The Making of Modern Britain

by Andrew Marr

  By the time Chamberlain had conceived his ‘Plan Z’, the theatrical notion that by flying in person to Munich to meet Hitler he could stop the invasion of Czechoslovakia and thus prevent a coming war, appeasement was a habit. Hitler was gambling, but he was gambling having seen his opponent’s cards. He did not want war with Britain in 1938 – Germany was not ready for that – but he did want war with Czechoslovakia. In theory that would bring in France, and thus Britain, just as the Great War had swept in countries linked by alliances. In practice, he knew the British people were fearful of war. Chamberlain, it is important to repeat, was not simply buying time. He saw his flight to Germany as part of wider vision to end the ‘mad armaments race’ and bring in general appeasement. He did not tell his cabinet what he was doing, and he only revealed his flight the day before he took off, on 14 September 1938. It was regarded as sensational news around the world, with ecstatic tributes to the boldness of this new form of diplomacy. With his famous rolled umbrella, but accompanied by nobody who actually spoke German, Chamberlain took off the following morning from Heston aerodrome north of London in a small hired Lockheed passenger plane. It was the first substantial flight the old man had ever taken. Hitler had been initially taken aback by the proposal and suspected that Chamberlain was arriving to declare war in person. When the prime minister arrived in Munich he was greeted by Nazi salutes and ‘Heil Hitlers’ and responded by waving his Homburg hat. After a three-hour train journey to Berchtesgaden, and unimpressed by his first sight of Hitler, he settled down face to face.

  This, the very first modern ‘summit’ meeting, was almost all British offer and German take. Despite the formal expressions of mutual respect, and Hitler’s long protestations about Czech brutality, at its core was Chamberlain’s offer to accept that the 3 million German-speaking Czech citizens wished to join the Reich; and his promise to bully the Czechs into agreeing. All he got was a pause, and a pledge that this would be done without German military invasion, so long as there were no frontier or ‘terrorist’ incidents, and that it would be carried out in an orderly fashion. In effect, Britain was selling off part of a country it had recently helped to create. Yet when Chamberlain returned home, the disgrace was greeted with enthusiasm because it put off war. Hitler drew the obvious conclusion. At a second summit, on the Rhine two weeks later, he upped his demands. Now German troops had to march into the Czech Sudetenland immediately. The Czech army must retire within two days. Chamberlain, aghast, protested. But with the Czechs now mobilizing, he made little progress beyond winning another short delay. This time when he came back to London he found the mood changing. Chamberlain proposed that in return for Britain and France guaranteeing that the Czechs would not resist by force, and guaranteeing the handover of the territory to Germany, Hitler would in turn promise not to use force either. By now the Foreign Office diplomats who had always worried about Chamberlain were in a state of grief and anger. Sir Alexander Cadogan, the senior official, wrote in his diary that he knew Britain was in no condition to fight, but ‘I’d rather be beat than dishonoured. How can we look any foreigner in the face after this? How can we hold Egypt, India and the rest?’131 He so stirred the conscience of Halifax, his boss, that the foreign secretary could not sleep and at cabinet the following day he began to turn against Chamberlain.

  Winston and the Grasshopper

  It was not only Halifax. The mood of the country seemed to be shifting, too, as the full implications of the betrayal of Czechoslovakia sank in. Chamberlain had heard some boos among the cheers as he set off for the second time from Heston. On the one hand the preparations for war, including the digging of trenches and underground shelters, the distribution of 30 million gas masks (though there were none for small children or babies) and amateurish advice about how to protect your home from bombs, was sending a cold shiver across the country. On the other hand Chamberlain’s diplomacy seemed to be failing, bringing war, but on shameful terms. In 1938 the country was not ready. There were only five squadrons of modern Hurricane fighter planes available, and nothing like the necessary amount of anti-aircraft guns or barrage-balloon protection. Chamberlain capitalized on the sense that all this preparation was surreal by broadcasting: ‘How horrible, how fantastical it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know little.’ This is remembered because, wittingly or not, its sense of half-embarrassed, frantic hand washing perfectly encapsulated what had become Chamberlain’s policy.

  Historians now speculate that, had Hitler gone ahead with the invasion of Czechoslovakia, dissident politicians and military officers were ready to mount a coup: ironically, he may have been saved by the last-minute diplomatic manoeuvrings. For Hitler blinked. Instead of invading he called a four-power summit, inviting Chamberlain, along with Mussolini and the French leader Daladier, back to Munich. When Chamberlain got the news, in a scribbled note during the final minutes of his report to the Commons, and read it out, to many MPs it seemed almost like divine intervention. Chamberlain himself called it ‘the last desperate snatch at the last tuft on the very verge of the precipice’. The summit was not good for the Czechs, though the area of their land to be grabbed was slightly reduced and the timetable slightly extended. Knowing he needed to bring back more, Chamberlain had had a short yet waffle-filled note typed out and, after a further general talk with Hitler, persuaded him to countersign it. It spoke of the importance of Anglo-German relations, including an earlier deal concerning the two countries’ navies, as ‘symbolic of the desire of our two peoples never to go to war with one another again . . . the method of consultation shall be the method adopted to deal with any other questions’. Hardly rousing stuff, but when he returned to Heston to be met by a large crowd, waiting in the rain, Chamberlain waved and read out his ‘piece of paper’ before driving to London, where the King thanked him at Buckingham Palace, and they waved to the crowds outside. Back at Downing Street there was another crowd and, leaning out of a window, Chamberlain let himself go. Referring to the reception that had greeted Disraeli returning from the Congress of Berlin, he told the people that it was the second time ‘there has come back from Germany peace with honour. I believe it is peace for our time.’ In the circumstances, it was a remarkably stupid thing to say, and Chamberlain quickly realized it. Too late; but we should never forget that the story of appeasement is the story of the people standing in the street looking up and not just of the man talking down.

  Soon the newspapers and much of the country had performed a U-turn on the Churchill question. In the run-up to the final declaration of war, following Hitler’s invasion of Poland, there was a steady crescendo of demands for his return to government, at the Admiralty or the War Office. Chamberlain sniffed. It would be inconvenient for him, he said, to have such a difficult ego rampaging about. The cries grew louder, including from many of those who had ridiculed Churchill so recently. In the press, right across the spectrum from the Communist Party’s Daily Worker, the Manchester Guardian and the News Chronicle, to the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph on the right, they all called for Churchill back. In Germany a member of Hitler’s cabinet privately said he should be brought back, as the last Englishman Hitler feared. Eminent generals visited him. He was shown round Biggin Hill to watch fighter exercises and heard rumours that soon there would be some kind of new atomic weapon. He was being treated already as a war leader in waiting. Still Chamberlain refused to unbend. He and Churchill rowed in the private members’ lobby of the Commons. Anonymous posters, in fact paid for by an advertising agent called Mr Beable, appeared across London asking ‘What Price Churchill?’, and when Chamberlain went to the Commons for a crisis debate, he passed half a dozen people carrying sandwich boards reading simply ‘Churchill’. Once war was declared, Chamberlain bowed to the inevitable and asked him to join his War Cabinet and return to the Admiralty, where Churchill had last set foot in 1915. One of his maps with the British fleet dispositions on it was s
till hanging in a cupboard. The Admiralty signalled to the fleet: ‘Winston is Back’. But the man who perhaps spoke for more Britons than any other was called Colin Thornton-Kemsley. A member of Churchill’s constituency party, he had tried to have him thrown out of the Commons for disloyalty to the Conservatives earlier in the year. Now in an army camp, he sent a letter of abject apology: ‘A grasshopper under a fern is not so proud now that he made the field ring with his importunate chink.’132

  Part Four

  THROUGH FIRE, A NEW COUNTRY

  1939–1945

  Courage is going from failure to failure, without losing enthusiasm.

  Winston S. Churchill, 1940

  Defeats shape countries more than their victories do. Though Britain ended the Second World War on the winning side, during the first few years she was overall a loser, experiencing mostly defeat. It was what happened between the winter of 1939–40 and the spring of 1942 that provoked the great changes in the British. These islands were in the position of a besieged city. Through the years of hunger, boredom and fear the besieged displayed great ingenuity and found themselves knitted together in a new national comradeship. It excluded some whose political instincts, social background or foreign origins made them immune. And after a few years it began to fray. Privation, sleeplessness and fear chewed away. But the majority, for a hinge period of perhaps twenty months or so, were fused together in ways that changed the country permanently. It was the real end of Britannia, the imperial, now befuddled conqueror-island, and the real beginning of modern Britain. People saw defeat in the newspapers and the faces of beaten soldiers. They tasted it in rations and smelt the burned buildings. They asked how they had got into their plight. They looked hard at their old rulers and they identified with possible liberators coming over the hills – with Russians and Americans. They dreamed of a new start, a fairer, more modern and efficient nation. This change in national mood, which shaped us all, was established well before D-Day.

  The Second World War has so many similarities with the First that some historians treat them as two episodes in the same long conflict. For Britain there was the obvious fact that they were fought against the same main enemy, Germany. Britain stood, once again, alongside France, Russia, America. There were other echoes. As in 1914, in 1940 the war proper began with a ruthlessly efficient German scythe through Belgium and northern France, at a time when the British Expeditionary Force (the same archaic-sounding name was used) was small and badly equipped. Both wars reshaped the British state, bringing higher taxes, endless new regulations, big changes in the role of women and earnest promises of a better future. In 1917 Britain had been brought almost to defeat by U-boat attacks on Atlantic shipping. In 1942 the same thing happened. The earlier war threw up a dynamic and controversial leader, Lloyd George, who enjoyed near dictatorial authority, though he bitterly rowed with generals. The next one similarly elevated his old friend and follower Churchill, who also enjoyed huge personal authority and also fought with his generals. And, of course, in both wars, the United States arrived late in the day as an ally and greatly changed the balance.

  Yet the two wars were more different than alike. The First World War was essentially a land war, fought in France by professional, volunteer and then conscript soldiers, who suffered terrible losses. Despite raids by warships, Zeppelins and German Gotha bombers, the British civilian population was affected mainly by greyness, shortage and bereavement. In the Second World War, because of the defeat of the British and French armies early on, the most important fighting was in the air and at sea until the invasion of Europe in 1944. British armies fought in North Africa and in the Far East. But most British were cooped up at home, waiting. Churchill himself reflected, during the grimmest period of 1940, that ‘this was the sort of war which would suit the English people once they were used to it. They would prefer all to be in the front line, taking part in the Battle of London, than to look on helplessly at mass slaughters like Passchendaele.’133 Meanwhile the civilian population found that if there was any longer a ‘front line’ it ran through Coventry and Southampton, London and Glasgow. Some 60,000 civilians were killed. For the first three years of the war more women and children were killed by German action than were British soldiers. Add the hundreds of thousands injured, and the millions who lost their homes, and the butcher’s bill is qualitatively different.

  In the First World War millions of people found their lives changed as they became munitions workers or helped on the land. But in the Second virtually the entire country was mobilized. Britain put more of her people and more of her wealth into fighting the war than any other nation. Unlike the Germans or the Russians, she conscripted her women. Many of her cities were devastated and, in response, Britain carried out massacres of German civilians in air attacks which remain hugely controversial. Politically, too, the wars were very different. When the Americans came the second time it was not as late-in-the-day helpers but as saviours. The earlier conflict began, as we have seen, when Britain was in a ferment of radicalism. Its effect, as we have also seen, was eventually conservative. At the start of the Second World War, Britain was under a Tory, formally National, government. Radicalism was scattered. Labour looked very far from power. Its effect, however, was to drive the country fast and quite far to the left. By the end Churchill found himself leading a big-state, high-taxing and interventionist government, most of whose famous figures were socialists. He was a colourful twist of old Britannia decorating a new reality.

  All this has led to the 1939–45 war being dubbed the ‘People’s War’, and so it was. Heroism was distributed widely, embracing pensioners and firefighters, air-raid wardens and nursing mothers. Yet the people running the British war were still overwhelmingly male, white and upper class. No woman had a key position in directing the British war effort. Most of the intellectuals who shaped policy, including John Maynard Keynes and William Beveridge, as well as the important Whitehall officials, the leading military commanders and most MPs, were public school and Oxbridge men. Only in the increasingly important world of scientific ‘boffins’ and the handful of working-class Labour ministers, most obviously Ernie Bevin, do we find rougher voices. The rise of the grammar-school boy, so important in the Britain of the fifties, was still largely invisible. It was beginning, in the armed forces and in factories, but below the level of national leadership. The ‘people’ of the People’s War were followers who were beginning to resent being followers and who would eventually shrug off their wartime leaders. Though in 1939 none of that seemed conceivable, never mind possible.

  Adolf Hitler lost his war. One of his many miscalculations was to think the British would not fight or, if they did, would not fight for long. But Hitler left a changed Britain. He changed us more than any of our leaders. By directing at the British the full force of his far better-organized war-state with its unifying ideology, he forced Britain to become more organized and more united too. Though this was a war fought for liberty at home (if empire abroad), the British citizen ended it weighted down with rules, taxes and restrictions as never before. Though it was a war that can be blamed on incompetent leadership by politicians beforehand, during and after its fighting, it left the political class at a historic high point. The first great historian of the war was Churchill himself. His books are well worth reading for their glorious prose, vivid detail and grand sweep, but he gave a bowdlerized and sentimental account of what had happened. After and around him broke never-ending waves of military memoirs, war films, diaries, popular war histories and, at the sandy bottom of the salty turbulence, boys’ war comics. They too glossed over the British defeats and failures and idealized the war in Churchillian terms – the darkest day, the finest hour, the turning of the tide. Spitfire pilots were nonchalant public-schoolboy heroes, Tommies were tough and dogged, the Germans bone-headed sadists and the British public were joke-cracking stoics who could take it. The Yanks . . . well, the Yanks came late. In the Cold War years, the Soviet ‘Ivans’ began, if not to d
rop out of our popular memory of the war – that would have been too ludicrous – then to slide away to one side.

  All this was natural. The war had been traumatic enough. There was no repetition of the anti-war writing of the Great War survivors. Hitler allows for few second thoughts. Only in the 1960s did some historians begin to revisit the politics of wartime, and disinter some of the follies, arguments and failures buried in the mesmeric Churchillian account. By the 1980s this revisionism had reached the grand figure of Churchill himself, though criticism of the war leader has never impressed the British public, who voted him Greatest (ever) Briton in a BBC poll and still buy his books in large numbers. In recent years a few writers, mainly American, have suggested the previously unthinkable – that it would actually have been better for the world had Britain not fought on, but had sought a peace treaty with Nazi Germany. Then, they say, Hitler would merely have transported the Jews, perhaps to Africa, and there would have been no global conflict – no Stalingrad, no Dresden, no Hiroshima. Hitler would have mellowed, or been overthrown, at far lesser cost. This depends on heroic speculation about a parallel or ‘counterfactual’ twentieth century. The more historians dig into Nazi Germany, the less likely it seems. In Britain the very idea produced infuriated reactions. This war, and how we remember it, still matters very much. The latest waves of books about it have been dominated by oral histories, diaries, letters and the Mass Observation archive of diaries and interviews, telling the story of the war from below – the people’s history as opposed to Churchill’s. These are gripping accounts but not ‘the whole story’, any more than the earlier history of the war seen only through the eyes of politicians, generals or pilots.