by Tony Benn
This posed a problem, because I was still on the reserve list as a Fleet Air Arm pilot and could be recalled at any time, so I had to ask the Admiralty if they would agree to release me; I received a letter from them granting me permission to emigrate, adding in a formal note that the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty wished me all success in my future life!
When I arrived in America, the US authorities wrote to welcome me, offering to provide courses in English for all immigrants – an offer for which I thanked them, but said that I did not need.
After we were married we left for England, as we had planned, and on my return home I got another letter from the United States asking me if I had left America to avoid military service. Meanwhile, under British law at that time, Caroline had to be registered as an alien, and was required to report to the police, and whenever she went more than fifty miles from London the police also had to be notified. This, on one occasion, led to the police calling at our front door to see if she was there.
If she had applied for British citizenship, as she was entitled to do, she would have had to renounce her American citizenship and take an oath of allegiance to the Crown, which, on principle, she was not prepared to do, being very proud of her US citizenship. When I once told this story in a parliamentary debate on immigration law, a Tory MP attacked me bitterly for not having insisted that she become British, and said it was a disgrace that as an MP I had allowed her to retain her US citizenship.
Caroline and I returned to Britain after our honeymoon on a French liner, the Île de France. As she had not had time to put her married name on her passport, the French stewards tried to be very understanding and nodded and smiled at each other, as if to say it did not matter that we were not married – and perhaps they had underestimated the British in matters of love.
After two months at home with my folks, we moved into a flat in Goldhawk Road, Hammersmith, where the rent was £115 per year. I got a job at the BBC at £9 per week as a producer in the North American Service, where I was able to do everything, including editing, interviewing and introducing programmes on subjects that I mainly picked myself, and which were transmitted by shortwave and re-broadcast on public-service stations.
Among the people whom I asked to broadcast was Bernard Shaw; and I received from him one of his famous postcards, the address hand-written by him and with the following printed message:
Mr Bernard Shaw’s readers and the spectators at performances of his plays number many thousands. The little time remaining to him at his age is fully occupied with his literary work and the business it involves; and war taxation has set narrow limits to his financial resources. He has therefore to print the following intimations.
He cannot deal with individual grievances and requests for money, nor for autographs and photographs. He cannot finance schools and churches. His donations go to undenominational public bodies and his charities go to the Royal Society of Literature.
He cannot engage in private correspondence, nor read long letters.
He cannot advise literary beginners nor read their unpublished works. They had better study the Writers’ Year Book (or other books of reference), and join the Society of Authors as associates.
He cannot discuss his published views in private letters.
He cannot receive visits at his private residence except from his intimate friends.
He will not send messages.
He begs to be excused accordingly.
Ayot Saint Lawrence
Welwyn Herts
2/4/1950
Having campaigned in the Abbey Division of Westminster in the 1945 General Election (and distributed leaflets as a lad of ten in the 1935 election), I was approached by the Abbey party in 1946 – by then I was twenty-one – to seek my nomination to ‘List B’. This was the list compiled by the party headquarters at Transport House with the names and details of party members whom constituency parties believed would be suitable for adoption as candidates by the Labour Party.
All it meant was that, if you were adopted by a constituency anywhere in the country to fight a seat, the local constituency party concerned would know something about you. When a vacancy for a candidate occurred, List B would be made available to the local party to give them some idea of people they might want to interview. The choice of candidate still had to be endorsed by the National Executive Committee, but there would be the safeguard that the person chosen was on List B. All that has now changed of course because the National Executive controls much more tightly the selection of candidates, particularly at by-elections.
One local party that approached me was Richmond, in June 1950, but I refused them for reasons that were explained in my letter to them:
… I am in rather a difficult position at the moment, so I am afraid that my answer will have to be no. I work in the BBC, which, as you know, prohibits all political activity. If I were nominated I would have to give up my job at once. I have been to Transport House to talk over the problem with Mr Windle, especially to ask if I should have my name taken off the list. But he has advised me to keep it on anyway and to try and find another job …
I would not be able to devote all my energies to the constituency, to say nothing of any other kind of backing. Besides, I have recently got married and that is an additional complication.
Again thank you for your offer …
I had earlier been approached by John Parker, an MP who became Father of the House, during the war; he was on the lookout for young Labour candidates and asked me if I would put my name forward, but as I was then only nineteen I had to ask to be excused.
However, by the time Raymond Blackburn, Labour MP, left the Party in 1950 and his Northfield constituency in Birmingham was looking for a new candidate, I had decided that I would give up my BBC job, if successful. I agreed to attend the selection conference, but before it was held Bristol South East approached me because their MP Sir Stafford Cripps, the Chancellor of the Exchequer (who had cancer), was retiring.
The approach came from Mervyn Stockwood, the rector of St Matthew Moorfield in my constituency, who was also a Labour councillor and later became Bishop of Southwark. I believe that my friend Tony Crosland, by then the MP for South Gloucestershire, had suggested me to Stockwood, so on 1 November Caroline and I set out by car on my first ever visit to Bristol for my first ever selection conference, knowing no one and having no hope of winning. Arthur Creech Jones, the Colonial Secretary who was born in Bristol and whose brother was a Labour councillor there, had lost his seat of Shipley in the February 1950 election, and the by-election offered a natural opportunity to him to return to Parliament and Government. Another candidate had also been a Labour MP: Muriel Nichol, the daughter of Dick Wallhead (also a former Labour MP), who had lost her seat at the same time.
The national agent of the Labour Party had come down to be sure that Creech Jones was selected, and the regional organiser was also there for the same reason. What I did not know was that having had a Cabinet minister as their MP for five years, Bristol South East desperately wanted some young candidate who would work with the constituency and not be siphoned off into high office.
One serious shadow hung over my candidature in that my dad, who was then seventy-three, would, when he died, saddle me with his wretched peerage and I would be disqualified. I pointed this out, but they didn’t seem to mind; and when I was asked what money I could give to the constituency if I was the candidate, I replied that this was not a Tory selection conference and if I did have money to give, I certainly wouldn’t tell them at this stage. They also asked me if I would move to Bristol to live, if I was their MP. I said, ‘I have just got married, we are hoping for a family and I really would want to be with them at the weekend, but promise that I will always be here whenever you want me.’
After all the candidates had finished their statements, we were brought in together to hear the result, which I thought was rather brutal. After I won, both Creech Jones and Mrs Nichol warmly congratulated me,
which was typically generous of both of them.
Polling day was 30 November and that day President Truman said, almost casually, that he might use an atomic bomb in the Korean War. But on polling day no busy candidate has time to listen to the news, and it was only later that I heard this devastating threat, which led Attlee to fly to Washington immediately to deflect Truman.
So it was that on 4 December 1950, at the age of twenty-five, I took the oath and my seat, with my parents and my brother in the gallery. I was technically ‘baby of the house’ (that is, youngest member of the Commons) for twenty-four hours. The circumstances were interesting because another Member, Tom Teevan, who was two years younger than I, was elected in a by-election on 29 November 1950 in Belfast West, but did not take his seat until the day after me.
Thus, with the threat of a peerage overshadowing me, began a life in the Commons that ended in May 2001, more than fifty years later, with a few interruptions. I had served in Parliament longer than any other Labour MP in the history of the Party.
My campaign to rid myself of the peerage began in 1955, five years before my father died. I introduced a private bill in that year and appeared before the Private Bill Committee of the House of Lords, in the Moses Room, to present my case, backed up by a petition from the Lord Mayor, Aldermen and Burgesses of Bristol and by the Bishop of Bristol. That committee dismissed my claim.
My father then introduced a public bill in the Lords, which was also defeated. That is why when he died in 1960 at the age of eighty-three, I found myself excluded and was taken to the Privileges Committee of the House of Commons, which demanded that I produce my parents’ marriage certificate, my elder brother’s death certificate and my own birth certificate, as the basis on which it recommended my exclusion from the Commons.
Throughout this whole period my mother and father, and Caroline and my family, supported my campaign unhesitatingly. Indeed, Caroline was most passionate in her views.
A few months after my exclusion my seat was declared vacant and a by-election occurred to find a successor. At that time there was a loophole in the law, which enabled electoral officers (in my case the Town Clerk of Bristol) to accept as candidates all persons who were ‘properly nominated’ – even if disqualified for some reason, as I was. Thus I was actually able to stand as the Labour candidate despite the peerage complication. One minor consequence of my campaign was that this loophole was later closed.
I was duly re-elected with a much bigger majority, having circulated to my constituents a letter of support from Winston Churchill and having received backing from a range of people. I therefore turned up at the House of Commons as the newly elected Member of Parliament and the Speaker told the Doorkeeper, Victor Stockley, that if I tried to enter the Chamber to take my seat, he was to keep me out – ‘if necessary by force’.
My Tory opponent, Malcolm St Clair (who, unbelievably, was also the heir to a peerage), took me to an election court presided over by two judges sitting alone, and I presented my own case after spending months studying peerage law with the help of Michael Zander; I found myself up against two QCs.
My initial speech took about four days to deliver. At the end the judges reported that I was disqualified on the basis of a judgement by Mr Justice Dodderidge, who in 1626 ruled that a peerage was ‘an incorporeal hereditament affixed in the blood and annexed to the posterity’, which (loosely interpreted) meant that it was a bit of real property in my blood that I could not get rid of.
On that basis, the candidate I had beaten was seated in the House as the new MP for Bristol South East and I was out in the wilderness, with no prospect of serving in the Commons again.
However, public support for my campaign, reflected also in the by-election result, led the Tory government to set up a select committee to look at the matter. In the summer of 1963 it recommended that an heir to a peerage could renounce within six months of succession. But when the Peerage Bill that included this provision went to the Commons, they made an amendment to exclude peerages that had already been inherited. This would have kept me out for ever.
Strangely, it was the House of Lords which reversed that amendment and allowed me to benefit. It may possibly be that one reason was that the Earl of Home was a potential candidate for the leadership of the Tory Party when Macmillan resigned (which he did later that year, on health grounds), and so they wanted to keep the door open for him. At any rate the bill was passed and I was sitting in the gallery of the House of Lords when the Royal Assent was given. When the words ‘La Reine le veult’ were spoken, I shot out of the gallery and the door banged audibly, then I went to the Lord Chancellor’s office with my Instrument of Renunciation and became a free man.
One amusing aspect of this was that when I went into the Lord Chancellor’s office, the Doorkeeper said, ‘Good afternoon, my Lord’ and as I left he said, ‘Goodbye, sir’.
Malcolm St Clair then resigned from the Commons, there was a further by-election, and I was returned again as the MP for Bristol South East in the autumn of 1963.
What I learned from it all was that an appeal for justice taken to the top rarely succeeds and it was the backing of my constituents and of the Constituency Labour Party that forced the government to shift – a strange way, you may think, to learn what every socialist has always known: that all progress comes from below, and that struggle has to be waged there.
Just before I renounced my peerage, I went to hospital and a kind doctor took some blue blood out of me, which I wanted to keep, since I knew I was about to lose it. I still have it in a bottle, and though the blood is clotted now, it would have been a ticket to a seat in Parliament (the Lords) for life, if I had been ready to accept the peerage.
When I left the Commons in 2001, Mr Speaker Martin recognised the fact that Ted Heath and I had both served for fifty years and conferred upon us both the new honour of ‘Freedom of the House’, which entitles us to use the Tea Room, the Library and the Cafeteria, and even to sit in the peers’ gallery of the House of Commons if we want to attend debates there. I therefore enjoy all the privileges of peerage without the humiliation of actually being a lord!
Throughout my political life, until her death in November 2000 (just before I retired), Caroline had been my sternest and most rigorous critic. Unlike me, she was a real intellectual, with a mind that could get to the bottom of any issue. Whenever I would submit a text to her for advice, she would read it and ask, ‘Well, what are you really trying to say?’ which sent me off to start afresh.
During our early years she had the four children to look after: Stephen, our eldest who has worked for many years as the Parliamentary officer of the Royal Society of Chemistry; Hilary, now an MP and in the Cabinet; Melissa, a writer, novelist and broadcaster; and Joshua, who is responsible for IT work in the Housing Corporation. The friendships she formed with them were deep and real, thinking about their needs and characters, just as she did later about our ten grandchildren, giving her full attention to them – a quality she showed to all her many friends around the world. She kept up a formidable correspondence with them almost to the day of her death.
Marriage to a Member of Parliament is a very demanding assignment and, despite her later reservations about the parliamentary world, Caroline would come willingly to the constituency and to meetings, and accepted the disruption to normal family life that Parliament involved and which made me a very inconsiderate partner.
She loved music and enjoyed going to concerts with her many friends, not least to Wexford with Peter Carter and to the Cincinnati Music Festival, which she attended whenever she could, travelling alone and combining it with a tour of her American relatives.
Her interest in education began in earnest when, having sent our children to Holland Park Comprehensive School, she became a governor there and served as Chair for twelve of her twenty-four years with the school, later being co-opted onto the LEA in London, which appointed her to be a governor of Imperial College and Mary Datchelor Girls’ School. Later
she began to teach for the Open University, being a passionate believer in adult education. This continued when she taught at our local college, only retiring at seventy.
She became a keen gardener in London and at Stansgate, where she bought a field and turned it into a nature reserve. Her concerns about the environment were real and led her to campaign actively on environmental issues. Both of us became vegetarians, converted by our son, Hilary, on the grounds both of agricultural economy and animal welfare.
But the real contribution Caroline made was as a writer about, and campaigner for, comprehensive education, working with Professor Brian Simon to produce a book entitled Halfway There which recorded the progress made by every local education authority.
Later, with Professor Clyde Chitty, she wrote a second book called Thirty Years On, which carried the story forward. And as a founder of the Campaign for Comprehensive Education, she moved on to be President of the Socialist Education Association and wrote many articles for learned journals about every aspect of education. She also headed up a Labour movement study of the work of the Manpower Services Commission, attending endless meetings and seminars, but never seeking any publicity for herself.
Her speaking style was quite unique: having prepared every word with the care that would normally be given to a university lecture, she stood rigidly, without a gesture, and spoke so softly that it was hard to hear it; but she was always listened to in absolute silence with rapt attention.
Apart from her novel, Lion in a Den of Daniels, which was published in England and America, her one major book was a life of Keir Hardie, which was recognised as the best account of the formation of the Labour Party. Caroline travelled to Scotland, America and the Netherlands to collect material for it, and received wonderful reviews from Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
