The Pursuit of Laughter (32 page)

Would an Englishman’s thesis on the burning and looting of American cities by
rioters
in 1967, or on the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, be any better than Mr
Benewick’s? In order to rank as history, it would certainly need to be more carefully researched.

Political Violence and Public Order
, Benewick, R.
Books and Bookmen
(1969)

The dust jacket of
To Build a New Jerusalem
is as old-fashioned as the title. Watched by the founding fathers, from Marx to Attlee, a grim looking ‘worker’ emerges, brilliant sun behind him, from the ruins of Westminster, St Paul’s, and some factories. Below is a
photograph
of a vast crowd, wearing caps, hats, or even boaters, which must be very ancient. Superimposed, giving the V sign, is Neil Kinnock, strayed into the revolutionary past.

A.J. Davies has written a fair, useful history of the Labour movement, its idealism and its internal quarrels, so bitter at one time as to make it unfit to govern. During the long years in opposition it has shed its most unpopular beliefs, Clause 4, and unilateralism. The word socialism seems to be taboo, presumably because of socialism’s economic failure wherever it has been seriously tried. ‘Labourism’ is what A.J. Davies calls it, just when the name Labour is under threat, as being outworn.

What he calls ‘the battle of Cable Street’ in 1936, never in fact took place. The British Union obeyed a police order to about turn before contact with its enemies, to the great disappointment of all. There was no fight, let alone a battle; just a few scuffles of left-wing supporters with the police dispersing them. It is a myth, believed as myths so often are.

Can Labour win this time? We shall very soon know. It is anybody’s guess.

Willie Hamilton is a Durham miner’s son, famous for disliking the royal family and for trumpeting his republican views in and out of Parliament.
Blood on the Walls
is a fearsome title, which puts us in mind of a cellar at Ekaterinburg, or torture in some vile prison. But Hamilton’s rather engaging book is not about red revolution, and contains no diatribes against the Queen. All his hatred is concentrated upon Mrs Thatcher. As she has retired, like Willie Hamilton himself, it is already out of date.

He thinks our monarchy is unnecessary, he would like to see it abolished, along with the House of Lords, but he is realist enough to know the huge majority would never allow any such thing to happen. He only wishes the Queen would pay taxes, which is rather tame after so much sound and fury for so many years.

He describes the frightful life of a miner in the 20s, and of the miner’s wife, his
parents
. There were no pit-head baths. She washed the coal dust off him in her kitchen. She cleaned and cooked and baked, there was one cold tap, she struggled to feed her family on a miserable wage, and to buy them clothes and boots. Baldwin’s wicked deflation in 1926, the starving of the miners into submission after the General Strike collapsed, all this is well told and grim enough, even if the blood on the wall comes from the bugs
which infested their wretched slum.

Anyone with enthusiasm for the good old days should read about Willie Hamilton’s childhood. It explains his dislike of Mrs T. Nobody could pretend the grinding poverty, the bitterness of unemployment, the frightful conditions of those days were the fault of the royal family. The Tories were in power and they did nothing.

To Build a New Jerusalem: The Labour Movement from the 1880s to the 1990s
, Davies, A.J.;
Blood on the Walls
, Hamilton, W.
Evening Standard
(1992)

The Germans have a proverb: ‘He who betrays once, will always betray.’ Or in other words, a traitor is a traitor. The game of the foxes proves the truth of this again and again. Spies, double spies, triple spies, they probably hardly cared whom they
double-crossed
in the murky world at war wherein they flourished.

The game of the foxes is a dirty game, without rules. The stakes are high because you play with death, the rewards are meagre because nobody can acknowledge the cat’s paw. Only half trusted by his superiors, the spy ends by being completely untrustworthy, a flawed man. From the humble agent right up to the very top there is a vileness met with in no other profession. Admiral Canaris, for example, sometimes served his country and at other times sought to betray it.

According to the author, who has had a good look at the secret files of the
Abwehr
, Canaris tried to recruit agents in England among members of British Union. He failed, as anyone familiar with English politics could have told him he was bound to do. There is a whole world of difference between the political opposition of patriotic men to a war which, win or lose, they considered was certain to be disastrous for their own country, and helping its enemy to secure its defeat. There has been an English tradition of
political
opposition to war; Charles James Fox’s attitude during the Napoleonic wars is one example. Mosley and his party followed this tradition, during the first months of the
second
world war, sometimes called the phoney war period.

Quite different from ordinary spying is the skilled work of decoding and
unscrambling
. When Churchill, ensconced in his bomb-proof shelter, spoke on the telephone to Roosevelt in Washington, both men imagined that their conversations were private because their hot line was scrambled to the last degree. Sometimes, apparently, they talked frivolously, but often what they said was of great value to the Germans, and in
particular
to the U-boats. One guesses, given the nature of the two men, that they talked far more than was strictly necessary. Every word was heard and recorded in Germany; not by the
Abwehr
, but by the Post Office. It was the triumph of the German equivalent of our Postmaster General, Reichsminister Ohnesorge, and a brilliant team of engineers.
They invented an unscrambler, so that within a couple of hours the Allied leaders’
conversations
were received in the appropriate quarters.

The British government also had its successes. One of these was Operation Doublecross, the object of which was to mislead the Luftwaffe into dropping its bombs on non-strategic targets that would in no way impede the war effort. This it brilliantly did. The choice of the actual targets lay with the politicians, and Mr Churchill was considered ‘rather callous’. This ‘led to a violent clash between the Prime Minister and Herbert Morrison.’ Morrison objected to the selection of working class residential districts as
targets
for the bombs.

Now that we are all friends again in what we hope is to become united Europe, it may be of interest to the Germans to learn that long before he had the opportunity to order the blanket fire-bombing of German civilians in non-strategic open cities, Mr Churchill had chosen English working class residential districts as targets for the Luftwaffe.
C’est la guerre
. Mr Farago calls Mr Churchill’s Operation Doublecross ‘somewhat fiendish’. But a very great many of the doings recorded in this exciting book are fiendish to a degree, and it shows there is no limit to the devilish ingenuity of the civilised countries once they are bent upon destroying one another.

For the politicians, and even for the soldiers, all that matters is to win. If you win you are given a statue; a doubtful benefit, perhaps, for we lack a Verrocchio. But if you lose, everything from run of the mill contingency planning to the deliberate bombing of
civilians
may land you in some Nuremberg of the victors’ devising.

The Game of the Foxes
, Farago, L.
Books and Bookmen
(1972)

The impact of Hitler on English politics was heavy. During the 30s, policy practically came to mean foreign policy. Recently published figures show that from 1933 to 1937 the Cabinet discussed foreign and imperial affairs 1,480 times, compared with 11 for
education
, 20 for housing and 47 for unemployment. The old familiar quarrels about protection versus free trade, or whether the prayerbook should be revised, faded into insignificance. As the author points out, in the 20s few could be found to defend the manifest anomalies of the Versailles treaty; the Labour party in particular was loud in demanding revision. But when Hitler came upon the scene and wanted the talk translated into action there was a lukewarm response both from England and from the League of Nations.

Collective security had been the keystone of League policy. It was an excellent idea, but when it came under pressure at the time of sanctions against Italy over Abyssinia it
melted
away until England remained as its sole protagonist. Since the English had no wish to fight for Abyssinia, sanctions were a half-hearted fiasco, and collective security collapsed
and was shown to be an illusion.

The 1935 plebiscite in the Saar was another turning point. English newspapers had argued as to whether the Saarlanders would vote for the status quo (League of Nations rule) or for France. English soldiers kept guard to ensure the secrecy of the ballot. A
little
over ninety per cent voted for incorporation in Hitler’s Reich. This was about the usual proportion in plebiscites within Germany, but the English press always pointed out that these votes were faked, therefore it came as a surprise. After this disappointing result in the Saar nobody wanted plebiscites in disputed territories: self-determination, once a
popular
League idea, had lost its savour in the democracies.

With the failure of collective security and the certainty that self-determination would mean that the brand-new country Czechoslovakia and the artificially swollen Romania and Poland would lose extensive territories which should never have been allotted to them in the first place, Britain’s foreign policy was in disarray.

The author, by means of innumerable quotations from his victims, has no difficulty in showing the politicians of the 30s in an unfavourable light. Never enamoured of them myself, it is ever so disheartening to see the whole lot, from Lloyd George and Churchill down to the very small fry, so avid of place and power, so jealous, disloyal and
hypocritical
, and so notably lacking in the essential talent of a statesman: that of being able to see a little further than the next man.

The vitally important question is, should England have intervened in a frontier dispute between Germany and Czechoslovakia? Was it a British interest? Was Britain’s frontier on the Rhine, the Oder or the Vistula? It is merely an academic question; we cannot ‘learn from history’ because England was so weakened by the war that such a role is now unthinkable.

Chamberlain’s whole policy may have been misconceived, but according to his lights he did his best for peace. He had to take into account not only ‘Herr Hitler and his
methods
’, deprecated by everybody, but also France, the alliance between France and Russia, Italy, the Balkans, Japan and its aggression in the Far East, and above all the strains and stresses within the Tory party and its unfortunate accretions (a legacy of 1931) of National Labour and National Liberals. The rump of the Labour party in parliament and in
journals
like the
New Statesman
demanded intervention in every war from Spain to Manchuria, while at the same time ardently advocating the disarmament of Britain. Chamberlain was sniped at from all sides, although he was encouraged by a mild popularity among
non-politicians
; it is doubtful whether any available leader of the Conservative party could have done much more than he did.