by Angus Calder
A more remarkable by-election record is that of the Scottish National Party. Its predecessor, the National Party of Scotland, had been founded in 1928, three years after Plaid Cymru, which it somewhat resembled in composition, attracting Catholic intellectuals, students, journalists and discontented Independent Labour Party followers: the latter included Roland Muirhead, its first chairman, and its secretary John MacCormick Muirhead, a wealthy tanner whose cash kept the party going, was a devoted pacifist in both world wars who argued that industrial and military conscription of Scots was contrary to the terms of the 1707 Treaty of Union with England, and therefore unconstitutional. In 1934, the National Party merged with the Scottish Party founded in 1931 by dissident Unionists (Conservatives) and Scottish Liberals. It polled 16 per cent in the eight seats which it contested in the 1935 general election. In 1937 the SNP pledged itself to oppose conscription save when carried out by a Scottish government, and when war broke out the chairman of its Aberdeen branch, Douglas Young – a university lecturer in Greek, poet and socialist – duly got himself charged with refusing to register either for military service or as a conscientious objector. Through a long legal battle in 1940 and 1941 Young ‘began to attain the status of a martyr’. Privately, he believed that the allies would lose the war and that Scots should prepare to make a separate peace with the Nazi conquerors. He wrote to Muirhead on 1 August 1940:
The Germans will look around for aborigines to run Scotland, and it is to be wished that the eventual administration consist of people who have in the past shown themselves to care for the interests of Scotland.
Yet in February 1944, Young came very close to winning Kirkcaldy Burghs for the SNP, with 41 per cent of the poll. And in April 1945 the new Party secretary, Dr Robert McIntyre, actually won Motherwell – the first nationalist candidate ever to be elected anywhere in Great Britain.18
This success had been prefigured, however, by the remarkable result on 10 April 1940 of a by-election in Argyll. The seat had been held by a Unionist (Conservative). Neither Labour nor Liberals now contested it. The SNP put forward an able candidate, the writer William Power, who fought on local economic issues. He was not explicitly anti-war, but to oppose a government nominee at all could be construed as unpatriotic – especially as only the day before the poll the Germans had invaded Norway. Nevertheless, the SNP got 37 per cent of the vote – easily their most significant electoral performance up to then.
Soothsaying how Scotland would go in 1940 was therefore problematic. The coming of war cut unemployment to negligible proportions, but created local strains, with many Scottish factories closing down entirely. The Clydeside shipyards, booming with war orders, enjoyed fairly tranquil industrial relations. Nevertheless, after Churchill appointed Tom Johnston as Secretary of State for Scotland in February 1941, the latter was able to use the bogey of Scottish nationalism as a powerful lever for getting what he wanted for Scotland from the Cabinet. Johnston himself belonged to a powerful tradition of support for Home Rule in the Scottish Labour Movement, which went back to the 1880s, but had gradually come to the view that Scotland needed no more than administrative devolution of decisions to the Edinburgh Scottish Office and an end to internal partisan strife. Sir John Reith, fellow Scot and pre-war director of the BBC, heard Johnston say in July 1943 that he was ‘very bothered by Bevin and other English ministers who do things affecting Scotland without consulting him. He thinks there is a great danger of Scottish Nationalism coming up, and a sort of Sinn Fein as he called it.”19
It is worth mentioning here an extraordinary example of the extent to which a respected Scot might distance himself (though without apparent political motive) from England during the war. Edwin Muir was one of the country’s leading poets, a middle-aged Orcadian who had once been a member of the Independent Labour Party and had later been attracted to the idea of Social Credit, but was now neither pacifistic, nor communistic, nor fascistic in his sympathies; as for nationalism, he had aroused the fury of C. M. Grieve (‘Hugh MacDiarmid’) by his suggestion in Scott and Scotland (1936) that Scots writers should turn their back on the Scottish tongue and work in English.
His poem ‘Scotland 1941’ carries not the faintest reference to war, but projects a thesis about purely Scottish history. The Calvinistic reformers, Knox and Melville, had destroyed an idyllic rustic culture and created a ‘desolation’, crushing ‘the poet with an iron text’. The ugliness and materialism of the industrial city had followed – ‘Now smoke and dearth and money everywhere …’ Though the war had reduced ‘dearth’ by full employment and restricted the use of money by the rich, Muir presents 1941 as merely another post-industrial year:
[of] spiritual defeat wrapped warm in riches,
No pride but pride of pelf.
Yet it was the ‘perverse’ bravery of Scots in the seventeenth century civil and religious wars – ‘Montrose, MacKail, Argyle’ – which had carved out ‘This towering pulpit of the Golden Calf …’20
Now Muir, ‘frustrated and isolated’ in St Andrews, and short of money, was an idiosyncratic poet concerned with the timeless and with a preoccupation with the freedom and innocence of an Orkney childhood which contrasted totally with the industrial Scotland where he worked as a clerk for a time from the age of nineteen.21 But it remains remarkable that he should draw attention, by the date in his poem’s title, to his sense of the unimportance of the international context. His attitude was not expressed in action like Douglas Young’s, but it too points to the real danger in 1940–41 that in Scotland, and Wales, as in France and Norway, significant people, confronted by defeat, could have reconciled or resigned themselves to it on local cultural grounds.
Wales and Scotland were (and are) very different countries, with almost opposite relationships, historically speaking, to English imperialism. A Welsh dynasty ruling in London, the Tudors, had persuaded the Welsh people into a compromise where independence was largely sacrificed but the Welsh language was preserved. In the eighteenth century, the country had been seized by an evangelical Protestant movement which had in effect divided common folk, largely Calvinistic Methodists, from Anglican, English-speaking gentry, just before English – and Scots – capital had invaded the Welsh economy and industrialised it. Scotland’s rulers, on the other hand, had joined in Union with England in 1707 in the hope – richly fulfilled – of a share in the profits of overseas empire. Scottish capitalism had developed independent strength, and the country had retained its distinctive established church and legal system. But while both countries had responded with especial fervour to the call to arms in the Great War, both had seen a striking upsurge of industrial militancy during and after that war, then met economic catastrophe. The danger in both was that pacifistic indifference to the war in some religious, nationalist and socialist circles would coalesce, in practical effect, under the strain of defeat, invasion or heavy bombing, with Communist obedience to the Moscow line. Besides Radio Caledonia and a Welsh ‘freedom station’, German ‘black’ broadcasting produced a ‘Christian Peace Movement’ station in August 1940, while its ‘Workers Challenge’ station attacked the Labour leadership as betrayers and sneered that the police – ‘coppers’ – were carrying their guns about but hadn’t ‘dared to use them against the workers’.22
Asa Briggs suggests, in his history of wartime broadcasting, that the Germans ‘exaggerated the significance of pacifism in Britain which had undoubtedly assisted them during the period of appeasement before 1939’.23 And, overall, the record of wartime pacifism paradoxically reinforces the claim implicit in the Myth of the Blitz that the British fought in 1940–41 with unusual unity and in a markedly civilised spirit.
In the thirties, pacifism or pacificism had affected people right across the political spectrum. The horrors of the Western Front in 1914–18 and the new horrors of air bombing revealed by the Japanese in China created very widespread revulsion from war. In 1933, the Oxford Union, representing the nation’s junior élite, voted that it would ‘under no circum
stances fight for its King and Country’. While Canon Dick Sheppard’s Peace Pledge Union acquired a membership of 100,000, the Communist Party by the mid-thirties was making ‘the fight against war’ a central campaigning point, though its line was certainly not pacifist. It supported the Abyssinians in their resistance to Mussolini’s invasion. As a leading CP spokesman wrote in 1935:
It is obvious that any victory for Italian aggression would be a tremendous encouragement for German fascism, already threatening the world with war. For Italy to gain any benefit from this war would be to make a new war, starting from Germany, an immediate certainty.24
In the summer of 1935, 11.5 million Britons participated in a ‘peace ballot’ conducted by supporters of the League of Nations, politically middle of the road. Ten to one voted in favour of all-round disarmament and ‘collective security’. The Labour Party in its conference that year rejected the pacifism of its veteran Christian Socialist leader, George Lansbury, who resigned, and identified itself with collective security and the League. But the Conservatives niftily outmanoeuvred Labour’s effort to seize leadership of pro-League opinion, as Baldwin too presented himself as its champion. Having won the 1935 election, Baldwin cynically turned away from the League and appeased Mussolini. Yet ‘appeasers’ in government circles might be moved by revulsion against slaughter, as Baldwin himself was. They too, as Arthur Marwick puts it, ‘had been “scorched” by war: they would not lightly risk playing with fire’.25 While the Labour Party abandoned its opposition to rearmament in 1937, and the Conservative government reluctantly began, and went on, rearming, there was no jingoistic relish in either. And when military conscription was introduced from 1939, provision was made for conscientious objection not only on pacifist grounds, which had been accepted in the First World War, but on political grounds.
There was no repetition of the persecution of conscientious objectors which had disfigured British life in 1916–18. Then, objectors who had refused to accept service in the Noncombatant Corps or other work useful to the war effort had been victims of official incomprehension and mass hysteria. Out of 16,000 objectors, more than 6,000 had gone to prison at least once and about seventy had died from their treatment. But the 1,500 unshakeable ‘absolutists’ had been widely admired for their courage after the war was over, and others, too, had seen that it had been a mistake: they had defended at great cost the individual’s freedom of conscience and judgement.26
In the event, in 1939, twenty-two in every thousand of the first age-group called up to register claimed the right of conscience and went before tribunals. From registration to registration the proportion of claimants fell – only sixteen in every thousand by 9 March, fewer than six by mid-summer 1940. Altogether, however, 59,192 people claimed objection before the end of the war – four times as many as in 1916–18, but of course 1939–45 was a much longer period. Of these, 3,577 were given unconditional exemption, and 28,720 were registered on condition they took up approved work, generally in agriculture, or stayed in their present jobs; 14,691 were registered for non-combatant duties in the armed forces, 12,204 were turned down altogether. The great majority specified religious grounds. They came disproportionately from the professions and the ranks of self-employed men providing services such as barbers. Individualistic occupations, it seems, bred individualist stances – few miners were conscientious objectors.
Only three out of a hundred, in this war, went to jail for their principles. About a third of those turned down altogether maintained their objection to the length of prosecution or court martial. Their experiences – which quite often involved repeated courts martial – were not pleasant. But there was little real legacy of bitterness, either against ‘conchies’ or on their behalf. The government advertised its tolerance well. Cabinet ministers attended a memorial service for George Lansbury held in Westminster Abbey. Later, the composer Britten was unconditionally exempted on the grounds that he had a vocation to continue his artistic work, and James Maxton was allowed to broadcast to America.27
There was only one period when signs of ‘anti-conchie’ hysteria were widely evident, and that was in the summer of 1940. When complete ‘national unity’ was less necessary, before and after that phase, it could be taken for granted, and extended to embrace even conscientious objectors. But with France falling in conditions which suggested general collapse of morale and widespread treachery, people in Britain looked at their neighbours suspiciously, and it was inevitable that some should express strong feeling against pacifists.
There was also strong anti-Communist feeling, nurtured for years not only on Britain’s Right but within the Labour Party. It is interesting to consider why so little official action was directly taken against the CP and its members in 1940; after all, the Joint Intelligence Committee, the senior body of British military and civilian intelligence, meeting on 2 May to consider the implications of the Scandinavian débâcle, concluded that German success in Norway and Denmark had been due to the subversive activities of a well-organised ‘fifth column’ and suggested that, besides enemy aliens, Fascist and IRA supporters, the CP – ‘well organised with 20,000 pledged subscribing members – the Daily Worker circulation is 90,000’ – was a possible source of recruits for such a ‘fifth column’ in Britain.28
Communist Party membership had in fact been rising since the start of the war, particularly in Scotland and the Midlands, and had been reported in a Party pamphlet published in March 1940 to be ‘close to 20,000’. Daily Worker readership had increased correspondingly; weekly sales of 362,000 in January 1940 (a rise of 54,000 in a year) could have included 90,000, or even more, of individual issues sold at weekends, when volunteer vendors were out in force.29
Hence Mary Adams, in charge of Home Intelligence at the Ministry of Information, was perhaps incorrect in asserting within the Ministry that there was no evidence that Communism was gaining ground. The Minister of Information, Sir John Reith, hoped, in a memo of April 1940, that ‘with rope the Party may go some way to hanging itself’. Anxious reports on Communist (and pacifist) activity daily arrived at the Mol from the regions. The Party’s line, openly published, seemed to imply defence, if not support, of German actions. But as the Ministry of Home Security told regional commissioners on 27 July, direct action against it would be foolish. In fact there was no evidence from any country which Hitler had invaded showing that the ‘fifth column’ had drawn on Communists. There was likewise no sign of organised attempts by the Party to slow down or disrupt production in Britain. To repress Communists merely for their political beliefs would arouse accusations of victimisation – and their advocacy of social reform evoked great sympathy. The Mol likewise ca’d canny, doing little directly to counter CP propaganda, and that of ‘an improvised and spasmodic nature’, as when in March 1940 the regional Intelligence officer in Wales reported that Communists intended to take over a meeting of the North Wales Miners’ Federation and the Ministry contacted the Labour Daily Herald and Liberal News Chronicle to get them to put out adverse publicity.30
The Party was protected by powerful commonsense arguments. Firstly its intelligent, dedicated and disciplined members exercised influence in the working-class movement out of all proportion to their numbers. We have noted their strength in Welsh and Scottish coal-fields, but their role in the modern engineering industry which was the basis of so much ‘war production’ was equally, or even more, significant. For instance, in Coventry, where the aircraft industry expanded rapidly in the late thirties with rearmament, the CP ‘played a leading part in the struggle to establish trade union organisation’ which ‘laid the basis for its central position in the trade union movement during the war’. Its major strongholds were three of the best-organised and highest paid factories, but it had a ‘significant presence’ in forty Coventry works altogether, including all the largest ones. Its members dominated meetings of local shop stewards and had much success in getting their way on the district committee of the Amalgamated Engineering Union. Jack Jones,
the dynamic young district organiser of the other key union organising in Coventry, the Transport and General Workers’, worked closely with a leading Party member, Jock Gibson.31 To attack such a well-entrenched section of the workforce at a time when industrial action was at a record low would have been absurd.
Secondly, it was very hard to separate the CP from respectable members of the Labour Party who had honest doubts about war in general or this one in particular, who were angry or guilty over British imperialism in the Far East, or who shared Communist concern over inadequate air-raid shelters and insensitive social policies. The Conservative Party, riddled with people who would be plausibly branded as appeasers, had hardly moved into war against Germany without some confusion and agony. Nor had the Labour Party. It required considerable faith in 1939 to imagine that a vicious war which was expected to combine a revival of trench warfare with the wholesale murder of civilians by heavy bombers could possibly be the prelude to a constructive socialist future.
The leaders of the Labour Left, Sir Stafford Cripps and Aneurin Bevan, argued in its organ Tribune on 8 September 1939 that it was the ‘duty’ of socialists to assist ‘the anti-fascist forces’ while demanding a change of government, working to stop the war degenerating into ‘a simple struggle between rival imperialisms’ and keeping eventual peace terms ever in mind. On another page of the same issue, Konni Zilliacus, later a Labour MP, declared that it was ‘a class war as well as an international war’. A fortnight later, Cripps in Tribune defended the Soviet Union’s invasion of Poland, and he later presented the Russian invasion of Finland in November as a defensive move. This was too much for the Tribune board, though, who a week later denounced the Soviet Union’s actions, adding, however, ‘We deplore her aggression, but we support her for her socialism.’32 By March, Tribune’s editor, H. I. Hartshorn, suspected of sympathising with the CP line, had been forced out, and under the new editorship of Raymond Postgate, and the leadership of Bevan, the journal gave critical support to Churchill’s coalition and attacked the CP fiercely.