Japanese victories were not only imperial embarrassments; they also meant significant shortages on the home front. With the winter victories of 1941/42, Japan had ‘pinched’ a large proportion of Britain’s source of rice, sugar and tea – not to mention rubber and tin. Added to this, German U-boats were pummelling shipping in the Atlantic. Rations took a hit and food consumption in Britain was at its lowest during this period. Irene Grant complained, ‘Our cupboard is bare.’ To ensure that her husband Tom had enough to eat, Irene went without. ‘No woman can eat less than I,’ she told M-O.
It didn’t seem possible, but the new year, with its food shortages, bitter temperatures and leaden snow clouds, soon became even more bleak. In early February Helen Mitchell noted that the government announced it would begin to ration soap. The news put her on high alert to watch the ‘extravagance’ of her housekeeper, Mrs Cripps, who was a perennial source of aggravation for Helen. She thought Cripps ‘batty’, and constantly found herself in exasperating struggles with her housekeeper.
Cripps always left such an unforgivable mess of the kitchen that, when the Mitchells bought a new cooker, Helen vowed never again to allow her near the saucepans or the cooker and swore to forever banish her to work in the garden. At least in the garden, she wrote, ‘One hopes she will be less of a menace than in the house.’ One morning, Cripps decided to take down the blackout curtains before the sun came up. Mitchell dashed madly behind her, frantically putting the curtains back in place while yelling at her to desist her crazy and dangerous behaviour. She was too late. ‘The long arm of the law’, an ARP warden, rang the bell to serve Mitchell with a fine. ‘Haven’t recovered from the horror of it,’ she wrote, ‘Cripps quite unable to see the enormity of the offence.’
Natalie Tanner thought the addition of soap to the ration was ‘rather a blow’ and found ‘the news very depressing’. But days later, Britons suffered a calamity far more grave and depressing than this: Singapore had fallen. After the infamous retreat from Penang in December 1941, refugees had flooded to the safety of ‘Fortress Singapore’, but the fortress was an illusion. Air support had been knocked out in one blow when the Japanese air force destroyed every available aircraft in the nearby airfield. Furthermore, all defences had focused on a seaborne attack, not a ground assault: the powerful gun batteries on the island pointed out to sea. When, just one month before Singapore surrendered, British General Archibald Wavell finally imparted this fact to Churchill, who had sincerely believed the myth of the stronghold, the Prime Minister told the chiefs of staff that ‘one of the greatest possible scandals’ had been exposed.
As Japanese forces pushed further south into the city, European refugees flooded the causeway onto the island. On the island, they found 85,000 British, Indian and Australian troops, most of whom were demoralized from the fierce fighting on the mainland. One of the soldiers in the garrison mockingly echoed Churchill when he wrote of the situation:
Never before have so many
Been buggered about by so few
And neither the few nor the many
Have bugger all ideas what to do.8
On 15 February 1942, Singapore surrendered to a Japanese force one-third the size of the Allied forces left on the island. That night, Churchill addressed the nation and gravely told them about the situation in the east. ‘I speak to you all under the shadow of a heavy and far-reaching military defeat … Singapore has fallen.’ It was a devastating defeat. Indeed, privately, Churchill declared the fall of Singapore the worst disaster in British military history. Nonetheless, the Prime Minister attempted to rally the nation in the face of such demoralizing news. ‘This is one of those moments’, he stressed, ‘when [the British race] can draw from the heart of misfortune the vital impulses of victory.’ He reminded his audience of past victories snatched from the jaws of defeat, as their ancestors had done, so too, Churchill stated, ‘We can meet reverses with dignity and with renewed accessions of strength.’ Finally, he roused them, ‘Let us move forward steadfastly together into the storm and through the storm’.9
The speech was unconvincing. As she was by most setbacks, Helen Mitchell was ‘very depressed’ by Churchill’s address. She thought it ‘weak and illogical’, and ‘wondered if we’re sunk’. Even those who were generally less apt to lose faith had genuine difficulty drawing any comfort from Churchill’s words. Edie Rutherford believed that the government was covering up incompetence in the matter and found that most people she asked were not ‘enthusiastic’ about the speech. Most importantly, she wrote, ‘The speech showed fear.’ Across the country, it seemed that many agreed with this sentiment. The former canon of Westminster and Bishop of Durham Herbert Hensley Henson noted in his private diary that Churchill’s ‘voice and manner suggested a depression and even dismay, very unlike his accustomed buoyancy of carriage’.10 Irene Grant’s husband predicted that the debacle would bring down Churchill within six months.
The empire was staring into the abyss. Indeed, the Indians and Malays who witnessed the defeat felt sure that, ‘The last days of the British Empire had come’. Edie Rutherford was dismayed. ‘Singapore gone’, she wrote in her diary when she heard the news. ‘Oh, I do hope our men have made a getaway in time. Has it been worthwhile?’ she wondered. Usually a confident and proud supporter of empire, her faith was shaken: ‘I believe in our Empire but God, is it worth the price we are paying now?’ It was difficult to escape the dark cloud descending upon what appeared to be the empire’s imminent demise. She could find only uneasy comfort in day-to-day distractions and a constant faith in ‘the invincibility of all that we hold dear’. ‘There is no other way of keeping an even keel when things look black as they do now’, Edie confessed to M-O.
If Japanese victories demonstrated that the British navy’s control over the waves was slipping, an incident in the English Channel further undermined the nation’s naval prestige. Three days before the Prime Minister’s admission of the loss of Singapore, Britons learned that two German battleships had left port in Brest, on the coast of Brittany, slipped through British defences in the Channel and steamed, unaccosted, into the North Sea. It was a humiliating prelude that intensified the impact of Singapore’s demise on the British psyche. Indeed, the proximity of this embarrassing episode to British shores exceeded the crippling loss that followed. Fears of invasion once again gripped the nation.
Within weeks of Singapore’s fall, the Burmese capital of Rangoon was evacuated as Japanese troops closed in. British forces escaped north towards eastern India; the enemy was now perilously close to the jewel in the imperial crown. With Japan at the gates of India, no one was entirely sure if the Indians would fight the invader or side with them against the British. In fact, some dissident Indians had already gone over to the Axis, installing a pro-Nazi Hindi radio station, Azad Hind, in Berlin to counter the BBC (which Azad Hind called the ‘Bluff and Bluster Corporation’) and building an army to help oust the British from India.11 In the hope of fostering loyalty against the Japanese at such a precarious time, Sir Stafford Cripps journeyed from London to Delhi on 14 March with the promise of independence.
Sir Stafford was the man of the hour. A teetotal, vegetarian ascetic, who exuded the very essence of austerity, he nonetheless had sparked the popular imagination after he was sent to Moscow as ambassador in 1940. Although it wasn’t true, many believed that Sir Stafford was a confidant of Joseph Stalin, and this myth gained him much popularity. Irene Grant, who always championed the cause of the left, was thoroughly enamoured with Cripps. He was one of the few politicians, she believed, who was truly ‘for the people’. He was a socialist who had spent some years in the political wilderness for radical views, but now he seemed to be Britain’s greatest hope. Indeed, in 1942, he was the only politician who posed a genuine threat to Churchill’s premiership.
In the spring of 1942, with disaster following disaster, the Prime Minister was in grave danger of losing his post. Twice, in January and July, Churchill fought off votes of no confidence
in the House over the direction of the war. Several days after the first opposition, Sir Stafford Cripps delivered a wildly popular Postscript broadcast after the 9 o’clock news, summing up the general feeling of discontent with the war. A M-O survey concluded that many felt that the broadcast was ‘sensational’.12 Indeed, the broadcast scored a 93 per cent favourable rating – better than either Churchill or J.B. Priestley at their best.
Helen Mitchell wondered if Sir Stafford’s mission to India was a political manoeuvre by the Prime Minister to dispense with a popular rival. But, despite the potential political benefit to Churchill of having him out of the country, Cripps did indeed seem like the perfect person to broker a deal in India. He was sympathetic to the cause of independence, a socialist like the leader of the Indian National Congress, Jawaharlal Nehru, and a vegetarian like Gandhi. He also had previous experience in working with the Muslim League’s Mohammed Ali Jinnah.
When he arrived in Delhi, Cripps offered the Indian National Congress the opportunity to draft a constitution. After the war, he promised, independence would be granted. In a nod to Muslims, the Cripps Offer also allowed those who disagreed with the new constitution to opt out.
Edie Rutherford followed the proceedings anxiously. She expressed some sympathy for the Indian cause, and felt that the Cripps mission to India was the right step towards a fair deal for India. But negotiations began to stall. Rutherford wondered if Japanese bombs dropped on Indian soil might make them see reason and speed up the process. Despite the fact that bombs did in fact begin to fall on India (Calcutta received its first on 6 April), the Indian National Congress was angered by the stipulation that allowed Muslims the right to secede, and the Muslim League was incensed by Congress’ reaction. Furthermore, with British fortunes down, Gandhi considered the deal to be a ‘post-dated cheque on a failing bank’.13 The Offer fell through.
Demoralized by the process, angered at Gandhi and alienated from Nehru, Sir Stafford left India on 12 April 1942. Edie Rutherford’s faith in the righteousness of the Indian cause was in tatters; she thought vindictively that perhaps Britain should abandon India to the Japanese in order to teach the rebellious Indians what tyranny really was. Natalie Tanner remarked simply that if Cripps couldn’t broker a deal, no one could.
So it was with the offer of independence in shreds and British fortunes in the east at their nadir, that Gandhi devised a plan to wrest India once and for all from the hands of the empire. Axis forces seemed irresistible that spring. The Japanese had closed the Burma Road, the Allies’ crucial supply line to China, and now roamed the Bay of Bengal with impunity. In Gandhi’s mind, the only way for both India and Britain to survive was for Britain to leave. ‘Britain cannot defend India, much less herself on Indian soil,’ he argued. ‘The best thing she can do is leave India to her fate. I feel somehow India will not do badly then.’14
In August, the Indian National Congress agreed to support Gandhi’s Quit India Movement. The next day, Gandhi declared ‘open rebellion’ against the British and told his supporters that this was the moment to ‘do or die’. ‘We shall either free India or die in the attempt,’ he declared to the cheering audience.15 That night, he and a number of leaders of the Congress were arrested. Once news of the arrests broke, waves of violence and arson erupted across India, which took over six weeks to quell.
Nella Last learned of Gandhi’s arrest and the resulting chaos while listening to the news over tea. A ‘wee bright fire’ burned in the fireplace as Will and Nella lingered over some wholemeal bread and a few poached eggs from her chickens. Neither one seemed particularly interested in doing much else but to stare at the fire, meditating wistfully about their son and the deteriorating situation in India. Cliff had recently been deployed overseas and all they knew was that he’d been sent ‘east’. Now they wondered if Cliff was landing in India, perhaps helping to subdue the local population or fighting off a Japanese invasion.
To Irene Grant, the chaos in India was a direct result of years of ‘capitalist’ meddling and ‘bad neglectful treatment at our hands’, but she was more concerned with her own struggles with debilitating sciatica and arthritis. Over the course of July and August, she received nine gold injections that were supposed to heal her ailments. Unfortunately, the treatment did little to help, and she complained of ‘pains very bad indeed’, spending most of her time ‘dazed and in pain’. It was a battle just to walk out to her garden.
Edie Rutherford received the news of Gandhi’s arrest with satisfaction. Although she expected India to erupt in rebellion, she also thought it would benefit the British to have him ‘out of the limelight’. Edie respected Gandhi and his stance on non-violence, but she felt it was treacherous and unsporting to raise opposition while Britain was in the fight of its life. She hoped that his incarceration would give him time to think over the fact ‘that the freedom of India at this moment was not worth exchanging for the freedom of the rest of the free world’.
While Edie could be, and often was, quite critical of the government, she nonetheless believed wholeheartedly in the righteousness of the war against the Axis powers. As Churchill repeatedly reminded the British people: not only freedom, but the very fabric of civilization was at stake in this fight. For Edie, active opposition to Britain at such a time was an unnecessary, inexcusable and dangerous diversion. Indeed, she had no time for those who sat on the fence, either. In a war of good versus evil, there could be no neutrality, she believed.
Reports of hardship in neutral countries failed to move Edie to sympathy. When she came across an article in the newspaper regarding Eire’s difficulties in wartime, her only response was, ‘I hope we’re not expected to feel sorry for the mutts? Neutrals deserve to suffer for their blindness.’ In fact, Edie was so fed up with Eire’s neutrality that news from the island only made her ‘just spit and spit and spit and make raspberries’. After an earthquake struck San Juan, Argentina, in January 1944, leaving 2,000 people dead and 4,000 injured, she wrote indifferently, ‘Can’t say I have much pity for Argentina … they are neutrals waxing fat on the war, faugh.’
Edie was a fierce supporter of the war effort and, as a daughter of empire herself, the performance of the Commonwealth and colonies in aid of Britain was a point of personal pride and significance. As such, she closely followed the happenings elsewhere in the empire, especially in her native South Africa, with great interest. The ‘Boer Diehards’ of her native country, who refused to fight for Britain, were a constant source of Edie’s ire.
She did not write a M-O diary at the time, but one suspects that, had Edie kept one, there would have been a hearty cheer for Jan Smuts on 6 September 1939. It was then that Smuts had forced a parliamentary debate against anti-British and pro-Nazi Boers led by J.B.M. Hertzog, in order to bring South Africa into the war on the side of the British. The majority of the Union’s parliament sided with Smuts, who became premier on the force of this debate. Still, there was a significant minority of South Africans who were never supportive of the British war effort – a fact that continued to exercise Edie throughout the war.
Edie’s extended family, however, contributed wholeheartedly to the war. Between her own and her husband Sid’s family, there were at least ten servicemen involved in the fighting, with whom she kept continual correspondence. Sid’s nephew served in the RAF in Cairo, India and the Middle East and a cousin fought with the Cameron Highlanders in France after the D-Day invasions. Her brother and brother-in-law, as well as Edie’s nephew, all fought in South African regiments. These volunteer forces saw action against the Italians in East Africa, the Germans in North Africa in 1942 and later were involved in the Italian offensive in 1944 and 1945.
It irked Edie that the British media, and Britons in general, rarely mentioned the significant events or endeavours of the empire. In order to balance matters a bit, Rutherford made a point of enlightening M-O on many Commonwealth efforts. In July 1943, she spent an entire week listening to the BBC for election news from South Africa to be broadcas
t, but when nothing was reported, she figured that the ‘BBC considers [the] news not worthy of notice’. The next year, when the BBC mentioned South African Union Day on 31 May, Edie could hardly believe it. ‘Hold me before I fall,’ she quipped, ‘the BBC actually mentioned our National Day!’ But, when Anzac Day (a commemoration of Australian and New Zealand forces who fought in the First World War) was celebrated in April 1945, she made sure to mark it, but sniped, ‘not that it means a thing to folk here’.
She was most proud by far, though, of the South African ‘Springboks’, and made sure their efforts were always reported in her diary, as when she reminded M-O that it was South African troops that helped recapture Bardia, on the Libyan border with Egypt, in early 1942. Edie compared them to others in the empire, noting with pride that, despite the ‘wretched Boers’, South Africa contributed more troops than other Commonwealth nations with similar numbers of whites. But although she applauded the bravery and participation of South Africa’s volunteers, Rutherford was disgusted that the best of South African blood was spilt on foreign battlefields while, ‘The anti-British Boers with all their narrow prejudices are safe at home breeding more youngsters to whom they can pass on their poisonous ideas.’
Domestic Soldiers Page 14