Dare to Be a Daniel (18 page)

Caroline’s mother was a Graydon, of Protestant Irish stock, who, as Caroline once said to me, had waited for the Pullman cars to be running before they came to Ohio – her grandfather being a Chaucer scholar and a partner in a law firm in Cincinnati.

I do not think Caroline’s Republican parents ever quite understood the radical ideas that she had formed for herself – not least her voting for Henry Wallace in the presidential election of 1948, at a time when he was receiving support from socialists and communists.

Caroline was brought up, as I was, as an Anglican. But she became a humanist, as I have done, cherishing the rituals of the Church, but unable to subscribe to the Creed, while embracing the moral teachings of the Bible, believing them best realised in collective political and social action.

At Vassar College, where she graduated with distinction, she organised a Radical Arts Conference to bring arts and society together; because of its success, it finally won round the support of the authorities who had initially disapproved of it.

From there, and after our engagement, she went on to do a
graduate
degree at the University of Cincinnati with a thesis on Milton, and when we arrived in London she did a second graduate degree at University College, with a thesis on Stuart Masques and the co-operation between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones.

In January 1949 I went by boat to New York, where Caroline was waiting, and on by train to Cincinnati to meet her family. They could not have been nicer, considering that they knew nothing about me, other than what Caroline had told them. They arranged a party at their home to meet their wider family, and I was taken to Caroline’s grandfather’s house for Sunday lunch, in a huge ‘Elizabethan’ building that they had put up in the 1930s, with a library full of books, including some of his about Geoffrey Chaucer, on whom he was an expert.

James DeCamp, her father, and Joseph Graydon, her mother’s father, were both lawyers. They all lived in Cincinnati, a solid middle-western Republican city, which was the home of the Tafts, one of whom – William Howard Taft – had been President; the most recent Senator Robert Taft was accepted as an elder statesman of the Republicans. Brought up during Prohibition, Caroline’s parents were quite heavy drinkers, and every night people came for drinks on the terrace while the meal was cooked, and then went on to drink late into the night.

My future mother-in-law, Anne DeCamp, had a social life of her own and was involved in the Widows and Old Folks Fêtes, which she helped organise to raise money. Her husband James was a golfer and enjoyed nothing more than a day on the links. I also became good friends with Caroline’s sister Nance and brother Graydon.

They had all the normal prejudices of their generation, and no idea at all about equal rights for the African-Americans. When
my
son Hilary was asked by his great-grandfather on a family visit to Cincinnati what he especially noticed about America, Hilary replied, ‘Well, the police have guns, and the Africans do all the work!’ He was about six at the time and his great-grandfather laughed.

Cincinnati is an old river town on the Ohio and across the water lies Kentucky, which had been one of the Confederate states in the war, so that slaves would escape across the water into Ohio, before civil war ended slavery throughout the United States.

Following my introduction to Caroline’s family, I began some months of travelling as a salesman for Benn Brothers’ publications – and a miserably lonely and unsuccessful trip it was. With paper rationing, British magazines were slim compared to the bulky journals that were available in the States. I moved from city to city staying in little hotels, culling the names of potential customers from the Yellow Pages and going round with my wares, always to be treated kindly, but with practically nothing whatsoever to show for it.

Because Benn Brothers had some connections with McGraw Hill in New York, in the spring of 1949 I took a little room on the west of Manhattan and worked at their HQ, where I learned a lot about publishing and editing and got on well as a student of modern American marketing methods. Then, in the summer, I was free, returned to Caroline’s home and we were married from there at the Church of the Advent, which was her local church. We went on to a honeymoon in Michigan in a cottage that her parents had rented, and from there to the Summer Institute for Social Progress at Wellesley College, where I spoke in the debate about the future of Europe and the world.

The story of the bureaucracy I encountered in order to marry Caroline is an amusing one. In Britain I had applied for a visitor’s
visa
from the American Embassy to allow me to go over to get married. The embassy replied saying that, if I was going to marry an American girl, it would only grant me an immigration visa, since nobody going to America to marry would ever want to leave.

This posed a problem, because I was still on the reserve list as a Fleet Air Arm pilot and could be recalled at any time, so I had to ask the Admiralty if they would agree to release me; I received a letter from them granting me permission to emigrate, adding in a formal note that the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty wished me all success in my future life!

When I arrived in America, the US authorities wrote to welcome me, offering to provide courses in English for all immigrants – an offer for which I thanked them, but said that I did not need.

After we were married we left for England, as we had planned, and on my return home I got another letter from the United States asking me if I had left America to avoid military service. Meanwhile, under British law at that time, Caroline had to be registered as an alien, and was required to report to the police, and whenever she went more than fifty miles from London the police also had to be notified. This, on one occasion, led to the police calling at our front door to see if she was there.

If she had applied for British citizenship, as she was entitled to do, she would have had to renounce her American citizenship and take an oath of allegiance to the Crown, which, on principle, she was not prepared to do, being very proud of her US citizenship. When I once told this story in a parliamentary debate on immigration law, a Tory MP attacked me bitterly for not having insisted that she become British, and said it was a disgrace that as an MP I had allowed her to retain her US citizenship.

Caroline and I returned to Britain after our honeymoon on a French liner, the
Île de France
. As she had not had time to put her married name on her passport, the French stewards tried to be very understanding and nodded and smiled at each other, as if to say it did not matter that we were not married – and perhaps they had underestimated the British in matters of love.

After two months at home with my folks, we moved into a flat in Goldhawk Road, Hammersmith, where the rent was £115 per year. I got a job at the BBC at £9 per week as a producer in the North American Service, where I was able to do everything, including editing, interviewing and introducing programmes on subjects that I mainly picked myself, and which were transmitted by shortwave and re-broadcast on public-service stations.

Among the people whom I asked to broadcast was Bernard Shaw; and I received from him one of his famous postcards, the address hand-written by him and with the following printed message:

Mr Bernard Shaw’s readers and the spectators at performances of his plays number many thousands. The little time remaining to him at his age is fully occupied with his literary work and the business it involves; and war taxation has set narrow limits to his financial resources. He has therefore to print the following intimations.

He cannot deal with individual grievances and requests for money, nor for autographs and photographs. He cannot finance schools and churches. His donations go to undenominational public bodies and his charities go to the Royal Society of Literature.

He cannot engage in private correspondence, nor read long letters.

He cannot advise literary beginners nor read their unpublished works. They had better study the Writers’ Year Book (or other books of reference), and join the Society of Authors as associates.

He cannot discuss his published views in private letters.

He cannot receive visits at his private residence except from his intimate friends.

He will not send messages.

He begs to be excused accordingly.

Ayot Saint Lawrence

Welwyn Herts

2/4/1950

Having campaigned in the Abbey Division of Westminster in the 1945 General Election (and distributed leaflets as a lad of ten in the 1935 election), I was approached by the Abbey party in 1946 – by then I was twenty-one – to seek my nomination to ‘List B’. This was the list compiled by the party headquarters at Transport House with the names and details of party members whom constituency parties believed would be suitable for adoption as candidates by the Labour Party.

All it meant was that, if you were adopted by a constituency anywhere in the country to fight a seat, the local constituency party concerned would know something about you. When a vacancy for a candidate occurred, List B would be made available to the local party to give them some idea of people they might want to interview. The choice of candidate still had to be endorsed by the National Executive Committee, but there would be the safeguard that the person chosen was on List B. All that has now changed of course because the National Executive controls much
more
tightly the selection of candidates, particularly at by-elections.

One local party that approached me was Richmond, in June 1950, but I refused them for reasons that were explained in my letter to them:

… I am in rather a difficult position at the moment, so I am afraid that my answer will have to be no. I work in the BBC, which, as you know, prohibits all political activity. If I were nominated I would have to give up my job at once. I have been to Transport House to talk over the problem with Mr Windle, especially to ask if I should have my name taken off the list. But he has advised me to keep it on anyway and to try and find another job …

I would not be able to devote all my energies to the constituency, to say nothing of any other kind of backing. Besides, I have recently got married and that is an additional complication.

Again thank you for your offer …

I had earlier been approached by John Parker, an MP who became Father of the House, during the war; he was on the lookout for young Labour candidates and asked me if I would put my name forward, but as I was then only nineteen I had to ask to be excused.

However, by the time Raymond Blackburn, Labour MP, left the Party in 1950 and his Northfield constituency in Birmingham was looking for a new candidate, I had decided that I would give up my BBC job, if successful. I agreed to attend the selection conference, but before it was held Bristol South East approached me because their MP Sir Stafford Cripps, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (who had cancer), was retiring.

The approach came from Mervyn Stockwood, the rector of St Matthew Moorfield in my constituency, who was also a Labour councillor and later became Bishop of Southwark. I believe that my friend Tony Crosland, by then the MP for South Gloucestershire, had suggested me to Stockwood, so on 1 November Caroline and I set out by car on my first ever visit to Bristol for my first ever selection conference, knowing no one and having no hope of winning. Arthur Creech Jones, the Colonial Secretary who was born in Bristol and whose brother was a Labour councillor there, had lost his seat of Shipley in the February 1950 election, and the by-election offered a natural opportunity to him to return to Parliament and Government. Another candidate had also been a Labour MP: Muriel Nichol, the daughter of Dick Wallhead (also a former Labour MP), who had lost her seat at the same time.

The national agent of the Labour Party had come down to be sure that Creech Jones was selected, and the regional organiser was also there for the same reason. What I did not know was that having had a Cabinet minister as their MP for five years, Bristol South East desperately wanted some young candidate who would work with the constituency and not be siphoned off into high office.

One serious shadow hung over my candidature in that my dad, who was then seventy-three, would, when he died, saddle me with his wretched peerage and I would be disqualified. I pointed this out, but they didn’t seem to mind; and when I was asked what money I could give to the constituency if I was the candidate, I replied that this was not a Tory selection conference and if I did have money to give, I certainly wouldn’t tell them at this stage. They also asked me if I would move to Bristol to live, if I was
their
MP. I said, ‘I have just got married, we are hoping for a family and I really would want to be with them at the weekend, but promise that I will always be here whenever you want me.’

After all the candidates had finished their statements, we were brought in together to hear the result, which I thought was rather brutal. After I won, both Creech Jones and Mrs Nichol warmly congratulated me, which was typically generous of both of them.

Polling day was 30 November and that day President Truman said, almost casually, that he might use an atomic bomb in the Korean War. But on polling day no busy candidate has time to listen to the news, and it was only later that I heard this devastating threat, which led Attlee to fly to Washington immediately to deflect Truman.

So it was that on 4 December 1950, at the age of twenty-five, I took the oath and my seat, with my parents and my brother in the gallery. I was technically ‘baby of the house’ (that is, youngest member of the Commons) for twenty-four hours. The circumstances were interesting because another Member, Tom Teevan, who was two years younger than I, was elected in a by-election on 29 November 1950 in Belfast West, but did not take his seat until the day after me.

Thus, with the threat of a peerage overshadowing me, began a life in the Commons that ended in May 2001, more than fifty years later, with a few interruptions. I had served in Parliament longer than any other Labour MP in the history of the Party.