The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  Outside Westminster, this seemed to be the new view of public opinion, as expressed by the leading newspapers, the churches and popular broadcasters. When the main church leaders signed a joint letter to The Times in 1940, top of their list of demands for a better future was that ‘extreme inequality in wealth and possessions should be abolished’. A few months later a large gathering of clergy and Christian intellectuals at Malvern concluded that private ownership of industry might itself be wrong. Left-wing Penguin books sold spectacularly well. As soon as the Soviet Union was drawn into the war, Churchill elegantly pirouetting from his famous anti-communist beliefs to a gracious welcome for the new ally, the wind of change started to feel like a hurricane. The Asiatic monster Stalin was lauded as an efficient tough-guy who got things done. At Earls Court a celebration of the new alliance, organized by communists, featured the Bishop of Chelmsford and the band of the Coldstream Guards. A few months later, in February 1943, another event in the Albert Hall included music by composers such as William Walton, a poem by Louis MacNeice called ‘Salute to the Red Army’ and fanfares for Stalin by the Brigade of Guards. In an extraordinary about-face Beaverbrook, that champion of right-wing capital and imperialism, left the government to campaign for a second front to help the Soviets, telling an American audience the war could end in 1942: ‘Communism under Stalin has produced the most valiant fighting army in Europe . . . the best generals in this war.’ Tory ministers took to praising Stalin, workers chalked pro-communist greetings on tanks being sent to Russia, membership of the Communist Party rose five-fold and T. S. Eliot, that most conservative and cautious of poets, refused to publish George Orwell’s Animal Farm because it would be offensive to Stalin. Strange days, indeed.

  Churchill, uneasy about the turn in domestic politics, was obviously right to devote himself instead to the grand strategy of the war, although he would periodically fire off his own thoughts on post-war reconstruction. He hoped and assumed that he would survive as prime minister well into the peacetime years, leading the coalition forward. He never came close to losing his premiership, though had British forces lost in the Western Desert, many of those close to him thought he would be finished. At a low point in the war, with the Eighth Army retreating before Rommel, Sir Stafford Cripps, the Christian vegetarian and former revolutionary who had been ambassador in Moscow and was a popular possible alternative to the prime minister, used a radio broadcast to criticize the ‘lack of urgency’ in Britain, as if ‘we were spectators rather than participants’. The Soviet Union was showing the way, Cripps suggested. His broadcast was very popular. Military humiliations followed. Two German battleships slipped up the Channel, evading the embarrassed Royal Navy. More significant was the shocking fall of Singapore to the Japanese – in Churchill’s opinion the worst disaster in British history and a genuine disgrace. He brought Cripps into the War Cabinet as leader of the Commons, from where Cripps urged ever more austerity, self-sacrifice and efficiency . . . and yet, now on the inside, his allure as an alternative war leader faded.

  After the fall of the Tobruk garrison in North Africa in 1942 there was a more serious backlash against what was beginning to look like an incompetent war leadership. Lord Beaverbrook considered himself a possible replacement, but the idea of a press baron becoming prime minister was a fantasy. A motion of no confidence in the direction of the war was laid in the Commons by a Tory MP who then badly muffed it by calling for the younger and obscure brother of the King, the Duke of Gloucester, to be put in charge of the armed forces. This was so silly that MPs responded with red faces and muffled laughter and any danger for Churchill evaporated in chuckles. Nye Bevan’s attack was more dangerous, pointing out that Churchill ‘wins debate after debate and loses battle after battle . . . The country is beginning to say that he fights debates like a war and the war like a debate.’ Churchill survived that, too, but he was a little diminished. This was, however, the most threatening challenge to his authority and it emerged not from the Commons but from the barrels of Rommel’s tanks. No wonder Churchill was forever berating generals for not attacking more effectively and, from time to time, sacking them.

  Later in the war the National Government would lose a spectacular series of by-elections to independent or Common Wealth (but always left-wing) candidates who pinpointed Churchill’s problem by lauding him personally but insisting the country needed a change of moral direction. Meanwhile the old Commons, a chamber which should have been cleansed by the vanished general election of 1940, became reduced from chamber to echo-chamber. Committees of officials and more junior ministers were hard at work on detailed post-war plans, of which Beveridge’s blueprint for the welfare state is deservedly the most famous. Keynes, the other great public intellectual Britain produced, was far advanced in his quiet overthrow of Treasury orthodoxy, something in any case inevitable as Britain bankrupted herself to fight the war. As for the Commons, its most important role was as Churchill’s personal theatre. In the semi-hysterical conditions of 1940 there had even been proposals to take things to their logical conclusion and shut down Parliament for the duration. A group of young Tories, including Harold Macmillan and Bob Boothby – key Tory politicians of the fifties – suggested a Committee of Public Safety, martial law and the standing down of Parliament, to be recalled only occasionally to hear statements and vote the necessary supplies. Churchill brusquely rejected that. It would have been strange for a country fighting for democracy to suspend its democracy. Yet in most respects, with government by ministerial diktat, this is effectively what had happened.

  What did this sidelining of Parliament mean for liberty during the war? On paper, almost all civil liberties were suspended. The direction of labour meant people could be ordered where to work, and at what. Britain became a militarized and controlled society, bound by thousands of new laws, some vital and others petty. There were some notable acts of censorship, such as the closure of the communists’ newspaper the Daily Worker. Many people were interned. They ranged from the far-right Tory MP and anti-Semite Captain Ramsay to Oswald Mosley and his wife and IRA men. Most were released later in the war and Churchill said he loathed locking people up, was saddened by the suspension of habeas corpus and in any case thought British fascists less dangerous than ‘those filthy Communists’.

  In the early hysteria about spies and fifth-columnists, unfortunate Germans, Austrians and Italians were rounded up and sent to internment camps in the north of England or on the Isle of Man. Of these, many were Jewish professional people who had fled Hitler – the Isle of Man camp became a bubbling centre of culture unmatched almost anywhere else in wartime Europe, with lectures, string quartets, theoretical science and art all flourishing. Other internees were Italians who had been living in Britain for most of their lives, doing nothing more dangerous than introducing the islanders to decent ice-cream, fish and chips, olive oil and coffee. In one terrible incident many internees were drowned at sea while being deported for the duration to Canada. There were shameful attacks on Italian restaurants and shops, but this too proved a passing hysteria, less serious than the window smashing and shop burning of the earlier war. By 1943 the vast majority of internees had been released to do war work.

  Similarly, compared with the First World War, the treatment of conscientious objectors (and there were many more of them, no doubt reflecting the pacifist mood of the thirties) was humane. Some of the most courageous bomb-disposal teams and front-line medical staff were COs. Pacifists included Britain’s most celebrated composer, Benjamin Britten, who produced some of his finest work during the war, and the famous novelist and memoirist of the Great War Vera Brittain, one of whose pacifist works sold 10,000 copies when it was published in 1942. It was possible to protest against the war even as it continued. Bishop Bell of Rochester had campaigned for German refugees before the war and for internees when it started. Friendly with some of the most courageous Christian opponents of Hitler inside Germany, Bell publicly attacked the RAF bombing of enemy cities as a degradat
ion of the spirit and called for it to be suspended. He attacked the practice in the Lords as ‘threatening the roots of civilization’ and, though much muttered against, was free to do so.

  In 1940, when things were at their most dangerous, Peace Pledge Union activists were putting up posters urging people not to fight. They were put on trial at a police court. The magistrate dismissed the case with the words: ‘This is a free country. We are fighting to keep it a free country, as I understand it.’151 There were times when ministers panicked. One of them was in response to a cartoon by Philip Zec of the Daily Mirror. He had drawn a sailor on a raft, presumably a survivor of a U-boat attack, whose vessel had been bringing fuel. The caption, written by another Mirror journalist called William Connor, read, ‘ “The price of petrol has been increased by one penny” – Official’. This could be taken as almost banal; an injunction to remember the sacrifices being made, and not to whinge. The War Cabinet decided that it must be an attack on profiteering and threatened to close the paper down. Connor himself, who had been writing as ‘Cassandra’, a very popular columnist, went off and joined the army. Yet this was a relatively rare example. Censorship was not extreme. Criticism of the conduct of the war was widespread and at times loud. On paper, Parliament had acquiesced in the creation of a wartime dictatorship, with savage repressive powers. In practice it turned out to be a satisfactorily soft dictatorship.

  The Americaning

  We have seen how Churchill lost much of the initiative in domestic politics, and have seen too how he tried to interfere, not always successfully, in military decisions. But where he proved shrewdest as the war leader was in his ardent and wily wooing of the United States, followed by an even tougher campaign to influence where and when they would fight. Nothing like this had happened in the Great War, when Britain had been comparatively stronger. One of the key differences between Churchill and the leaders of the thirties was that MacDonald, Baldwin and Chamberlain were somewhat contemptuous of America. Churchill was an ardent, romantic admirer. His mother had been American, he had many American friends and, above all, from his early years he had made a lot of money by publishing and talking in America. It was fortunate for Britain, perhaps, that Churchill was a ‘half-breed’ hack writer on the scrounge and not the affluent English aristocrat he could be mistaken for. Later in life he would reflect that, given another chance, he would like to have been born American. Though an old-fashioned British imperialist, he was emotionally prepared for a world in which the United States would lead: his History of the English-Speaking Peoples had a title which both acknowledged reality and flattered his home island.

  Churchill had understood from the first evidence of France’s 1940 collapse that Germany could be beaten only if the United States came in. His defiant speeches nodded to the possibility of the fight being carried on from ‘the New World’, which of course included Canada. From the start of the war he had begun a secret correspondence with President Roosevelt, warning him that the US would face ‘a United States of Europe under the Nazi command’ better armed and stronger than the USA. Next, Churchill began badgering Roosevelt for obsolete US destroyers to help defend the Atlantic convoys in return for British bases – a deal done in August 1940. Finally, and against the advice of the bitterly anti-British US ambassador Joseph Kennedy, he slowly persuaded the sceptical president that he was, indeed, the voice of the British people. Even apparently excessive acts such as the sinking of the French Mediterranean fleet in case it fell into German hands (which poisoned French official views of the British for years) were intended to persuade Roosevelt of his ruthless determination to fight on. Roosevelt’s emissaries Averell Harriman, Harry Hopkins and the new ambassador Gilbert Winant, who replaced Kennedy, were subjected to the full force of Churchill’s charm and wooing. He spent remarkable amounts of time confiding in them, hosting flirtatious weekends at Chequers and flattering them while writing more than 2,000 letters throughout the war to Roosevelt himself. Churchill, the bricklayer and oil painter, could lay it on thick.

  Perhaps the most extraordinary example of Churchillian wooing was the mission led by Sir Henry Tizard to Washington in September 1940, when he carried over in a single case most of the deepest scientific secrets of his country and – more or less – handed them over. There was rising hysteria about the possible new weapons to be delivered by science: Hitler himself was prone to warn about terrifying inventions on the way, and officialdom was bombarded by cranks promising death-rays. Tizard was a remarkable man. He was a real scientist. An aeronautics specialist who had tested his own theories by piloting Royal Flying Corps machines in the Great War, he had become one of the British government’s key advisers by the outbreak of the next one. An early enthusiast for jet engines and radar, it was on his desk that the first detailed memo from Manchester University about a coming weapon, the nuclear bomb, arrived. Tizard’s idea was to draw in American productive capacity to help Britain, by giving the Americans British secrets covering plastic explosives, rockets, gunsights, radar and much more. He told Churchill the mission should be ‘to tell them what they want to know, to give them all the assistance I can . . . to enable the armed forces of the USA to reach the highest level’.152 There had been a brisk fight in Whitehall about this. It was, after all, long before America had entered the war. Could the Americans be trusted? Would they give anything back?

  Churchill gave Tizard the go-ahead. He set off on a cold and dangerous journey by flying boat, sustained mainly by Bovril, while most of the rest of his group went by ship. In a clever stroke, he insisted he would be joined not by high-ranking RAF, naval and army staff but by serving officers who had themselves recently fought. Among the loot being carried was the cavity magnetron. This is a high-powered vacuum tube which generates microwaves (and is still used in microwave ovens today). Developed at Birmingham University, the 1940 British version increased the effective power of radar beams by a thousand-fold beyond anything the Americans had, and would soon allow radar in night fighters and bombers hunting U-boats. An example was brought to Washington, luckily being recovered after it was nearly lost at Euston station. The cavity magnetron, even apart from the other secrets, was a war-changing device, described by one US historian as ‘the most valuable cargo ever brought to our shores’.

  When Tizard finally arrived in the US after a stopover in Canada he was brought to see President Roosevelt, smuggled into the White House by a back door to avoid photographers in what was still a pro-neutrality Washington atmosphere. There followed, between the British mission and US military chiefs and scientists a kind of intellectual strip-poker, with both sides playing ‘I’ll show you mine, if you show me yours’ until the British secrets had been handed over. Not all of them this time, however: the process of passing over the full breakthroughs by two exiled German scientists on the nuclear bomb, and then teams of British nuclear scientists, would come later. Tizard had been an early convert to the possibilities of nuclear power. His pre-war warnings to the Belgian owners of the world’s only uranium mine, in the Congo, resulted in shipments going to America which would end up in the world’s first atomic bomb. For now, he only passed on general details to scientists in the US, who were sceptical about the British approach. It was the same story with Frank Whittle’s jet engine. This humbly born, risk-taking and anti-establishment RAF officer turned scientist had been working for years on jet propulsion. In the late 1930s he nearly lost everything thanks to official lack of interest: the delay would be part of the reason that the Germans were flying jets nine months ahead of the RAF. But in 1940–41 Whittle was far ahead of the Americans. Again, Tizard dropped hints.

  The British got little useful information in return. Details of the latest US bomb-sight were withheld even after Pearl Harbor. But a full exchange of facts was not really Tizard’s aim. He thought British industry, much of it outdated before the war and much of it being heavily bombed now, could not hope to produce the radar gear, never mind atomic bombs, that the larger and protected American
industrial base could. Not, at least, if she was building tens of thousands of warplanes, tanks and guns at the same time. Like Churchill, he was sure that the US would be drawn into the war whether Britain was beaten or not: if so, they needed to be as strong as possible. Finally, only by convincing the Americans that Britain was ready to be a full ally and to share her secrets might the US be induced to assist in full. And in all those ways the Tizard mission, along with Churchill’s wooing and the brute facts of the 1940 world, worked. First, there were large and increasing supplies of American aid, then Lend-Lease, and American protection of large tracts of its side of the Atlantic, long before the US formally entered the war.

  In August 1941, when the Russians were allies but the Americans were not, Churchill and Roosevelt had their first meeting in two warships off the coast of Newfoundland and announced the ‘Atlantic Charter’ of joint aims for the post-war world. It was vague and skated over profound disagreements about the future of the British Empire. What was really remarkable about it was that Britain, fighting, and the US, apparently neutral, were agreeing war aims at all. At the end of that year, on 7 December 1941, came Pearl Harbor. Roosevelt, by now re-elected for a third term, led the US into what had become a world war – although, rather bizarrely, it was Nazi Germany that declared war against the US on 11 December, not the other way about. Churchill, who heard the news of the Japanese attack while closeted with Roosevelt’s men Harriman and Winant, famously reflected: ‘So, we had won after all!’ It was a clear-headed judgement. After America’s entry into the war Churchill devoted just as much time to Roosevelt and took considerable personal risks to visit him in Washington. The US president came almost to love him, and certainly treated him with a respect and affection that Stalin never showed.