The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  The odd thing was that the Scottish left proved so ineffective in grappling with the growing demands for home rule, and left it to a wide coalition of outsiders and mavericks instead. Though ‘Red Clydeside’ was overblown, socialism in Scotland had caught on strongly and early. The Independent Labour Party was a predominantly Scottish creation, and Glasgow sent a stream of radical Labour MPs to Westminster. James Maxton, whose biography was written by the later prime minister Gordon Brown, left the railway station in Glasgow promising ‘a Scottish Socialist Commonwealth’ including a Scottish Parliament. He wanted it because, according to another Scottish Labour MP who put down a motion for a Scottish Parliament in the Commons, child poverty and other social problems in Scotland could only be dealt with by a Parliament which understood Scottish problems. Again and again motions for ‘home rule all round’, linking Scottish self-determination to Irish (and English), had been put to the Westminster Parliament. Indeed, one of the key pieces of legislation that was stillborn in 1914 was for a Scottish Parliament. Yet the post-war efforts of the Scottish Labour MPs to get Westminster to take home rule seriously were brushed aside very easily. And quite soon, as unemployment and then the international threat of fascism became dominant issues, even the Labour Party decided that Scottish self-government would have to wait. When eventually Clement Attlee became leader in the thirties it disappeared from the Labour agenda all together. This left a vacuum.

  There had been pro-independence organizations before the ILP. The Liberals were, in theory, in favour of home rule. There was a Scottish Home Rule Association, with thousands of active members. There was a Scots National League, which wanted Scotland to separate entirely from England and which was dominated by romantic Jacobites, often living in London. But the man who began to draw the strands together was a twenty-two-year-old former Labour supporter called John MacCormick who founded a Glasgow University Scottish Nationalist Association and then in 1928, helped by the financial support of a tannery owner, created the National Party of Scotland. Scotland’s older universities have the quaintly democratic habit of allowing the students to elect their titular leader, or rector. In 1928, in Glasgow, the prime minister Stanley Baldwin was chosen as candidate and the newly formed nationalists put up our old friend ‘Don Roberto’ Cunninghame Graham against him. To general shock, he came within sixty-odd votes of beating Baldwin. Bringing together all the very different groups who dreamed of an independent Scotland had, however, come at a price. The new party was not socialist and quickly fell out with the pro-home-rule people left in the Labour Party. It courted Scottish aristocrats and when in 1933 it merged with the right-wing Scottish Party to form the SNP, the break from radical politics seemed complete. Scottish public life was in those days rank with sectarianism – the Church of Scotland was particularly guilty of warning about the dangers of Irish Catholic immigration swamping the pure Protestant heritage, or what was called simply the ‘green terror’. The nationalists played along.

  Meanwhile, a bewildering number of small splinter groups, dedicated to ‘Sinn Fein’ tactics, private armies and secret plots, proliferated on the fringes of Scottish politics, sometimes cheered on by MacDiarmid and his friends. MacCormick was trying hard to make the SNP respectable, raising cash from wealthy supporters and proposing some kind of fusion with the Liberals; but by the later thirties, the new party was divided over the issue of national service. Radicals in the SNP thought Scots should have no part in a war between the British Empire and Nazi Germany and by 1936 all of its male members were committed to refusing military service in the British forces. The SNP began to attract the attention of MI5 and, though during 1938–9 the party reluctantly accepted the need for conscription in a coming war against Hitler, it would split itself apart in 1942 over the issue. History remembers the Oxford Union’s 1933 debate when students voted heavily in favour of the motion ‘that this house will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country’, but the Scottish movement to refuse to fight which came later was rather more serious. Most Scots, of course, were not nationalists or home-rulers. They continued to vote for the mainstream Unionist, Labour and Liberal parties, just as the English and Welsh did. The next war would bind the peoples of Britain together strongly in sentiment, shared suffering and achievement, and usher in decades of intensely unionist politics. Yet from the perspective of a new century, the nationalist rumblings that grew out of the Great War seem at least as significant – part of the broken history still waiting to be resolved.

  From the Black House to Pentonville

  We last left Oswald Mosley still vaguely associated with the left, and yet showing clear leader-cult tendencies, attended by his ‘biff boys’ and more under the influence of Mussolini than of Hitler. He was not beyond the pale, not in the eyes of the Prince of Wales, or Churchill, or even idealistic Tory radicals like Harold Macmillan. Mosley needed to start again because his New Party had been humiliated in the general election of 1931. He was confused enough to be seeking funds from such well-known Jewish businessmen as Israel Sieff, chairman of Marks and Spencer. In what must be one of the most cack-handed attempts at political fundraising in British history, Mosley told Sieff, in a bluff man-to-man way, that new movements ‘must find somebody or something to hate. In this case it should be the Jews.’ Realizing he might have been tactless, Mosley quickly added that it did not apply ‘to Jews like you, Israel’, but it was too late: Sieff told him to get out. The Nazis thought Mosley was nothing like anti-Semitic enough but Mosley’s problem was that he was getting so much of his funding secretly from Mussolini, and Mussolini thought the Germans were far too anti-Jewish. So he hedged. Though he was waiting for the great economic crash to sweep him into power, Mosley was meanwhile dependent on the foreign powers that were prepared to fund him.

  When Mosley launched his British Union of Fascists in October 1932, the Mussolini money became vital. It seems to have flowed in, brought in suitcases and deposited carefully to avoid official notice. It allowed Mosley to open up his own headquarters, a former teachers’ training college, the ‘Black House’ at 232 Battersea Park Road, from where his Blackshirt army was organized and disciplined. Dark work was supposed to take place in the basement, including punishment beatings, but the supply of men and women who were ready to wear the militaristic uniform was steady. Mosley’s capacity for work was huge and his aggression barely in control; once he leapt into an audience and beat three hecklers senseless, and another time knocked down one of his own officers who he thought had insulted him. He was soon soliciting support from right-wing aristocrats, intelligence officers, ex-military people and the fragmentary fascist groups that Britain already had. The most important event of the following months was, of course, Hitler’s arrival in power as German chancellor, quickly followed by admiring profiles from Rothermere’s Daily Mail. Launching its domestic campaign, the paper cheered: ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’ and for six months in 1934 the Rothermere group was as frantic in its support for the British Union of Fascists as it had been a few years earlier for the Empire Crusade. It bought up hundreds of seats at Blackshirt rallies. Rothermere tried to start a cigarette-making company with Blackshirts to distribute them. He tried to run a beauty contest for Blackshirt women.

  But then came Mosley’s biggest rally, at London’s Olympia on 7 June 1934, when 15,000 gathered to hear him, and a couple of thousand communist infiltrators heckled to the point where open and exceedingly violent confrontations with Blackshirt stewards erupted all over the hall and on the streets outside. In the Communist Party of Great Britain, Mosley was up against another group quite happy to use violence and which, indeed, thought that bloody public confrontations were a good way of radicalizing British workers. Rothermere at last seemed to understand what he was getting into. Public revulsion about the Olympia riot was widespread, a turning-away which showed just how far Britain was from Germany or Italy. In that year the BUF, with its press backing, had managed a peak of about 50,000 members, but in 1935 numbers crashed to ab
out a tenth of that. Mosley’s explanation for the defection of his mainstream newspaper support was that Rothermere had been leant on by his Jewish advertisers. Under the influence of Hitler, he was moving further in an anti-Semitic and violent direction. Searching for a new strategy, he decided to target one small part of Britain where, because it contained a third of British Jews and much poverty, the prospects for stirring up fascist feeling seemed particularly strong. He decided to make the East End of London his battleground. This would prove just as disastrous as his Olympia rally. Blackshirt speakers began to whip up anti-Jewish feeling in Rotherhithe, Bethnal Green, Stepney and Shoreditch. Blackshirt thugs, often very young, began daubing anti-Semitic slogans on walls, desecrating Jewish cemeteries and attacking synagogues and Jewish shops. From vague accusations of international Jewish financial control, the BUF had stooped to just the same attacks on individual, often poor Jews that the Nazis had initiated in Germany.

  The East End, however, was also a Labour and communist stronghold, and a series of front organizations were quickly formed under Jewish communist leadership. The fascists were, in turn, attacked with razors and truncheons. Mosley decided on straightforward mass confrontation. On 4 October 1936 he led around 2,000 BUF members in uniform in a march through the East End designed to intimidate local Jews and rally fascists. From his point of view it was a catastrophic mistake from which his organization would never recover. Waiting for him in Cable Street, under the banner of the Jewish People’s Council against Fascism, were around 100,000 counter-demonstrators who had overturned a lorry and piled up bricks as a barricade. The police, seeing what was about to happen, ordered Mosley and his men to turn away. They did. The police then turned on the anti-fascist demonstrators and in the ensuing fracas more than a hundred people were injured and eighty arrested. There was a brief rise in BUF membership in the East End but, once again, the overwhelming public reaction was one of disgust. The Home Office and the Metropolitan Police had been debating the merits of banning fascist parties and continued to hold back, on civil-liberty grounds. Instead the government passed the Public Order Act which banned the use of paramilitary uniforms on British streets and the ‘stewards’ used by political parties, as well as giving the police new powers to ban marches all together. Insulting words likely to cause a breach of the peace were also outlawed.

  This was repressive legislation, strongly protested against not just by the British Union of Fascists but by the communists and the Greenshirts too. But it worked. Mosley continued to hold his rallies, turning his theme to a campaign against any war with Hitler’s Germany, but it had a limited impact. One writer on British fascism said that Mosley’s ‘dream of a fascist nation was reduced to the reality of a minority anti-Semitic sub-culture in some areas of the East End of London’. The extraordinary truth is that through all the battles between fascists, communists and others in Britain, not a single person was killed. Unfashionably, much of the credit must go to the Home Office and the police, who reacted moderately, refusing to take Mosley too seriously and relying on public ridicule. When war came, the fascists, including Mosley and his second wife, would be rounded up and imprisoned. His long-suffering first wife, Cimmie, had died from peritonitis in May 1933 and he had become infatuated with a woman called Diana Guinness, a great society beauty. Her original family name is even better known to students of these times, however. The story of the Mitford girls remains one of the essential essays in how extreme politics overturned the common sense of a small but vocal and vivid minority. It is an exotic, almost unbelievable upper-class family saga; but our appreciation of the texture of the times would be incomplete without it.

  The Tragi-comedy of the Mitfords’ England

  They were famous then. They are still famous now, their lives slimmed down by time to jokes and scenes that still have the power to shock.

  Scene one: Near High Wycombe in the Chilterns, a stream and some rough-looking fields, just before the First World War. Three girls and a boy are running, screaming with apparent terror, darting past startled sheep, in and out of the running water until they collapse with exhaustion and wait. Behind them, some way behind, runs a lean, wiry, tall, rather handsome man in rough country clothes carrying a whip, who is in turn chasing a bloodhound. The man is the second son of a minor peer, wounded in the Boer War, now working in the unlikely surroundings of the Lady magazine, engaging in one of his favourite recreations, the child hunt. It is a game; and the hound will slobber on the children eventually, rather than tear them to pieces, but it seems alarming enough.

  Scene two: Gloucestershire, 1926. The same man, just as impressive-looking but now angrier, has been standing outside a Jacobean country house, swearing about ‘damned sewers’ and cracking a long stock-whip to express his feelings. Inside a collection of young Oxford aesthetes, with their flapping wide trousers, luridly coloured Fair Isle sweaters and silk ties, has been staying the night, friends of his eldest daughter, Nancy. One of the effeminate creatures, Mark Ogilvie-Grant, totters down for breakfast, much the worse for wear. The whip-cracker, now Lord Redesdale after the death of his eldest brother in the war, sees his chance. He welcomes the young man by snatching off the cover of a tureen: ‘Brains for breakfast, Mark! Pig’s thinkers.’ Seeing the mess of boiled brains, Ogilvie-Grant turns bright green and staggers out to be violently sick. A brief flicker of something like satisfaction is seen on the peer’s face.

  Scene three: By now, it is 1931 and the aesthetes and flappers of the Roaring Twenties are already history. We are in the upper floor of a newly built house, Swinbrook, on a hill above the river Windrush in the Cotswolds. Lord Redesdale has built it to his own design near the earlier country house and his family regard ‘Swinebrook’ as hideous. Two girls, aged fourteen and seventeen, are glaring at one another across a room which they share. On one side is ‘Boud’, or Unity Valkyrie Mitford, and on the other her younger sister Jessica. Let her take up the story:

  We divided it down the middle, and Boud decorated her side with Fascist insignia of all kinds – the Italian ‘fasces’, a bundle of sticks bound with rope; photographs of Mussolini . . . photographs of Mosley trying to look like Mussolini; the new German swastika, a record collection of Nazi and Italian youth songs. My side was fixed up with my Communist library, a small bust of Lenin purchased for a shilling in a second-hand shop, a file of Daily Workers. Sometimes we would barricade with chairs and stage pitched battles, throwing books and records until Nanny came to tell us to stop the noise.119

  Later Unity would say she was going to Germany when she was older to meet Hitler, while Jessica would counter that she was going to run away and become a communist. (Their youngest sister, Deborah, would complete the perfect predictive sequence by saying she would become a duchess.) Unity and Jessica, their fights over, would snuggle up and discuss how they would feel if one was ordered to execute the other.

  Scene four: 9 February 1935, the Osteria Bavaria, in Munich. Unity Mitford finds her hand is shaking so much she cannot drink her hot chocolate. After weeks of waiting and staring as he passes, Hitler has finally noticed her and, his curiosity aroused, has invited her to join him at his table. She introduces herself, and they talk about how their two Nordic countries must never again fight each other, about the global Jewish conspiracy, about films and London’s architecture. Earlier Unity’s sage assessment of the Night of the Long Knives, in a letter to her older sister Diana, is that she is terribly sorry for Hitler: ‘It must have been so dreadful for Hitler when he arrested Roehm himself and tore off his decorations . . . Poor Hitler.’ As she starts to meet Hitler she writes to her father, that same child-hunting peer, ‘I am so happy that I wouldn’t mind a bit dying. I suppose I am the luckiest girl in the world.’ She will go on to meet Hitler privately a total of 140 times in the next four years, becoming such a close member of his inner circle that there are widespread rumours the two of them are lovers. Though she sits at his feet while he strokes her hair, and though he is clearly intoxicated by her prese
nce, this is probably not so. Unity introduces her parents, brother and some sisters to Hitler, attends the Nazi rallies, wears a swastika given to her by the Führer and writes a foamingly anti-Semitic letter to Der Sturmer, Julius Streicher’s notorious paper, declaring herself a proud ‘Jew-hater’. Later she accepts the present of a luxurious flat in Munich, recently evacuated by some Jews who, the Nazis say, have ‘gone abroad’.

  Scene five: It is 6 October 1936. Diana, the beautiful older sister we have not met since she was running from the bloodhound as a small girl, is now divorced and standing in a spacious drawing room beside the man she idolizes and will support all her life – Oswald Mosley. They are looking out of the window of the apartment of Diana’s great friend Magda. Outside in the park-like garden the autumn sunshine plays on trees just turning yellow as the guest of honour arrives. Diana and Mosley are to be married, in secret to spare the blushes of their families, particularly those of Mosley’s first wife Cimmie. The apartment is in Berlin, Magda is the wife of Joseph Goebbels and the guest of honour is Hitler. Unity is there too, as are Mosley’s witnesses, one of whom is an MI5 agent. Hitler’s wedding present is a silver-framed, eagle-surmounted picture of himself. Mosley and Diana had been pressing him to allow them to set up a radio transmitter in northern Germany from which they could run a commercial station, broadcasting popular music the stuffy BBC ignored, which would in turn make such a profit from advertisements they could fund the British Union of Fascists out of it. Hitler is not sure about this, and there is no time for a proper discussion at the wedding feast. Later, the project will go ahead and fails only because war comes, ruining Mosley’s finances. That night he and Diana retire to their grand hotel but their perfect day is spoiled by a marital tiff.