Testament of Youth: An Autobiographical Study of the Years 1900-1925 (84 page)

As soon as the Coalition fell, the Six Point Group announced its inspired and disconcerting expedient of publishing Black and White Lists. The Black List contained the names of those Members of Parliament, including the jocular opponents of the Criminal Law Amendment Bill, who had hampered the various reforms demanded by organised women, and members of the Group were urged to work and vote against them. The White List represented those men and women who had been especially helpful to the women’s cause in Parliament. Its twenty-two names included those of Lord Robert Cecil, Lady Astor, Sir Robert Newman, Mrs Wintringham and Colonel Josiah Wedgwood, and members of the Group were asked to work and vote on their behalf.

In the intervals of my work in Bethnal Green, I kept in touch with the Six Point Group campaign, which reached its most spectacular moment on November 1st with a big meeting at the Central Hall, Westminster, to demand the amendment of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act. It was at this meeting, where she was one of the speakers, that I first saw Rebecca West, whose novel
The Judge
, which had recently been published, I had read with a disturbed and passionate interest. Dark, courageous, still in her rebellious twenties, she gave, with her incisive voice and proud head with brushed-back hair, the impression of some intrepid young thoroughbred, destined to win all contests because completely undaunted by every obstacle conceivable to mortal imagination.

‘The Houses of Parliament,’ she said, ‘seem to me the most romantic buildings in the world . . . They . . . are the symbol of a real miracle, a real mixture of ramshackleness and nobility. There has developed there a system of government which bears witness to the extraordinary nature of the human soul, and the hopefulness of the prospects that are before human society. There again and again assemblies have gathered in all honesty, have matured to power, have fallen into corruption, have miraculously reassembled again, glorious with the honesty of a new generation and a new movement. There men of all sorts who seemed utterly selfish and corrupt have to an extraordinary extent, that the most cynical interpretation of history cannot dispute, showed that they cared a little for the common good.’
^b

As she spoke she seemed the embodiment of the modern woman’s movement, so old in its aspirations but so young in achievement, and some at least of her audience began to visualise the House of Commons, not as the place which thwarted their hopes and hampered their participation in the forward-looking work of their day, but as a genuine part of the work itself, as the actual scene in time to come of their own finer struggles and efforts. It was still many years before I was to know Rebecca as a friend, but from that moment she became to me a personal symbol of the feminist cause which had thrilled me ever since my naïve adolescence, the twentieth-century successor of Mary Wollstonecraft and Olive Schreiner.

The Six Point Group was only one of many active women’s organisations that autumn, for these were now able for the first time to use a measure of power instead of merely to agitate for it. Even past and future Ministers began in alarm to remember that all but the youngest women had votes and could no longer be disregarded, and Mr Bonar Law addressed a mass meeting of women voters at Drury Lane Theatre. It was the first time that a Prime Minister had addressed an audience composed solely of enfranchised women, and many of the more prescient feminists - foreseeing deplorable consequences if the new voters came to be regarded in politics as a class apart - sincerely hoped that it would be the last. Whatever their Party, the election addresses of the thirty-three women candidates supported the League of Nations and urged the need for measures to benefit health and education, but though women had already introduced a new element of compassion, of perceptiveness, of imagination, into politics, there appeared to be no reason, other than the established tendency of certain males to look upon ‘the ladies’ as a sub-species of humanity, for treating them as a specialised category.

So, refusing to be pushed out of the main political stream even by a Prime Minister, a large number of the women voters went on serenely demanding equal political and economic rights, an equal moral standard, and equal status for married women in relation to employment, nationality and the guardianship of children. To many male candidates it came as a disagreeable shock to realise that women’s desire - so long complacently taken for granted by anti-feminists - to assume such inconvenient responsibilities could now be attained by them as the result of persistence. When these reforms, too, were obtained by the women, what would become of their opponents? It was indeed a horrid speculation, which caused a spontaneous revision of election addresses all over the country. The over-active Six Point Group had already published a selection of quotations from the speeches of Black List M.P.s which their makers would have been thankful to forget; who knew where such detestable expedients would end?

When the election results were published, it was found that sixteen of the twenty-two White List M.P.s had been returned to Parliament, and only twelve of the twenty-three on the Black List. In spite of this encouraging portent, the twelve untouchables consistently withstood, with a united determination worthy of a better cause, the growing influence of the women’s vote, and among them one of the most conspicuous was Mr - now Sir - Dennis Herbert, the Conservative M.P. for the Watford Division of Hertfordshire.

During the debates on the Criminal Law Amendment Bill, Mr Herbert displayed,
^c
in the eyes of the Six Point Group, a distinct tendency to defend the double standard of morality as a convenient museum-piece of English social tradition, and in the discussions on one of the most revolutionary measures of 1923, Major Entwistle’s Matrimonial Causes Bill, this inclination reappeared. ‘Is there any man in this House who is the father of a son and a daughter,’ Mr Herbert dramatically demanded in opposing the measure, ‘who would regard the sin of adultery on the part of his son as being as serious as the sin of adultery on the part of his daughter ?’
^d

In spite of such archaic criticism, Major Entwistle’s Bill had passed both Houses of Parliament by the middle of July 1923, and for the first time in England the rights of men and women were equal with regard to divorce. As usual in matrimonial legislation, adultery was over-emphasised as a wrecking factor in marriage, and conditions far more disastrous to marital relations - such as habitual drunkenness, insanity and excessive incompatibility - remained inadmissible as causes for their dissolution. ‘Civilised man,’ as a
Time and Tide
leader-writer expressed it, ‘recognises that sexual intercourse is not the only thing that matters in married life, and he knows that there are other things besides physical unfaithfulness which can make married life impossible.’ Still, it was at least an advance towards the far-off ideal of equal companionship when even the law, with its former pompous wink at masculine irregularities, began to expect the same standard of conduct from husbands as from wives, and the Six Point Group felt a strong political reluctance to forgive Mr Herbert for his endeavours to prevent the introduction of even so small a measure of civilisation into marriage.

So on July 12th the Group took a large hall in Watford and organised a protest meeting against the attitude displayed by the Member for that division towards the Criminal Law Amendment and Matrimonial Causes Bills. Numerous local clerics appeared on the platform, although one of them had included Mr Herbert amongst his churchwardens, and the hall was, irrelevantly but not unnaturally, packed with jubilant members of the local Liberal and Labour Parties. As it happened, the meeting coincided with the end of a nine days’ heat wave; only three nights before, London had been kept awake until dawn by one of the most prolonged and violent thunderstorms within English memory, and the hot passions in the hall were inflamed by the sultriness of the still summer air.

It was one of the most terrifying evenings of my life. With my usual rashness I had agreed to be first on the list of speakers, and the knowledge that Mr Herbert, courageous and unrepentant, was in the hall ready to meet his critics did not exactly give me the feeling that this was a pleasant party. My first novel was about to be published after a series of agitating vicissitudes, and only the previous week my mother’s mother had died after a serious operation which for a fortnight had thrown the whole family into a condition of grieved perturbation. Neither of these occurrences was conducive to that robust state of mind best suited to a political fight, but I endeavoured to pretend that I possessed it as I rose to attack this arch-anti-feminist with such eloquence as I could still command. I dared not use my notes, for I knew that the hands that held them would tremble and give me away. Later, in an interview with the local Press, Mr Herbert referred contemptuously to me as ‘a sulky child’, and suggested that the Six Point Group must indeed be hard up for supporters if they allowed so young and foolish a creature to advocate their cause. But even he was not so conscious as myself of the defects of my qualities. Never had I longed more passionately for a ‘presence’ and a dignified manner; if only, I thought, the harsh experiences of the past ten years could have been inscribed on my countenance or reproduced in my gestures! Was I always to remain this youthful, unimpressive figure, suggestive of the nursery rather than the platform?

As I had foreseen all too clearly, Mr Herbert heckled me furiously in the middle of my speech and challenged the accuracy of my statements, but the clerical chairman, who sympathised with the Group, persuaded him to allow me to continue by offering him a later opportunity to put his own case to the audience. As soon as I had finished, Lady Rhondda herself continued the indictment; flourishing several copies of Hansard, she flung Mr Herbert’s own utterances back at him with fearless indignation. I have never heard her make a better fighting speech; its effect was to convert the meeting, which passed the Six Point Group resolution, ‘specially deploring’ Mr Herbert’s attitude towards the two Bills, and urging him to bear in mind ‘the effect of his utterances upon the young people of the neighbourhood’, by a majority of about four to one.

The campaign was continued by the Group in Watford during the 1923 election, which not only put the first minority Labour Government into office on the day following the death of Lenin in Russia, but by giving seats to eight women M.P.s carried the hopes of political women to a point which, ten years previously, had seemed likely to remain unwarranted for centuries. In Conservative Watford the activities of the Six Point Group, rather than the left swing of the pendulum, were probably responsible for the drop of nearly 500 votes in Mr Herbert’s large majority, and for several weeks after the first Watford meeting an acrimonious correspondence raged in the columns of the
West Herts Post and Watford Newsletter
. In the letters contributed by Mr Herbert’s supporters my name and personality were treated with that uncompromising frankness which always characterises political controversy, and I was obliged to attempt to defend myself. But the agitation caused me by this continuous polemic was soon swallowed up in the far greater perturbations which accompanied the publication of my novel
The Dark Tide
.

12

For the first two or three years of my onslaught upon editorial offices, my journalism, like Winifred’s, remained persistent and hopeful rather than progressive. It might, indeed, have perished altogether from sheer lack of encouragement as soon as I left the flattering undergraduate atmosphere of Oxford, had I not been haunted by the memory of a ride through Fleet Street with my St Monica’s aunt on the top of a No. 13 ’bus while I was still at school.

We were going back to London Bridge in the early twilight of a late autumn evening; against the smouldering red of the November sunset, the roofs of the tall newspaper buildings were silhouetted with black, challenging sharpness. Clenching my hands in the earnest ecstasy of seventeen, I vowed to win for myself the right to enter those offices as a respected contributor. The War came and went; love and life came and went; but the dream remained. It was with me when, in the early days of
Time and Tide
, I took my first tentative notes and articles to the former Fleet Street office. It is with me still; though for years now I have passed on numerous professional errands along that narrow thoroughfare, I never see the name ‘Fleet Street’ without a profound, absurd renewal of the old childish emotion.

From time to time during the months in Bloomsbury, Roland’s father, who maintained his benevolent interest in our literary prospects, discussed our work with us, and deplored ‘the fume and fret’ of our London activities. Actually, as he came later to realise, we could hardly have had a better preparation for the free-lance political journalism to which we were both growing more and more attracted than that turbulent, kaleidoscopic life of journeys and meetings, platforms and debates and speeches. Under its influence our articles, from being the colourless, anecdotal productions which every newspaper office receives by the thousand, gradually acquired those provocative qualities which alone bring the era of rejection-slips to a close. Even when lectures and pacifist controversies were new and nerve-racking experiences, the delightful sense that I now had something else to write about but the memories which were then still too painful to be reconstructed with detachment caused me to send Winifred an unusually optimistic letter.

‘I sometimes envy the Huxley family, with its swarm of distinguished relatives and hereditary niche in literature,’ I told her in November 1921. ‘And yet, I think, if one can only do it, it’s really more exciting to rise “from obscurity”, as Machiavelli would put it.’