The Story of Britain

by Rebecca Fraser

  Adolf Hitler had been elected on a very clear programme: to destroy the humiliation of Versailles and to reclaim the land removed from Germany. In his book Mein Kampf (‘My Struggle’), he had openly described his plans to exterminate races he believed were either evil like the Jews or stupid like the Slavs. He outlined a policy of occupying territory in the east to give the superior German race living space, or Lebensraum. But at the time the book was written in the 1920s no one could take Mein Kampf seriously. Hitler was then a would-be painter and political activist who had been imprisoned for a failed coup in Munich. Yet only a few days after he took over as chancellor he had removed civil liberties for Jewish people, and two years later racist laws were in place forbidding Jewish people to marry non-Jews; by 1938 half the Jewish population of Germany had left in despair.

  Hitler’s actions effectively destroyed the principle of collective security based on disarming to the lowest point, but its enthusiasts refused to accept that. For the rest of the decade Winston Churchill was one of the strongest voices urging action against Nazi Germany. As early as April 1933, he warned Parliament, ‘One of the things which we were told after the Great War would be a security for us was that Germany would be a democracy with Parliamentary institutions. All that has been swept away. You have dictatorship, most grim dictatorship.’ If Germany was allowed to rearm, he said, she would soon snatch back her lost territories–territories which bands of unemployed German youths were aggressively campaigning for, ‘singing their ancient songs, demanding to be conscripted into an army, eagerly seeking the most terrible weapons of war; burning to suffer and die for their fatherland’. Churchill believed that MacDonald’s ideas, for all their nobility, were a load of hot air, that while he talked of Britain dropping four air-force divisions, European factories were filling with arms. ‘I cannot recall any time when the gap between the kind of words statesmen used and what was actually happening in many countries was so great as it is now,’ he told the Commons.

  After Germany’s withdrawal from the Disarmament Conference the government acknowledged to some extent that the ideas of disarmament and reduction of armaments to the lowest point were no longer viable. In 1934 a new air-defence programme was announced, increasing the RAF by forty-one squadrons, and the following year the government published a White Paper which recognized the need for greater military provision. Nevertheless, at a popular level disarmament went on being the remedy for the world’s ills. There was a general reluctance to contemplate the possibility of war. Moreover the British government, like many Britons, felt that Germany had been treated too harshly and was sympathetic to Hitler’s revision of Versailles. For that reason, nothing happened in 1935 when Hitler told the world that he had created an air force, or when he started military conscription again to add another thirty-six divisions to his army. The British had thought they had protected themselves by signing a treaty with Hitler that limited the German navy to 35 per cent the size of the British, and submarine strength to 45 per cent.

  At the same time, neither the British nor the French wanted to alienate Mussolini, the Italian leader. In April 1935, at the Stresa Conference called specifically to discuss Hitler’s announcement that Germany would no longer be bound by the arms limitations of Versailles, Britain, France and Italy sought agreement on forming a common front against German rearmament. Nevertheless Mussolini had more in common with Hitler as a fellow dictator whose regime was based on violence than with the western democracies of France and Britain.

  Despite joining the Stresa Front in October that year Italy, which had been very disappointed by the territories she had gained in the peace treaties, flouted the precepts of the League of Nations and invaded Ethiopia in pursuit of her dream of a north African empire. Reluctantly, because she still wanted Mussolini as an ally, Britain along with the rest of the League imposed sanctions on Italy. But the Italian forces did not withdraw.

  The French and British governments now behaved very curiously: they decided to ignore the League of Nations and make a deal with Mussolini. By the secret Hoare–Laval Pact, signed by the British foreign secretary Samuel Hoare and the French prime minister Pierre Laval, they offered Italy a partition plan that gave her two-thirds of Ethiopia. In December the agreement leaked out and aroused such anger in Britain that Hoare had to resign. Italy nevertheless remained in possession of most of Ethiopia. The Anglo-French policy of appeasement, of allowing dictators to take chunks of territory at will in preference to fighting a war, had begun to take shape.

  MacDonald the idealist grew too ill to remain in office and at the general election in November 1935 Baldwin became prime minister, his National Government winning a majority of 245. The public-school-educated barrister Clement Attlee had been elected to lead the Labour party, which, though it remained out of office, now had 154 seats in Parliament, a gain of one hundred.

  Having seen that nothing had happened to Mussolini over Ethiopia, on 7 March 1936 Hitler moved his troops into the demilitarized Rhineland, proclaiming that Germany would no longer abide by the peace treaties. Versailles was at last visibly dead in the water. France was devastated by this move. The buffer between her and Germany had been removed, and she was left staring at a militarized frontier with Germany that now bristled with soldiers.

  But Britain, France’s ally, did not share her fears. British ministers were distracted by the many other issues demanding their attention which seemed just as important as containing the European dictators. In Mandated Palestine, British troops were required in greater numbers because of clashes between the indigenous Arabs and Jewish settlers. As the decade went on, growing numbers of Jewish refugees fled there from Germany, though a 1930 government White Paper on Palestine emphasized the resulting plight of the Arabs. It warned of the possibility that they might be swamped by a Jewish majority if there was not a temporary end to Jewish immigration.

  But the real issue preoccupying British statesmen and British newspapers was India. In 1931 the architect Edwin Lutyens completed his masterpiece, the Viceroy’s House in New Delhi, little knowing that it was only to be used for another sixteen years. All kinds of excuses continued to be found for preventing India from obtaining independence or even reaching Dominion status. There was now an articulate party called the Muslim League under Mohammed Jinnah, who like Gandhi was a lawyer. Jinnah was beginning to call for the partition of India to surmount the racial hatred between Muslims and Hindus.

  With the great business of India linking so many members of the British middle classes, the subject of Indian independence obsessed Britain in the 1930s. Generations of Britons had been Indian civil servants, tea-brokers, planters and district commissioners; they were incensed at the way their businesses were being ruined by Gandhi’s boycott of British goods.

  By 1927, with Congress refusing to recognize the provincial legislatures because they would be satisfied with nothing less than full responsible government, Indian discontent produced a new Parliamentary Commission. Members of all three British political parties were sent to India to investigate her grievances. Though it was headed by the distinguished Liberal Sir John Simon, former attorney-general and home secretary, it did not contain a single Indian member. The viceroy Lord Irwin, the future Lord Halifax, who had become friendly with Gandhi, had already stated in 1929 that Dominion status was the ultimate goal of the British government for India. But this was not good enough for the militant Indian politicians, nor did the Simon Commission promise it when the report was published in 1930.

  Neither did the Government of India Act of 1935. This act was brought in when it was at last acknowledged that talks with Gandhi were the only solution, after 100,000 people had been imprisoned for taking part in his civil disobedience campaigns. It created a federal structure so that the national administration could reflect the diversity of the provinces within the country, an arrangement which the Indian princely state rulers led by the Maharajah of Bikaner agreed to participate in. But, although this gave responsible self-gove
rnment to the provinces, it still was not the self-government of a Dominion. At national level despite a federal legislature to which Cabinet ministers were responsible, the ultimate say on foreign affairs, defence and religion continued to lie with the viceroy. The new constitution was considered not to have taken into consideration properly the rights of the Muslims and to have given too much power to the Indian princes. It had nonetheless just begun to be implemented when the Second World War broke out.

  The Cambridge don E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India, which highlighted the uneasy relationship between the British and their colonial subjects, was published in 1924, and soon reached classic status in Britain. Nevertheless complacency was an overwhelming characteristic of the empire in the 1930s. This was partly because the empire and British influence seemed as prevalent as ever. A treaty of 1936 put an end to the occupation of Egypt, but British troops still guarded the Suez Canal, and there was a clause allowing Britain to reoccupy the country in the event of any threat to her interests.

  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.

  Edward VIII (1936)

  George VI (1936–1952)

  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 d
rove 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.