by Abrams, Fran
Despite the sudden and ignominious closure of the Little Commonwealth, a host of other educational and psychological thinkers were ready to take on Lane’s views. Among them were Alexander Sutherland Neill, a Scotsman who had met Lane during the war and who had hoped to join the Little Commonwealth. Instead, Neill undertook a course of psychotherapy with Lane in London before his deportation, and then went on, in 1924, to found a school along similar lines to the Little Commonwealth. Summerhill spent its first three years in Lyme Regis in Dorset before moving to Leiston in Suffolk. And a host of other little educational experiments were bursting out all over the country, often funded by wealthy enthusiasts who believed children should be allowed to regulate their own lives.
The parents of the children who went to the schools often tended to have sent them not so much in pursuit of radical ideals but in a spirit of desperation. In their early days, they catered mainly for society’s juvenile misfits – those who had transgressed, or who had simply failed to thrive in the mainstream system. Parents usually had to be able to afford to pay fees, of course – though some of these early pupils later remembered protracted negotiations about the level of fees they would pay.
Peter Thomas, an only child whose father ran a small iron and steel foundry in south Wales, had only intermittently attended school before he was sent, aged eleven, to Dartington Hall, in Devon. There, Leonard Elmhirst, the heir to an estate in south Yorkshire, and his wealthy American wife, Dorothy, had begun what had originally been an experiment in rural regeneration. In 1926, they founded a progressive school where children could take part in agricultural activities as well as doing lessons. ‘I’d been to a small fee-paying school for about two or three years – I didn’t attend a great deal. I kept complaining about my stomach and eventually had my appendix out when I was eight, and that took time. I don’t know that I had any particular friends,’ he recalled.30
For Peter – who was told on his arrival at Dartington that as there was already a Peter on the roll he would henceforth be known as Stuart – a traumatic early experience of the school soon gave way to a whole new existence: ‘I was miserable for six, seven, eight weeks – I don’t know how long. We had to write letters home, one a week – I can’t imagine what they were like. My mother said when I went back for the holiday they’d almost given up and gone to collect me. But suddenly my letters had started to get less tearful, I presume because I got into the swing of the school.
‘It was such a friendly place – I was a single child and this was my family. I don’t know when I felt it, but I thought, it’s nice to have all these friends, they were very friendly and the staff were lovely. Because I hadn’t really been to school consistently, I don’t think really in my heart of hearts I knew it was a school. You were encouraged to go to classes, but I spent most of my time out on the estate. I got friendly with a local boy, Bobby Robson, who was my age. I just went to occasional classes.’ The biology teacher, David Lack – a keen ornithologist who would later write a seminal work on Darwin’s finches – roped in Peter and his friend Bobby to help with a study of the local bird population: ‘We helped make great big wire fenced traps which we moved from place to place, catching robins. I’m still a member of the British Trust for Ornithology.’
The school, whose headmaster for many years was a charismatic man called Bill Curry, fast began to gain a somewhat scandalous reputation. Particular umbrage was taken at its lack of team games and at the fact that its pupils were in the habit of bathing nude in the River Dart, just at the point where it met the Ashburnham to Totnes railway line.
The experiences of children like Peter Thomas at schools such as Dartington Hall were rare exceptions, of course, in a system that was still largely dominated by routine and by rote. And the activities of the staff at Dartington were starting to attract attention that went beyond the perennial gossip about nude bathing. As the 1930s crept in and the air in Europe began to darken, the atmosphere around the school became more political. ‘Curry’, as he was universally known, became immersed in a pacifist campaign called the Federal Union, and the efforts of Dartington’s staff were increasingly supplemented by those of liberal refugees from mainland Europe.
Such was the establishment alarm at these goings-on that the progressive schools gained their own security service file, entitled ‘Dartington Hall School and other disturbances’.31 The documents within it reveal that the security services became increasingly interested in what was going on at the schools during the years before World War Two: ‘Dartington Hall has for some time been a matter of interest to us, and we have been able to reach some general conclusions about it . . . presumably because it has never had to pay its way, the experimental purposes for which it was founded have tended to run riot. The most serious count against it is usually the lack of moral restraint consequent upon the general encouragement to “self expression” and this has attached an unsavoury reputation to the school,’ read one note on the file. MI5 would have been monitoring all manner of subversives, most of them adult, but there is something particularly potent about the notion that children are being indoctrinated, that the enemy is getting in, as it were, through the basement window. Similar themes would emerge again during the 1970s, as the fear that the more socially degenerate elements on the political fringes might be finding ways of colouring the vision of the nation’s youth. The fear, of course, is a very potent one and goes to the heart of the debate about who actually has charge of children’s lives. As the education system took on an ever-greater role, and children consequently spent more time away from their home environment, the myth of a potent and mind-altering undercurrent in schools would become an ever-present one.
Not that the main complainants were parents, though. During the 1930s, MI5 would respond to a wide range of complaints about the schools and about the radicalization of children more generally – mostly, if the file is anything to go by, from a small group of conservatives who were concerned about moral standards. And while the security service would not find evidence of any major threat, it did feel the need to ask questions about what was going on. For instance, the Secretary of the International Law Society, Wyndham Bewes, wrote in great alarm to the Home Office about promiscuity at Neill’s school at Leiston, and about another run by Countess Dora Russell in Sussex. He attached an article from a Norwegian magazine which gushed about Neill’s liberal attitudes: ‘Very often he was obliged to hide from parents what he knew about their children. As to young people of eighteen years of age, it had happened that he had been obliged to tell them that he could not allow them to sleep with each other because he knew that they could not afford preventatives . . . In other cases he could well imagine that some of the young people slept together but he did not interfere because he knew that they had enough money.’ Could anything be done, Mr Bewes wanted to know? The MI5 officer who responded thought not. If Neill had allowed a girl under the age of sixteen to have sex, there might be grounds for a prosecution: ‘But there is no allegation of this. Quite frankly I feel unable to take the statements in this article at all seriously. It is typical left-wing eyewash. My personal feeling is that the article is quite unreliable and there is no evidence in it whatever that any sexual irregularity does in fact take place . . . it would be difficult to justify any action on the strength of a tendentious foreign article.’
Why the Security Service would have been given the task of investigating illicit teenage sex is something of a mystery. However, its officers were tasked at the time with assessing all threats to the security of the UK, and some of the complaints about the progressive schools involved the political activities of their teachers – so the letters tended to find their way to the desks of MI5 officers, maybe for want of any other obvious recipient. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the responses of MI5 to these complaints became increasingly weary as the years went by. Yet as the international tension mounted, they continued to come in thick and fast – and during the 1930s this deep-rooted fear that young people wer
e somehow being subverted grew ever stronger.
According to the right-wing press, children across the country were becoming increasingly radicalized, and the issue was fast becoming a head-on clash between the forces of conservatism and the those of the left. On 2 November 1932, the Winscombe Women’s Conservative and Unionist Association sent an appeal to the government, asking it to take immediate steps to close down the Communist Sunday Schools which appeared, its members felt, to be springing up all around them. An enclosed resolution, proposed by Mrs Percival Wiseman, noted that these Sunday Schools were ‘teaching children that there is no God, are deliberately making heathens in a professedly Christian country’. The resolution, the letter confirmed, had been passed unanimously. In evidence, the association sent a cutting from the previous day’s Daily Mail about a new society called the League of Militant Godless, which had been founded by a Communist named T. A. Jackson. ‘The Reds of Moscow have thrown down their greatest challenge to the world. They have launched a campaign to dishonour God, defame the Bible, and eliminate religion from the life of mankind,’ the paper had thundered. MI5’s response was more measured: ‘We have no information to indicate that there are in Cornwall churches in sympathy with the idea of substituting the cult of Lenin for that of divine worship. It seems hardly necessary to make further inquiries,’ the agency’s official noted dryly.
Despite this scepticism in official circles, there does seem to have been something of a proliferation of organizations for young radicals at the time: the Young Communist League was thought to have about 400 members, while the Young Pioneers of Great Britain, which had recently replaced the Young Comrades League, had claimed to be selling around 3,500 newspapers each month. This was sufficient to alarm the Daily Telegraph into running a series of articles on the menace in April 1933, including this parody of the Lord’s Prayer, from the children’s corner of the Daily Worker:
Our fathers who fought in the last war
They are still out of work
Give them a gun
They have been worse off on earth
Than those that went to heaven
They will take some day their daily bread
And they’ll use those guns
Against those who have always trespassed against them
They will not fight against the workers
For theirs will be the cartridges,
The power and the earth
For ever and ever – Red Front!
And it was sufficient to inspire an admiral, Mark Kerr, to set up an Order of the Child, to campaign against such ‘child corruption’. He wrote to the Home Office in March 1933 of ‘sinister developments’. ‘The communists are now attempting to get at the children by penetration into the ordinary state schools, and it is most significant that at the Special Conference of the Teachers Labour League in October 1930 it was decided by an overwhelming majority that this league should become affiliated to the National Minority Movement – the communist organisation active in this country and closely bound up with the Russian Soviet,’ he wrote.
All of this passed the pupils of Dartington Hall by. But in the East End of London, a young boy from a very different background was soaking up the political atmosphere. Bernard Kops, the son of desperately poor Jewish migrants from Holland and later a playwright, was growing up in Stepney Green – a stone’s throw, quite literally, from where Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists would hold its meetings.
‘I joined the blue and white shirts,’ he said. ‘It was all shirts in those days. There were green shirts, red shirts. Our leader, Mr Pritchard, was killed in the Spanish Civil War. So we were quite organized.’32
Kops was born in Stepney Green Buildings, which overlooked a long strip of land where the Fascists would set up their soapboxes: ‘The British Union of Fascists had this idea, they were going to take over the East End. So we children had a job to do – we had to stand on our balcony and throw stones over at the Fascist speakers,’ he explained. When the BUF decided to send thousands of marchers into the East End on Sunday, 4 October 1936, Kops was among the ranks of children who were sent out to oppose the march.
‘We didn’t trust the police. We knew they had allowed the march to go ahead. I think the police didn’t like any of the immigrant communities, anyone who wasn’t English,’ he said. ‘We had to stand on the sidelines with our marbles, and throw them under the hooves of the police horses.’ Kops, who was ten at the time, saw a police horse go down in the crowd: ‘Though I don’t think it was because of any of my marbles.’ Afterwards, he said, his cousins tracked the policeman down and ‘did him straight up – left him with two broken legs. He had been laying about him with his truncheon.’33
The Battle of Cable Street, as it became known, involved no fewer than 10,000 police and a massive 300,000 anti-fascist protesters. There were 150 arrests, 100 people were injured and several policemen were kidnapped. Afterwards, a law was passed requiring marchers to obtain a police permit before staging a demonstration, and the Fascists began to retreat from the East End.
Elsewhere, the news grew increasingly grim. In the Kops’ crowded flat, the talk was of the Spanish Civil War, of Hitler, of whether the family should return to Holland. Fortunately for them, they could not scrape the money together to go: ‘If it hadn’t been for that, we would all have been killed.’
At Dartington, too, the mood was darkening. Bill Curry was often absent, up in London pushing the already lost cause of pacifism. Peter Thomas remembers unrest in the school as a result: ‘There was quite a hoo-ha with the pupils – there was a sign, I think in the dining room: ‘We want our headmaster back,’ he recalled. The pupils became very involved with the Spanish Civil War, as teachers went away to fight. One of the Spanish teachers at the school was a refugee, and at one point the children knitted blankets for a group of Spanish children who were housed somewhere in the Hall.
During Curry’s increasingly rare visits to the school, he would invite pupils up to his house for debates about pacifism. Yet despite all his efforts, by 1939 the children of Dartington, like so many others across the country, were preparing for war.
5 War Babies
‘At 10.30 we heard from a radio news bulletin that hostilities had broken out between Poland and Germany. It seemed that war was inevitable. We listened to every news that we were able for the rest of the day. Mother and I went to the cinema in the evening, and we received a shock when we came out to find the town in a state of darkness.’1
To a fifteen-year-old boy, living in Hampshire and recording the outbreak of war for the Mass Observation organization, Hitler’s invasion of Poland was an exciting development; one that would be bound to make life more interesting. Through a child’s eyes, with so much in the world still unexplored, the events tended to be viewed with a sense of mounting excitement rather than with the knowing dread the adult world was feeling. The details this particular boy felt significant enough to record reveal a sort of banality about the preparations. Somehow, seen through this boy’s eyes, the implementation of the civil defence plans which had been made over the preceding months and years come across as rather sedate, rather English and rather middle-class.
‘I noticed while doing some shopping for my mother a large van outside an empty shop off one of the main streets. Gas masks, gum boots and steel helmets were being unloaded from it and taken into the shop. A few days later I learned that it was to be the ARP central store. Later in the morning I sat in the Princess Gardens and watched some raw recruits of a Scotch regiment being drilled. After dinner I went and sat in the municipal gardens with a book to read. I have got all this spare time owing to the fact that the school is closed for a holiday. As I got there a man and woman pushing a pram went by. “Well we shan’t be gassed this time,” said the man. “No,” replied the woman, “I’m going to bed with my gas mask on tonight.”’
Yet the war was to have profound effects on the children of Britain, some of which would only truly be recognized once the hos
tilities had ceased and the smoke had begun to clear. If the inter-war years had been years in which the Western world learned the importance of stability and parent–child relations in the life of a growing youngster, the war would throw all that knowledge in the air. The years of World War Two were, for many thousands of families, years in which parents and children experienced separation from one another. They experienced separation through evacuation and through displacement because of bombing and other disruption. But they also experienced separation because suddenly the workforce of Britain was largely female. In a way which was far better organized than it had been in World War One, day care was made available so that women could perform necessary war work. For many children, that meant daily contact with the state at a much earlier age than had previously been common.
In the past, a few children had been moved from one part of the country to another, some children had been separated from their parents, and some children had even had the opportunity to meet people of a different social status from themselves – but the numbers who had done so were tiny in comparison to what was about to happen. The war was to shake up the whole class system – not in a way which would cause it to be destroyed, but in a way which would allow the poor to see how the wealthy lived, and vice versa. After the war, no one would again be able to turn a blind eye – as the East End slum-owning Lord Alington, forced by Sonia Keppel’s mother to confront the truth about his wealth, had done – to the reality of how the poor were living in Britain’s inner cities. The net effect, then, would be a national eye-opening about the state of the population. The war would lay bare the nation’s undergarments, and childhood would never really be the same again.
