History of England 1-6

Yet Mussolini declined to be bought off, and his troops pushed forward. The League decided to impose limited economic sanctions against Italy, a proposal the National Government reluctantly agreed with, to the annoyance of some Tory backbenchers and the delight of a group of Labour MPs. The pacifist section of the party disagreed, however, and Labour split into two factions. Baldwin’s unerring political instinct prompted him to call an election. During the campaign he successfully exploited Labour’s divisions, while boasting of the National Government’s success in hauling Britain out of its economic malaise. A Conservative-dominated National Government would, he promised, do everything in its ‘power to uphold the Covenant and maintain and increase the efficacy of the League … collective security can alone save us’. Baldwin had not attended a single meeting of the organization, yet now posed as its defender.

Baldwin struck a winning formula on rearmament that confirmed his genius for equivocal language. He asked for a mandate from the electorate to ‘remedy the deficiencies which have occurred in our defences’ in order to further the aims of the League, while at the same time giving his word ‘that there will be no … materially increased forces’. Since voters were themselves ambivalent about rearmament, they were perhaps inclined to give Baldwin the benefit of the doubt. In any case, he was Britain’s most experienced politician following Lloyd George’s retirement. Labour, meanwhile, was growing in confidence and cohesion under the leadership of Clement Attlee. Yet although Attlee was a unifying force within a divided party, he lacked Baldwin’s public appeal.

At the election of November 1935 the Conservatives lost some seats, as was usual for an incumbent government, but still claimed almost 50 per cent of the popular vote. They also increased their dominance within the coalition, since both the National Liberal and National Labour parties suffered heavy losses. Attlee’s Labour performed well, gaining 38 per cent of the popular vote, yet Labour’s 154 MPs posed no serious threat to the government. With hindsight, the most significant consequence of the result was that it left in power the ‘old gang’, as they were derisively known at the time. Baldwin assembled a cabinet of the ‘second-class intellects’ he favoured, who could be trusted to react cautiously to events rather than to try and influence them. The sharpest and most dynamic member of the government was Chamberlain, the chancellor, but he had no flair for foreign affairs, which now dominated parliament.

Churchill, meanwhile, was alienated from the party leadership. This was partly because of his opposition to its cautious rearmament, but mostly because of his views on India. A few months prior to the election, Baldwin had passed the Government of India Act, which granted the country virtual self-government. Churchill had bitterly opposed the bill, on the grounds that it would lose British manufacturers a key market and cause unemployment at home. The introduction of democratic elections, he argued, was also of no real advantage to India, since the country was not ready for them. Besides, it would only increase the power of Gandhi, whom Churchill described as ‘a seditious Middle Temple lawyer, posing as a fakir’.

Churchill had openly challenged Baldwin over the Government of India Act, yet only fifty or so Conservative MPs had joined him. Most Tory backbenchers had seen no reason to fight their popular leader over a lost cause, while many older Conservatives regarded Churchill as a shameless careerist. Meanwhile, younger politicians in the party, such as Harold Macmillan, saw him as a reactionary anachronism. Another prominent young Tory, Anthony Eden, was equally hostile to Churchill and stood by Baldwin, who rewarded him with the offer of a seat in the cabinet. Henceforth Churchill was isolated in the Commons; he made speeches in which he warned of impending disaster, but they invariably went unheeded.

Once in office, Baldwin reneged on his key campaign promises and rearmament now began in earnest. Over the next two years, the chiefs of staff looked to match Germany in every military department, having identified her as the potential enemy. The government’s official aim was still to convince Germany to return to the League, yet a contingency diplomatic plan was necessary should that fail. Part of the strategy was the courting of Italy, a potential ally of Germany. As a result, Baldwin’s electoral commitment to ‘increase the efficacy of the League’ was severely tested by events in Abyssinia, where the Italian invasion continued.

Representatives of the League now demanded full sanctions against Italy, including an embargo on oil. They also urged the deployment of a naval fleet in the Mediterranean, to halt the flow of supplies and men between Italy and Africa and to suggest the threat of war. Yet the government was unenthusiastic about both the embargo and the naval manoeuvres, which might involve losses and leave Britain exposed to Japanese ships in the Pacific. It did not believe the French would join the British fleet, and it was also intimidated by Italian air power. Behind these various excuses, historians have sensed the British government’s overwhelming desire to avoid alienating a key ally, as well as the fear of provoking another war. Baldwin viewed that prospect with terror, as did the pacifist king: ‘I will go to Trafalgar Square and wave a red flag myself,’ commented George, ‘sooner than allow this country to be brought in … to a horrible and unnecessary war.’ Instead of taking action against Italy, the foreign secretary Samuel Hoare tried to buy off Mussolini with an improved offer that involved Abyssinia ceding extensive territories.

Somehow Hoare’s secret plan was leaked, to public outcry. The National Government had sworn to defend the League, but was now bypassing it in favour of an ally guilty of unprovoked aggression. Protest marches were organized throughout England, and countless petitions were drawn up, while Labour MPs spoke out against the government’s perfidy. The government dropped the plan, while Hoare was forced to resign as foreign secretary. He was replaced by Anthony Eden.

In the absence of an alternative policy, Baldwin reluctantly contemplated imposing oil sanctions on Italy. But as the prime minister procrastinated, Mussolini urged his armies to press on. To break the staunch Abyssinian resistance, the Italians used poisonous mustard gas, in contravention of the 1925 Geneva Protocol; they also indiscriminately attacked civilians, Red Cross units and medical facilities. Eventually, in May 1936, the emperor of Abyssinia surrendered and left his country.

The exiled emperor demanded that the League condemn Italy’s ‘violations of international agreements’ and criticized Britain and France for condoning the Italian conquest. ‘It is us today,’ he prophesied; ‘it will be you tomorrow.’ His efforts were in vain. Under pressure from the British and the French, the League recognized Italian Abyssinia and ended sanctions against Mussolini’s regime. Once again the public was outraged, while Churchill accused Baldwin of ‘discrediting’ the League. The National Government believed that undermining the organization was justified if the goodwill of Italy was secured, yet its handling of the affair was an abject failure. By imposing limited sanctions, Britain had angered Mussolini, who now announced that the Stresa declaration was void. The news was welcomed by Hitler, who embarked on diplomatic discussions with his fellow Fascist dictator in Italy. European Fascism was uniting.

With Italy now friendly towards him, and the British and French preoccupied with the Abyssinian question, in March 1936 Hitler decided to remilitarize the Rhineland, in contravention of the Versailles Treaty and the Locarno Pact. He was relying on the British to reject calls from the French for united military action against Germany. If the National Government would not stand up to Mussolini when he had invaded the territory of a fellow League member, Hitler calculated that it would not oppose a peaceful movement of the German army into German territory, and his gamble paid off. The government declined to support French calls for military action, a tearful Baldwin admitting to the French government that Britain’s limited military resources rendered such action impossible. He added that public opinion was also against military intervention – most English people had no objection to German soldiers going into their ‘own backyard’.

Labour wholeheartedly approved of Baldwin’s decision. The only voice of dissent was from Churchill, who warned of an impending catastrophe and urged the government to join the French in opposing Hitler with force. With the enormous benefit of hindsight, many historians have taken Churchill’s view that March 1936 was the last time a military challenge to Hitler might have been mounted by the Allies without precipitating a devastating war.

The government justified its feeble response to Hitler by emphasizing the bigger diplomatic picture. ‘It is the appeasement of Europe as a whole,’ the foreign secretary assured parliament, ‘that we have constantly before us’. His attempt to direct attention to the ‘bigger picture’ did not inspire much confidence, since the picture was not only bigger but bleaker. The treaties of Versailles and Locarno had been ripped up by Hitler, who was unwilling to agree to any new accord that might stabilize international relations. As for the League, it had been emasculated during the Abyssinian affair and was now moribund.

Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland was applauded by the German people, and by the country’s elite. The German chancellor had proved to his country, and to the world, that he could dictate to the other European powers. He soon crowned his success by establishing an alliance with Italy, which was formalized as the Rome–Berlin ‘axis’ in October 1936 (and later confirmed when both powers signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Japan). While publicly Hitler claimed to have no further territorial ambitions in Europe, he secretly extended his rearmament programme in order to prepare Germany for a ‘worldwide conflict’. The first stage of his plan, announced in Mein Kampf over a decade previously, was to embark on a war against the Soviets, in order to secure land in the east. It is hardly surprising, then, that experienced observers of the diplomatic scene looked to the future with foreboding. Austen Chamberlain, the former foreign secretary, remarked that he had never ‘seen blacker clouds on the horizon’.

27

The Spanish tragedy

Recent diplomatic events had been watched with fascination and horror by the English people. For the first time since the Versailles conference, foreign policy captured the popular imagination and dominated parliamentary debate. Hitler and Mussolini featured in countless British cartoons and advertisements, while their regimes were discussed endlessly in the papers and the pubs. Support for the League of Nations had been a decisive issue at the 1935 election, and the government’s ‘betrayal’ of that organization during the Abyssinian invasion had brought thousands onto the streets in protest. While ‘Leagueomania’ was stronger on the left than on the right, it nevertheless cut across the parties and the classes. Yet the next act of the unfolding European tragedy would divide English opinion clearly along political and ideological lines.

In July 1936, the Spanish military hierarchy tried to seize political power, under the leadership of the ultraconservative General Franco, who admired the Fascist governments of Italy and Germany. Franco’s aim was to re-establish ‘Catholic Spain’, and to crush the modern ‘diseases’ of democracy, socialism and secularism. To achieve this, the Second Spanish Republic would have to be defeated and a military dictatorship established. Spain was deeply divided between a Catholic, authoritarian and monarchical right and a secular, socialist left. The Left flourished in the urban, proletarian centres of Catalonia and the Basque Country, while the Right was dominant in most rural areas, where landowners and the Church held power. These deep social divisions ensured that Franco’s attempted coup provoked a lengthy and bloody civil war.

The conflict soon expanded beyond Spain’s borders. Italy and Germany declared their support for Franco, while the Soviet Union sided with the Republic. It became an international and ideological battle in microcosm, as well as a rehearsal for a full-scale continental war. It also posed a diplomatic and ideological challenge to the governments of Britain and France. A fellow European democracy was crying out for support, but what would be the diplomatic price of assisting her? And what would be the price of refusing aid to the Spanish Republic and standing aside?

France’s left-wing government at first offered military aid to Spain’s republican forces, yet fears that its assistance might provoke its own civil war convinced it to withdraw its offer. Since Britain’s military and civil service favoured Franco, and its establishment feared Communism more than Fascism, the Conservativeled National Government encouraged caution. Baldwin’s principal aim was to try to prevent the Spanish Civil War from turning into a continental conflict, even though there was a risk that maintaining European peace might result in the destruction of European democracy. Bypassing the League, the National Government brokered a nonintervention deal between the European powers and established a committee to enforce it.

The Italians and the Germans soon began to provide Franco with military support on a lavish scale; in response, the Soviet Union offered aid to the republican forces. Both sides wanted to secure an alliance with the future Spanish government; they also regarded Spain as a convenient training ground for their armies and armaments. The nonintervention committee lived up to its name by declining to intervene, even though evidence of Fascist and Communist meddling was conspicuous. The obsolete League, meanwhile, played no significant role. The failure of collective security, as well as British and French inaction, gave considerable advantage to Franco. Democratic British and French governments looked on as the democratic Spanish government was eventually defeated, and the influence of Fascism spread further across the continent.

Labour MPs criticized the National Government’s policy of nonintervention, yet they had no appetite for the war that might follow the pursuit of an alternative strategy. Nor were they unequivocal in their advocacy of the republican cause, since it was supported by Communist Russia. The party’s qualified response disappointed intellectuals on the English left, who took up the cries of ‘Arms for Spain’ and ‘Fight against Fascism’. Some of these radicals left Labour and joined the British Communist party, whose membership swelled from 1,300 in 1930 to 15,000 by the autumn of 1936. Many on the left saw the civil war as a straightforward struggle between Fascism and democratic socialism, the only moral and political basis upon which a civilized future might be built. The English left wanted to hasten and share in this glorious victory. Opposing them were pro-Fascist intellectuals and the vehemently anti-Communist journalists in the right-wing press – the Daily Mail dubbed Franco’s men ‘Crusaders of Righteousness’. Some Conservative MPs also espoused pro-Franco views, while more pragmatic Tories, such as Baldwin, were happy to see Fascists and Communists killing each other.

The Spanish Civil War undoubtedly spread ideology among English youth in the Thirties, but there are deeper reasons for that generation’s engagement in politics. It had, in the words of the poet Edmund Blunden, been in ‘the nursery in 1914’, and was now confronted with the increasingly real possibility of ‘a world roaring with bigger bombs’. It is hardly surprising that the Thirties generation were, in many respects, the opposite of the bright young people. The Twenties cult of the hedonistic rich had been replaced by what Evelyn Waugh called the ‘solemn cult of the proletariat’. A sober style of dress – corduroy trousers, woollen jumpers, plain white shirts – was favoured in the Thirties, together with thick moustaches and beards. Even the flamboyant Brian Howard was forced to tone down his appearance, lest the left-wing opinions he now espoused lack persuasiveness.

Earnestness and ideology also permeated English literature and art throughout the decade. In the Twenties, many authors and artists had tried to escape from history and contemporary politics by focusing on stylistic experimentation. In the Thirties, history and politics returned as the central theme of art and literature. According to a cliché of the decade, a work of art was ‘first of all a social and political event’ and its relation to the world and to history was more important than its place within an artistic tradition. In this climate many authors became topical and didactic, while others, like the plain-speaking Orwell, aimed at stylistic transparency. A parallel development can be seen in the proliferation of clubs formed in the decade to ‘save’, ‘fight’, ‘defend’, ‘declare’ or ‘overthrow’ various political causes.

One such organization was Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club. This socialist society sent its 60,000 members the magazine Left News and its ‘Book of the Month’, along with various educational titles. By the end of the decade it had circulated over half a million publications; many of them espoused the republican cause in Spain or anti-fascism, while others focused on poverty at home, the most famous example being Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier (1937). A number of LBC publications championed the Communist cause, both in and outside Russia. In 1937 the club published an augmented edition of Sidney and Beatrice Webb’s 1935 book Soviet Communism: A New Civilization?, dropping the question mark from the title in deference to Stalin. The fact that the Soviet dictator had recently conducted show trials as part of his ‘Great Purge’ of 600,000 officials and peasants did not tarnish his reputation in the eyes of the authors or the publisher. Such naivety was common on the left, where many saw Stalin as a champion of democratic socialism.

Throughout England, Left Book Club centres were established, providing venues for discussion groups and lectures. According to Orwell, who gave a number of LBC lectures, the meetings were typically attended by ‘old blokes from the local Labour Party [in] overcoats’; argumentative youths from the local Communist party; and young women who sat with their ‘mouths a little open, drinking it all in’. Many members of the audience wore orange LBC badges, which bore the organization’s watchwords: KNOWLEDGE, UNITY, RESPONSIBILITY.

Some middle-class intellectuals did much more than write books, pledging to defend the Spanish Republic with their lives in the International Brigades. Of the 30,000 European male and female idealists who fought on the republican side in Spain, around 2,400 came from Britain. Among them were undergraduates, artists and poets, such as Julian Bell and W. H. Auden, who wrote memorably about their experiences. For some of the middle-class soldiers, stretcher bearers, ambulance drivers and nurses, the war was the defining experience of their lives. It provided a mirror image to the defining middle-class political experience of the previous decade – the General Strike, when many volunteers had defended the status quo against the workingclass strikers. Other volunteers in Spain, however, were disillusioned by their experience. Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia (1938) tells the depressing tale of infighting on the republican side, which the author witnessed during his spell of active service. Communism in action proved a disheartening spectacle, with the Russian soldiers behaving brutally towards their allies as well as their enemies. Orwell’s seven months in Spain turned him into a vehement anti-Stalinist; yet some on the left were not interested in his criticisms – the Left Book Club refused to publish Homage.

Partly because of the famous war literature produced by intellectuals, the English contribution to the republican effort is sometimes regarded as a middle-class affair, yet the largest numbers of English recruits were drawn from the working classes. The first English memorial to one of the fallen volunteers was erected to Percy Williams, a twenty-three-year-old apprentice railway engineer from Swindon, who died two months after joining the International Brigades.

Five hundred and twenty-six British volunteers died in Spain, and around 1,200 were wounded. These casualties, and the death of a quarter of a million combatants on all sides, curbed the idealistic optimism of the English left. The horrors of war, which included 80,000 executions on both sides and the Francoist bombing of militarily insignificant targets such as the town of Guernica, increased their disillusion. As Franco and the Fascist forces advanced, few on the left retained their hopes of victory in Spain and even fewer their optimism concerning the ultimate defeat of Fascism. Socialism no longer seemed to be inevitable, or even desirable, in its Stalinist form. Yet at the same time, the civil war strengthened the Left’s conviction that the Fascists had to be opposed, and that a war between democracy and Fascist dictatorship was likely. ‘To be anti-war,’ wrote Julian Bell, ‘means to submit to fascism, to be anti-fascist means to be prepared for war. War will come.’ Pacifism steadily lost its appeal on the left. Socialists now urged the National Government to press ahead with rearmament and to stand up to Hitler and Mussolini.

The Spanish Civil War offered members of the English left their first real encounter with fascism, a political ideology that had failed to flourish in England, despite the best efforts of Sir Oswald Mosley. After Mosley was expelled from Labour in 1931, he had created a ‘New Party’ to promote his corporatist economic policy. Under the influence of Mussolini’s ideas, and in the growing conviction that liberal capitalism and parliamentary democracy were unlikely to survive following the depression, Mosley transformed the party into the British Union of Fascists.

The BUF united various Fascist splinter groups under Mosley’s leadership. Authoritarian, nationalist, anti-Semitic and rabidly anti-communist, the party offered itself as the only viable alternative to an eventual communist success. Like its policies, the BUF’s ethos was Italian – a group of violent and uniformed paramilitary stewards called ‘blackshirts’ would ‘protect’ ‘The Leader’ from anti-fascist protesters during public meetings and marches. Their most notorious march took place in October 1936, through an area with a large Jewish population in London’s East End. Around 6,000 police attempted to ensure the safe passage of the 2,500 marchers but they were repulsed by approximately 100,000 anti-fascist protesters, with many women and children among them. After a series of running battles with the police, the anti-fascist protesters forced the BUF to divert their march.

Mosley possessed charisma, and an aristocratic hauteur admired by his workingclass followers. With impassioned and eloquent speeches, he bewitched the crowds and certain sections of the press. His populistic diatribes against the ‘old gang’ of the establishment impressed the young and the poor, who felt ignored and despised by mainstream politicians. During its first two years, the BUF attracted 50,000 members and also received the vociferous backing of the Daily Mail, which ran the headline ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’ Yet the BUF’s popularity never translated into parliamentary gains, and no more than a handful of Conservative MPs offered Mosley their support. Moreover, unlike the Communist party, the BUF lacked middle-class intellectual champions.

After 1934, Mosley’s blackshirts became increasingly violent, and their activities were disowned by sympathizers who aspired to represent respectable opinion. The National Government attempted to eradicate political violence by introducing the 1936 Public Order Act, which banned all quasi-military organizations and demonstrations. After the bill passed into law the BUF’s membership dwindled to a few thousand, and in the end it was no more successful than the British Communist party. After 1937 mutual vilification was the raison d’être of both parties, with communist protesters the largest presence at Fascist meetings.

Why did fascism and communism fail to sway England, despite widespread poverty and the ineffectiveness of the political elite? It has been argued that Mosley’s movement was doomed because its mass meetings, uniforms and leadership cult had no antecedents in English politics, yet this explanation is unsatisfactory. Political violence was often seen on England’s streets in the Thirties, while the English taste for military pageantry and for organizations such as the Boy Scout movement suggests that the Fascist ethos was not entirely alien to its culture.

Even so, a belief in parliamentary democracy and the rule of law was deeply embedded in English life, however undemocratic and fallible the political and legal systems were in practice. Through successive reform acts, the entire adult population of the country had been enfranchised, which had given the political system some legitimacy. The English governing class was allowed to govern by the people, ultimately because it offered them protection, whether actual or perceived, in return for their obedience, according to the traditional social contract.

28

This is absolutely terrible

At the beginning of 1936 it became obvious that the health of George V was declining rapidly. Regular BBC radio bulletins kept people informed about his deteriorating condition. On 20 January, the announcer read out the words of George’s physician, Lord Dawson – ‘the King’s life is moving peacefully towards its close’. Dawson then administered two lethal injections of morphine to the monarch. A swift denouement guaranteed a relatively painless end for the king, and also ensured that his death could be announced in the morning edition of The Times rather than in the evening newspapers. George remained a model of decorum to the end.

Lord Dawson also accelerated the king’s death in order to ‘preserve dignity’. As he lay dying, his mind wandered and his speech was irritable. On being informed that he might soon be well enough to revisit the town of Bognor, he exclaimed ‘Bugger Bognor!’ The official version of George’s final words was ‘How is the Empire?’ – he was the last British monarch who might have plausibly mentioned imperial matters on his deathbed. By the time of the next royal passing, the empire would be diminished beyond recognition.

George V had been a relatively popular king, to judge by the public grief that followed his death. Yet this may also have been evidence of anxiety concerning the future, as well as nostalgia for the supposedly stable nineteenth-century world in which his character had been formed. As George’s coffin was drawn through London, it received a jolt when it crossed a set of tramlines and the sapphire cross and ball of diamonds on top of the imperial crown fell down into the street. Some regarded this as an ill omen.

George V was succeeded by his son Edward, who commanded as much popular affection as his father, though for different reasons. Nicknamed ‘Prince Charming’, Edward VIII was a dashing twentiethcentury dandy with a distinguished war career and countless love affairs behind him. As Prince of Wales, the carefree Edward had shown as little interest in marriage as he had in preparing himself for his future public role. His current inamorata was Wallis Simpson, a striking American who had married a British-American businessman following a divorce from her first husband. George V had disapproved of the affair, as well as of his son’s behaviour. ‘After I am dead,’ he prophesied, ‘the boy will ruin himself in twelve months.’ Edward VIII set the tone of his reign in his first weeks as king by repeatedly breaking with protocol. He was also unorthodox in his outspokenness on political matters, expressing sympathy for the unemployed as well as for the Indians who demanded full autonomy for their country. None of this went down well at court or in Downing Street. Neville Chamberlain resolved to tell the new king to ‘settle down’, but was dissuaded by Baldwin from doing so.

A few months into his reign it was rumoured that the king intended to marry Mrs Simpson, who had filed for her second divorce. The problem was that the government, along with the dominions, the Church of England, the wider royal family and the royal household, objected strongly to the proposed marriage. Edward was the titular head of all of these institutions, and bound, by precedent and protocol, to heed their views. Society, still dominated by the aristocracy, was equally disapproving, while the public’s view was summed up by MacDonald – ‘they do not mind fornication, but they don’t like adultery’.

Edward underrated the strength of conservative opinion within the establishment, and overrated his ability to influence it. He espoused the view that his marriage was a private matter; yet most of the governing elite begged to differ. Adopting a firm yet tactful manner, Baldwin told Edward he would resign if the marriage proceeded; this was effectively an ultimatum, since it might provoke a ‘king versus government’ constitutional crisis. Edward’s champions, who included Rothermere and Beaverbrook as well as Churchill, suggested a marriage by which Simpson could become Edward’s wife but not queen. But Baldwin, along with the empire and the royal family, refused to compromise.

As the crisis dragged on, many people became tired of it, and blamed Wallis Simpson for threatening the survival of one of the oldest institutions in the world. Meanwhile, Edward was increasingly seen as brazen, dictatorial and unbalanced. In the end he was forced to make a choice between Wallis or the crown: ‘I am going to marry Mrs Simpson,’ he told Baldwin, ‘and I am prepared to go.’ He then made a farewell radio broadcast to the nation and became the Duke of Windsor once more, retiring from public life on a vast salary. He was succeeded as king in 1937 by his younger brother, George.

‘This is absolutely terrible,’ George VI told a cousin. ‘I never wanted this to happen. I’m quite unprepared.’ Diffident and volatile, George sometimes spoke with a pronounced stammer, and he responded to the news of his brother’s abdication by sobbing like a child. Generally regarded as a ‘good sort’ with unexceptionable qualities, he emerged bewildered from a cloistered family into the limelight. As a young man he had been taught that routine, discipline and manliness were paramount, just as duty and loyalty were imperative. He learned that he must sacrifice his private interests for his public role. This upbringing moulded a ‘sound’ character, quite different from that of Edward. In one of his first public utterances as king, George said that he would respect ‘the duties of sovereignty’ and declared his ‘adherence to the strict principles of constitutional government’.

Yet George’s sheltered youth had hardly prepared him to rule over a country living through a difficult period of its history, with division inside its borders and menaces without. So far as foreign affairs were concerned, he supported the government’s policy of appeasement. No one could deny that George had pluck – he had demonstrated this at Jutland, where he had seen active service in 1916, and he would draw on that experience in the years to come. The stolidity of his character reminded people of his father; some observers came to see his reign as contiguous with that of George V, with no intervening abdication. The flashy Edward was soon forgotten.

Baldwin had emerged triumphant from the abdication episode. To the surprise of many, ‘Master Stanley’ had seen off a series of apparently insurmountable challenges – a constitutional crisis, an economic depression and confrontations with Lloyd George and Churchill, the greatest politicians of the age. People now hoped that he would succeed in calming the confrontation brewing on the Continent. Yet the prime minister decided, at the beginning of 1937, that it was time to bow out. While his decision to retire was prompted by exhaustion and increasing deafness, it ought to have alarmed political observers: the supreme political survivor may have sensed that he would be unable to steer the nation through what Churchill called ‘the gathering storm’ of continental diplomacy.

‘No man has ever left in such a blaze of affection,’ commented Harold Nicolson in his diary. Baldwin had presented himself as a Victorian paterfamilias to the nation – earnest, benevolent and stern. Unfortunately, however, he was forced to deal with post-Victorian problems – including economic depression and Hitler – that were beyond his capabilities. Because he viewed England as an imperial power, he had taken little interest in the continental affairs that would determine the destiny of his country. On retiring, Baldwin was made an earl for ‘services to the country’, another emblem of the marriage of convenience between the English plutocracy and the aristocracy.

The man to whom Baldwin passed the chalice of the premiership received it eagerly, showing no concern that it might contain poison. Neville Chamberlain had been in Baldwin’s shadow since the Twenties; his family had been waiting for Britain’s highest office for almost forty years. Neville’s father, Joseph, had been the most influential politician of his day, yet had never managed to climb to the summit in an age when aristocrats still dominated politics. Neville’s stepbrother Austen had led the Conservative party but not the country – an anomaly in an era of Tory hegemony.

Neville Chamberlain had a fair domestic record. He had been a diligent health minister and a conscientious, if unimaginative, chancellor. He would enhance his reputation during his time as prime minister by passing the Factories Act, the Coal Act, the Holidays with Pay Act and a Housing Act, all of which improved workingclass conditions without costing the Exchequer, or offending Tory sensibilities, too much. Only a skilful and determined politician, with a vast capacity for work and for mastering microscopic technical detail, could have formulated and passed such legislation. Chamberlain was also a consummate manager of all departments of government, who knew in detail what each of his ministers was doing. The contrast with his indolent predecessor could not have been more marked. Where Baldwin looked like John Bull in slippers, Chamberlain, as one contemporary put it, ‘was corvine, with piercing eyes and a curving beak of a nose’.

Yet along with his efficiency, earnestness and singlemindedness, Chamberlain had several character flaws that would come to impede him. He was shy and oversensitive; his introversion and self-reliance made him obstinate, arrogant and tactless. This charmless man was as rigid as the black umbrella he seemed to carry with him everywhere. Entirely deficient in imagination, emotion and intuition, he put his faith in common sense, rational self-interest and fair play. Since he was guided by these values and motivations, he assumed the same of everyone else. His personality represented the narrow, puritanical and thrifty side of the English mercantile, Nonconformist character. It had been revealed during the abdication crisis, when he had urged the king to make his mind up over the marriage before the end of 1936, lest his shilly-shallying ‘hurt the Christmas trade’.

Chamberlain wanted to deal with continental matters quickly, so that he could concentrate on more important domestic and imperial issues. Like his father and his mentor Baldwin, he saw his country within the global context of an empire of ‘white dominions’ rather than as a European power. Unlike Baldwin, however, Chamberlain had a hubristic belief in his capacity to settle all difficulties and disputes through personal negotiation. One consequence of this attitude was that he adopted a far more active approach to European diplomacy; another was that he ignored the Foreign Office and Churchill when they warned him about Hitler’s untrustworthiness and territorial ambitions. Chamberlain preferred to rely instead on his own judgement and on the advice of an inner circle – all of them members of the so-called ‘old gang’ of experienced but unimaginative politicians. Churchill was disturbed by the ‘marked dearth of men of ability’ surrounding Chamberlain. Perhaps only an ageing, insular empire, and an archaic political system, could have produced such leaders. ‘These men’, Mussolini remarked, ‘are the tired sons of a long line of rich forefathers and they will lose their empire.’

As Lloyd George had once said, ‘Neville has a retail mind in a wholesale business’, and it was this meticulous ‘retail mind’ that now attempted to deal with the gangster and gambler in charge of Germany. Chamberlain’s strategy was the apparently reasonable and in some respects well-intentioned policy of appeasement, first invoked by Eden after Hitler’s remilitarization of the Rhineland. Appeasement involved addressing Hitler’s grievances regarding the ‘flawed’ Versailles Treaty, and permitting the extension of Germany’s influence in Eastern Europe. Germany might be permitted to absorb the German populations who lived in Czechoslovakia, Poland and Austria, all of whom ‘merited’ self-determination. If any of these developments sparked a regrettable war, it need not involve Britain. In terms of military policy, Britain would continue to rearm, while its diplomatic strategy would be to court Mussolini, in a bid to weaken the Rome–Berlin axis.

Chamberlain and his inner circle believed that the restoration of Germany’s power and status would satisfy Hitler and encourage him to ‘settle down’. Appeasement would be promoted through direct negotiation with the German dictator; conferences were suitable in some circumstances, but there was nothing better than face-to-face discussion for resolving difficult issues. In November 1937, Chamberlain sent his trusted cabinet colleague Viscount Halifax to inform Hitler that Britain was sympathetic to German territorial claims to Austria, Danzig and Czechoslovakia. At the same time the prime minister opened up a private line of communication with Mussolini: ‘an hour or two tête-à-tête with Musso,’ he mused, ‘might be extraordinarily valuable’.

The motivations of the appeasers, and the relative merits of their policy, have been endlessly debated. Appeasement was above all else inspired by the desire to avoid another bloody and costly conflict, and the English press amplified the message. In the late Thirties, the appalling consequences of a second world conflict were endlessly discussed, with visions of the coming apocalypse vividly depicted by the wireless and the newspapers. England’s cities would be reduced to rubble; its future generations would live amidst ruins. Since the English population was overwhelmingly anti-war, appeasement was an eloquent expression of its mood.

Yet appeasement also revealed a reluctance on Britain’s part to attend to its European responsibilities, as well as an unwillingness to condemn the Nazis, either on ideological or moral grounds. Continental issues often appeared as a distraction to Britain. With its colonies and dominions averse to participating in another conflict, the country sought continental peace at any cost. Hitler’s persecution of the Jews, as well as his assassination of political opponents, had become common knowledge, yet reports of Nazi brutality did not concern the men who formulated Britain’s foreign policy. Some Conservatives admired the way Hitler had ‘restored’ his country’s economy, while the English upper classes flocked to the extravagant parties laid on at the German embassy. George VI spoke for the ruling class when he described Nazi Germany as preferable to the ‘Bolshevik’ alternative.

Some historians see appeasement as part of Chamberlain’s subtle plan to play for time and to address the deficiencies in Britain’s defences. Rearmament was intensified between 1937 and 1939, while all departments of government were prepared for another war. Yet Chamberlain’s rearmament effort was too little and too late. The £1,500 million he earmarked for defence expenditure in 1937 fell short of the £1,884 million the various defence departments saw as essential. In any case, Chamberlain had supervised the economy since 1931 and could have spent more on defence before 1937.

Other historians follow Churchill in regarding appeasement as both hapless and hopeless. Chamberlain and his colleagues, the argument runs, turned out to be the victims of Hitler’s hypocrisy and mendacity, and vainly clung on to the hope of peace because they could not face the prospect of another war. The government should have embarked on a more extensive rearmament programme, while Chamberlain ought to have constructed a grand anti-fascist alliance with France and Russia. With powerful allies and weapons behind him, the prime minister might have called Hitler’s bluff. In the end, it is hard not to see the period 1937 to 1939 as a series of wasted opportunities and, in Churchill’s memorable phrase, as a ‘line of milestones to the disaster’.

Between 1937 and 1938, Britain tried to persuade Mussolini to withdraw his troops from Spain and to recognize the Mediterranean status quo, in return for an acknowledgement of his Abyssinian conquest; the Duce was not tempted. Neither would he help Chamberlain with his attempts to persuade Hitler to resolve the ‘Austrian question’ through negotiation. In March 1938, without warning the other European powers, Hitler sent troops into Austria to incorporate the country into a Greater Germany. There was no opposition from the Austrian army or government.

Chamberlain was not averse to Germany absorbing Austria, despite the fact that the country was a democratic republic and a member of the League. But he was ‘deeply shocked’ by Hitler’s unilateral show of force and sent an official protest to Berlin. When German diplomats told him that Austria was none of Britain’s business, Chamberlain became angry. But what was he going to do about it? This was the question Churchill asked in the Commons, warning that Europe was ‘confronted with a programme of aggression, nicely calculated and timed, unfolding stage by stage’.

It is doubtful that Hitler ever engaged in precision planning, yet Churchill’s argument was soon justified by events. After Austria, Hitler turned his attention to Czechoslovakia, where a majority of Germans lived in the northwest area known as the Sudetenland. He declared that he would ‘defend’ the ‘liberties’ of these Germans and ensure their right to join a Greater Germany. His intention was to incorporate the Sudetenland, perhaps as a prelude to the annexation of other parts of Czechoslovakia.

Following Hitler’s absorption of Austria, Chamberlain had been asked in the Commons to pledge support for Czechoslovakia’s independence. Created by the Versailles Treaty, the country had been exceptional among the new Eastern European states in maintaining its democratic institutions since 1919. Rich in industrial and military resources and occupying an important geopolitical position, its borders had already been guaranteed by France and Russia. Yet Chamberlain declined to follow – ensuring the Czech frontiers would be militarily impossible and diplomatically risky, carrying with it the possibility of provoking another European war. Army chiefs, meanwhile, had warned the prime minister that British intervention would be like ‘a man attacking a tiger before his gun is loaded’. Chamberlain believed that neither the public, nor the armies of the empire, would ‘follow us … into war to prevent a minority from obtaining autonomy; it must be on larger issues than that’.

The Russians, eager to halt any possible German territorial advance in the east, proposed a conference whose aim would be to stop continental aggression. The Labour party and Churchill saw this as an opportunity to establish an alliance that would deter Hitler and encourage opposition to him within Germany. Yet Chamberlain declined to participate – he loathed Communism and thought the Soviets wanted to embroil Britain in a war with Germany. He informed the ‘idealistic cranks’ and ‘warmongers’ in the Commons who criticized his decision that conferences were, any case, ineffective. It was far better to take the direct, personal route.

Over the spring and summer of 1938, Chamberlain talked things over with Hitler and Mussolini on various occasions. These private discussions took place in a public climate of fear and panic, created by the threat of German invasion of the Sudetenland. During these talks, Chamberlain came to believe that Hitler was prepared to use force to facilitate the ‘self-determination’ of the Sudetenland Germans. Nevertheless, his confidence in Hitler’s trustworthiness, and in his own ability to orchestrate a peaceful solution, remained undimmed. For his part, Hitler came away from the discussions confident that Britain would not oppose him with force should he annex the Sudetenland.

But Chamberlain was determined to do far more – or rather far less – than simply back down. The prime minister now privately persuaded France to renege on its commitments to upholding Czech borders. This was not difficult, since the French had no appetite for another war and nor could they guarantee Czech borders in the absence of British assistance. Chamberlain urged France to accept the absorption into Germany of all Czech areas containing a majority of German people, in return for the promise that Britain would guarantee the new Czech borders. Reluctantly France agreed. The prime minister then pressured the democratic Czech government to accept these terms, making it clear that the alternative would be a German invasion during which France and England would stand aside. With both the French and the Czechs in tepid agreement, Chamberlain returned triumphantly to Hitler on 22 September 1938, to announce that he had come up with a settlement that satisfied everyone.

Yet instead of thanking Chamberlain, the German chancellor now insisted on the immediate occupation of German-speaking areas by German troops. Chamberlain demurred on the usual grounds that ‘the use of force’ should be avoided. The French and the Czechs agreed, and a diplomatic stand-off ensued. France now declared she would stand by Czechoslovakia’s frontiers and Britain reluctantly pledged to assist France. In the Commons, Churchill urged the government to hold its nerve, since the partition of Czechoslovakia would represent ‘a complete surrender by the Western democracies to the threat of force’. The choice, he told a friend, is between ‘War and Shame. My feeling is that we shall choose Shame, and then have War a little later.’

In the last week of September, however, it seemed likely that war would come first. London schools and hospitals were evacuated, sandbags were piled around public buildings and millions of gas masks were distributed. In anticipation of air raids, numerous trenches were hastily dug in city parks across the country and the navy was mobilized. The mood among the people was fearful: ‘We were expecting 30,000 casualties a night in London,’ the historian Arnold Toynbee wrote, ‘and we believed ourselves … to be within three hours of the zero hour. It was just like facing the end of the world.’

On 27 September, a weary Chamberlain addressed the nation on the radio: ‘How horrible, fantastic, incredible, it is,’ he said, in his stiff, thin voice, ‘that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks because of a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing.’ It was an extraordinary description of Germany and Czechoslovakia from a man who spoke of the intimate ties within the far-flung empire. Yet it is precisely because Britain was a vast global power that its governing class saw European ‘quarrels’ in these distant terms.

Despite his weary tone of resignation, Chamberlain still hoped to find an escape route. When Hitler asked Chamberlain to intervene with the Czechs, the prime minister grew optimistic once more, assuring the German chancellor he would secure his ‘essential’ demands ‘without war, and without delay’. With the help of Mussolini, a four-power conference was hastily organized at Munich. There, on 30 September, an agreement was struck that gave Hitler almost everything the British and French had denied him a few days previously. It dismembered Czechoslovakia, ceding to Germany the industrially rich Sudetenland, which effectively destroyed the country’s infrastructure and military capability. Britain and France guaranteed Czechoslovakia’s new borders with the threat of force, but since Germany and Italy did likewise, the agreement was worthless. How would the Fascists oppose their own acts of aggression? Representatives of the Czech government were forced to wait outside the room in which the deal was struck; Chamberlain yawned as he informed them of its details afterwards.

After the conference, Chamberlain had another of his tête-à-têtes with Hitler, during which he asked the chancellor to sign a declaration committing Germany to ‘the method of consultation … to deal with any other questions that may concern our two countries’ and describing the Munich Agreement as a symbol ‘of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war again’. Hitler was delighted to sign the declaration and, when Chamberlain stepped off the plane on his return to England, he waved the accord in the air. ‘The settlement of the Czechoslovakian problem,’ he announced, ‘is only the prelude to a larger settlement in which all Europe may find peace.’ Later that evening he was even more jubilant: ‘There has come back from Germany to Downing Street peace with honour,’ he declared. ‘I believe it is peace for our time.’

Many newspapers echoed Chamberlain’s triumphalism, while most English people felt overwhelming relief. ‘The general opinion,’ commented a clergyman, ‘is that the P.M. has saved civilisation … No one seems to care which side has got the better of the other. The one thing they care for is that there will be no war … Thank God.’ Sugar umbrellas were sold in the shops, confirming that the prime minister who carried a brolly with him everywhere had become a national hero.

Yet voices of dissension soon rose in the Commons. Attlee complained that a democratic European country had been ‘betrayed and handed over to a ruthless despotism’, while Churchill called the affair ‘a total and unmitigated defeat’. He predicted that Hitler would now advance triumphantly ‘down the Danube Valley to the Black Sea’ without ‘firing a single shot’, and that Britain would, in the near future, be forced to accept ‘subservience to Germany’. After returning home from one parliamentary debate, the diarist Harold Nicolson went to bed ‘pondering the Decline and Fall of the British Empire’.

Yet perhaps Chamberlain was not taken in by the rhetoric he had used on his return from Munich. In the winter of 1938 he claimed to have signed the Munich Agreement only in order to buy necessary time to rearm. He now made plans to create an army capable of fighting a continental war and bolstered the RAF. On the home front, meanwhile, detailed evacuation plans were drawn up for the major cities, and an increasing number of gas masks were distributed. Sandbags accumulated at the end of residential streets, and ‘blackout’ tests were carried out across England, in preparation for air strikes. The population watched these developments with a mixture of anxiety and disbelief. How could it have come to this, only two decades after the carnage of the Western Front?

The descent from Munich to war was rapid. A few days after the conference, Hitler, with his eye on the Free City of Danzig, declared his determination to settle the fate of ‘other German populations’ not yet incorporated into the Fatherland. He then demonstrated his belief that he could act with impunity by carrying out a pogrom against Jews, foreshadowing the genocide to come. In Austria, the Sudetenland and in Germany, Nazi thugs murdered hundreds of Jewish German citizens and destroyed their houses, shops, schools and synagogues. The widely reported massacre provoked outrage in Britain, but did not immediately alter its government’s foreign policy.

In January 1939, with the help of Germany and Italy, Franco finally defeated the Spanish Republic. Fascist forces had again prevailed over a democratic continental government, and Britain had been unwilling, or unable, to prevent it. In an attempt to improve relations with the Italians, Chamberlain recognized Franco’s Spanish government a few weeks later, and embarked on further talks with Mussolini’s government in Rome. The prime minister left these talks convinced of the ‘good intentions’ and ‘good faith’ of the Fascists, while the Italians were convinced only of Britain’s weakness. A decidedly unimpressed Mussolini rebuffed Chamberlain’s advances and moved closer to Hitler, transforming Italy’s political axis with Germany into the military ‘Pact of Steel’.

Meanwhile, Hitler encouraged internal division inside what remained of the Czech state. In the early months of 1939 the mutilated country disintegrated, and the western half fell into his hands, with the eastern portion becoming the independent state of Slovakia. By annexing ‘Czechia’, Hitler not only ripped up the agreements he had signed at Munich, but he also contradicted almost every official statement he had ever made on foreign policy, by absorbing non-German peoples into the Reich. There seemed to be no limit to his expansionist ambitions, and no rationale to his policy.

Over the spring of 1939 there was a sea change in English opinion. The papers now advocated standing up to Hitler, even if this made war probable. ‘Who can hope to appease a boa constrictor?’ asked one journalist. At long last, the threat of Fascism was widely recognized. ‘We’ll have to stop him next time,’ people commented in pubs across the country. ‘We’ll have to cry Halt. We’ll have to go to war.’

Even Chamberlain now changed his tune. In a public speech made after Germany’s annexation of Czechia, he asked: ‘Is this the last attack upon a small State, or is it to be followed by another?’ Even the prime minister could see that appeasement had failed. He also warned Hitler that Britain would ‘take part to the uttermost of its power in resisting’ any attempt to ‘dominate the world by force’. The prime minister backed up his words with action, by announcing the conscription of 200,000 men for six months’ military training.

Chamberlain also made a momentous diplomatic commitment when reports of German troops’ movements on Poland’s border prompted the prime minister to pledge Britain’s support for Polish independence, a promise that was seconded by the French. It was an uncharacteristically bold gesture from Chamberlain, and unprecedented from a British prime minister in peacetime. It was also extremely rash, since there was no access to Poland for either British or French troops. Moreover, with only France supporting Britain, the country was in a much weaker position than she had been a year previously when Czechoslovakia and Russia would also have stood up to Hitler. ‘I cannot understand,’ the seventy-six-year-old Lloyd George complained in parliament, ‘why before committing ourselves we did not secure the adhesion of Russia … If we are going in without the help of Russia we are walking into a trap.’ Churchill and Labour agreed, and once more demanded a ‘Grand Alliance against aggression’ including Russia. Yet Chamberlain did not rate Russia highly as a military power and had a profound loathing of communists: ‘I distrust Russia’s motives,’ he said, ‘which seem to me to have little connection with our ideas of Liberty.’ The contrast with his attitude towards Hitler and Mussolini could not have been more marked.

Nevertheless, discussions did take place between Britain and Soviet Russia in the first six months of 1939. The British wanted a pledge of military assistance from the Russians, should that be desired by both Britain and Poland; the Russians, meanwhile, sought a more general and mutual guarantee against German aggression. The talks did nothing to diminish suspicion on either side, and were conducted half-heartedly by Chamberlain’s government, who may have seen them as a means of prompting Hitler to return to the negotiating table. Once there, Chamberlain was prepared to offer the German chancellor the control of Danzig, and economic influence in Africa and in the east of Europe – exactly what the Russians most feared.

Once again, Chamberlain’s hopes were not realized. Instead of opening fresh discussions with Britain, Germany embarked on its own talks with Russia, which would pave the way for the Nazi– Soviet Pact of August 1939. Russia agreed to remain neutral should Germany become embroiled in a war, and Germany agreed to limit its territorial ambitions in Poland. Germany was no longer ‘encircled’, and Russia was no longer isolated. News of the pact was greeted with consternation in Britain. Conservative MPs, who had seen Nazi Germany as an infinitely lesser evil than Soviet Russia, felt betrayed by Hitler, while the Left felt betrayed by Stalin.

Chamberlain spoke publicly of his determination to honour Britain’s agreement with Poland, while privately trying to lure Hitler away from Poland with the promise of economic rewards. Pressure was also placed on Poland to accede to German demands over Danzig, but the Poles stood firm. Hitler, unconvinced that Britain and France would go to war over Poland, thought he could once more deceive the enemy with a successful yet limited war in Poland, followed by negotiations in which Britain and France would cede to his demands.

On 1 September 1939, German troops entered Poland, and its planes attacked Warsaw. Britain’s response was to urge Hitler to withdraw his troops, as the prelude to a negotiated solution to the ‘Polish question’. When Chamberlain mentioned this plan in the Commons the next day, he was greeted with silence. Arthur Greenwood, acting as leader of the Labour party for the convalescing Attlee, demanded that Chamberlain send an immediate ultimatum – ‘Every minute’s delay now means the loss of life, imperilling our national interests, imperilling the very foundations of national honour.’ Chamberlain agreed and an ultimatum was sent the following morning at 9 a.m. When it expired two hours later, Britain was officially at war with Germany. She was soon joined by France, India, the colonies and the dominions. Ireland, which had declared itself a sovereign state in 1937, exercised its right to remain neutral.

On 3 September 1939, air-raid warnings could be heard across London, sandbags were filled and thousands of children were evacuated to the countryside. They filled the platforms of the capital’s railway stations, gas mask boxes in hand, just as a violent thunderstorm burst in the skies above them. The contrast to the mood in 1914 could not have been more marked. There was no rejoicing, no enthusiasm. Instead, as the writer Vera Brittain put it, ‘the expected had happened, and was accepted with philosophic pessimism’.

29

The alteration

If war had indeed fallen on England, then it appeared to have done so with remarkable diffidence. Preparations for the predicted casualties of bombing had been intensive, with two million beds set aside in Greater London alone, and yet the terrible bombardment from the air remained unseen, unfelt and unheard for eight months. Rumours of war lay far off. The blackout had been put in place, the children prepared, and rationing had begun, but where was the enemy?

In fact, the enemy had other concerns. Until 1938, the possibility of war with Britain had not been seriously entertained by the Nazis. There had been no attempt, for example, to identify the most vulnerable or valuable targets. German intelligence had been uncharacteristically amateurish. In any case, Poland had to be secured before any further ventures could begin. Defended by an army that combined great gallantry with pitiful weaponry, Poland swiftly fell and burned. The Poles had rejoiced at Britain’s declaration of war, but as the bombs fell on Poland’s cities, the French and the British divisions in France did nothing. They outnumbered their German counterparts by more than two to one and yet a brief French incursion into the Saar region of Germany was all they achieved. Indeed this ‘invasion’ served only to convince the Germans, if further persuasion was needed, of Allied timidity. The Polish commander-in-chief was informed that the Siegfried Line had been broken and then that the operation ‘must be postponed’. The first was a simple lie and the second one of those painful euphemisms that were to characterize so much of the conflict. Why then did France and Britain stand by when they were committed by treaty to intervene ‘within two weeks’ with a ground attack on Germany? The French, led by a commander who trusted to the strategy of the previous war, felt unprepared, and the British were still divided.

Meanwhile, a German official wrote, ‘it is the Führer’s and Goering’s intention to destroy and exterminate the Polish nation. More than that cannot even be hinted in writing.’ But the clandestine madness, and the vindictive cruelty, should soon have become obvious. From the outset, a policy obtained of bewildering the conquered peoples; savage violence alternated with hypocritical gestures of conciliation, particularly where the Jews were concerned. Even the forced moves to artificial ghettoes were presented as a means of protecting the Jewish minorities from their gentile neighbours. Nazi policy towards other Poles, however, was forthright from the first. They were plucked from their homes and shifted in vast numbers to the east, frequently before being casually murdered. It was considered vital to destroy the nation’s cultural leaders, so the intelligentsia went the way of industrialists and nobles. Priests were singled out for particularly savage treatment.

In time, the use of buses, theatres, concert halls and even churches was prohibited to all but those of German stock. The intent was to kill or drive out all but a rump population, kept alive solely to furnish the Greater Germany with slave labour, leaving the land ‘free’ for German settlement. Polish children were given a bare minimum of education, the most important task of such ‘education’ being to engender in them a sense of inferiority to their conquerors. This was to prove a template for later conquests. A policy of removing elements considered ‘unfit’, ‘undesirable’, ‘degenerate’ or ‘useless’ commenced. In suburban Brandenburg a euthanasia centre was established, where the insane and mentally impaired were destroyed.

Anxiety and terror were the responses of those in England who listened to the wireless and accurately heeded the signs: horror at the rapid German advance and fear that the ‘Blitzkrieg’, or ‘lightning war’ would soon be visited upon their own country. The term well evoked the successive shock, terror and destruction that characterized the German military approach. Soon enough Britain would feel the force of its first wave. Hitler teased his next victim cruelly. At a rally he proclaimed, ‘They are asking themselves in England, “When will he come? Will he come?” I tell you: He is coming.’

Norway had done its best to remain neutral, but the Reich had invaded anyway. The Allies had sent forces against the great battleships that heaved their way up the fjords, but were soon obliged to withdraw. Britain’s first active engagement with the enemy had ended in humiliation at Narvik. On 7 May, the mood in the House of Commons was incandescent. Lloyd George openly called for Chamberlain to ‘sacrifice the seals of office’. Before proposing a division, Herbert Morrison of Labour reminded the House that defeat would be ‘a fatal and terrible thing for this country and, indeed, for the future of the human race’. Most celebrated is the appeal of Leo Amery, who, invoking Cromwell, urged: ‘In the name of God, go.’ The stern, succinct reproaches of Sir Roger Keyes, a war hero who had bedecked himself in full uniform for the occasion, carried perhaps more weight than anything. His refusal to blame any individual or party, and simple protest that it ‘was not the Navy’s fault’ was eloquent enough. As for Churchill, he had been reinstated as First Lord of the Admiralty on the day that war was declared, and thus felt bound to support the government he had so relentlessly attacked, whatever his private misgivings. When the results of the division were announced, the government found that its majority had been reduced to double figures. It was a defeat in all but name.

On 10 May, Chamberlain asked Clement Attlee and the Liberals whether they would be prepared to join a coalition government. Attlee’s polite but firm response was that the party’s National Executive Committee must be consulted before any decision was made; they confirmed that Labour would not serve with Chamberlain as prime minister. The jibe ‘If at first you don’t concede, fly, fly, fly again’ had been thrown at him for months, but now he could concede with honour. That evening he resigned. Lord Halifax was regarded as more reliable than Churchill, but he knew that he was not the man to lead the nation at such a time; Churchill immediately assembled a war cabinet of all parties and persuasions.

On the day of Chamberlain’s resignation, German forces invaded Belgium and France. Churchill promised the House ‘only blood, toil, tears and sweat’. These all soon poured out as the British Expeditionary Force – sent to France in September 1939 – fled to the coast. Britain was isolated and seemed likely to be crushed, but Halifax believed peace could be salvaged from the wreckage of honour. On 25 May, he proposed to the war cabinet that Italy be approached as mediator between Britain and Germany. Many in the cabinet had expressed admiration for Mussolini, Churchill among them; surely the Duce could be persuaded to soften the demands of the German enemy? In the following days, Churchill left the Italian option open, but at the last, seeing his war cabinet inclined to a dishonourable peace, he suddenly recalled both duty and panache. On 28 May, he appealed to the twentyfive members of the outer cabinet: ‘If this long island story of ours is to end,’ he declared, ‘let it end when each of us lies choking in his own blood on the ground.’

On 10 July 1940 came the first attacks from the air; the Germans had come at last. Bombers like the feared Junkers Ju 88 pounded the cities and ports of Britain, while the nimble Messerschmitt Bf 109 engaged the Hawker Hurricanes and Spitfires. Many commentators wondered how Britain could survive such an assault. Hundreds of thousands of civilians would die, the radar would prove useless, and the Royal Air Force was surely no match for the invincible Luftwaffe. Yet by the end of the summer of 1940, the Luftwaffe, overstretched, outgunned and outfought, was forced to abandon its attacks on the country beyond the metropolis. Now it was the turn of London.

‘The spirit of the Blitz’ was at the time seen by foreigners as a miracle of the communal soul. From 7 September 1940 to 11 May 1941, by night and day, the German air force sought to destroy London. Aside from the obvious target of the East End Docks, St Paul’s Cathedral, Buckingham Palace, Lambeth Palace and the House of Commons were hit. Pubs also seemed to attract their due share of attention from the Luftwaffe. After one such attack, an observer remembered alcohol pouring into the street and ‘an old man with a cup, scooping it up out of the gutter’. In such straitened times, the sight must have evoked less disgust than rueful admiration.

The populace as a whole was not always responsive to government appeals. It is characteristic of Londoners to shrug off a summons to vigilance; in spite of the deaths and the burnt-out homes, the misery and the fear, they showed themselves unbowed. Dance halls still opened, pubs were busy and the children who were left still played. Since no one knew when bombs might strike, after a while there seemed little point in worrying about them. In time the city came to regard ‘blitzing’ as only another instance of bad weather. Nevertheless, while the Nazis made typically malevolent provision for the weak and helpless, Britain made a very different kind of provision for its own. Tales of what might happen under aerial attack had been circulating for years; at all costs, the defenceless must be moved to safety. ‘Operation Pied Piper’ was the fanciful name given to the mass evacuation of the young from Britain’s cities.

Plans for the evacuation of children had been drawn up long before the declaration of war; Baldwin himself had warned the nation about the horrors of aerial bombardment. The Spanish Civil War had shown how much destruction could be wreaked on cities from the air. The bombing could also break hearts – nothing destroys morale like the death of children. This was made plain in a public information leaflet thrust through every letter box in the country in July 1939:

We must see to it that the enemy does not secure his chief objectives – the creation of anything like panic, or the crippling dislocation of our civil life. One of the first measures we can take to prevent this is the removal of the children from the more dangerous areas. The scheme is entirely a voluntary one, but clearly the children will be much safer and happier away from the big cities where the dangers will be greatest.

For the purposes of evacuation, the country was divided into three regions: ‘danger zones’, ‘neutral areas’ and ‘reception areas’. Danger zones were areas of obvious importance to the nation and therefore to the enemy, including big cities, docks, factories and industrial complexes. Neutral areas comprised the smaller towns, larger villages and the suburbs, while reception areas were exclusively rural. Parents and children were enjoined to keep gas masks at the ready in small boxes hung about the children’s necks. In the event, no gas attacks came, but that they were expected at all is telling.

On 31 August 1939, the order came from the ministry of health: ‘Evacuate Forthwith’. War had not even been declared, but one evacuee, Irene Weller, remembered mothers standing on their doorsteps ‘crying as we walked to the station … I said to my brothers as we walked past our house, “Don’t look round whatever you do,” because I knew my mum would be there waving.’ They all looked straight ahead, weeping. It had been anticipated that 3.5 million children would need to be withdrawn in the three days scheduled for the evacuation; in the event the number was nearer to 1.9 million.

Many children turned up where they were not expected. Anglesey had been expecting 625 children and found itself host to 2,468. Cultural clashes were frequent – an English child billeted in rural Wales, for example, could find herself having to learn an alien tongue. As the social scientist Richard L. Titmuss observed: ‘Town and country met each other in critical mood.’

Yet practical inconveniences were inconsiderable beside the uneasy awareness that you were yourself considered an inconvenience. That this might be overlooked if you were personable cannot have proved very much of a solace. Susan Waters, a twenty-one-year-old teacher, arriving in Bedford from Walthamstow, remembered a scene ‘more akin to a cattle or slave market than anything else’. Some women would specify ‘two fair-haired, blue-eyed little girls’, while farmers might size up boys to see if they were strong enough to work. John Wills from Battersea noted that ‘if you were similar to Shirley Temple you were grabbed right away’. A woman appeared to be checking the evacuees’ hair and inspecting their mouths. A helper suddenly intervened to save the children from further indignity. ‘They might come from the East End,’ she said, ‘but they’re human beings. They’re children, not animals.’ And the evacuees could scarcely be expected to have the necessary clothing. Few had serviceable boots, for example. Indeed, Liverpool quickly became known as ‘plimsoll city’ – the children’s parents could afford nothing hardier, and plimsolls were worthless as protection against countryside mud.

‘Verminous heads’ were reported in Weymouth, and the response of some foster parents and ‘aunties’ was to shave them bald. A Lancashire chemist mentioned one particularly resourceful, or cash-strapped, woman who used sheep dip on her charges. Impetigo, a particularly virulent skin disease, was rampant among almost a quarter of the evacuees sent to Wrexham. There had been no time to medically examine them prior to departure. Yet in the universal cliché applied to every precarious situation, no one was to blame.

There were also happier tales. Between the frets and the joy, a middle note may be heard in the recollection of one reluctant evacuee. She was met by an equally reluctant ‘grey-haired lady’, who welcomed her new charge with the remark: ‘Well, come in. I didn’t want you, but come in anyway.’ A large dog was the first to greet this child, its paws on her shoulders. ‘The people of Littlehampton are the kindest in the world,’ reported one relieved headmistress. Experiences varied according to area, cultural and social expectation, and human nature. Mothers who had waved off ten-year-olds were to find themselves, six years later, hugging teenagers. Sharp-eyed scrappers came back chastened, wild ones were tamed and soft ones hardened.

In September 1939, the government was and was not prepared. Officially, it had been firm in its commitment to peace, but, as is so often the case in British affairs, Whitehall proved more prescient than Westminster. Civil servants had been turning the cogs of war while Chamberlain hoped for peace. The devastating power of aerial bombardment was not underestimated, though it happily proved to be exaggerated. The penultimate roar of the Nazi dragon came in the shape of the V1, a pilotless plane better known in Britain as the ‘doodlebug’, whose rise led to a third wave of evacuees. Then came the V2, hitting the earth at more than 3,500 miles per hour. Milton may have named Pandaemonium, but Hitler created it.

30

The march of the ants

On 10 May 1940, the Germans carved their bloody trail into Belgium and towards Holland. The more factional among Labour MPs still found it hard to accept that Hitler was the true enemy; for Aneurin Bevan, hostility to Germany was a distraction contrived to divert the workers’ energies from the real business of destroying capitalism. Small wonder, perhaps, that Churchill was later to say of him that he would prove ‘as great a curse to his country in peace as he was a squalid nuisance in time of war’.

But a new government must be formed, and with Chamberlain gone and Churchill as prime minister and minister for defence, Labour could join it in good conscience. Meanwhile, the German forces continued to advance, crossing the French border and threatening Holland. The British and French failed to hold their positions and the British Expeditionary Force, outflanked and outgunned, retreated to the coast. The Germans reached Brussels, their fifth conquered capital, and captured Antwerp and Cambrai. ‘This,’ said Churchill, ‘is one of the most awe-striking periods in the long history of France and Britain.’

There was a ray of hope in May, when the experts of Bletchley Park disarmed the most formidable of Germany’s secret weapons. Under the guidance of the mathematician Alan Turing, a machine was devised which could crack the feared Luftwaffe’s Enigma code. Generated by a device adapted by the Germans from a Polish model, the code’s settings were changed every twenty-four hours. It was necessary to use the prophetic powers of Turing’s machine only in desperate need, and the authorities were forced to let many ships sink rather than reveal their ability to decipher the German code. It was perhaps the greatest breakthrough of the war, but tragically compromised by the realities.

On the evening of 26 May 1940, ‘Operation Dynamo’ was launched by the English to rescue the men of the Expeditionary Force stranded on the beaches of Dunkirk. Every available water vessel was commandeered in pursuit of this miracle, but official ineptitude and the exigencies of the moment ensured that some of the troops were left behind.

On the following day, the King of the Belgians abdicated; he had had enough, as had other continental rulers overtaken by Fascism. ‘We must possess the continent,’ Churchill declared, ‘to make our way with every stop through “disaster and grief”.’ One major disaster was the capture and occupation of Paris. Was there worse to follow? On 2 July, Hitler ordered his forces to make detailed plans for the invasion of Britain. The plan gives an early glimpse of the erratic and deluded mind later evinced by the Führer. Even Göring did not believe that the preconditions for invasion could be met.

But if the nation was not aware of the possibility of invasion, it was scarcely the fault of government. All the talk about turning pots and pans and kettles into Spitfires and Blenheims kept the home fires burning. In 1943, 110,000 tonnes of scrap metal were being collected weekly. Iron railings, many of them ripped up from stately homes, fed the furnaces. ‘The Great Saucepan Offensive’, during which the women of Britain were exhorted to ‘give us your aluminium’, proved alarmingly successful once Lady Reading gave it her support. Only minutes after a speech in which she had urged her sisters to act, she walked home to see women converging on the nearest depots, saucepans in hand.

Nor did the fever to give stop with armies of women. The famous Children’s Salvage Group were enjoined to gather whatever they could – and they responded, their nimble hands collecting when the national need demanded it. ‘There’ll always be a dustbin,’ they sang, to the tune of ‘There’ll Always Be an England’. Tales of First World War veterans offering their artificial limbs abound, although they were courteously refused. By 1943, government statistics claimed that each of the country’s homes had provided about half a ton of salvage.

In the drive to save paper, even libraries were not spared. Private owners denuded themselves of all but those books that were of national importance. All paper had to be salvaged, and wrapping paper was prohibited. By 1945, the National Book Drive had brought in more than 100 million books. Rationing, meanwhile, was extended to all foodstuffs apart from bread, vegetables, offal, game and fish. The result was a great upsurge in general health, but also in flatulence. The spirits of the people were still robust. While the army fought, the civilians, amidst making, mending, rummaging and whistling, did their best to laugh both at circumstance and at the enemy. A spoof pub sign portrayed Hitler’s distinctive hairstyle and moustache, and underneath ‘The Bore’s Head’. Comedy, whether in the music halls, on the wireless, or in homes, rose to happy heights.

It was as well that it did. The Battle of Britain, as it was known, beginning in July 1940, was Hitler’s experiment on British preparedness; German High Command recognized that unless German force could dominate the island’s air defences, there could be no security for the Nazi project in Europe, let alone an invasion of Britain. More attacks followed: the docks of London were particular targets, together with those of Liverpool, Manchester and Bristol. Göring directed operations; he opposed the wanton bombing of civilians because he saw no strategic advantage to it. By the end of September 1940, 1,500 civilians had been killed, but by the beginning of November, the Germans no longer dived over London. Their pilots and their planes had reached the limit of their usefulness. But within the areas of Europe ‘under German influence’, terror and violence mounted ever higher. Thousands of infants, boys, girls, crippled men and women were flung on burning piles and shot in ditches before being obscenely violated.

But Hitler’s will was undeniable, and by 14 November 1940, the city of Coventry was in ruins. A photograph of the time shows a priest standing quiet beside the lines of bodies. By contrast, the city of Oxford was spared – Hitler had intended it to be the capital of an occupied Britain in the event of a successful invasion. In similar fashion, he decided not to destroy Paris.

Russia, however, as the ancestral leader of the ‘degenerate’ Slavic nations, was to receive less considerate treatment. The Ribbentrop–Molotov Pact had been signed the previous year, but Hitler had no intention of honouring it. The failures of the USSR in the Winter War against Finland, coupled with Stalin’s timely cull of his own officers, gave him his opportunity. Hitler had issued a decree that ‘The struggle against Russia was one of ideologies and racial differences and will have to be carried out with merciless harshness.’ This was not a war, he said, that could be waged ‘in a knightly fashion’. The language of spite, violence and murder sprang to his lips as if from some secret recess of Hell. Hitler told his officials that his great invasion of Russia was to occur on 20 May.

Slaughter by conventional means carried on. During the bombing of Belgrade, 17,000 civilians were killed in a single day. The Yugoslavs signed an act of surrender, and national dissolution followed. Serbia, now under occupation, was succeeded as leader of the former union by a newly forged Fascist state of Croatia, with results that would be felt decades after the war had ended. Elsewhere in the Balkans, the Greek dictator Metaxas refused the Italian demand that he surrender his country’s ports. The Italian invasion of Greece, undertaken largely to impress Germany, was considered ‘easy to accomplish’, but it quickly sank into a vortex of lives lost in the cause of national self-respect. An overconfident Italian army found itself driven back into the mountains of Albania by dogged Greek opponents, but this hope for a free Europe quickly died when the Germans moved in to aid their ally, and Greece was divided between the two Axis powers.

Another large annexation was taking place. In the early morning of 22 June 1941, the Germans initiated their attack on Russia. Sixty-seven aerodromes were attacked and five cities subjected to bombardment, before the Germans began their march across the frontier. Three thousand Ukrainians were killed by the NKVD, the Communist secret police, followed by the massacre of Jews in Romania. This was not war as it had ever been envisaged. As the Germans advanced closer to Moscow, barbed wire and deep ditches were laid along their route. Seven thousand Jews at Borisov were shot ‘in the manner of tinned sardines’. The killers confirmed their slaughter by consuming bottles of alcohol. Such a recourse was not unusual: German doctors engaged to separate the healthy from the sick in the death camps could stomach such work only when drunk.

Everything changed on 11 December 1941, four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent American response, when Germany declared war on the United States. The Allies, immensely heartened, counselled time and patience – victory was by no means a foregone conclusion. Hong Kong surrendered to the Axis powers on 25 December, and 11,000 Allied prisoners were taken. The death camps multiplied in almost unimaginable ways. In Sobibor, in the Lubin district of Poland, the Axis troops killed 250,000 Jews in a year. Auschwitz was one of the most notorious of the camps, but the procedure was to be one of ‘concealment’. Whether this suggests guilt or fear of punishment is difficult to determine, though the euphemisms employed are telling: ‘special treatment’ referred to the mass murder of Jews; a ‘special action’ was an individual massacre. The latter often served as popular entertainment for visiting officials.

31

Would you like an onion?

In Britain, as rationing became even more severe, the most unlikely foodstuffs became luxury items. Jokes about onions wrapped up and offered as house-warming presents or wedding gifts quickly proved prophetic, but beer was still very much available. Despite severe rationing of grain, the government accepted that it would be foolish to deny the nation its follies. An unintended consequence was the new acceptance of women in pubs, or, rather, the new willingness of women to enter them. And grain could go to still more salutary uses. As a sign outside one bomb-wrecked pub proudly proclaimed: ‘Our windows are gone but our spirits are excellent. Come in and try them.’

Nevertheless, life for civilians was harsh and uncertain; it was increasingly felt that the nation’s soldiers had it easy by comparison. Aerial bombardment had ensured that the ordinary citizen was placed in the front line, while the soldier was frequently kicking his heels, waiting to leave. One observer, speaking for many, noted: ‘Although I can readily believe that most serving men want to play their part in winning the war, I can’t resist the taunt that joining the Army is about the quickest way to forget all about it.’

Such sentiments were generally felt, if rarely uttered, and instead found their way into the nation’s disgruntlement as a joke. Caustic jeers about soldiers ‘practising for when they meet Rommel’ (in other words, running away) abounded in a nation whose sense of deference to the military had worn thin. Others jibed at ‘the chairborne troops’, the vast sub-army of auxiliary staff, who seemed to many to be little more than clerks. And in a time of austerity, some could not fail to notice that soldiers had certain material advantages over their compatriots. Much of this resentment was groundless, of course, and nor did it preclude gratitude. Yet the perceived discrepancies in life between soldier and civilian engendered an attitude quite different from that of twenty years before.

When the soldiers did encounter Rommel, the jokes about flight withered in the speakers’ mouths. The first battle of El Alamein had checked the German Eighth Army in its advance against Alexandria, but it had not been as successful as the second battle, under Bernard Montgomery. Like Wellington, ‘Monty’ was a martinet who cared deeply for his troops and received from them a respect leavened by wry affection. Sir John Cowley, recalling his first meeting with Montgomery, was to say that it took only the sight of that slight, wiry figure unhitching his jacket and rolling up his sleeves to know that all would be well. Lord Dowding, who commanded the air force, was of similar constitution; stern in most other ways, he would call his men his ‘lambs’.

The first battle, in the summer of 1942, had stopped the Axis advance. The second went much further, resulting in the retreat of the Afrika Corps and the German surrender in North Africa in 1943. It was the turning point of the war, the culmination of the Allied desert campaign that changed the whole conflict. If the invincible Rommel could be stopped, what else might be achieved? That turning of the tide was matched with the Russian defence of Stalingrad and the ability of British and Commonwealth troops to expel the Germans from Egyptian territory. This may have been the moment when Hitler and his officers were revealed as superior only in the art of killing. The campaign was related to ‘Operation Torch’, devised to expel the Germans from North Africa with 300 warships, a large force of merchant ships and over 100,000 men. The church bells rang through England.

In the same month as the invasion began, November 1942, the Red Army launched an opposing force against the Germans north of Stalingrad, before moving south of the enemy forces and encircling them. The siege of Malta was also broken. Roosevelt and Churchill met at Casablanca, with Churchill insisting that the Allies ‘cannot let Russia down’. It was also agreed that ‘Hitler’s extinction’ must take priority over the defeat of Japan. The Stalingrad trap had caught the Germans, and the Axis surrendered the city. It was a great victory and must have suggested to Hitler and his cohorts that the writing of destiny was on the wall, not that Hitler had succumbed internally. The air raids against Germany continued day and night. Preparations were now being made for a cross-Channel invasion, with an elaborate deception arranged to convince the Nazis that the Americans and English were to aim for Pas de Calais rather than their true destination of Normandy. The monthly loss of German aircraft rose to 1,581.

Both Western and Eastern Fronts were now being attacked by the Allied forces, with mutual distrust set aside. The nightmare of Hitler’s Aryan empire was being torn apart piece by piece. The Red Army had advanced almost 1,000 miles in a year, while the breaking of the Enigma codes gave the Allies an accurate and invaluable insight into German military preparations. The situation in Berlin became disordered, yet still the Germans threw more and more innocents upon the fire. Several thousand Jews were sent each day to Auschwitz, including more and more from newly annexed Hungary. The most obscure islands in the Aegean were raided to find the handful of Jews who had escaped the Greek mainland, and all this while the Allies marched further north and approached the gates of Rome. The Reich had reached the last limits of self-delusion.

By 6 June, the Allies had landed on the strand in Normandy, and in less than twenty-four hours 155,000 were assembled there. Hitler, not knowing the enemy’s true destination, was for once unsure of himself. At the same time Churchill was informed that the Axis was running out of aircraft fuel. Its empire had been sustained by resources plundered from other nations, which were slowly being detached from their conqueror. A more private note of revenge was struck when a group of conspirators attempted to destroy Hitler; after its failure, the would-be assassins were hanged or shot, with Hitler invited to watch their bodies swinging.

In the spring of 1944, Churchill announced the number of casualties so far: 120,958. A report from the Reich noted, ‘in this uneasy period of invasion and retribution … The people of Germany are beginning to long for peace.’ British intelligence had now, by virtue of Ultra, discovered the position and size of all German military formations. It is one of the great mysteries of the war that the Germans did not suspect some secret military intelligence. The Allies were on the verge of a cross-Channel invasion of northern Europe, and Goebbels felt obliged to write that ‘Germany must be made more desolate than the Sahara.’ It came from the depths of despair, but it also evoked Hitler’s belief that if Germany was defeated, it did not deserve to survive.

The ending had come. On the evening of 5 June, the Allied flotilla approached the beaches of Normandy. Hitler had ordered that the aim should be to repulse the enemy and send them ‘back into the sea’, but it was as futile as Canute’s order to the waves. By midnight, more than 50,000 Allied combatants were on French soil. By 25 August, the general commander of Paris, General von Choltitz, had surrendered, to be triumphantly replaced by General Koenig. Yet it was not members of his group who liberated Paris, but the legions of the free Spanish. A German general who visited Hitler reported that ‘it was a tired, broken man who greeted me, who shuffled onto a chair, his shoulders drooping, and asked me to sit down … He spoke so softly and so hesitantly, it was hard to understand him. His hands trembled so much he had to grip them between his knees.’

By February 1945, Berlin was deemed to be a fortress city in the charge of the Germans, but a further gesture was needed. This was the American and British attack upon Dresden from the air. The rocket scientists nurtured by Hitler fled for haven. As the Russian soldiers closed in on Berlin, the Nazi leaders made their final preparations. Their fates are well known. Hitler shot himself in the mouth, while his wife swallowed poison. Their bodies were soaked in petrol and enveloped in fire. Goebbels and his wife, loyal to the last, died with him, making sure to kill their children first. The justification for this was given by Goebbels’s wife in her last letter to the world: ‘everything beautiful’, she wrote, ‘is about to be destroyed.’

Their allies in militant nationalism fled such a fate, only to be outrun by justice. Mussolini and his mistress were shot and suspended by their legs in a market square. Vidkun Quisling, ‘minister president’ of Norway, whose name would become a byword for collaboration, was shot in October 1945, still proclaiming that he had had his nation’s best interests at heart. In Slovakia, Jozef Tiso, the priest turned Fascist dictator, was caught and hanged in 1947. Ion Antonescu, the Romanian ‘conducatore’, was executed in 1946. Hungary’s Ferenc Szálasi, the brutal mummy’s boy of ‘Hungarism’, was executed in the same year. Only Ante Pavelić, the head of the infamous ‘Ustashe’, the Croatian separatist movement whose cruelty had shocked even the Nazis, managed to evade justice. He found a sympathetic host in Juan Perón of Argentina, who also welcomed a remarkable number of fugitive Germans. Regarding the war in Europe, the last word belongs to its victims. One of the inmates of Buchenwald, snatched from death at the last hour, wrote that ‘you were our liberators, but we, the diseased, the emaciated, barely human survivors, were your teachers. We taught you to understand the Kingdom of the Night.’

In Britain, the celebrations that had greeted the end of the First World War were muted, even sombre, when compared with the geyser of joy that burst forth on VE day. In no previous war had the English civilian been made to feel the force of the conflict so intimately or relentlessly. The notion of the ‘home front’ would have been almost inexplicable to a previous generation. Londoners had faced obliteration once every thirty-six hours for over five years, threatened at their work, having their meals, putting their children to bed, and going about the ordinary business of their lives. It had been a time when the ‘moral economy’ of war had been complicated, at times even reversed. If the soldier had suffered and died as a combatant, so too had the civilian.

But there was to be a moral inventory for the Allies to complete. The names of Hiroshima and Nagasaki would not be forgotten, and nor would that of Dresden. Closer to home, the Channel Islands had been liberated from the Germans, but the tale there is not wholly comforting. A photograph from that occupation shows a German officer and a British ‘bobby’ chatting amicably by a roadside. It may be that this image was taken for propaganda purposes, but it seems unlikely. Either way, it serves as a sobering corrective: Britain could afford a sense of triumph and relief, but not of complacency or self-indulgence.

When VE day was announced, a ration-ridden nation felt able to loosen its halter for a moment. For the children, there was a special treat of free ice cream. One mother, speaking of the day when the surrender of the German armed forces was announced on the wireless, remembered offering this earnest injunction to her four-year-old: ‘“Marian,” I said. “You must remember this all your life. It’s history.” But the reception was poor; and I could see that she would forget at once any word she happened to hear.’

32

The pangs of austerity

The nation that gathered at the polling booths in June 1945 was weary and ripe for a gust of optimism. But where the Labour party threw up the sash and flung open the window, the Conservatives seemed huddled in a corner, growling out their maledictions with little regard for the national mood. As Churchill warned, ‘Socialism is, in its essence, an attack not only upon British enterprise but upon the right of an ordinary man and woman to breathe freely, without having a harsh, clumsy, tyrannical hand clapped across their mouths and nostrils.’ Many might have agreed, but he went further: ‘No Socialist Government conducting the entire life and industry of the country could afford to allow free, sharp or violently worded expressions of public discontent. They will have to fall back on some form of Gestapo.’ If his reference to wartime conditions was merely unfortunate, this proved disastrous. Its manifest hyperbole at once disgusted and alienated many supporters.

By contrast, the Labour party attacked the profiteer and promised that most elusive of grails: economic equality. While Churchill invoked his wartime record, Labour looked further back, citing the hardship that had wasted the Thirties. In the Daily Mirror, a cartoon showed a veteran holding out the promise of peace to the people of Britain, with the plea that they should not squander it ‘this time’. More subtly, Labour slipped a lever under the very cornerstone of Conservatism. ‘Freedom is not an abstract thing … there are certain so-called freedoms that Labour will not tolerate: freedom to exploit other people, freedom to pay poor wages and to push up prices for selfish profit, freedom to deprive the people of the means of living full, happy, healthy lives.’ There was, of course, an element of ‘shadowboxing’ in all this: the claims of the two parties were not irreconcilable. Nevertheless, the majority of the people, stirred by the appeals to solidarity and equality, made their choice. The success of the Labour party in 1945 was as unexpected by some as it was desired by others.

There were those who drew up elaborate plans for a better, safer world. Although Sir William Beveridge has great claim to be the founder of what became known as ‘the welfare state’, the Tories were also part of the group of experts that fashioned the report entitled Social Insurance and Allied Services in 1942. This, in turn, built upon the work of Lloyd George and the Liberals in the 1900s. In any sense that matters, the new welfare state was the lucky progeny of natural enemies. In 1944, one commentator declared that ‘the time and energy and thought, which we are all giving to the Brave New World is wildly disproportionate to what is being given to the Cruel Real World’. Every second thought was now directed towards the goal of reconciling the claims of employer and employee. It was believed that the unions would lie down with employers as lambs with lions.

The Labour party had no desire to continue in coalition with Churchill and the Conservatives. Many aspired to some ‘good old days’ after the years of hardship, and a few were foolish enough to trust them. But the vision expounded by the Labour party was to be a new dawn for a new epoch, and with a new breed of man in mind.

This was reflected in the rival campaigns. Labour fought with the vigour and vitality derived from a new horizon, while Churchill could not help but dwell upon his victories. Few relish being reminded of a period of pain, even by their deliverer, and so it proved. In the general election of July 1945, Labour won 393 seats and the Conservatives won 219, an exceptional result. Even the most stubborn Tory might have felt the force of a rising wind.

Despite his reputation for diffidence, the new prime minister, Clement Attlee, had a strong and independent mind. He formed a group of men who had that much in common with him, though little else, and neither did they have a great deal in common with each other. Aneurin Bevan, the minister of health and housing, was a Welsh bull with the face of a cherub, gravel in his belly and helium in his heart; the minister for fuel and power was Hugh Gaitskell, his stare one of almost lunatic intensity, as fierce in his centrism as Bevan was in his socialism; there was Hugh Dalton, the new chancellor, of vampiric appearance, loyal soul, brilliant mind and disastrous naivety; Stafford Cripps, his successor, lean and prematurely withered, an austere tribune always licking his upper lip as if to moisten his punishingly ascetic vision. And then there was Attlee himself, small and tight-featured, with a grin that could disarm the most obdurate adversary. Their very dissonance was to prove their glory.

The world was still much as it once was, with Lyons’ Corner Houses and steam trains. Most goods were still rationed, paid for with warm heavy coins. The slump had left its mark, and 7 million houses were without hot water. It was the same old pre-war world, steadily more constricted and diminished. The effect was all the more unusual since the public sector of the country was slowly being populated by ministries, departments, red-brick boxes of officials packed together in computations for the future. In the spring of 1948, 42 per cent of people wanted to emigrate, compared with 19 per cent in 1945. Everyone was locked to the future, except those who were deluged in the dizzying present of jazz and bands. Others were preoccupied with planning to better their families, and even their nation – there was real hope that a more serious-minded consciousness would outweigh frivolity. But as Orwell wrote: ‘Everyone wants, above all, a rest.’

But who had the time to rest? And what was there to sweeten it? ‘Clothing? Not here, mate. Food? Try next door. Fuel? There may be a can nearby. Beer and baccy? No chance.’ The Express announced ‘Meat and Eggs going to be Off next week’, a term widely used deep into the Fifties. One group, however, promised ‘On’, come what may. This was the ‘spiv’, the ringmaster of the wartime underworld. He was a profiteer, of course, but though despised, he was still needed. He was instantly recognizable: a trilby, a pencil moustache and a sloping stride. He could not proclaim his wares in the time-cankered fashion of the street hawker, as his antecedents might, but murmured them in a downward glissade of confidentiality. Behind him would stand his straight man, lending him a patina of respectability, with the available wares in a little box. He was a creature of the twilight, amoral rather than immoral.

In Cecil Day-Lewis’s children’s novel of the post-war years, The Otterbury Incident (1948), the chief villain, Johnny Sharp, is a spiv. Against two plucky bands of boys, themselves rather prone to scavenging, he and his accomplice wage a quietly implacable war. Sharp is softly spoken, slinky in movement and prone to Americanisms. He addresses people as ‘buddy’, another affectation typical of the spiv; but the American influence on the national voice was to outlast the spiv by generations.

After the war, over a quarter of the working population had to be brought back into the fold and retaught the ways of the civilian. Overseas service had trained men and women for combat, but not for the demands of a nation in a state of material haemorrhage. The rigours of austerity, the demands of regular work and the expectations of wives, husbands and sweethearts could prove both bewildering and dismaying. Where was the opulent, cheerful nation they had left? Why were there so many ruins? And what had happened to the courtesy they remembered?

The contraction ‘demob’ has the sting of dismissiveness, and its connotations were ambivalent. On the one hand, such men and women were conquering heroes; on the other, they had escaped much that the civilian had been obliged to endure, and were often reminded of it. More than one returning soldier overheard, ‘There’s one who had a good war!’ Some among them, prisoners of war in particular, could be certain of sympathy and respect. But however they were greeted, there can be little doubt that ‘demobs’ were regarded as a burden. One child of the time remembered her father digging hungrily into the cheese on the dining table and asking her mother whether there was any more. ‘No dear,’ she replied, ‘you’ve just eaten the family’s ration for the week.’ Afterwards ‘he was very quiet’.

From the viewpoint of the returning soldier, it was often a question of having one’s expectations upended. ‘It had made my blood boil,’ recalled one, ‘while we were sweating in a jungle on a few shillings a day. Now I’m beginning to see how impossible it is to live on present-day civilian wages – let alone pre-war pay. The value of money is topsy-turvy.’ Another said, ‘I have to take the laundry, and calculate so that I have enough to wear before I can collect it again … I’m more harassed by small worries than I have been for five years.’ Such ‘small worries’, coalescing often into implacable panic, were the staple of the world in which the demob was forced to acclimatize.

But the population wanted social change; for what else had the war been fought? Were the impoverished days of the 1930s to return? The celebration of the royal wedding in November 1947 might have been considered a positive jubilee, but the reports sound muted. Ursula Wood, later married to Ralph Vaughan Williams, considered it ‘as quiet as a Sunday’. Orderly crowds gathered in restrained groups with the occasional bonfire to enlighten the proceedings. Some travellers waited to join the last 68 bus, illuminated with pale-blue lighting. Nor were civilians always impressed by the demob’s efforts in the workplace. He was supposed to be complacent and work-shy – a host of satirical terms were soon coined. ‘Stripes disease’, ‘pippitis’, ‘air crew’s chest’, ‘storeman’s clutch’, ‘ranker’s dodge’ and ‘scrimshanking’ were all expressions flung at the demob’s back, and sometimes at his face. A veteran, writing in the Picture Post, felt minded to offer a counterblast: ‘As one who has had five years’ holiday in foreign lands at public expense, I feel that it is high time I turned my hand to honest work and civilian life, while some overburdened civilians are given the chance of rest and recuperation in the Forces. Why should the delights of a camping holiday in sunny Burma or a cruise to Japan be denied these jaded people?’ It is clearly unwise to speak of demobs in general. Their narratives touch every point: from ease to starvation, from ‘cushy’ staff posts to incarceration under unrelenting hosts.

33

The cruel real world

This was a time for even more privation. Bread rationing was reintroduced in the summer of 1946, and the cloud of a new terror occluded the sun with the threat of atomic war. It may seem odd that people can prevail under such circumstances, but patience and resignation had become customary. After constant attacks in the press, the prime minister, Attlee, felt obliged to reassure the nation that ‘many of these restrictions fall heavily on the housewife. You can be assured that the Government will ease them as soon as it is possible to do so … On the question of bread rationing, your knowledge and good sense was an important factor in steadying and educating public opinion in the face of the press campaign last summer.’

The late 1940s inaugurated what may be termed the ‘housewives’ war’, which was in part a war against the political classes. That the burden of increasingly restrictive rationing fell heaviest upon housewives was a fact denied by none, but while Conservative women aimed their darts at the government, women loyal to Labour reserved their wrath for the opposition. It was an unglamorous affair, and there were no clear or certain victors beyond the pale of Westminster and Whitehall.

The measures were provoked by a dollar economy, and by huge food import cuts. There was a further reduction in the clothes ration, and the use of foreign currency for pleasure travel was suspended. Hugh Dalton was forced to resign after he inadvertently supplied a journalist with details of the 1947 budget. He was perhaps the first victim of what became known as the press ‘leak’. Stafford Cripps was now chancellor, and seemed quietly intent on spreading his own brand of punitively abstract philanthropy. But, like Churchill himself, he led by example. A proud Spartan, he demanded nothing of others that he was not prepared to do himself.

As the 1940s progressed and a new election came closer, political rhetoric rose both in heat and in shrillness. ‘We’re up against it’, ‘We work or want’, ‘A challenge to British grit’ – such appeals were characteristic of the Labour approach. They would have had a certain resonance only a few years before, but many were now beginning to wonder why wartime appeals were being made in a time of peace. As ever, the press was divided. Where the Labour-supporting papers emphasized that the cuts were inevitable, their Conservative counterparts scoffed at what they saw as excuses for simple mismanagement.

While it was generally agreed that wartime rationing had introduced a diet that was far healthier than before, by the late 1940s the case was not so clear. The suggestion that rationing had begun to badly affect the nation’s basic health was first raised in May 1947 by Dr Franklin Bicknell in his paper ‘Dying England’. Speaking for the government, Michael Foot proclaimed that on average children were ‘stronger … than any breed … we have ever bred in this country before’. It is true that not even the Conservatives went so far as to say that the nation was starving. On the other hand, the medical world was increasingly troubled by the effects of the low fat ration. The fatigue and irritability so characteristic of the age might have been provoked less by the existential agonies of a war-weary nation, and more by a lack of carbohydrates.

The opposition’s case was put most forcefully by Lord Woolton, former minister for food during the war. He is now remembered best for the Woolton Pie, composed of whatever was left in the larder, but at the time he was still revered as the quiet saviour of the nation’s health and heart. He had refused to allow the fat ration to dip below 8 oz ‘if we were to maintain the nation’s health and productive capacity’. Now it had fallen to 7 oz. ‘That is a dangerous position,’ he maintained.

Labour countered such concerns with an appeal to community spirit. What was needed was the attitude of ‘cooperative effort’, ‘courage’ and ‘common sense’ – in short, something like the spirit of the Blitz. But to many, that spirit had come to require not so much sturdiness and solidarity as an almost angelic forbearance. The word ‘propaganda’ was now used without embarrassment by all sides in the austerity debate – the cuts of 1947 worked both ways. Horns sounding in the cause of export production and solidarity were answered by trumpets for free enterprise and individual effort. The local elections of that year heard the first answering murmur to the trumpet. The ‘food and basic petrol election’, as it was termed by Morgan Philips, resulted in large local election gains for the Conservatives, but did not sway the nation as a whole.

By 1948 the rationing had eased somewhat, the shop lights were on and the electric lights flashed occasionally. But prices were rising. ‘Dreariness is everywhere,’ one school teacher lamented. ‘Streets are deserted, lighting is dim, people’s clothes are shabby and their troubles [laid] bare.’ ‘Oh, for a little extra butter!’ one social worker complained. From the late 1940s onwards, a tilt towards consumerism may be discerned.

It is often maintained that there was little to choose between the competing parties’ aims, but that claim was made in hindsight – the differences were clear enough at the time. The Labour demand for a socialist democracy with full employment and a state that provided for its citizens ‘from cradle to grave’ sat uneasily with the Conservative promise of individual affluence and freedom from state interference. A tacit acquiescence in the post-war settlement grew to be the hallmark of all parties, but that was to come later.

Rationing had tightened under Stafford Cripps. The public’s initial reaction was understandably resentful, but the mood swiftly softened when it was discovered that ordinary households could cope with the new austerities, however uncomfortably. Some resentment remained, yet in spite of continued shortages, the English could at last share in a luxury that had been rationed for centuries: a sense of gratitude. The new government was no sooner in power than it began to make good its promises; foremost among them was that none in these islands should ever again fear illness or want. In 1942, the Liberal William Beveridge had drawn up a paper in which he identified ‘Five Giants’: want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness. By ‘ignorance’ Beveridge meant lack of education, by ‘squalor’ poor housing and by ‘idleness’ unemployment. These could, and should, be amended by the state. Thus, in 1946, the National Insurance Act was passed, ensuring benefits against unemployment and sickness and provision for mothers and widows. No one, in principle, needed to starve. The Industrial Injuries Act provided for those stricken at work, and the Butler Act offered free schooling for all. There remained only the matter of the nation’s health, and that would take longer to resolve. On 5 July 1948, three years after Britain went to the polls, the labourer, the clerk, the miner, the midwife and the seamstress, together with their children, could go to the doctor without fear of paying a penny. For Labour, it was the great new promise for the great new era. ‘It’s real Socialism,’ proclaimed Aneurin Bevan, adding, ‘and it’s real Christianity too, you know.’

Here was a revolution with no clear precedent in England. Whatever G. K. Chesterton may have believed, the monasteries and friaries of pre-Reformation England were not ‘the inns of God where no man paid’. Similarly, those who drew up the Tudor poor laws and established the parish system of relief had no conception of universal healthcare. Victorian refinements to those laws taught the lesson that sickness should be understood as the consequence of feckless living. Even the comparatively enlightened provisions of the 1911 National Insurance Act were confined to working men.

Rationing might have slimmed the nation down, but it had done nothing to avert disease. Tuberculosis, ‘the white plague’ of the Victorians, was still abroad, with few X-rays available to detect it. Diphtheria could cause a child to choke. Rickets and polio crippled the young as surely as they had a century before. Measles could be fatal. Scarlet fever, smallpox and influenza were as widespread as ever. Furthermore, the nation was simply run-down. The faces of the poor showed concave cheeks, chap-fallen jaws, grey, stubby teeth, and a nutcracker profile. As if poor sanitation, overcrowding and unsympathetic elements were not enough, children were still subject to Victorian notions of nutrition, being fed on starchy breast milk substitutes. Indeed, artificial feeding could be as dangerous for children as lack of hygiene. At a time when diarrhoea alone could kill a small child within days, it was common for a hospital administrator to spend half her day filling out death certificates. The imbalance of provision between rich and poor was dark and ugly. There was one GP for 18,000 people in the East End, while in the suburbs ‘it was one for every two hundred and fifty’. Money had to be put on the shelf for the doctor in case anyone fell ill; if there was no money, people would pay in kind, with eggs perhaps, or vegetables.

Medicine was, in every sense, a private affair. Even funding for hospitals was secured by charity parades or private benefactors. The doctor himself was a breed apart. You did not visit him – he came to you. Pre-eminent in that world was the consultant, tailed by his subordinates in the hospital as a king by his courtiers. Any love he or the general practitioner had for the sick might have been considered incidental. Yet the reason for what seems like a rather mercenary approach is simple enough. Before the NHS existed, a GP bought his practice. Like any other professional, he sought to enlarge his business, improve it, and perhaps sell it on at a profit. He had a capital investment in his work and sought to preserve it.

Nye Bevan, for one, did not see why matters should remain so. His own father had ‘died from dust’, in miners’ parlance. Bevan himself had started working in the pits of Tredegar at the age of twelve. He spoke of how food on the plate became a family’s calendar: you knew it was the weekend when there was almost nothing. ‘My heart is full of bitterness,’ he wrote, ‘when I see … the ill and haggard faces of my own people … There must be another way of organising things.’ There was, and it lay nearby. The Tredegar Medical Aid Society had been founded at the end of the previous century as a means of providing the local workers with healthcare they could not otherwise have afforded. Workers put in ‘thruppence a week’ of their earnings and received free medical, dental and optical care. It was, as one resident recalled, a ‘miniNational Health Service’. Bevan took it as his template.

The National Health Service Act had been passed along with the rest of the welfare legislation, but the other bills would not need quite such lavish preparation. The Conservative party under Churchill was opposed to Bevan’s proposals on the basis of cost. Bevan wanted a truly national health service, invested in by the employee but sustained by taxation. But this, its opponents argued, would be costly, unwieldy, ineffective and, given the high levels of taxation required, would necessitate a threat to English liberties. Surely such matters could be devolved to the regions. But the population wanted social change; for what else had the war been fought?

On 3 January 1948, Bevan offered his pledge: free healthcare for all, to be delivered on 5 July of that year. In a speech he reflected that ‘there is a school of thought, you know, that believes that if a thing is scarce, it ought to be dear … But this is not an orthodox government, and I am not an orthodox Minister of Health.’ It was an assessment shared by his most implacable opponents, the nation’s doctors, represented by the British Medical Association.

Members of the BMA had already become known as the ‘shock troops’ of the middle class. For the BMA, the proposed reforms were tantamount to an invasion of medicine by the state. The objection was not as disingenuous or self-interested as it appears: teachers would later display similar concerns about national curricula. And how would lawyers react if they were told to become servants of the state? Medical science had become a true science by the early Forties, and doctors were rightly proud of what had been achieved.

Dr Charles Hill, the leader of the opposition to Bevan, had been the ‘Radio Doctor’ during the war, dispensing homely advice to 14 million people in a voice as warm as a freshly baked loaf. Now, speaking on television against the reforms, his voice was grim and dour as he raised the old Tory shibboleth of freedom. ‘We all want better healthcare, better treatment … But in organising them, let’s make sure that your doctor doesn’t become the state’s doctor, your servant, the government’s servant.’ For all that Hill came from Islington, he acquired a slight West Country accent for this occasion, reassuringly bluff and English.

On 13 January 1948, the BMA called a plebiscite of its 35,000 members. ‘Our independence,’ it insisted, ‘will have been sacrificed to a soulless machine.’ An openly vituperative press campaign was launched, with Bevan satirized as ‘fuhrer’ in letters to the nation’s newspapers. The whole project was denounced as a ‘socialist plot’. On 9 February, Bevan presented his bill for an unprecedented fourth time; while in Newcastle, London and Liverpool, the BMA’s efforts bore fruit and the NHS was rejected outright by doctors. In Brighton, the ratio of rejection was 350 to 1.

Amidst all this, a subgroup emerged: the Socialist Medical Association, composed overwhelmingly of students, led what support there was for the NHS, in the face of hostility and ridicule. It was not uncommon for members of this group to be pointed out as ‘communists’ in the middle of a lecture. It was of a piece with the BMA’s language. They were convinced that with assimilation would come regimentation. Doctors would be forced to ‘march up and down’. The word ‘totalitarian’ was ubiquitous.

On 18 February 1948, the results of the BMA’s plebiscite came in. Thirty thousand had voted against, 86 per cent of the membership. Outwardly Bevan contrived to appear at once unbendable and good-humoured, but in private he confessed to a growing desperation. He consoled himself by trying to recall what first provoked his mission. ‘When I hear the cacophony of harsh voices trying to intimidate me, I close my eyes and listen to the silent voices of the poor.’ The man who it was said could make others believe that ‘their dreams were realisable’ was beginning to doubt. The bill had been passed but could not proceed. With victory in sight, the BMA felt it could begin to patronize its foe. Bevan was compared to ‘a very difficult patient’, self-willed but powerless.

Now at last the nation spoke. On 1 March 1948, a Gallup poll showed 87 per cent of the people in favour of the NHS, yet even this endorsement could not end the impasse. The National Health Service had a head but as yet no body, and if doctors chose not to work within his system Bevan had no means of compelling them. And so, unable to persuade the middle men of medicine, Bevan determined to woo its aristocracy. On 10 March he paid a visit to Lord Moran, president of the Royal College of Physicians and former doctor to Churchill. Moran headed the nation’s consultants and they in turn controlled the great charity hospitals: Barts, St Thomas’s, the London Hospital. These mighty institutions had reached financial extremis; in their vulnerability lay Bevan’s advantage.

The two men took an instant liking to one another. Moran, known as ‘Corkscrew Charlie’ for his supposed deviousness, saw in Bevan not the orator in his parliamentary pulpit, but a charming and persuasive man with whom one could reach an accommodation. Everything now rested on Moran, but he faced a challenge from Lord Horder, physician to kings and queens and a man whose views tallied with those of the BMA. On 26 March 1948, the Royal College of Physicians held its election. One by one its members dropped their silver coins into the bucket. Moran won, by only five votes.

Moran wrote to Bevan, explaining the deeper causes of the BMA’s intransigence. ‘My dear Nye,’ he began. ‘The irrational fears of GPs [are] that one day you will turn them into salaried servants of the state.’ This, Bevan felt, could be addressed. He therefore presented an amendment on 7 April which ensured that GPs would never be civil servants or wage slaves without a new Act of Parliament. What was more, he promised that the GPs could join the new health service while maintaining their private practices, something he had learned from the Tredegar Association. The cynicism was as striking as the magnanimity. ‘I stuffed their mouths with gold,’ Bevan boasted. But the BMA, still confident of final victory, remained unbiddable.

In spite of growing scepticism in the press, on 12 April Bevan insisted that his health service would be launched on time. The government appealed again to the nation, this time via a press campaign. ‘Every forty minutes, a child dies of diphtheria’, it was emphasized. Twenty million people now signed up for the service. Within five weeks, 75 per cent of the adult population had put themselves down for the free healthcare promised.

On 4 May 1948, the BMA turned again to its members for support. Now, however, almost 40 per cent had changed their minds. The swing was by no means complete, but it was enough. And so, on 28 May, the BMA advised all its members to join the NHS. What seemed a remarkable capitulation carried a caveat: they called for a delay. This would have meant final defeat for Bevan, whose riposte was to point out that there would always be more demands and more delays. The reply worked admirably.

But the NHS was still far from ready. Moreover, in two years costs had almost doubled, to £180 million. Most of the 3,000 hospitals were crumbling; age and the Blitz had seen to that. In London, not one hospital was unscathed. Most worrying of all, with five weeks to go, 30,000 new nurses were needed. Another campaign was launched, revealing once again the Labour government’s readiness to adapt to new media, but the press resumed its attacks: ‘Free for All’ and ‘Stop this Bad Bill’ were among the milder headlines.

It was Sunday 4 July 1948 and the NHS was to be open for business on the following day. Yet Bevan chose this day to launch an attack on his political opponents so intemperate as to be self-defeating. All the resentments of the past few years inspired this otherwise generous man to describe the Tory party as ‘lower than vermin … They condemned millions of first-class people to semi-starvation.’ Why did Bevan launch his spectacular assault the day before the birth of the NHS? There was little in the way of calculation at work. In truth, while he spoke like a poet he thought like a child, with an immovable sense of right and wrong.

On the next day, the NHS was inaugurated. The event was signalled by the opening of the Trafford Park Hospital in Manchester. ‘It was like a wedding,’ remembered Mary Bane, a nurse. True to form, Bevan greeted everyone. He proclaimed that ‘we have been the dreamers, we have been the sufferers. Now we are the builders.’ Attlee himself, in a period of illness, refused a side ward, insisting that he should be treated like anyone else. Nurses would find him chatting happily with his fellow patients. A spirit of gratitude, so long dammed up, now gushed forth. Even administrators would be given little presents, as if they had wrought this miracle themselves. There was, of course, a huge backlog of diseases, phlegmatically borne for want of any alternative. Women came to their GPs with their uteruses turned inside out. Men had gone about their affairs with hernias ‘the size of balloons’.

All this came at a cost: 240 million prescriptions were filled out, a fourfold increase in two years. The budgetary caps were soon broken, and an upper limit of £170 million swelled to £352 million in the space of two years. A citizen would soon have to wait half a year to see an optician. Thirty-three million sets of false teeth were made in the first nine months, many of them for children. Bevan and others had imagined a decrease in the numbers of people using the NHS as the nation became healthier, but a different law applied: gas expands to fill the space available. As medicine developed and demand increased, so costs rose. But the effects of the new service could not be denied. Deaths from infectious diseases fell by over 80 per cent. For a while, the opposition remained unconvinced and unrepentant. Lord Horder spoke of ‘this temporary minister’ and predicted that the good old days of private practice would soon return. But the NHS remained, and its GPs remained its motor. The role of the doctor had come full circle: he was again the helper and healer.

Bevan himself resigned in 1951 over Hugh Gaitskell’s introduction of prescription charges for dental care and spectacles. The funds were needed for a project particularly loathsome to a man of Bevan’s sympathies, the Korean War. Attlee felt obliged to speak of Britain’s ‘very serious financial position’; the Americans withdrew their ‘Lend-Lease’ provision, which had provided supplies without Britain having to pay for them, resulting in a disproportionate excess of imports over exports. In eighteen months, a committee was set up on the ‘Socialisation of Industries’ to concentrate on the Bank of England, civil aviation, the coal industry and cable and wireless, but the fatal continuation of union opposition, mismanagement and general incompetence did not respond to optimism. The era that had offered so many sweeping commitments was finding it harder to sustain them. In the Labour manifesto of 1950, the party in government still felt able to recall its New Testament roots:

Socialism is not bread alone. Economic security and freedom from the enslaving material bonds of capitalism are not its final goals. They are means to the greater end – the evolution of a people more kindly, intelligent, free, cooperative, enterprising and rich in culture. They are means to the greater end of the full and free development of every individual person. We … have set out to create a community that relies for its driving power on the release of all the finer constructive powers in man.

Never again was any party able to speak in such utopian terms. Once again the country seemed to be stumbling towards crisis. If it could happen in war, it could happen in peace. The scheme of nationalization had been put in place but many questioned whether it was of any actual benefit. They might have agreed with Churchill, who said it was ‘proving itself every day to be a dangerous and costly fallacy’. Nothing was going as well as it appeared.

An almost hung parliament in 1950 led Attlee to call a second election. Perhaps he had grown complacent, or perhaps he desired vindication. In 1951, after only six years, the Conservatives were returned to office, promising an end to austerity and the beginning of wealth. But austerity, in one form or another, was to last until 1955.

34

An old world

On 6 February 1952, the king died, and, quite by accident, an Elizabethan age was established. Another herald was the establishment of the Conservative government in 1951. Domestic duties were no longer considered as inevitable as they had been, and the status of nursing and teaching rose proportionately. Women were no longer merely duchesses, mistresses, housewives or labourers, but teachers of mathematics and gymnastics. It had taken the carnage of the world wars to illuminate that. There were complaints, as at all times of social change. Surely it was not proper to train women as doctors in a world where cuts in services were continually threatened?

The coronation of the young queen was, if anything, more panoplied and pearled than that of her father. For those with ears to hear it, however, a new and sombre note had been struck. The new monarch of Great Britain was not the Empress of India; she was proclaimed simply as ‘of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories, Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith’. Her declared devotion to ‘our great Imperial family’ was celebrated, but she understood her new place.

The preceding year had been marked by the Festival of Britain. If it could not match the opulence of its Victorian model, then that was its glory. The times were quieter, pockets shallower and the people less inclined to triumphalism, but the bunting fluttered and the beer flowed. The Festival inaugurated, too, the establishment of the ‘South Bank’ as one of London’s cultural centres. There were jarring moments, of course. One of the exhibits was a collection of printed rayon cloths, and the king was invited to inspect them but had no notion of their purpose. When enlightened, he was heard to mutter: ‘Thank God we don’t have to wear those.’ Despite all outward gestures to popular sentiment, the royal family could not fully share the shared experience. Their role during the war years was revealed as an anomaly.

The empire was in fact on the brink, though few cared to recognize the fact. India had gone in 1947, lost, according to political legend, by the condescension of the middle-class English rulers. In truth, the efforts of Gandhi, Congress and the Muslim League had done much to convince the British that they had outstayed their day. The government was presented with a choice: the nation could afford an empire or a welfare state, but not both. The princes of the subcontinent were warned by Lord Mountbatten that if they resisted integration into the successor states of India and Pakistan they would be cut adrift, with neither dominion status nor a place in the Commonwealth. Independence came at midnight on 15 August 1947, and with it partition. Although none had foreseen this, some 14 million people were displaced as a consequence and countless lives lost. The line dividing India from Pakistan was drawn by the British, with scant regard for local realities or feelings.

Without India, what value the empire? To be sure, people admired the blaze of imperial pink on the map, but the empire had been a faint glimmer of gaslight in the minds of most. The paradox of an imperial and industrial superpower that allowed so much poverty in its midst was precisely what had inspired Marx and Engels. Cyril Radcliffe, on many occasions a defender of the empire, and the man who was tasked with dividing India from Pakistan, found himself agonizing over the question for the rest of his life: ‘The gifts we brought … were Roman: peace, order, justice and the fruits that those things bring … Such benefits were admirable.’ But he also felt obliged to issue a caveat: ‘It may be that the government of one people by another can never be the best government in the long run, since benevolence and fairness are no substitute for national inspiration.’ Though he was speaking of India, his remarks may serve for the empire as a whole, which was to undergo osmosis on a vast and humbling scale.

It began quietly enough. When the Empire Windrush docked in the summer of 1948, it brought less than a thousand people from the Caribbean. Some had paid their way and some had hitched a lift, while others were soldiers. They had heard of the ‘mother country’, as it was still known, but few had visited it. At first, they and other groups were met with placards bearing the legend, ‘Welcome to Britain’. But what welcome lay behind the placards and the smiles? As the settlers settled, the legends changed and ‘No Coloureds’ became a common sight on boarding-house windows. In its own hideous way, it was inclusive. Any skin pigmentation darker than pink was refused. Who knew what might happen to the sheets?

The experience for the immigrants was dislocating in many senses. You arrived, and then you moved and, more often than not, moved again. The migration did not stop at Southampton. A soldier recalled:

When we arrived at Tilbury, a few people, political people, mostly Communists, you know, tried to befriend us … But all it needed at the time was who hadn’t got any place to go to, wants somewhere to go, and that was uppermost in our minds … you’ve got to go around and look, because in those days, it’s either two or three of you in a room, in those days, as a black man, it’s very hard to get a room, you wouldn’t get one. They always put on the board, ‘Black – niggers not wanted here’, on the board you know, these boards out there, ‘No Niggers’ or ‘No Colour’, things like that.

Vince Reid, the only teenager on the boat, highlighted a fact that many in England had chosen to forget: the Windrush generation represented only the latest chapter in the long tale of a Black England. ‘I was a boy. And I wasn’t expecting anything. But how I was received was when I went to school, first of all, I was a subject of curiosity, which is quite surprising when you think that you had black soldiers in England. And, you know, people would come up and rub your skin and see if it would rub off the black, and rub your hair and, you know, it’s really insulting.’

War films of the time, and later, show little of black men and women contributing to the country in any way. But for the immigrants, visibility could prove a curse. Tryphena Anderson recalled: ‘You’re not thinking of your skin, but you feel other people are thinking of it. And every little thing you do reflects on your reaction … if you get on the bus, and there’s an empty seat, you sit down … But when the bus fills up and you find you’re the last one to have somebody beside you, then you know something is wrong.’

Then there was the cold, which could steal through the thickest clothing, let alone the light but formal dress favoured by the new arrivals. Theirs was not solely, however, a tale of dislocation and prejudice. Warmth and friendliness could be found, often in the most surprising places. One immigrant recalls a visit to a butcher: ‘I got a mixture of genuine affection and a lot of curiosity. I always remember going into my first Dewhurst butcher’s shop, when I was about seven, and this big, large lady looked at me. She kept looking at me and then she turned to the butcher, and said, ‘Ooh, I could eat him.’ I’ll always remember Dewhurst butcher’s shops.’

The England to which they had come was hag-ridden and worn. The proud imperial nation of rumour or propaganda could be discerned with difficulty in a small, cramped island, still gasping from the blows of a war it had nearly lost. The promise of ‘diamond streets’ was belied by ones that seemed paved with lead, gashed by bomb sites, beside grey houses interchangeable in size and shape and a population which seemed so old. Along with anxiety, fear and relief, the immigrants sometimes felt a certain pity for the nation that had adopted them:

But what was most striking, I think, was the age of the people. At that time there were old men working on the stations, and on the buses there were old men or old women. There weren’t very many young people. And then we began to realise that the war had taken its toll of the young people between eighteen and probably thirty-five … and people were living in prefabs, and that was quite strange. You couldn’t understand why they were living in what we saw as huts.

Other customs also attracted bewilderment. There was a vast and varied network of child support, but many Caribbeans found it at once invasive and remote – the deeper support of family appeared to be lacking. Another novelty for many of the Windrush generation was being addressed as ‘sir’, which seemed bizarre rather than respectful. Some of the customs they encountered provoked fear and dislike among the immigrants, and for many it was difficult to determine which was harsher, the coldness of the climate or the coldness of the people.

It is easy to forget that while England might have wanted cheap labour, the early immigrants had other concerns, with education not the least of them. Among other blandishments, England had been touted as the land of educational opportunity, yet not all found it so. Russell Profitt found many sympathetic teachers but also a wayward and confusing secondary system. He had come from a culture where education was taken seriously as a tool for self-betterment; where study, not leisure, was the point of schooling. He encountered the new welfare-state approach to education, and racism was not quite the issue:

Most people in senior positions wanted to be helpful, but I don’t think they really understood the emotions I was experiencing, having to come to terms with the racial issue, having to come to terms with an education system that was quite different from the one I’d experienced in the Caribbean, where we were a lot more formal and a lot more structured and set in relation to work that we had to do by certain times. A number of black kids just got lost in the system.

Twenty years later, many mothers of Caribbean origin would be expressing concerns similar to those of Profitt’s mother: ‘My mother hadn’t gone through education in Britain, and so I don’t think she fully appreciated the way the system worked … The pressure was not on in the way I think Caribbean families expected pressure to be on teenagers.’ Baroness Amos recalls being relegated to the bottom of the class as a matter of course:

When I went to school, that was a bit of a shock, because I wasn’t tested before I was put into a class, and I was put into the bottom class, and I found everybody was kind of way behind what I’d been used to. But my parents were very assertive about that and went up to school and ensured that I was given a test, and I was moved. I think the other thing that I found difficulty dealing with was the environment, and the fact that it felt like a much less disciplined society.

She recalls reactions that derived from simple ignorance, an ignorance that was not unkind but inadvertently intrusive. ‘I was in the school choir, we would go and sing in what were then called old people’s homes, at Christmas. And they would all touch my skin and touch my hair, and I was the first black person they had ever seen.’ The empire had been an abstraction to most; now it was made flesh. Englishmen and women had new neighbours, new shoots in their garden, new influences to accommodate. The best in all major parties acknowledged a duty of care to the immigrants, whether because one should pay a debt of reparation to those colonized or because one does not let down old retainers. But no leader could afford to shout out the benefits of a multiracial community.

Just as the controversy concerning race rose higher and sharper in the Houses of Parliament, in clubs and in private homes, the very notion of racial supremacy was given its quietus. On 25 April 1953, Watson and Crick revealed the existence of DNA. With this discovery, our inheritance was shown to respect neither persons nor ideologies. ‘Racial’ origins might exist, but they determined nothing that might lead one group to consider itself superior to another. The lesson was to take many decades to filter down, and such affirmation would certainly be needed.

35

The washing machine

On 5 April 1955, Churchill retired as prime minister. He had had enough of his post, of parliament and even of power. For some years, anecdotes had circulated about his decline. He had known, and adapted to, more worlds than any of his generation, yet he could never reconcile himself to the loss of empire. His younger years had been spent fighting for it, and his later years maintaining it. Even his belief in a united Europe was born in the conviction that the Continent should take care of itself; Britain had an empire to govern. His successor would have agreed.

Anthony Eden had been the heir apparent for some time and could not always hide his frustration. Chafing at Churchill’s intransigence, he once dropped a hint about retirement. Churchill was heard to growl: ‘Don’t worry; it’ll be yours soon.’ There was little in Eden’s character to suggest that he would be anything less than a credit to his party. He had won laurels on every field: academic, military and diplomatic. And it doubtless helped that he was handsome and with a gentle charm. But there were worrying signs. Eden showed himself to be a foot-stamper, raging when he could not get his way. And it was unkindly suggested that he ‘bored for England’. Nor was the impression Eden gave of unassuming sincerity always borne out by events.

Eden distrusted his predecessor’s Atlanticism, but equally disapproved of any involvement in the nascent European Communities. His position was perhaps that of a latter-day Salisbury: unemphatically imperialist, but emphatically Tory. He was often accused of a lack of conviction but maintained that the preservation of peace was his lodestar. In any case, his conviction and resolve were soon to be tried. As the decade progressed, it was as if the submerging empire sought to whirl him down in its wake. The British state left its possessions with many backward glances of longing and not a little brutality, though the British people themselves had other concerns. And while it has been suggested that India had become unmanageable and even uneconomical by 1947, that Gandhi and Congress were ‘pushing at an open door’, many other colonies were restive.

Kenya was one such. If India was the jewel in the diadem of empire, East Africa was the string of pearls binding it. But British rule in Africa had left many communities at odds with each other. The Kikuyu had been the dominant tribe in the Kenyan highlands before the arrival of Europeans. During the Thirties they were expropriated, the final insult. The largely abandoned houses of ‘Happy Valley’, the supreme symbol of decadent Britishness in the colony, fell to the torches of the Mau Mau in the Fifties. Bloodletting became familiar on all sides, with colonial authorities resorting to the methods that might brand them as ‘imperialists’, and the Mau Mau to those techniques that would confirm them as ‘savages’. The death toll was vast. The Mau Mau outlasted the death of their leader in 1959, and four years later came independence. In the case of Kenya, the grievances were at least clear. Far less clear was the case of Cyprus.

On 1 April 1955, Britain’s most peaceable colony received a violent calling card from a new guerrilla group, EOKA. It seemed inexplicable to the mandarins of Nicosia, let alone to those of Whitehall – Cyprus had no obvious economic problems and its people were renowned for their lack of political ardour. When EOKA attacked a police station in Limassol, the initial reaction was one of bafflement, but the complaint of the assailants was simple. Why would the British not surrender their claims on Cyprus and let it join with Greece? In his memoir Bitter Lemons, Lawrence Durrell found that his sympathies lay with the authorities: ‘as a Conservative, I saw their point. If you have an empire, you do not simply give it away.’ It was the presiding spirit, and at the time it still seemed an obvious and immutable law.

But such tempests rolled over distant seas; at home, all was calm. Eden, only weeks after Churchill’s resignation, felt ready to call an election. His confidence was vindicated. On 26 May 1955, the Conservatives again won the general election, with 345 seats to Labour’s 277. Among other considerations, the result represented something like a kiss blown to the new prime minister. The mandate was as much personal as political. Eden’s popularity sprang from his modest manner, his lack of overt jingoism and from the fact that he did not appear to be of the old guard. The age of ardent rhetoric and mighty personalities had passed, to be succeeded by that of ardent goodwill and good intentions. People were now ready for relaxed and unstated glamour.

That Eden was very much of the old guard, having been trained and educated under their systems, was overlooked. But surely the ancient conflicts had been dissolved in the post-war solution? For while the decade was Conservative in flesh, it remained Labour in soul. That a Labour epoch should result in a Conservative era was an irony that few statesmen, thinkers, housewives or labourers had the time or will to ponder. Once again, they had other concerns. The perennial needs were how to secure food, water and a roof. Beyond that, how to give them life and grace? The washing machine was a start.

36

Plays and players

Household appliances, or ‘white goods’ as they were termed, made slow and hesitant headway through British households. The glories of the ‘labour-saving device’ were not always apparent, but the washing machine undoubtedly aided the harassed housewife. It revolved and churned, slowly but assiduously, before the results were passed through a hand-operated or automatic mangle. It was the age of modern conveniences, or ‘mod cons’.

Some older traditions could still be found, although they often came in a modern guise. Families were encouraged to adopt a fashion known as ‘DIY’. The ancient art of pickling, too, was practised in households long after formal austerity had ended. It was to be expected: fridges were both expensive and cumbersome. Nor, in a climate that was scarcely subtropical, was the usefulness of these new appliances immediately clear. Still, they advanced on the swell of prosperity.

But there was a catch: these utensils were not always built with durability in mind. This was an unsettling development but perhaps an inevitable one, given that Britain had moved from being an exporting to a consuming society. A survey conducted in 1953 found housewives’ chief concern was that these new gadgets should last, but it was increasingly recognized that they did not. The market was skewed in favour of the supplier, and the interests of supplier and consumer were inherently at odds.

One of the more distinctive developments of the Fifties was the emergence first of the milk bar and then of the coffee bar. England had been a nation of tea-drinkers from time immemorial: tea, after all, had rescued England from the gin craze of the early eighteenth century and was the settling beverage of what has been called an instinctively phlegmatic nation. Coffee had been the drink of intellectuals, of the restless and the politicized, and had never gained wide popularity.

As is often the case, it was immigrants who changed this – Italian immigrants in this instance. The coffee bar, fuelled by the sprightly and galvanizing espresso machine, began to appear first in Soho, then all over London, and then throughout the land. At first glance, it bore little relation to the coffee houses of the eighteenth century, yet a family relationship can be discerned even in the variations: pipe smoke had been replaced by cigarette smoke, the stench of bodies by that of cooking grease, and the politics by music.

There were other signs of emerging affluence. In 1954 the meat ration ended, and wartime austerity fell away. Another shoot sprouted on 14 September in that very eventful year, when the first comprehensive in London, Kidbrooke School, opened its gates. Less than a decade after its inception, the grammar school system was already under assault. Children were selected, at the age of eleven, for grammar schools, secondary moderns or technical colleges. It is perhaps best understood as a mentality that saw privilege as something that must be earned. Paradoxically or not, we may see in it the impulse that led William of Wykeham, in the fourteenth century, to establish a college for boys disadvantaged by circumstance but avid for learning. It is noteworthy that neither Attlee nor his successors in the Fifties attempted to dismantle the public schools. Perhaps they had more nostalgia than some of their successors. By these lights, the grammar school meritocracy set up under Labour in the Forties was unimprovable. If universal education was to be imposed, then a basic fact had to be acknowledged: different pupils had different aptitudes. Let the academic become academics, and the handy become handymen. If you failed the eleven-plus you were simply meant for other tasks, often more socially useful.

The first objection lay in the title of the exam. Was it wise, just or even sensible to determine the future prospects of a child at eleven? The second objection, of course, was that rejected pupils could not help but feel that failure, and express it. Secondary moderns became bear pits for the unwary. The third was that the role of technical colleges was ill-defined, for all the benefits they brought to many, and as a result they were underfunded. They soon disappeared, and even now they represent an unmarked grave in the history of education.

It was a year of advances. On 2 February 1954, the government announced £212 million for road development, including the first motorways. In the same month, it announced that 347,000 new houses had been built in the previous year. They were sturdy and serviceable, if oddly designed; they tended to the triangular, particularly in the suburbs of London.

While England’s physical highways thickened and deepened, the country’s moral certainties seemed increasingly fragile and vulnerable. On 13 July, Ruth Ellis was executed for the murder of her lover, becoming the last woman to be hanged in Britain. The calm courage in her decision to admit her guilt impressed many. When the prosecuting counsel asked whether she had truly intended to kill her lover, she replied: ‘It’s obvious when I shot him I intended to kill him.’ In true eighteenth-century fashion, she dressed herself immaculately for her trial, and even dyed her hair. A campaign for her reprieve was launched, but she wanted no part of it. Her executioner, Albert Pierrepoint, wrote later that hers was the one execution for which he felt not a jot of remorse. Her record was against her, certainly, but then so was that of many men.

Ellis’s execution pricked awake a sleeping giant: the justice of capital punishment itself. The cabinet was divided on the question. The Commons were to vote for abolition in 1956, but the Lords voted against. When Pierrepoint sought the position of official executioner, it had to be explained to him that no such office existed: it was not quite English. Rab Butler, home secretary in 1957, was not at first an abolitionist, but his agonies over the choice of life or death were palpable. ‘Each decision,’ he wrote, ‘meant shutting myself up for two days or more … By the end of my time at the Home Office I began to see that the system could not go on, and present day Secretaries of State are well relieved of the terrible power to decide between life and death.’

The Homicide Act of 1957 was a compromise that satisfied no one, least of all the humane Butler. It was predicated on the notion that punishment should be exemplary rather than condign. The legal and moral incoherence of this approach would soon be apparent, and only a few years had to pass before government was obliged to choose between unravelling the tangled noose and cutting it.

It was a decade in which many supposedly inviolable traditions would be questioned. In 1957 a report on sex and sexuality was assembled. It is ironic, perhaps, that the Wolfenden Report echoed many of the concerns raised by the law it sought to overturn: the Labouchere Amendment. The issue, as before, involved prostitution. The ‘blackmailer’s charter’, as the 1885 amendment was known, was motivated in part by its author’s drive to extirpate underage prostitution. The Wolfenden Report sought to protect prostitutes from being exploited any more than they were already. Two years earlier, the Church of England had assembled a memorial on the question of sexuality, urging the government to ‘separate sin from statute’. It is hardly coincidental that the Church’s reputation for gentle compromise arose just as its political influence began to falter.

Meanwhile, the Cold War crept across minds and cabinet tables in a new Ice Age of anxiety. In its progress, it encouraged a curious doublethink. On the one hand, Stalin’s purges, the Ukrainian famine and even the Gulag itself were scarcely known; Stalin was still invoked as ‘Uncle Joe’. On the other, the Red Menace hung like a crow over a peaceful meadow. Its hour would come soon, it was whispered, and in that hour all freedoms, and perhaps all life, would be extinguished. For it, too, had the Bomb.

The Labour party under Attlee disavowed any connection with communism and even expelled members suspected of being fellow travellers. Communists were held to have powers of concealment almost preternatural in scope, and on 11 February this superstition seemed vindicated when Guy Burgess and Donald MacLean, who had disappeared in 1951, now took shape again in Moscow five years later. Of the two, it was Burgess who caught the public imagination. He was charming, erudite, handsome and clever, qualities that made his apostasy all the more puzzling. ‘Surely only the aggrieved could become socialists?’ ran the reasoning. But Burgess had no genuine grievance, beyond a conviction that his peers had failed to appreciate his gifts. Like many English radicals, Burgess quickly found that he had little taste for Russia or the Russians. Apart from anything else, he missed cricket. Again, like many radicals, his nursery was Eton College. This school has often been seen as the forcing ground of the English establishment, but any paradox dissolves under scrutiny: Eton taught self-reliance within an atmosphere of uneasy equality.

Anger howled in many alleys during this supposedly settled period. The English theatre, dominated for four hundred years by bourgeois or aristocratic concerns, was to celebrate the kitchen and the bedroom along with the fury they might nurture. On 8 May 1956, Look Back in Anger was first staged.

English theatre was previously notable for three professional playwrights and two poets. J. B. Priestley, Noël Coward and Terence Rattigan had very different styles and political opinions, but their subjects were broadly the same: middle-or upper-middle-class people whose ingenious attempts to fend off reality led to comic or tragic failures. They were schooled in the tradition that the business of art was to entertain rather than preach. While these three wrote in a style that owed at least something to the cadences of ordinary speech, T. S. Eliot and Christopher Fry wrote in verse, on explicitly or subtly religious themes. During the post-war years, overt religious affiliation was gradually being diminished. How could it draw audiences when it could scarcely keep congregations?

John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger embodied other spirits. And when Jimmy Porter, a young man fulminating against the world, savages the women in the play for their supposed distance from reality, he sets the tone for later generations. The play could only have belonged to the newly affluent, newly educated Fifties. The Royal Court used the expression ‘angry young man’ to describe Osborne, shrewdly hinting that they had coined it. But it was a term already current in 1951. And its most distinctive avatars appeared in fiction, not on the stage.

To call the movement ‘leftist’ would be reductive and inaccurate, and ‘workingclass’ will not quite serve. The opening salvo of the movement is an instance in point. John Wain’s Hurry On Down, published in 1953, tells the story of Charles Lumley, an irritant abroad, and his search for freedom and authenticity. Such a quest is ideally bourgeois, but the time was not ripe for that irony to be apparent: the middle classes were not yet rich enough. Lumley becomes a window cleaner, a chauffeur and a drug dealer. True love proves his salvation in an ending that is at best uneasily hymeneal: he and his love simply look at each other, their expressions ‘baffled and enquiring’.

In an introduction to the 1985 edition, Wain took up the gauntlet of critics who had accused him of being peripheral to the angry young men. As he pointed out, his novel predated those of others in the movement. ‘If anything,’ he wrote, ‘I started it.’ This claim can be justified on other grounds. In many ways, Charles Lumley is far more typical of the movement than either Osborne’s Jimmy Porter or Kingsley Amis’s Jim Dixon. Though in no sense a son of the tenements, Charles contrives to reinvent himself as one. Once a social fetter, a workingclass origin had become a rosette.

One of the book’s characters, an old soldier, speaks of how the working classes had ‘got above themselves since the war’. C. S. Lewis, too, felt that the working classes had been ‘flattered’ under the post-war settlement. If so, it was a flattery that many were eager to accept. A superstitious dread grew around what had once been known as ‘middle-class values’, even as the middle classes spread inward from the suburbs and so deep into the heart of national life that they seemed close to comprising the majority.

Like the post-war consensus itself, the phenomenon of the angry young men was in part the creature of public perception. In any case, it would have defeated the object of those authors to be placed in a group; it was a confused and fissiparous trend. And what provoked the anger? Partly the perceived failures of the political class, but primarily the continuing existence of class in the first place. The culture of aristocracy had gone up in steam, and a mist of gentility fell. ‘True’ democracy lay as far off as ever. The promises of the Left had addled, and those of the Right were so much chaff. England seemed a drab, chiffon-choked, tea-and-cake-smothered boutique, all too often with a ‘CLOSED’ sign. So what remained for a reflective soul but indiscriminate anger? As Kingsley Amis suggested in later years, ‘annoyance’ might be the better term. Amis himself made a literary career of it, and his protagonists evince this quality to a high degree. In Lucky Jim, Jim Dixon ends his lecture on ‘Merrie England’ with a comically drunken diatribe directed at ‘The Esperanto crowd’, but the rage expressed is curiously apolitical. In this, Amis was as much of his nation as of his class. The English rarely maintain intensity in political matters – sooner or later, their instinct is to wipe the sweat from the demagogue’s collar and propose a soothing cup of tea.

The post-war years had brought fables of spiritual or material collapse, from That Hideous Strength to Brave New World to Nineteen Eighty-Four. During the Fifties, the novel seemed to be settling back to its journalistic roots – quotidian in subject, unpretentious in style – but the zeitgeist is a wayward wind. Among writers of fiction, another response was offered to the bewilderments of the post-war world, which was to fly above it. In 1955, The Return of the King, the last instalment of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, was published. It was the resurrection of heroic romance, tempered by its author’s memories of war.

It tells of a small, unregarded race of Middle-earth, the ‘hobbits’, who ‘arise to shake the counsels of the great’. The freedom of the world hinges upon the destruction of something tiny, beautiful and evil, a ring forged by a fallen angel. While elves, men and dwarves fight, two hobbits are tasked with the destruction of the great destroyer. A whole world, formed of its author’s experiments in language, came into being, to the extent that if anyone were to point out that ‘Middle-earth’ is only a translation of the Norse ‘Mittlegard’, the hearer would respond with a shrug. It was there, whatever its origins.

For the English journalist Bernard Levin, it offered a beautiful and salutary reminder that the ‘meek will inherit the earth’; for the American critic Edmund Wilson, it was ‘juvenile trash’, a story of good boys being rewarded. In spite of the naysayers, the popularity and influence of The Lord of the Rings grew to unprecedented heights. Tolkien himself, a scholar and devout Catholic, was later to find his work taken up as a banner by most unlikely allies, a group that came to be known as the ‘hippies’.

In 1958, T. H. White offered a quite different vision of the past and of how it should be interpreted. Like Tolkien, he was an academic, and unappeasable loathing for the cant of politicians and the horrors of imperialism also bind the two. But there the comparisons cease. Where The Lord of the Rings progressed from being a story for children to a novel for adults to a romance for our ancestors, The Once and Future King was postmodernist, which so soon after modernism was a remarkable feat. A picaresque version of the story of King Arthur, it subverts everything possible in the revered legend. Here, Arthur is ‘Wart’, an idealistic but callow boy who is to be sent to Oxford in the Dark Ages. Merlyn is an eccentric tutor with birds in his hair, whose wisdom comes from having lived backwards.

Beneath the aphorisms and persiflage, White’s book hews its way into the rotten heart of statecraft and of power. Anachronisms abound, and the last is the most terrible. Mordred’s troops use shells on London, at which juncture Arthur knows that the age of chivalry is truly dead. In time, ‘fantasy’ would be the lazy catch-all term for this genre. It is one that both authors would have rejected – they were addressing reality.

37

Riots of passage

In an age renowned for its dourness, foliage seemed to sprout from the furniture. Roses were stitched on bedspreads, lilies on sofas and orchids on ‘pouffes’. Images of the countryside enriched an increasingly suburban England. That the countryside was in retreat lent the fashion an added poignancy. But if interiors had become cosier, public spaces had grown unforgiving. The ersatz opulence of rose-scattered sofas was met by a countertrend in public spaces, owing much to the new severity of American and continental fashions. Clean, sharp lines were favoured in cafes, clubs and office blocks, as if the world of science fiction had already landed.

Another group of angry young men began to appear; they may have been rebels without causes, but they possessed flags and war cries in abundance. In 1953, vague references to the ‘New Edwardian style’ sharpened to a name: the Teddy boys had arrived. They bore little relation to the clean, pretty boys of the Eighties who would wear bright colours and winsome smiles – the ‘Teds’ of the Fifties did not set out to please. It had begun as an upper-class trend. After the war, tailors had attempted to encourage trade by resurrecting the fashions of the Edwardian era. Their market was the wealthy, but workingclass teenagers developed a taste for the new style. How could they afford it? Either by paying in instalments or by sticking to the cheapest but most distinctive items of the look. Its prodigality spoke of a new phenomenon in an affluent working class. The Teds did not merely copy the clothing of the 1900s – they parodied it, adding elements such as the ‘zoot suit’ favoured by black gangs in the United States. A mirage of respectability would become the conduit for rebellion. Quickly, and cheerfully, they established a reputation for violence. The Garston ‘blood baths’ of Liverpool, where Teddy boy gangs regularly clashed, were infamous.

But not all teenage boys were Teds, and not all Teds were members of gangs. The stigma was largely unearned; it was, above all, a style. More significant was the role of the press in creating that stigma. English youth had been cynosures of disapproval since the glory days of the apprentices in the seventeenth century. The Teds were heirs to the apprentices, in spirit if not in diligence, and thus a fear of supposedly feral youth was again coaxed from its cave. No one who stood out in those days could be trusted, particularly when they wore a costume which was considered to be ‘as outlandish as it was sinister’.

Here, Edwardian elegance was twisted. In place of fob watches, the Teds sported bicycle chains, their purpose unsettlingly clear. The tight ‘drainpipe’ trousers stopped just below the ankle. Broad, crêpe-covered ‘beetle-crushers’ stood in place of brogues. And then there was the famous hairstyle, on which two birds made their mark: a cockatoo’s comb in front and a ‘duck’s arse’ behind. Just as the last strands of aristocratic influence were falling between the shears, the dandy had been resurrected, though now he was workingclass.

And in this perhaps lay the true offence. For though it was only ever hinted at, many must have felt that it was simply not ‘proper’ for the working classes to ape the dress of their betters. Swinging their chains, combing their hair, locking and unlocking their razors, the Teds paced the streets. Their uniform was their own rather than the garb of a trade, for they had no trade. Thus we may truly speak of the first teenage ‘style’, not that they were in the slightest measure revolutionary. If anything, they could show a vein of fascism. Events later in the decade were to bear this out.

Whether the Teddy boy was as great a source of societal pollution as many believed is doubtful; it was more significant that pollution as a whole had become an urgent matter of public health. When the mist of the Thames met the murk of the chimneys in a fog of eerie green, silence and blindness fell. For years, Londoners had told visitors not to trouble themselves about it, but any such insouciance lost its charm in 1952. In that year, the ‘London Smog’ claimed 4,000 lives. The gay, gaudy city that Monet had painted less than a century before was obliged to clear its lungs. On 5 July 1955, the Clean Air Act was passed, a somewhat delayed response to the smog that had struck in the coronation year.

A simple trade agreement between France and Germany in the late Forties was now taking root as the European Communities began to cohere. The cabinet’s Economic Policy Committee remained unconvinced on Europe. It was ‘against the interests of the United Kingdom to join the Common Market’, it asserted in November 1955. This was understandable. There was a confidence that England, supported by the Commonwealth and with her mighty transatlantic ally beside her, could retain her former stance.

In 1956, the island received a double irruption from East and West. Khrushchev and Bulganin arrived from the Soviet Union to begin an official visit to the UK. Little came of it in practical terms, but its symbolic significance was enough. Bullish, brash but shrewd, Khrushchev had nothing in common with Eden, who on this occasion offered little but a blustering assurance that Britain would go to war to guard her oil reserves. The visit was further marred by the mysterious loss of a British soldier around the wreck of a Russian submarine. The other irruption was the showing of Rock Around the Clock, a short American film about nothing in particular. Its significance was to be far more than symbolic, since it was the first rock-and-roll musical extravaganza.

The first signs could be felt of a fraying in the post-war consensus. On 1 June 1956, Macmillan warned Eden of financial collapse. Inflation would continue if Britain continued to live beyond its means. The promise of full employment had been central to the Attlee settlement, but, coupled with defence spending and overseas commitments, it was proving hard to sustain. From the disenchanted and disenfranchised Left came a new approach. In that year, Anthony Crosland’s The Future of Socialism was published. Crosland remains an ambiguous figure in the annals of the Labour movement, and this in part reflects the ambiguity of his thought. His book was well regarded at the time, but it is little remembered now. The oversight is easily explained: his ideas were taken up, almost forty years later, by a politician far more ambitious and considerably more accommodating.

Crosland argued that the post-war consensus was in danger of failing its own goals. Nationalization had become an empty shibboleth. Socialists were in danger of mistaking means for ends. They must remember that their primary mission was to abolish poverty, not inequality. He wrote: ‘We need not only higher exports and old-age pensions, but more open-air cafes, brighter and gayer streets at night, later closing hours for public houses, more local repertory theatres, better and more hospitable hoteliers and restaurateurs, brighter and cleaner eating houses, more riverside cafes, more pleasure gardens on the Battersea model, more murals and pictures in public places.’ There had been too much flattening in the socialist vision; it was time for humanity to be lifted. In one respect, Crosland’s insights were tacitly acknowledged to be unanswerable. Nationalization needed nourishment, after all. The trope ‘while stocks last’ increasingly applied not just to necessities in the home, but to those that fed and fired the household. How long could coal, gas or electricity last?

Perhaps Calder Hall, now known as Sellafield, was named by someone with a sense of historical irony. No hall of the fading nobility needed to be demolished for this nuclear power station to replace it. Thus, on 17 October 1956, it became Britain’s first nuclear power station. The young queen opened it ‘with pride’. England was ready, in principle, to have her firesides warmed and her streets made safe by what Oppenheimer, the inventor of the Bomb, called ‘the destroyer of worlds’.

In 1956, England was to be weighed and found wanting. Far away, in a protectorate that had grown tired of being protected, a man had seized power – with cunning, bullets and a brilliant smile as his weapons. Gamal Abdel Nasser had plans for Egypt, and indeed for the whole Arab world. In what was proclaimed as a simple assertion of sovereignty, on 26 July 1956 he nationalized the Suez Canal. This was taken badly in Westminster.

Anthony Eden was in many respects an instinctive diplomat, with an almost preternatural gift for languages and for compromise. He had no obvious reason to clash with Nasser. They were both patriots, after their fashion; both knew well the limits and dangers of militarism. But Nasser was a consummate opportunist. In quietly shifting from Egyptian nationalism to pan-Arabism, he had amassed far greater moral resources than his British counterpart could boast.

When Nasser took the Canal, for many countries the chief artery of oil into Europe, Eden was moved to respond. And his response was unequivocally warlike and strangely personal. What moved him to compare his former ally to Mussolini and Hitler remains a puzzle. He was to claim in his wilderness years that he could not stand by and see the lessons of the Thirties forgotten. Whatever his motives, on 5 November 1956, Britain and France invaded Egypt.

The dishonesty in the plan was palpable even then. Israel was to launch an attack on Egypt, and then France and Britain would ‘intervene’ before leaving an armed force for the maintenance of peace, the cooling of tempers and the reopening of Suez. Israel had some reason for her actions; the other aggressors had only an excuse. Besides, too much in the plan had been predicated on the support of the United States. Churchill might have been able to coax them, but he would have had a deep well of respect to draw from. Eden did not, and his hunger to bring down Nasser led him to disregard the most glaring tokens of American unease. The United States had in any case made clear its opposition to any act that might so much as smell of European colonialism, and Eisenhower denied any American support for the Suez adventure. With that, a barren cause became a lost one. As they were advancing down the Canal, British and French troops were given the order: cease fire.

Reactions to the debacle were mixed. People who had never cared about the empire were moved to wonder why Britannia invicta had been worsted. Eden attempted to brazen it out but heart trouble struck, a misfortune seen by some as less an act of God than of expediency. Perhaps they were right, and his life was not in fact as deeply in peril as his doctor suggested. He never disavowed his decision over Suez. Perhaps, having committed himself so far, he could not withdraw. Eden was not stupid, but his judgement was bewildered by the fear of being considered a weakling. Churchill foresaw it all and feared for his successor: ‘Poor Anthony’ was his verdict. In any event, on 9 January 1957, Eden resigned.

It was as well that he did. The empire he had known and loved had begun to haemorrhage. The Mau Mau in Kenya were unbroken, despite the capture and execution of their leader. The EOKA fighters in Cyprus still raged. And on 6 March 1957, Ghana won independence, precipitating the end of British colonial rule in West Africa. Suez is often seen as the moment when the British Empire collapsed. It was not: the Second World War had rendered the empire unsustainable. But it represented the moment when the absence of something never before valued began to be felt.

Having lost its empire, Britain had to find its strength, or ‘credibility’, in other arenas. Britain might have established Calder Hall for innocent, or at least neutral purposes, but the nuclear arms race must still be run. On 15 May 1957, Britain tested its first hydrogen bomb. The battle to achieve this was painful for everyone, whatever their political stripe. Churchill, who had seen more wars than any of his peers, was horrified at this new development.

Aside from building houses and dismantling empires, caring for the old and for the young, and receiving guests that it had once known only as servants or slaves, England had to address the perennial problem of how to direct and mobilize its citizens. Inspired as much by the German as by the American example, the first motorway was laid. On 5 December 1958, the M6, the Preston Bypass, was opened and the ‘motorway age’ was thus tacitly inaugurated. And in 1959, the M1 was opened. The motorway was to acquire almost mythic connotations. In later years, it became, like the Thames, a cynosure of wonder.

To call national service a ‘rite of passage’ would be simplistic or misleading. For many it had the character of a pointless hiatus, robbing the participants of precious years that could have been spent working or playing. For others it was an exhilarating introduction to manhood and responsibility. In either case, it was almost impossible to avoid. A nation that had only recently emerged from war needed to keep its spine stiff and its sinews supple. National service was a typical example of how a temporary emergency can prompt a major alteration. Britain still had the peace to keep in Europe, allies to support and an empire to protect. It was promoted as a kind of trade-off for all the benefits of the welfare state. But the allies proved unstable and the empire untenable.

The training itself was if anything harsher than that imposed in wartime – there was an illusion to protect, along with the remains of empire. Dangers there were, whether roaring or skulking, and the still renowned British military was needed to face them. But in any case Britain needed its youth to be healthy, if they were not to end up like Teddy boys, shiftless and disobedient. In the event, the Teds flourished under national service. The hair was a problem, of course, but it could be hidden. In fact, the style was the only real objection of the training officers. One observed: ‘We’re a proud lot in the Airborne and feel that these modern fashions that a few of the chaps like rather lets (sic) the mob down.’

Other contemporaries were less predictable. Among the few who mourned Eden’s departure deeply were four young men whose brand of humour created at a stroke the modern alternative tradition. Eden’s consonants, snipped off by his protruding front teeth, had been succeeded by the languorous vowels of Harold Macmillan, which were far less susceptible to imitation. The Goons, the lords of Fifties radio comedy, must have sighed in disappointment at the gently genial new PM. They came together above a fruiterer’s shop in Shepherd’s Bush, and their backgrounds were as difficult to represent as the new age itself. Michael Bentine was an Old Etonian, Peter Sellers a Jewish boy from Muswell Hill, Harry Secombe was a Welshman, and Spike Milligan had been born in India, his father an army captain.

Unlike many later comedians, the Goons had no interest in innuendo, or indeed in sexual matters of any sort. It was comedy in the tradition of Ben Jonson or the Restoration playwrights, with the difference that the types shown by the Goons were all not merely eccentric but palpably insane. The nation had excitement and opportunity, but too little in the way of salutary madness, which now the Goons unveiled. To get life insurance, all one had to do was to ‘get deceased’, for example. And the names were a feast. Denis Bloodnok, always blaming his wind on ‘curried eggs’, tells us nothing and suggests everything. And it was comedy for radio, for airwaves that could carry at last something more bracing than cheerful propaganda and interminable organ music. The voices, whether shrieking or whining, bellowing or wheedling, filled the home with brisk and contrary winds of every sort.

A forgotten irony lies in the notion of the post-war consensus, since in truth it had been developed under both Labour and Tory auspices. By the mid-Fifties, however, notions of a grand ideological confrontation existed only as fodder for journalists. The belief that the state must support its citizens if it is to demand anything of them had been tacitly absorbed by all parties. The post-war consensus was at last in place. The only question was whether it could hold its own.

Nationalization of services was almost complete by the mid-Fifties. To return the means, and the fruits, of production to the producers had been the grand mission. But how much had really changed? The children’s book series Thomas the Tank Engine by Wilbert and Christopher Awdry spanned three decades but began in 1945. The anthropomorphic engines have a fond mentor in the rotund shape of the Fat Director, Sir Topham Hatt, Bt. In the tale of James the Red Engine, the Fat Director becomes the Fat Controller. Clearly, nationalization has struck. It had been a project advanced as much by Conservatives as by socialists, and it was not always easy to see how the central cast had altered. The Fifties saw a gradual acceptance of the post-war settlement. Government cooperation with the union movement continued, and even accelerated, under the Conservatives. At this point, all appeared to be in agreement.

With widening education, however, came a certain unease. Was to be educated to accept the thirty pieces of silver? Such a notion would have seemed strange a hundred years earlier, when an education was a source of pride for many of the working class. But the working class was itself in transition, culturally and racially. The word ‘minority’ also changed its meaning in the Fifties. Before, it had usually referred to the Welsh or to women; now it turned outwards, to signify the immigrant. The notion of a ‘white’ England was most often a chimera; there had been black communities in England long before the Windrush generation, just as there had been black servicemen in the war. And as for the empire, the English knew it as something in the papers – now they learned of it through their neighbours.

But the riots that broke in Notting Hill in the summer of 1958 had nothing to do with neighbours. It was a hot, hate-filled summer. One black resident recalled the riots thus: ‘We could feel the pressure was there … You were constantly being threatened on the streets.’ ‘Kill the niggers!’ rose the cry on Portobello Road and Colville Road. It was a grisly echo of the Thirties, when ‘We’ve got to get rid of the Yids’ cawed from the throats of blackshirts. Caribbeans were targeted, and their property attacked. But then, after years of battening down the hatches, they turned. ‘We were getting the worst of it, until a few of us decided to fight back … And when they came, we attacked before they did and they ran away.’ The police did their best, but the tide had turned. As well as bruisable skin, ‘minorities’ had heart, muscle and spirit. It was not the Teddy boys’ finest hour. They participated gleefully in the baiting of Caribbeans, but were then repelled.

Racism was not the only neurosis to afflict the country. As Hugh Gaitskell saw it, there was a creeping undercurrent of anti-Americanism too. ‘It is easy to see,’ he said, ‘how powerful anti-American sentiment can be when to this already difficult relationship is added the genuine fear felt by many people that America will land us all in war.’ It was prophetic in many respects, but he need not have worried. Beyond the environs of Westminster, the people were largely untroubled by the concerns Gaitskell ascribed to them. By the Fifties, any residual resentment towards American culture was balanced by a hunger for its boons. And the music sent over the airwaves was a boon indeed. Whatever was resented in the fiscal debt to the United States, the youth of England appreciated this inrush of hope.

First from the jukeboxes of the milk bars and then from the cafes, in the music that cooed over the airwaves there was an influence both old and new. It was the brash, generous, overbearing confluent of the United States. During the Second World War, willing girls and reluctant boys had begun to notice that Americans seemed to have it all, and the Fifties did everything to encourage that impression. In 1956 Bill Haley & His Comets released ‘Rock Around the Clock’, an example of the new trend known as rock ’n’ roll. The genre had numerous parents, all of them black, but political considerations required that its ambassadors be white. Haley himself was a plump little man with a kiss-curl on his forehead, fronting what was, in essence, a jazz band. Yet his energy and panache submerged all objections.

He was followed by Elvis Presley, or ‘the King’, as he became known. Songs like ‘Blue Suede Shoes’ and ‘Hound Dog’ would not have passed muster later, when musicianship and wordcraft were prized, but when sung in the Elvis purr and accompanied by gyrations so suggestive as to give the singer the sobriquet ‘Elvis the Pelvis’, they achieved mass hysteria and Olympian sales. It also helped that he was not merely handsome but beautiful, exciting but unthreatening. This was not, of course, the rock ’n’ roll that purists recognized; for them, Chuck Berry was the king. In lifting the old blues from the piano to the guitar, he had become the founder of a genre. This would be remembered in the slumbering years.

The blaze of excitement soon settled in England. Sooner or later, the instinct of a young audience is to scramble onto the stage and join in, but despite its workingclass origins, rock ’n’ roll needed instruments that were far beyond the means of English youth. Pianos, double basses, drums and even guitars lay at an impossible distance. It seemed as if an old law would reassert itself: the passion dies that cannot be performed.

The name ‘skiffle’ was a dialect word from the West Country, meaning ‘a mess’. In the United States, the term came to be applied to a kind of music in which only the most rudimentary instruments were employed. Appropriately enough for such a ramshackle genre, skiffle came to England by accident. Chris Barber had formed a jazz band, and its new banjoist was Lonnie Donegan. They were recording a disc but had run out of songs to play. Donegan had a suggestion: ‘What about some skiffle?’

In the United States, its homeland, skiffle had already been forgotten. Unlike jazz or the blues, it was barely a genre. This was interlude music at best, a distraction proposed when there was nothing worthwhile to be played, no real musicians to play it and few instruments to play it with. Nonetheless, the other two unpacked their instruments. And then, in what has been called his ‘pseudoblues wail’, Donegan broke into ‘Rock Island Line’. No one knows when the song was written, but all agree that the songwriter was a convict, and the song is one of yearning for escape.

The song tells of an engine driver who successfully smuggles a stash of pig iron past a railway toll gate. A more American theme could scarcely be imagined, but that was the point. Not Bill Haley & His Comets, nor Elvis, nor even Buddy Holly so galvanized the British young. They were haloed at an almost unbridgeable remove from British realities. In any case, white rock ’n’ roll, or ‘rockabilly’, the music offered by Haley and Elvis, could be a curiously sedate affair; it was music for joyful or even elegant dancers. Perhaps, when the Teddy boys tore up the cinema seats, they were not so much fired by rock ’n’ roll as impatient with it. Skiffle might have been rudimentary, but it was never sedate.

Moreover, Donegan, short, thin, ostentatiously workingclass and British, was ‘one of us’ – if he could do it, so could everyone. And then there was the simple rush of the tune, and the wild, whooping triumph in its chorus. The skiffle craze was sparked. As has been many times remarked, ‘We owe it all to Lonnie Donegan.’ The principle was simple. If you wanted rhythm, you scraped a washboard; if a double bass, then you strung a washing line to a sweeping brush and rammed it into a tea chest. If you couldn’t afford a guitar, you could surely get a banjo. A comb-and-paper kazoo could serve for a harmonica, and puffing into a jug created a sound not unlike a tuba. In short, you could create such music on your own.

Skiffle itself might have died without issue. The sound was thin and scratchy, and the ease with which it could be played made it restrictive for serious talents. That it did not die is in some part due to a man nicknamed ‘Dr Death’, whose real name was Paul Lincoln. On 22 April 1956, he and Ray Hunter refounded a club in Old Compton Street as a coffee bar, ‘The 2i’, with a music venue downstairs. There was little or no seating. The tiny stage for the musicians was built from milk crates and planks. Even the microphone had been a relic of the Boer War. Performers were paid, so the legend ran, in coffee and Coca-Cola, and alcohol was not served. Skiffle could not have wished for a warmer cradle. It did not last long into the succeeding decade, and in this it was typical of the coffee bar boom. Espresso bars still flourished, but no longer as conduits of musical talent. They would never die, but they would have to adapt.

38

North and south

On 8 October 1959, the Conservatives under Macmillan won the election by 365 seats to Labour’s 258. The unofficial campaign slogan was ‘We’ve Never Had It So Good’. Macmillan had proved himself worthy – now he had only to make ‘it’ even better, whatever ‘it’ was. He had beguiled and persuaded the nation by virtue of his Edwardian charm, but he remained in certain respects a little-known figure.

‘A born rebel’ was how Lloyd George described the young Macmillan. The young of Sixties England might have found it hard to spot a rebel in their prime minister, but those living further afield would not have been surprised. By 1960, decolonization was already underway, but the process had been halting. Macmillan had always believed in the nascent strength of the smaller Commonwealth nations, and on 6 January he reaffirmed this in a speech in Ghana. The choice of location was deliberate: Ghana had won its freedom by peaceful means, its new leader following the example of Gandhi. This, coupled with the sobering examples of chaos and bloodshed in former French and Portuguese possessions, led the shrewd and compassionate Macmillan to conclude that empire could not coexist with African nationalism.

This speech passed largely unnoticed, but when he repeated its central points in the parliament of apartheid South Africa, the world took note. After thanking the relevant dignitaries, Macmillan proceeded: ‘At such a time it is natural and right that you should pause to take stock of your position – to look back at what you have achieved, and to look forward to what lies ahead.’ The tone was that of a kindly headmaster sending his boys off into the wider world, and was received as such. However, his next observation garnered him a good-natured laugh. ‘This afternoon I hope to see something of your wine-growing industry, which so far I have only admired as a consumer.’

The following section could have been received as a polite nothing, but for the more attentive there was a bite beneath: ‘We in Britain are proud of the contribution we have made to this remarkable achievement. Much of it has been financed by British capital.’ He praised the South African contribution to the two world wars, saying, ‘As a soldier, I know personally the value of the contribution your forces made to victory in the cause of freedom. I know something too of the inspiration which General Smuts brought to us in Britain in our darkest hours.’ The reference to Smuts, a hero of Anglo-South African relations but no friend of apartheid, would not have been missed. Then came the sweetener: ‘Today, your readiness to provide technical assistance to the less well-developed parts of Africa is of immense help to the countries that receive it.’ At last, he moved to the image for which the speech would be remembered. South Africa, he said, was ready ‘to play your part in the new Africa of today … Ever since the break-up of the Roman Empire, one of the constant facts of political life in Europe has been the emergence of independent nations … Today the same thing is happening in Africa, and the most striking of all the impressions that I have formed since I left London a month ago is of the strength of this African national consciousness.’ Macmillan’s voice rose in declamation as he rapped the lectern. ‘The wind of change is blowing through this continent. And whether we like it or not, this growth of national consciousness is a political fact. And we must all accept it as a fact, and our national policies must take account of it.’

There was silence in the hall at this blasphemy. But Macmillan, the consummate performer, was prepared. His message, if not his tone, became unctuous. ‘Of course you understand this better than anyone; you are sprung from Europe, the home of nationalism. And here in Africa you have yourselves created a new nation. Indeed in the history of our times you will be recorded as the first of the African nationalists.’ It was a masterly performance – this was logic not so much employed as deployed. And with his most resonant image behind him, Macmillan came to the true point. ‘We may sometimes be tempted to say “Mind your own business”. But in these days I would expand the old saying, so that it runs, “Mind your own business, but mind how it affects my business, too.”’

For of course, if South Africa continued along its present course, mayhem would be the result. Macmillan concluded with what may best be described as a sermon.

Our aim has been … not only to raise the material standards of life, but to create a society which respects the rights of individuals – a society in which men are given the opportunity to grow to their full stature. And that must in our view include the opportunity of an increasing share in political power and responsibility; a society in which individual merit, and individual merit alone, is the criterion for a man’s advancement, whether political or economic … Those of us who by the grace of the electorate are temporarily in charge of affairs in my country and yours, we fleeting transient phantoms of history, we have no right to sweep aside on this account the friendship that exists between our countries.