The Story of Britain: From the Romans to the Present (98 page)

British businessmen, officials, civil servants and advisers continued knocking around in Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo and other famous British expat haunts. Shrewd deals made in the nineteenth century ensured that the empire still controlled parts of the Gulf States, such as Kuwait whose foreign policy was run by Britain until 1961. To the growing number of Arab nationalists in the Middle East, nothing much seemed to have changed. When in 1924 the warlike Wahhabi tribe under their leader Ibn Saud pushed the sharif Hussein out of Mecca, uniting the whole of Arabia under what would become the Saudi royal family, they negotiated their borders with the British.

Though Iraq was no longer a Mandate after 1932, rebelling Iraqi tribesmen were still strafed by British aeroplanes. The Brooke dynasty of white rajahs continued to rule Sarawak, a state in Malaysia on the island of Borneo, as they had done for nearly a century. The Malaysian rubber planters, as was candidly observed by the novelist Somerset Maugham, whiled away their time with chota pegs brought to them by natives they called ‘boys’, as if nothing would ever disturb the empire. Few of them took much notice that Britain was no longer absolutely assured of being able to defend the far eastern parts of the empire like Singapore and Malaya, whose rubber in the age of the motor car had become very alluring to the Japanese.

In Britain life went on much as usual. The publisher Victor Gollancz had started the Left Book Club in 1935, a vehicle for attacking fascism and promoting left-wing ideas which two years later had half a million subscribers. Gollancz and his supporters wanted to wake Britain up to the fact that in Italy fascism had destroyed free speech and imprisoned its opponents, while in Germany it had become a daily occurrence for Jews to be beaten up, robbed and sometimes killed. Yet the British and their government attempted to ignore what was going on in Europe. Britain continued to be a predictable, mainly tranquil land where all classes were passionate about games. Too many of her people were shutting their eyes to the impending cataclysm of world war.

The Failure of Appeasement (1936-1939)

Stanley Baldwin was a reassuring leader of a country whose people were longing for stability and the nostalgic sort of England which they remembered from before 1914. The dreamlike calm in which Britain existed between the wars was only briefly disrupted by the Abdication Crisis. In 1936, the year after Baldwin became prime minister, the popular king George V died. He and his wife, the redoubtable Queen Mary, had stored up a great deal of affection for the monarchy (George V had even nobly forsworn alcohol as part of the war effort), as was seen during the celebrations of their Silver Jubilee in May 1935.

But their son, the new king, Edward VIII, a handsome, weak-willed man-about-town, was quite unlike them. Showing none of the attentiveness to duty characteristic of the British royal family, frivolous and pleasure-loving, he was famed for his mistresses and his hedonistic way of life at Fort Belvedere, his country house. He had a soft-hearted and emotional side, however, and had earned some popularity by speaking out about the unemployed and about miners’ conditions in Wales during the depression. But the bulk of his time was spent playing among the fashionable London fast set. He became enamoured of a hard-bitten, twice-married American named Mrs Simpson, who could not have adorned the throne and might in fact have endangered it. As the head of the Church of England, despite the anomaly that its founder Henry VIII had been married many times, the king, it was felt, could not be married to a divorcee. It was also believed that such an unsuitable marriage might be the last straw for the already fragile empire and Dominions, which were united by the crown.

Somehow, guided by Stanley Baldwin, Edward VIII had enough sense of his royal duty to abdicate, ‘for the sake of the woman I love’, as he put it dramatically in a speech broadcast to the world by the BBC. Edward took the title Duke of Windsor and retired to France. His younger brother the Duke of York, whose daughters were the ten-year-old Princess Elizabeth and the six-year-old Princess Margaret Rose, became King George VI. The Duchess of York, the former Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyon, became Queen Elizabeth. Thanks to Baldwin, the country and the throne survived tremors which could not have been less welcome. For the international situation had suddenly taken a turn for the worst.

Nazism seemed to win international respectability when the 1936 Olympic Games were held in Berlin, a venue arranged two years before the Nazis came to power. The Olympic stadium was tarnished by being draped with swastikas, and the Olympic experience by being associated with the Nazis, who used the Games to hand out leaflets about the superiority of the Aryan (non-Jewish German) race. But though the Germans won the largest number of medals, their racist propaganda was exposed for nonsense when the black American Jesse Owens won four gold medals. The impression that Nazism was socially acceptable was enhanced the following year when the Duke and Duchess of Windsor visited Germany to meet Hitler.

Despite Baldwin’s kindness as a man, his readiness to respect views other than his own and his gifts as a Parliamentarian, his weakness as a prime minister was that he was not really interested in foreign affairs. Britain in the late 1930s with her slightly parochial air, reminds one of a jolly ocean-liner heading comfortably towards catastrophe. With its red telephone boxes (first seen in 1929), its red buses, its men in bowler hats, London was as orderly and safe as it had always been. And no real extremists flourished to either the right or the left despite the turmoil on the continent.

Few Britons joined Sir Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists, created in 1932 in response to what Mosley called the communist threat. He used his claim that Jews were behind the Russian Revolution as an excuse to unleash his own brutal quasi-military gang, the Blackshirts, on innocent Jewish people. The Blackshirts used to march through the East End of London where many Jewish people then lived and beat them up. That same year Parliament passed the Public Order Act which gave the home secretary the power to stop marches and banned the wearing of political uniforms. But like everything to do with Britain, for good or bad, it was felt that the home secretary could have moved a lot more quickly to stop Mosley than he had done. The tolerance traditional in Britain, where communism could attract intellectual sympathy but not inspire a large political party, allowed most people to think of Mosley as little more than a foolish man. He was permitted to carry on with his BUF rallies–he was knocked unconscious at one in Liverpool in 1937–and was not interned until May 1940, nine months after war had broken out (he was released in November 1943).

However, to the young and intellectual, Britain’s pragmatic indifference to extremism in foreign countries where it did not threaten her interests smacked of moral cowardice, of passing by on the other side. The Spanish Civil War, which broke out in 1936, was a case in point. Many believed that Britain should have done more to prevent the republican Spanish government being destroyed by right-wing forces under General Franco. The lack of support the republicans received from the liberal powers of Europe such as Britain and France drove brave young men from those countries and America, alarmed by the apparently unstoppable spread of fascism, to go out to Spain to help the republicans. But Baldwin and Chamberlain stuck to the view that it would be wrong to intervene in a civil war.

They also did not want to antagonize Italy, which they still wished to wean away from Germany, even though the two countries had combined to form an alliance called the Axis–and the Axis powers supported the right-wing side in the Spanish Civil War, while Soviet Russia armed the legitimate government.

Baldwin retired in 1937, having seen George VI safely on to the throne and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor off to permanent exile abroad. Neville Chamberlain took over as prime minister. He was a good, decent man, the author of much progressive social legislation. But he faced a very difficult international situation, which had given rise to the widespread belief that to oppose the dictator Hitler would plunge Britain into war. Chamberlain shared that belief, and as a result became associated with what after the Second World War would be regarded as the craven policy of appeasement. There was in fact little else Britain could do at a time when she was so weak militarily.

In the late 1930s the international situation began to spiral out of control. Even southern Ireland turned up the heat. By 1933 De Valera’s Fianna Fáil had become the majority party, and immediately set about unilaterally dismantling Ireland’s relationship with the British Empire and jettisoning the old constitution of the Irish Free State. Relations between Britain and Eire (Fianna Fáil’s new name for southern Ireland) became even more bitter: De Valera repudiated the £100 million lent by the British government after the 1903 Irish Land Act which had enabled tenant farmers to buy more than nine million acres from their landlords, and a trade war began between the two countries. By 1937 Eire, in every way but name, was an independent republic. In 1949 that final detail was remedied and the Republic of Ireland was formally declared. She announced her neutrality at the outbreak of the Second World War but would not let Britain use her southern ports, thus endangering Britain’s security.

Ever since Germany had broken the terms of the Versailles treaty, the danger she posed to international peace was all too evident to far-sighted people like Winston Churchill and an increasing number of Labour and Conservative MPs. They believed that Britain should spend more on rearming and should stand up to the dictators who were destroying democracy in Europe by threatening to fight them if necessary. But the national government was still in power in London and its leaders still held to appeasement. They shrank from plunging Britain into another world war when she had scarcely got over the dislocation caused by the first.

In 1937 Lord Halifax was sent to discuss treaty revision in central Europe with Hitler. To the dismay of his critics, Chamberlain a year later made a more dramatic move to separate Mussolini from Hitler: the British government accepted Mussolini’s conquest of Ethiopia by recognizing the King of Italy as its Emperor. But the foreign secretary Anthony Eden who had become convinced that this level of appeasement was a mistake, believed the price was too high and resigned in February 1938.

In March Hitler drastically began to reinvent the German Empire. A German army went into Austria in March 1938 and joined her to the Third Reich, or Third Empire. Welcomed by most Austrians, the ‘Anschluss’ had been expressly forbidden by Versailles, yet not a soul stirred to prevent it. The Nazi government had been confident that nothing would happen, because reports from its ambassador to London Joachim von Ribbentrop had assessed the British upper classes as being pro-German, mainly on the evidence of the appeasers he met at Nancy Astor’s home, the so-called Cliveden Set. One of them, the editor of
The Times
Geoffrey Dawson, wrote his paper’s pro-German editorials. Sir Oswald Mosley, whose admiration for the Nazis was so great that he would be married to his second wife Diana Mitford at Goebbels’ house in Berlin, continued to be received by much of upper-class London society.

Hitler had only just begun. The German government, whose presses were pouring forth directives describing what the new German Empire demanded from its citizens, started churning out propaganda about the plight of the three million Sudeten Deutsch (or Germans) who lived in former Habsburg territory which the 1919 Treaty of St Germain had given to the new state of Czechoslovakia. It was quite obvious that Czechoslovakia was Hitler’s next target, and in September he duly gave her an ultimatum. America’s failure to guarantee the peace had driven France to make alliances on Germany’s borders to protect herself more thoroughly. By the terms of one of these treaties she was bound to come to Czechoslovakia’s aid. This meant war.

It was a war for which Britain was simply not ready. Moreover, since Europe was devoted to the right of self-determination there did seem to be good reason for the Sudetenland to be joined to Germany. Neville Chamberlain, who had had two earlier meetings with Hitler at Berchtesgaden and Godesberg, and had been persuaded that the Sudeten Germans had a point, flew to Munich to negotiate with the Führer. At the Munich conference attended by the French prime minister Edouard Daladier, Hitler, Mussolini and Chamberlain, it was agreed that Germany would take over the Sudetenland part of Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain returned clutching a piece of paper and saying in what would become a notorious phrase that he had achieved ‘peace in our time’. Duff Cooper, the first lord of the Admiralty, resigned in protest at the betrayal of Czechoslovakia.

Nothing could have been less true than Chamberlain’s belief that he had achieved peace for his time. He had bought a breathing space by throwing Czechoslovakia into the mouth of the wolf. And, as the clearest sign that appeasement did not work, Germany’s military position became still more formidable once her tanks had rolled into the Sudetenland and appropriated forty divisions of the Czech army and most of the country’s natural defences.

Whatever Chamberlain’s feeling that it was ‘horrible, fantastic and incredible…that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing’, it was becoming clear that even Britain could not insulate herself from Hitler’s activities. By March 1939 the Führer had broken his word to Chamberlain and seized the rest of Czechoslovakia, the non-German Czech part–her steel mills, her industries and her population. All Chamberlain had bought was time, a year, for Britain to rearm and create an air force able to take on the Luftwaffe. Even he now saw that his policy of appeasing dictators had failed. Reluctantly Britain began to prepare herself for war. Appeasement formally came to an end on 31 March 1939 when guarantees of her territorial integrity were offered to Poland by France and Britain. Soon afterwards similar guarantees were granted to Romania and Greece.

Conscription, which even at the height of the First World War had appeared such an ethical problem and a threat to Britain’s civil liberties, was introduced without prior discussion or much protest on 29 April, its first appearance in peacetime. The menace of Hitler, who had grabbed one country after another, made most Britons accept the need to begin military training. Once again Britain, which had been on distant terms with her First World War ally for too long, co-ordinated military secrets with the French.

Hitler had no fear of their preparations. Since 1936, if not before, many ordinary German factories had been turned over to manufacturing a huge arsenal for the drive to the east to recapture all the cities wrongfully given to Poland in 1919. That summer, more strenuously than ever, the German press pounded out demands to get Danzig and the Polish Corridor back where they ‘rightfully’ belonged. The only country which might prevent this was Soviet Russia. France and Britain now found themselves in a race with Germany to obtain an alliance with her new ruler Stalin.

But the dictator Stalin had not been impressed by the western powers’ sacrifice of Czechoslovakia to save their skins, and Poland–with painful memories of her old ruler’s savagery–refused to allow any of Russia’s troops on to her soil.

On 23 August 1939, to the despair of the liberal western powers the German–Soviet Non-Aggression Pact was announced. It contained a secret agreement that Germany and Russia would divide Poland between them. Chamberlain warned Hitler that Britain would support Poland if she were attacked, and that pledge finally became an official Anglo-Polish Treaty on 25 August. But Hitler had obtained the go-ahead he needed. On the first day of September Nazi tanks supported by dive-bombers invaded Poland, spreading terror wherever they went. Two days later Britain and France declared war on Nazi Germany. The Second World War had begun.

The Second World War (1939-1945)

For the inhabitants of Britain, the Second World War began in a strangely hesitant way. A couple of thousand miles away, in the middle of the continental landmass, palls of smoke hung over the bombed-out cities of Poland. By the end of September 1939, more than 80,000 Polish soldiers had abandoned their homeland to avoid joining the 700,000 prisoners taken by the Germans and their allies, the Russians, who invaded Poland from the east that same month. But in Britain, Poland’s ally, all was as quiet and peaceful as if she were not at war.