.

It worked. With Lawrence’s support, the Arabs waged a highly effective guerrilla war against Turkish communications along the Hejaz railway from Medina to Aqaba. By the autumn of 1917 they were probing Turkish defences in Syria as General Edmond Allenby’s army marched from Sinai towards Jerusalem. The Arab revolt helped to turn the military tide for Britain in the middle east, and so take the pressure off the Suez Canal and the oil fields for the duration of the war. But this did not solve Britain’s long-term problem of how to safeguard her middle eastern interests now that the old Turkish buffer was gone; or the short-term problem connected with it, of how to avoid quarrelling with her friends over it. To settle these problems she had come to a secret arrangement with France in April 1916 – the Sykes-Picot Treaty – which was supposed to determine how the Ottoman empire would be partitioned after the war. When it was revealed to the world after April 1917, following the entry of the USA into the war, Sykes-Picot was on the face of it a blueprint for a cynical piece of imperialistic plunder, and Britain was embarrassed by the look of it to the Arabs, who got to know of it from the Russian Bolsheviks later that year. T E Lawrence claimed that it was evident to him that Britain’s promises would amount to nothing, and confessed that he himself had been party to deliberately misleading them:

I risked the fraud, on my conviction that the Arab help was necessary to our cheap and speedy victory in the East, and that better we win and break our word than lose.

Writing in 1954, Lord Vansittart claimed that Lawrence’s Arab army was overrated, and that it had raced rather than fought its way to Damascus. He had believed that the Arabs occupied the city first, but later found out that it was the Australians who bore the brunt of the siege.  Of Lawrence himself, he wrote that…

He felt too big for the pumps in which he entered my office, boasting of having torn off his British decorations… Lawrence was one of the people I was glad to have known and not to have known better. He was an acquaintance, not a friend, a relative so distant that we never mentioned the subject… He wanted to go far with him, seeming to think that I could ‘do something about’ the kingdom terrestrial yet not of this world, on which he had set his public heart.

In June 1917, there were six ‘young imperialists’ in the wartime cabinet, including Leopold Amery and Mark Sykes, who were there to advise on eastern and middle eastern affairs. Harold Nicolson was seconded to work with Sykes. John Buchan was deputy director of a new Information Ministry created to brief ministers. It was a remarkable resurrection of a school of imperialism which had been thought to be dead and buried for years, spurned by successive electorates since 1906. In ordinary times it would have remained mouldering under the ground, but the extraordinary circumstances of war had acted like an earthquake, throwing up the coffin and breaking it open. As Bernard Porter has put it, Joseph Chamberlain walked the earth again. Leopold Amery’s first and foremost war aim was the immediate security and, still more, freedom for the development and expansion of the British Commonwealth in the world outside Europe. A Cabinet Committee on Territorial Desiderata chaired by Curzon in 1917 recommended that this expansion be concentrated in east Africa and the lands between Egypt and India. It was clear what these new imperialists had in mind, if they were still in control of government when the war was over.

The Great War was a total war, and, for its duration, it stretched the Empire’s resources to the limit. When peace eventually came, she would be much less able to hold the empire by force: even now she could ill afford to keep tied up in the colonies troops which were badly needed in Europe, or to count on reinforcing them in an emergency. In India, for example, the number of British troops numbered only 15,000, which was 23,000 fewer than on the eve of the mutiny, sixty years earlier. The perils of the situation were clear, and could only be met by compromising with any insurgency or emergency which might arise. Given the somewhat feigned antipathy of the USA for being harnessed to imperialists after April 1917, concession was a means by which the British could retain control of their empire, but it was also a way in which that control was diluted as well. The war forced it into all kinds of actions which were unwise in the long-term, but the sort of war it was made these almost inevitable. In wartime there could be no long-term coherent policy for the empire. Everything was overshadowed by the war on the Western Front. Consequently colonial policy decisions could not be other than pragmatic, unplanned, short-term, often inconsistent. Quite often they came to be regretted afterwards, especially those made to curry favour from various quarters, to nationalists in India and the middle east.

In India the promises came very slowly, because until 1917 it looked as if they might be done without. India was relatively tranquil when war broke out, and Indians refrained from exploiting the difficulties of their British ‘masters’. It seemed that Britain would not need more than 15,000 troops to control them. Nevertheless, some of the members of the government, including Edwin Montagu, were keen to announce reforms from the beginning. India’s representation at Imperial Conferences of the ‘white’ self-governing dominions, were met with considerable opposition from those dominions who protested that India was neither ‘white’ nor ‘self-governing’. Despite this, India was admitted at the beginning of 1917, and promises of political reforms followed in August. Both concessions were late enough to suggest that they were born out of fear rather than persuasion, for in the year before the nationalists had healed both of the main breaches: between Congress and the Muslim League by the Lucknow Pact of December 1916, and between moderates and extremists when Tilak, released from gaol in 1914, was readmitted to Congress in the same month, capturing it soon afterwards. In 1916 the nationalists had gone on the offensive under him and, ironically, the Englishwoman Annie Besant. Montagu wrote later that it was her activity which really stirred the country up. By June 1917, they were threatening enough to persuade the Indian government to intern Mrs Besant, which provoked further agitation. In July the viceroy wrote home that the situation was urgent, and any further prevarication over the reforms would be fatal. It was at this moment that Montagu, who had returned to the India Office as Secretary of State in July, was allowed to make a declaration of intent for India to provide…

…the increasing association of Indians in every branch of the administration, and the gradual development of self-governing institutions with a view to the progressive realisation of responsible government in India as an integral part of the British Empire.

Montagu was able to use the words ‘responsible government’ in 1917, even though it provoked a storm in the House of Lords and a flurry of resignations in India, because the situation was then more desperate: nationalist opposition more widespread, the need to arrest the further defection of moderate opinion, according to Chelmsford, more urgent, the country, according to Montagu, rolling to certain destruction. This was the result of the war, but the war had also made it less likely that the promise of Liberal reforms to India, when it did come, would be enough to stem the nationalist tide.Indian nationalism was fired enormously by the war: its grievances compounded, its following augmented, its organisation greatly improved, its expectations increased; a seething, boiling, political flood, as Montagu described it in November 1917, raging across the country. Yet the Montagu Declaration and the Montagu-Chelmsford Report had held it back; if nothing else, as Montagu wrote in February 1918, I have kept India quiet for six months at a critical period of the war. The reforms represented the biggest concession Britain had yet made to the demands of the nationalists.  Whether they were big enough to keep pace with them was yet to be seen when the war finally ended.

                 

Sources:

Bernard Porter (1984), The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism. London: Longman.

Niall Ferguson (2005), Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Michael Clark & Peter Teed (1972), Portraits & Documents: The Twentieth Century. London: Hutchinson.

            

9-31 December 1936 – Abdication, Accession & Aftermath:

While the King was making and announcing his decision to his brothers and the prime minister, Wallis had remained in the relative safety of Cannes, from where she issued a statement that she would be willing, if such action would resolve the problem, to withdraw forthwith from a situation that has been rendered unhappy and untenable. Wallis knew that Edward would never give her up, however, and was adamant in his intention to marry her. Everybody who knew the couple knew that Edward was so besotted with her that he would follow her, not just to Cannes, but to the ends of the earth. She may have tried to persuade him during the several hours each day they spent in telephone conversations while the King remained besieged at Fort Belvedere.  Clearly she did not succeed, despite the Daily Mail trumpeting her announcement as marking the End of the Crisis.

Although Baldwin sent Theodore Goddard to Cannes and he returned with a signed statement confirming that she was indeed willing to renounce her hold on Edward, few believed her to be sincere. Baldwin sent a telegram to the governments of the Dominions dismissing it as no more than an attempt to swing public opinion in her favour and thereby give her less reason to be uneasy as to her personal safety.  While the King had received many letters of support, she had received just as many hate messages, some containing threats, and a brick had been thrown through her window. In any event, when Wallis telephoned Edward on Wednesday 9^th December to tell him of her decision herself, he replied:

‘it’s too late…the Abdication documents are being drawn up – You can go where you want – to China, Labrador, or the South Seas. But wherever you go, I will follow you.’

The King sat up late at Fort Belvedere, thinking over his decision. He could keep the throne – and give up Mrs Simpson; he could ignore Baldwin’s advice, ask for the Premier’s resignation, and rule with a new Cabinet, or he could abdicate.

The following morning, 10^th December, at ten o’clock, King Edward VIII signed the Instrument of Abdication, renouncing for ever all claim to the throne for himself and for his descendants. His three brothers were witnesses, the Dukes of York, Gloucester and Kent, the eldest of which, Albert, then succeeded him as George VI. The established fact, however, that he lied about his personal wealth to exact a huge pay-off, making him one of the richest men in Europe, led to a bitter family split which was never healed in his lifetime, as well as a damaging quarrel with his great ally, Winston Churchill. Queen Mary, although sympathetic to her son’s emotional state, was horrified by his action. She told him later that she could not understand how, when more than a million men of the British Empire had done their duty and given their lives in the Great War, he could not have made a lesser sacrifice and given up a woman so unsuited to be the King’s wife. She felt even greater sympathy for ‘poor Bertie’, the nervous, shy, retiring brother who burst into tears when his fate was confirmed. The Queen told Baldwin that her eldest son had brought disgrace on the family in not carrying out the duties and responsibilities of the Sovereign of our great Empire.

That afternoon, Baldwin stood up in the Commons, nervously holding some papers, a message from His Majesty the King, signed by His Majesty’s own hand he told the packed House. He then handed the papers to Capt. Fitzroy, Speaker of the House, who read out the Instrument of Abdication in a quavering voice. When he had finished, Baldwin again rose, this time to be greeted by cheers, and now told his fellow MPs the whole story, speaking for a whole hour, referring only briefly to his notes. He was heard in dead silence, the silence of Gettysburg as Harold Nicolson described it. Baldwin told him afterwards that Edward…

could see nothing but that woman… He lacks religion… I told his mother so… I love that man. But he must go.

The ‘King’s Abdication Bill’ was passed the next morning because the King wishes it and so, Nicholson recorded in his diary, thus ends the reign of King Edward VIII, after just 327 days, and without a coronation.  His reign was the shortest in the history of England and Wales since the disputed reign of Lady Jane Grey four centuries earlier, and the shortest in the history of the United Kingdom. After a goodbye lunch with Winston Churchill at the Fort and a farewell dinner with his family at the Royal Lodge, Edward went to the Castle. Here, introduced by Sir John Reith as His Royal Highness the Prince Edward, he finally got to deliver his broadcast to the nation in the voice of an angry man at the end of his tether, declaring:

I have found it impossible to carry on the heavy burden of responsibility and to discharge the duties of king as I would wish to do without the help and support of the woman I love.

His last words were ‘God save the King!’  In Merthyr Tydfil, the effect of his abdication speech was shattering. The people had lost someone who they thought was going to do something for them at last, so the mood was slightly different from the national response, as John Meredith commented.

After the broadcast and a final, warm farewell to his family at the Royal Lodge, Edward left Windsor just after midnight and was driven to Portsmouth, from where he left Britain as the Duke of Windsor in the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Fury. From France he was to make his way to Austria, where he would stay with Baron Eugene de Rothschild until Wallis’ divorce was made absolute at the end of April. After Fury slipped its moorings and headed out to sea in the early hours of 12 December, he spent the rest of the night drinking heavily, pacing up and down the officers’ mess in a state of high agitation as the enormity of what he had done began to dawn on him.

It was now the reign of ‘Albert the Good’, George VI, earnest, dignified, embodying sound family values. Later that same morning, George was proclaimed King by the Heralds, and at his Accession Council, the new King declared his adherence to the strict principles of constitutional government and… resolve to work before all else for the welfare of the British Commonwealth of Nations. His voice was low and clear, though punctuated with hesitations. His accession showed that cherished family values had been placed once more on their pedestal.  Together with his charming wife, Elizabeth, and their two daughters, the little Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret Rose, they became the first happy family to have its home in Buckingham Palace since it was built. The Victorian sage of the British constitution, Walter Bagehot, had written:

We have come to believe that it is natural to have a virtuous sovereign.

Edward’s belief that the public role of the monarch should be separated from his private life had been rejected. The monarch and the man were once more fused together, if not identical. This has remained the case for the last eighty years of the Windsor dynasty, beginning with the fifteen-year reign of George VI under the steady guidance of Queen Elizabeth, later the Queen Mother, and continuing with the reign of HM Elizabeth II. Edward’s experiments with modernity were at an end and, in future, the monarchy would be more concerned to provide continuity of tradition, with only incremental, evolutionary change.

This wholesale return to Victorian virtues, if not values, was part of a deliberate attempt of Baldwin and Chamberlain to reverse what they saw as a decline in moral standards that was afflicting the nation as a whole. It was part of a cultural counter-revolution in which a ‘very British coup’ had become an absolute necessity. How else could their steely determination to see Edward depart be explained? Baldwin had twice sacrificed veracity to what he saw as ‘the greater good’. He had deliberately misled the King both about the need for an act of Parliament to achieve a morganatic marriage, and about the position of the governments of the Dominions over the matter. Looked at with the perspective of the time, however, Baldwin’s handling of the whole transition between monarchs appeared, and still appears, masterful, and it certainly preserved him in office for a time of his own choosing, after the coronation, now to be that of George VI. Other key ‘establishment’ figures did not reveal the same statesmanlike abilities.

On Sunday 13^th December, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Cosmo Lang, broadcast a sanctimonious homily in which he compared Edward to James II, fleeing into exile in darkness, and attacking him for putting his craving for personal happiness before duty and condemning his morals. He went on to state that it was…

…even more strange that he should have sought his happiness in a manner inconsistent with the Christian principles of marriage, and within a social circle whose standards and ways of life are alien to all the best instincts and traditions of his people. Let those who belong to this circle know that today they stand rebuked by the judgement of the nation which had loved King Edward. 

The directness of the Archbishop’s comments distressed the Duke of Windsor, listening to it from the Rothschild’s castle in Austria, and produced an angry response from several people who wrote to the newspapers. Letters were published in the Daily Telegraph condemning Lang’s words as unnecessary and needlessly unkind. The broadcast was criticised by the Bishop of Durham and caused a perfect storm of protest. Lang had offended the British sense of fair play by kicking a man when he was down.  H. G. Wells called the sermon a libellous outburst and the primate was lampooned in a memorable verse:

My Lord Archbishop, what a scold you are!

And when your man is down, how bold you are!

Of Christian duty how scant you are!

And, auld Lang swine, how full of cant you are!

Lang had revealed his hatred for Edward and the modernity he stood for. He had done nothing to reassure doubters that he had not abused his high office to force his Supreme Governor to abandon his role on the grounds of  his outdated morality. He had also tactlessly referred to King George VI’s long battle to overcome his speech defect. For years Prince Albert had indeed struggled to overcome his speech defect, with the help of his therapist Lionel Logue, as recently depicted in the film The King’s Speech. Logue was among the first to send his congratulations to ‘Albert’ on 14 December:

May I be permitted to offer my very humble but most heartfelt good wishes on your accession to the throne. It is another of my dreams come true and a very pleasant one. May I be permitted to write to your Majesty in the New Year and offer my services.

As Logue complained, to draw attention to the King’s speech impediment at this stage could only make matters worse. Rather than leaving his comment on the new King by referring to the obvious fact that in manner and speech he is more quiet and reserved than his brother, Lang chose a parenthesis which he hoped would not be unhelpful. He reminded the nation, unnecessarily, of the Duke’s stammering which had been so much worse in the previous decade, and which he and Logue had succeeded in controlling, where many others had failed:

When his people listen to him they will note an occasional and momentary hesitation in his speech. But he has brought it into full control and to those who hear, it need cause no embarrassment, for it causes none to him who speaks.

Lang’s comments were picked up by the American press and Time magazine asked all three hundred Privy Councillors if the king still stuttered. On 21 December it reported that none could be found willing to be quoted as saying that His Majesty does not still stutter. Moreover, as one prominent ‘courtier’, Henson observed about Lang’s broadcast ‘homily’, there was an assumption of patronising familiarity with the new King and his family which was also offensive. On Christmas Eve, Lang sent out an urgent clerical circular imposing a period of silence. I think enough has been said on this painful matter and the time has come for reticence, he told his colleagues, fearing that they might use their Christmas sermons for further attacks. He had received a telephone call from the Palace the previous night in which Lord Wigram had told him that the King was ‘put out’ and urged ‘reticence’ on the ‘leaders of religion’.

For their part, the British newspapers certainly played their role in ensuring a smooth transition, and did not comment on the matter of the king’s speech. Instead, they greeted the resolution of the crisis with enthusiasm. Bertie may not have had the charm or charisma of his elder brother, but he was solid and reliable. He also had the benefit of a popular and beautiful wife and two young daughters, whose every move had been followed by the press since their birth. The Daily Mirror, which the week before had been doggedly supporting Edward VIII, now doted on the great little sisters whom, it said, the whole world worships. However, as Lloyd George commented from his isolated rest in Jamaica, this second king was…

…just the sort of King which suits them, (one who) will not pry into any inconvenient questions: he will always sign on the dotted line and he will always do exactly what he is told’.

Completely foreign observers were even more cynical. In the same edition in which it drew attention to the king’s continuing impediment, Time magazine commented, rather unkindly:

Neither King George nor Queen Elizabeth has lived a life in which any event could be called of public interest in the United Kingdom press and this last week was exactly as most of their subjects wished. In effect a Calvin Coolidge entered Buckingham Palace with Shirley Temple for his daughter.

Inadvertently, Lang’s comments helped fuel a whispering campaign of gossip against the new king and his fitness to rule. Several among the Duke of Windsor’s dwindling band of allies suggested ‘Bertie’ might be to weak and frail to survive the ordeal of the coronation, let alone the strains of being king. They also made sure that the idea took hold that there had been an establishment plot to remove King Edward. Certainly, all the evidence we now have, suggests that, just because Edward himself may have believed it to the point of paranoia, that did not mean that there were not those in the establishment who were ‘out to get him’, Baldwin, Chamberlain and Lang among them. Vera Brittain expressed the view of many liberal intellectuals that the whole Simpson affair had been…

…a convenient excuse for removing a monarch whose informality, dislike of ancient tradition, and determination to see things for himself had affronted the “old gang” from the beginning.

Certainly, whatever tributes Baldwin may have paid the retiring monarch from the floor of the Commons, he showed in private how relieved he was that Edward had been persuaded to depart. There was little, if any, sign of regret. Both Nicolson and Bernays recorded similar gleeful reactions from him in their exchanges with him on the corridors of the House. No quiet reflection, certainly no remorse or guilt. Most tellingly, Baldwin told Bernays that a crisis was bound to come and that it might have come on a more difficult issue. In this remark, at the time it was made, he can only be referring to one issue – that of unemployment and the distressed areas. The timing of ‘the crisis’ and the nervousness of ministers and civil servants before, during and after his visit to south Wales, is a clear sign that his intervention in social policy was what precipitated his downfall.

Though there was undoubtedly a sizeable body of opinion supporting Edward when they eventually heard of the crisis, which was unable to find its own voice, free from the machinations of politicians, there was also a strong feeling of disappointment in Edward, even a sense that he himself had betrayed them, or at least let them down at a time of great need. Nevertheless, the sense of exclusion from the process leading to the Abdication, of ‘democratic deficit’, led  one young man in Lancashire to set up an organisation to gauge public opinion. Tom Harrison set up Mass Observation in December 1936, to find out and publish the views of ordinary people on the issues of social and foreign policy.

George V had started Christmas Day broadcasts from Sandringham four years earlier, and as the festive season approached, there was some speculation as to whether George VI would keep up the tradition. In the event, Alec Hardinge, acting on the advice of Lionel Logue, decided against it. The King was in a nervous state about it, due partly to the Archbishop’s recent tactless remarks, which had made him even more self-conscious and the public even more aware of his impediment.  There was also a feeling at court that a period of silence from a monarchy still in disgrace would be appropriate. The royal family continued to enjoy a quiet family holiday together.

Sources:

Mark Logue & Peter Conradi (2010), The King’s Speech: How One Man Saved the British Monarchy. London: Quercus

Norman Rose (2005), Harold Nicolson. London: Pimlico

Denys Blakeway (2011), The Last Dance. London: Murray

Andrew J Chandler (1989), ‘The Re-Making of a Working Class’ (PhD thesis, UCW Cardiff).

Andrew J Chandler (1982), ‘The Black Death on Wheels’ in Papers in Modern Welsh History. Cardiff: Modern Wales Unit.

Tony Curtis (ed.) (1986), Wales: The Imagined Nation. Cardiff: Poetry of Wales Press.

René Cutforth (1976), Later Than We Thought. Newton Abbott: David & Charles

30 November – 9 December 1936:

End of the Exhibition, but the Royal Show goes public:

London’s one-and-a-half million pound amusement centre and landmark, the Crystal Palace, was destroyed by fire on November 30th. Within half an hour of the first alarm, the building, covering twenty-five acres, was wholly ablaze, and the blood-orange glow from the fifty foot flames could be seen from another great landmark of pleasure, the Grand Pier in Brighton, eighty miles away. The Investigation failed to find the cause of the fire, which started around 6.30 p.m., during an orchestral rehearsal in the lobby. At first it was dismissed as a minor fire, and the band played on, but the flames were fanned by a strong wind so that the musicians had to be evacuated. The central transept collapsed only minutes after they got outside. The whole structure was now ablaze and melting, made as it was of wood, iron and glass. The noise of the crashing glass roof could be heard five miles away. Thousands of Londoners came out to see the spectacle of streams of molten iron and glass, looking like a volcano, so many that they had to be held back by a cordon of police to allow the ninety fire-tenders to tackle the blaze through the intense heat, which could be felt on faces half a mile away. The Duke of Kent arrived on the scene, boosting the morale of the firefighters by donning a helmet and staying until 2.30 a.m. The next morning all that was left of the structure were the two 300 ft, stone-built water towers.

The destruction of the immense glass palace, built to Joseph Paxton’s design to house the Great Exhibition of 1851, symbolised a breach in continuity with the Victorian Age and the commencement of a new, frightening age in which fires, whether started accidentally or by bombing, were becoming commonplace. The only relics of this bygone era were plaster of Paris effigies of the kings of England on their tombs and the concrete sculptures of dinosaurs, which can still be seen in the gardens to this day. The glass exhibition hall had first stood in Hyde Park, before being moved, at great cost, to Sydenham in 1854, where it was reconstructed, enlarged and made the centre of a large pleasure park. By the thirties it had gone into decline as an exhibition centre, being used mainly for choral singing and orchestral competitions. It still housed waxworks, which had, of course, all melted away. John Logie Baird’s new television laboratory was also destroyed, but this did not affect the BBC’s new TV broadcasts.

Some saw the fire almost as a divine judgement on the King’s rejection of traditional values. Queen Mary was deeply affected by the sudden fall of the People’s Palace she had re-opened with George V as the first home of the Imperial War Museum in 1924, before it moved to Lambeth. She watched the smoke rising in the distance from the windows of Marlborough House, visiting the burnt-out site three days later, still dressed in black, surveying the mass of bent and twisted metal. The sense of melancholy which the scene conveyed must have matched her mood at the end of an annus horribilis, with the monarchy on the verge of collapse, just as her late husband had predicted at its beginning. Abroad the warlike turn of events had destroyed Chamberlain’s hopes of economic recovery and social reform on the home front. Resources were needed for Rearmament, the fire-fighting appliances needed priming, and the prospects for peace had been shattered. The public mood, like that of Queen Mary herself, was deeply pessimistic, symbolised in the tangle of steel and glass she stood before. It looked like a bomb site and reminded some journalists of the bombing of Madrid. In recent weeks, the newspapers and newsreels had been full of images from Spain of huddled men and terrified women and children taking shelter from the German bombers.

On 2nd December Baldwin went again to the Palace and informed the King that he thought that the lady he married should automatically become the Queen, and that, although inquiries in the Commonwealth were not yet complete, neither Britain nor its Dominions would tolerate a morganatic marriage. In fact, this was not true. We now know that only the Australian Prime Minister’s response was entirely against the morganatic marriage. Both the New Zealand and Canadian responses were far more sympathetic to the idea, but they were either changed or not put formally to the Cabinet, and were withheld from the King.

However unbelievable it may seem from the perspective of the multi-media society of the twenty-first century, most of the country had still not heard of Wallis Simpson until December 2nd, when the Yorkshire Post  reported a fairly innocent comment made by the Bishop of Bradford, the aptly named Dr Blunt, who also had never heard of Mrs Simpson, at a Diocesan Conference the previous day:

The King’s personal views are his own but it is still an essential part of the idea of kingship…that the King needs the grace of God for his office.

Above: Alfred Blunt, Bishop of Bradford.

The Bishop said that he wished, therefore, that the King would show more positive evidence of the need for Divine Guidance.  All he meant was that the King ought to go to Church more often, but a local journalist in the audience wrongly took the Bishop’s remark as a none-too veiled reference to the King’s affair. When his report was carried by the Press Association, the national news agency, the newspapers interpreted Blunt’s words as the signal they had all been waiting for: an official breaking of the silence by the Church, and therefore the Establishment, over the Simpson affair. The national press soon circulated the story, breaking their self-imposed silence about the monarch’s love-life. The whole story of the King’s affair was now filling the pages of the newspapers. Over the previous few months, only a relatively small number of Britons had known what was going on. Now the newspapers quickly made up for lost time, filling their pages with stories of crisis meetings at the Palace, pictures of Mrs Simpson and interviews with men and women in the street, asking their opinions. Feature articles included biographies of Wallis Simpson, photographs of her previous husbands, reports of the Nahlin cruise, pictures of the couple together and columns of comment. While Dawson of The Times attacked the King, with Baldwin’s collusion, The Daily Mail, The Daily Express and The Daily Mirror backed him, reflecting their owners’ views. They have much in common, began a profile of the royal couple in the Daily Mirror on 4 December. They both love the sea. They both love swimming. They both love golf and gardening. And soon they discovered that each loved the other. The Liberal-nonconformist Daily Chronicle also came out in favour of a morganatic marriage. While only eighty thousand read the broadsheets, the combined circulation of those supporting the marriage was nine million.

The same day, 3rd December, Baldwin addressed the House, simply reporting that no constitutional crisis had yet arisen. Harold Nicolson MP went to Islington, where he gave a public lecture, a long-standing engagement. Out of an audience of four hundred only ten joined in the singing of ‘God Save the King’ at the beginning of the meeting. He wrote that evening that he didn’t find people to be angry with Mrs Simpson, but that there was a deep and enraged fury at the King himself. In eight months, Edward had destroyed the great structure of popularity which he himself had raised. Apparently, for Nicolson, not even his popularity with the armed forces, the ex-servicemen and the unemployed miners, so recently demonstrated, would be enough to break this fall from grace.

The King retreated to Fort Belvedere, clinging to his morganatic dream, which Baldwin demolished it in a public statement:

There is no such thing as what is called a morganatic marriage known to our law…the lady whom he marries, by the fact of her marriage to the King, necessarily becomes Queen…The only way in which this result could be avoided would be by legislation dealing with a particular case. His Majesty’s Government are not prepared to introduce such legislation.

The Duke of York, Albert, and his family, had been in Scotland during the previous days. Alighting from the night train at Euston on the morning of 3 December, they were confronted with newspaper placards with the words, The King’s Marriage. Albert and Elizabeth were both deeply shocked by what it might mean for them. When the Duke spoke to his younger brother, the Duke of Gloucester, he found him in a great state of excitement. The King himself had not yet decided what to do, saying he would ask the people what they wanted him to do and then go abroad for a while. In the meantime, he sent Wallis away to Cannes for her own protection. She was already receiving poison pen letters and bricks had been thrown through the window of the house she was renting in Regent’s Park. The couple feared that worse was to come. The same day the Duke of York telephoned the King, who was at his retreat at Windsor Great Park, Fort Belvedere. ‘Bertie’ wanted to make an appointment to see his brother ‘David’ in person, but this was declined. He kept trying over the next few days, without success, the King refusing to see him on the grounds that he had still not made up his mind as to his course of action. Despite the huge impact that his decision would have on his brother’s life, Edward refused to confide in him. He must have known that Bertie had no desire to become King. The Duke’s sense of foreboding was growing and, according to Princess Olga (sister of the Duchess of Kent), he became mute and broken… in an awful state of worry as David won’t see him or telephone. 

Wallis Simpson had not been not entirely as disinterested as she later made out, even if she was more capable than Edward of being dispassionate in public. She had encouraged him to take up Churchill’s morganatic marriage idea and now urged him to appeal to his people over the heads of the politicians by means of a radio broadcast. Her plan for him was that he should then fly to Switzerland and wait to see what the impact of public opinion on the government would be. Edward went along with this and again summoned Baldwin to the Palace on the evening of 3rd December. The PM told the Cabinet that he had driven to the Palace and had been taken in by a back entrance to avoid the photographers camped out at the front. The King had read a proposed draft of his radio broadcast to Baldwin, who had responded by saying that, although he was willing to put the idea to the Cabinet, he thought they would regard it as thoroughly unconstitutional. At this, the King had lost his temper with Baldwin, demanding to know what more the PM would have him do. Baldwin had replied, so he said, that what he wanted was what the King had told him he had wanted: to go with dignity, not dividing the country, and making things as smooth as possible for your successor. Trying to calm the situation and step back from the abyss that he must have sensed opening between them as they sat together on the sofa, Baldwin is then said to have raised his whisky-and-soda and said: Well, Sir, whatever happens, my Mrs and I wish you happiness from the depths of our souls, at which the King burst into tears, and Baldwin followed suit. What a strange conversation piece, observed Harold Nicolson when he heard of this from Liberal MP Robert Bernays, those two blubbering together on a sofa!

As Baldwin predicted, the entire Cabinet was once more united behind him the next morning and against the whole idea of a royal broadcast. Chamberlain again urged the PM to bring the King sharply up to the point and get him to abdicate the same day. The politicians now began to panic because they feared that if he were to broadcast, public opinion would move irrevocably in his favour, especially as Chamberlain confirmed, from the whips, that Churchill and Beaverbrook were working on the King’s speech together. The terrible consequences of Churchill being asked to form a government, then demanding a General Election were too dreadful to contemplate, apparently. Baldwin calmed the situation, agreeing to make a statement in the House ruling out any possibility of the King making his broadcast.

Wallis told Edward, ‘You must speak!’, perhaps confusing his powers with those of an American President. As she was now nearing a nervous breakdown herself, she had agreed to go to France, to stay at the villa of friends in Cannes. When Churchill went to meet the King the next morning, 4 December, he found him ill and isolated. He persuaded Baldwin to delay the Cabinet’s ultimatum, and the following day accused the King’s ministers of acting unconstitutionally in demanding his abdication and in reaching secret deals with His Majesty’s ‘Loyal Opposition’ to confront him with the ultimatum. In his press release, he also made an implicit appeal to the Dominions, perhaps sensing that Baldwin had not been entirely truthful in his representation of their views. Forty Conservative MPs were ready back Churchill, who had already selected much of his Cabinet, and was planning his first actions on replacing Baldwin as PM. Crowds formed outside Buckingham Palace and Downing Street cheering for the King, holding placards which read Cheer Your King at the Palace: After South Wales, You Can’t Let Him Down.

Liberal opinion was also behind the King: John Maynard Keynes wanted to know, on simple utilitarian grounds, why the King could not have his morganatic marriage. However, many liberals were nervous about joining forces with the reactionary Beaverbrook and Rothermere press to support the monarchy. There were demonstrations against Baldwin and the Archbishop of Canterbury, but as the MPs toured their constituencies that weekend, they also found a widespread sense of betrayal felt by many who, like the Jarrow marchers, had seen the royal family as a model of family life, symbolising the most important values of their subjects. Perhaps this helps to explain why there was no great spontaneous uprising in support of a previously immensely popular member of that family. Apart from the welcome support from Churchill and Duff Cooper in parliament and government, most of the vocal and visible support was unwelcome, coming from the pro-fascist Right and, more sinisterly, Mosley’s blackshirts who, not yet proscribed from wearing their uniforms, marched up and down Whitehall with a picture of the King, shouting: One, two, three, four, five, we want Baldwin dead or alive! But, in any case, it was largely uncoordinated, useless and simply too late.

By the end of the following weekend of 5th-6th December, if not at its beginning, Edward had decided to give up his fight and hand the Crown to his brother. Yet Albert had none of his brother’s charisma and was ill-prepared for the role he was being handed by him. He also had come close to a nervous breakdown during the four days since his return from Scotland, during which his brother had declined to see him. On Sunday 6th, the Duke again rang the Fort to be told that the King was in a conference and would call him back later. The call never came. Edward had summoned his lawyer, Sir Walter Monckton, to his room at Fort Belvedere and told him of his decision. The next day, Churchill, unaware that the decision had been made, was shouted down when he tried to argue that no pistol should be held at the King’s head. Edward finally made contact with his brother, inviting him to the Fort after dinner. The Duke wrote his own account of this meeting:

The awful and ghastly suspense of waiting was over… I found him pacing up and down the room, and he told me his decision that he would go. 

When he got home that evening, he found his wife had been struck down with flu. She took to her bed, where she remained for the next few days as the dramatic events unfolded around her.  She wrote to her sister:

Bertie & I are feeling very despairing, and the strain is terrific. Every day last a week & the only hope we have is in the affection & support of our family & friends.

Meanwhile, events moved swiftly. At a dinner at Fort Belvedere on Tuesday 8th, attended by several men, including the Duke and the prime minister, Edward made it clear he had already made up his mind. Baldwin had arrived with a suitcase, ready for lengthy negotiations. For a moment, the King was horrified at the prospect of his PM staying the night. The King’s brothers, Princes Albert and George were also at the dinner. According to Baldwin’s account, before they sat down the King merely walked up and down the room saying, “This is the most wonderful woman in the world.”   The Duke of York’s account reported his astonishment as his brother, the life and soul of the party, told Baldwin things I am sure he had never heard before about unemployment in south Wales. Edward may have felt that this was, at least, some small way in which he could honour his Dowlais declaration before departing. Apparently, the Duke turned to Walter Monckton and whispered, and this is the man we are going to lose. Monckton later wrote that it was his lawyer’s acumen that probably prevented  him from retorting, and this is exactly why we are going to lose him, because he makes the politicians feel uncomfortable.  The Duke was in sombre mood and wrote that it was a dinner that I am never likely to forget. On each of the following days, crowds gathered in Whitehall, waiting for news (see below).

The contemporary journalist and commentator René Cutforth, wrote forty years later that his remark, Something must be done (as it was wrongly reported) to an unemployed miner in Dowlais had indeed been made to the umbrage of the politicians, who wanted none of that sort of talk. To that one sentence he owed most of his reputation among them as ‘irresponsible’. But while the remark may have sealed his fate as far as Chamberlain and others in the cabinet were concerned, the King had left Baldwin in no doubt about his determination to marry Wallis Simpson. Cutforth made an interesting comment on this:

Millions of words have been written in explanation of this world shaking affair, and American friends of mine cling to this day to the theory that only some shared sexual deviation could explain Edward’s insistence on a world well lost for love. In the Thirties we thought Freud could explain everything… It was, in fact, a simple case of delayed adolescent romantic love… Ernest Simpson… knew this well enough: he used to refer to the Prince of Wales as ‘Peter Pan’. Years later Wallis wrote of Edward: “Over and above the charm of his personality and the warmth of his manner, he was the open sesame to a new and glittering world that excited me as nothing in my life had done before… All I can say that it was like being Wallis in Wonderland.”