Maybe there is not much evidence to blast him with, and he must be blasted. Goebbels was against the war in 1939, as Speer has testified. His courage and his loyalty cannot be impugned. Hence the ‘inner emptiness’ and the ‘palatial residence’. Goebbels’s reading (Carlyle and Schopenhauer are mentioned) is disapproved of; it is not what we should wish an English propaganda minister to indulge in.
His opposite number in England during the war was Brendan Bracken, a man I also happened to know rather well. I was quite fond of Brendan, but even his best friend could not claim that he was truthful. His whole life was one long lie; he pretended to be an Australian orphan whereas in reality he was Irish and had a mother living in Templemore, Co Tipperary. While he was minister of propaganda a misfortune occurred. Illustrated pornographic leaflets, which had been concocted in his ministry by German-speaking émigrés, and which were supposed to be dropped on German soldiers stationed on the Spanish frontier in order to ‘weaken their resistance’ (sic), blew away in a freak storm, and one of them landed on a golf course in Surrey. J.B. Hynd, a prim Labour MP, went to complain to the minister.
Brendan was quite ready for him. He told Mr Hynd:
As a man of the world who claims to understand the German mentality, you shouldn’t be surprised at the lengths to which Goebbels will go. You’re playing into Goebbels’s hands at this moment. Goebbels knows of the divided counsels here about British propaganda activities, and that’s no doubt why he and his henchmen have taken the trouble to despatch the balloons and those obnoxious leaflets just to exacerbate the divisions as you’re now doing.
Mr Hynd was contrite. This tale is from Andrew Boyle’s Poor, Dear Brendan, indispensable reading for anyone interested in lie merchants.
The Goebbels Diaries, ed. Trevor-Roper, H. Books and Bookmen (1978)
A Liturgical Bob and Go
One chapter in Father Brocard Sewell’s delightful autobiography is ‘At odds with the Red Hat’. There’s none called ‘At odds with the Triple Tiara’,* but there very well might have been. Father Brocard regrets, as all lovers of beauty and tradition must, the abandonment of the ancient liturgy. Because it was in Latin, it made the Catholic Church truly universal, with the same services in the same words the whole world over. He bitterly regrets the impoverishment of religious life in its outward manifestations. The distress caused by the Vatican Council was widespread. It killed Evelyn Waugh.
Father Brocard is a Carmelite priest, an expert on type and printing, and the author of several books on fairly obscure writers of the end of the nineteenth century. He was born to Protestant parents, and says he became a Catholic because, as a very religious boy, he suffered from acute boredom in the chapel of his low-church school.
After his conversion, as a young man, he worked for G.K. Chesterton’s magazine GK’s Weekly. Deciding that his vocation was for monastic life, he became a novice of the Dominican Order.
In 1941 he joined the RAF, and is wonderfully funny about his wartime adventures. He ended up in Germany, in 1945. There were strict rules about no fraternisation, of which he took not the slightest notice. He still sees his friends from Wulfrath, which is now ‘twinned’ with Ware.
After the war he decided not to go back to the Dominicans, and joined the Order of the Canons Regular of the Lateran; though finally he transferred to the Carmelites, and was ordained a priest at Aylesford Priory in 1954.
For many years he edited the Aylesford Review, in which he often supported unpopular and unfashionable causes if he thought them right. It was his courage and independence which got him into trouble with the hierarchy and the Cardinal. When the spirit moved him he did not hesitate to write to The Times.
Perhaps we should be thankful that at least Cardinals still have red hats, even if their trains have been docked. Father Brocard is glad that during his time in Rome, at the Carmelite college, there was still the old Roman splendour, before, as he says, Popes were given paupers’ funerals.
* The Pope.
The Habit of a Lifetime, Sewell, B. Evening Standard (1992)
A Matter of Class
When General Fuller was appointed military assistant to the CIGS the Sunday Express described him as ‘probably by far the cleverest man in the Army’. This was in 1926, when Fuller was 47; he was already well known as a writer on military matters. A professional soldier, he had fought in the Boer War as a very young man; during the First World War he served on the stall in France. He did not invent the tank, but when this new weapon appeared on the scene in 1916 he was the soldier who immediately understood its potential. Since he had no power to direct the method of deploying the tanks they were largely wasted, but then and after the war he devoted his brilliant intelligence and far-seeing imagination to tanks and mechanized warfare.
It goes without saying that although a younger generation of army officers agreed with them, the old generals paid little attention to Fuller’s theories. Field Marshal Montgomery Massingberd, for example, was still talking about the necessity of using tanks to support cavalry at the end of 1928. But if Fuller’s books were largely ignored in England they were read, admired and understood, and his precepts acted upon, in Germany. Shortly before World War II General Fuller was invited to a military parade in Berlin. Thousands of tanks thundered down Unter den Linden. Hitler greeted him afterwards with the words: ‘I hope you were pleased with your children?’
Some of our generals were stuck in 1914, but it was the politicians who ruled Britain in the 20s and early 30s who were criminally negligent of our country’s defence. Completely frustrated, Fuller left the army in 1933 to devote himself to writing. The only politician who insisted that Britain must be armed in an armed world, and that it must be equipped with a modern mechanized force, was Oswald Mosley. For this reason General Fuller joined the British Union of Fascists in 1934.
Brilliance is not always considered an asset in England, but how did it come about that General Fuller, who was not only the cleverest man in the army but a military thinker of genius and a first rate writer, was completely unheeded in official circles? The author of ‘Boney’ Fuller: The Intellectual General gives a wonderfully frank answer:
His relative lack of success as a soldier was in part due to the cause of mechanization, which he espoused too strongly and too early from the point of view of his career interests; but it was also due to central factors of his personality, his extreme intellectual competence, his superlative rationality, his barbed and irrepressible wit, his somewhat clinical human relations, his rejection of compromise even when his future was at stake.
He was regarded by many senior officers as ‘too clever by half’, and he had an ‘impossible wife’. ‘He was an uncomfortable and all too aggressively cerebral member of the military organization’, writes Brigadier Trythall. ‘Uncomfortable’ is strangely enough the very word used about him by Fuller’s noted disciple, Adolf Hitler. A great admirer, he once asked me whether the General might not be an ‘Unbequemer’ in an organization. Mosley never found him so, he was a loyal and splendid colleague. On the other hand for stupid people he was uncomfortable, with his rapid and sarcastic manner of pointing out their inadequate processes of thought. Liddell Hart, the other English military genius of the century, maintained close friendship with Fuller for many decades: he sought his company and obviously did not find him uncomfortable. As to the ‘impossible wife’, Mrs Fuller’s admiration for Boney was boundless and her loyalty to him absolute. True, she had a strong foreign accent, either Polish or German, but as a convinced European with an ineradicable English accent I cannot accept that this made her ‘impossible’.
It was Fuller’s patriotism and concern for our defences that took him into the British Union of Fascists, and it was his patriotism which made him oppose the second World War. He saw at once that, win or lose, this war would be the end of Britian’s greatness. If, however, once the fatal war had been declared, his advice had been asked, there would most likely have been no lightning defeat of France i
n 1940. The Allied armies had more tanks than the Germans, but it was the Germans who used their armour in accordance with Fuller’s text books on mechanized warfare. As he used to say: ‘The greater the mass of the opposing infantry the greater the victory of the armoured divisions.’ Even if some of the soldiers had found him uncomfortable his expertise, his professionalism, his intelligence, would have been of incalculable value to Britain, fighting for its life. ‘Extreme intellectual competence’ is not considered a grave disadvantage by everyone. General de Gaulle is quoted as having asked in 1943, ‘What about your best soldier, General Fuller?… I have often wondered why he is never used.’ Admittedly General Fuller had no great opinion of Mr Churchill, whom he once described as the greatest mountebank since Nero, ‘but Nero had the better of him in that he committed suicide when comparatively young; that, at least, was a decent act’, he added characteristically. He had an ‘intellectual disapproval of Churchill’s political aims and military strategies, and emotional distaste for Churchill’s style.’
A letter in The Times recently pointed out what strangely childish nicknames our generals in World War II were known by: Squeaker, Boy, Jumbo, Pip, Bubbles. Fuller’s nickname was Boney, the name the English gave Napoleon during the Napoleonic wars. With his small stature and sharp intellect it suited him admirably; a name any soldier would be proud to bear.
Brigadier Trythall’s biography is excellent in many ways, an enthralling book. He often allows Fuller to speak for himself, and when he does so the brilliance and charm of the man come across. Perhaps I should declare an interest: I was devoted to General Fuller and delighted in his clever conversation and sarcastic, unkind jokes; I was also very fond of Mrs Fuller.
‘Boney’ Fuller: The Intellectual General, Trythall, A.J. Books and Bookmen (1977)
More Violence than Politics
A book called Political Violence and Public Order, by an American, might well be about the tragic situation in Northern Ireland, but a glance at the photograph on the jacket shows mounted police, not armoured cars and tanks. In fact, Mr Benewick’s book (a product of the flourishing PhD industry) deals with not very violent violence. He has no bombs to record, no gunmen, no arms and legs blown off, not a single death. It is a history of fascism in England in the 30s, but only of a fractional part of fascism: the part connected with violence.
The hundreds of public meetings, where attentive audiences listened to Sir Oswald Mosley’s economic and social policy for what was then a very sick country with over two million unemployed, are hardly mentioned. It is not politics but violence that interests Mr Benewick. Meetings and marches where there were clashes between fascists and communists are described at length. They were fascist meetings and fascist marches, and they were attacked by communists. This is known as fascist violence; had a communist meeting been attacked by fascists, presumably it would have been communist violence. If a notable orator, putting forward a quite difficult argument, has assembled a crowd of people many of whom have paid for their seats to listen to a speech, he and his stewards are unlikely to attack their audience.
After the Olympia meeting, which a large number of communists, drummed up for days before by the Daily Worker, tried to smash, Lloyd George wrote (Sunday Pictorial, 24 June 1934): ‘The Blackshirts secured an audience of 15,000 people to pack the huge exhibition hall…. I feel that men who enter meetings with the deliberate intention of suppressing free speech have no right to complain if an exasperated audience handles them rudely.’ Strangely enough, this defence of Mosley by an ex-Prime Minister is not mentioned in the long account Mr Benewick gives of the Olympia meeting. It is omissions such as this which show a certain bias.
The other charge made is that Mosley and his fascists provocatively marched through East London, said to have been hostile to them. It is worth remembering that a large proportion of the men who marched were in fact citizens of East London, and that it was there the fascist candidates polled 19 per cent of the votes at municipal elections in 1937, elections where only householders, that is by and large older people, had the vote. Among young people in that part of London Mosley had mass support.
Far from it being the fascists who ‘invaded’ East London, they considered it was they who had been invaded from foreign parts by people who could not even speak English, but who were handy with foreign notions of how to fight a man they disagreed with, such as throwing potatoes with razor blades stuck in them.
In Mr Benewick’s book there are slovenly mistakes and misspelt names, and he is at times grossly inaccurate. There is a bad example of this on page 162: ‘Mosley could say without any hesitation… from the bottom of my heart, “Heil Hitler”.’ These words were in fact written by Captain Gordon-Canning MC, an ex-10th Hussar, in a contribution to The Blackshirt. In both style and content they are so unlike anything Mosley ever wrote (le style c’est l’homme) that no intelligent person who had made a detailed study of him could conceivably make this particular mistake, and Mr Benewick is not unintelligent. An historian would check the origins of so controversial a statement.
‘The combination of slow promotion, unsettled beliefs, personality conflicts…’ these according to Mr Benewick are the reasons why Mosley left the old parties. Slow promotion? At the age of 32, Mosley was the Minister charged with the hardest task facing the government of the day: how to solve the unemployment problem. It would not be easy to find an example this century of quicker promotion. It was because not only the policy he devised but any action at all was refused that he decided to build a grass roots movement. He had no supporting press and had to speak, and be heard, or give up. Mr Benewick describes him as ‘an outstanding leader whose appeal reached charismatic dimensions’, which sounds like an American compliment. Attacked, he and his men defended themselves, and that is the beginning and end of fascist violence.
Would an Englishman’s thesis on the burning and looting of American cities by rioters in 1967, or on the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968, be any better than Mr Benewick’s? In order to rank as history, it would certainly need to be more carefully researched.
Political Violence and Public Order, Benewick, R. Books and Bookmen (1969)
Blood on the Walls
The dust jacket of To Build a New Jerusalem is as old-fashioned as the title. Watched by the founding fathers, from Marx to Attlee, a grim looking ‘worker’ emerges, brilliant sun behind him, from the ruins of Westminster, St Paul’s, and some factories. Below is a photograph of a vast crowd, wearing caps, hats, or even boaters, which must be very ancient. Superimposed, giving the V sign, is Neil Kinnock, strayed into the revolutionary past.
A.J. Davies has written a fair, useful history of the Labour movement, its idealism and its internal quarrels, so bitter at one time as to make it unfit to govern. During the long years in opposition it has shed its most unpopular beliefs, Clause 4, and unilateralism. The word socialism seems to be taboo, presumably because of socialism’s economic failure wherever it has been seriously tried. ‘Labourism’ is what A.J. Davies calls it, just when the name Labour is under threat, as being outworn.
What he calls ‘the battle of Cable Street’ in 1936, never in fact took place. The British Union obeyed a police order to about turn before contact with its enemies, to the great disappointment of all. There was no fight, let alone a battle; just a few scuffles of left-wing supporters with the police dispersing them. It is a myth, believed as myths so often are.
Can Labour win this time? We shall very soon know. It is anybody’s guess.
Willie Hamilton is a Durham miner’s son, famous for disliking the royal family and for trumpeting his republican views in and out of Parliament. Blood on the Walls is a fearsome title, which puts us in mind of a cellar at Ekaterinburg, or torture in some vile prison. But Hamilton’s rather engaging book is not about red revolution, and contains no diatribes against the Queen. All his hatred is concentrated upon Mrs Thatcher. As she has retired, like Willie Hamilton himself, it is already out of date.
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nbsp; He thinks our monarchy is unnecessary, he would like to see it abolished, along with the House of Lords, but he is realist enough to know the huge majority would never allow any such thing to happen. He only wishes the Queen would pay taxes, which is rather tame after so much sound and fury for so many years.
He describes the frightful life of a miner in the 20s, and of the miner’s wife, his parents. There were no pit-head baths. She washed the coal dust off him in her kitchen. She cleaned and cooked and baked, there was one cold tap, she struggled to feed her family on a miserable wage, and to buy them clothes and boots. Baldwin’s wicked deflation in 1926, the starving of the miners into submission after the General Strike collapsed, all this is well told and grim enough, even if the blood on the wall comes from the bugs which infested their wretched slum.
Anyone with enthusiasm for the good old days should read about Willie Hamilton’s childhood. It explains his dislike of Mrs T. Nobody could pretend the grinding poverty, the bitterness of unemployment, the frightful conditions of those days were the fault of the royal family. The Tories were in power and they did nothing.
To Build a New Jerusalem: The Labour Movement from the 1880s to the 1990s, Davies, A.J.; Blood on the Walls, Hamilton, W. Evening Standard (1992)
Spies Good and Bad
The Germans have a proverb: ‘He who betrays once, will always betray.’ Or in other words, a traitor is a traitor. The game of the foxes proves the truth of this again and again. Spies, double spies, triple spies, they probably hardly cared whom they double-crossed in the murky world at war wherein they flourished.
The game of the foxes is a dirty game, without rules. The stakes are high because you play with death, the rewards are meagre because nobody can acknowledge the cat’s paw. Only half trusted by his superiors, the spy ends by being completely untrustworthy, a flawed man. From the humble agent right up to the very top there is a vileness met with in no other profession. Admiral Canaris, for example, sometimes served his country and at other times sought to betray it.
The Pursuit of Laughter Page 22
