by Tony Benn
He engaged in public debates with Jimmy Maxton, the Scottish socialist; founded the Society of Individualists and, on principle, refused when he was in his seventies to fill in his census form for 1951, on the grounds that it was an infringement of his right to privacy. He was taken to court, and his barrister – in an attempt to be helpful – said, ‘I hope Your Honour will take account of the fact that Sir Ernest Benn is a very old man.’ This infuriated my uncle, who sacked his lawyer on the spot, pleaded guilty and was duly fined, but retained his self-respect.
Like Margaret Thatcher, Ernest was a genuine libertarian on the right in British politics. By contrast my father, who was also a Gladstonian Liberal, had acquired from the Grand Old Man a passion for liberty, which made him a rebel against the authority that money claimed to have over individuals. When he joined the Labour Party, Father moved naturally to the left – much like the Foot family, of which Michael (and later Dingle) found his natural home in the Labour Party, along with Josiah (Josh) Wedgwood, who joined the Labour Party on the same day as my dad in 1926.
It is assumed that I am related to the Wedgwoods. I always understood that my grandfather, who was an artist and greatly admired the work of the potter, gave the name Wedgwood to my father as a second Christian name, and my father did the same with all his children. My mother used to say that she thought that one of the family may have married a Wedgwood in the nineteenth century.
Relations between Uncle Ernest and his brother Will, my father, were rather complex. Ernest was generous to my father, who had worked as a journalist on Benn Brothers trade magazines and continued to receive assistance from him while an MP until salaries of £400 a year were introduced in 1910. Ernest also helped Father when he returned from the war in 1918 and lost his seat, due to boundary redistribution, and had to find a new constituency elsewhere; and lent him £1,500 to buy Stansgate, a retreat and holiday home in Essex, at a time when he was out of Parliament. Uncle Ernest generously allowed me to work for Benn Brothers after leaving Oxford, which meant that I could travel to America in 1949, ostensibly on behalf of the company, but with the real purpose of visiting my future wife, Caroline.
When I returned to Britain in 1949, Ernest was not prepared to re-engage me, which was why I was lucky to get my first paid job as a BBC producer at the princely salary of £9 a week.
MARGARET RUTHERFORD
It was through visiting my Uncle Ernest that I met my cousins, who were all much older than me, because Father was forty-three when he married. My first cousin once removed, the actress Margaret Rutherford, was my father’s first cousin.
She used to come to Blunt House for Christmas and seemed to me to be quite old, though she was only in her early forties and was making a living as a teacher of elocution and doing repertory theatre, hoping to make it big on the stage.
Many young girls want to go onstage, but it is unusual for that desire to be so strong later in life, and we used to treat this as an eccentricity. To the surprise and delight of the whole family, Margaret became a superstar, appearing in Noel Coward’s play Spring Meeting in 1933 and until her death in 1972 moving from triumph to triumph, one of her most successful performances being as Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit, and playing a medieval historian in Passport to Pimlico. She also appeared with Alastair Sim in another famous film, The Happiest Days of Your Life, in which a girls’ and a boys’ school found themselves sharing the same premises during the war, and she and the boys’ headmaster were drawn into a conspiracy to prevent the parents from discovering this fact.
We had another sweet great-aunt called Auntie Tweenie, who lived in Oxted in a tiny house, which I think my uncle had bought for her and where we had tea on Boxing Day with cakes that she had baked; Margaret Rutherford watched her carefully and affectionately and I have an idea that some of her stage characters were based on her observations.
What I did not know at the time, and only discovered by chance later, was the family tragedy that lay behind Margaret’s story. I had often wondered how Margaret Rutherford was related to us and, if she was, why her surname was not Benn. When I asked about her father I was always brushed aside. If I tried to press my mother, all she would say was, ‘Darling, he never did anything to be ashamed of.’ And it was only when I was a Member of Parliament that I decided to consult The Times index and found the headline in 1883 about Margaret’s father, who murdered his own father, Julius.
Margaret’s father was William Rutherford Benn, son of Julius Benn (my great-grandfather). William married Florence Nicholson in 1883, but had some sort of a mental breakdown on his honeymoon and spent a short spell in an asylum. Then his father, Julius, decided to take William on holiday to Matlock in Derbyshire to help him recover. While they were there, William killed Julius with a chamberpot in the lodgings they had taken in the town, and then tried to cut his own throat; he lived and was found, next to the body of his dead father, by the police.
William Rutherford Benn was sent to Broadmoor and to this day I do not know whether Margaret Rutherford ever knew what had happened to her father. Later he began to recover and the Home Secretary at the time released him. Margaret was born some time after this sad saga.
William later went to India as a journalist, but when his brother John heard that he had decided to remarry there following the death of Florence, he felt obliged to stop the marriage. When William returned to England, he was recommitted. William was my father’s favourite uncle, and the tragedy had a profound effect on his life.
When my dad was about to marry my mother in 1920, my grandfather John actually wrote to my mother’s father to report this history, though it never occurred to him to write direct to my mother, who was, after all, the bride about to marry into a family with this tragic background. This absolutely incensed Mother’s mother, who came out against the wedding and stood outside the church while the marriage took place, announcing to all and sundry that she was not in favour of it; it is not clear to me whether the guests of the wedding in St Margaret’s Church in Westminster knew who this strange lady was.
Margaret Rutherford herself later married an actor called Stringer Davis, and it was part of an understanding that he would always have a small role in the films in which she was taking part.
Margaret was always very kind to me, and I have many happy memories of sitting with her on the beach at Bexhill as a child, and of occasions when we met in the years before her death.
The News of the World once paid a genealogist to research the Benn ancestry. It discovered the story and printed photographs of Margaret and of me, to imply that I had a streak of inherited madness. I worried what political damage this might do, but the only reference ever made to me about it was from a friendly London cab driver, who said, ‘I am sorry to hear about your uncle!’ So much for the power of the press.
2
My Parents
UNFORTUNATELY FOR THE reader, I cannot claim a tragic childhood, rebellion against parents or a struggle to make a success of life from hard beginnings, for I had a happy home and my parents were devoted to each other, and at no time did I react against what I was taught by them. Everything rotated around Father, in a way that would be unacceptable today, and this was a pattern which to some extent I followed – to my regret in later life.
FATHER
My dad was a Victorian, born in 1877 and in many ways practising what we think of as Victorian values: very conscious of the need never to waste time or money. I was born in 1925, and as a child I was required to keep an account book showing how I had spent my pocket money each week, which then had to be audited by my father’s secretary, Miss Triggs, before my next pocket money was paid.
I received one penny a week, rising to tuppence when I went to school, and made up to threepence if I submitted my accounts promptly. I recall on one occasion when I was taking an early interest in carpentry, I went to Woolworths and bought a little vice and Miss Triggs queried this – though what vice an eight-year-old could have paid for was beyond my imagi
nation.
Father used to call out ‘Antonio’ if he wanted me to do something. He referred to me as a ‘serving brother’ because I was a very helpful boy, always keen to be popular, cycling to the village to post letters, buy papers and so on, and on one occasion I said to him, ‘I want our relations to be on a strictly business-like basis.’ So when I was sent to the village near Stansgate to post a letter, I told him, ‘That will be a shilling.’ Father replied, ‘And your lunch costs two shillings and sixpence.’ So that was the end of that!
My elder brother Michael and I would set up little businesses. We had one that made cigarettes (Jigarettes, as my father called them, because my nickname was Jiggs) using a roller and cigarette papers. Michael was very inventive, and there was a model aeroplane at that time called a ‘Frog’, powered by an elastic band that set the propeller off. He worked out that it would be possible to have two elastic bands working consecutively, thus doubling the range of the Frog. He took it to the company that produced the Frog, which was interested and gave Michael a model to experiment with.
Phone calls were regarded as totally unnecessary luxuries, and I can remember many occasions when, having asked permission from my dad to use the phone, he would say, ‘Why don’t you send a postcard?’ At Stansgate, where we had a house for summer holidays, he had a call box attached to the phone, which we had to feed with coins before we could use it; although my father had a key to the cash box, we still had to cycle to the village of Steeple nearby to get change if we wanted to make a call. Occasionally the electricity (also on a cash meter) would run out while Sunday lunch was cooking; this happened many years later when my wife Caroline was trying to produce a meal at Stansgate.
Father’s passion for economy was matched by an equally strict view of the importance of not wasting time, since he had read a book published by Arnold Bennett in 1908 called How to Live on Twenty-four Hours a Day. Bennett’s argument was that we are all equal in one respect, namely that no one has more than twenty-four hours in a day and no one has less, and that we each have a moral responsibility to make full use of the time allocated to us. For this reason Father kept a daily time chart on which he set down the number of hours he worked every day and the number of hours that he slept; in theory it should equal twenty-four – a curious calculation in that there was no time for meals, conversation or any social life. So keen was he on this that, as a boy, I was expected to keep a time chart. I still have one in my own archives (see opposite page), which no doubt explains why the wise use of time has been a major factor in shaping my thinking, making me feel guilty – even to this day – if I go to bed believing that I have achieved nothing. My house has always been full of clocks. Father never went on ‘holiday’ and his answer to depression was overwork.
Regular bowel movements were considered very important, and Father, though he took absolutely no interest in our domestic routine, would unfailingly enquire every day, ‘Have you caught the bus yet?’ – a euphemism that I have never heard used elsewhere for this particular function.
Father was a teetotaller because, having been born in the East End of London (which he loved), he had been much stirred by the problem of drunkenness there. His parents were keen members of the Blue Ribbon Brigade, active campaigners for temperance. At the time, drink was seen as a problem, rather like that of drugs today, contributing to the destruction of many lives; gin, at a penny a pint, was described as ‘mother’s ruin’.
Father once said that his parents used to sing temperance hymns, one of which began with the words, ‘There’s a serpent in the glass, dash it down, dash it down’. Another also had a splendid double-entendre: ‘The good ship temperance is heading for the port.’ He used to recite the story of ‘Timothy Prout’, who fancied a night out and, when he returned home to Fulham, entered the wrong house and was found fast asleep by the real owner. Timothy swore he would never have another drink. The story was also a reference, I think, to new housing at the time, because the villa in which Timothy lived had the same key as every other house in the street.
Let me tell you the story of Timothy Prout
Who had fancied to live a little way out
He was tired of the dirt and the din and the noise
And the rudeness of so many young city boys.
In Fulham a neat little villa he found
Quite a nice little house with its own piece of ground
Each one was the same and as any could see
The front doors all used the very same key.
One night when he’d had just a bit much to drink
He wandered back home quite unable to think
But he soon saw his house and opened the door
And dropped all his things and sank down to the floor.
Then in came a woman who gave a big scream
And Timothy woke up as if from a dream
Then her husband came in and with just a small frown
Said, ‘Oh yes sir, I’ve frequently met you in town.’
As Timothy rose from his place on the floor
The man said, ‘You’ll find your own house next door’
So Timothy left and resolved without doubt
That he never again would mix gin with his stout.
Father asked me not to drink alcohol and I never have done so, although when I joined the RAF in 1942 he gave me his permission to do what I thought right. But long ago I decided to keep alcohol for my old age, which today seems as far away as ever.
I suppose my grandparents were puritanical in outlook, but I hope I have not given the impression that my father was a severe man, for he was full of fun and the jokes he made remain with me to this day and often come to mind. Mother was nervous of bats, and Father once tied some string to a piece of coal and swung it from the ceiling in a dark bedroom. He used to amuse the children of his sister-in-law, my Aunt Gwen, with stories about a pink giraffe, which Gwen thought silly and disapproved of. So Father said, ‘All right, the pink giraffe will die.’ And he then proceeded to tell long stories about the pink giraffe’s funeral. He was everyone’s favourite uncle. He would recite a poem about the Lord Mayor’s coachman, who promised to get the Lord Mayor from Mansion House in the City of London to Buckingham Palace, without going down any streets:
The Lord Mayor had a coachman
The coachman’s name was John
Said the Lord Mayor to the coachman:
‘Take your wages and begone
I want a better coachman
For I am going to see the Queen.’
Said John: ‘I am the finest coachman,
That was ever seen
And if you’ll let me drive today
I’ll show I can’t be beat
I’ll drive to Buckingham Palace and
I won’t go thro’ a street.’
‘You must be mad,’ the Lord Mayor said,
‘But still I’ll humour you.
But remember that you lose your place
The first street you go through.’
The coachman jumped upon his box
And settled in his seat;
And started up the Poultry
Which we know’s not called a street.
Along Cheapside he gaily went.
The Bobbies cleared the course
To the statue of the Bobby
Who first organised the force.
‘You’re going into Newgate Street,’
The Lord Mayor loudly bawls.
But John said: ‘Tuck your tuppenny in
I’m going round St Paul’s.’
‘But round St Paul’s means Ludgate Hill
And Fleet Street, John,’ said he.
But John said: ‘I don’t go that way
But down the Old Bailey.’
Up Holborn and High Holborn
And St Martin’s Lane he drives
And thus to keep out of a street
He artfully contrives
And when they reach Trafalgar Square
Said the Lord Mayo
r in a pet:
‘O dash my wig and barnacles
I think he’ll do it yet!’
John nearly drove into the Strand
Then stopped as if in doubt.
‘I’m not surprised,’
The Lord Mayor cries
‘To find you’re put out.
Up Parliament Street you must go
Or else cross Cockspur Street
It’s very hard but still
You must admit defeat.’
But John said: ‘Not at all, my lord
I don’t much think I shall.
You ask me where I’m going:
Well, I’m going down Pall Mall.’
Along Pall Mall he gaily drove
And drove at racing rate
By James’s Palace through the Mall
To Buckingham Palace straight.
The coachman gave the Lord Mayor
The Lord Mayor
The Lord Mayor
The coachman gave the Lord Mayor
A curious kind of treat
He drove him from the Mansion House
The Mansion House
The Mansion House
The Mansion House to Buckingham Palace
And didn’t go through a street.
Father once said to me, ‘Never wrestle with a chimneysweep’, which was a curious piece of advice to give an eight-year-old, but I now understand exactly what he meant: ‘If someone plays dirty with you, don’t play dirty with him or you will get dirty, too.’ My attempt to keep personal abuse out of political controversy has been shaped by that simple phrase about how to steer clear of chimneysweeps. I recommend it to others without reservation.
