by Tony Benn
Father had inherited a distrust of established authority and the conventional wisdom of the powerful, and his passion for freedom of conscience and his belief in liberty explain all the causes he took up during his life, beginning with his strong opposition to the Boer War as a student at University College London, for which he was, on one occasion, thrown out of a ground-floor window by patriotic contemporaries.
He had been sent to France with his brother Ernest in the 1880s and learned to speak French fluently. When he wore a beret, he looked very Gallic. He studied French at university and, after leaving with a first-class honours degree, lived in East London and worked as a journalist for The Cabinet Maker, the journal founded by his father, which later became part of Benn Brothers’ publishing concern.
By the turn of the century Father was already active in Liberal politics in St George’s constituency in Wapping, helping to raise funds for cigar workers locked out in their industrial dispute. He won the unanimous support of the Municipal Employees Union and of Stepney Labour Council when he was adopted as a Liberal parliamentary candidate for Tower Hamlets.
In his 1906 election address he criticised the Tories for ‘having made laws for the benefit of their privileged friends and entirely neglected the claims of the workers’. He pledged himself to support legislation ‘to protect the funds of trade unions, to support Irish Home Rule and to work for the establishment of a national home for the Jews’, helping Jewish refugees who had fled to East London from the pogroms in Tsarist Russia at the end of the nineteenth century. He made his maiden speech in the House of Commons arguing for the municipal ownership of the Port of London, drawing attention to the rising unemployment among dock workers.
After serving as a Parliamentary Private Secretary (PPS) to Reginald McKenna, the First Lord of the Admiralty, in 1908, Father was made junior Whip in 1910 and carried the responsibility for answering questions in the Commons for the Office of Works, because the First Commissioner of Works, Earl Beauchamp, was in the House of Lords.
In 1914 he volunteered for the Middlesex Yeomanry, although both his age (then thirty-seven) and his membership of the House of Commons would have exempted him from military service. For the next four years he served in the forces fighting at Gallipoli, flying as an observer in sea planes from a passenger ship, the Ben-My-Chree, which had been converted into an elementary aircraft carrier. When the Ben-My-Chree was sunk by Turkish gunfire, he commanded a small Anglo-French force, holding out in Castellorizo. Later, aged almost forty, he qualified as a pilot and served on the Italian front, where he flew on the night mission with Tandura, the first spy ever dropped by parachute behind enemy lines in Italy.
He once described how he took a saw and cut a hole in the bottom of the plane so that Tandura, the Italian chosen for this operation, could be launched with his parachute and a box of pigeons – being released at an agreed moment when Father pulled the lever that allowed him to fall out of the plane.
Tandura undertook this immensely dangerous task, landed safely and reported on enemy positions by scribbling them on little notes, which he tied to the legs of the carrier pigeons, which then flew back to Headquarters with their important intelligence information. Tandura survived, and after the war named his own son Wedgwood Benn Tandura. I have often thought of an ageing Italian who must have asked himself why he had such a ridiculous name.
A Punch cartoon showing Father and some young Radicals with an anxious Prime Minister. Punch wrote:
House of Commons, Monday, May 20: To-day we have with us only one BENN, upon whom his godfathers and godmother in his baptism, with prophetic foresight of what in due time would become a precious antique ware, bestowed the name of WEDGWOOD. The twentieth-century LITTLE BENN ranks in Ministry as Junior Lord of Treasury, his place being in the Whips’ room or the lobby. PREMIER’S quick eye discerning his capacity, he has this session provided for him a seat on Treasury Bench, where he represents FIRST COMMISSIONER OF WORKS, throned in the Lords.
Father was awarded the DSO and the DFC, the Légion d’honneur, the Croix de Guerre and an Italian decoration which he called the ‘Fatiguera di Guerra’ and translated as ‘Sick of the War’.
For him, public service in wartime meant military service and he refused two invitations from Lloyd George (who, by December 1916, had become Prime Minister) to join the government, first as a Parliamentary Secretary and later as joint Chief Whip in the wartime government.
Father’s wartime service helped to develop his political philosophy, and his book In the Sideshows, about those years in the services, throws some light on it. He saw the old professional army officer as being incapable of ‘appreciating the diversities of human character and capacity’ and as discouraging ‘initiative and energy through class prejudice determined to entrench itself’.
He wrote, ‘There are no regulations to say that none but the privileged class is permitted to enter; the existence of class barriers is denied; but those who have been on the inside know perfectly well that the gate is strictly kept.’ And he noted the ‘inevitable ignorance’ of officers who ‘live in narrow grooves and are forbidden by the rules of the game to receive any education from those who alone can educate them, namely their subordinates’. ‘Wars are peoples in arms,’ he argued:
Leaders are needed, military as well as political, who see the difference between a just and an unjust cause; who understand how much ideals count as a practical force, even in the behaviour of individual soldiers; who know that Right is the steam which drives the engine Might.
His experience also made him into an internationalist. It was the war that drove him on to promote international understanding.
On his return home in 1918, he discovered that his constituency had been redistributed and another Liberal candidate was in place. Rather than fight it out, Father accepted a nomination as an independent Liberal for Leith, in opposition to Lloyd George’s coalition, and was elected. The next eight years were ones of vigorous parliamentary activity with the Radical group that he jointly led, and it was during those years that he developed his skill as a debater and his reputation as a parliamentarian. He was bitterly opposed to the government’s Irish policy and to the use of the ‘Black and Tans’ against the Irish Nationalists.
In 1920 he moved an amendment in Parliament to the King’s Speech, condemning the Coalition for having handed over ‘to the military authorities an unrestricted discretion in the definition and punishment of offences’ and ‘having frustrated the prospects of an agreed settlement of the problems of Irish self-government’. Though he had, earlier, been more attracted to Lloyd George’s radical reforms than to Asquith’s Whiggery, he deeply mistrusted Lloyd George as a person and detested his coalition with the Tories.
Finding himself voting more and more often with Labour MPs in the Commons, Father finally resigned from the Liberals in 1927 after Lloyd George was elected their leader. He joined the Labour Party, sat for a moment on the Labour benches and applied for the Chiltern Hundreds on the same day – a device used to effect an immediate resignation from Parliament. He thought it right to resign his seat because his constituents had elected him as a Liberal and he believed it was immoral to remain as a Labour MP, a precedent that few who have changed their party allegiance since have followed.
When he and Mother were visiting Moscow in 1926, they witnessed the trade unions marching with their banners in the May Day Parade. He loved to tell us how when he asked an interpreter to translate one of the revolutionary slogans, the answer was: ‘Workers of the Electrical Trades improve your qualifications’!
Though Father neither embraced the full socialist economic analysis nor was rooted in the trade unions, he greatly valued the fellowship that his membership of the Labour Party brought him and shared its seriousness of purpose. After attending his first Labour Party Conference in 1927, he wrote in the Daily Herald that ‘a great sense of responsibility seemed to overshadow the gathering … they were making decisions that in the near future woul
d pass from being the resolutions of a Party to becoming the policy of the British government’. Until the end of his life his sympathies remained instinctively with the non-conformists within the Party, especially when attempts were made to impose Party discipline on them, being something of a lone crusader himself.
In 1928 there was a by-election in North Aberdeen and my dad was elected as a Labour MP and a year later was put in the Cabinet in Ramsay MacDonald’s second minority government, as Secretary of State for India. It was his first experience as a departmental minister and he had to defend himself in the Commons. Lloyd George, mocking Father’s short height, once taunted him as a ‘pocket edition of Moses’, to which he replied, ‘At least I do not worship the golden calf’ – a reference to the fact that Lloyd George had sold peerages to boost his own political funds.
Working towards ‘Dominion status’ for India, he came under heavy attack both from Churchill, the old imperialist who opposed the very idea of Indian independence, and from the Left, who believed that this policy was too slow, and disapproved of Gandhi’s imprisonment. But Father did succeed in calling two Round Table conferences and in bringing Gandhi to London as a delegate to the second one.
By the time it was held, however, the Labour government had fallen. In August 1931 Ramsay MacDonald had capitulated to financial pressures and had formed a National government. An interesting insight into MacDonald’s mind is given in a letter sent to Labour MPs dated 25 August 1931, justifying the cutting of benefit to unemployed workers, and saying:
… To restore the necessary confidence, as every one of us recognises, it is necessary to balance the Budget, and the problem is how to spread the burden involved equally throughout the community … During the past weeks events moved so rapidly that widespread consultation was impossible but I hope you will suspend judgement until the situation has been made clear to you and the facts put in your possession.
All this has caused us great pain. When it is over the Party will be left untrammelled as to its policy and programme …
Within three days of that letter MacDonald had been ousted as leader of the Party and a General Election followed, on 28 October 1931.
Father, who fought North Aberdeen on the basis of ‘the manifest failure of the outworn creed of “every man for himself”’ and called for the establishment of a ‘new Social Order’, was defeated at the election by the Conservative candidate and found himself out of Parliament again, leaving only fifty Labour MPs in the new House of Commons.
It is easy to forget that, before the calamity of 1931, Ramsay MacDonald had been tremendously successful in building up the Labour Party. He opposed the First World War, and my mother told me that on 4 August 1918 (the anniversary of the outbreak of that war) he came home with my grandfather, Daniel Holmes, because he feared he might be attacked in the street on account of his outspoken opposition to the war.
For five years following the election, Father and Mother travelled very widely, meeting world leaders and writing about it together in a book entitled Beckoning Horizon, which dealt with the politics and religious beliefs of America, Japan, China and the Soviet Union. Meeting Henry Ford gave Father a chance to study modern industrial capitalism; ‘with one lens they had a peep at the hundred percent efficiency of machine production’ and ‘through the other lens a glimpse of the suppression of the individuality of the workman, sensitive and even philosophical, who felt he was a diamond being used to cut glass’.
Later, on the same tour of 1934, Father went to see the Molotov works in the Soviet Union, where he found that ‘the two main springs of human effort in the West, fear of unemployment and hope of financial reward had been removed’. His Russian guides told him that ‘a belief in Bolshevism and all that it means for the uplifting of humanity had replaced both the carrot and the stick’. But in the book Father asked himself whether the alleged justification for what is called the dictatorship of the proletariat is not in fact the dictatorship of the Communist Party.
Neither Ford nor Stalin offered him a way he wanted to follow. But a year later, in his election address in the 1935 campaign, when there were two million out of work, he told his constituents, ‘There is no hope in this patching. A more rational approach must be made to our problems and it is to be found in the principle of socialism. Many [who] repudiate the word socialism yet approve the thing itself when they see it working … the forces of production need to be liberated and vitalised.’ That was the authentic voice of the old ‘gas-and-water socialism’ (upon which he had been brought up as a municipal Progressive in East London) heard again in the middle of a world slump.
* * *
Smile! Smile! Smile!
To the Tune of “Pack up your Troubles.”
Vote, vote for Wedgwood Benn
the LABOUR MAN,
And Smile, Smile, Smile,
He stands for Justice and the
People’s Plan,
So smile boys, that’s the style,
We want a Labour Government
To make our lives worth while,
So pile all your crosses on the
LABOUR MAN
And Smile, Smile, Smile,
BENN X
* * *
Father’s leaflet for the 1935 General Election
Defeated in Dudley in the only campaign where he felt that corrupt methods were used against him, my father was finally elected in a by-election in Gorton in Manchester in early 1937. Back in the Commons, he threw himself into the campaign against appeasement and was elected top of Labour’s Shadow Cabinet, which was a great tribute to the respect in which he was held by his colleagues.
When the war with Germany began, he felt that he ought to rejoin the services and in May 1940, at the age of sixty-three, when France fell, he applied to the RAF and was commissioned as a Pilot Officer, the lowest commissioned rank, and was posted to the Air Ministry, leaving my mother to carry on all his constituency work. Promoted later to Air Commodore, he went back to Italy (where he had served in the First World War), this time as a member of the Allied Control Commission. My dad was very fond of the Air Force and was extremely proud when his eldest son, my brother Michael, joined it and became a night-fighter pilot.
The following year Churchill asked Attlee to recommend three Labour MPs for inclusion in a special list of Labour peers. The announcement from Number 10 made the reasons clear: ‘These creations are not made as political honours or awards but as a special measure of State policy. They are designed to strengthen the Labour Party in the Upper House.’
Father was very proud of the fact that his peerage was not an honour and, though it was a wrench to leave the Commons, he was back in uniform and he thought the Lords would be a useful place to continue in Parliament after the war. There were no life peerages at the time, and Father consulted my elder brother Michael (who would inherit the title) to find out whether he objected. He did not object because he planned to go into the Church after the war. Father did not tell me about the peerage in advance, and I was angry about this.
Then in 1944 Michael died, and I became heir to the peerage. Father was overwhelmed by grief and determined to be active, so he flew home from Italy and got himself transferred to a new job, lecturing on the post-war world at RAF stations. He managed his itinerary so that it took him to Air Gunnery Schools, where he bullied the instructors to put him through a regular gunnery course, which he was able to do by virtue of his senior rank.
When he had completed his training, he arranged to visit airfields where bomber squadrons were stationed and flew on a number of air operations as a gunner in the rear turret, before he was discovered and grounded. He was sixty-seven and had earned a second mention in dispatches by the time he was demobilised in the summer of 1945, just before the General Election.
A few weeks later, after Labour came to power, Attlee made him Secretary of State for Air in his new Cabinet, and in his fourteen months there Father was particularly proud of one achievement. Having been sent to Egy
pt to lead the British delegation to renegotiate the 1936 Anglo-Egyptian Treaty, he felt his job was simply to end the British occupation of Egypt, which had soured Anglo-Egyptian relations for so long.
It was a cause he had believed in since he had served in Egypt in 1915, and though the final withdrawal from the Canal Zone did not take place until 1956, when he went to see President Nasser, he felt he had had some minor part in bringing it about.
Four years after I became an MP in 1950, Father took up the cause of a young constituent of mine called Paul Garland who was expelled from the Boy Scouts for being a communist. Father raised a debate in the Lords in which the Chief Scout, Lord Rowallan, and almost every peer who spoke supported the expulsion of this young lad. Writing about it, he said:
I will say quite simply what is my opinion. You can only conquer ideas with ideas … in the fresh air of freedom. This youth is sincere. We may think his opinions are in error but there is something more important than his opinions and that is his attitude. The conscience of a man, whatever his creed, is very precious, it is far stronger than acts of Parliament.
In 1958, two years before he died, he made a BBC broadcast and gave his own view of the role of Parliament. He interpreted his radicalism in these words: ‘Parliament is more than an assembly. It is a workshop or, I should prefer to say, a battlefield. I have often tried to think why it is that when political issues arise I find myself instinctively holding opinions of a particular mould. I have had, so far, to be content with the explanation of the poet who declared “We do not choose our convictions, but they choose us and force us to fight for them to the death.”’
Father was either tremendously buoyant or he would be ‘on active service’, as he called it, very serious and busy. But as he got older he was subject to depression and used to say, ‘I’m not feeling very well today.’ I would ask him, ‘Would you like to go into the Lords and make a speech?’ No. ‘Would you like to go to Stansgate?’ No. I too have periods of depression when I wonder if I have ever done anything worthwhile.
