The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  Some of what was revealed was shocking. When it was agreed that German observers be given a sight of the latest RAF aircraft, they were so unready that fake gun-turrets and hurriedly trained special pilots had to be used to pretend things were better than they were. By 1937 even the cabinet knew that the Luftwaffe was stretching ahead in aircraft numbers and pilot training, and that Churchill had been right all along. There was always an ambiguity in the Baldwin–Chamberlain cabinet about the infuriating old man’s campaign; from early on, though they hoped he was wrong, they accepted at some level that he might be right. In rejecting him as a cabinet minister after his triumphant 1935 election, Baldwin wrote to the Conservative chief whip that Churchill ‘should be kept fresh to be our wartime prime minister’, and he was not being merely wry. Meanwhile, Churchill used every method he could think of to keep the pressure up. He wrote a torrent of articles and soon had at least some of the press, notably the Daily Mail, on his side. He spoke endlessly in the Commons. He wrote privately to ministers. He accumulated a growing group of outriders, MPs like Harold Macmillan and Brendan Bracken, mavericks like the ‘Red’ Countess of Atholl, and increasingly press supporters too, along with Labour figures and even the odd trade unionist. He would hold court in the Savoy Hotel, and slowly but surely part of public opinion began to swing his way.

  Behind the scenes, after 1935, British rearmament was underway, if progressing slowly. Sir Henry Tizard, one of the many conscientious public servants who found Churchill’s attacks almost intolerable, had driven through the development and installation across the south of England of radio direction-finding (RDF) stations, later known by the American acronym radar (radio detection and ranging). The credit went both to the Scottish scientist who invented the system, Robert Watson-Watt, and to Tizard for understanding its implications; without these men, the Battle of Britain would have been lost. As to the aircraft themselves, a large system of shadow armaments factories, which could be turned to full armaments production, was being prepared. In February 1936 the first prototype Hawker Hurricane was tested. Correctly forecasting the government’s changing attitude, the plane’s privately owned manufacturers began planning for mass production of the fighter that would be the staple of the 1940 struggle; their foresight paid off in July 1936, when 600 aircraft were ordered. Even so, after years of downplaying military needs for civilian, it took a long time to prepare the factories and refine the designs, and by September 1939, against the RAF orders for 3,500 Hurricanes, fewer than 500 had actually been delivered. Reginald Mitchell’s famous Spitfire Mark 1 began test flights at Southampton a few months after the Hurricane. Mitchell, who thought it had ‘a bloody silly name’, died in 1937 from cancer, leaving the aircraft to be refined by others. The first were delivered to the RAF by August 1938 but Supermarine struggled to build enough and the job was sub-contracted to a car maker, Nuffield, who built a new factory at Castle Bromwich. Nuffield’s efforts proved no more successful than Supermarine’s and by the beginning of 1939 only forty-six airworthy Spitfires had been delivered to the RAF.

  In other ways, the numbers game being played by Churchill and the ministers had unhappy consequences. In an attempt to match the Luftwaffe’s superior strength, every semi-modern design was ordered for the RAF during the late thirties, including aircraft that would prove obsolete by 1940, such as the ill-starred Fairey Battle light bomber and the Bristol Blenheim. In general, believing the old mantra that the bomber would always get through, both Churchill and most RAF commanders overestimated the effectiveness of bombing. By the time the war started, only a relatively small proportion of British bombers could actually reach Berlin, and their payloads were light. Churchill, like Baldwin and most other politicians, believed ten or twenty times as many people would be killed in bombing raids as actually were, and assumed gas would be used by all sides. It is this combination of hard-edged, unflinching warnings about the coming war and the fear of overwhelming air attack, against which there would be no defence, that explains the ambiguous popular attitude to Churchill. He was bravely speaking out, but his message seemed horrible and hopeless. Virginia Woolf’s diary in 1938 reports the local postman saying that the country might be cheering Chamberlain now, ‘but in five years time we may be saying we ought to have put him, Hitler, down now. These dictators & their lust for power – they can’t stop. He’ll get stronger & stronger.’ Yet then the postal philosopher adds, ‘But now we can’t help being glad of peace. It’s human nature.’

  A Funny Kind of Crisis

  The hardest thing to understand about the abdication crisis of 1936 is why it has been remembered as a moment of national trauma. After all, there were plenty of other things to worry about at the time. Mass unemployment remained at a monstrous level. The dictators were on the march. The Spanish Civil War was raging. Yet when the foreign secretary Anthony Eden arrived to tell the prime minister about his latest moves, Baldwin rebuked him: ‘I hope you will not trouble me too much with foreign affairs just now.’ He was, he explained, far more worried about the consequences of Edward VIII’s love affair with American divorcee Wallis Simpson. Baldwin spent day after day wrestling with other ministers, his friends and the leaders of rival parties over what to do. For months, normal political life seems almost to have come to a standstill while archbishops, press lords, MPs, eminent lawyers and royal advisers argued with the forty-one-year-old monarch and with each other. In this age before international broadcasting or the internet, most of the public were ignorant of the story. Rumours leaked into Britain, of course. American and other newspapers were covering the great romance between the King and the sexy (though not beautiful) Mrs Simpson at lavish length. In the Commons it was asked why news magazines from overseas were on sale with certain pages torn out. Knowing fingers tapped knowing noses. Everybody who was anybody knew. One example of the kind of letters pouring in from British citizens overseas came from the US to the editor of The Times and protested that Britain’s reputation abroad was being covered in a perfect avalanche of muck and slime: the doings of the King had ‘in the course of a few months transformed Great Britain, as envisaged by the average American, from a sober and dignified realm into a dizzy Balkan musical comedy attuned to the rhythm of Jazz’.122 Yet until the episode was almost over, and the King on the road to abdication and exile, none of this was mentioned in the British press, never mind broadcast by the BBC. Lord Beaverbrook had been summoned by King Edward to Buckingham Palace and asked to help impose a news blackout on Mrs Simpson’s second divorce, which would clear the way for their marriage. She was, said the monarch, ‘ill, unhappy and distressed by the thought of notoriety’.123 Beaverbrook promptly agreed. With Esmond Rothermere of the rival Associated Newspapers group, he set about creating a conspiracy of silence among the press barons. When the news finally broke, and it was clear that Britain was going to lose her new monarch, Beaverbrook’s Daily Express would join forces with the Daily Mail to try to create a ‘King’s Party’ to get him to fight on. They would be joined by Winston Churchill. It was another example of the romantic swashbuckling outsiders (as they saw themselves) confronting the timid, orthodox political and religious establishment still led by Baldwin. Baldwin saw it differently. Confronted by Harmsworth about the idea of a ‘morganatic marriage’ which would have allowed the two to marry but without Mrs Simpson becoming Queen of England, Baldwin told him that ‘he and his filthy paper did not really know the mind of the English people, whereas I did’. And in a remark which perhaps explains as well as any other why the marriage plans of the King convulsed the country’s leadership, Baldwin added, ‘You are right: the ideal of morality and duty and self-sacrifice and decency certainly has gone down since the War: but the ideal of Kingship has gone up . . . And I tell you the English people will never accept the thing that you suggest.’124

  We cannot tell what the British people really thought. Before scientific opinion polling, and with no vote that put it to the test, all we have are the impressionistic accounts from diarists and
reports of the size of crowds on the streets. For what all that is worth, Baldwin seems nearer the truth than the ‘King’s Party’. Churchill found himself mocked and then shouted down in the Commons. In private he cried and raged at the way his King was being treated, one of the most humiliating episodes of his life at a time when he needed all his political credibility for the rearmament struggle. Churchill was widely thought to have miscalculated so badly that his reputation could not recover. This was still a country scandalized by divorce, particularly double divorce (Mrs Simpson’s position), and which expected better behaviour from its leaders than from the rest of society. Later, in his famous broadcast, the Duke of Windsor, as he had suddenly become, cast his choice as a near-impossible one between love and duty. We have been acclimatized long since to assume that love should always win through – and that was how, even in 1936, Americans and many other people saw it. At the time in Britain, however, there was deep resentment about Edward’s dereliction of duty. When the story finally broke, the vast majority of newspapers were brutally critical and there were reports of respectable middle-class people refusing to stand for ‘God Save the King’.

  Baldwin, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the heads of the Commonwealth countries had hoped that the King would give up Mrs Simpson. But what really scared them was the idea that he might not, and also try to stay on as monarch. Because he chose the other path, the full consequences have rarely been spelled out. But Baldwin and many others thought it would have destroyed the British Empire, since the monarchy was the keystone that held it together. The prime ministers of Australia and Canada thought so too. The story of 1939–45 would have been different had Canada, Australia and South Africa, which took a similar view, broken their formal links with the United Kingdom a couple of years earlier. Inside Britain there would have been a bitter stand-off between the King and the government. Baldwin would have resigned. There would have been a general election, in which neither of the opposition parties would have supported the King. After it, senior Commonwealth officials predicted, drastic cuts in the Civil List supporting the monarchy and an upsurge of popular feeling would have forced him out. Britain would perhaps have been nearer to ditching the entire institution than at any time since the return of Charles II. All this is speculation, though it helps explain Baldwin’s dismissal of Eden’s questions about overseas affairs.

  Monarchy lives by symbols. On 28 January 1936, when King George V’s body was being taken in a small procession from King’s Cross to Westminster to lie in state, Edward had already tried a few symbolic gestures of his own. George and his father, Edward VII, had kept the clocks at Sandringham half an hour fast. It was eccentric, but meant to ensure punctuality. The new king went straight from his father’s cooling body to order them put onto ordinary time: a clockmaker was summoned in the early hours of the night to do this. He meant it, perhaps, as a symbol of a new kind of monarchy. But you cannot always choose your symbols. That morning, as Edward walked behind the coffin, hatless, he could see the royal crown fixed to the lid of the old man’s coffin. As the gun-carriage turned into Palace Yard, two watching Conservative MPs saw the Maltese Cross on the top of the crown suddenly topple and fall into the road. A sergeant-major picked it up and popped it into his pocket. The MPs heard the new king exclaim: ‘Christ! What will happen next?’ One turned to the other and suggested it was a fitting motto for the coming reign. Later in the short story of that reign, on 1 December 1936 when the story was finally breaking in the British newspapers, Crystal Palace burned down in a vast conflagration. As one of those papers remarked, it was fitting that a bishop’s strictures against the monarch’s behaviour were uttered ‘on the day when a great monument of Victorian tradition lies shattered in a smoking ruin’.125

  Yet in so many ways, Edward (who was always, confusingly, known as David to his friends and family) had brimmed with promise. He was short but strikingly good-looking. He spoke not in the upper-class voice of today’s monarchy but in a more demotic tone variously described as ‘a stable boy’s’ and ‘off-cockney’. He dressed beautifully and much of the time was an excellent listener. For millions of Britons he was a brilliant symbol of modernization, a glamorous, informal super-celebrity when Britain was short on homegrown glamour. Though his love affair with Wallis Simpson would destroy his reign and reputation, it is perfectly possible to see it as another attempt to be modern at the time when all those writers and intellectuals were calling for honest relationships between the sexes. His grandfather had had mistresses and everyone had known, but that was acceptable so long as it was never publicly discussed. For Edward this was archaic hypocrisy, and dishonourable too. He would be told again and again that he could keep his mistress behind closed doors, just so long as he did not insist on ‘flaunting’ her in public. But he was from early on determined to be completely public and to marry her and to accord her proper status. He was deeply in love with this apparently shrewd, funny, assertive American woman. Later conspiracy theorists, noting how plain she could look in photographs, suggested she had some unique sexual power over him – or even that she was a man in drag. This seems to be nonsense. Those who knew her found her charming, even charismatic, and believed this was what it seemed, a simple case of romantic love.

  Edward himself, however, was no kind of simple case. He had been brought up in an austere family. His mother found it hard to express her feelings. As for George V, there is a story which is of dubious authenticity but which seems to convey some kind of truth about his attitude to his children. The Earl of Derby, the King’s oldest friend, thought he bullied them too much and raised the subject one day while they were walking. There was a long silence. Then George replied: ‘My father was frightened of his mother: I was frightened of my father; and I am damned well going to see to it that my children are frightened of me.’ As we have seen, George V was a shrewd monarch, who belied his reputation as a simpleton only interested in the details of dress codes and his stamp collection. During his reign, it has been pointed out, five emperors, eight kings and eighteen other dynasties disappeared; it was a measure of his success that he was still a popular figure by the late thirties. Yet it was a dour, deeply philistine environment in which he raised his children. Edward had survived it all, and a very harsh time at the Royal Naval College at Dartmouth, to emerge as an energetic and mildly rebellious young man. He was a talented and courageous horseman and tried desperately hard to get to the trenches during the Great War. He became a byword for risk-taking: even Kitchener found it impossible to keep him away from danger. As Prince of Wales in the early twenties, his trips to the Commonwealth had been staggeringly successful, even in India when the aftermath of the Amritsar massacre had made the royal tour a serious risk.

  Yet he was also petulant, pleasure loving and in search of a mother substitute. His first one was a woman called Mrs Dudley Ward, whom he had met in March 1918 when she had run into a Mayfair house to avoid an air raid and found herself with a party made up of the Prince and some friends. It was hardly a brief affair. For fifteen years, during which time she separated from and then divorced her husband, he saw her almost every day he was in London and became very close to her children, who called him ‘Little Prince’. Yet when he met Wallis Simpson, he ditched Mrs Ward in the most brutal way. He simply stopped turning up, and when she phoned as usual to speak to him at St James’s Palace, a sobbing telephonist told her she had something so terrible to tell her she didn’t know how to say it: ‘I have orders not to put you through.’ Later Edward would ruthlessly dump old friends, such as the wonderfully named ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe, when they became inconvenient. He ran with a flash set in twenties London, rich and fun-loving people, often Americans, christened by the novelist Compton Mackenzie the ‘Invaders’: ‘the most heartless and dissolute of the pleasure-loving ultra-rich, the hardest and most hated people in England’. He was, in short, not only modern and dashing but thoroughly spoiled.

  When Edward first started making love to the once-divorced, now
remarried Mrs Wallis Simpson in Biarritz, she was honest enough to admit that his status was part of the attraction. It was, she said later, ‘open sesame’ to a new and glittering world which excited her as nothing had done before. He had ‘an unmistakable aura of power and authority. His slightest wish seemed always to be translated instantly into the most impressive kind of reality. Trains were held; yachts materialized; the best suites in the finest hotels were flung open; aeroplanes stood waiting. What impressed me most of all was how this could be brought to pass without apparent effort.’126 Indeed. As Prince of Wales, he also had his own toy castle, Fort Belvedere, near Windsor, and access to a life of stupendous self-indulgence, though he was neither a drunk nor sexually promiscuous. Still, George V was worried. ‘After I am dead,’ he once said, ‘the boy will ruin himself in twelve months.’ When Edward did become king he made economies which hit staff and retainers hard, while spending lavishly on jewels and other gifts for Mrs Simpson. As his biographer put it, there was a lot of public sympathy for the Buckingham Palace servants, ‘who resented having their beer money cut down at a time when they were often employed loading cases of champagne, or furniture or plate, destined for Mrs Simpson’s flat’.127