The Myth of the Blitz

by Angus Calder

  4

  Celts, Reds and Conchies

  At last! Now is the time with due intensity

  To hew to what really matters – not

  ‘Making the world safe for democracy’,

  ‘Saving civilization’, or any such rot.

  Hugh MacDiarmid, ‘Verses Written

  during the Second World War’

  AN INTERNAL ‘NATIONAL problem’ lay far less deeply submerged under the surface of British life in 1939–41 than most historians have assumed.

  Ireland might have been a major problem for the British government as it had been during the First World War. The Easter Rising of 1916 had ignited the tinder of nationalism to such effect that by 1922 an Irish Free State had emerged, though Ulster remained outside it. The Free State was formally a member of the British Commonwealth until 1949, but in 1937 its leader, De Valera, devised a new constitution which gave it, as ‘Eire’, complete practical independence. Throughout the Second World War, Eire was neutral, though its subjects were still accorded automatic British citizenship if resident on the larger island.

  The clandestine Irish Republican Army continued to demand the reintegration of Ulster with Eire. From January 1939 it conducted a campaign of violent ‘outrages’, calling on Britain to withdraw her institutions and representatives of all kinds from the whole of Ireland. Public utilities in various parts of England were attacked with explosives, bombs went off in the London Underground, fires were started in stores in Coventry. There were tear-gas bombs in London cinemas, balloon-acid bombs in letterboxes and post offices, and a device at Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks, in the summer, which blew up King Henry VII. An explosion in Coventry’s shopping centre on 25 August left devastation like an air raid, five people dead and several more seriously injured, and on the same day there were more IRA incendiary bombs in Blackpool and Liverpool.1 Outrages continued during the Phoney War.

  But De Valera and the Dail had responded by stern measures against the IRA in Eire, internment without trial. Many thoughts of danger from Ireland seem to have occurred to people in Britain, at all levels, during the paranoid summer of 1940. Ulster required some delicate handling. Its Protestant, Unionist government loyally asked for conscription to be applied there, but Whitehall feared that this might inflame Catholic and nationalist feeling, strengthen the IRA, and enrage Irish emigrant sentiment in the USA. So Ulstermen and women in the services were all volunteers: some 42,000 came forward during the war, with early peaks in October 1939 and the summer of 1940. Even more Eire citizens ‘went to it’ in the British armed forces – some 50,000 – and the BBC eventually put out a special series of Irish Half Hours for them.2 And other Irish assisted in the civilian war effort – 60,000 found work in Britain in 1940–41 and a further 100,000 in 1942–3.3

  The possibility that the Germans might try to invade Britain via Ireland was taken so seriously that four divisions of British troops were stationed in Ulster by 1941. Belfast received its first significant air raid on 7 April of that year, when some 100 casualties were caused; eight days later a further attack killed at least 745 people and seriously injured hundreds more. Raids early in May caused several hundred further casualties. Belfast’s shelters were probably fewer and worse than in any other British city. A hundred thousand people fled to the countryside after the first big raid. Firemen were sent up from Eire to help. Protestants and Catholics joined in prayer at a public funeral for 150 of the victims. Then, on 31 May 1941, the Germans made an absurd navigational error and dropped four bombs on Dublin, killing twenty-nine people and seriously injuring forty-five. On balance, Irish neutrality was effectively pro-British. The Irish and British economies, already closely involved with each other, were brought still closer. Though the Irish authorities turned a blind eye on Nazi use of Eire as a base for espionage, that proved inefficient – and though the Germans in May 1940 sent an agent to contact the IRA in Eire, he found them so disunited as to be useless. (‘You know how to die for Ireland’, he told them, ‘but how to fight for it you have not the faintest idea.’4)

  Scotland and Wales were in effect more problematic. It must be stressed that there are no substantial signs that ‘morale’ during the war was ever weaker in these countries than in England. But they were among the ‘buried nationalities’ of Europe, to use a phrase deployed by Tom Nairn, who compares them with Catalonia and Euzkadi (the Basque country).5 The German conquest of the Low Countries and France in 1940 was accompanied by a radio propaganda barrage which seemed to people within the BBC to have been spectacularly effective, and had included appeals to Flemish and Breton nationalists. The ‘New British Broadcasting Station’ operating from Germany and associated above all with William Joyce, ‘Lord Haw-Haw’, was supplemented at this time with a ‘Welsh’ freedom station and ‘Radio Caledonia’, which demanded a separate peace for Scotland.6 There were good reasons for British public men to be alert to special factors liable to influence morale in Wales and Scotland.

  Both contained areas where traditional heavy industries had taken a hammering in the interwar years. Even before the great slump of 1929, a fifth of all British coal-miners were unemployed – and coal was a key industry in both south Wales and Lowland Scotland. A similar decline was seen in shipbuilding, textiles and iron and steel. Thereafter, matters got even worse. In 1932, 36.5 per cent of Welsh workers were unemployed, 27.7 per cent in Scotland – and these proportions were higher than those found in any area of England, or even in Ulster. In certain particular areas the figures were still more horrendous. In Wales, in 1934, ‘74 per cent of male workers were unemployed in Brynmawr, 73 per cent in Dowlais and 66 per cent in Merthyr’. As for Scotland, ‘whereas Glasgow had a total of 89,600 unemployed in 1936, Birmingham, a city of comparable size, had only 21,000’.7

  Both Scotland and Wales had thrown up nationalist parties between the wars. Plaid Cymru, formed in 1925, had brought together ‘nonconformist radicals of the old school’, many of them previously pacifist, with certain cosmopolitan intellectuals – one of them the writer Saunders Lewis – who were attracted by Roman Catholicism and by right-wing French Catholic nationalism. The party was at first mainly a cultural pressure group, committed above all to the protection of the Welsh language. But Lewis was a man with some charisma, and Kenneth O. Morgan sees his small party as highly significant of a ‘phase of self-examination and self-doubt’ in Wales which had important influences on the country’s whole culture. By 1939 it had 2,000 members. Its growth had been greatly stimulated by the ‘martyrdom’ of Saunders Lewis and two other leading members after an incident in September 1936 when they had taken part in the burning of an RAF bombing school in Caernarvonshire to which there had been much local opposition, and had then admitted responsibility. Welsh people of all parties were angered when the Baldwin government moved the trial from a local Welsh court to the Old Bailey, on the grounds that a Welsh jury would probably be biased. No less a Welshman than David Lloyd George wrote of this as an ‘outrage’ that made his ‘blood boil’. The three men were imprisoned in London for nine months after refusing to give evidence in English. There was a mass public subscription in Wales to pay their defence costs. ‘For writers and intellectuals’, Kenneth Morgan observes, ‘the imprisonment of “the three” for an idealistic gesture committed on behalf of nationalist and pacific values had a profound impact.’

  The appeal of Plaid Cymru for Christian pacifists was enhanced. Lewis, however, was a man of the Right, ‘tinged with anti-democratic and anti-liberal sentiments’. Though he resigned the presidency of Plaid Cymru in 1939, after serving for thirteen years, his party remained detached from ‘England’s imperialist war’. In August 1940 his successor, Professor Daniel, explained that the war was ‘a clash of rival imperialisms from which Wales, like the other small nations of Europe, has nothing to gain but everything to lose … It does not accept the popular English view that this war is a crusade of light against darkness. It does not admit the right of England to conscript Welshmen into her ar
my …’ The German Abwehr thought of attempting to use Welsh Nationalists as supporters ‘on the line of Quisling in Norway or the Breton separatists in France’. Despite the general unpopularity of Lewis’s intense brand of nationalism, he received 22.5 per cent of the vote in a by-election in January 1943 for the University of Wales parliamentary constituency (one confined to the institution’s graduates) – a striking proof of his prestige in certain intellectual circles.8

  But a well-informed English patriot casting anxious eyes towards Wales in the summer of 1940 would be more worried by the popularity and militancy of the Communist Party in certain areas. A quarter of the insured working population of Wales was employed in coal in 1939. The Miners’ Federation in Wales represented 135,000 miners and sponsored thirteen MPs. Communists were entrenched in its executive council and its impressive president, Arthur Horner, was a Communist. His base at Mardy in the Rhondda Valley had been in the twenties the best-known of the ‘Little Moscows’ which flourished in Wales, where a whole community had been ‘translated into a Welsh sector of a proletarian international with its Young Pioneers, its secular funerals (red ribbons and hammer-and-sickle wreaths) …’ By the mid-thirties, the CP was an important part of the informal ‘Popular Front’, including Labour and Independent Labour Party people, which organised an astonishing demonstration on Sunday 3 February 1935, when, as Gwyn A. Williams puts it, ‘the population of south Wales seems to have turned out on to the streets’, in a great cry of protest against unemployment and the ‘Means Test’. About 300,000 people marched that day – one Welsh person in seven. The CP’s moral position was strengthened by the fact that of the 174 volunteers who fought with the International Brigade in Spain, the majority were ‘in coal’ and Communists: ‘To serve in Spain became as much a mark of honour as to have gone to jail for the cause … a poverty stricken people gave milk, money and goods to the Spanish republic’ As late as 1945, the Communist Party leader, Harry Pollitt, came close to defeating Labour in the Rhondda heartland of working-class militancy.9

  In 1938 the Central Committee of the British CP acknowledged the right to self-determination of Wales – and Scotland – and supported the Welsh language. Horner did not go along with nationalism. Nor did he like it in 1939 when the CPGB committed itself after the Nazi-Soviet pact to the view that Britain was fighting an ‘imperialist’ war. Kenneth Morgan suggests that he ‘defied the might of the Comintern in endorsing the war effort’. However, when he expressed his detestation of Hitler to a journalist at the time, and was asked how far he was actually prepared to go in fighting him, Horner hesitated and said ‘I stop short at defence.’10

  And many in the Welsh mining valleys did not like Winston Churchill. It was widely believed in the working-class movement that, when Home Secretary in 1910, Churchill had ordered troops to fire on strikers at Tonypandy in the Rhondda. In fact he ‘had at first specifically forbidden the sending of troops, insisting that police be used instead. But he had later authorised the stationing of troops in the valley’.11 And no class-conscious miner on any coalfield was going to forget Churchill’s fierce opposition to the General Strike of 1926. It is no accident that the most memorably vehement of Churchill’s critics in the wartime Commons was Aneurin Bevan, who represented a Welsh mining constituency. Even in August 1940, while recognising Churchill’s immense popularity, he was warning that ‘in a democracy, idolatry is the first sin. Not even the supreme emergency of war justifies the abandonment of critical judgement.’12

  However, the only Communist Party MP in the Commons was Willie Gallacher, who sat for West Fife, in Scotland, from 1935 to 1951. Like Horner, he was only a very reluctant follower of his party’s line of opposition to the war in 1939–41. Nevertheless, he ‘pursued an obstructionist policy of attacking the Government on issues such as cheap fares for parents of evacuees; payment of the armed forces; the alleged use of the Home Guard in industrial disputes in Scotland; and the inadequacies of the air-raid shelter system …’13

  Gallacher was a famous veteran of the militant doings in and around Glasgow in 1915–22 which had created the myth of the ‘Red Clyde’. Clydeside during the First World War had been the key centre of arms production in the British Empire. It had also seen a great Rent Strike in 1915 – R. J. Morris has recently argued that ‘the people of Glasgow collectively and in conjunction with others wrecked an important part of the capitalist system, namely the free market in private rented housing, for ever’.14 This had been preceded and was followed by impressive strikes by skilled engineers, and vehement anti-war agitation, notably by John Maclean, the leading Scottish Marxist who after the Russian Revolution became Soviet Consul in Glasgow. Maclean was several times jailed. Gallacher and other shop stewards active in the Clyde Workers’ Committee were at one stage deported to Edinburgh. After the war, the Clyde Workers’ Committee was revived to demand a thirty-hour week, the Scottish Trade Union Congress more moderately called for forty hours and the ‘Forty-hour Strike’ which ensued worried the Lloyd George government so much that 12,000 troops and six tanks were sent into Glasgow. On 31 January a huge crowd was attacked and dispersed by police in George Square. The Myth of Red Clyde conflated this record of militancy with the election of November 1922, in which ten Labour MPs were returned in the fifteen Glasgow constituencies, and with the image acquired by these ‘Clydesiders’ of extreme fundamentalist socialists. While some historians agree with Morris that the Myth or legend is not without much basis in fact – after all, Glasgow did become and remain a stronghold of left-wing politics – others have stressed that the Women’s Rent Strike and the strikes by engineers were separate, and that 1916–19 saw three years of industrial peace and successful arms production in Clydeside, while Labour’s triumph in 1922 had much more to do with the swing of the Catholic vote to the left by the RC hierarchy itself than with the classes in Marxism previously organised by John Maclean.15

  Be that as it may, myths, as this book has argued, can affect ‘fact’ by affecting behaviour. Glasgow’s shipbuilding industry and the Scottish coal-mines were on the rack of industrial decline between the wars – but both were of key significance again after 1939.

  The CP had considerable influence in industrial Scotland. Abe Moffat, who sat on Fife County Council as a Communist from 1924, resigned from it in 1942 when elected president of the National Union of Scottish Mineworkers. Alexander Sloan, secretary of the Union, became Labour MP for South Ayrshire just before the war. He had been a conscientious objector in the previous world war, joined the Labour Party Peace Aims Group in 1939 and signed their manifesto in October calling for an armistice. He worked closely with Gallacher in the Commons. Like all other sections of the Trade Union Congress, the Miners’ Federation of Great Britain adopted a policy of full support for the Chamberlain government against Germany. The Federation’s Scottish constituent formally supported ‘the war against Fascist aggression’. But its Annual Conference on 4 May 1940 sent fraternal greetings to the Russian miners’ trade unions. Its delegate conference on 1 July 1940 called by 61:45 for ‘the establishment of a Labour Government and complete removal of elements associated with the Chamberlain Government from important offices in this country’. Sloan, seconding, argued:

  The working classes are fighting because they believe they are fighting for freedom. The possessing classes are fighting for their own interests. Ten per cent of the population possesses 90 per cent of the wealth. France was defeated because 200 families of France possess nearly the whole of the country.16

  The Independent Labour Party had been an important constituent of the Labour Party until 1932. Its disaffiliation reduced it to a dwindling purist rump with Marxist propensities, though its relations with the CP were intensely hostile. Its figurehead, James Maxton, MP, had been a pacifist agitator on the ‘Red Clyde’, and publicly congratulated Chamberlain in 1938 for securing the Munich agreement. In practice, as left-socialist opponents of the war, he and his party in 1939–41 had a position akin to that of the CP, but they r
emained committed to peace after Russia was invaded. Despite this, Maxton and his fellow MPs John McGovern and Campbell Stephen would all be re-elected as Independent Labour Party members in 1945. All three had seats in Glasgow, which was the only area in Britain where the Independent Labour Party, in normal times, retained electoral significance.

  But 1939–45 was not a normal period. Even before Labour went into Churchill’s coalition in May 1940, the major parties observed an ‘electoral truce’ in by-elections. Despite its ‘Stop the War’ line, the Independent Labour Party gained new members, and eventually did rather well in by-elections. At Lancaster in October 1941, at Central Edinburgh in December and again in Cardiff in March 1942, it secured, in the absence of Labour candidates, between a fifth and three-tenths of the vote. While ‘independents’ of a bellicose populist-Conservative cast did as well or better in the same phase in other parts of the country, there is clear evidence that the Independent Labour Party’s virtual pacifism did not make its members electoral pariahs. Even in April 1940, its candidate got a quarter of the poll in Renfrew East, near Glasgow.17