The World at War (56 page)

DINGLE FOOT

Sir Oswald Mosley was a very sick man, he'd been interned for a number of years without trial and I would have thought anybody who was in favour of civil liberties would be glad to see him released, whatever his views might be. This wasn't the universal view and you even had the National Council for Civil Liberties making a nonsense of its own name by resisting his release.

CECIL HARMSWORTH KING

Proprietor of the
Daily Mirror

The shares remained absolutely steady, sales remained absolutely steady, the only man who thought it was going to be shut down was Churchill. When it was brought up in the House of Commons, on the whole the House came out on the side of the
Mirror,
more or less. They didn't like the
Mirror
but they weren't going to have it suppressed. And after that we trimmed our sails a bit and the government forgot their foolishness. I was told at the time that the relevant episode was earlier. The country was covered with posters of Churchill and underneath it said the word 'Victory'. After we were thrown out of Singapore under conditions which did the war direction no credit at all we got a former member of your [Communist] Party to write a piece in which he said, 'There's a victory yourself, Mr. Churchill' and that was said to have annoyed him more than the loss of Singapore. After that he was looking for an excuse to suppress us and the cartoon was just what he thought a suitable occasion.

TOM DRIBERG

Things were going very badly in North Africa. Independent candidates were beginning to be put up to challenge the official coalition Cabinet because there was a party truce and if a member died or retired, his seat went automatically to the party who had held it. From about 1942 Independents started challenging this fix and one or two of them got into Parliament. Several friends said they thought I should consider standing. A month or two later, listening to the radio at night I heard that the Conservative Member of Parliament in the constituency in which I lived in Essex had died and I thought it was a chance and I took it. I hadn't the faintest idea how to be a candidate, I didn't belong to any party, didn't know the electoral law. First I went to see my employer, Lord Beaverbrook. I was working at the
Daily Express
and he was a bit sceptical and the only advice he would give me was that I must wear a hat: British people will never vote for a man who doesn't wear a hat: He was completely wrong, as on so many things: I didn't wear a hat and I got in. On polling day – this was before the age of public-opinion polls – Beaverbrook was giving a lunch party in London; he said that according to his best advice from his man on the spot in New Maiden [Essex], I was going to forfeit my deposit. In fact I won by a two-to-one majority.

ANTHONY EDEN

British Foreign Secretary

When Tobruk fell on 21 June 1942 Churchill was in Washington and the American press carried alarmist reports of the state of the government at home and possible votes of censure. Winston rang me up, I suppose about midnight his time, to ask what was happening, whether the government was still in office and what was going on. And I was able to tell him as far as I knew nothing had happened except that this motion had been tabled, which he'd have to take. By then Russia had been attacked and Pearl Harbor had taken place, so though there might be a rough passage there was very little doubt how the whole business would come out in the end and that there would be an Allied victory. The debate wasn't all that formidable for a number of reasons it's not worthwhile going into here, and once it was over the government was in comparatively calm waters. I was Leader of the House part of that time and there's a difficulty, in wartime: everyone nominally supports the government, all parties do, but that doesn't prevent quite a few people in each party suddenly thinking they want to be critical and that it wouldn't endanger the government. But from outside it looked as though there was much more criticism than probably there was and in itself it was healthy. It is remarkable, really, that during a war we were able to continue the conduct of Parliament like that with critics, some of them very formidable ones, saying whatever they wanted to say in public session or secret session.

TOM DRIBERG

I remember two persons in particular who were very helpful, both Christian Socialists. Although an Independent, I'd always made clear that I was a socialist and one of them was vicar of the famous socialist stronghold of Flaxted. The other even more interesting one was Jack, who was a person in the constituency and secretary of the Braintree local Labour Party, Braintree being the principal stronghold of Labour votes in this largely rural, largely Tory constituency. So he was in a bit of a dilemma because all the parties were officially supporting the coalition government. But I wouldn't have got elected if it hadn't been for the thousands of Labour votes and he came out and formed the committee in Braintree which promoted my candidature, for which, needless to say, he was removed or had to resign from the secretaryship of the local Labour Party, quite correctly in the bureaucratic sense. And then there were all sorts of other people. I daresay a few Tories voted for me because there was universal uneasiness about the war, they thought it was time for some fresh blood and then the Communists were supporting the war effort, Russia was in the war by now and the secretary of the local Communist Party also got expelled from his party for supporting me. He came out on the evening of poll and testified in the most dramatic way at a meeting in Braintree market square, because he had just heard the Conservative candidates had said that what was going wrong in North Africa was because too many supplies had been sent to Russia. The most dramatic event, which was a national tragedy, was the fall of Tobruk, which certainly pinpointed the need for changes pretty high up in the armed forces, if not in the government. I think Tobruk fell about three or four days before polling day in the election and it was a tragedy and we felt it was such, but nonetheless I'm bound to admit that it probably greatly added to the number of votes we got.

DINGLE FOOT

Secret sessions of Parliament did serve a particular purpose; it didn't mean of course that the government revealed any state secrets or military secrets. Obviously you don't do that to six hundred people, even though they are Members of Parliament. But it did enable the criticism of the government to be expressed much more freely than it could have been done in open debate, in which of course if somebody made an outright attack on the government that of course assisted the enemy propaganda, it was helping Dr Goebbels, and therefore people found it far more convenient to make their attack in secret session.

TOM DRIBERG

The impact, as so often with these great Parliamentary occasions, there was a bit of an anticlimax when you get there, and in this case the anticlimax came instantly in the opening speech of this ineffable old Tory, Sir John Ward, because he made this fantastic suggestion that there should be a Supreme Commander of all the armed forces who should be none other than the Duke of Gloucester. But there was a roar of laughter and a howl of disappointment from various parties in the House, and from then on the debate never really recovered its momentum. Although Nye Bevan and various others spoke very forcibly in support of the motion that 'This House has no confidence in the central direction of the war', which was a direct attack on Churchill, in the end Churchill won it very easily.

MICHAEL FOOT

I went to the debate because it was soon after the fall of Tobruk and the whole situation was extremely serious and the motion was going to be moved by Lord Milne on behalf of the critics, because the critics embraced some on the Tory side and some on the Labour side. Well, Lord Milne started off his speech by suggesting that one of the ways we could deal with the situation was to put the Duke of Gloucester in charge of the military forces of this country and I'm afraid this did not conduce to the effectiveness of his speech. It looked as though the whole vote of censure was going to be blown up in derision and so Aneurin Bevan got up in the most awkward circumstances on the second day to try to repair this situation. There was not the slightest doubt that the whole place was shaken by what he said, partly of course because his criticisms fitted so closely with what many people in the House of Commons knew to be the truth of reports from the front and partly because it merged into a general misgiving, which was widespread in the House at this time, about the general strategy of the war. He concluded the speech by emphasising demands about the Second Front – which was not so widely shared in the House of Commons, although of course it was shared by many strategists, particularly in the United States.

RAB BUTLER

We had very few home civil Cabinets in the war. We had this committee under Reconstruction Minister Lord Woolton, which really did splendid work; it finally approved my Education Bill. It launched the bill of the Health Service and Beveridge's plan, it launched the whole of the
postwar housing plan and the Insurance Bill which the Labour government introduced in 1946 – also some very powerful Labour men were on it: Bevin, Attlee and Morrison. Churchill didn't take much interest really but he was pleased to support the Reconstruction Committee. He had a great regard for Bevin and he was pleased to support any social reform that Bevin supported. Bevin was a most remarkable man because, practically uneducated, he managed to deal with everything, including the whole foreign affairs of the country, and he was one of our greatest helps on that committee, and Lord Woolton was a very good chairman. We had two or three Conservatives on it, a man called Oliver Lyttelton was very bright and helpful, and then that sinister figure Lord Cherwell we used to call 'The Prof. He represented Churchill on the committee and hurried off to tell him the news after every meeting because Churchill wanted to know how we were going to go in for nationalisation. And we had a proposal by Herbert Morrison to nationalise the electricity industry and that's where the coalition government stopped and they couldn't get agreement on that. But Herbert tried to get us to agree to nationalise electricity, which after all we agree to now. The Conservatives felt we mustn't go too far in wartime on the home front and we'd already gone a long way because the Health Service is one of the biggest things in any country in the world. There has never been a plan like the Beveridge Plan and it was all planned in that committee.
^*56

MICHAEL FOOT

Defence Regulation 1AA [banning strikes in essential services] was introduced by Labour Minister Ernest Bevin with the support of the whole of the official trade-union movement, but here again Aneurin Bevan understood better the ferment outside and there was a massive unofficial strike among the
miners because they felt they were being extremely unjustly treated. That was not understood by the official leadership of the miners or by the official leadership of the Labour Party as a whole. This regulation was introduced by Ernest Bevin to try to deal with the kind of threat of strike action that, as he was saying, was incited by unofficial agitators. Aneurin Bevan poured scorn on what was said and argued that the official leaders of the unions didn't understand what the rank and file were thinking and saying.

'BILL'

Betteshanger Colliery striker

There were several of the local residents, and particularly some of the troops, they were jeering and sneering at us, but little did they know that at the time we were manning this pit twenty-four hours a day, with the Home Guard, troops and ourselves, and many of us worked and stopped at the pit here twenty-four hours a day, so that in one sense we were patriotic in the safeguarding of the interests of the other capitalist owners. I don't think Churchill would have interfered. I don't think he wanted us to go to prison – I think he wanted us to stay here and guard his property, because it was his property after all, it wasn't ours.

LIEUTENANT HUGH DANIEL

Eighth Army dispatch rider

I'm sure it was at the time of Alamein, or a little before, there was some industrial dispute in this country concerning the miners, the details of which I've never followed up. But when this was reported it did cause tremendous distress because at that time I remember being with the 50th Division, Tyne and Teesdale, and these lads from the north-east were really baffled. They were fighting hard and enduring hardship and they couldn't understand how back in this country, when even Russia had come into the war, they couldn't understand how the miners could be squabbling back home when everything was needed to push the wheel round.

TOM DRIBERG

There were lots of Jews serving in the Polish forces stationed in Britain, this was a good deal later, early in 1944 when the British forces were getting ready for D-Day and they didn't want any trouble in the rear, and so there were some difficulty about these unfortunate Jewish soldiers. They were being persecuted in the Polish forces stationed in Scotland and about one hundred of them deserted or went absent, came to London to hide in the East End and sent a message to me and I went to see them. It was a very dramatic moment in a darkened hall in the black-out, groping one's way through East End Lane to find this obscure hall, and great tension in it, as these hundred and twenty men sat around. I couldn't see them properly and they told us of the appalling persecutions to which they were subject and the constant insults. Again and again a man would say that one of his supposed mates, the Polish soldiers, would say to him, 'When we land in France, one bullet for a German, one for you, bloody Yid.' So we had to take this up in Parliament and there was quite a tussle about this, but the War Office gave way rather reasonably and rather quickly and agreed that because of the impending D-Day they agreed to transfer all these men
en bloc
to the British Army and they settled down very happily.