Category: Britain 1945 – 1951

Englishness and Empire and ‘Winning the Peace’

11th November 2007

I’ve recently read "Englishness and Empire: 1939-1965" (Oxford University Press, 2005), in which the author, Wendy Webster, describes how the way the British Empire was portrayed (in the press and films) changed during and after the Second World War.

During the war, ‘heroic’ narratives of empire, as a story of British power and conquest, were superseded by a story of a multi-racial community of (more or less) equal nations, loyal to Britain as the ‘mother country’ and united in the fight against a common enemy. Wendy Webster calls this a ‘People’s Empire’, to complement the idea of a ‘People’s War’, which united everyone within Britain regardless of wealth, class or status.

The projection of a ‘People’s Empire’ reached its high point at the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953, but soon faded to be replaced (in the press and in feature films) by siege narratives of isolated British people defending their threatened homes in colonial wars in, for example, Malaya and Kenya, as the native inhabitants of these countries fought to achieve independence from Britain.

Instead of a multi-racial ‘Commonwealth of Nations’ the empire was now increasingly portrayed as a racial community of (white) people, with the British sharing ties of kinship and culture with the (white) inhabitants of the dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. If this was extended to the idea, popularised by Winston Churchill, of a community of the ‘English Speaking Peoples‘, the US could also be included as part of the family.

In parallel with these changing images of empire, the Second World War was presented, not as a ‘People’s War’, but as a story of heroic individuals. (For example in numerous adventure feature films such as The Dam Busters, in contrast with high-minded documentaries such as those by Humphrey Jennings, which showed the teamwork and heroism of ordinary men and women in wartime). In Wendy Webster’s words "The idea of heroic British masculinity, transposed from an imperial to a Second World War setting, offered a far more exclusive image of the nation than the ‘People’s War’.

So what is the relevance of all this to my own research on the British Occupation of Germany after the war?

Firstly, many of the British behaved as if their Zone in Germany was an extension of the empire. Noel Annan in his memoirs ‘Changing Enemies‘ gives his chapter on  post-war Germany the title ‘Britain’s new colony’ and Donald Cameron Watt, in his book ‘Britain looks to Germany: British Opinion and Policy towards Germany since 1945’ says of the occupation: "… it will be obvious that the method of control and re-education bears a strong resemblance to the systems of indirect rule administered in the 1890s by Lord Cromer in Egypt and Lord Lugard in sub-Saharan Africa."

In the early days of the Occupation, many of the British thought they would need to stay in Germany for a long time, 25 years or more, to complete their civilising mission to make Germany a democratic country, much like Britain, but this soon changed to an overriding concern with the cost of occupation, and the transfer of government back to German control. So the withdrawal from Germany could be seen in some ways as similar to the British retreat from empire elsewhere (though there are clearly many differences as well as similarities). 

Secondly, I think Wendy Webster’s description of changing attitudes to Englishness and empire after the war helps to explain why the British Occupation of Germany has faded from popular memory. It doesn’t fit easily with any of the themes she discusses: a multi-racial ‘People’s Empire’ united against a common enemy (Germany), or a community of ‘English speaking peoples’ united by common ties of kinship and culture. In the retreat from empire, nostalgia for former British national power and glory could be preserved in heroic memories of the war, and what happened afterwards conveniently forgotten.

To some extent, I suppose, you could say the countries of western Europe after the war, including both Britain and Germany, did unite in a new People’s Empire, but this time it was a Cold War empire led by the US, against a new enemy, the Soviet Union. From a British point of view, this was a far less exciting story than that of the ‘finest hour’ when British people ‘stood alone’ to defend civilisation from barbarism.

This left no room for an alternative theme of reconstruction and reconciliation, of international fellowship and of seeing people, whoever they are, as individuals (rather than as collective members of an ethnic or racial or national group, and therefore different).

In my work, I try to restore the memory of how people, on both sides, worked to achieve reconciliation with the former enemy. Heroic war stories are not enough. What really matters is ‘Winning the Peace.’

So to finish this posting, I’d like to quote from the front page of the final issue of the British Zone Review, the quarterly journal of the Military Government and British Control Commission in Germany. This was published on September 20th, 1949, a little over four years since the end of the war and sums up how the British in Germany wished to portray their work of ‘winning the peace’ after ‘winning the war’ – as a task of reconstruction, not destruction, and of reconciliation, not revenge. To my mind it’s just as relevant now as it was then:

"We have grown and developed with the changes brought about by the reconstruction of Germany and now our task has come to an end. In this, our last issue, we should like to express our very sincere thanks to all our readers in all parts of the world and to our many contributors, whose support and co-operation has made success possible. We are glad to think that this spirit of good will and the desire shown for better understanding between British and Germans may have contributed towards a better international co-operation and fellowship which alone can ensure a lasting peace."

Finest Hour: Films by Humphrey Jennings

3rd November 2007

A few weeks ago I saw a programme of four films by Humphrey Jennings (Finest Hour: Films by Humphrey Jennings, 11th – 13th September 2007, BFI South Bank). This was part of a documentary season run by the British Film Institute (BFI) commemorating five British documentary film-makers, all of whom were born in the same year, 1907 – Humphrey Jennings, Basil Wright, Paul Rotha, Edgar Anstey and Marion Grierson.

I’ve written several posts in this blog about Humphrey Jennings’ film A Defeated People and the view it portrayed of Germany after the war. Seven of Jennings’ films were shown as part of the documentary season at the BFI, (four in ‘Finest Hour’ and three in other programmes), but not A Defeated People, and none of the programme notes made any reference to it, probably because it does not fit easily with the themes highlighted in the season – technology, nationhood and industry, the everyday heroism of ordinary men and women during Britain in wartime, technical and industrial progress, people at work and Britain as a ‘Land of Promise’.

This made me think about using film as historical evidence. On the one hand films can provide a very immediate and accessible view of place and time. Angus Calder in his classic work ‘The Myth of the Blitz’ makes extensive reference to Humphrey Jennings and his films in his last three chapters on ‘Deep England’ (on the emotive power of the English landscape), ‘Telling it to America’ and ‘Filming the Blitz.’ He refers to most of Jennings’ films in the book, but, like the BFI documentary season, completely ignores A Defeated People. Presumably this is because the film does not fit easily with his theme of ‘The Myth of the Blitz’ and how British people like to remember their role in the war and afterwards.

In my MA dissertation (on ‘Winning the peace’: Germany under British Occupation, as portrayed in Humphrey Jennings’ film A Defeated People, the British Zone Review and the exhibition Germany under Control) I argued that, if Jennings’ films are considered an accurate representation of Britain in wartime, A Defeated People should also be considered an accurate representation of post-war Germany, especially when viewed critically and compared with the treatment of similar themes in other sources.

On the other hand, different people respond to films in different ways. As I said in my dissertation "when we watch the film now, our reactions may tell us more about our own personal experiences and beliefs and about popular memories in the society in which we grew up, than what were the original intentions of the director, or whether the film reflected official policy or popular attitudes at the time."

I was therefore interested to read (in the BFI programme notes) about differences in interpreting another of Humphrey Jennings’ films ‘Spare Time’. This short, 15 minute film aimed to show  what ordinary working people did in their spare time in different parts of England: coal miners in Wales, steel workers in the North-East, and cotton workers in Lancashire. The ‘Kazoo Band’ sequence in the film, where a group of young people, dressed in uniform, practiced playing their kazoos, marching up and down an empty football pitch, has been controversial ever since the film was first released in 1939. Basil Wright, Jennings’ fellow documentary film maker, wrote in 1951:

"The Kazoo band, the wind blowing chilly through the imitation silk uniforms, the Britannia tableau tottering on its undernourished pall bearers, and the drum majorette aping, like a grey ghost, the antics of a transatlantic and different civilisation – all this is brilliantly presented. But it is presented in terms of a cold disgust; there is no sense of the human enthusiasms which must somewhere exist behind such a drab and pathetic spectacle. Humphrey was, perhaps rightly, attacked violently for this sequence when Spare Time first appeared, but the fact remains that, as a piece of movie, it is both brilliant and unforgettable." (Quoted in the BFI programme notes for ‘Finest Hour’ Films by Humphrey Jennings)

Others have different views. As the BFI programme notes said:

"All this results in a film that different viewers have quite differently interpreted. Some find it patronising: Jennings’ fellow ‘movement’ film-maker Basil Wright attacked it as ‘sneering’. Others consider it less patronising than other documentaries of the period whose concern for social improvement has sometimes dated horribly."

After watching around 20 films in the documentary season at the BFI, including programmes of films by other directors, I was in no doubt that I agreed with those who found ‘Spare Time’ less patronising than many other documentaries, a few of which had indeed dated horribly. Though all those featured were great documentary film directors, what distinguished all of Humphrey Jennings’ films (including ‘Spare Time’, his wartime films, and A Defeated People) was an overriding concern for people as individuals, sympathy and human understanding, and his ability to portray people on their own terms, without putting words into their mouth, or obviously acting out a script.

If a viewer sees a sequence in his films, such as the Kazoo Band, as ‘patronising’ or ‘sneering’, perhaps this reflects more of the attitudes of the viewer, than those of Jennings himself?

William Strang – Home and Abroad

20th January 2007

William Strang was the political adviser to Field Marshal Montgomery, who was Commander-in-Chief of the British forces of occupation in Germany after the war.

He was born in 1893 and had a distinguished career in the Foreign Office. He was made head of the German section of the Foreign Office in 1948 and from 1949 to 1953 was the senior civil servant and Permanent Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.

‘Home and Abroad’, published in 1956 (London, Andre Deutsch), is not so much his autobiography, as a series of memoirs and commentaries on events.

One chapter deals with his time in Germany, and this provides, in his own words, only "a brief personal impression of the British Zone of Germany as seen in the summer of 1945." He skips the period from 1946 to 1949, saying "this is not the place to tell the story of the British occupation of Germany." His next chapter resumes with a discussion of South and East Asia in 1949, when he was permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office.

The previous chapter covers his time as British representative on the European Advisory Commission (EAC), the joint Allied body established after the British, US and Soviet foreign ministers’ conference in Moscow in October 1943, to make recommendations on the terms of surrender to be imposed on Germany and other states with which the Allies were at war.

Strang writes with pride of the achievements of the EAC, in particular how its recommendations in the three areas it worked on, terms of surrender, zones of occupation and machinery of control, were all put into effect (which is more than can be said for most other joint Allied bodies during and after the war).

But a case can be made that the policy agreed by the EAC, and endorsed by the Allied governments, was deeply flawed in all three areas; in many cases based on assumptions which turned out to be incorrect. For example:

As Strang himself says in the book, the terms of surrender drafted by the EAC assumed "there would still be in existence a central German civilian authority competent to give a signature." They had to be hastily revised after the German military forces had surrendered, to account for the fact that there was no civil government left in Germany possessing sufficient authority to sign anything. In the event the three Commanders-in-Chief, Montgomery, Eisenhower, and Marshal Zhukov, issued a unilateral proclamation on behalf of their governments, in Berlin on 5th June, and this formed the legal basis of the subsequent occupation.

On the issue of the borders of the zones of occupation, Strang says that  "it could not be foreseen [in Sept 1944] how deeply the Western allied forces would penetrate into Germany." At the time, he says, the British were more concerned that the Soviets would halt their forces at the German frontier and leave the US and British to finish the war in Europe. This seems strange and I wonder how true it is? Following the success of the Normandy landings, many people in Britain believed the war would be over by Christmas. The first time the British and US set foot on German soil was as early as 11th September 1944 and victory was only delayed to the following year after setbacks at Arnhem and in the Ardennes.

On the lack of cooperation between the British and the Soviet Zone he says that: "it was not our expectation that the zones would be sealed off from one another. (This was a Soviet conception which only became apparent in the late summer of 1945, when the occupation was an accomplished fact.)" In the event the disruption caused by new barriers to long established patterns of trade within Germany caused all sorts of economic problems in the British Zone after the war; one frequently quoted example is the difficulty experienced by the coal mines in the Ruhr obtaining wooden pit props, which previously had been supplied from the Soviet Zone and now were no longer available.

The third achievement of the EAC, the establishment of a joint allied machinery of control, broke down very quickly after the war. In theory the four allies (now including France) would reach unanimous agreement on policies, which would then be implemented by central German administrations. In practice the central German administrations were never established and the allies rarely reached unanimous agreement on anything that really mattered. As Montgomery said in a telegram to Prime Minister Attlee as early as October 1945: "I had once thought Four-Power government of Germany was possible. I now considered that it could never be made to work…"

Here are three further extracts from the book, in no particular order:

Firstly, Strang’s impressions of Berlin when he first visited the city on 5th June 1945.

"This was our first sight of the ruins of Berlin. Rubble piled yards high along both sides of the streets, leaving only a narrow passage; detours to find practicable bridges over railways or canals; the pervading smell of corruption; few inhabitants to be seen … Was it necessary to cause all this destruction? We still thought there had been no alternative. Would all this ever be restored? We doubted it, but we ought to have known better. ‘Men, not walls make the city.’ Or, as Ernest Bevin said when he first gazed on the scene of desolation a few weeks later: ‘It’s people, not things, that matter’ … To us, who came in due course to live among them, they became in time a familiar feature of the landscape and progressively lost their first sharpness of impact."

It’s interesting to compare this with the impressions of another British observer, ‘Berlin Twilight‘ by Lieutenant-Colonel Byford-Jones, which I wrote about in an earlier posting.

Secondly, on a discussion with Rudolf Petersen, mayor of Hamburg, in 1945, Strang says that Petersen told him that "Germans were already beginning to feel disillusioned and disappointed. They sincerely wished for friendship with England, but the policy of the occupying Powers seemed to be one of grinding Germany in the dust. The German economy would be in danger of collapse in the coming winter, and the Germans much be given some hope for the future, otherwise they might decide in despair to turn to Communism."

This argument was not unique to the Germans. Some British officials were making much the same point, for example Noel Annan, who worked in the Political Division of the Control Commission, and indirectly reported to Strang as Political Adviser.

Strang, however, would have none of it. He says of the discussion with Petersen: "I interrupted this exercise in self-pity and covert blackmail to say that we were determined that there should be no repetition of the two world wars brought about by Germany, and this was the purpose of our alliance with the Soviet Union. The primary purpose of the occupation was to disarm and demilitarise Germany and to uproot the Nazi party, not to promote Anglo-German friendship or to bring about the economic revival of Germany, though these were laudable objectives which might well be consequently achieved."

Thirdly, towards the end of June 1945, Strang went on a tour of inspection of the British Zone:

"We made our journey in high summer. We found a smiling countryside, beautifully farmed, with bountiful crops growing right up to roadsides and hedgerows. Villages and small towns off the main roads were intact; towns and villages at cross roads often smashed; larger centres like Munster and Osnabrück, half or three quarters demolished; industrial cities like Dortmund almost totally in ruins, except round the fringes."

The people were healthier and better fed than he expected and he saw few signs of "acute distress." His perception was that the Germans "suffered less from the continued strain of war than did our own people. They had the material resources of Europe to draw upon, and had the profit of skilled and unskilled slave labour, ruthlessly exploited. There were still at that time substantial, though diminishing private stocks of food."

Again, I wonder how true this is? Frank Donnison, in the British official history of the military occupation says (Civil Affairs and Military Government: North-West Europe 1944-1946, London HMSO, 1961, P330) that minimal stocks of food were found in the British Zone of Germany after the war.

Noel Annan in his memoirs, (Changing Enemies: Harper Collins, 1995) provides another view of Strang’s tour of the zone in October 1945. Annan says that "the tour with Strang opened my eyes to the assumptions with which Military Government officers worked. Grotesque as it may sound today, they assumed that the occupation of Germany would last twenty years."

Annan goes on to describe the colonial mentality of some of the British administrators. Speaking of one former colonial servant, now a member of the British Control Commission in Germany, Annan tells how he: "was apt to treat the Germans as if they were a specially intelligent tribe of Bedouins. Discussion in the shady tent was permitted until the Resident Officer struck the ground with his stick and gave his decision. This attitude exasperated the Germans."

I have no evidence that Strang himself possessed this ‘colonial mentality’ but still find the different and contrasting attitudes of the British to Germany and German people after the war an intriguing subject, not so much for what it tells us about Germany, as for what it tells us about the British.

Questions and Answers

14th January 2007

Last week I posted the text of a talk I gave at on: "The British Occupation of Germany, as portrayed in Humphrey Jennings’ film ‘A Defeated People‘", at the annual German Historical Institute postgraduate conference in London. I said I would post some of the questions I was asked at the end of the talk and my answers, so here they are:

Q:  Did the film or Humphrey Jennings refer to the Cold War? (And by implication did anti-Russian sentiments account for a relatively pro-German attitude in the film, compared with other materials produced 6 months earlier in May 1945?)

A:  No. The film looks at the British zone only. There is no reference to Russia, the US, or France, or to life in their zones. Jennings was politically on the left and, as far as I knew, sympathetic to the Soviet Union. In his British wartime film ‘A Diary for Timothy’ made at the end of the war, there is shot of a British school choir singing away in a school hall, with a huge banner behind them with a picture of a hammer and sickle and which reads: "Greetings to the Red Army and the Glorious Fighting Forces of the United Nations."

Q:  Were there any British training films made to show to the military, similar to the US film directed by Frank Capra, ‘Your Job in Germany’ which is much less sympathetic to the defeated enemy than ‘A Defeated People’?

A:  Not to my knowledge. As far as I know, ‘Your Job in Germany’ was shown to many British as well as US troops, at the time they crossed the frontier into Germany, as they were then under joint command. The difference between the two films indicates how much attitudes changed in the 6 months after the end of the war. (I wrote about this in my earlier posting on the film ‘Your Job in Germany‘)

Q:  Did the film refer to any resistance by the Germans to the Allies?

A:  No, rather the reverse. There was no sign of any resistance to the Allies. What shocked Jennings was how the German people appeared stunned and dazed, apathetic and listless at the end of the war. (He wrote about this in his letters to his wife from Germany – see my earlier posting).

Q:  Was there any connection between Humphrey Jennings and Victor Gollancz and the ‘Save Europe Now’ campaign?

A:  Not to my knowledge. After he had completed ‘A Defeated People’ Jennings moved on to other subjects which had nothing to do with Germany. He died in a climbing accident in Greece in 1950.

Q:  Do the themes which appear in the film also appear in the ‘Germany under Control’ exhibition which opened in London in June 1946.

A:  I don’t know.  This something I still need to work on.

Q:  How do you analyse a film to use it as a historical source?

A:  A good question and I didn’t have a good answer. My reply was that my use of the film was illustrative, and to be historically valid it would be substantiated by other sources. (In fact, I think films can act as good historical sources, but they do need to be placed within a good analytical or theoretical framework. I don’t this have at present and probably don’t need it for the MA dissertation. It is something I will need to think more about, when I’ve finished the course).

Q:  I claimed in my talk that studying the British Occupation of Germany can tell us as much about how the British saw themselves, as how they perceived Germany and Germans. What does the film tell us about British society at the time?

A:  The effort which went into the process of reconstruction in Germany, in contrast with more negative actions often given more prominence in historical accounts of the period; how attitudes changed in the transition from war to peace, in the six months after the end of the war; the British view of themselves as morally superior and self-righteous, (which was interpreted by some Germans at the time more negatively as arrogance and hypocrisy); how people came to terms with living with the former enemy. I’m sure there is more I could have said on this…

Overall it was an excellent conference, but I don’t intend to say anything about the other very interesting talks given at the conference and the discussions which followed. It’s not appropriate for me to do this in this blog, which is about my own research, and there is no way I could do them justice.

Germany under British occupation – as portrayed in Humphrey Jennings’ film ‘A Defeated People.’

6th January 2007

Next Saturday 13th January, I will be giving a brief talk on my research at a conference for postgraduate students at the German Historical Institute in London.

The talk summarises the work I have been doing in the past year or so, much of which I’ve been writing about in this blog.

So as this is my first posting of the New Year, here is a copy of the talk. Next week I hope to write about any comments and questions from those attending the conference.

The British Occupation of Germany – as portrayed in Humphrey Jennings’ film ‘A Defeated People’

My area of interest is the British Occupation of Germany after the second world war. In particular, to what extent did the British and Americans succeed in ‘winning the peace’ as well as the war? And how did people, on both sides, become reconciled to the former enemy and even, in many cases, become friends, allies and partners?

I am currently in the second year of a part-time MA in Contemporary British History and for my dissertation, I am researching how British policy and actions in Germany were presented by the government, to people back home, in the eighteen month period between June 1945 and December 1946. In particular I am looking at how the British Occupation of Germany was portrayed in two specific contemporary sources: Humphrey Jennings’ documentary film ‘A Defeated People’ which was filmed in Germany in September and October 1945 and first shown to the public in Britain in March 1946, and an exhibition which opened in London in June 1946, called ‘Germany under Control.’

I have chosen these two sources because they were both sponsored by the British Ministry of Information and both received the full support of the British Military Government and Control Commission for Germany. They therefore show, not only a personal view of the film’s director, or the exhibition organisers, but an official British view of Germany after the war, in the first few months of Occupation.

When I started looking at the subject, I thought the British Occupation of Germany was a neglected area, and in some ways it is, especially in Britain. But it soon became apparent that a great deal of historical work has been done on this period, especially in the 1980s, most notably, the project sponsored by the German Historical Institute, completed in 1993, to catalogue and create an inventory of the British Control Commission files held at the National Archives in Kew.

In the past ten years, since 1995, less work appears to have been published, but I have been pleasantly surprised to find several other postgraduate students are now working on various aspects of the subject, some of whom are here at this conference, so perhaps it is now due for a revival and maybe also a re-assessment. 

As a student of Contemporary British History, it seems to me that a significant gap in our knowledge lies, not in understanding the period of occupation in terms of international diplomacy, or as part of the history of Germany, but in what it can tell us about British history, society, politics and culture.

For five years, and with reserved powers in some areas for longer, the British ruled an area half the size of their own country and had direct responsibility for a population of over 20 million people.

With very few exceptions, such as the recent article by Matthew Frank in Twentieth Century British History on ‘The New Morality – Victor Gollancz, ‘Save Europe Now’ and the German Refugee Crisis’, this episode in British history is largely ignored in surveys of Britain, except in so far as it contributed to increased global tensions and the cold war, or was an economic burden on the British treasury.

My dissertation aims to show that the British occupation of Germany can tell us as much about how the British saw themselves, as about how they perceived Germany and the Germans.

Progress to date

Up to now, most of my time has been spent researching the film ‘A Defeated People’ and the film’s director, Humphrey Jennings.

Humphrey Jennings was probably the greatest of all the British wartime documentary film makers. Angus Calder, for example, in "The Myth of the Blitz" refers to him as "Britain’s most remarkable maker of official films." His wartime films include well known classics such as London can Take It, Listen to Britain and Fires were Started, the last of which has been described by the film historian Jeffrey Richards as "one of the key works in creating the mythic image of the London Blitz."

His films were remarkably popular, at a time when film was still a mass media, and the British documentary film movement was at its peak. In addition to cinema showings, the Ministry of Information arranged so called non-theatrical film shows in factories, village halls and clubs, reaching an audience of twenty million people over a two and a half year period. In the heightened emotional atmosphere of wartime, these non-theatrical audiences sometimes wept, or broke out into spontaneous applause, when they saw Jennings’ films. For example, Roger Manvell, who worked for the Ministry of Information as a regional film officer, and later became a well-known film critic and writer, organised over 25,000 showings during the war and included a film by Humphrey Jennings in nearly all of them. He has told how "I do not exaggerate when I say that members of audiences …(especially during the earlier, more immediately alarming years) frequently wept as a result of Jennings’ direct appeal to the rich cultural heritage of Britain … going back to Shakespeare and the Elizabethans, to Purcell and Handel."

It is therefore intriguing to ask what did this Englishmen, who some historians say created the mythic image of the London Blitz, and whose audiences sometimes cried when they saw his films, make of Germany after the war.

The film ‘A Defeated People’ was intended to show an accurate and realistic picture of Germany at the time. As far as we know there was no formal brief, no rules as to what could and could not be filmed and no official censorship. Humphrey Jennings wrote the script as he went along and was expected to tell it like it was, which was the way he worked on all his films, both during and after the war.

The picture it shows of Germany after the war is grim. Many British observers were openly shocked at the scale of destruction they saw when they crossed the frontier into Germany, especially in the cities and above all, in Berlin. This was far worse than anything they had seen at home, even in Coventry, Bristol or London during the blitz. As British soldiers were told in the 64 page pocketbook given to them before they crossed the frontier into Germany, (recently republished by the National Archives), more tons of bombs were dropped by the Allies on one German city, Duisburg, in just two days on 14th and 15th October 1944, than were dropped on London in the eleven months from September 1940 to July 1941.

The film shows not only the physical destruction, of the cities, the railways and factories, but its effect on the people, who were shown as stunned, dazed, as if they didn’t know what had hit them. In the words of the commentary: "Place and time meant nothing, because the people; the links between the people, were smashed too. They were just left wandering, looking for food, looking for their homes, looking for each other."

Most historians and other commentators have largely ignored Humphrey Jennings’ post war films, preferring to discuss his films about Britain during the war, rather than the one about Germany after the war. One well-known British historian however, Nicholas Pronay, refers to the film in the context of writing about how a defeated Germany was presented in British newsreels at the end of the war. The initial attitude of the newsreels was, to quote Pronay, "The Germans were a guilty people with an inborn compulsion to war." This reflected long held views in Britain, going back to stereotypes presented during the first world war. Then, as Pronay says: "Any lingering doubts about the thesis of the collective guilt of a whole nation were … crushed at the end of April by the footage from the concentration camps" which was shown very widely, both in Britain and in Germany. This meant that whenever German people were shown in the newsreels as suffering and in distress, this was always presented in the collective context of Germany as a guilty nation, receiving its just deserts.

Pronay goes on to argue that the left-wing idealist documentary film makers, and  Humphrey Jennings’ film ‘A Defeated People,’ in particular, presented the same hard-line image of Germany after the war as the right wing commercial newsreels, and this reflected a basic consensus in Britain about Germany.

In my dissertation I argue that Pronay may have been right about the newsreels, but was wrong about ‘A Defeated People’. Far from presenting the same picture as the newsreels, the film shows that attitudes in Britain to the former enemy were varied and complex and changed with the transition from war to peace, as the British occupying forces found they had to deal with people as individuals, rather than collectively as the enemy. While the script tells one story, the images show a different and more complex picture. On the one hand, the film shows a grim picture of destruction, with a voice-over commentary that has no hesitation in blaming the Germans for "the war they started." But the images also show German people as individuals, not as a collectively guilty nation; men and women looking for lost relatives, children playing in the rubble on the bomb sites, people living underground in cellars because that’s all that remains of their houses, old women sawing up logs to take home for fuel because they have no coal.

Not only, I would argue, has Pronay misunderstood the film, but he has also underplayed several important and contrasting aspects of the British view of Germany and the German people in the first year after the war, which are clearly evident in the film. Firstly the energy and determination with which the British Military Government tackled the process of reconstruction, their desire to get on with the job and get the place working again. Secondly, their perceived need to explain to people back home that that they were doing this out of self-interest, not altruism, to prevent disease and prevent a resurgence of fascism which could lead to another war. Thirdly, the unquestioned belief of the British in their own superiority and moral self-righteousness. And fourthly, and this is perhaps the most surprising aspect of the film, sympathy with the undoubted suffering of the former enemy, recognition that life goes on in the midst of destruction, and hope for the future.

What evidence is there to support this case? Of course we can watch the film. I am one of those who believes that sources speak for themselves, without requiring too much interpretation by the historian, which sometimes serves to confuse as much as it illuminates. But we have to question the film’s value as historical evidence, because, especially when referring to images rather than the script, we are dealing with a work of art and different people will respond to it in different ways. When we watch the film now, our reactions may tell us more about our own personal experience and beliefs, and about popular memories in the society in which we grew up, than what were the original intentions of the director, or whether the film reflected official policy or popular attitudes at the time it was made.

Fortunately there is other evidence available. Firstly when the film was first shown in London in March 1946, it was extensively reviewed by the Press, which helps us understand how it was perceived when it was first released. Secondly, while filming in Germany in September and October 1945,  Jennings wrote a number of  letters to his wife and these provide an indication of his state of mind, his reactions to what he saw in Germany and the ideas he intended to convey in the film. And thirdly, we can compare how certain themes were treated in the film, with the presentation of similar themes and images in other historical sources.

What the film reviews said in 1946

The film was first shown to the public at the Tivoli cinema in London on March 17th 1946, after a private press showing earlier in the week. The publicity material stated that, as the "first official film record of life in Berlin and Hamburg under the British Control Commission," it would answer the question everyone was asking: "What is it like inside Germany today?" It would show the scale of the destruction, but also how a curl of smoke emerging from the rubble showed someone, still living in the cellar of a destroyed building, trying to make a home out of chaos. The role of the British Control Commission was stressed in bringing order out of ruin and despair. And in the final sentence, there was a glimmer of hope for the future as, "In the wintry sunlight the children are beginning to laugh and dance again, the horrors of war behind them."

The film was reviewed in all the major British papers, and all, regardless of their political persuasion, followed much the same line as the publicity material. In summary, the reviewers recognised that the situation in Germany was grim, that conditions were bad and people were suffering. The British, as the occupying power, had an obligation to do something about this, but there was no single answer and no easy solutions. As Joan Lester said in her review in Reynolds News, the film dealt with "the vital and complex problems arising out of the economic, political and human tangle created by Nazism in defeat. Mr Jennings has, within certain essential limitations of time and opportunity, brought to his subject understanding, intelligence and humanity."

Humphrey Jennings’ letters to his wife while filming in Germany

Humphrey Jennings’ own reactions to the situation in Germany are revealed in the letters he wrote to his wife in September and October 1945. These show that he was initially confused and uncertain what to make of it. In his first letter, written on September 1st 1945, he says:

"Well I have been quite overwhelmed by Germany in the past few days and can’t really say anything sensible yet – it is quite unlike anything one has been told or thought – both more alive and more dead." A week later he was still none the wiser: "I am still unable to give any sort of reliable picture of Germany – even of the bits (Cologne, Essen, Hannover, Hamm) which we have seen – for the moment the contradictions are too great …"

In general, the letters are very far from the uncompromising view, claimed by Pronay, as a consensus in Britain at the end of the war, of a guilty people getting its just deserts. There is no doubt in Jennings’ mind that the Germans were to blame for the war, but he is also clearly looking beyond this to the plight of people as individuals, to the obligations of the British as occupiers, and even to a Germany that once was a beautiful country, and might become so again.

The theme of the broken clock

I have found it interesting to compare how themes were handled in the film, with the treatment of similar themes in articles, features and letters in other official sources: in particular the British Zone Review, which was a fortnightly review of the activities of the British Control Commission.

To take one example: the theme of the broken clock. Near the start of the film, the commentator says, to a picture of broken clock on a ruined railway station: "And at the finish, life in Germany just ran down like a clock."

The same theme appears in the first issue of the British Zone Review, published on 29th September 1945, the same time as Jennings was filming in Germany, in a feature on page four with the headline "Winding up the Clock" about what the British were doing in Buxtehude, a small town near Hamburg.

The image, of course, is similar to that of ‘Stunde Null’ – Year Zero. Life had stopped, like a broken clock, and the job the British believed they had to do was to wind it up and get things going again. Many German people have written about their memories of the time, but very few British. So to conclude my talk I would like to quote this official British view of ‘Stunde Null’ in a small town in Germany. Like the film, it reveals the same strange mixture of sympathy and self-interest, of reconstruction and self-righteousness:

"This is the story of Buxtehude. It is not a sensational story because Buxtehude is one of those quiet little country towns where – even in Germany – sensations seldom happen. But it is the story of what Military Government has done and is doing to restore to the British Zone the essential things of life which were swept away in the collapse of Nazi Germany…. When the British 213 Military Detachment took over the Nazi-run town on May 10, Buxtehude was like a clock with its spring unwound. There was no gas, and there was no electricity. The water was impure. The town’s small industries were at a standstill. The flour mills were idle. Road transport had stopped, and no trains ran. Today the Nazi bosses are gone, and the town has a Burgomeister, a social democrat, who was three times imprisoned by them. The public services have been restored. Trains are running, and there is a daily bus for those who have passes to say that their journeys are really necessary… How have these things happened?

‘It has just been part of the drill for dealing with such problems’, a British Army officer of the Military Government Detachment told me. ‘The German people have been obedient and cooperative. We have told them what they must do and they have got on with the job.’"

Finally, and as a way of summarising the aims of the dissertation, I would like to quote Peter Wende, the former director of the German Historical Institute here in London, who said in the introduction to a symposium held in May 1995 on the 50th anniversary of the Unconditional Surrender of German armed forces in Europe: "May 1945 marked the transition from decades of conflict to an era of peace and cooperation. Focusing on this decisive historical event from different angles may provide a starting point for discussion of its wider implications."

Christopher Knowles
January 2007

‘Victory over Japan’ exhibition

20 November 2006

A ‘Victory over Japan’ exhibition was opened in London by the Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, on August 21st 1945, shortly after the dropping of the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima on 6th August and the surrender of Japan on VJ Day (15th August in the UK). The exhibition ran for four months and closed on December 23rd, after it had been visited by over one and a half million people; that’s nearly 400,000 a month, over 10,000 a day on average.

Despite its massive popularity, I can find no mention of the exhibition in any books about post-war Britain, or on Anglo-Japanese relations. It is remarkable how events, which were massively popular in their day, fade away from memory.

The Times reported on August 21st that on entering the exhibition "visitors will find themselves experiencing jungle conditions." Giant cobwebs "brush against the face as one passes, and spiders, the size of a man’s hand, are seen curled up in the web. One hears the sound of running water, the noise of insects and the wails of jackals and hyenas." To add further realism "the temperature is kept at an artificial heat of 120 degrees."

Cecil Taylor, director of the Displays and Exhibitions Division at the Ministry of Information, wrote to LR Bradley, the director of the Imperial War Museum, inviting him to attend the exhibition, but warned that the exhibition was "drawing the public to an extent exceeding all our expectations. I suggest 10 a.m. is the only feasible time any day for an examination of the show; after that hour it is so crowded as to make detailed assessment practically impossible."

Bradley was interested in acquiring some of the exhibits for the Imperial War Museum collection, and in due course the museum did receive a few items including dummy figures, model aircraft, munitions and weaponry.

My own in interest in this exhibition arose because it was held at the same "10,000 square feet" venue in London, on Oxford Street, near Tottenham Court Road, where the ‘Germany under Control’ exhibition was held six months later (see earlier postings). I thought it would be interesting the compare the two exhibitions, to see how the British Ministry of Information presented victory over one enemy, Japan, and the post-war occupation of the second, Germany.

Unfortunately it seems that there is not enough material available about the ‘Victory over Japan’ exhibition to make a useful comparison possible. It will have to stay as a footnote in history, with a few interesting items in the archives. (This posting is based on material from The Times on 21 August 1945, 22 August 1945 and 24 December 1945 and a file at the Imperial War Museum).

I have discovered more about the ‘Germany under Control’ exhibition and will write about this in future postings.

Bread Rationing (Conclusion)

11 February 2006

A New Year and a new term.

I have finished my first two essays on the
MA course in Contemporary British History.

One of the essays was on Bread Rationing in
the UK after the war. Earlier posts on this blog show how I became interested in the
topic, and here is my final contribution to the
subject on this blog:

Bread Rationing was introduced in the UK by the
Labour Government in July 1946 and remained in force for two years. Bread had
never been rationed during the war and at the time was seen as the height
of austerity.

The measure was vehemently opposed by the
Conservatives, including Churchill, who called it “one of the gravest
announcements that I have ever heard made in the House [of Commons] in the time of peace” and the Daily Mail reported on 3rd July 1946, that it was
“the most hated measure ever to have been presented to the people of this
country." 

However, in practice Bread Rationing turned
out to be completely ineffective in reducing the level of consumption in the UK and most
historians agree it was “probably unnecessary."

The question I tried to answer was: why did
the government not only impose a measure they knew would be unpopular and which
in practice proved to be ineffective in achieving its stated purpose, but
persist with it for two years in the face of significant opposition at home?

Here is my conclusion in the final
paragraph in the essay:

At first sight, the brief two year
period of bread rationing may appear as a minor issue; the government simply
followed the practice, well proven in wartime, of controlling demand for essential
supplies at a time when there was a potential risk of shortages. This is at
best a partial explanation. The Attlee government’s decisions on bread
rationing were directly affected by four of the gravest and most difficult
issues it faced during its first three
years in office. Firstly, the ineffectiveness and unpopularity of a policy of
direct controls, seen by the public as necessary in war but increasingly
superfluous in peacetime. Secondly, virulent opposition from some elements of
the public, spurred on by conservative politicians and the press. Thirdly,
total dependency on the United States for essential supplies and the means
to pay for them. Fourthly and finally, having won the war, having to decide how
best to win the peace, at a time of shifting allegiances among the victors and
vanquished.

It was a fascinating story. In the course
of the research for the essay I learnt about conditions of life in Britain
after the war, the desperate economic situation facing both Britain and the
rest of Europe, how close much of Europe, including Germany, but not Britain,
came to starvation and famine, the international politics of food supplies, the
emergence of cold war diplomacy and the division of Europe.

For a taste (!) of what it was like at the
time, I looked up British Pathe’s archive of cinema newsreels on the web http://www.britishpathe.com and was
amazed at what I found. (Search for “Bread Rationing”). Low resolution
downloads for private study are free.

The newsreels include the Minister of Food,
John Strachey, justifying the government’s decision, protests by the British
Housewives’ League and the Master Bakers’ Federation, plus a film called “Germany’s food – the Truth” which includes
pictures of a factory in Germany which converted tons of beech and pine
logs into fake liver sausage for human consumption.

Victor Gollancz, Peggy Duff, and “Save Europe Now”

5th November 2005

In late 1945, Victor Gollancz organised “Save Europe Now” – a campaign to persuade the British Government to allow British people to send food parcels to Germany. At the time this was forbidden.

Peggy Duff, later to become well known as Secretary of CND, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, worked for Save Europe Now from September 1945 to December 1948.

In her book “Left, Left, Left” (Alison and Busby 1971), she describes her experiences as the main organiser of six campaigns over the period from 1945 – 1965. In addition to Save Europe Now and CND, Peggy Duff worked for Common Wealth, the independent socialist party formed by Richard Acland, Tribune, the left-wing newspaper, as a councillor for the London boroughs of St Pancras and Camden, and the Campaign for the Abolition of Capital Punishment.

In the book, she describes how the sponsors and executive of Save Europe Now included well known public figures such as Eleanor Rathbone, Bertrand Russsell, Lord Lindsay of Birker (Master of Balliol), Dr Gilbert Murray (Bishop of Chichester) and Michael Foot, MP and later to become leader of the Labour Party.

I’ve quoted below some extracts from the book. It seems to me they show that there was an active desire among large numbers of people in Britain for reconciliation after the war, and a willingness to help other people worse off than themselves.

“People were asked to send postcards to the office of Save Europe Now indicating their willingness to spare food or (food rationing) points from time to time.”

“By early 1946 sixty thousand people had sent in their postcards. Before long the total reached a hundred thousand.”

Save Europe Now sent a deputation to see Ben Smith (the Minister of Food at the time), but all proposals to allow people to make voluntary contributions were turned down.

John Strachey replaced Ben Smith as Minister of Food in June 1946. “He was willing to give way to Save Europe Now’s demand that people should be allowed to send food parcels abroad either to individuals or for general relief. However when bread rationing was introduced (in the UK) in July, the Cabinet refused to endorse his decision.”

Save Europe Now launched its own relief fund. “By August 1947 we had collected £76,550.”

“In the autumn of 1946 we had our first success on the parcel front. The parcel post for most European countries had re-opened but not for Germany. Save Europe Now was permitted to collect and ship parcels of clothing, shoes, linen and some medicines from individuals in Britain to individuals in Germany.”

“As winter set in and conditions deteriorated…we wrote to our hundred thousand (supporters) and asked them all, during the same week to write to the Prime Minister.”

This met with some success:

“People were to be allowed to send a parcel a month. They had to get a permit from a Food Office and the post the parcel off.”

“There was no parcel post to Germany. It was not scheduled to open until 15th January, abut 6 weeks ahead.”

So for 6 weeks Save Europe Now organised the parcel post themselves, from a tiny office in Victor Gollancz’s publishing offices in Covent Garden.

“I still have nightmares about parcels. It was, as the Post Office said, a complicated scheme. You had to write for, or collect, a four shilling label from Save Europe Now. Then you had to get your permit from the Food Office. Then you posted your parcel to the shipping agent who packed them and shipped them to Germany.”

“For six weeks we coped, sending out thousands of labels and thousand of leaflets explaining the scheme. Customers queued downstairs for labels.”

“On 15 January the parcel post to Germany re-opened and we heaved sighs of relief.”

“Gradually Europe became less hungry. Devaluation in Germany got rid of the black market. Slowly life returned to normal and Victor (Gollancz) began to lose interest in Save Europe Now.”

Victor Gollancz – In Darkest Germany

28th October 2005

I came across this book, first published in January 1947, some years ago, in the 10p box at my children’s school Christmas fair.

Victor Gollancz, the publisher and creator of the Left Book Club, had decided to visit the British Zone in occupied Germany for six weeks from October 2nd to November 15th 1946, to see for himself what conditions were like.

The book comprises various letters and articles he wrote when he returned to England, and which were published in the press – The Times, The Manchester Guardian, The Observer, The Daily Herald and the New Statesman, among others – describing the condition of the German people under British occupation – the famine, disease, lack of clothing and places to live and the overcrowded, ruined cities.

Of course, this was not entirely unexpected after the war. But what impressed me was the tremendous humanity shown by someone who could write, in the foreword to the book, about why he had decided to “help suffering Germans” instead of other people and nations, whom many people, especially in Britain immediately after the war, would consider more deserving.

To me three propositions seem self-evident. The first is that nothing can save the world but a general act of repentance in place of the present self-righteous insistence on the wickedness of others; for we have all sinned, and continue to sin most horribly. The second is that good treatment and not bad treatment makes men good. And the third is – to drop into the hideous collective language which is now the mode – that unless you treat a man well when he has treated you ill you just get nowhere, or rather you give further impetus to evil and head straight for human annihilation.

Peggy Duff, later to be well known as Secretary of the CND, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, worked for Victor Gollancz on “Save Europe Now” – the campaign he organised in late 1945 to try to persuade the British Government to permit British people to send food parcels to Germany. At the time this was forbidden.

Save Europe Now finally won the argument twelve months later, when the government relaxed the rules. “People were to be allowed to send a parcel a month. They had to get a permit from a Food Office and the post the parcel off.”

In her book Left, Left Left, Peggy Duff wrote of Victor Gollancz:

He was not in my view a great thinker, nor yet a great writer. His books suffered from the fact than he was a publisher and nobody ever dared to edit them. But he had his instincts which made him react to situations passionately, often violently, but always positively. That is why so many were prepared to work with him and why so many loved him He was aggressively good. And he knew it.

Clement Attlee – The Labour Party in Perspective

23 October 2005

My special interest is the period from 1945-1951.

As an introduction to the period, I recently read my father’s Left Book Club edition of Clement Attlee’s “The Labour Party in Perspective” published in 1937, when Attlee was leader of the Party, well before he became prime minister in 1945.

It contains a superbly clear expression of his political aims and ideals at the time.

Two themes stand out in the book:

  • Attlee’s view of the Labour Party, its policies and methods. The policies of the Labour Party at the time were fully socialist. The differences between Labour and the Communist Party lay in their methods, not their aims.

  • The distinctiveness of the British road to socialism. In Britain, so Attlee believed, socialism could be achieved by democratic means, not violent revolution.

Here are a few extracts from the book. How different the Labour Party then was from “New Labour” of today!

On Socialism:

The dominant issue of the twentieth century is Socialism. The Labour Party is the expression in Great Britain of a world-wide movement. In every country in the world where modern Capitalism has developed, there is to be found in some form or another a revolt of those who suffer from its conditions and reject its assumptions. Wherever the economic system has developed in such a way that the instruments of production are in the hands of a possessing class, while the workers own little or nothing but their labour, a Socialist movement will be found. The form of the revolt will differ in every country. There is no sealed pattern for the social revolution.

Socialism is not the invention of an individual. It is essentially the outcome of economic and social conditions. The evils that Capitalism brings differ in intensity in different countries, but, the root cause of the trouble once discerned, the remedy is seen to be the same by thoughtful men and women. The cause is the private ownership of the means of life; the remedy is public ownership. The essentials of Socialism have been well stated by Bertrand Russell:

‘Socialism means the common ownership of land and capital together with a democratic form of government. It involves production for use not profit, and distribution of the product whether equally to all or, at any rate, with only such inequalities as are definitely in the public interest. It involves the abolition of all unearned wealth and of all private control over the means of livelihood of the workers, To be fully realised it must be international.’

On the Labour Party as the inheritors of the British Liberal tradition:

The immediate predecessors of the Labour Party were the Liberals. They sought to free the individual from the power of the State. They believed that economic liberty meant political freedom. Realising that British liberty was essentially the liberty of the man of property, they thought that under free competition, and with a wide distribution of individual property, this could be achieved.

The dominant issue throughout the nineteenth century, as it seemed to most thinking men and women, was political liberty. The issue of the twentieth century is economic freedom and social equality.

On the influence of religion and Christianity on the development of Socialism:

Leaving aside Owen and the early pioneers, I think that the first place in the influences that built up the Socialist movement must be given to religion. England in the nineteenth century was still a nation of Bible readers. To put the Bible into the hands of an Englishman is to do a very dangerous thing. He will find the material there which may send him out as a preacher of some religious, social or economic doctrine. The large number of religious sects in this country, and the various tenets that many of them hold, illustrate this.

The Bible is full of revolutionary teachings, and it is not surprising that, in a country where thought is free, many men and women have drawn from it the support which they needed for their instinctive revolt against the inhuman conditions which Capitalism brings.

On the distinctive characteristics of British socialism:

It naturally follows, however, from the heterogeneity of the sources from which the movement drew its inspiration, that the Labour Party has always comprised people of very various outlooks, and that its note has always been one of comprehensiveness. The natural British tendency to heresy and dissent has prevented the formation of a code of rigid Socialist orthodoxy. Those who have sought to impose one have always failed to make real headway and have remained sects rather than political parties. As in religion, so in politics, the Briton claims the right to think for himself.

A further characteristic of the British movement has been its practicality. It has never consisted of a body of theorists or of revolutionaries who were so absorbed in utopian dreams that they were unwilling to deal with the actualities of everyday life. From the first, British Socialists have taken their share wherever possible in the responsibility of government.

The last few years have seen the overthrow of democracy in many countries and the development of Fascism, which is only a cloak for Capitalism. It is, however, unwise to argue from the experience of one country to that of another. There is nothing more misleading than to try to apply to all countries a cast-iron theory of historical necessity and to argue that Britain must go the Moscow road unless she follows the example of Berlin or Rome.

His view of the British national temperament:

In this country there have always been small sections who advocated a forcible revolution, but they have found little favour with the majority of the people because such methods are alien to our national temperament.

I believe the people of this country are as unlikely to accept Communism and Fascism. Both systems appear to the politically immature. Both are distasteful to peoples like the British and French, who have had years of experience of personal freedom and political democracy.

On the Labour Party:

The Labour Party has deliberately adopted the methods of constitutional action and has rejected the tactics of revolution.

The Labour Party believes that, when it has obtained the support of a majority of the electors for its policy, it will secure the acquiescence of the greater number of its opponents in the changes which will be brought about.

[The Labour Party] accepts the will of the majority, which has decided that the country shall be governed by a Capitalist Government, and it expects its opponents to do the same when it is returned to power.

On Nationalism and Imperialism:

National Socialism  is a contradiction in terms. A true Socialist cannot allow his sympathies to be bounded by anything so narrow as a nation, for nationalism is only egotism writ large.

While, on the one hand, [the Labour Party] is the protagonist at home of the struggle of the workers against the Capitalists, it is, in relation to the less developed peoples of the world, part of a dominant race which collectively exploits them.

The great difficulty in consolidating the British Commonwealth is that it is essentially a moneylenders’ empire.

The history of colonial expansion is a terrible record of cruelty to, and exploitation of, backward peoples by the advanced races. Great Britain must take her full share of blame.

On Ramsey MacDonald, his predecessor as leader of the Labour Party and Prime Minister from 1929 – 1931, and on the formation of the National Government, with MacDonald remaining a Prime Minster, in a government led by the Conservatives.

[MacDonald] had for some time been more and more attracted by the social environment of the well-to-do classes. He had got more and more out of touch with the rank and file of the Party, while the adulation which is almost inseparable from the necessary publicity given to the leader of a great movement had gone to his head and increased his natural vanity. The philosophy of gradualness which he had always maintained became almost indistinguishable from Conservatism, while his innate disinclination to take the necessary executive decision made him readily accept the impossibility of any serious challenge to the powers that be.

One feature of MacDonaldism needs to be specially emphasised. The attempt was made to make people believe that there was really no need for the existence of separate parties, as all good men were working for a common end. MacDonaldism is, in fact, in its philosophy essentially Fascist. MacDonald himself uses the same phrases that may be found in the mouth of Hitler and Mussolini. He constantly draws a distinction between party and national interests, the theory being that there is really some ideal course to be followed for the good of the country and that party policies are deflections caused by mere factiousness. If MacDonald had succeeded in seducing any large proportion of the Labour Party, it is quite possible that the country might have swallowed this doctrine. The steadfastness of the rank and file of the Labour Party, in fact, saved British democracy.

The Fascist danger in this country does not come from the crude activities of Sir Oswald Mosley, but from the clever propaganda which has been actively disseminated ever since the formation or the National Government in favour of what is called national unity. There has been a deliberate attempt made to suggest that after all there are no real political differences in this country, and everybody is really in agreement. The increasing danger of the international situation affords an opportunity for pressing this point. The speeches of Mr Ramsey MacDonald are full of Fascist ideas and even fascist phraseology. The essentials of the Corporate State without any coloured shirts might be introduced in this country in a period of international tension.

And finally, on his personal character and ideals:

Socialism to me is not just a piece of machinery or an economic system, but a living faith translated into action.

I am not prepared to arrogate to myself a superiority to the rest of the movement. I am prepared to submit to their will, even if I disagree. I shall do all I can to get my views accepted, but, unless acquiescence in the views of the majority conflicts with my conscience, I shall fall into line, for I have faith in the wisdom of the rank and file.

But the future of the Labour Party depends, first and foremost on the idealism, the devotion, and the intelligence of the rank and file of its adherents.

It is this army of active Socialists which will in due time achieve power and create the Britain which they desire. The deciding factor, to my mind, will not be leadership or the exact theories which are held to be orthodox Socialism. It will not be the brilliance of particular individuals. The thing which will secure the triumph of Labour will be the demonstration by Socialists in their lives that they have a high ideal and live up to it. People are converted more by what they see Socialists are than by what they hear them say.