by Tony Benn
With girls I feel romantic. Of course there is no lasting element in it and I know it, but I seem to love them. Whenever I meet a respectable looking girl, I think I have fallen in love with her. I don’t quite understand it. Contrary to my feeling to male friends, I have no desire to discuss politics or religion … It is a thing of emotions, not of interest or reason.
As a teenager, I wrote in my journals the most elaborate, stumbling analyses of ‘how to approach females’, comparing friendships with them to friendships with ‘males’ and trying to distinguish between physical attraction and relationships based on shared interests and understanding – passages that look absurd now, but which reflected someone brought up in a family of boys by Victorian parents, and who went to an all-boys school.
In 1942, at the height of the war, Mother and I went to stay at my Uncle Ernest’s old home, Blunt House, by then a girls’ school. I was sixteen or seventeen and there was a girl whom I liked very much; I tried to get into her bed, in the dormitory. Not surprisingly, the offence was discovered and raised with my mother, who must have been very embarrassed. Most unfairly, the girl involved was punished, whereas I was not. In a letter she wrote to me after the ‘incident’ she said:
PS. Just a short note at the end. Miss X really blamed me for the whole thing, [unreadable] that you were so young and hadn’t met many girls and that I should have been firm and refused but how could I have? In fact according to her I led you astray.
During the war I wrote to my brother, who was serving in North Africa, and said that I thought of subscribing to a girls’ magazine called Girl’s Own Paper, but discovered it was full of advice on dressmaking and cookery that wouldn’t really have helped me.
I once asked my father, when I was about twelve, what buggery was, and with a look of extreme embarrassment he said, ‘It is two men trying to have a baby.’ Even at that age I knew this was nonsense and, when I told Father that, he referred me back to Mother, who I suspect had never heard of it.
At some stage I think a booklet was smuggled into my room called ‘Straight Talks to a Boy on Growing Up’, which I seem to recall consisted of very sketchy descriptions of the way that babies came to be born, accompanied by dire warnings against masturbation. It quoted the advice given to Boy Scouts, which was that if desire gets too strong, try plunging your arms up to the elbows in cold water – a remedy I never tried, but which I suspect would not have worked.
From 1937 and 1938 I have poems and letters that I never sent, with declarations of passion: ‘to my love Pauline, I dream every night of you’; ‘Hether [sic] Betty Harper whose laughing eyes and flowing black hair and sporting decency are in a class of their own’; ‘Name-not-yet-known whose calm dignity and graceful movement made a true case of love at first sight’.
I did have embedded in my mind for many years, right into my late teens, that if you even kissed a girl delicately on her cheeks, you had to marry her – a thought that held me back on many occasions, for fear that marriage with children might prove a disaster. I sometimes wish my eight-year-old granddaughter had been available to advise me when I was eighteen.
A normal and open attitude towards sex seems to me to be so obvious, and when Caroline and I were asked about it by our own children, we answered frankly, but maybe in some trepidation, waiting for the next question. This was usually ‘What are we having for dinner tonight, Dad?’, which indicated that the basic information provided had satisfied their curiosity.
One long-term effect was to convert me to the importance of co-education, because if children are segregated at school, they are denied any understanding of the opposite sex and of the respect that is due between men and women throughout later life.
5
Michael, David and Jeremy
THE ALL-BOYS CULTURE of senior school was reinforced by my being born into a family of boys. Michael was born in 1921, I came along in 1925, David in 1928 and Jeremy in 1935.
Michael was a very thoughtful person and someone to whom I looked up with great respect, even though, like all brothers, we had fierce arguments that sometimes led to blows. Once he seized a copy of Mein Kampf, which I had bought when I was about twelve, and tore it apart so that, when I read it now, I have to struggle to keep the pages from flying out. He was a keen sportsman and used to row on the Thames with the Westminster Eight, which impressed me greatly.
Influenced by my mother, Michael became very religious and, when he was at school, established a prayer circle. He used to send duplicated messages, a copy of one of which I still have. A text written in purple ink on a piece of shiny paper was turned upside-down and pressed on a jelly-like substance; further copies could be made by pressing blank pieces of paper on the jelly, which then reproduced the writing in a very faint purple colour.
In 1940, when he was nineteen, Michael went up to Gorton, Manchester, where my father was then the Labour MP, but was away at the war; Mother was standing in for Father at meetings. From there he wrote to me, ‘Mother is unfortunately ill and I am doing the work which she was to have done this week. Naturally I am a little apprehensive at addressing so many meetings, especially as the first one is in a church and I shall find myself in a pulpit.’ He was very competent at such a young age. A few days later he wrote, ‘I had quite an enjoyable time in Gorton. I spoke for about 50 minutes three times, though I was compelled to be a bit shorter on two evening meetings on account of air raids.’
In March 1941, following the small, private prayer circle that he had formed, and from many airfields where he was subsequently stationed, he found time to send advice to those who were carrying on that work. In one letter he set out his views on the role that Christian fellowship could play, and how it might be explained to others:
March 24th 1941: Here are a group of people who are trying to live Christian lives and grow up into Christian men and we find that by meeting together we derive more benefit and help than by remaining separate. If you think you could also derive benefit from joining us, then do come.
We ask no standard of people but we realise we are all probably at different stages of advancement.
You are entirely free to leave and come back just as you wish. We shall force no ideas down your throat and the only thing we shall demand from you is genuine and liberal tolerance towards people with whose ideas you do not agree.
That is most important. It was the thing we learned first … For we believe that in religious matters it is essential for the individual to exercise full and unprejudiced choice.
Long before his death, Michael had resolved that, if he survived the war, he would seek ordination and become a Christian minister, and his letters dealt at length with both religion and politics.
Of course, many of his letters to me were about service life and his hopes that he would be able to qualify as a pilot, which he did, serving first as a night-fighter pilot flying Beaufighters and later on Mosquitoes.
On one occasion, when his aircraft developed a fault, he had to bale out over the Scottish moors. He wrote about this from RAF Accrington on 28 March 1942, ‘It was a nice moonlight night and we flew around for about half an hour while making up our minds on the best course to take. Eventually, we agreed that we should jump.’ Arthur (Michael’s navigator) came forward, opened the front door, said goodbye and jumped:
I called up goodbye on the wireless and went too. It was very thrilling though over very quickly.
I stood at the hatch and disconnected myself from everything and then allowed the slip stream to blow me away. I had my hand on the rip cord and I somersaulted twice before I pulled it. It opened with a bit of a jerk and before I fully realised what had happened, I was dangling in the moonlight over the moors of Scotland.
I had landed very heavily on soft moss and after a moment to regain my breath was none the worse.
Michael said it was two hours before he found a house, where a woman took him in and gave him food: ‘It took a good deal to finally allay their suspicions that I was not a German
but fortunately I was not shot at or piked to death.’
After his tours of duty in Britain, Michael was sent to North Africa, where he shot down four German planes and was decorated with the DFC, took part in the landings in Salerno, and for a period was attached to Air Marshal Hugh Pugh Lloyd’s staff. Despite all these gruelling operations, he still found time to write at length about those matters that interested him. One of his letters describes a long talk he had with his observer over the intercom during a dusk patrol, on subjects that were not at all what you might expect during a military operation:
March 10th 1943, Algiers: We flew last night on a dusk patrol from 6 to 9 and I quite enjoyed it. The intercom being good, we talked occasionally which is rather unusual and he told about his youth. Apparently his father is one of the elders in the local church and he himself was in charge of the Sunday school of 90 children.
The subject then drifted round to the Divinity and he said that primarily and fundamentally he believed in a Divinity of some sort, though in what form he did not know.
He said that at one time, he had intended to go into the church but gave it up because he couldn’t accept so much of the stuff – it would have been hypocrisy to go on.
We agreed that nothing disillusioned a man so much as a war and he said that his best friend came out of the last war after having never been in a church and became a Minister. I think I see what he’s getting at. He is realising increasingly that life in the service tends to be futile.
Later in the same letter, Michael wrote:
Of one thing I am sure, you cannot reconcile Christianity to the war. Christ said – ‘turn the other cheek’, not ‘go and bomb them four times as heavily as they bombed you.’ Christianity is permeated with the idea of returning good for evil. All we have done is to explain that for the sake of the future, and many other things, we are justified this time in returning evil for evil. Besides this there is the other question of whether you can make up for suffering by inflicting still more and whether you gain anything anyway by adding more chaos to that which already exists.
It is obviously a better thing not to fight unless there is some good reason for it so in our case we are amply justified in doing so. The whole of our future depends on winning the war as does the future of pretty well the whole world. That is justification enough. Now I’m not arguing that the war is either justified or not justified. All I am saying is that in my opinion war is unChristian and that the church ought to say so and not compromise with public opinion.
Like many of his generation, Michael thought a lot about what had to be done after the war and, writing from RAF Church Fenton on 10 September 1941, he said:
The question of what sort of world is going to result from the war is of vital importance to the young people of today. It’s going to be their world, their families are going to live in it. Are we going to allow a world to exist where our children are killed as they are here each night?
I wouldn’t lift a finger to fight for the British Empire and all the egos it embodies. No anarchist, communist nor even a revolutionary, I am only a Christian who believes that this war will give the world and the Christian forces in it the supreme chance of making a fresh start realising that all men have the right to live and worship their god in their own way. Who can say this way is right, this way is wrong? Religion is very largely a personal interpretation, that one must realise. But oh, to see Christians united on a common ground instead of disunited by petty differences. What people don’t understand is that what they think now – every minute – is in a minute way contributing to the sort of post-war world.
Commenting on the Beveridge Report of 1942, Michael wrote from Algiers on 20 March 1943:
Beveridge does not basically solve anything. It seems to me to tackle the problem from the bud and not the root. It says we will construct machinery to deal with cases of want and hardship and poverty as they arise instead of saying we will build a state where, in the main, they don’t arise.
I feel the Beveridge report aims at supporting our tottering social system rather than doing what we ought to do and what is the only lasting solution, namely to build a sound social and economic system.
Perhaps it is put on the market by the old capitalist element in order to soothe the people and avoid a change-over which would take the power out of their hands. We must have a complete and radical change in outlook and attitude.
As the last five years have been devoted to destruction and chaos so the next years must be devoted to building and designing and reorganising an order. We will build schools and hospitals, libraries and laboratories, roads and railways, stations and new churches – the whole countryside will show to later generations the change from the spirit of antagonism and destruction to one of co-operation and reconstruction. No more shall the country be run for the benefit of the few but by everyone for the benefit of everyone.
The state must use the talents and skill of the individual for improving the conditions of the community – medical services, travel facilities and back again to schools.
On 30 March 1944, Michael commented on Churchill’s attitude and the Cabinet’s decision to oppose demands for equal pay for women: ‘People are tired of being told what to do as shown by the by-elections and though presumably he will get away with it this time, he won’t do so indefinitely.’
His criticisms of the Labour Party were based in part on the fact that it was in the Coalition and, like many people with his views, Michael took an interest in the Common Wealth Party, which, led by Richard Acland, was fighting by-elections on a socialist programme.
At the end of 1943 Michael was posted back to England and began his last tour of duty flying Mosquitoes, taking part in the famous low-level attack on Amiens Prison to liberate the prisoners held there by the Germans.
On 23 June 1944, Michael took off on a mission, but discovered when he was airborne that his air-speed indicator was not working and it would therefore be impossible to complete the mission. He was advised to drop his bombs in the sea, and another plane was asked to come in with him to indicate his air speed as he landed at RAF Tangmere in Sussex. But he overshot the runway, his plane hit the sea wall and went into the water beyond, and his neck was broken. He died later that day in St Richard’s Hospital, Chichester, with my mother at his bedside, who was comforted only by the knowledge that, had he lived, he would have been totally paralysed.
Few, if any, wartime servicemen and women thought of themselves as defending the pre-war world, believing that they were fighting to prevent a return to the unemployment, poverty and militarism of the 1930s. Though Michael did not live to see it, it was those same personal convictions that were later expressed in the establishment of the United Nations and the building of the welfare state, which we then thought were objectives that made all the sacrifices worthwhile.
I greatly loved my brother Michael, and his death was a shattering blow to the whole family. The telegram arrived at the beginning of a class in Rhodesia, where I too was learning to fly. Thinking about his own life and his own ideas, I see him as a young man very much in tune with the aspirations of young people at the beginning of this century, for whom the war is a distant memory of their grandparents, although the ideas of that generation seem fresh and bright and optimistic.
My younger brother David was born when the family was in Scotland, having moved there after the Thames floods had ruined our house in London. He has always been the intellectual in the family, and was known from quite an early age as ‘the professor’, retaining an interest in high academic standards, which he has put to good use in his own life.
In 1935, David was suddenly taken very seriously ill with TB in his intestines, which had led to a number of lumps developing there, and we all thought he would die. Somehow he pulled through and there is no doubt that his own will power helped. He would never allow anyone to refer to his illness and just said, if asked, that he was ‘staying in bed today’, showing personal courage that inspired th
e whole family.
As I have already mentioned it was through his doctor, a Russian immigrant to Britain, that my brother took an interest in the Russian language. He bought Hugo’s Teach Yourself Russian and learned it by himself, encouraged but not taught by Dr Bromley on his visits. David became so proficient that when he visited the Soviet Union later, he was treated as a native Russian and was even congratulated on his Moscow accent.
When he was sent away to Bexhill and Bournemouth with Nurse Olive, the family was deprived of his company for much of the time, and to some extent the household lost its central focus because Nurse Olive had been removed.
During the first months of his illness, David was taken out for walks in a spinal carriage – a long, flat, high perambulator – and used to go and watch the Changing of the Guard at Horse Guards Parade in Whitehall. The sight of him dressed up in a toy Horse Guard’s uniform, gazing up at the Household Cavalry, attracted the attention of a photographer in July 1938 and a picture appeared in a newspaper above the text, ‘Although he may never ride a horse, he’s as smart as any Guardsman with his shining helmet, breast plate and sword.’
It was not until 1938, at the age of ten, that David was able to stand, and we have a picture of him with his emaciated legs, leaning against the wall outside the guest-house where he was staying in Bexhill; it was a tremendous triumph for him that he had managed to pull through and begin to lead a normal life.
In the summer of 1940, when the Blitz was imminent, a number of children from England were sent to America, and David was very keen that he should not be moved himself, so he wrote to my mother about this from his boarding school in Devon. In his letter he said, ‘I would rather be bombed to fragments than leave England now’ – a very dramatic way of describing his feelings. My mother wrote anonymously to The Times and quoted this letter, believing that the views of the children should be taken into account before they were sent away; Father also wrote to Brendan Bracken, Churchill’s Minister of Information:
