Churchill's Wizards (34 page)
Read Churchill's Wizards Online
Authors: Nicholas Rankin
Had any real leadership existed on the Left, there is little doubt that the return of the troops from Dunkirk could have been the beginning of the end of British capitalism. It was a moment at which the willingness for sacrifice and drastic changes extended not only to the working class but to nearly the whole of the middle class, whose patriotism, when it comes to the pinch, is stronger than their self-interest. There was ⦠a feeling of being on the edge of a new society in which much of the greed, apathy, injustice and corruption of the past would have disappeared.
Orwell had had a dream one night back in August 1939 that helped convince him of his true feelings. He dreamed that the war had already started, and this had two lessons for him. The first was that he would be relieved from dread when it did happen, and the second was the sure knowledge that he was patriotic at heart, that he would not sabotage his own side, and that he would support the war and fight in it if possible. The next day he had read in the newspapers about the NaziâSoviet pact. By March 1940, Orwell had reached George Bernard Shaw's position:
When war has once started there is no such thing as neutrality. All activities are war activities. Whether you want to or not, you are obliged to help either your own side or the enemy. The Pacifists, Communists, Fascists etc are at this moment helping Hitler.
In April 1940, reviewing Malcolm Muggeridge's
The Thirties
, Orwell recognised something more sympathetic to him in its closing chapters than the self-righteousness of the leftwing intelligentsia:
It is the emotion of the middle-class man, brought up in the military tradition, who finds in the moment of crisis that he is a patriot after all. It is all very well to be âadvanced' and âenlightened', to snigger at Colonel Blimp and proclaim your emancipation from all traditional loyalties, but a time comes when the sand of the desert is sodden red and what have I done for thee, England, my England?
âGeorge Orwell' was the nom de plume of a writer who often features in discussions of what Englishness is. The name camouflages the old Etonian and former Burma Police officer Eric A. Blair under the regal Christian name of England's warrior saint, St George, joined to the name of the river Orwell that winds through Suffolk to the North Sea. Although a democratic Socialist and a man of the Left (with what a Special Branch surveillance report called âadvanced communist views'), Orwell wrote shrewdly on Kipling and understood the spiritual need for patriotism and the military virtues among the English people. âThe English are not intellectual,' he observed in âThe Lion and the Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius', âbut they have a certain power of acting without taking thought ⦠Also, in moments of supreme crisis the whole nation can suddenly draw together and act upon a species of instinct', like cattle facing a wolf. Orwell says that the gentle, hypocritical English can be martial, but hate militarism. The British Army don't goose-step, he points out, because the people in the street would laugh.
Another war veteran who wanted a better world and had just had his first spell with the Local Defence Volunteers was the novelist J. B. Priestley, keeping watch and ward at night on a high down near his home at Godshill in the Isle of Wight. As he described the experience in his third broadcast talk on Sunday, 16 June, Priestley found himself back in a world not of the Flanders trenches or of Spanish revolutionaries but of Thomas Hardy, out among Wessex country people, âploughman and parson, shepherd and clerk', talking about âwhat happened to us in the last war, and about the hay and the barley, about beef and milk and cheese and tobacco'. He felt a powerful sense of community and continuity with those gone before, like the men who stood ready for Napoleon's
Grande Armée
:
But then the sounds of bombs and gunfire and planes all died away. The âAll Clear' went, and then there was nothing but the misty cool night, drowned in silence, and this handful of us on the hilltop. I remember wishing then that we could send all our children out of this island, every boy and girl of them across the sea to the wide Dominions, and turn Britain into the greatest fortress the world has known; so that then, with an easy mind, we could fight and fight these Nazis until we broke their black hearts.
Balding, bespectacled Tom Wintringham,
Daily Worker
journalist
and founder of the International Brigades in Spain, was, like Orwell, a veteran wounded in the Spanish Civil War who thought that 1940 was the moment to make âan army of the people'. Born bourgeois in Grimsby, Wintringham was an ardent public-school Communist who went on to be a motor-cycle dispatch rider with the kite balloon section of the RFC in WW1. He had commanded the British battalion of the International Brigades at the Battle of the Jarama in February 1937 when 150 of them got killed. Wintringham, once a loyal Stalinist hack, was expelled from the Communist Party in October 1938 over his affair with the âundesirable' American reporter Kitty Bowler, but his card remained marked by MI5. Orwell likened him to G. A. Henty with Marxist training.
In May 1940 Wintringham was writing vigorously not just for
Tribune
and the
New Statesman
but also for the
Daily Mirror
and Picture Post, which were read by millions. His slogan for an article in the
Daily Mirror
addressed to the newly appointed Edmund Ironside, was âAn Aroused People, An Angry People, An Armed People': he was preaching popular guerrilla warfare. âHow to Deal with Parachute Troops' filled a page of
The War Weekly
on 7 June and was soon followed by two more long pieces for Picture Post: âAgainst Invasion' and âArm the Citizens'. The War Office printed 100,000 copies of the second article and distributed them to Local Defence Volunteer units. His biographer Hugh Purcell says in
The Last English Revolutionary
that his pieces
gave practical instructions for a people's war based on his experience in Spain: how to destroy tanks and bridges, capture or kill German parachutists, fortify a village, make and throw hand grenades, engage in street fighting.
All Wintringham's articles were worked together into a longer text,
New Ways of War
, published as a Penguin Special in July 1940, which sold 75,000 copies in a few months. In it he points out that German âBlitzkrieg' evolved to escape trench deadlock, giving a certain amount of autonomy to front-line soldiers, and that the German tactic of âinfiltration' also worked through individual initiative. He criticises snobbish and rigid military thinking in Britain and says what is needed is âan army of free men' who can think for themselves. Scanning history to find âdemocratic' forces who prevailed against more powerful autocratic societies, Wintringham looks to, among others,
ancient Greeks against Persians, the Roman republic versus Carthage, and the bowmen of Crécy and Agincourt against French knights. For examples of a âPeople's War', he cites the Dutch Republic, Garibaldi's Italy, Japanese-occupied China and the old native Anglo-Saxon tradition of the
fyrd
, the freemen's shire militia.
New Ways of War
is a rousing piece of propaganda that mixes bomb-making tips, guerrilla tactics and battle lore with his radical argument for a âPeople's War':
There are those who say that the idea of arming the people is a revolutionary idea. It certainly is. And after what we have seen of the efficiency and patriotism of those who ruled us until recently, most of us can find plenty of room in this country for some sort of revolution, for a change that will sweep away the muck of the past.
Picture Post
, a pioneering illustrated magazine from the moment it first appeared on 1 October 1938, strongly supported Wintringham's ideas. The most popular news magazine ever published in Britain, it was later imitated by
Signal
in Germany,
LIFE
in the USA,
Paris
-
Match
in France,
Drum
in South Africa. The proprietor was the Conservative Edward Hulton, the son and grandson of newspaper proprietors, and in June 1940 the left-leaning Tom Hopkinson became its editor. Hopkinson was dining with Wintringham at Hulton's one night in late June, talking about the frustrations of the LDVs having to do drill with broomsticks when they were itching to learn to fight. On 20 June, in the Secret Session of the House of Commons, hadn't Winston Churchill said that âthe essence of the defence of Britain is to attack the landed enemy at once, leap at his throat and keep the grip until the life is out of him'? Then the idea clicked. Why couldn't
Picture Post
help provide the training?
It was all set up by midnight. Hulton rang a friend, the Earl of Jersey, who came round straight away. He owned a large mansion to the west of London set in the spacious grounds of Osterley Park. Jersey was happy to allow the grounds to be used for a training course, but said he'd rather the house wasn't blown up, as it had been in the family for some time. âCan we dig weapon pits? Loose off mines? Throw hand grenades? Set fire to old lorries in the grounds?' asked Wintringham. âCertainly. Anything you think useful.'
Wintringham became Director of Training at Osterley Park School which started its first course on 10 July. By now Churchill was
overruling Eden and insisting on changing the name âLocal Defence Volunteers' to âHome Guard'. Churchill found âLocal', as in âLocal Government' uninspiring, and he absolutely hated the name âCommunal Feeding Centres', telling the Ministry of Food: âIt is an odious expression, suggestive of Communism and the workhouse. I suggest you call them “British Restaurants”. Everybody associates the word “restaurant” with a good meal, and they may as well have the name if they cannot get anything else.'
Members of the Home Guard came to Osterley from all over the country for two-day courses in irregular warfare at Hulton's expense. Every week there were three courses with sixty men on each. By the end of July there were a hundred men on every course and more clamouring to get in. In August 1940 over 2,000 attended.
Picture
Post
appealed to the USA for private citizens to donate weapons: they sent a serviceable shipload to Liverpool, including six-shooters, buffalo guns, hunting rifles and.45 calibre gangsters' âTommy guns' which were duly distributed to the Home Guard.
Picture Post
also showed how to manufacture heavier weapons in the garage. âMake Your Own Mortar for 38/6d' was one feature, with instructions for milling home-made black powder. This sort of thing perturbed the conventional authorities.
The Communist Party of Great Britain had not been proscribed nor the
Daily Worker
banned at this time. Their line of ârevolutionary defeatism', which had emerged from the peculiar contortions of having to explain the NaziâSoviet pact in MarxistâLeninist terms, had now evolved into shouting loudly for the conscription of all wealth, the arming of the workers and a new government. The hard-line Security Executive was worried by CPGB propaganda and suggested in July that the Home Office frame a new defence regulation making it an offence âto attempt to subvert duly constituted authority'. The Permanent Under Secretary at the Home Office, Sir Alexander Maxwell, resisted this in an admirable minute, dated 6 September 1940:
There would be widespread opposition to such a regulation as inconsistent with English liberty. Our tradition is that while orders issued by the duly constituted authority must be obeyed, every civilian is at liberty to show, if he can, that such orders are silly or mischievous and the duly constituted authorities are composed of fools or rogues ⦠Accordingly we do not regard
activities which are designed to bring the duly constituted authorities into contempt as necessarily subversive; they are only subversive if they are calculated to incite persons to disobey the law, or to change the Government by unconstitutional means. This doctrine gives, of course, great and indeed dangerous liberty to persons who desire revolution, or desire to impede the war effort ⦠but the readiness to take this risk is the cardinal distinction between democracy and totalitarianism.
Wintringham's âThe Home Guard Can Fight', spread across several pages of
Picture Post
on 21 September 1940, was probably the apogee of the revolutionary militia idea, before the War Office and GHQ Home Forces began taking Osterley Park's staff and facilities under their control. The article shows the Home Guard shooting at model aircraft, stalking, sniping, attacking behind smokescreens and blowing up vehicles with mines. Pictures of the staff include a moustached surrealist poet, painter and art collector who was teaching camouflage, Captain Roland Penrose.
When Penrose's
Home Guard Manual of Camouflage
was published by Routledge in October 1941, he was described as âLecturer to the War Office School for Instructors to the Home Guard, formerly lecturer at the Osterley Park School for Training of the Home Guard'. Penrose, former leading light in the British Surrealist movement, was now working full-time at the South Eastern Command Fieldcraft School at Burwash in Sussex. The course, near Kipling's home, Bateman's, at Burwash taught men to use the countryside for cover and camouflage when dealing with German parachutists:
Your fieldcraft training can be summed up as being a way of learning by practice many of the things which animals do by instinct ⦠We have forgotten to do these things largely because we live in civilized communities, where custom, law, and policemen have put a padded cushion between us and the raw struggle for existence. When the Nazis come the cushion will be removed. The nearer we are to animals, the better we shall be prepared: but we can only regain the wisdom of animals through our brains, through thinking, learning and practising.
The study of hedges and ditches, woods and roads, fields and streams, how cattle behave when someone is in their vicinity, what cock pheasants, wood pigeons, magpies, jays, lapwings and blackbirds do when disturbed, how to move silently or under fire, how to freeze,
how to become inconspicuous, how to bivouac, the dangers of shape, shine, shadow and silhouette, the power of Nazi field glasses, the best way to use your ears, eyes and nose at night, reconnaissance and message carrying were all part of the Burwash syllabus. Like Osterley, Burwash pioneered some of what later army battle-schools would do, teaching platoon skills that would be useful when the British were fighting in Normandy hedgerows in 1944.
