Growing Up In a War

by Bryan Magee

  In fact, that whole general election campaign was an education for me. It shocked me beyond words when Churchill said, or implied, that a Labour victory would lead Britain towards being a totalitarian state, and used the word ‘Gestapo’ in this connection. Although I was only fifteen, the nonsense of it was transparent to me, and I did not see why it was not transparent to everyone else – although actually, as things turned out, it was. In this way, and in others, Churchill insulted the intelligence of the electorate, not to mention the personal, barbarous insult to his colleagues in the wartime government. A left-wing newspaper explained that he was talking this vile rubbish because his thinking had come under the influence of a writer called Hayek, in a book called The Road to Serfdom, and the paper displayed a photograph of the book’s dust jacket. This was how I first heard of Hayek. For some years afterwards I assumed, without reading him, that he was a demonic writer of black-hearted, reactionary malevolence.

  The whole business of choosing a government, and thus choosing the direction in which the country was going to develop from now on, excited me. The time span over which the campaign was stretched was an unusually long one, because we needed to wait for the votes of the servicemen overseas to be collected and brought back to England for counting. During this time I was introduced to electioneering, the cut-and-thrust of party politics, so different from anything that had gone on during the war. The Conservatives based their campaign on an appeal to Churchill’s popularity: he was a historic figure now, hailed all over the world for his great leadership; and it must be obvious, said the Tories, that he was the right man to lead us into the peace. Labour dwelt on the horrors of Conservative rule before the war, when the country had been blighted by mass poverty and mass unemployment. They called for a new and different social order based on public ownership and a welfare state. It was this that captured the public mind. The general feeling, put crudely, was that the people had not fought their way successfully through six years of world war in order to go back to the Bad Old Days. They wanted a Brave New World. So not only did the workers in the factories vote Labour: the servicemen did too, and also, decisively, the lower middle class in the modest suburbs.

  I was partisan in all this, but my partisanship was chiefly negative. I detested the Conservatives. I was in favour of Labour but cool about them. My coolness was not because I had doubts about their declared beliefs but because I had doubts about the commitment with which they would put them into practice. I had got it firmly into my head that when people came to power in the Labour Party they sold out on the party’s principles, and that leaders of the big trade unions did the same. Now that the Labour movement had itself come to power nationally, my fear was that it would betray the people it was most supposed to help. This fear was reinforced by my father. When I next went to London for the school holidays, and he met me at Victoria station, my first words to him were an expression of delight at the general election result, but his immediate reply was: ‘Yes, provided they stay on the right lines. It’s up to people like Aneurin Bevan and Emmanuel Shinwell to keep them to it. Otherwise they won’t.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  AT THE BEGINNING and end of each term the school used to hire a private train to take us to and from Victoria: we called it ‘the Housey Special’. As was the general custom in those days, each of us had a trunk which made the journey separately from door to door, collected the day before we travelled and delivered the day after we arrived. This meant that on the journey we were empty-handed – and that was an invitation to misbehave, given that we had a whole train to ourselves. On the last morning of term we made an early start, because many of us would face long connecting journeys from London. House by house we marched down to the station, singing. I always knew there would be a member of my family waiting for me on the platform at Victoria, and hoped it would be my father. From there, in a state of excitement, I would be swept into a different life.

  I loved London with an immoderate love. I was happy enough at school, but I took for granted that London was the hub of the universe. To me the most exciting part of it was the West End, with its crowded streets and department stores, theatres and concerts, parks, greasy-spoon restaurants and second-hand bookshops. And to these there had to be added one or two more local pleasures, such as the cinemas in Palmers Green and the billiard hall at Southgate. All this was lived against a background of my parents and sister in Arnos Grove, plus the rest of my family in Southgate, and the Tillsons at Potters Bar. The whole of it was bound together by London’s buses and tubes, the tube above all. And it was mine. (During or not long after this period a novel came out called London Belongs to Me, and that was how I felt.) Not a single one of these things had any counterpart at Christ’s Hospital. When the school had been in London it had famously been part of the warp and woof of London’s life; but now that it was in the Sussex countryside it might just as well have been on Mars.

  One of the keenest of my pleasures, now that I was so full-bloodedly political, was to go to Hyde Park on a Sunday afternoon, to Speakers’ Corner. One often reads mistaken references to the speakers as being at Hyde Park Corner, but Speakers’ Corner is at the other end of Park Lane, by Marble Arch. It is a child’s picture-book illustration of free speech. Spread across a large asphalted open space there would in those days be anything between six and a dozen speakers addressing different audiences simultaneously, each far enough away from the others to be heard by his listeners, and each raised above his crowd by a makeshift podium that he and his organisation had brought with them, a collapsible platform constructed on the same principle as a stepladder. The audiences could be of widely differing sizes, ranging from almost none to several hundred. There were all the time people arriving and leaving, or wandering from one crowd to another to sample the different speakers, so there was perpetual coming and going. The speakers were on two main subjects: politics and religion. I never took much notice of the religious ones, so I never knew much about them – they seemed to be mostly of an evangelical cast. The political groups were mainly fringe parties of the Left, and that suited me to the ground. One or two of the speakers represented no one but themselves, but these were nearly always cranky and uninteresting, and seldom lasted for long – though there was one who was outstandingly entertaining, a little man who invariably wore a black suit and a wide-brimmed black hat, and sold a regularly produced, privately printed sheet of articles written by himself called The Black Hat, price one penny. He was Bonar Thompson, a Swiftian of the left, a socialist cynic convinced that all political parties, not least those represented by the speakers round him, were corrupted by inescapable, universal, gross and ridiculous human failings, such that nothing could ever be expected of them or anybody else. Of course, he implied, we all knew how society ought to be run, but it could never be like that because of the hopeless folly and absurdity of human beings, which would never change. I spent hours listening to him. I was too much of an idealist to believe him, but I found him endlessly amusing, and learnt more from him than I realised at the time.

  As far as the fringe parties were concerned, each one thought all the others were wrong. But among them there was one speaker who, by common consent, was supreme as an orator, a man called Tony Turner. He spoke for the Socialist Party of Great Britain, an organisation of immaculate socialist purity that had existed since the early twentieth century without ever acquiring more than a thousand members. It was fortunate in having a rich patron, and it brought out a well-produced paper, the Socialist Standard; but Tony Turner remained the only member of the party of whom anyone outside it had heard. To this day I think of him not just as the best open-air speaker I have heard but as in a class by himself. This is not a judgement peculiar to me. Many have expressed it. Bernard Levin, one of them, told me that when he was a student at the London School of Economics he used to listen regularly to Tony Turner, who on weekdays would address the lunchtime office workers in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, and Bernard was spellbound by him as by
no speaker before or after. Turner was in his late twenties then; small, and with an unusual face, having been born in New Zealand as the illegitimate child of a Maori and a housemaid from England. He had a normal European skin colour with half-Maori features. His mother had returned to England with him and brought him up in poverty in the Old Kent Road, where eventually she married a Mr Turner. Tony joined the navy for seven years at the age of fourteen, and it was the navy that gave him his education, a good one, ranging from Far Eastern travel to the mathematics required for navigation. He grew into an intelligent, disciplined, forceful personality. He was not ill-looking, and women found him unusually attractive. More than three decades later, when I was a Labour MP, he and I became friends – I stayed with him at his home in Nairobi, where he spent the second half of his life, and travelled all over Kenya with him; and we used to meet whenever he came to London. When he died he left me his library – and there I found the intellectual substructure of all those speeches I had stood listening to as a schoolboy. At that time, though, I would not have dreamt that he and I would ever know one another, and I looked up to him as something of a hero.

  His special gift as a speaker was to be dramatic without being phoney. He pictorialised: whatever he was talking about, he gave you a picture of it, painted in clear, bold colours, though not unsubtle. His wording was economical, so his thoughts must have moved fast. And the logic was good – it was rare for him to say something that was not reasonably arguable. But as with all truly great speakers, the key to his success lay in a highly distinctive personality which conveyed itself to his audience in everything he said, but is not itself conveyable in words. He was charismatic. Instinctively, he had all the gifts of timing and phrasing, pausing and pacing, contrast. He would play his speeches off his audience, perceptive of their reactions, responding to them instant by instant. What he said had plenty of substance always: his comments on current affairs, about which he was well informed, rested on an additional foundation of reflection and reading, solidly acquired. The whole was pervaded by sharp humour, so that although serious in argument it was entertaining, and one stood listening in a state of chuckling delight. It was normal for him to have an audience of some hundreds, always the biggest in the park.

  As I came more fully to understand years later, when I acquired his library and read through the comments he had written in the margins of his books over many years, he had slowly formed a classical socialist outlook, pondered with unusual intelligence, thus equipping himself with an ideology that could explain everything. This meant he could apply it to anything that happened; and he did this with great brilliance, making clever and illuminating comments about whatever occurred – comments which always, however spontaneous, fitted in with his larger world view. These practical applications of an underlying outlook were the speeches I was hearing on Sunday after Sunday. Their staple consisted of criticisms of existing society and its current affairs. But of special interest to me were his attacks on other left-wing viewpoints that put themselves forward as alternatives to his own. He saw the Labour Party and the trade unions as too complicitly involved in the society they were claiming to be critics of, always running with the hare while hunting with the hounds, compromised at every turn. On the communists he was both withering and devastating: the gulf between the Marxist theory which they espoused and the nightmare social reality of Soviet Russia, which they invariably and abjectly defended, was unbridgeable, and all the evidence of their behaviour ought to warn us that if communists were to come to power in any other country they would implement not Marx’s theory but Stalin’s practice. Their conduct in non-communist countries was marked by a breathtaking lack of principle: for instance the Communist Party of Great Britain here at Speakers’ Corner had passionately opposed the war against Hitler – in reality, of course, because Hitler was an ally of Stalin, but ostensibly because the war was between capitalist states, and therefore one in which the workers had no interest – until the Germans invaded Russia, whereupon they somersaulted overnight and became passionate supporters of the war, saying it was a people’s crusade against fascism. The consistent cynicism with which they conducted all their affairs provided him with endless material for his savage but wonderful humour. And he had equally little difficulty picking off the remaining leftwing parties – the Trotskyists, the anarchists and the rest. His words had a cutting edge all the sharper for the fact that speakers for those parties, and crowds of their supporters, were only a few yards away.

  His positive message was milk-of-the-word socialism, such as the other left-wing parties claimed to believe in but showed by their actions that they did not. The underlying theory was a fusion of Marxism and democracy, arrived at from the writings of Marx himself as a starting point but then as criticised by the philosophical anarchists, and after that reconstructed by the so-called revisionists. There is a body of literature there that constitutes a rich tradition of political thought, one that has had a much greater influence on the continent of Europe than in the English-speaking world. For me at that age it was the perfect brew. I did not, needless to say, read any of the books on which it was based, but through Tony Turner their influence fed into a political outlook that was forming itself from different sources – of which the most important was my father. And to hear it articulated week after week with such charismatic brilliance came close to being an orgastic experience for me. I continued to believe something like it until disenchantment set in at university. Until then I too found, as I thought, that it enabled me to understand everything, and gave me clever answers to all the criticisms I encountered. Being outside the Labour Party and to its left I could easily be mistaken unthinkingly for a communist, but in fact I was fiercely anticommunist. At that time there were a number of anti-communist socialists who were more famous than Tony Turner, but I did not as yet have the same acquaintance with them – people like Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, and Arthur Koestler.

  Tony lost his faith in socialism during the post-war years, and by the end of the 1950s had ceased to believe in it altogether. The whole belief system, he then told me, came to seem to him like a gigantic work of art, or like a religion: glitteringly attractive to contemplate, inspirational, huge in scale, seriously thought through, full of good ideas and penetrating insights which all connected up with one another, marvellous in its ability to meet our emotional needs, brimming with life – and the whole thing an illusion. Although he had thought of himself as anti-religious when he believed in socialism, it now seemed to him a religion substitute, and he sometimes referred to that period of his life as his religious period.

  My father would often come to Speakers’ Corner with me. He and I were close companions now. He delighted in introducing me to new things of every kind – new venues of art and entertainment, new sports and games, new cafés, restaurants, shops. ‘Don’t you know this one? Oh, you must have a look at this one. Let’s go in, shall we?’ He would wander into men’s clothing shops and examine their wares with professional interest, explaining their points to me as he did so. Even if he came out without buying anything he had usually charmed one of the staff in the process. We watched billiards and snooker at Thurston’s Hall in Leicester Square, and cricket at Lord’s. Those were years of legendary English cricket players, against equally legendary visitors from Australia, and it gave me warm, huggy pleasure to watch them. All sorts of things that are boring to me now, from cricket to ballet, excited me in my teens, when they were part of a new world opening up around me. One way in which my father’s policy of introducing me to as many different things as possible paid off was that not only did I discover and pursue those interests that were to become lifelong passions, I also found out about a lot of other things too, with a curiosity which, although it turned out to be more short-lived, was genuine as far as it went, and extended my horizons.

  He taught me things about the life of the streets that I would not have known at that age – how to deal with traders of all kinds without being taken
in, and what the commonest deceptions were. He explained to me how pickpockets operated – Hoxton had always been the best-known base of the whizz mob, as they were called, and he must have known some of them personally. He explained not only these low-level scams, but also the stings used by confidence men, and these fascinated me. At the races we stood watching the three-card trick, and he pointed out in whispers how it was being worked not only by the man with the cards but by associates of his in the crowd – he would identify them and explain what they were doing. His normal phrase for a truly silly fellow, a ninny, a gull, was: ‘He’d fall for the three-card trick.’ One of his lessons to me was: ‘Never, ever assume you can get the better of any of these people just because you know what they’re up to. Those who think like that are the biggest mugs of all. [‘Mug’ here meant victim or target, not fool.] If you imagine the whizz mob can’t whizz you because you know their tricks, you’re a sitting duck. Mugs are set up by their own complacency.’