The World at War (55 page)

Several wartime episodes did not reflect well on politicians in Britain, most notably the demands by prominent leftists like Sir Stafford Cripps, Aneurin Bevan and Michael Foot that as soon as the Soviet Union was invaded by Germany, British lives should be risked in an invasion of Europe that would, at that time, certainly have failed. Nor did the war prevent inaccurate sniping from the press. On 5 March 1942 the
Daily Mirror
printed a cartoon produced by the columnist William 'Cassandra' Connor and his friend Philip Zee that showed a sailor clinging to wreckage with the caption 'The price of petrol has been increased by one penny'. Labour Minister Ernest Bevin and Home Secretary Herbert Morrison were infuriated by the implication that they were conniving at profiteering and demanded that the
Mirror
should be closed down. At Churchill's urging they settled for summoning Cecil King, the proprietor, and giving him the dressing-down of his life. The
Homes Fires
episode of the series permitted King to represent the incident as an attack on the freedom of the press by Churchill and in the same vein portrayed Bevin's legal action against a strike at the Betteshanger colliery in Kent in January 1942 as unjustified repression, obscuring the fact that strikes over wage differentials and 'who does what' were as much a feature of wartime Britain as they were of its post-war industrial decline. 'Churchill's speeches rang less true these days,' affirms the soundtrack. 'The hopes of the British people were moving away from Churchill,' it continues. Away from the Conservatives, most certainly: but the throng that cheered itself hoarse on VE day, 8 May 1945, when Churchill appeared on the balcony of Buckingham Palace, and continued to do so wherever he appeared during the 1945 General Election, suggest that the electorate did not so much vote
against Churchill, but in favour of change. I believe that many of those who cast their votes in 1945 remembered what had happened after 1918. Then, too many of the men who had fought so hard for 'a land fit for heroes to live in' came home to face unemployment, and there was a firm determination in 1945 that the same thing should not be allowed to happen again.

LUCY FAITHFULL

Child evacuee organiser

When the evacuation scheme was first announced by the government and it was explained to the people what the evacuation scheme was, this posed the parents with the most terrible and cruel dilemma. And particularly for the women – the men knew they must stay in London – the women had to decide whether to go out with their children under five or whether to stay in London, whether to keep their schoolchildren with them or whether to allow them to go out. No one should think that this was an easy decision – why not keep your children with you, which is the natural thing to do? But against this was the terrible thought that there was going to be gas, that there was going to be terrible bombing and death, and the children would be maimed. And by and large, with of course notable exceptions, parents did decide to send their children out and I always feel that probably they did this knowing the teachers, and knowing that their children would be in the charge of the teachers whom they knew and whom they respected. When the train drew out a kind of stillness came in the train when the children realised they were leaving parents behind, and they weren't parents who were waving gaily to them but parents with tears streaming from their eyes thinking they'd never see their children again. Then, in the train, a liveliness would break out; then there would be the arrival at whatever place they were going to. Then they would be herded into some hall, then the foster parents – the people who were going to have children billeted on them – would come to the hall and some of them were wonderful, some of them would just take children for the sake of the child. Sadly, others would choose children and then there would be the terrible situation that at the end one or two unattractive children would be left, and I can remember one case when nobody would have this child and there was this terrible sense of loss on the child's part.

OLIVER LYTTELTON

President of the Board of Trade 1940–41

I had a medium-sized country house near Rye and I went into it very carefully indeed, and I came to the conclusion on my wife's advice that we could take eleven children, something like that. And thirty-one arrived with their two junior nurses, I think. They were pretty dirty and two of them had impetigo. I put them into a large room – you've no idea, I'd no idea that such things existed in England – they relieved themselves all over the carpet and the place was a shambles. Well, you might say that I ought to have known that this sort of thing happened, but when their parents came down to see them on Sunday in motor cars I realised things were different. I mean, I wouldn't have thought that parents would have allowed a child to become lousy, or with impetigo and relieve themselves on the carpet and at the same time have a smart motor car.

LUCY FAITHFULL

Then when no bombs were dropped and the Phoney War was on, parents didn't see why they should be without their children and the children certainly wanted to be back with their parents, and of course there was a great flow back. Now it could be said that this was a wasted experience but I don't think it was, because when the bombs did drop and the war really started, as you might say, in earnest, children went out with not quite the apprehension that they did in the first instance.

J B PRIESTLEY

English author and broadcaster

By May 1940 the people of this country felt they had to fight and fight hard. I don't think most people realise that the British called up a larger proportion of their population for war service than any other country. Far more than Nazi Germany, women and all. The summer of 1940 has stayed in my memory as a very exceptional summer in Brighton. It was rather hot and what I wanted to do in the
Postscripts
broadcasts was to relate the little homely things I'd noticed, like ducks on a pond or a pie in the shop, breakfast and so on. The theme was the war and the way people were taking the war. I think if the
Postscripts
were popular, as I believe they were, it was that tying up of the big war theme to the small, homely things that gave them their popularity. We were really alone. Certainly I don't think now that Hitler was ever really determined to invade this island, but we didn't know that then. And the eyes of the world were undoubtedly on Britain. Now this was important for two reasons – first, immediately, because of the war but also for another thing I brought into those
Postscripts,
which was that you could never keep things as they are. I always remember a play Daphne du Maurier wrote called
The Tears Between
about an officer who didn't want any changes, he was just fighting for the world he had in 1939. I don't blame him, but it's a curious notion because after a war there must be changes. I mean either they'll go one way or they'll go another way and either they'll be worse than they were in 1939, or better. This was my own view, and so I expressed the view that we were fighting the Nazis but we were also fighting in a sense for our better selves. We were fighting for a better Britain and this made the broadcasts popular to a good many people and made them very unpopular with some other people. But they were under the illusion that you can keep things in one place, and you can't.

RAB BUTLER

President of the Board of Education 1941–45

One of the great features of my Act was the settlement of the religious issue. Over half the schools were church religious schools, and over half those were out of date. I brought in this idea of putting three-quarters or seven-eighths of them under the council, which was highly controversial, but if I hadn't done that, you would have trouble now. You have no trouble with Roman Catholic schools and no trouble with Anglican schools and all the rest are under the council. I think it was a great achievement because that had alarmed Churchill in 1902, when he'd had the religious controversy which made
education so bitter. The Roman Catholic hierarchy came round and were very distinguished, nearly always dressed in their robes when they saw me, with a little chaplet hat on the head and those crimson robes, makes you sit up if you're only dressed in a poor old suit like I am. And I argued with them and told them they'd get more. What astonished me about the meeting with Peter Amigo, Archbishop of Southwark, was that his cathedral had been bombed and his palace had been bombed, and there was no proper means of keeping out the chill winter air. He was dressed in full canonicals and I climbed up a staircase which had not been bombed, so it was possible to go up it. He was sitting there and he said, 'I can never agree with politicians' and as he'd been nominated by the Roman Catholic hierarchy to talk to me I thought this was a bad start. He then suggested we might pray, so I said I was quite ready to because I was also a Christian, and little by little we began to get on terms. But he wasn't exactly friendly to start with and nor was Cardinal Archbishop Arthur Hinsley.
^*55

MICHAEL FOOT

Left-wing journalist

When the Russians came into the war, were brought into the war by Hitler's attack on Russia, we started – and it was organised partly by the Soviet Solidarity Society, which was predominantly Communist of course – a
Second Front campaign was organised in which many of us participated, many of us who were not Communists like myself and Frank Owen, who had been editor of the
Evening Standard,
and Aneurin Bevan. Of course we were also stating a view which was the same about the Second Front and about support for the Russians which Beaverbrook [Foot's employer] himself was expressing inside the Cabinet when he was there. Anyway we started a campaign in the country in which we advocated this and undoubtedly we had Secret Service – or whatever it was – people sent to our meetings.

DINGLE FOOT

Liberal MP and Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Economic Warfare
In the first war you had to give coupons for restaurant meals, but in the second war the Ministry calculated that the more people ate out of their homes the better, because in fact less food is consumed. They therefore wanted to induce people to eat in restaurants and particularly to eat in canteens, and for that reason quite deliberately meals taken outside your home were exempt from
rationing. The great difficulty we discovered was to get a great number of British workers to eat in canteens and many of them insisted on going home even though it meant eating up the family rations.

OLIVER LYTTELTON

It was quite simple – the difference between rationed clothes and free clothes is four hundred and fifty thousand workers, simply that. I came to the conclusion when I looked at the manpower that this was a necessary thing. Winston was opposed to it because he held a rather simple, straightforward view that the civilian population which kept up its morale the longest would end up the winner. I told him that I thought the population wanted to do something, particularly the women, after Dunkirk, wanted to feel they were part of the war. 'How dare you tell me what public opinion is, where did I find you?' he said to me, that sort of tiling. So I said, 'Well, all right, I still think that' and when it came off and people were glad to be a little bit shabby and felt that they were doing their stint, he was absolutely delighted and announced to everybody, 'Here's somebody who taught the Prime Minister something he didn't know.' That's a very engaging feature there – most people don't like it at all when other people turn out to be right.

MICHAEL FOOT

There wasn't a tremendous protest about the suppression of the
Daily Worker,
chiefly because that took place during the period before the Russians came into the war. But at the time when the subsequent threat was then made to the
Daily Mirror,
the
Daily Worker
case was brought up with it because the action against both was done under Regulation 2–D. As subsequent matters have revealed, the government was very near the complete suppression of the
Daily Mirror,
which would have, undoubtedly, caused a tremendous ferment because the
Mirror
was the spokesman for the feeling of many people up and down the country, and expressing it probably much better and more openly and much more bluntly than many other newspapers. Moreover the threat to the
Mirror,
which so nearly succeeded, did have an effect partly in emasculating the
Mirror –
I don't say completely emasculating it – but certainly the tone and temper of the
Mirror's
criticisms of the government were modified and of course it had an effect on newspapers throughout the rest of Fleet Street. But I must say that if anybody looks at the papers of those days they will see that the government ministers – everybody – were bitterly criticised in the general press and even more in individual weekly newspapers like the
Tribune
or the
New Statesman,
so the idea that there was any general suppression I think is false.

TOM DRIBERG

British Independent Labour MP and later Soviet spy

I think Britain was freer than any of the other countries, probably, within the war. We had the rights of Parliament reserved, which was something, but it wasn't a free society in other respects. There was censorship but one newspaper had been suppressed, the
Daily Worker,
and the
Daily Mirror
had been warned that it might be suppressed, so it wasn't a free society in that way and of course, perhaps necessarily, we were locking up people without trial, the Fascists and people it was believed would be pro-Hitler and pro-Nazi if Hitler invaded. [Leader of the British Union of Fascists]
Sir Oswald Mosley and his wife spent most of the war in Brixton prison – that's not part of a free society, imprisonment without trial – but it was agreed to at the time, under the pressures of wartime necessity, by pretty well everybody, including myself.