Dare to Be a Daniel (8 page)

All this has caused us great pain. When it is over the Party will be left untrammelled as to its policy and programme …

Within three days of that letter MacDonald had been ousted as leader of the Party and a General Election followed, on 28 October 1931.

Father, who fought North Aberdeen on the basis of ‘the manifest failure of the outworn creed of “every man for himself”’ and called for the establishment of a ‘new Social Order’, was defeated
at
the election by the Conservative candidate and found himself out of Parliament again, leaving only fifty Labour MPs in the new House of Commons.

It is easy to forget that, before the calamity of 1931, Ramsay MacDonald had been tremendously successful in building up the Labour Party. He opposed the First World War, and my mother told me that on 4 August 1918 (the anniversary of the outbreak of that war) he came home with my grandfather, Daniel Holmes, because he feared he might be attacked in the street on account of his outspoken opposition to the war.

For five years following the election, Father and Mother travelled very widely, meeting world leaders and writing about it together in a book entitled
Beckoning Horizon
, which dealt with the politics and religious beliefs of America, Japan, China and the Soviet Union. Meeting Henry Ford gave Father a chance to study modern industrial capitalism; ‘with one lens they had a peep at the hundred percent efficiency of machine production’ and ‘through the other lens a glimpse of the suppression of the individuality of the workman, sensitive and even philosophical, who felt he was a diamond being used to cut glass’.

Later, on the same tour of 1934, Father went to see the Molotov works in the Soviet Union, where he found that ‘the two main springs of human effort in the West, fear of unemployment and hope of financial reward had been removed’. His Russian guides told him that ‘a belief in Bolshevism and all that it means for the uplifting of humanity had replaced both the carrot and the stick’. But in the book Father asked himself whether the alleged justification for what is called the dictatorship of the proletariat is not in fact the dictatorship of the Communist Party.

Neither Ford nor Stalin offered him a way he wanted to follow.
But
a year later, in his election address in the 1935 campaign, when there were two million out of work, he told his constituents, ‘There is no hope in this patching. A more rational approach must be made to our problems and it is to be found in the principle of socialism. Many [who] repudiate the word socialism yet approve the thing itself when they see it working … the forces of production need to be liberated and vitalised.’ That was the authentic voice of the old ‘gas-and-water socialism’ (upon which he had been brought up as a municipal Progressive in East London) heard again in the middle of a world slump.

Smile! Smile! Smile!

To the Tune of “Pack up your Troubles
.”

Vote, vote for Wedgwood Benn

the LABOUR MAN,

And Smile, Smile, Smile,

He stands for Justice and the

People’s Plan,

So smile boys, that’s the style,

We want a Labour Government

To make our lives worth while,

So pile all your crosses on the

LABOUR MAN

And Smile, Smile, Smile,

BENN X

Father’s leaflet for the 1935 General Election

Defeated in Dudley in the only campaign where he felt that corrupt methods were used against him, my father was finally elected in a by-election in Gorton in Manchester in early 1937. Back in the Commons, he threw himself into the campaign against appeasement and was elected top of Labour’s Shadow Cabinet, which was a great tribute to the respect in which he was held by his colleagues.

When the war with Germany began, he felt that he ought to rejoin the services and in May 1940, at the age of sixty-three, when France fell, he applied to the RAF and was commissioned as a Pilot Officer, the lowest commissioned rank, and was posted to the Air Ministry, leaving my mother to carry on all his constituency work. Promoted later to Air Commodore, he went back to Italy (where he had served in the First World War), this time as a member of the Allied Control Commission. My dad was very fond of the Air Force and was extremely proud when his eldest son, my brother Michael, joined it and became a night-fighter pilot.

The following year Churchill asked Attlee to recommend three Labour MPs for inclusion in a special list of Labour peers. The announcement from Number 10 made the reasons clear: ‘These creations are not made as political honours or awards but as a special measure of State policy. They are designed to strengthen the Labour Party in the Upper House.’

Father was very proud of the fact that his peerage was not an honour and, though it was a wrench to leave the Commons, he was back in uniform and he thought the Lords would be a useful place to continue in Parliament after the war. There were no life peerages at the time, and Father consulted my elder brother Michael (who would inherit the title) to find out whether he objected. He did not object because he planned to go into the
Church
after the war. Father did not tell me about the peerage in advance, and I was angry about this.

Then in 1944 Michael died, and I became heir to the peerage. Father was overwhelmed by grief and determined to be active, so he flew home from Italy and got himself transferred to a new job, lecturing on the post-war world at RAF stations. He managed his itinerary so that it took him to Air Gunnery Schools, where he bullied the instructors to put him through a regular gunnery course, which he was able to do by virtue of his senior rank.

When he had completed his training, he arranged to visit airfields where bomber squadrons were stationed and flew on a number of air operations as a gunner in the rear turret, before he was discovered and grounded. He was sixty-seven and had earned a second mention in dispatches by the time he was demobilised in the summer of 1945, just before the General Election.

A few weeks later, after Labour came to power, Attlee made him Secretary of State for Air in his new Cabinet, and in his fourteen months there Father was particularly proud of one achievement. Having been sent to Egypt to lead the British delegation to renegotiate the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, he felt his job was simply to end the British occupation of Egypt, which had soured Anglo-Egyptian relations for so long.

It was a cause he had believed in since he had served in Egypt in 1915, and though the final withdrawal from the Canal Zone did not take place until 1956, when he went to see President Nasser, he felt he had had some minor part in bringing it about.

Four years after I became an MP in 1950, Father took up the cause of a young constituent of mine called Paul Garland who was expelled from the Boy Scouts for being a communist. Father raised a debate in the Lords in which the Chief Scout, Lord
Rowallan
, and almost every peer who spoke supported the expulsion of this young lad. Writing about it, he said:

I will say quite simply what is my opinion. You can only conquer ideas with ideas … in the fresh air of freedom. This youth is sincere. We may think his opinions are in error but there is something more important than his opinions and that is his attitude. The conscience of a man, whatever his creed, is very precious, it is far stronger than acts of Parliament.

In 1958, two years before he died, he made a BBC broadcast and gave his own view of the role of Parliament. He interpreted his radicalism in these words: ‘Parliament is more than an assembly. It is a workshop or, I should prefer to say, a battlefield. I have often tried to think why it is that when political issues arise I find myself instinctively holding opinions of a particular mould. I have had, so far, to be content with the explanation of the poet who declared “We do not choose our convictions, but they choose us and force us to fight for them to the death.”’

Father was either tremendously buoyant or he would be ‘on active service’, as he called it, very serious and busy. But as he got older he was subject to depression and used to say, ‘I’m not feeling very well today.’ I would ask him, ‘Would you like to go into the Lords and make a speech?’ No. ‘Would you like to go to Stansgate?’ No. I too have periods of depression when I wonder if I have ever done anything worthwhile.

M
OTHER

My mother was born in Scotland in 1897. Her religious convictions were the result of an interesting correlation of family experiences. Her Grandfather Holmes was a member of the Irvine Brethren, which meant a very severe start in life for her dad, who used to be dismissed with the phrase, ‘Go to bed, Daniel, you’ve had enough pleasure for one day.’

This drove Daniel Holmes to atheism, but this atheism worried my mother. When she was a little girl of eight she said to herself, ‘If there is no God, we were all born in an orphanage.’ And so, on Sundays, she would go off on her own to the nearest Church of Scotland kirk, and from that developed her religious interest.

Mother had first visited the House of Commons in 1908, with her father and a Liberal MP; later, as a fourteen-year-old, she first saw my dad there. Afterwards she wrote to a London photographer and asked for photographs of some prominent MPs, including one of my father. However, it was not until after the war that she met him, when she was staying with her parents on the south coast and Father went to visit, using the excuse that he wanted to talk to his parliamentary colleague, but with his eyes on the young woman he wanted to marry.

When Mother married Father in 1920 he was a handsome man of forty-three, known as Captain Benn, decorated with the DSO and the DFC. He did not actually propose as such, but said, ‘It would be quite easy – we could have a chop at the House every night’, implying that he planned to marry her. She said, ‘Yes, but what should I call you, Captain Benn?’ She used his Christian name, Will – the name his wider family used – though his political friends called him Wedgie.

Mother was twenty years younger than Father, and she saw it as her duty to put Father’s interests before hers. This she did until his death forty years later. She used to say that Father’s existence was essential to her happiness, but his presence was not!

She became a teetotaller when she married, to comply with Father’s wishes (not that she saw it as a sacrifice), but she insisted that alcohol was kept in the house for visitors. However, few ever came to the house for a meal, as my parents did not ‘entertain’ socially.

My father insisted that when they married, Mother should give up her favourite little dog, Dugald, a West Highland terrier. That, I think, was a hardship, for she was very fond of animals and used to see the dog occasionally afterwards, when it would whimper at her.

After they were married she visited his constituency of Leith, near Edinburgh, and went to a school with him. When the teacher said, ‘And who has Captain Benn brought with him today?’, the children called out, ‘His daughter!’

On their honeymoon in Mesopotamia my father looked across a river (either the Euphrates or the Tigris, I am not sure which) and said, ‘This reminds me of Stansgate!’ – which was the place on the River Blackwater in Essex where his father had built a house, then sold it in 1903. Father always remembered how happy he had been there, and Mother discovered that he loathed holidays other than at Stansgate – a trait I picked up from him – so she took him to Maldon in Essex to stay at the Blue Boar. They went to Stansgate and met Captain Gray, an old sea captain, who then owned the house, and persuaded him to let them rent another house nearby for holidays. After Captain Gray’s death, Father bought the house back in 1933, his attachment to Stansgate explaining why he took that name when he was made a peer.

Mother was a passionate believer in the rights of women, arguing against her own father who, even when women got the vote in 1918, said to her, ‘We may have to take it away again, yet.’ Although she called herself a suffragist rather than a suffragette, her theological interest and her campaigns for the rights of women led her to work as a young woman for the ordination of women in the Church of England, to which she had transferred when she married Father. The earliest movement devoted to this was called the League of the Church Militant and, while still a young woman, she met Dr Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury, at a dinner (he had been appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in Queen Victoria’s reign) and was told by him to desist from such an idea, which only strengthened her own determination.

Later, as a delegate on behalf of the Church of England, at the ecumenical Amsterdam conference in 1948, Mother discovered that the conference was told she was not to be taken as representative of the Church on this matter, so she left the Church and joined the Congregationalists. Father was also passionate about equal rights for women. When he was appointed Secretary of State for Air in 1945, in order to support Mother’s campaign, he appointed the first woman Chaplain in the Royal Air Force – Elsie Chamberlain, a Congregationalist minister. This greatly upset the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, who wrote to my father that he hoped that under no circumstances would a male Chaplain be required to take orders from a woman. Father discovered that when the Air Force list was published, the Revd Elsie Chamberlain had been put under the heading of ‘Welfare Officer’ instead of Chaplain, so he had the whole list pulped and reissued, with her in the proper place.

When the Congregationalists joined the Presbyterians to form
the
United Reformed Church, which appointed its ministers instead of electing them, as was the Congregationalist tradition, Mother joined with Elsie Chamberlain and others to form the Congregational Federation, of which she (Mother) became the first President.

I am very proud indeed to be the son of the first woman to be the head of a Christian denomination. Her influence in our family was immense: she was highly committed to the ecumenical movement and to inter-faith dialogue. In particular, she sought to eliminate from Christianity the traditional hostility to the Jews. She became a Fellow of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where a library is named after her.