Dare to Be a Daniel

by Tony Benn

  MOTHER

  My mother was born in Scotland in 1897. Her religious convictions were the result of an interesting correlation of family experiences. Her Grandfather Holmes was a member of the Irvine Brethren, which meant a very severe start in life for her dad, who used to be dismissed with the phrase, ‘Go to bed, Daniel, you’ve had enough pleasure for one day.’

  This drove Daniel Holmes to atheism, but this atheism worried my mother. When she was a little girl of eight she said to herself, ‘If there is no God, we were all born in an orphanage.’ And so, on Sundays, she would go off on her own to the nearest Church of Scotland kirk, and from that developed her religious interest.

  Mother had first visited the House of Commons in 1908, with her father and a Liberal MP; later, as a fourteen-year-old, she first saw my dad there. Afterwards she wrote to a London photographer and asked for photographs of some prominent MPs, including one of my father. However, it was not until after the war that she met him, when she was staying with her parents on the south coast and Father went to visit, using the excuse that he wanted to talk to his parliamentary colleague, but with his eyes on the young woman he wanted to marry.

  When Mother married Father in 1920 he was a handsome man of forty-three, known as Captain Benn, decorated with the DSO and the DFC. He did not actually propose as such, but said, ‘It would be quite easy – we could have a chop at the House every night’, implying that he planned to marry her. She said, ‘Yes, but what should I call you, Captain Benn?’ She used his Christian name, Will – the name his wider family used – though his political friends called him Wedgie.

  Mother was twenty years younger than Father, and she saw it as her duty to put Father’s interests before hers. This she did until his death forty years later. She used to say that Father’s existence was essential to her happiness, but his presence was not!

  She became a teetotaller when she married, to comply with Father’s wishes (not that she saw it as a sacrifice), but she insisted that alcohol was kept in the house for visitors. However, few ever came to the house for a meal, as my parents did not ‘entertain’ socially.

  My father insisted that when they married, Mother should give up her favourite little dog, Dugald, a West Highland terrier. That, I think, was a hardship, for she was very fond of animals and used to see the dog occasionally afterwards, when it would whimper at her.

  After they were married she visited his constituency of Leith, near Edinburgh, and went to a school with him. When the teacher said, ‘And who has Captain Benn brought with him today?’, the children called out, ‘His daughter!’

  On their honeymoon in Mesopotamia my father looked across a river (either the Euphrates or the Tigris, I am not sure which) and said, ‘This reminds me of Stansgate!’ – which was the place on the River Blackwater in Essex where his father had built a house, then sold it in 1903. Father always remembered how happy he had been there, and Mother discovered that he loathed holidays other than at Stansgate – a trait I picked up from him – so she took him to Maldon in Essex to stay at the Blue Boar. They went to Stansgate and met Captain Gray, an old sea captain, who then owned the house, and persuaded him to let them rent another house nearby for holidays. After Captain Gray’s death, Father bought the house back in 1933, his attachment to Stansgate explaining why he took that name when he was made a peer.

  Mother was a passionate believer in the rights of women, arguing against her own father who, even when women got the vote in 1918, said to her, ‘We may have to take it away again, yet.’ Although she called herself a suffragist rather than a suffragette, her theological interest and her campaigns for the rights of women led her to work as a young woman for the ordination of women in the Church of England, to which she had transferred when she married Father. The earliest movement devoted to this was called the League of the Church Militant and, while still a young woman, she met Dr Randall Davidson, Archbishop of Canterbury, at a dinner (he had been appointed Archbishop of Canterbury in Queen Victoria’s reign) and was told by him to desist from such an idea, which only strengthened her own determination.

  Later, as a delegate on behalf of the Church of England, at the ecumenical Amsterdam conference in 1948, Mother discovered that the conference was told she was not to be taken as representative of the Church on this matter, so she left the Church and joined the Congregationalists. Father was also passionate about equal rights for women. When he was appointed Secretary of State for Air in 1945, in order to support Mother’s campaign, he appointed the first woman Chaplain in the Royal Air Force – Elsie Chamberlain, a Congregationalist minister. This greatly upset the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, who wrote to my father that he hoped that under no circumstances would a male Chaplain be required to take orders from a woman. Father discovered that when the Air Force list was published, the Revd Elsie Chamberlain had been put under the heading of ‘Welfare Officer’ instead of Chaplain, so he had the whole list pulped and reissued, with her in the proper place.

  When the Congregationalists joined the Presbyterians to form the United Reformed Church, which appointed its ministers instead of electing them, as was the Congregationalist tradition, Mother joined with Elsie Chamberlain and others to form the Congregational Federation, of which she (Mother) became the first President.

  I am very proud indeed to be the son of the first woman to be the head of a Christian denomination. Her influence in our family was immense: she was highly committed to the ecumenical movement and to inter-faith dialogue. In particular, she sought to eliminate from Christianity the traditional hostility to the Jews. She became a Fellow of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where a library is named after her.

  Elsie gave the address at my father’s funeral. Later, when Elsie died, I was honoured to be asked to give the address at her funeral and referred to these events, as well as to her distinguished service as Head of Religious Broadcasting at the BBC.

  With all Mother’s preoccupations outside the home, she developed no domestic skills at all. She and Father had a nurse for the children, a cook and servants to keep house, but Mother was not very good at handling domestic staff. When our first nurse, Nurse Parker, came to work for her, she became very depressed because the nurse would take us for a walk in our pram and speak of ‘her children’, which got Mother down. Eventually Nurse Parker had to go.

  I never saw my mother cry; she was very ‘Scottish’, imbued with a strong Protestant ethic, and was not an openly emotional woman, although my father was sentimental and was easily moved to tears, as I am. When he was dying, he talked of his father a lot – ‘My dad worked so hard, all those lectures he gave …’ – and held my finger like a pencil and tried to write with it.

  3

  Life at Home

  THE BENN HOUSEHOLD when I was a child was, I suppose, fairly typical for a Cabinet minister and MP at the time. In comparison with most people (even middle-class people), we were well-off. Father’s income in the 1920s was made up of his parliamentary salary plus a ‘pension’ of £500 per year from Benn Brothers, which he was given when he was first elected to Parliament in 1906, before MPs’ salaries were introduced. He also had dividends from shares in Benn Brothers, although I do not know the exact amount of these.

  As will become clear, Father – like Ernest – was very careful with money. His mother-in-law bought a Morris Oxford car for him in 1928 for £180 and that was our only car until 1954, when he bought another Morris Oxford!

  The house I was born in, 40 Grosvenor Road, was on the Embankment looking south over the River Thames. In those days there were tugs going up and down, hooting as they pulled the barges full of goods that were being handled by the Port of London, which was then very active; that was long before the area became full of offices and fashionable flats. I used to imagine as a child that the barges were hooting at me for permission to pass.

  Next door had lived Beatrice and Sidney Webb, and although I never remember meeting them, their role in the history of the Labour Pa
rty is a formidable one, since Sidney had drafted the famous Clause Four of the Labour Party’s 1918 constitution, which committed us to ‘the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange’. It is a strange irony of history that when the houses in Grosvenor Road (which was by then renamed Millbank) were torn down in 1959, the Millbank Tower was built on that exact site, and became the headquarters of New Labour in the 1990s; and so it was there that Tony Blair succeeded in getting Clause Four removed from our constitution.

  In 1928, when I was three, there was a huge flood in London and I remember looking out of the window and seeing boats sailing down the street in front of our house, which became completely flooded in the basement. Several people were killed in the flood, though fortunately no one from our house. We had to move out for a time to Greenock in Scotland, to Clydebank House, where my father was the Labour candidate for West Renfrewshire. When the mess in the basement was being cleared up, we discovered that a suitcase full of Sidney Webb’s underwear had floated in from next door. I suppose that entitles me to claim that my political roots were based in Fabianism.

  We returned to London in 1929 and for the next twenty years, until I got married and moved to Hammersmith, 40 Millbank (as it was renamed) was my home, apart from the war years and holidays at Stansgate in Essex.

  It was a tall, five-storeyed house a few yards from the Tate Gallery, next to a military hospital, and I used to see wounded soldiers from the First World War in their strange blue outfits with bright-red ties, still limping around and helping each other; one had been blinded, another would be pushing a wheelchair for a wounded comrade who had lost a leg. When we are told to support our boys in battle, we sometimes forget to look after them when they come home disabled.

  We had a cook called, appropriately, Mrs Candy, who lived in the house with her husband and daughter Margaret, who was about the same age as my brother Michael. The Candys slept at the back of the house, next to my father’s basement office. The kitchen acted as their living room.

  On the top two floors were the rooms that made up the children’s nursery. I remember that it was cold and the food was undistinguished. In August 1927 a piece appeared in Nursery World (owned by Benn Brothers) called ‘Other People’s Nurseries’, describing:

  … distempered walls of apple green, painted wooden huntsmen and hounds in full cry [which] tear around the picture rail. Mrs Benn drew my attention to the open grates for she thinks coal fires far better for children than more modern ways of heating … Michael who is five and three quarters is going to school when he is six; so he and Nanny are practising lessons. He showed me the sums he had been doing that morning, all perfectly neat and all quite right … Anthony ran fluently through one nursery rhyme after another. He has a wonderful memory and could talk when he was fourteen months old. We had more nursery rhymes, on the gramophone this time, till a march reminded the boys that they were going to be soldiers when they grew up. It was hard to believe that their rosy cheeks and brown limbs were gifts of a London sun but Nurse said that they almost lived in the Parks …

  The reality was not quite so harmonious. Nurse Parker bullied my mother and was vaguely threatening if her demands were not met. She favoured me, and my elder brother definitely suffered as a consequence. Caroline concluded that many of my faults were the result of Nurse Parker’s care, because afterwards I expected special treatment from everyone. I certainly recall weeping when she left, though I have only vague memories of her.

  Our next nurse was Olive Winch, who was engaged by Mother in 1928. She was born on 1 January 1900, and she told us that her mother couldn’t think of a name for her, so she picked on Olive because she had rubbed the new baby with olive oil. Nurse Olive had previously worked for the Horniman family and had also been in America working for a Mr Stuart, a journalist with the New York Times; she told us that on one occasion he had come back ashen-faced having witnessed an execution.

  She lived at the top of our house, and was assisted by a series of nursery maids who also lived there. It seems odd now, but was common then for middle-class children to be left in the care of nannies for long periods at a young age. Earlier, I mentioned that in 1926 my parents had gone to visit the Middle East and Russia while I was a baby, and subsequently between 1931 and 1934 they were away on a tour of Germany, the USA, Japan, China and the USSR again.

  Nurse Olive became a very close and intimate friend for well over sixty years, getting to know and love my own children. She was the daughter of a successful builder in Harlow, had been to the Norland Institute to be trained as a children’s nurse, and under no circumstances was she to be referred to as a nanny! Apart from one month a year when she was on holiday, she was really in charge of our lives. As I have said Mother was busy as a theology student and campaigner for women’s rights in the Church, and had no domestic skills beyond making tea and toast. When she had to cope on her own, her meals for us would comprise orange juice, cereal, tea and toast, which no doubt explains why that remains my favourite meal.

  When my brother David became ill with what was thought to be TB of the intestines in 1935, Nurse Olive devoted herself completely to his care and recovery, moving with him to Bexhill and Bournemouth, and only leaving him during the war when she went to serve in a children’s orphanage in London – where she was immensely popular.

  We called her ‘Nursey’ and loved her dearly; my children used to stay with her in her retirement in Harlow, renaming her ‘Buddy’ – as it is the privilege of the young to do to the old. The Buddy stories she told them became part of family mythology. The one they most enjoyed was the story of the Three Pears: she had ‘misheard’ the Three Bears and created this ludicrous and unbelievable story about a big pear, a middle pear and a baby pear.

  I continued this tradition, squeezing as much pathos as I could from stories to my children: the most shameless was the Daddy Shop story, about some children whose daddy was so busy that he couldn’t play football with them or go on holiday, so one day they decided that they wanted a perfect daddy and took him back to the shop and asked for a new one. Their old daddy shuffled to the back of the shop and a brilliant new daddy appeared, with endless time to take them swimming, to the theatre and on holiday. But they began to miss their real daddy, so they went back to the Daddy Shop and asked for him back. The shopkeeper said, ‘I don’t know whether he is still there, I’ll look.’ He came back and there was real Daddy looking bent and sad, and a bit scruffy, and the children were so excited that they gave him a big hug and took him home. This used to produce floods of tears from my children – and even brought a few to my eyes. Caroline forbade me from telling it!

  Another story of mine was about Tubby, a little man who lived in a house below the plughole in the bath. When the children were about to get into the bath, he would come out of his house, sit on a bar of soap and row up and down the water with two toothbrushes for oars. He became very friendly with my children and had a little pill that he gave them, which made them so small that they could go down with him to visit his house. When Caroline got into the bath and couldn’t see the children, she noticed that they were on the bar of soap being rowed about by Tubby. Tubby also went to school with them, causing endless trouble, and even went out one day and put butter on the street so that the buses skidded and couldn’t get up the hill. He had two cousins – one who lived in France, called M. Tubbé, and an Italian called Signor Tubbia – and was able to travel through the water pipes to visit them.

  It was at Buddy’s house in Harlow that, aged eighteen, I spent the last night with my brother Michael, sleeping in the same bed; our rest was disturbed because I had severe cramp and my brother dreamed that I was attacking him and reacted most vigorously. The following day I went with him to the airfield at Hunsdon in Essex where he was stationed, and he took me to the railway station for my return to London. My very last memory of him is as he cycled away when the train set off. Six months later he was dead.

  Buddy continued to live i
n Harlow in her little house and we visited her there when she was bed-bound and could hardly speak, cared for by one of her nieces, to whom she had been immensely kind when that niece’s marriage had broken up in South Africa and she had returned to Britain alone and without friends. Buddy died in 1992 and I spoke at her funeral, meeting again many of her family whom I had got to know as a child.

  It goes without saying that Nursey was a very influential person in our young lives. My brothers and I had breakfast with her in the nursery. We had one meal a day with my parents in the dining room, the food being brought from the basement kitchen by a hand-operated lift. We were waited on at table.

  I detested the food. I never liked meat and I loathed most of all turnips, parsnips and rice pudding. Many a time I was told I could not leave the table until I finished my rice pudding, which by then was cold and had a thick disgusting skin on it. It turned me against rice pudding and, to some extent, food itself ever since.

  Life revolved around tea – early tea, breakfast tea, mid-morning tea, lunch with tea, dinner with tea and late-night tea.

  When we were little we were sent to bed early every night. We had a small Bakelite radio in the nursery on which occasionally I used to listen to programmes such as Monday Night at 8; my father had a great walnut veneered radio in what was called the Green Room, which actually belonged to the house next door, but which Father rented and entered through a connecting door in the party wall.

  Mother would come up at night and tell us Bible stories and hear our prayers, which included prayers for the Spanish republicans during the Civil War and, when Father was out of Parliament between 1931 and 1937, for ‘Father getting back into Parliament’; and for ‘the wall at Stansgate to be repaired’ (being next to the Blackwater estuary, the land was prone to flooding). When Mother tucked us up in bed she would say ‘Goodnight Darling, another happy day tomorrow’ even if we had had a flaming row that afternoon; the assumption that every day would be happy provided a framework of security which was very reassuring.