by A. N. Wilson
President Truman was the first world leader to recognize the state of Israel when it was finally proclaimed on 14 May 1948. It therefore came as a shock to many when his diary entries about the telephone call with Henry Morgenthau came to light in 2003. Morgenthau, who had been US Treasury secretary under FDR, was chairman of the United Jewish Appeal. Truman went into a tirade to his diary. ‘He’d no business whatever to call me,’ wrote the President. ‘The Jews have no sense of proportion, nor do they have any judgement on world affairs. Henry brought a thousand Jews to New York on a supposedly temporary basis and they stayed.’ Warming to his theme, Truman made a statement which, written in only the second year after the world had discovered the horrors of Auschwitz and the other death camps, is quite startling. ‘The Jews I find are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as Displaced Persons as long as Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog.’16
In a letter to Eleanor Roosevelt, the late President’s widow, Truman wrote: ‘Jews are like all underdogs. When they get on top they are just as intolerant and as cruel as the people were to them when they were underneath.’17 The director of the US Holocaust Memorial Museum is quoted as saying that such remarks are ‘typical of a sort of cultural anti-Semitism that was common at the time’.
Since this was President Truman’s view, it is not surprising that Ernest Bevin, the British Foreign Secretary, told a Labour party conference that the Americans were pushing for a Jewish state in Palestine because ‘they did not want too many Jews in New York’.18 Interestingly enough, identical views were entertained by other members of the British government at the time, but these led Clement Attlee and Bevin to oppose the setting up of a Jewish state. When Labour came in Chaim Weizmann assumed that they would be sympathetic to the Zionist cause, but the burly figure of Bevin, who was once described by Churchill as a working-class John Bull, consulted with the Foreign Office and then waddled across Whitehall to consult the Prime Minister. ‘Clem,’ he said, ‘about Palestine. According to my boys, we’ve got it wrong. We’ve got to think again.’19 Attlee like Truman possessed the flaw of ‘cultural anti-Semitism’. When his Chancellor Hugh Dalton suggested Ian Mikardo and Austen Albu as potential junior ministers in the government, Attlee replied that ‘they both belonged to the Chosen people and he didn’t think he wanted any more of them’.20
The decision to allow a Jewish homeland was an admission by the British that they were unable to control the situation in Palestine. They did not do so willingly. They did so because they had no other option. Just as their method of abandoning India left the subcontinent with problems which persist into our own day, the abandonment of the British mandate in Palestine before any international agreement had been formed about the political future of the Arabs in the region, or any plan for relief and aid to the inevitable multitude of new refugees caused by the setting up of the state of Israel, must be seen as another current world problem21 which has the ‘Made in England’ label stamped indelibly upon it.
After hundreds of thousands of needless deaths in India, there was one, in Delhi, on 30 January 1948 which rounded the story in the most tragic way. Throughout the disturbances, Mahatma Gandhi had prayed and fasted for peace. The emaciated lawyer, turned political agitator, turned holy man, was seventy-eight years old, but by now he could really have been any age. He had become like the statue of a saint. The skinny figure in its loincloth symbolized an ideal which was never, it would seem, to be accomplished, a time when religious hatred and the rivalries between political and creedal factions would cease, and the human race unite in the love of God. Tolstoy, Gandhi’s great mentor, had essentially been a man of the Enlightenment. Distrustful as he was of science, technological progress, wealth-creation and so many of the achievements of which the capitalistic nineteenth century had been so proud, and in love as Tolstoy was with his idea of peasants and peasantry, he remained, to his core, a believer in the power of human reason. Gandhi carried into his peace campaigns something of his Master’s belief in reasonableness. It appeared, after all, to have worked. The British, so long stubbornly holding on to an Empire which had only grown up, as one of the Victorians had observed, in a fit of absence of mind, were eventually persuaded that a vast land mass such as India could not be governed by a few white men from far away. Though Africa, where Gandhi’s political awakening had occurred, still remained part of the Empire, it would as surely go the way of India and Palestine—Israel.
When an assassin tried to kill him with a bomb, Gandhi replied: ‘This is not the way to save Hinduism. Hinduism can only be saved by my method.’22 But just as Tolstoy’s reasonable Christianity had depended upon removing many of that faith’s core elements – such as a belief in the miraculous, the Resurrection and so on – so for many Hindus, the Mahatma, with his wish to do away with the caste system and to pray with Muslims, Sikhs and Christians, was anathema. Figures such as Madan Lal and Nathuram Vinayak Godse, Hindu refugees from the Punjab, were incensed by Gandhi’s willingness to have the Koran read at Hindu prayer meetings and by his urging upon the newly formed government of Nehru a policy of conciliation with the Pakistanis who had murdered or dispossessed so many of their co-religionists. Godse later testified: ‘I sat brooding on the atrocities perpetrated on Hinduism and its dark and deadly failure if left to face Islam outside and Gandhi inside.’23 Godse was facing up to a challenge which still haunts the world: what is the appropriate response to Islam in its militant and aggressive form? In common with many Western politicians today, he believed that Gandhi’s policy of conciliation was essentially impossible. He said at his trial that he bore Gandhi no ill will. He took a small pistol, and waited for Gandhi to emerge, in the early morning of 30 January 1948, from his joint prayer meeting. He bowed to the Mahatma because he felt genuine reverence for a man who was visibly holy, and trying to do right. Then he fired. Gandhi’s last word was Rama, one of the incarnations of the Hindu god Vishnu.
The funeral of the holy man attracted over a million people. Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Parsees assembled, with many British, by the banks of the Jumna river to witness the burning of the cortege. They cried out ‘Mahatma Gandi ki jai’ – Long Live Mahatma Gandhi. To keep the peace among the peace-lovers, the commander in chief of the Indian army (an Englishman, General Roy Bucher, who had served in India since 1918, had been appointed to the role by Nehru) deployed four thousand soldiers, a thousand airmen and a thousand policemen. Three Dakota aircraft incongruously did a fly-past over the burning pyre whose flames rose into the sky for fourteen hours as the entire text of the Gita was chanted.
Nehru began his panegyric by saying that a light had gone out and then corrected himself – ‘For the light that shone in this country was no ordinary light. The light that has illumined this country for these many years will illumine this country for many more years …’ And so on.24
The pious Sir Stafford Cripps, a devout Christian Socialist, wrote: ‘I know no other man of any time or indeed in recent history who so forcefully and convincingly demonstrated the power of spirit over material things.’25
Certainly there are few human beings of the twentieth century more impressive than Gandhi. But half a century after his death, his desire that religious fanaticism should give place to a spiritual calm, and his wish that we should settle our differences by prayer and not with guns, seems as impracticable as it did in 1948. And the word which came so aptly to his dying lips, that of the ineffable, all-holy and ever-merciful Rama, remains, like Allah, or Yahweh, as difficult to understand.
36
Widmerpool’s Britain
The Victorians were now dying off, and so was their England. William Nicholson (1872–1949) was one of the most impressive painters of his time, easy to undervalue because, as his son the modernist painter Ben remarked, all William had ever wante
d to do was merely to paint. His portraits – of the Earl of Harewood, George VI’s brother-in-law, or of Arthur Quiller-Couch (editor of that volume of all but Biblical status, The Oxford Book of English Verse), or of Sidney and Beatrice Webb beside their austere bricky chimneypiece, captured many of the key figures of his time. Unlike Augustus John, this painter has not (in any sense) imposed himself upon the sitters. His landscapes, especially of the Wiltshire Downs, his interiors – whether of City Dinners or of ballrooms suddenly emptied by an air-raid – are both rich, painterly works of art and records of a passing age. Perhaps most eloquent of all are his still lives, pale English light glowing on newly burnished pewter, gold or silver. In 1949, it probably felt as if a merely minor painter had died. Now, seeing his work as a whole, we probably rank William Nicholson with the giants. And like all great artists, however private their concerns, we see that he reflected the age in which he lived with complete sureness.
In the post-war world which he just lived long enough to see, they looked to the future, and yet so much, in spite of bombing and war, survived of the world not just of pre-1939 but of pre-1914. Especially was this true of the railways.
If we had travelled about in Victorian England we should almost certainly not have imitated John Ruskin, who was rich and old-fashioned enough to go everywhere in his own privately designed horse-drawn coach. We should have gone by train. The hiss of steam, the clank of coupling, the rattle of girders, the vast tenders heaped with glistening Welsh coal, and the smell, on every station, of coal; the gas-lit platforms of the Victorian rail networks survived deep into the twentieth century. Until the 1950s, at least, Britons travelled in much the same way as Sherlock Holmes and Mr Gladstone had done. That magnificent old steam locomotive the Stanier ‘Pacific’ City of Birmingham was still puffing its way up Shap, drawing the ‘Night Scot’ from London to Glasgow, as late as 1964. But it already looked like an anachronism;1 it was at one with such great, lost, majestic locomotives as the 1938 Flying Scotsman, an ‘A4’ Pacific No. 4498, designed by Sir Nigel Gresley; or Liddesdale’s North British ‘Atlantic’ No. 9877, or the superb engines which ran on the Great Western with the names of Welsh castles, such as Abergavenny and Caerphilly. In these railway engines, and the lines on which they ran, a century and more of Britain’s past was carried in a rattling rhythm and a steam-filled cloud of romance never to be recaptured. The beginnings of change came with the new Labour government.
The nationalization of the railways took effect from 1 January 1948. The Big Four railway companies – LMS (London, Midland and Scottish), the LNER (London and North Eastern Railway), the Southern and the Great Western – were now absorbed into British Railways. These four companies had themselves, in the course of time, absorbed innumerable smaller Victorian railroad companies, many with picturesque and distinctive engines and carriages: the Brighton and South Coast Railway, the Dingwall and Skye, the Settle and Carlisle, the London, Chatham and Dover, the South Devon and many another.
The war had put great pressure on the railways. The Southern Railway was alone in seeing a fall in passenger numbers (361 million in 1938 down to 347 million in 1944); this was owing to the all but complete collapse of holiday traffic. All the other railways, which had been used both for troop movements and for freight traffic, including the transport of munitions, had a huge increase; there was also a rise in the number of ‘passenger specials’ – there were 24,241 special trains commissioned by the government to move troops in 1940 alone. Imports, and rail transport from the docks, a traditional source of rail income, fell, and not much money was spent on infrastructure, so that by 1948 most of the railways were in a poor state of repair. ‘This railway system of ours is a very poor bag of assets,’ complained the Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton. ‘The railways are a disgrace to the country.’2 It was inevitable perhaps that coal-dependent steam trains would eventually be phased out. Americans during the war had begun to interest British railway engineers with the change in some US railroads from steam to diesel traction.3 Inevitable, too, once nationalization had gone ahead, would be the eventual arrival upon the scene of a figure such as Dr Richard Beeching, the Widmerpool of the railways, who in the early 1960s under a Conservative government began his merciless closure of branch lines. Had the railways not been nationalized, some of the old steam trains would probably have survived.
Although in the early days of steam, some landowners had protested at the new-fangled railway innovation, steam trains had quickly become part of the British landscape. There was no more romantic way to travel through the West Highlands, or the Lake District, or across the expanses of Suffolk and Norfolk, than by train; the movement and smell, the gushes of steam, though all the consequences of engineering skill, had an almost organic quality which made the steam trains part of nature in a way that diesel and electric never could be. As with the mists of nature, in dawn or autumn, there was always a hint of melancholy about the steam trains. Their banshee warning-shrieks had something about them, especially when heard at night, of the uncanny. Almost no writer in English conveys the romance of rail travel so well as the crime writer Michael Innés, whose The Journeying Boy or Appleby’s End describe railway journeys which have not been possible since Beeching, and which would entirely lack poetry without their steam accompaniment.
Typical of the British habit of coming in at the end of things and therefore creating almost instantaneous nostalgia was the Rev. W. Awdry’s decision, in the late Forties, to write a series of children’s stories about Thomas the Tank Engine on a small branch line. Within a very few years of Awdry’s series beginning, the Fat Controller, one of the old private railway bosses, would in fact have been sent packing by the new British Railways apparatchiks; and Thomas’s friends, Gordon the Big Engine, Henry the Green Engine, and so on, would only have survived in museums or those slightly sad small stretches of track on which enthusiasts still run steam trains. In the world of children’s literature, however, these steam trains with their Fat Controller appear to be as immortal as the fairies or the gods, impervious to any changes on the Earth, let alone changes of government or transport ownership. Children who have hardly travelled on a train, still less a passenger steam train, find these stories endlessly re-readable. In part this is surely because of the illustrations by C. Reginald Dalby which evoke – witness the marvellous snow scenes in the story called ‘The Flying Kipper’ – a vanished Britain, though not always one which is sin or crime-free. (In a later story in that volume, ‘Henry’s Sneeze’, some boys throw stones from a railway bridge and leave the Fireman concussed.)
The Labour victory came as no surprise to those who had heard the way men spoke while on active service about their hopes for postwar Britain. Few, if any, wanted a return to the high unemployment, the poverty, the social divisions of the 1930s. Most people in Britain, though obviously not all, attributed these ills to the Conservatives.
A Mass Observation Poll was conducted at the height of the Blitz to determine the answer to a number of deep political questions: would postwar Britain have less class distinction? More state control? A reform of the educational system? A levelling of incomes? An increase in social services? A dictatorship, possibly along fascistic lines?
Mass Observation was not an opinion poll to which people knew they were contributing. The observation was by busybodies of the Masses. Obviously, it was rough and ready, but the results of this particular report, drawn up by a panel of observers who had moved among a cross-section of society in pubs, factories and other work-places, were as follows: 29 per cent thought there would be less class distinction; 21 per cent more state control; 19 per cent educational reforms; 15 per cent a levelling of incomes; 14 per cent increased social services; while 13 per cent believed that there would be a fascist state after the war. If by fascist they meant absolutist, or interventionist on lines undreamt-of in former ages, this was hardly surprising given the conditions of wartime, in which Habeas Corpus had been suspended, the press and broadcasting were
heavily censored, a high proportion of the male population was in uniform, and, it seemed, the state was suddenly in unstoppable control.4
It is interesting that 71 per cent therefore believed that class distinction would continue after the war more or less as it had before; and that a thundering 81 per cent thought there would be no real educational reform. These people were broadly speaking right. The trivial details of class distinction would perhaps become less important in the immediate postwar years; and by the 1960s, deference, and debutante presentations at Court, and the sillier outward trappings of the class system had been laid aside. But as late as 1962, in his Anatomy of Britain, for example, Anthony Sampson could observe that while the Civil Service ‘lean over backwards to avoid favouring public schoolboys’, between 1948 and 1956, 50 per cent of recruits to the Senior Civil Service were from Oxford, and 30 per cent from Cambridge, and the great majority of those educated at the older universities were still from public schools.5
The existence of private schools, and in particular those private boarding schools called public schools, Eton, Harrow, Winchester and the rest, was one of the most socially divisive, and deliberately socially divisive, features of Victorian Britain. Although many of these schools went back to the sixteenth, and some as far as the fifteenth (Eton) or fourteenth (Winchester) century, the constitution of the public schools, their ethos and their place in the scheme of things were essentially Victorian. Moreover, it had been the policy of the Victorians, as they founded and built new schools, and gradually provided education for all, to do so on strictly stratified lines. Funds which had been laid aside by philanthropists of an earlier age were often simply plundered for the middle classes. For example at Sutton Coldfield, where a charitable fund existed to educate the poor, £15,000 was taken by the Victorians to provide a ‘high school for well-to-do children’. In the older public schools, which had all been founded to educate the poor, money was taken by the nineteenth-century reformers to build new schools for the lower orders. For example, one of Thomas Arnold’s first acts when becoming headmaster of Rugby was to close the free class for town boys, and to make his school exclusively the preserve of ‘gentlemen’. The Lawrence Sheriff School was started in Rugby town for the more plebeian customers. Canon Woodard, founder of High Church boarding schools for boys and for girls, did so with clear ideas, in each case, about the social position of the parents. Lancing was meant to be a sort of nouveau riche equivalent of Eton, preparing boys for the university or the army, whereas Ellesmere, Denston or Ardingly, some of the canon’s other creations, were for ‘respectable tradesfolk’.6
