by Tony Benn
During my time in Rhodesia 60,000 whites were in total control, living off the land that had been stolen from the Matebele and the Mashona by Rhodes, with the Africans having no vote at all. That experience first interested me in the anti-colonial movement, and became my main interest when I was elected to Parliament. It has made me appreciate why Britain is the last country in the world to be entitled to lecture Mugabe, the dictator of Zimbabwe, on the importance of democracy and human rights.
My diaries Years of Hope record my life in Africa, my training as a pilot, the death of my brother while I was there, and the trip on to Egypt, where the war in Europe ended just after I had got my wings.
9
Caroline
I ARRIVED HOME in a troopship in time to play some part in the election campaign of July 1945 and returned to Oxford to complete my degree. I had transferred to the Fleet Air Arm in the hope that I might serve in the Far East, but that plan collapsed with the end of the Japanese war following the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As I was no longer needed, I was released.
Post-war Oxford was of course by then full of ex-servicemen who had seen action. It was a telescoped generation, with students who had been colonels, including a man in his mid-twenties who had been blinded and lost a leg.
David Butler had been in a tank that sank while crossing the Rhine, and Tony Crosland was back from the army, finishing his degree and acting as a tutor as well – known as a pseudo-don. He too became a firm friend.
I was there from 1946 to 1948, and it was in Crosland’s rooms in 1947 that I met Hugh Dalton, who had just been sacked for leaking his Budget to a journalist as he entered the House to deliver it. I accidentally greeted him as Chancellor, to which he boomed, ‘No, the ex-Chancellor.’
Dalton was talking to some philosophy students about the books they read, and they discussed their work with him. Then he mentioned a German name that I had never heard of. It silenced them. They looked at each other in embarrassment, and I suspected that he had made up the name to see how they would react. But I dared not ask him if it was a joke. That was typical of Dalton.
I was elected President of the Oxford Union and was chosen to lead a debating tour with Edward Boyle and Kenneth Harris to the United States in the autumn of 1947–8. We visited sixty colleges and universities in forty-two states and discussed a number of contemporary issues, including a motion favouring an Anglo-American alliance. While there I met a number of American students, one of whom, T. George Harris, later introduced me to Caroline DeCamp in the summer of 1948 when she visited Oxford from Vassar College to attend a summer school.
We met on 2 August, saw each other every day and nine days later, on 11 August, sitting on a bench in a churchyard in Oxford on the eve of her departure for America, I realised that I would never see her again. When I first met Caroline I was not immediately struck by her and had no idea that within just over a week I would have proposed to her.
She accepted, and so began the most important relationship of my life, for she and our children, Stephen, Hilary, Melissa and Joshua, had by far the greatest influence on me. The bench, which I later bought for £10, was in our front garden for fifty years until it was moved to Stansgate and placed by the grave where her ashes are now buried in the garden.
It was at about this time that I had a strange invitation to take up a government job. My old headmaster approached me and said he had heard of a post that I might be interested in, but he couldn’t tell me what it was. However, he could arrange for me to meet the person concerned.
Partly out of curiosity and partly because I would need a job once married, I agreed to meet a Colonel Sheridan, who asked me if I would be interested in working indirectly for the Foreign Office at a salary of £1,000 a year – which was more than twice the salary I had at the BBC the following year. I thanked him for the suggestion, but said that I hoped one day to be elected to Parliament and that MPs were not allowed to take government jobs (known as ‘offices of profit under the Crown’), which disqualify the holders from election.
‘Oh,’ he said, ‘that’s no problem; you could do both jobs as an MP, if elected, and there is no cause to worry on that account.’
At that stage I had a word with my dad, because I was very suspicious. He said, ‘Don’t touch it with a barge pole’ and made it clear that he believed (as I had guessed) that it was a job with the security services.
So I wrote back to Colonel Sheridan on 13 December 1948:
After a great deal of thought I have decided not to send my name forward for the job we discussed on Friday. The real difficulty arises from what seems to me an almost inescapable incompatibility between the work you spoke of and my political activities.
But that was not the end of Colonel Sheridan, because even after I had been elected to the House of Commons, he came to see me and in effect asked me to do the same job.
It was only after his death that I realised that the appointment he had in mind was in the IRD, a part of the security services set up by Chris Mayhew during the Cold War. When he died, Sheridan’s obituary described his real role (and the role of IRD and its links with MI6), which was to write anti-communist stories and have them planted in the press. For the Cold War had begun as soon as the Second World War ended, and from then until the fall of the Berlin Wall it was the main preoccupation of the security services.
I was shocked, and remain shocked, at the thought that the security services should have been able to defy the constitution and employ elected MPs as spies for them, on the basis that this would never be publicly disclosed. I later came to believe that there were MPs who were doing just that, and no doubt still are. The fact that such an offer was explicitly made to me means that this suspicion is not a conspiracy theory, but founded on a real event.
Moreover, I assume they approached me because, as the son of a peer, a public-school boy, an Oxford graduate and a former RAF pilot, I would be considered on class grounds to be reliable, since class has always been the basis for a presumption of loyalty to the Crown and the basis of recruitment to positions in the security services. It also showed that they knew nothing about my politics, for if they had made the most elementary enquiries, they would have discovered that I was a socialist who was committed to the very policies that the security services would have regarded as fundamentally disloyal. But then the intelligence services have never been very bright.
After Caroline returned to America and before I went over for the wedding the next year, she and I discovered, during a long and detailed correspondence, that we had many shared beliefs and experiences that had shaped our thinking in childhood. In one of her letters she wrote:
As far as American politics go, and that is all I know, having never studied the subject elsewhere, I have always been torn between the existing parties and practices and never really wholeheartedly devoted myself to any particular one. This is especially true of the present situation which climaxes in the coming election.
I was violently in favor of Roosevelt much against my family’s views, for they have always been Republican; but I was quite young and vastly disinterested in the subject during most of the time he was in office. So I guess my sympathies were mostly with his ideals and what I fancied he stood for and was driving towards, rather than with the specific practices and acts he was responsible for. But then in this field my reasoning is highly likely to be based on idealistic rather than practical grounds.
I think the machinery of democratic government available to both our countries a remarkable and useable system. But unfortunately in this country anyway an honorable set of ideals and a desirable theory doesn’t always ensure a sound practice. The Bossism, the lack of interest in political affairs and the niggling stupidity of a great many of our political leaders has always made me cringe; and for a long time I was so discouraged that I refused to even think about it at all …
Caroline voted for Henry Wallace in 1948 and wrote:
In a way I don’t blame the Wallace people … for s
ticking to the basic Marxian idea of revolution. Because things are pretty hopeless. Yet even the fact that the changes here are so remote does not justify such a code to me, especially in view of the fact that the basic desirable changes can be brought about peacefully. And yet as I have said, I have much sympathy with them because they are willing to do something and have energies and capacities that are outstanding and because, in general, their ends are noble and that always appeals to me.
She also wrote at length about religion and described how her family were Anglicans and were given the usual childhood religious training, but none of them was passionately devout. It was only when she went to school:
… where with the strict sequestered life we led and the fact that we had to go to chapel twice daily, things of this nature began to assume an importance hitherto unknown. I became violently religious and acutely conscious of the fact that my own life was unbelievably below the Christian ethical standards.
I did everything in my power to obey to the letter. Naturally this couldn’t be done and for a while I developed something of the Christian guilt complex which I see so strongly in your letters. I was really miserable and for a while quite gave up hope for my small soul. But then, with graduating, living at the naval air station and entering college I became involved in outside activities and goals and the Christian scale of right and wrong began to be tempered by the human scale of such.
And there is that distinction, because the Christian ethics, if interpreted as I had done, are really inhuman, and it is only the saints and martyrs who can hope to keep them.
There is a great similarity between the ethical codes of all religions. They all preach tolerance, the golden rule, peace and honesty.
Of course there are differences but I still maintain that they are not of such a vital nature that they cannot be reconciled with one another …
I believe from the bottom of my heart that religion is a human as much as a divine problem.
I believe that it is after all only a divine myth, much like all other myths that have been invented by various civilisations and peoples, to explain that which is mysterious and to provide laws for societies which demand them by their own incompetence to handle life decently.
Ritual has very powerful effects over me but they are not any the less simply because I believe they are just ritual and not a divine ordination handed down from heaven.
What does constitute heaven I do not know.
We are human beings and as such are completely incapable of understanding things divine. The most we can do is to have faith which I do have and have very strongly and make the best of what has been given to us – our lives.
In retrospect, perhaps the most significant passage in one of Caroline’s letters was about her love of the arts. I wish I had reread it regularly, for it was an important aspect of her life, which I was unable to share but which explained so much about her:
My real loves are the arts and I just can’t help it. One Beethoven trio is worth a hundred presidential elections to me and I cannot look at it otherwise. I will try to be interested in the things you are because I do want to know about them and because I do not want to let you down in any way, but the key to the world to me lies in literature and music and philosophy, and that is the only route I can ever take to really discover what this life is all about. Even if I don’t particularly care for someone in a great way, if they are lifted out of a day by a Scarlatti sonata or discovering themselves in a Thomas Mann character I warm up to them in the most immediate way.
The kinship I feel with all the university people I am with this Fall, is entirely based on the fact that our interests in life, our real interests, are precisely the same. We are violently different as people but we all feel unconsciously that the really important things in life are the same; and although our ideas and opinions differ greatly, the sense of togetherness these common interests create is fantastic. When I am in a group or a place where no-one thinks much on the things I do, or where the things that matter are so entirely in a different field of study, I begin to think how narrow and unimportant are my tastes and likes.
I just will never be able to find anything that is of such supreme interest and importance to me, so maybe I should just stop worrying about it.
Caroline was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, a descendant of a family of Huguenots who had originally come to America to escape from repression in France in the seventeenth century. In 1812 Ezekiel and Mary Baker DeCamp, her immediate forebears, with ten of their children, took a journey that lasted six days in a covered waggon, pulled by horse and oxen, from New Jersey to settle in Ohio. There a further seven children were born, all but one (Moses, who died at ten) living to adult life.
Within less than one hundred years of their marriage, they had more than 700 descendants by 1896, and a later updated history edited by Caroline’s brother Graydon in 1976 lists twelve generations, from the first DeCamps who had come from France nearly 300 years before and whose descendants must now run into tens of thousands.
The early DeCamps were dedicated Christians – Methodists and Presbyterians, hard-working and God-fearing, who worked as stonemasons, bricklayers, carpenters and plasterers, some founding businesses and with a strong sense of their public duty. Six of the DeCamp brothers were introduced to President Lincoln, a few months before his assassination, and he was told that they had all voted for him and prayed every day for him to receive divine guidance.
Caroline’s mother was a Graydon, of Protestant Irish stock, who, as Caroline once said to me, had waited for the Pullman cars to be running before they came to Ohio – her grandfather being a Chaucer scholar and a partner in a law firm in Cincinnati.
I do not think Caroline’s Republican parents ever quite understood the radical ideas that she had formed for herself – not least her voting for Henry Wallace in the presidential election of 1948, at a time when he was receiving support from socialists and communists.
Caroline was brought up, as I was, as an Anglican. But she became a humanist, as I have done, cherishing the rituals of the Church, but unable to subscribe to the Creed, while embracing the moral teachings of the Bible, believing them best realised in collective political and social action.
At Vassar College, where she graduated with distinction, she organised a Radical Arts Conference to bring arts and society together; because of its success, it finally won round the support of the authorities who had initially disapproved of it.
From there, and after our engagement, she went on to do a graduate degree at the University of Cincinnati with a thesis on Milton, and when we arrived in London she did a second graduate degree at University College, with a thesis on Stuart Masques and the co-operation between Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones.
In January 1949 I went by boat to New York, where Caroline was waiting, and on by train to Cincinnati to meet her family. They could not have been nicer, considering that they knew nothing about me, other than what Caroline had told them. They arranged a party at their home to meet their wider family, and I was taken to Caroline’s grandfather’s house for Sunday lunch, in a huge ‘Elizabethan’ building that they had put up in the 1930s, with a library full of books, including some of his about Geoffrey Chaucer, on whom he was an expert.
James DeCamp, her father, and Joseph Graydon, her mother’s father, were both lawyers. They all lived in Cincinnati, a solid middle-western Republican city, which was the home of the Tafts, one of whom – William Howard Taft – had been President; the most recent Senator Robert Taft was accepted as an elder statesman of the Republicans. Brought up during Prohibition, Caroline’s parents were quite heavy drinkers, and every night people came for drinks on the terrace while the meal was cooked, and then went on to drink late into the night.
My future mother-in-law, Anne DeCamp, had a social life of her own and was involved in the Widows and Old Folks Fêtes, which she helped organise to raise money. Her husband James was a golfer and enjoyed nothing more than a day on the links. I also
became good friends with Caroline’s sister Nance and brother Graydon.
They had all the normal prejudices of their generation, and no idea at all about equal rights for the African-Americans. When my son Hilary was asked by his great-grandfather on a family visit to Cincinnati what he especially noticed about America, Hilary replied, ‘Well, the police have guns, and the Africans do all the work!’ He was about six at the time and his great-grandfather laughed.
Cincinnati is an old river town on the Ohio and across the water lies Kentucky, which had been one of the Confederate states in the war, so that slaves would escape across the water into Ohio, before civil war ended slavery throughout the United States.
Following my introduction to Caroline’s family, I began some months of travelling as a salesman for Benn Brothers’ publications – and a miserably lonely and unsuccessful trip it was. With paper rationing, British magazines were slim compared to the bulky journals that were available in the States. I moved from city to city staying in little hotels, culling the names of potential customers from the Yellow Pages and going round with my wares, always to be treated kindly, but with practically nothing whatsoever to show for it.
Because Benn Brothers had some connections with McGraw Hill in New York, in the spring of 1949 I took a little room on the west of Manhattan and worked at their HQ, where I learned a lot about publishing and editing and got on well as a student of modern American marketing methods. Then, in the summer, I was free, returned to Caroline’s home and we were married from there at the Church of the Advent, which was her local church. We went on to a honeymoon in Michigan in a cottage that her parents had rented, and from there to the Summer Institute for Social Progress at Wellesley College, where I spoke in the debate about the future of Europe and the world.
The story of the bureaucracy I encountered in order to marry Caroline is an amusing one. In Britain I had applied for a visitor’s visa from the American Embassy to allow me to go over to get married. The embassy replied saying that, if I was going to marry an American girl, it would only grant me an immigration visa, since nobody going to America to marry would ever want to leave.
