Dare to Be a Daniel

by Tony Benn

  My dear Brendan

  If you want to see the sort of people the PM is leading read the enclosed. I received it entirely unprompted from my youngest. The ‘happy childhood’ he referred to includes three years on his back. He is as strong as a lion now and recently presented himself to the local ARP office with the demand ‘I want a grown up job with some risk’.

  Yours Wedgwood Benn

  Churchill was so impressed by this that he composed a handwritten letter to my dad:

  My dear Benn

  A splendid letter from your boy. We must all try to live up to this standard. Thank you for sending it to Brendan.

  Every good wish

  Yours very sincerely

  Winston S. Churchill

  Churchill also sent to my brother David a copy of his My Early Life. This was in July, just after France had fallen and when an invasion was imminent. It was extraordinary that the Prime Minister found the time to write personally on such a matter.

  My brother David replied to thank Churchill, and delivered his letter in person to Number 10 Downing Street, writing: it ‘will be interesting in my later life to remember your kindness and to keep your book as a relic for ever’. David was unaware of all the press coverage, because it was thought that it would ‘turn his head’. I knew this and, of course, could not resist telling my brother that the publicity had been withheld from him, in case it made him conceited. The correspondence is now in the Churchill archives in Cambridge.

  When the communist newspaper, the Daily Worker, was banned by the government for its opposition to the war, David – who was living at our uncle’s house in Oxted, Surrey – was incensed at the erosion of civil liberties, and bought a little John Bull toy printing set. He carefully prepared a leaflet about three inches square, saying ‘Lift the ban on the Daily Worker’. He left it on trains and buses – whether the City gents who travelled from Oxted to London every day were much influenced, I do not know, but it was worth a try.

  After the war, David went to Balliol College, became Secretary of the Oxford Union, and practised as a barrister although, looking very youthful, it was not altogether credible to see this mere boy in a wig. In his first case, which was a domestic argument between two neighbours, he appeared for one of them and at the end the judge, in a moment of confusion, bound over ‘Mr Benn to keep the peace’, instead of the offending neighbour.

  After that, being a very good linguist, David went for a time to the Socialist International, and from there joined the BBC World Service at Bush House, where he eventually became Head of the Yugoslav Service. After he left the BBC, he continued to take a keen interest in Soviet affairs and, among his own archives (for it is a family disease), he has almost every copy of Pravda from 1955 in a garage at his house. He makes good use of them as a contributor to the BBC Russian Service and is an active member of the Royal Institute of International Affairs.

  Dave has always had a phenomenal memory for dates and details and, when my memory lets me down, I ring him and get the right answer; he is a walking reference book. He has also written a book about Soviet propaganda, pointing out that the absence of democracy makes it difficult for an authoritarian government to know what people really think; as a result, its propaganda ceases to be effective because it is not directed at people’s concerns and therefore fails to deal with the underlying problems that face the government. This was, no doubt, one of the factors that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union itself.

  He married June, a teacher from Yorkshire; she is a prolific novelist, a keen student of family history and, by dint of this, has discovered that the Benns have deep roots in Yorkshire. This has helped my own son Hilary, now a Leeds MP, to discover that his great-great-great-grandfather was married in a church in Leeds, just a few yards from where he now lives.

  David and June have two children: their son is a philosopher who teaches at Imperial College and concentrates on medical ethics; and their daughter, who herself worked for the BBC and has a little boy, Michael.

  In 1935 my mother became pregnant with her fourth child and, as it was such a surprise, we nicknamed it ‘the Bombshell’ and looked forward greatly to its arrival. The birth was due in August, when we were all at Stansgate. Sadly, the pregnancy went wrong. Mother sensed that there was something amiss because one day the baby stopped kicking. But our doctor (who, we later heard, had been a drug addict) did not arrange an immediate Caesarian and, when Jeremy was born, he was dead. The doctor took the little body away in a white metal container, leaving us to grieve. My mother never forgot Jeremy and, more than ten years later, my father was determined to find the baby’s body so that he could be given a proper funeral.

  He went to immense trouble and finally located the woman who had worked in the doctor’s surgery in Burnham. She remembered the incident and the fact that the baby had been buried in the same white container in an unconsecrated part of a cemetery. My dad located it, managed to get an exhumation order from a local magistrate so that the body could be lifted; then another certificate allowed a cremation, and the baby’s ashes were interred in a small church, where my elder brother Michael’s ashes had been laid and where my father’s and mother’s ashes are now buried.

  This simple act gave my mother immense happiness and provided us all as a family with a chance to pay tribute to the baby brother we had never seen.

  6

  How I Became a Philistine!

  DURING MY CHILDHOOD and growing up, no attempt was made to develop the artistic, musical and literary side of life, and that became a serious disadvantage as I got older.

  My mother read a lot of theological books, and my dad scanned The Times and filed it for future reference, but neither encouraged me to read. I was taken to the theatre only once or twice and, because I was no good at music, my music teachers at school took no interest in me, which denied me the opportunity of developing my tastes. I have described how as a child I never visited the Tate Gallery, though our house was right next door.

  The one exception (though a limited one) in my cultural education was my enjoyment of films, and I do recall with enormous pleasure some of the classics that I saw as a youngster, and which I still love to watch.

  One was The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which I must have seen when it first came out during the war, and which I have watched many times since on video. That film excited me in part because of its historical span, from the Boer War through the First World War into the Second. But I loved also the figure of Colonel Blimp himself, whom Low the cartoonist had invented as a figure of fun but who, in the film, was developed into a man whose convictions were rooted in experience and who, though apparently so intransigent and arrogant at the end of his life, had a very human side to him. The film had depth and understanding, including its sympathetic portrayal of the position of a German officer, which led Churchill to believe that it might undermine the war effort and at one stage to contemplate a ban on it.

  Another film that I saw at about the same time was Proud Valley, with Paul Robeson as a black American miner trying to get a job in a South Wales colliery. Initially finding himself rejected on the grounds that he was black (the objection coming from miners who were themselves black with coal dust) he was then welcomed into the miners’ ranks – a welcome that was especially warm because he was a brilliant singer who gave their choir phenomenal strength. In the film, Robeson joined with his Welsh comrades in a march on London to save a colliery, and some compromise was reached with the coal owners – a rather weak ending, which I later learned was enforced on the film-maker because the original was considered too radical for wartime.

  Paul was the son of a slave. He threw himself into socialist and peace campaigns in a way that led to his denunciation as a fellow-traveller during the Cold War. I met him in London in 1958 when the Americans had restored his passport and he was able to travel. He said that when he went to Wales, he realised two things: firstly, that he was an African, and secondly, that he was a member of the working
class.

  Another wartime film was The Way to the Stars, which was based on the experience of Halfpenny Field, an airfield once occupied by the RAF and then taken over by the Americans when they came into the war; the relationship between the air crew and the local pub, where Rosamund John played the manager, was very skilfully directed. Michael Redgrave played the British pilot who fell in love with Rosamund John, and who was subsequently killed in action.

  When Redgrave’s character died, he left behind a poem, written by John Pudney, called ‘For Johnny Head-in-Air’. And when the Member of Parliament Bob Cryer was killed in 1994, I was asked to read that poem at his graveside, standing facing Bob’s widow and children, before his body was lowered into the grave.

  The Way to the Stars exactly captured the mood of the RAF and I find the film very nostalgic, having been stationed at Moreton-in-Marsh once as an air cadet.

  Similarly, A Matter of Life and Death caught the same spirit, with David Niven almost dying in an air crash but being found alive, after he had baled out on a beach, by an American girl and falling in love. The story was a battle between Heaven and Earth as to who should have him. It was dramatic and powerful. The prosecutor in heaven was an American from the revolutionary war, and the court was made up of thousands of British and American soldiers who had died; the film had a considerable audience in the United States.

  I also loved Brief Encounter, the story of a suburban housewife who fell for a doctor she met on a weekly visit to a local town; although he only kissed her, he recognised the danger of what lay ahead and felt that he should emigrate to Africa to avoid breaking up their respective marriages. The film ended with a tragic farewell in a station buffet, as the doctor left to catch the train and she went home to her husband – and all was well, according to the morality of the time.

  I am at heart a very sentimental person, easily moved to tears. In the film The Railway Children, when their daddy had been falsely arrested for espionage and finally returned home, and Jenny Agutter stood at the railway station and recognised her father through the steam of the railway engine, I always burst into tears. Indeed, my children describe these moments as ‘Railway Children’ moments. And when I burst into tears after introducing my son Hilary to the Chamber of the House of Commons in 1999, the family, who were all sitting in the gallery, turned to each other and nodded, whispering, ‘It’s the Railway Children again.’

  Brassed Off! also always makes me cry, being the only authentic drama about the miners’ strike of 1984–5, which brings out in a most powerful way the sufferings of the miners and the way they responded with courage and goodwill. It was illuminated by the playing of Rodrigo’s ‘Orange Juice’ (Aranjuez) by the girl who had been a miner’s daughter and went to join the colliery band in the village where they were struggling to survive; and it culminated with Pete Postlethwaite as the conductor who, when the band won the contest at the Royal Albert Hall, made a passionate speech rejecting the prize. It all ended happily when the band seized the trophy anyway.

  I always cry at the Durham Miners’ Gala, standing on the balcony at the County Hotel as the bands go by and the children dance, and the injured miners wave from their wheelchairs as they are pushed past. Gresford, written to commemorate a terrible mining disaster, is another real tear-jerker.

  I like happy endings and detest violent films, which frighten me and seem designed to acclimatise people to violence, spread despair among the viewers, in exaggerating the evil side of mankind, and encourage hopelessness and cynicism.

  High Noon, which had a violent end to it, depicted Gary Cooper as the sheriff married to a woman (Grace Kelly) whose pacifist – probably Quaker – convictions were tested when gangsters came to town to kill him. She saved her husband, resolving the dilemma we would all face in a similar situation.

  Another powerful film is Dr Strangelove, in which Peter Sellers plays three parts: a German scientist; an RAF officer who is a bit of a buffoon; and the President of the United States, who finds himself sucked into a nuclear incident that he hadn’t planned, but which could well have led to a Third World War. Mockery is a powerful instrument in politics and, after watching Dr Strangelove, no one could take the case for nuclear weapons seriously.

  All my life I have lived in the oral tradition, learning from listening and watching rather than from reading, and communicating by speaking rather than writing. I am not – nor do I aspire to be – an intellectual.

  In some ways, however, I do feel the disapproval of intellectuals who look down on people who have lived in the oral tradition; but it is a fact that from a speech you get a multi-dimensional understanding of a person that is not available through the printed word, however beautifully crafted. When you listen to someone, you can make up your mind about the nature of the person speaking and whether they believe in what they are saying. I have learned most of what I know (not least at my surgeries as a Member of Parliament) through listening to people, not from reading books.

  Experience comes into play, of course, because with experience you are able to judge the truth of even the most powerful demagogue’s speech more directly and personally than if you had read the same words in a book or an article.

  The oral tradition is in fact far stronger in history than the written tradition. For generations, people learned by the stories that were told and passed on orally; these made an impact that was greater, it could be argued, than that of written works by clerks and scholars.

  I suspect that, in my mind, the Protestant work ethic made the enjoyment of anything suspect – that applied equally to reading, and I have undoubtedly denied myself a lot of pleasure by not reading fiction. However, there is also the hard work involved in decoding twenty-six letters before you can understand what the author is saying! I remember at one of the great universities in Beijing someone explained to me that in Chinese the little pictures give greater freedom to your imagination and allow you to visualise, say, a man or a horse. I much favoured that way of communication!

  By contrast, my grandchildren are immensely musical and artistic, and when I hear them play or sing I feel most inadequate.

  7

  The Outbreak of War

  WE WERE ON holiday at Stansgate in summer 1939 when Hitler invaded Poland. Parliament was recalled, and my parents went back to London. My brothers and I stayed at Stansgate and sat listening to the radio as Chamberlain announced that ‘a state of war now exists’. I shall never forget the realisation that this would fundamentally change our lives. I was both relieved and frightened and I sensed that my brother Michael, who was then just eighteen, would volunteer for the Air Force before his call-up papers arrived. Two days later we heard of the first air attack by the RAF on Germany; this was later made into a film called The Lion Has Wings, part of the propaganda of war.

  I have described how war affected my schooling, with Westminster School being evacuated first to Lancing College in Sussex and then to Exeter University. In 1940 Father was the Member of Parliament for Gorton (Manchester) and he and a number of other MPs joined, or rejoined, the forces. He was sixty-three. My mother was left to look after the constituency as best she could.

  I had a telegram from Father and all it said was:

  + I HAVE A NEW JOB. NO RISK. HONOUR BRIGHT! +

  At the end of July 1940 the school authorities decided, incredibly, that it was safe to return to Westminster and preparations were made just as the Battle of Britain was beginning! When the Blitz started, the family was living at Millbank. Every night when the siren went off we would hurry to the basement in Thames House just by Lambeth Bridge (now occupied by MI5) and unroll our mats to sleep. Down there was a friendly atmosphere and we got to know everybody well. We could hear the bombing quite clearly, and on one occasion an old lady whom we knew was late in arriving and we were worried. As she came into the shelter we asked, ‘What is it like up there?’ And she replied, ‘It’s awful, look at my umbrella, it’s absolutely soaked!’

  On another occasion a la
ndmine was dropped near the shelter and 500 people were killed in and around Thames House. St John’s Westminster, which I had attended as a child every Sunday, was bombed. Coming up in the morning, you could see the fires still blazing over East London, where the docks had been hit, and there were some daylight raids, where I saw the bombers of the Luftwaffe being attacked by anti-aircraft fire.

  At that time there was a severe blackout, and every light had to be turned off and the curtains tightly drawn, in the hope that this would make it harder for the bombers to know where they were. Therefore, before we left the house every night we turned off the lights at the mains, but when we returned we found that the electric clocks had moved forward. That summer we had a cook, and we discovered that although she came to the shelter with us, she used to go back to the house and turn on the lights, and we began to suspect that she was a spy.

  Father’s first reaction was to say, ‘It certainly saves money if Hitler pays our cook!’ But he did report it to the security services, who duly investigated. When a bomb hit a government department, the record of spies was destroyed and by then our cook had moved elsewhere.

  ‘Digging for Victory’ was the current slogan and the need to grow our own food to survive the blockade on imports by German U-boats was very real.

  At the height of the Blitz, David and I were moved to Oban, where we stayed at the Columba Hotel; my grandmother and grandfather were also staying there. As soon as I arrived I volunteered for the local Air Raid Precaution (ARP) unit and explained that I had been in London during the Blitz – this was designed to impress them, and did! They were busy preparing for a war that had not yet hit Oban, so my experiences (even though I was only fifteen) were considered quite interesting. Oban was in fact the base for the Sunderland Flying boats, manned by the RAF and crew from the Royal Australian Air Force, who stayed in the hotel, so it could have been a target.