As air raids over Germany heated up in 1943, the playwright, singer and songwriter Noël Coward added a satirical edge to the debate with his song, ‘Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Hun’. His style was to sarcastically emulate those ‘humanitarians’ who were concerned about being too hard on the Germans or gathering them all in the Nazi camp. ‘It was just those nasty Nazis who persuaded them to fight,’ he sang, ‘And their Beethoven and Bach are really far worse than their bite.’ The BBC sought to ban the song, convinced that it was seditious, and afraid Coward’s song might be interpreted by the public as pro-German. But that was going too far. It was clear from his tone, the rollicking melody and the content of the song that Coward was expressing the moral conundrum of fairly punishing the appropriate Germans without setting the stage for a future war, as so many felt the terms to end the First World War had done. In every verse, he alluded to failures of the Treaty of Versailles and the inter-war period – allowing the Germans to rebuild their fleet and occupy the Rhineland with impunity, for instance – and linked them to the current conflict. Tongue-in-cheek, he offered to be nice to the Germans, but also to ‘remind them that “sterilization” simply isn’t done’. As the melody lightly rolled along, Coward jokingly encouraged making ‘them feel swell again’ so they could ‘bomb us all to hell again’. ‘But don’t’, he gibed, ‘let’s be beastly to the Hun.’8
There were no clear solutions, and individuals struggled to find a judicious solution that would end the war quickly, while simultaneously harbouring an irresistible desire to lash out at the enemy who destroyed lives, homes and businesses with wild abandon. Irene Grant’s attempt to wrestle the problem of bombing German cities illustrates the complexities and contradictions felt by many in Britain. She admitted feeling ‘all ways about’ the issue and listed out her thoughts for M-O as they occurred to her. Her first impulse was that massive bombing of ‘the brutes’ would end the war sooner and thus, ultimately, save lives on both sides. Yet, she could not ignore ‘the horrors and miseries’ that must come with such action. Furthermore, the damage that committing such ‘savagery’ wrought upon the young British bombers themselves was particularly disturbing.
It was a common feeling, with which many of the women agreed. Both Edie Rutherford and Natalie Tanner felt the raids were ineffective at undermining German morale, and they considered the impact on the British air crews a horrific experience that would most likely inhibit their ability to become useful members of society after the war. Others, with more millenarian predilections accepted the bombings – and sometimes revelled in them, viewing them as necessary for the second coming of Christ – but, despite their part in God’s grand plan, felt that the fighters would have to account for such sins in the final reckoning.
After pondering the miseries attendant on both sides, Grant felt the sharp stab of vindictiveness and impulsively wrote ‘Serves Germans right!!’ Struggling with the issue, she then pulled back, recognized her generalization and, perhaps feeling embarrassed by it, admitted that one couldn’t tar all Germans with the Nazi brush. She even noted that many Germans themselves had been victimized by the Nazis. Yet, once again, Irene was overcome by the feeling that it was ‘better [to] wipe Germans out than decent peace-loving folks’. Then, she turned back to the British bombers themselves and, like Rutherford who noted losses regularly, confessed that her ‘heart misses a beat’ every time she learned of missing and downed RAF fighters. In the end, she felt no nearer to finding an answer to the problem and threw her hands in the air, telling M-O she didn’t know what to think, and cursing ‘the wickedness and cruelty’ that made such dreadful contemplation necessary.
The complex moral questions surrounding the destruction wrought upon the German people by their own ‘brave lads’ continued to exercise many Britons until the end of the war, and indeed was exacerbated by the atomic bombs released in August 1945 to end the war with Japan. Still, in the summer and autumn of 1943, everyday life went on.
Edie Rutherford took her yearly holiday to Bakewell during the week that the RAF burned Hamburg. Helen Mitchell flitted from friend to friend, trying to escape the never-ending grind of housework and the evil drone of aircraft overhead at home in Kent, relishing in the delirious ‘pre-war life’ of her friends’ tidy maids and refreshing mid-afternoon cocktails, all the while lazily dreaming of a better life from the comfort of lawn chairs and gently swinging hammocks. Nella Last fretted over Cliff’s latest deployment and tried to negotiate the politics of the local WVS. Natalie Tanner’s son was home from school until mid-September, so the two spent much time together, as they always did on his vacations: at movies in town, train spotting (his favourite activity) and leisurely exploring north-east England. Meanwhile, Irene Grant was moving into her new home, and enjoying the joys and frustrations of home ownership. And, characteristically, Alice Bridges was deeply involved in dance hall intrigue: teaching new ‘chappies’ the tango and precariously balancing her signature risqué flirtation with a paradoxically confident moral rectitude.
Ensconced in their own personal lives, the women also watched the international and domestic events closely. Imperial problems were manifest, and debates over both significant and trifling domestic issues abounded. Many, for instance, were intrigued that autumn with the Prime Minister’s crusade to establish Basic English across the globe.
Developed in the 1920s and early 1930s, Basic English was supposed to improve international relations through a commonly understood, and easy to learn, method of communication; it pared the English language down to just under 1,000 of the most necessary words, which could, theoretically, describe anything. An altercation between Edie Rutherford and an Esperantist (one who expounded a different form of international communication) illustrates the core of the Basic English debate: ‘[the Esperantist] said in Basic English I cannot be called a wife, but a married woman.’ Unruffled, Rutherford replied, ‘that was OK by me, “kept woman” would be all I’d baulk at, having worked most of my married life!’ ‘Then you can’t say eyebrows, but hairy arches above the eyes,’ the Esperantist shot back. ‘Well … I’d know what was meant and that is all Basic English intends I suppose,’ Edie retorted.
That is indeed what Basic English was supposed to do. But there was more to it, and Rutherford astutely perceived the underlying significance of the movement. She told M-O, ‘Churchill is artful. He knows what he is doing.’ ‘If we can get Basic English established over the face of the earth,’ Edie argued, ‘it will be a grand thing for all’. Edie saw Basic English as a manoeuvre to assure the predominance of the English language across the globe, and hence the hegemony of English-speaking nations. Furthermore, Churchill believed that the special relationship between Britain and the US was effectively built upon a common language. If this ability to understand each other (if only in a limited fashion!) could be extended, the implications for peace, Churchill stressed, were astounding. Noble and crafty as were his intentions, many nonetheless had a good laugh at the Prime Minister’s expense.
In November 1943, the issue of Basic English came up in Parliament. Churchill was asked jokingly if the BBC would be required to adopt the new standard, or if they would continue with ‘Basic BBC’. Willie Gallacher, Scottish Communist MP, asked the Prime Minister, ‘Would the Right Honourable Gentleman consider introducing Basic Scottish?’9
Even the American President, Roosevelt had his own fun with Basic English. When Churchill approached him with the idea, he replied, ‘I wonder what the course of history would have been if in May 1940 you had been able to offer the British people only “blood, work, eye water and face water,” which is the best I understand that Basic English can do with five famous words.’10 Churchill was miffed by the playful banter surrounding his pet project. To those in Parliament who asked similar questions about the impact upon the beauty and emotional depth of the language, he responded, ‘Basic English is not intended for use among English-speaking people but to enable a much larger body of people who do not have the go
od fortune to know the English language to participate more easily in our society.’ Those who did not see that Basic English was not a ‘substitute for the English language’ were, he stressed with a rhetorical flourish unimaginable within the corpus of Basic English, ‘quite purblind’.11
Basic English sparked a bitter debate between Helen Mitchell and her husband, Peter. He could see the benefits of its usage, but she hated it. The one thing they could agree on that night was another issue that came up in Parliament that cycle: something that struck closer to home. Earlier that year, a judge in Oxford had ruled that the savings laid aside from a woman’s housekeeping money were, in fact, her husband’s property. In this case, a jilted husband claimed, and received, the £103 his wife had saved over the course of their marriage. The woman in question, Mrs Blackwell, had put aside the excesses of the housekeeping money her husband had given her over the years, as well as earnings from taking in lodgers, in a Co-operative Society savings account. The judge ruled that Mr Blackwell was entitled not only to the housekeeping money (which had come from his earnings), but also to the savings accumulated from the profits his wife made in her boarding business, since he had paid for and provided the home.
The case, and the unsuccessful court appeal of the wife, sparked a firestorm of anger from married women across the country. Dr Edith Summerskill, MP, claimed that she had never received such ‘a deluge of correspondence’ over any other issue raised in Parliament. The overwhelming message from this correspondence was that the judge, and the legal system that upheld his decision, made marriage ‘a mockery’: housekeeping money and the home should be shared, they argued, and urged the government to make explicit changes to the law.12 Indeed, The Married Women’s Property Act of 1882 had ensured that a married woman’s wages were hers alone – not her husband’s, as had been the law until that point. Still, Blackwell v. Blackwell revealed an obvious loophole that angered many women, including Edie Rutherford and Helen Mitchell.
Helen reported that even her husband, Peter, felt the ruling ‘a bit thick’. Household expenses – from rent to food to paying domestic servants – were often paid out of the husband’s pocket, but from the woman’s hand. Most women managed household matters with whatever money their husbands gave them and felt it their right to keep any money they managed to save. Nella Last was proud of her domestic management and skill in saving, and announced to M-O that despite the fact that she had not once asked for a rise in her housekeeping since the war began, she nevertheless was able to save. There wasn’t much left, though; she complained,
I’ve often wished I had a little more money – to travel, to have good holidays and not to always plan – to buy a new hat because I liked it and not because I needed it.
The root of the problem lay in the fact that full-time housewives did not earn wages, a fact that Edith Summerskill lobbied strongly against; to mitigate this problem, she and her Married Women’s Association argued that wives should be paid for their work in the home. William Beveridge disagreed with Summerskill on this point, but nonetheless recognized the precariousness of women’s financial security in his 1942 report and therefore suggested that housewives be insured under his schemes. While such a scheme would help housewives if they became widows or if their husbands were unable to work, it did not change the fact that much of their independence was nonetheless often subject to the whim of their husbands.
For Natalie Tanner, this fact was no problem, as Hugh seemed very generous with his earnings. At least from January 1943, Edie Rutherford earned her own wages; otherwise, it seems she and Sid had a financial agreement that rarely chafed Edie’s sensibilities. Irene Grant and her husband, Tom, also enjoyed similar congeniality, while Alice Bridges made her own money through seamstressing. But for Nella Last and especially Helen Mitchell, the financial constraints of housewifery were palpable.
If Helen’s husband thought the result of the Blackwell case ‘a bit thick’, it was also a bit ironic, because Helen felt Peter never gave her enough housekeeping in the first place. Indeed, from her perspective she had little property or savings of her own, beyond a piano, which she often played in order to recapture some semblance of peace and sanity. If she had wanted to leave her unhappy marriage, it was painfully clear that she had nothing and would, therefore, be destitute if she struck out on her own. And, after the ruling in the Blackwell case, in the event that she actually had been able to save something, it would obviously be returned to Peter if she left him.
The furore over the case lasted until November 1943, but then soon ebbed away. The Blackwell decision stood, and beyond a few moments of levity in the House now and again (when a similar issue came up in 1951, members laughed it off, saying that the ‘supposed’ problem of women’s inequality had gone so far that men were in danger of becoming women’s ‘chattel’), little would be done to resolve the issue subsequently.13
Not long after the Blackwell case faded from the newspapers and parliamentary debate, a new political controversy sparked indignation and anger across British society. In late November, the Home Secretary, Herbert Morrison released Britain’s most infamous Fascist couple from prison. Sir Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Union of Fascists (BUF, renamed BU in 1939), and his wife, Diana, had been thrown in jail three years earlier because of suspicions of the BU’s Nazi sympathies. Indeed, the couple had strong ties to the highest echelons of Nazi power, including the Führer himself. The two had been married in Joseph Goebbels’ drawing room in the presence of Hitler, and Diana’s sister, Unity, spent much time in Hitler’s entourage before the outbreak of war. (When Unity learned of war in 1939, she attempted suicide, but failed, suffering instead severe brain damage.) Mosley’s fascist union – attracting perhaps 9,000 members by the beginning of the war – had stirred up violence and hate in pre-war Britain, but never gained the political power it craved.
Nonetheless, once the German war machine began rolling in earnest after Dunkirk, the BU came under close scrutiny for its likely fifth column tendencies and its obvious links to the Nazi Party. By July 1940, when the BU was officially shut down by the government, the authorities netted over 700 BU members, most of whom were interned on the Isle of Man. For fear that he might stir up rebellion amongst the internees, however, Sir Oswald was kept at Brixton, while his wife spent her days in Holloway. But by 1942, Sir Oswald and Lady Diana were doing time together. Tom Mitford, Diana’s brother, had successfully lobbied Winston Churchill (on the strength of Mitford’s relation to Churchill’s wife, Clementine, who was a cousin of Mitford) to allow the Fascist couple to live together. The two were given a home in the grounds of Holloway Prison, complete with a little vegetable plot and their very own servants – fellow prisoners – to wait on them.
If this arrangement was too much for the British public, the Home Secretary’s decision to release the couple conditionally in November 1943 seemed entirely unacceptable. Morrison defended his actions, stating that Mosley was gravely sick, suffering from thrombophlebitis (blood clotting and inflammation of the walls of veins). More than the disapprobation of the British public, Morrison feared that Mosley’s death while in custody would most certainly create a martyr – a possibility the Home Secretary did not wish to face.
Demonstrations protesting at Mosley’s release erupted around the metropolis and across the country that November, culminating in a mass protest in Trafalgar Square that attracted thousands. Some MPs, such as Sir Richard Acland of the Common Wealth Party, swore publicly that they would support a vote of no confidence against the government over the issue. This threat did not come to fruition; however, certain members did register their displeasure with the Home Secretary’s decision in the House. The MP for Finsbury, Reverend George Woods, moved to tell the King that the House, ‘humbly regret the decision of Your Majesty’s advisers to release Sir Oswald Mosley, which is calculated to retard the war effort and lead to misunderstanding at home and abroad’.14
To Helen Mitchell, who encountered an angry mob protest
ing at the Mosleys release in London, however, the entire controversy was rather surprising. ‘Seems a lot of fuss about nothing. Shouldn’t have thought he mattered,’ she told M-O. Natalie Tanner hated Defence Regulation 18B, which sent Mosley and his Fascist friends to jail in 1940, for its blanket repression of anyone deemed an enemy of the state and its suspension of habeas corpus, yet she found Mosley thoroughly repugnant. Still, she thought, the street demonstrations over his release were less ideological and more a ‘Roman Holiday’ because boredom was the pervasive mood in the autumn of 1943.
For her part, Irene Grant didn’t care if Mosley walked free; she was certain that the British people would censure Mosley on their own, ‘Let him and pals get on soap boxes if they dare!’ Irene exclaimed. Of course, Sir Oswald’s release did not allow him such freedom of expression. He was under a strict gag order – he could not publish any statements, give interviews to reporters or otherwise speak publicly. Furthermore, he was not allowed outside a 7-mile radius from his home. Despite the Home Secretary’s concerns over his health, Mosley made it through the war and died in 1980.
Edie Rutherford was less concerned that the old Fascist was let out to spew his hate another day than about the humanitarian crisis erupting in the empire that autumn. One year earlier, a massive cyclone had struck East Bengal (today’s Bangladesh), decimating the rice crop for forty miles inland. Rice slated to be sown for that winter’s crop had been eaten by the peasants, and by May 1943, a severe crisis was taking shape. Burma – India’s largest source of rice – was in Japanese hands, and too much rice had been shipped to British troops. By mid-October, more than 2,000 people a month were dying in Calcutta alone. The streets of the city were littered with dead and starving skeletons, while birds of prey circled above. ‘What a queer race we are,’ Rutherford reflected to M-O:
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