by A. N. Wilson
Spokesmen of the late Labour Government saw in the crisis that collapse of capitalism which they had prophesied with religious fervour. The crisis came in a lucky moment for them. Labour was in office, and had every resource of the State at its command. What happened? The great day dawned, and Labour resigned; cleared out just when they had the realization of their greatest wish. What must we think of a Salvation Army which takes to its heels on the Day of Judgement?
The speaker was Sir Oswald Mosley, a baronet, a First World War hero, and a Staffordshire squire, who had been by turns a Tory and a Socialist MP. During the year of his break with Labour, 1931, and his formation of something called the New Party, unemployment had risen to 2,642,000. The following year it was to rise to 2,756,000; thereafter it sank, gradually, to 1,408,000 in 1939.
The humiliations and deprivations which these figures represent in millions of British families can barely be guessed in today’s comfortable world. This was the era of the hated means test, when dole money was refused if a household possessed so much as a silver teapot, and inspectors called at working-class households to rummage through people’s belongings. The Jarrow Hunger March in 1936, in which the destitute workers of the northeast walked to the capital, has never been forgotten. In the provinces, where people tended to rely upon one or two local industries for work, there was little or no chance for them to get “on their bike” to find alternative employment. If the local mines or mills or shipyard were laying men off, the workers were sunk, their families condemned to near starvation. Dame Janet Vaughan, who worked as a doctor in the poorer parts of London during this era, once described to me conditions in the tenements—malnourished children with rickets who had no shoes; diseases that as an educated young doctor she had supposed had gone out of existence in the nineteenth century. “You could only be a Socialist in such circumstances,” she said simply.
Because of the dire situation in the provinces, many came to the capital to find work; the population of Greater London between 1911 and 1939 swelled from 7.25 to 8.73 million.
“You could only be a Socialist,” but Morrison’s chirpy election promise—“Up with the Houses! Down with the Slums!”—was only partially working. Two factors led Londoners, in very substantial numbers, to flock to Sir Oswald Mosley’s call, first to his New Party and then to his British Union of Fascists.
The first was a dread of Communism, which had plunged Russia into a bloody civil war, followed by the worst tyranny ever known in the history of the human race. In Germany, Austria, Hungary, France, and other European countries, the economic crisis had led to anarchy, greatly exacerbated, as many believed, by Communist agitators, who positively wanted the system to collapse.
The second and more important factor in Mosley’s popularity was the singular failure of the Labour Party to address the desperate plight of the unemployed. Those out of work, and those who dreaded losing their work, believed him correct in his advocacy of the economics of John Maynard Keynes, his belief that a government could borrow its way out of the unemployment crisis and create an artificial labor market. Combined with this Keynesian sleight of hand, Mosley had an extraordinary eloquence. “It was better than a visit to the theater,” one old Londoner once said to me, fondly recalling Sir Oswald’s speeches. The Labour movement had looked to him: “How wide across all parties was the fascination which Mosley exercised,” Michael Foot once wrote; and the ex-Communist firebrand Mannie Shinwell wrote in 1952 that “almost everyone expected that, because of his popularity, [Mosley] would replace Ramsay Macdonald.”
The photographs speak for themselves—whole streets in Limehouse, or Bermondsey, packed with working men giving Mosley the Fascist salute; Trafalgar Square, and even Hyde Park, in 1934, packed. The last of his huge rallies, in July 1939 in the Earl’s Court Exhibition Hall, was reported to be the largest indoor meeting ever to take place, anywhere in the world.
Yet, although in his book My Life Mosley talks of “our electoral triumph,” this in fact refers to a few seats on borough councils and, in general elections, a polling of 19 percent of the electorate in one sympathetic constituency. Mosley’s Fascist party never won a single parliamentary seat and this charismatic figure, deemed only a few years before so popular that he would inevitably become leader of the Labour Party and then prime minister, did not even win a seat himself.
The truth is that although the Fascist rallies were impressive, they did not offer any real hope of a solution to the unemployment crisis. Mosley admitted in retrospect that it had been a mistake to adopt uniforms, making his movement seem like an imitation of Mussolini’s in Italy. With the rise of Hitler in Germany, the behavior of a minority of Blackshirt thugs in London’s East End made the movement repellent to the ordinary decent voter. Mosley showed no sign of being personally anti-Semitic, but he was willing to subscribe to conspiracy theories about international Jewry to bring about the result he wanted, a war. It was hard to see how his mission in the cause of the British working man was helped by associating with bullies who marched through poorer districts in the East End, chanting “The yids, the yids, we’ve got to get rid of the yids,” or smashing the windows of synagogues or small shopkeepers and tailors. Such behavior was intolerable and the violence at Mosley’s rallies (largely started, he always maintained, by left-wing agitators) led to a parliamentary ban on his bizarre uniforms, which resembled those of a strutting fencing master in some Ruritanian mountain kingdom.
The rallies of the British Union of Fascists, when seen in the context of the history of London, seem less like imitations of Mussolini or foreshadowings of the Third Reich than like 1930s versions of the age-old ability of Londoners to take to the streets and then retreat home, without any obvious change having taken place. They rallied for Wilkes and Liberty, but they did not rampage, as the French would have done, until they got them. They spent a few days setting fire to jails and embassy chapels, shouting themselves hoarse against Popery for Lord George Gordon. But after three days, the Pope seemed no more of a threat than the Shah of Persia. They flocked to Kennington Common in the rain to support the Charter, and then waited seventy patient years before the vote was offered to every adult in the land.
George Orwell, in The Road to Wigan Pier, said that “fish and chips, art-silk stockings, tinned salmon, cut-price chocolates, the movies, the radio, strong tea and the Football Pools have between them averted revolution.” Would-be revolutionaries have often been shocked (as Lenin was when he spent a year living in London) by the English capacity to switch off politically. This capacity, less marked in the Irish, Welsh, and Scots, has been a repeated pattern of London political existence. In the diary he kept before writing Wigan Pier, Orwell noted, “There is no turbulence left in England.”
In a period which was by and large undistinguished architecturally in London, a few buildings and architects stand out as being of outstanding and enduring merit. No one who drives into London by the A40 can fail to be uplifted by the proportions, color, and beauty of the Hoover factory near Perivale, built to designs by Wallis Gilbert and Partners in 1932–33. The BBC used good architects for their two great broadcasting centers in London. Bush House, home to the World Service of the BBC, is by the American architects Helmle and Corbett, completed in 1935. Nikolaus Pevsner, the great architectural historian, tells us, “It represents a big-business classicism which the Americans handled more successfully than the English, and Bush House has without doubt more distinction than the other Kingsway buildings.”
Broadcasting House itself in Portland Place is by the Arts and Crafts architect Charles Holden (1875–1960). With its Eric Gill relief of Ariel, this noble building is not only a thing of great beauty but also a symbol of all that the British Broadcasting Corporation once was, central to London and civilization, a beacon of truth telling and decency, now threatened by its own suited executives, who mistake it for a commercial station like any other. (Under the director-generalship of Sir John Birt, they even wanted to leave this great building, w
ith all its associations; and it has been painfully wrecked inside.) Charles Holden was the best architect of the interwar years in London. His Senate House in the University of London Bloomsbury, is another truly great building, and it is to Holden that we owe so many excellent Underground stations, of which Arnos Grove is the classic expression.
More overt attempts at modernism such as Lubetkin and Tecton’s Highpoint blocks of flats on North Hill, Highgate (built between 1935 and 1938), have the air of having been insolently set down regardless of their setting. Their Penguin Pool at London Zoo (1934), being of smaller scale, continues to amuse but only as a joke. If you measure a penguin against Lubetkin’s strange geometrical walkways, and a human being against one of his blocks of flats, you begin to have a frisson of dismay, a foretaste of what crudely modernist architecture was going to do to London in the years to come.
Some of the jollier buildings of the period, though hardly great works of architecture, were the cinemas—Frank Verity’s Odeon (formerly the Pavilion) at Shepherd’s Bush (1923), or the Regal by E. Norman Bailey in Uxbridge High Street. Older cinema style can be appreciated, incidentally, in the wonderful refurbishment by Simon Wedgwood and Faithful Blyth of the Electric Cinema in Notting Hill, dating from 1911, with its detailed classical façade, its fluted pilasters in faience and its barrel-vaulted auditorium.
It was in cinemas that Londoners, in the first four decades of the twentieth century, both escaped and confronted the gathering storm, since as well as the hypnotic escape of westerns, farces, romances, these same screens were those on which the audiences, nearly all smoking cigarettes, watched the unfolding dramatic tragedy of the 1930s: a Berlin Olympic Games staged like a National Socialist propaganda rally; the occupation by German troops of the Sudetenland; the Italian bombardment of Ethiopia; the Spanish Civil War. Crumbling buildings, gunfire, crowds roaring their enthusiasm in huge stadia for sporting heroes or gesticulating dictators, rolling tanks and the British Prime Minister at an airport, waving a piece of paper on which he had collected Herr Hitler’s guarantee of “Peace in our time”—these shared the bill with Charlie Chaplin and the cartoon character dismissed by the King Emperor George V as “that damned mouse.” Karl Marx was momentarily forgotten as they laughed at his namesakes Groucho, Harpo, Chico, and Zeppo in Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, and Duck Soup. Here, too, they could see the films which the great Hungarian director Alexander Korda produced with London Film Productions at Denham Studios, starting with The Private Life of Henry VIII in 1932 or shriek with laughter at Will Hay in Boys Will Be Boys or Oh, Mr. Porter!.
By the end of the 1930s the world elsewhere, the European catastrophe, was coming to London, not just on the flickering screens of the cinemas, but in a huge increase in the refugee population. Whereas at most ten thousand refugees from Germany had arrived between 1933 and 1938, events now changed all that. Following the union of Austria and Germany (Anschluss) and the Crystal Night, when Jewish businesses, synagogues, schools, and houses were smashed or attacked by arsonists, the number of Jews arriving in Britain grew dramatically.
Tragic as were its causes, the arrival of so many refugees from the mainstream of cultural and intellectual life in Europe had the most invigorating effect on London. The strange outcome of the huge increase in London’s population up to 1939 had been to make it more, not less, homogeneous since, until the refugees from Hitler leavened the lump, nearly all the newcomers to London were English provincials and almost all of them chose to remain in the suburbs. London had never been bigger, but it had never seemed less cosmopolitan than when the majority of its inhabitants commuted to and fro on bus or electric train between offices in inner London and small houses in Surrey or Middlesex. At last, for the first time since the immigrations of the nineteenth century, London reverted to its norm, with different languages being spoken in its streets and sizable numbers in search of food which was not available at the Lyons Cornerhouse café or the plain English grocer. The refugees enabled London once again to be itself, the city of Huguenot weavers, lascar sailors, Dutch merchants, and liberated African or Caribbean slaves.
In the eighteen months between March 1938 and September 1939, sixty thousand were admitted from Germany. Of Vienna’s 180,000 Jews, thirty thousand came to Britain as their first port of call. The rescue of Jewish children, the scheme known as the Kindertransport, brought ten thousand children to Britain, perhaps a tenth of all the Jewish children left in the Reich.
Although the Jews were being persecuted in the countries now dominated by the Reich, deprived of professional status, their assets confiscated, their right to study at university curtailed or removed, their movement restricted, comparatively few had actually been killed. Their outright massacre was, according to Hitler in Mein Kampf, part of his endgame, but few could really believe that he intended—or was in a position— to carry out a scheme so monstrous or so absolutely deadly. With hindsight, many of the British Foreign Office and Home Office personnel who quibbled about visas and entry permits for German Jews must have wished that all six million had been invited to Britain.
The consequence in the immediate to mid-term of the tragedy was, as far as London was concerned, an unmixed blessing. Sigmund Freud arrived in Primrose Hill (later to move to Maresfield Gardens) with his celebrated couch and his collection of fetishistic sculptures. Karl Rankl, Fritz Busch, Alexander Korda, Elias Canetti, Friedrich von Hayek, Nikolaus Pevsner, Ernst Gombrich . . . It would be possible to fill page after page with the names of those who have enormously enriched the musical, artistic, academic, scientific, philosophical life of London because of Hitler’s maniac anti-Semitism.
None of these people were given state handouts or dole money just for being “asylum seekers.” Educated and middle-class Jews took any work that was offered to them. In the “Situations Wanted” columns of the papers it was commonplace to read such ads as “Will any kindhearted people help bring husband out of Vienna? Wife already here; first-class cook and dressmaker; desire post together anywhere.”
Others, more fortunate, fled Hitler’s lands with jewels or gold sewn into their clothing and would turn up in Belsize Park offering to buy flats or even houses with their portable capital. The huge majority were not so fortunate and a large number had to endure years of poverty before getting themselves established. Many felt themselves to be exploited by their English ( Jewish or Gentile) employers, who tried to turn a blind eye to the emotional trauma they were undergoing, separated from their endangered loved ones at home in Austria or Germany.2
In all the tension and buildup to war during the first nine months of 1939, and in all the feelings of guilt and hope following the Munich agreement, national fears focused on the destiny of London. A week before war broke out, Vita Sackville-West wrote to her husband, Harold Nicolson, “If only you were not in London. It makes me physically sick to think of air-raids.” 3
As Londoners watched the international fiasco happen, they hoped against hope for peace and prepared for war. Sir John Anderson, chairman of the Committee of Imperial Defence, believed that London would be the immediate target of aerial bombardment. His committee calculated that two thousand tons would be dropped by the Germans in the first twenty-four hours. They calculated a death roll of 28,000 civilians in the first month. In Which Way to Peace?, the philosopher Bertrand Russell predicted that London would be “one vast raving bedlam, the hospitals will be stormed, traffic will cease, the homeless will shriek for peace, the city will be pandemonium.” 4
At eleven A.M. on September 3, Neville Chamberlain told anxious wireless listeners that Britain was at war with Germany. An hour passed; twenty-four hours; and still no bombs, no destruction. Apart from the sandbags piled up against windows and in doorways, and apart from a palpable atmosphere of tension and excitement, London seemed much as normal. But it was about to enter into the six most extraordinary years of its history. The bombs would come, though not at once. Some traffic would be stopped. Some would shriek for peace. But a much stran
ger thing was going to happen than Bertrand Russell’s vision of pandemonium.
11
WARTIME 1939-1945
The photograph, by Herbert Mason, of St. Paul’s Cathedral on December 29–30, 1940, expresses an unalterable historical truth and a tragically false prophecy. They called it the Second Great Fire of London. Since September, London had been the chief, almost the exclusive, target of a relentless series of raids by German bombers: 27,500 high-explosive bombs and innumerable incendiaries were dropped, on average 160 bombers attacking nightly, between September 7 and November 13. The docks were a prime target, often in flames; the dwellings of the poor who lived nearby were reduced to street after street of smoking rubble. Buildings as familiar as Madame Tussaud’s in Baker Street and the Tower of London had been hit by bombs. The Guildhall was all but gutted by fire on that clear moonlit night of December 29, 1940. And it was after that air raid that Herbert Mason’s camera captured St. Paul’s, its dome clearly visible in all the smoke and flames, an orderly embodiment of calm and reason, of the English enlightenment, of piety, and of the past in all the tempests of war.
The photograph is testimony to a truth: namely that London endured regular bombardment with extraordinary sangfroid. The courage of Londoners set a wonderful example to other cities when their turn came. St. Paul’s in the flames, but unburnt like the mystic bush of Moses, told the world that though everyone else in Europe had surrendered to Nazism, or formed unworthy alliances with it, the capital city of the British empire would do no such thing.
So much for the historical truth. The photograph also, by implication, speaks a prophecy that
This England never did, nor never shall,
Lie at the proud foot of a conqueror.1
The photograph seems to say, “When this war is over, the London that Christopher Wren created will return: the London where reason and learning go hand in hand with commerce and trade, and where the citizens make homes, theatres, churches, and streets for themselves that are objects of beauty.” This prophecy, or defiant hope, was never realized. The victors who rose from the ruins of wartime London were vandals, property speculators, modernist fanatics, and shysters. The very ownership of the City, its firms, its institutions, and its buildings, would pass out of British hands and London would be sold so that a few semicriminals could make a quick buck. No one, however, could have guessed this during the amazing six years when London was at war.
