Dare to Be a Daniel

by Tony Benn

  I never remember being taken to a concert or the theatre, except once to see Peter Pan. Although we lived next to the Tate Gallery, I cannot even recall having been inside. My brother Dave told me that when Father passed the Tate and considered going in, what clinched his decision not to was that it would cost him sixpence!

  We were not allowed to have pets at home as children, but I had three toy animals of which I was extremely fond: Big Teddy, Little Teddy and Doggie. Doggie still lives in a cupboard at Stansgate.

  It was a happy childhood, but it changed when Dave fell ill and went away to recuperate with Nurse Olive, leaving my brother and me very lonely. Dave’s illness was treated by our family doctor, Alexander Bromley.

  Our original doctor was a Dr Attlee, a relation of Clem’s. I don’t remember him.

  Dr Bromley was a Russian refugee who had come to England with his brother and had then qualified medically. He became a close friend of the family and it was he who gave David the idea of learning Russian, in which David became fluent. He looked after me when I had appendicitis, and I thought I had been put to sleep by an ‘atheist’. I subsequently learned that the anaesthetist in question was also an atheist – a story that amused Dr Bromley very much.

  My mother thought that Jewish doctors were the best because they were interested in the patient rather than the disease, and I myself came to appreciate that when Caroline and I met our first NHS doctor, Dr Stein.

  My mother’s parents used to come and stay with us in Grosvenor Road because they had no fixed home and travelled continually, living mainly in hotels. When my mother was ill in bed once, and Michael and I were fighting, our grandmother said, ‘If you don’t stop fighting, your mother will die’, which frightened us and greatly angered Mother.

  Father’s office was the centre of the house and everything revolved around it. It was not one room, but was spread over the first floor, ground floor and basement, with trapdoors and ladders built by him connecting the rooms, so that he could easily move up and down and consult and file his papers. His secretary Miss Triggs worked on the ground floor.

  Father was a very serious student of national and international politics and developed the most elaborate filing system based on his daily and meticulous study of The Times. Three copies were delivered each day – two of the royal edition, so called because it was printed on rag paper that did not yellow with age. One copy was for my mother and the other two for my father: he would read them carefully, mark them with a decimal system of his own invention and then, by the use of huge guillotines, the newspaper pages were cut, moved over little rollers with sticky paste and stuck onto pages that were then inserted into loose-leaf files appropriate to the subject.

  His indexing system, rather like the Dewey system, was based on giving a number to each subject, all of which were cross-referenced for ease of consultation. For example, his personal files were 101, and Russia, as far as I remember, was 10065. He devised this system because he used to refer, somewhat contemptuously, to a normal filing system where Alcoholism would be filed under A, Drunkenness under D and Teetotalism under T, with various miscellaneous and urgent files under M and U! Such a system – which he sometimes, possibly unfairly, attributed to his brother Ernest – made it impossible Father thought to find anything quickly.

  All my personal files from the time when I was a child until now have always also been marked 101, and some of my children have used 101 for their personal files, too.

  The task of reading, marking, cutting, gluing and filing the day’s news according to their subject took a great deal of his time and Miss Triggs’s, but it meant that at any moment he could pull out any file and remind himself of what The Times had said on the subject over the previous twenty years, with some contempt for those colleagues in Parliament who allowed the day’s banner headlines to shape their thinking.

  The guillotines and gluing machines, though invented by my father and very amateurish, made his basement office into a mini-factory; but they did not have the necessary safety precautions that would now be required by law. On one occasion, one of the really big guillotines – whose size can be gauged by the fact that it was able to cut a page of The Times from top to bottom in one deadly swoop – fell on my older brother Michael and cut a slice off the side of his thumb. He put it in a bottle of alcohol and showed it proudly to reluctant family members and visitors, who found the whole thing disgusting and felt that my father had been highly irresponsible.

  This passion for keeping things reached absurd limits, as when I had my appendix out, aged thirteen, and put it in a little bottle of formaldehyde and brought it to the table. This led my father to make a set of appendixes for all members of the family, so that one day when I came to lunch there were little bits of vegetable in bottles of cold tea, one for each member of the family.

  We only had one telephone in the house – VICtoria 0078 – the number presumably indicating the low coverage of the telephone at the time it was installed. Because Father wanted to be able to phone and work at the same time, he acquired from the Post Office a telephone operator’s headset, which was very big and cumbersome and drove my mother mad because when she answered the phone the headset messed up her hair, which had to be brushed back into position.

  Father’s great passion was for what he called ‘improvements’ and the house was full of them, normally installed by a jobbing carpenter who did his best to make possible the extraordinary ideas my father had as to how a house should be constructed.

  For example, just outside one of his offices he built a cupboard in the ceiling and all his clothes were hung on coathangers attached to a bar, which with the aid of a pulley could be hauled up and out of sight. The rope had to be released to allow him to choose what suit he was going to wear that day.

  As a twelve-year-old, I remember getting into serious trouble when we had a visit from his parliamentary colleagues and, in order to interest them, I opened the cupboard door and released his clothes, so that they all came down. Although this aroused a great deal of amusement, as you can imagine, it did not go down very well with my mother.

  Most of the visitors to the house were connected with Father’s work. For instance, on one occasion the Maharaja of Alwar, whom Father had met while Secretary of State for India, came. He was charming and told us stories about hunting tigers, and he gave me an Indian prince’s outfit with a turban, a jewelled jacket and white breeches, the remains of which are still rotting in a box at Stansgate. I later discovered that he had been a brute in his own state, and I think he was subsequently murdered in France. Another visitor was Reinhold Niebuhr, the American theologian, who had married Ursula, an English student. They were firm family friends.

  We were governed by Victorian principles of prudence and economy. Father always turned the lights out and we were rebuked for leaving them on. The greatest offence that we could commit was to WASTE TIME!

  Despite this rather grim account, he was the most amusing man I have ever met, with a great sense of humour, a capacity to tell stories and play practical jokes that would have done credit to a teenager, and listening to him was always enormous fun.

  STANSGATE

  All of our holidays have been at Stansgate, on the Blackwater estuary in Essex, since I was a child. My father loved the house and the location; Stansgate also became his title in the Lords, which has given the impression that it is an ancient stately home, and that I came from one of the oldest aristocratic families in Britain – a myth nurtured by the tabloids for their own political purposes.

  My father spent his childhood summers there sailing on the river and taking part in plays, which his father wrote and which were enacted in the garden.

  We had no mains water supply when I was a child and we depended on a windmill to raise water from our well, using oil lamps to light the house and wood fires to heat it.

  There was a disused slaughter house, which my father had bought from a nearby farmer, and it was there that he moved his archives from L
ondon when the house in Millbank caught fire in 1940. It would be more interesting to claim that we had been victims of the Blitz, but the real reason for the fire was that, in order to save money, my father had asked my brother Michael (who was then in his late teens) to rewire his office and it had not been done safely. Happily, most of the papers were safe, and during the war my brother and I moved them to this old slaughter house, and Father spent many happy hours going over them. At Stansgate we swam and cycled and did a bit of sailing, and Father used to sit with us and reminisce about the old days.

  My brothers and I did not have any pets in London, but there was a little puss called Fluffy living locally at Stansgate, which my brother and I smuggled into the car to take back to London. On the way back my father discovered this kitten and was furious – he stopped the car, knocked at a cottage and asked the woman who lived there to take it. We were very upset. Father had strong ideas about what was, and what was not, in order.

  On another occasion at Stansgate my brother David gave a local boy my set of toy soldiers while I was away. I loved those soldiers – I would dig trenches and sew sandbags, and would advance and withdraw the soldiers in my own little stories. When David gave them away I was so angry that I rushed at him and bit him; he screamed and I was punished, and the other boy had to return the soldiers.

  The house at Stansgate was a pre-fabricated wooden structure built by Boulton and Paul, at a cost of £600, which had been floated downriver for construction and originally had a thatched roof. Captain Gray had this replaced by tiles, and covered the outside with expanded metal and then pebble-dashed it to give it greater strength.

  There were various outbuildings, including the windmill, a garage and a circular wooden summer house which we used to call ‘The Temple’, where Mother would work when she wanted to escape from the family. The farm was next door and we used to milk the cows and go out on the tractor at harvest time, and ask for a ride on the horses that drew the waggons as the hay was collected and built up into hayricks for winter feed.

  Father had acquired an old ship’s lifeboat, which he named the Brethren, and we used to sail in the Blackwater. It had strong tides and muddy beaches on which, if we got stuck, we had to wait for the tide to come in and float us off many hours later, for the mud was like quicksand and could trap you, making escape impossible.

  We sailed to Osea Island, just opposite; down to Bradwell, where the long lines of deserted merchant ships lay at anchor because of the Depression; or up to Maldon, from where the fishing smacks came out each day, returning later with their catches.

  Osea Island itself was fascinating, with a pier along which were gun emplacements to defend the river in the First World War; facing us across the river was the big house built by Charrington, who gave up his fortune as a brewer, and turned the house into a home for recovering alcoholics.

  There was a simple causeway connecting Osea to the mainland, used for the delivery of supplies, and when the tide was low the causeway would appear. The postman would cycle across with letters to deliver and collect from the postbox, which bore the unique inscription: ‘Letters collected according to the tide.’

  Here, as in London, Father was always making ‘improvements’ with the help of a local joiner. For example, all the rooms at Stansgate interconnected – so that you could enter the bathrooms from both ends, which was not always altogether comfortable!

  The nearest village was Steeple, with the Star Inn and the Sun and Anchor, a little church and two chapels, one being established for a dissenting sect called the Peculiar People and the other Congregational. There my grandmother had paid for a notice board on which it was announced that marriages could be ‘Solomonized’ – an innocent misprint that conveyed the wrong impression of the sanctity of monogamous marriage.

  Also in Steeple was Mr Harrington, the cobbler, who worked in a little thatched shed and would cut our hair for sixpence, which seemed a lot at the time.

  Mrs Hipsey had a cottage where she took in washing, and in 1945 we collected from her the laundry we had left there to be washed in 1939 – and it had all been done and kept carefully.

  Along the street was Mr Dash, who had a horse and cart and advertised his work with the simple words painted on the shed next door: ‘DASH 1868’, which remained there for many years.

  Further away was Southminster and occasionally we would go to Maldon, or even Chelmsford, which seemed like a teeming metropolis compared to Steeple.

  We sat on the lawn, played games, sunbathed, collected chalk and pebbles from the beach and swam in the river, which was at that time clean enough to do so safely.

  Once a week we had a musical evening and I would play some 78 rpm records on an old gramophone – all of which are still in my possession – and we would sit and drink tea (or rather the grown-ups did, because I was not allowed to drink tea or coffee until I was twelve, on the same day that I wore long trousers for the first time).

  Stansgate was – and still is – my idea of a real holiday and, apart from a one-day trip to Boulogne, I never went abroad until my war service; the happiest time for me is to have my children and grandchildren down for a weekend and discuss with them more and more improvements.

  4

  Growing Up

  WHEN I WAS born in 1925, my father was, as I said, the Liberal Member of Parliament for Leith. Two years later he left the Liberals, resigned his seat and joined the Labour Party. In 1928 he was asked to stand for Aberdeen and was successfully elected there in a by-election.

  In that year, when I was three and a half, I visited the home of a Labour MP, Sir Oswald Mosley, who had joined Labour from the Conservatives. I must have been invited to a children’s party, although I don’t remember that; Mother recalled that we regularly played with Cynthia and Oswald Mosley’s children, so presumably that was why we were there. I remember there were enamelled fire ‘dogs’ – one in the shape of a soldier and one a sailor – and at the end I was asked to say thank you and said, ‘Boys and girls and sailors, thank you for a nice tea’: my first speech. Mother had no time for ‘Tom’ Mosley, as he was known, or the British Union of Fascists, which he later formed.

  In June 1930, at the age of five (by which time my father was in the Cabinet as Secretary of State for India), I went to 10 Downing Street to watch the Trooping of the Colour from the balcony, and Ramsay MacDonald gave me a chocolate biscuit. My mother told me that I said afterwards, ‘I expected to meet the Prime Minister, but I didn’t expect a chocolate biscuit.’

  Ramsay MacDonald had been left a widower with five young children, and by the time he was Prime Minister for the second time, his daughter Ishbel acted for him as his host at Number 10. In her hand-written letter of invitation to my mother to take us to see the Trooping of the Colour, she added:

  Of course if it is against your principles to make them picture soldiers as fine fellows belonging to a good institution I shall quite understand. I should like to have an anti military lecture for the children after the show, but I think I had better leave that to the parents.

  Father had devoted his period at the India Office to an attempt to bring about Indian self-government, for which he was sharply criticised by Churchill. It was at Father’s initiative that a Round Table conference was arranged in London in late 1931 to discuss the future of India. In the election in October that year, Labour was heavily defeated and my father lost his seat. Nevertheless he took me to meet Mahatma Gandhi with my older brother Michael, and I remember the occasion vividly because Gandhi, who was sitting on the floor on a carpet, invited us to sit down next to him. Though I don’t remember what he said, I was much struck by the power of the man who both defeated the British empire and reconciled the British to their defeat – as Archbishop Desmond Tutu later attempted with his policy of Truth and Reconciliation.

  When Father lost his North Aberdeen seat, he sent Michael a very sweet telegram from Scotland, saying:

  + + MUCH MORE TIME FOR GAMES NOW = DADDY + +

  The 1
935 election was the first which I remember and in which I was involved. I thought of myself as a socialist at an early age, although I did not really understand what ‘socialism’ meant. I distributed a little book called Fifty Reasons Why You Should Vote Labour. It cost one penny and on each page was a different policy, such as:

  No. 1 The Peace Act: Once it was passed no Government without violating the law of the land could resort to war as an instrument of national policy.

  No. 15 National Transport: The duty of the National Transport Board would be to bring all forms of transport together to give the public good service and the employees a fair deal.

  No. 26 Land Ownership: A primary step towards the national planning of agriculture is to bring all agricultural land under public ownership.

  No. 41 Child Welfare: Labour’s Policy is to provide more and better infant welfare centres and to develop, on a large scale, open-air nursery schools.

  * * *

  FIFTY REASONS WHY YOU SHOULD VOTE LABOUR

  Prices:

  1 copy, 1½d. post free

  12 copies, 10d. „

  100 „ 6s. 8d. „

  from

  THE LABOUR PUBLICATIONS DEPT.

  Transport House,

  Smith Square, London, S.W.1

  October 1935

  3.—DISARMAMENT

  Labour stands for drastic disarmament by rapid stages through international agreement.

  A Labour Government would maintain such defence forces as are necessary and consistent with our membership of the League.

  But the best defence is not huge competitive armaments, but the organisation of collective security and the agreed reduction of national armaments everywhere.