by Norman Stone
In the election of 1945 Labour swept in and it had a radical programme. It nationalized the heavy industries, coal, the docks, the railways: what were called ‘the commanding heights’ of the British economy. Education had already been made costless, even for parents who could afford some fees. Health was to become so, under a National Health Service (inaugurated on 5 July 1948, but debated since 1946). It replaced earlier charitable or for-profit arrangements, and also the extensive private insurance schemes which had grown up since the nineteenth century (under the ‘Friendly Societies’ which sprang straight from the respectable working class and much of the lower-middle class). Curiously it did not abolish private (or ‘public’ as they were bizarrely called) schools, which were a key element in the class structure. If the State supplied a decent and costless education, then why bother to abolish them? In any case Labour believed in equality, and the tax arrangements were such that equality was largely attained. Paying school fees became a problem for families that traditionally could afford them.
There was an argument behind all of this — that the State would do better than private arrangements ever could. The basis for this lay in the thirties, when private enterprise had indeed been associated with mass unemployment. But there was also the example of the war itself, and, there, the British were pleased with themselves, supposing also that their example was one to be widely followed as some sort of ‘third way’ between American capitalism and Soviet Communism. Early in 1945 Michael Foot, later to lead the Labour Party, told Parliament that the country was at the summit of its power — with ‘something unique to offer’, combining the ‘economic democracy’ of Communism and the ‘political democracy’ of the West: socialism without labour camps. Rationing had worked quite well, and health improved vastly during the war because working-class children were given rations of vitamin-rich food — orange juice, for instance — and had to do without sweets. Many children attended day nurseries because their mothers were working; the diets of these nurseries were supervised by doctors who had a power that they had not previously experienced, and the health of that generation was far better than that of its predecessors. Women had been brought into wartime employment, often classed as ‘national service’, and most remembered these years as a good time. There was an almost universal belief that the war economy had been very successful, despite German bombing and submarine attacks on shipping. One third of it had been devoted to the great Bomber Offensive, and Germany’s smashed cities were a testimony to its success. For the State to take over, to plan, and to develop a Welfare State therefore seemed sensible.
People who argued to the contrary were in a small minority — derided by the historian A. J. P. Taylor as similar to ‘Jacobites at the court of Louis XIV’, men who had lost any connection with the reality back home as they tried to support the lost cause of the Stuart dynasty — but even in the later 1940s these supposedly half-demented figures were starting to have reality on their side. It struck with a ferocious blow, in the second post-war winter. The money began to run out, and the government became quite badly divided as to priorities. A saying at the time was that ‘France is getting order through chaos; England chaos through order’, and, even now, a classic post-war problem with trade unions emerged.
The nightmare winter of 1946-7 went on well into April; brief thaws only added to the problem in that they created small ice-rinks. In all of this, the miners went on strike, and their output generally, let alone individually, was considerably below what it had been before the war. Then the dockers went on strike as well, such that exports were badly affected: without these there would be none of the vital imports (though it was maybe characteristic of the era that more dollars were spent on tobacco than on machinery: cigarettes were regarded as a vital import, as almost everyone smoked and there would probably have been a general strike if tobacco had given out). London, still with huge areas of bombed-out buildings, was a very depressed and depressing place as that winter went ahead. Rations now meant that you could get a pair of socks every four weeks. There had already been, in 1946, an American loan of $3.75bn. That had in effect allowed dollars to be spent — even on the import of timber for ‘social’ (‘Council’) housing — but it had come with the condition that the pound could be changed into dollars, free of wartime restrictions. The historian Kenneth Morgan even claims that it made the Labour programme possible. There was an implication, too, that the Americans would be able to trade freely with the British Empire, which, in places, had vital raw materials still priced in pounds.
In 1947 convertibility was introduced, and foreigners, in droves, changed their pounds into dollars. Almost £200m was being lost every week. The Labour government was in effect broken by this: there was never the same drive in it again; its huge majority collapsed at the next election, in 1950, and in 1951 it lost. The money ran out, but it had already been so programmed domestically that there was no room for going back: the various reforms that constituted the ‘Welfare State’ were mainly in place. It is notable that no other country copied the British formula in these matters, or at any rate not without substantial emendation of it. The Germans in a way were fortunate, in that they experienced that winter before any post-war social reforms had taken place: their state was constructed without the illusions of 1945.
However, the worst position for a Cabinet minister to be in was probably the Foreign Office. The country may have been badly weakened internally but there was no end to its responsibilities, and these were turning very sour. The problems went back to the first post-war period, in 1919, when men had joyously assumed that Empire made them rich, and the British Empire, already enormous, received a considerable extension in the Middle East. In 1929, the world slump in the end particularly affected agricultural prices, such that lambs were simply slaughtered rather than eaten, because the profit margins were lost in transport costs. India, ‘the jewel in the Crown’, became instead a liability and the nationalist leader there, Gandhi, rightly said that the Empire consisted of millions of acres of bankrupt real estate. But the British were nevertheless responsible for these problems. Of course, they tried hard to keep order, and they often inspired considerable loyalty, being uncorrupt, and holding the balance among various peoples. The Governor of Uganda was a much loved figure who got about on a bicycle. But the bottom had dropped out of the Empire, and a war for succession was under way — in India, between the Moslems who eventually set up Pakistan (‘land of the pure’) and the others, including Moslems living in southern India. In Palestine, there was a three-cornered war between the British, Arabs and Jews. Then there were the problems of Europe, and the drain of hard currency into Germany — £80mn in 1945-6 alone. Even in 1945 there had been some desire for a joint Anglo-American zone in Germany, but the USA was not minded, then, to do much more than leave Europe to sort itself out, maybe with the aid of the new IMF and World Bank. True, early in 1946 George Kennan, who was a very influential diplomat in Moscow, famously warned as to Soviet policy (Stalin had made a threatening speech in February), but even when Churchill talked of the ‘Iron Curtain’, Truman was careful not to associate himself with the idea. Crisis was needed, if the Americans were to intervene. The British had tried to attract support by showing themselves worthy of it. Now they used a different tactic. They would just collapse.
The Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, was an old trade unionist, whose ways ran very counter to those of the old imperial Foreign Office, but he inspired much loyalty and admiration. Though born illegitimate, and lacking schooling, he was literate (using phrases such as ‘with alacrity’) because, like so many of his class at the time, he could and would make use of the after-hours workers’ education libraries and self-help mechanisms without embarrassment. He was an astute trade union leader, and that gave him some insight into the ways of Communists, who would exploit an industrial crisis for their own political ends rather than for the workers’ own good. Bevin ran his machine well at the Foreign Office, and he needed to, because his in
-tray was a very gloomy one. Was Great Britain bulldog or bullfrog, ran one question.
After 1945 the Western empires fell apart. The Japanese had already broken their prestige, the ‘charisma’ that had kept, say, British India going. There, apart from the army, there had been only 60,000 British in a subcontinent of 400 million, and a unique combination of circumstances kept them in control for an extraordinary length of time. A good part of the story had to do with divisions within India (Churchill said that it was ‘no more a nation than the Equator’), but there was also the army, which worked remarkably well almost to the end, and the British themselves respected the rule of law (with one or two notorious lapses). In 1904 a Viceroy, Lord Curzon, who was not at all a stupid man, remarked that the British should stay in India ‘as if… for ever’. But by the 1930s the formula was coming apart. A nationalist intelligentsia emerged, men such as Nirad Chaudhuri, a Bengali whose English and whose knowledge of literature were better than most Englishmen’s, and whose life story, The Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951), is one of the classics of the era. Chaudhuri started off as a nationalist — precisely the sort of Brown Briton who, if Indian independence had developed as, say, Canada’s had done, would have been a paladin of Commonwealth and Empire. Instead, he became rapidly disillusioned when his cause had won. His admiration for England was immense, but men of his stamp sometimes had to put up with absurd humiliations: a Cambridge-educated Burmese rugger player told he could not use the common bath with the British players; a Chinese millionaire in Singapore being invited by the Governor-General to dine at the chief club, and the Governor-General receiving a letter of protest from the committee the following day; George Orwell crossing the road in Rangoon if he heard Scottish voices, so far did they bear overtones of crudity. The heart of Indian nationalism had been in Bengal, itself a special area (and the oldest part of the British raj). But when the British went down, so, too, did Bengal: a festering mass of hatreds was soon revealed, and they were to wreck Indian independence. Chaudhuri emigrated to an England which he also found culturally impoverished by the loss of Empire.
In the later 1930s it was clear enough that the British would not be staying. The great difficulty was to find a successor element on which to rely, and, here, the war made problems much worse. The Japanese invaded Burma, causing hundreds of thousands of refugees to flee to the already overcrowded north-east. Boats were wrecked, so as to deter further Japanese invasion over the sea. In 1942 the main Indian nationalist movement demanded immediate independence and refused to have any truck even with sympathetic British politicians who asked them to wait until the end of the war. A movement of civil disobedience was put down with some harshness in the same year, and was broken in effect only when a great famine broke out — partly a consequence of the Burmese disaster, partly because of a terrible cyclone that wrecked the rice crop, partly for lack of transport, and partly because the British gave priority to war transports rather than to civilian needs. The (Indian) government of Bengal itself proved none too efficient, and 3 million people starved to death. India had been radicalized, the prestige of the raj broken; in 1946 government buildings were routinely being destroyed, and there were even alarms for the loyalty of the army. In the event, the great tragedy of modern India soon emerged. Getting the Hindu-dominated Congress to agree with the Moslem League proved to be impossible, and a partition was hurriedly agreed. It was, in the words of the very sober Christopher Bayly, ‘a crazy geographer’s nightmare’. Bengal, 25 million Hindus to 35 million Moslems, was almost impossible to partition, and 8 million people moved. However, ‘East Pakistan’ without Calcutta was ‘an economic disaster area’, with the jute production separated from the mills, and it was itself separated from the rest of Pakistan by a thousand miles. The division of the Punjab in spring and summer 1947 turned out to be savage, whole train-loads arriving with corpses that were burned or disembowelled, as the Punjab was mixed, with a large Sikh population that was to be split between India and Pakistan. By the summer of 1947 the British had neither the money nor the will for a fight, and the army did not carry out proper policing; besides, the timetable was absurdly short, and maddened people grabbed what they could when they could. On independence, in mid-August, New Delhi itself was seething, while in Calcutta 7,000 tons of rubbish built up, even at the gates of the stock exchange, the leading financial institution in Asia. It was a dismal end to the British raj and even then showed something of what was soon to happen in England herself. The last Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, was indeed the gold filling in a rotten mouth — a jibe later on made about the role of the monarchy itself. Not a British life was lost in the departure, but quite soon India and Pakistan were at war over a vast disputed area, Kashmir.
Of all oddities, the British had been at work in 1945 even trying to extend their empire. British troops were present in Vietnam and Indonesia, where they were dragged into support for the existing French and Dutch rulers. In order to do so (and in Burma as well) they were driven to use the hundreds of thousands of Japanese prisoners of war to put down risings by the local nationalists. The French and the Dutch somehow understood even less than did the British that the European position was hopelessly lost: the Foreign Office adviser on Mountbatten’s staff told him that the Dutch were ‘mentally sick’ and ‘not in a fit state to resume control in this vast area’; it was not until 1948 that the Dutch abandoned Indonesia. But the British were also fantasizing, though less bizarrely. In the second half of the 1940s they were trying to create a new form of empire, in this case one based on Malaya. Here, they had a certain amount of justification, in that Malayan rubber earned a surplus of £170m for the sterling area — more than a third of its income (the Gold Coast supplied another quarter). Malaya was put together in a novel way, together with Singapore, but this did not solve the three-cornered problem of Indian, Chinese and Malay cohabitation. A civil war soon developed, with a Communist insurgency that was largely Chinese, and Malaya was not stabilized until 1960. The Americans faced problems of the same sort in the Philippines, to which they gave an independence with certain limits.
The nightmare of nightmares was Palestine. Whatever the British did would be wrong. As with India, it is obvious that a few more years of Empire would have been desirable for an orderly transfer of power to occur. But to whom? Here again, as with other parts of the British Empire, there was much strength in the argument that the Empire kept order, tried to assure legal rights, and sent out honest people. But there was an original sin at the centre of the Palestinian question, and it lay in the context of the Balfour Declaration of 1917, which had offered the Jews a national home in what was then Arab (or Ottoman) territory: the aim being essentially to keep the French away from the Suez Canal. The British then found themselves responsible for keeping order in a small area claimed by both sides, and there was a further problem, in so far as the native Palestinians were themselves very divided. Partition was an obvious solution, and even then the transfer of Palestine to Jordan would have made sense, but there were vast problems as regards Jerusalem. The British muddled, swung to one side and the other with pressures of terrorism, and thus encouraged the terrorists to do their worst. There were some particularly horrible episodes, such as the blowing up, in an operation of sinister brilliance, of the King David Hotel, British headquarters in Jerusalem (March 1946), or the hanging of two sergeants, whose bodies were then booby-trapped, and the British were much criticized for stopping the emigration of Jews from the concentration camps to Palestine. The Americans were loud in their criticism, and in February 1947 the British threw the affair at them and the United Nations. The Mandate was abandoned; an unworkable plan for partition came up; ethnic cleansing occurred, and 700,000 Palestinians fled from their homes. On 14 May 1948 Israel was proclaimed as a state, and a war then followed, until 1949, when an unsatisfactory boundary was set up through an armistice. This period is full of questions: was there ever any possibility that proper partition, or even a single-state solution, might
have been established? At any rate, here was another problem, involving Moslems, that the British simply could not manage. They ‘scuttled’, as in India or Greece.
Those dreadful winter months of 1947 were decisive and the issue which caused the decision was the least of the problems: Greece. She had a very important place in British imperial strategy. Control of the eastern Mediterranean was essential for any power concerned with the Suez Canal and the shortest routes to Asia, and there had long been a British interest in the whole area — it had led to the Crimean War, and in 1878 to the taking over of Cyprus. The British were preponderant in Athens and in 1944 Churchill had struck a bargain with Stalin to keep it that way. The Red Army was conquering eastern and much of central Europe, and the resistance movements were heavily influenced by Communism — in Yugoslavia especially, but also in Greece.
Greece was indeed almost a textbook case of the sort of country most open to Communist takeover. She was backward and largely agrarian; the Orthodox Church, unlike the Catholic Church, was not solid as regards resistance to Communism (it had not been much of a focus of reaction against the Bolsheviks in the Civil War); the non-Communists were badly divided between monarchists and republicans, and, besides, they were dominant in different parts of the country. There were also minorities, whether Albanian, Bulgarian (or Macedonian) or Vlach (or Romanian), and, decisively, a quarter of the entire population consisted of refugees — people, destitute, who had fled from the collapse of the Greek invasion of western Turkey after 1922. Salonica and its hinterland had been populated by them, as the local Moslems also emigrated to Turkey and that city, very heavily Jewish, was the capital of Greek Communism. Its leader, Nikos Zachariadis, had even once been a dock-worker at Galata, the port of Istanbul. The Communists had been a political presence in the 1930s and kept an organization even under the military dictatorship that ruled Greece. When the German army invaded in 1941 and occupied the country, Greek Communists eventually became foremost in the resistance movement and when the Germans withdrew, late in 1944, they nearly took over Athens. British troops prevented this, but there was a more important factor: Stalin instructed the Greek Communists not to take power but to make an agreement with the British and with the monarchists whom they supported. This was Stalin’s part of a bargain that otherwise provided for the British not to resist Communist takeovers elsewhere (Romania and Bulgaria, expressly, though the implications as regards the other parts of Soviet-dominated eastern Europe were menacing enough). In 1946 the Greek Civil War flared up again, and this time the Communists had help from Yugoslavia (there was a substantial Macedonian Slav minority in northern Greece) and bases in Albania.
