The Life of Graham Greene (1904-1939)

by Norman Sherry

  By August he put paid to the material/spiritual arguments of Vivien with one final dismissive assertion: ‘There is only one creative instinct. I think the idea that physical marriage is debased and isn’t spiritual in motive and feeling is simply prurient.’51

  *

  Though Greene was pleased to be working for The Times, his early restlessness sometimes returned. Just so long as he was snowed under with work he could control his feelings of hopelessness and despair but the work was not sufficiently fulfilling. Seeking an escape from this tedium, he began enquiries about learning to fly: ‘I’ve heard from the Flying Club … The ordinary membership is three guineas & the 30/- an hour can include instruction. I really am rather thrilled at the idea of learning to fly. I feel it would be quite an original thing for a subeditor to do in his spare time.’52 And he had plans of swooping down on Vivien at Oxford: ‘When I can fly, I shall take out a club plane for an hour’s flight from Edgware, & I shall wire to you to be at the meadows at 2.30 sharp, & I shall swoop down & you’ll climb in with your suitcase & we’ll fly back to London!!’ But he had, also, a practical purpose as a letter to Vivien two days later shows:

  There are some splendid photos of the Amazon in to-day’s Times taken by the expedition which has been exploring the Amazon by air. The more I feel that there might be great opportunities for a journalist, who knew something about aeroplanes. The next twenty years will be full of that type of expedition – what with the Amazon, the Poles & New Guinea, & who knows that there might not be correspondencies going?53

  Already he felt a prisoner in his occupation, love alone keeping this ever-restless man sane: ‘Without you life seems to be made up of an endless sub-editing till death.’ But history took its part in delaying Graham’s rising sense of tedium over sub-editing. On 3 May the General Strike began, and Greene played his small part in the front line.

  fn1 In fact, on his application form, someone had written in capitals ROMAN CATHOLIC, though this was later scratched out.

  fn2 On this occasion he sent Vivien a stanza of religious verse written during a lull in Room 2:

  There was a woman watched her son hang dying,

  with the uprising of a hundred creeds,

  and centuries of chicanery & lying.

  She heard his long despair; she could not hear

  the shriek of trumpets & the din of deeds,

  saw but the cross, and even that not clear.

  fn3 Thirty years later in 1957 Greene wrote the screenplay of St Joan. He tells how he came to do work on St Joan and his attitude towards it then: ‘Preminger was insistent that I do the screenplay and I did have six weeks blank, so I acceded. Shaw is not a sacred name to me. I didn’t mind adapting his work.’ From the above letter we can see that, once, Shaw was a sacred name to him.

  21

  The General Strike

  Constitutional Government is being attacked.

  – STANLEY BALDWIN

  THE GENERAL STRIKE in Britain was literally a nine days’ wonder. It began on 3 May 1926 and ended on the 12th. Writing in her diary two days after the strike, Beatrice Webb, reflecting that it had cost Britain tens of millions of pounds, commented that it had left ‘other nations asking whether it was a baulked revolution or play-acting on a stupendous scale’. For some of the better off – students and young professional people – it was an exciting joke; for the poor it was a disaster; and for Britons generally it was a short, sharp conflict between the unions and the rest of society.

  It began with the miners who, because of a decline in the economy, were threatened with wage cuts and longer working hours by the coal mine owners who were backed by the government. The Prime Minister’s statement that ‘all workers in this country have got to take reductions in wages’ ensured the miners of support from other unions. The unions and the Labour Party believed that they could shut down the nation, and a government with no one to govern must cease to exist: ‘If the [union] leaders … dinna let us doon we’ll hae the Capitalists crawlin’ on their bellies in a week’, was not untypical preliminary rhetoric.1 But the call to strike came precipitately and almost accidentally when the printers’ union, Natsopa, attempted to prevent the publication by the Daily Mail of an editorial entitled ‘For King and Country’, which argued that an industrial dispute on a national scale was part of a revolutionary act intended to inflict suffering on the ‘great mass of innocent persons in the community’. The printers saw this as an attack on the Labour side and struck. That was late on Sunday 2 May: on the following day the transport workers, the printing trade, iron and steel workers, metal, chemical and building workers came out.

  But the strikers faced a well-prepared country, and if this General Strike was to be the dawn of revolution, Prime Minister Baldwin and his government were ready for it. Beforehand an Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies (O.M.S.) had been set up. This was allegedly non-political and motivated only by patriotism, and so it was, but it was not the poor and unemployed who joined but the employed and comparatively prosperous. Placards posted throughout the country asking for volunteers to keep the country going – which meant replacing striking workers – brought a swarm of recruits lining up to become special constables, transport drivers, messengers and clerical workers, and they were mostly middle and upper class people, university students and professional men.

  The Strike and its implications frightened the respectable classes and although it began peacefully, trouble was expected. Arnold Bennett, after lunching at the Reform Club, noted in his journal: ‘Most people gloomy, but all uncompromising. General opinion that the fight would be short but violent. Bloodshed anticipated next week.’2 The well-known journalist, Sir Philip Gibbs, forecast that: ‘Before we are through, unless it is a quick finish, there is bound to be some outbreak of violence leading to stern and merciless suppression.’3

  The government over-reacted. The battleships Ramillies and Barham were recalled from the Atlantic fleet; two battalions of infantry were landed at Liverpool and marched through the city with steel helmets and rifles; all Army and Navy leave was stopped; and Hyde Park, becoming a great food depot, had armoured cars guarding food trucks. In a wireless broadcast, the Home Secretary appealed ‘to all who are fit and strong to offer their service as special constables’, even though there were already 11,000 specials in London. By Friday he was appealing for more: ‘I want 50,000 specials by Monday morning’; the appeal was couched in patriotic terms: ‘Surely there must be another 30,000 men in London willing and eager to serve.’ In the quadrangle of the Foreign Office in Whitehall, thousands formed up in fours, indeed ‘willing and eager’.

  *

  The immediate effect of the cessation of most normal activities in London which struck many people on that first Tuesday morning, was ‘a stillness which nobody had ever known before in English history’.4 One observer stressed ‘the breathless feeling of intense quietness’, and Greene recalled in A Sort of Life: There was a wonderful absence of traffic, it was a beautiful hushed London that we were not to know again until the blitz.’5 But enforced inaction also made him restless, as his letters to Vivien show. On the first day of the strike he wrote to her of the absurdity of staying in London if there was no job to be done: ‘The Daily Mail has already stopped publication, & there’ll be no papers after tomorrow, so that it seems utterly ridiculous that I’ve got to get stuck in London.’ His instinct to seek out trouble-spots, to experience the situation at first hand and perhaps obtain copy, led him to continue: ‘If there is nothing to do in London I’ve got a good mind to borrow a pack & go for a long week’s walk. If I pass through Oxford, I’ll call. It might be fun, if one could get enough trains to give one a start to go down to the Welsh or some other mining district.’ By the following day his attitude had changed with changing events. As he recalled in A Sort of Life, ‘there was the exciting sense of living on a frontier, close to violence. Armoured cars paraded the streets.’6

  By the second day there was war in so far that
violence broke out: mass pickets in the East End of London stopped and wrecked vehicles suspected of carrying goods; some vehicles were set alight and thrown into the river. On Thursday, the fourth day, there were further clashes in the East End and mounted police had to break up the crowds; in Camberwell some women laid their babies in front of commercial vehicles and when the vehicles drew up attacked them; at Middlesbrough a mob reputed to be 4,000 strong wrecked the goods and passenger stations and on the seventh day a train, the Flying Scotsman, was derailed at Cramlington.

  Apart from this, however, Greene found himself in the ‘front line’, because the strikers had succeeded in bringing the publication of newspapers to a halt (which gave the new-fangled news broadcasts on ‘the wireless’ a chance to come into their own). There was an almost total blackout of newsprint, apart from the government-established (and quite unobjective) British Gazette, edited by Winston Churchill, and The Times. Greene was obviously not going to leave London in those circumstances.

  Greene’s letters to Vivien at this time are more revealing than his autobiography. He was concerned that the strike might prevent his letters reaching her, but mainly they reflect his excitement at the developments – putting a paper half its usual size to press at 10 p.m. before the men left on strike, expecting to go to the office that night only to be dismissed and going back home, then the excitement because the T.U.C. leaders went to Downing Street at 10 a.m., which suggested the strike might end – and then the non-delivery of his copy of The Times:

  I went round to my newsagent to see why my Times hadn’t come. Miss Friend had got hers from another newsagent. Mine was furious. He said there was going to be trouble for those that had distributed copies. His shop was crowded with sympathisers, unshaven toughs of Saklatvala’s Battersea. Don’t bite me, please. I can’t help feeling a little excited. Claud [Cockburn] came round to the office last night & we went out to dinner. We could really imagine ourselves back in the Ruhr there was such a sense of sinister strain. I can’t help wishing that there’s a little bit of a civil war. Yesterday in Oxford I’d have betted ten to one against. Now I wouldn’t bet more than 3–1 against.7

  Shapurji Saklatvala was the Member of Parliament for Battersea where Greene lived, and the country’s only Communist M.P. At a May Day rally in Hyde Park, he had called on the British Army and Navy to revolt: ‘I want the army boys to revolt now and refuse to fight … they will be the real saviours of their homes and the workers … I want the army and navy really to protect the people instead of the rogues and thieves of the master classes.’8

  At 4 p.m. on the second day, Greene was at the offices of The Times and at 4.30 was writing again to Vivien:

  Having nothing else to do, I shall be able to talk to you. We are bringing out a single news sheet roneod. I don’t know how it will be distributed. There were fights apparently yesterday. I’m feeling fearfully glad to be alive. Everything fearfully exciting. We are almost barricaded here. The front door closed & bolted, & the back guarded by innumerable people to prevent any but the staff getting in. Armoured cars passed down Fleet St last night for the East end, & the barracks in the King’s Rd were full of field guns & bluejackets. And Saklatvala’s under arrest & Yorkshire’s on the edge of riot. Hurray!

  Saklatvala was sentenced to two months’ imprisonment.

  Many people treated the General Strike as a bonus holiday. Greene discovered that his friend Claud Cockburn was taking time off and motoring down to Oxford, and although he would have liked to go with Cockburn and kept insisting there was nothing for him to do in London, it is clear from his letters that he was very busy. Almost alone among journalists, the staff of The Times continued working – and Greene, among others, was doing the work of the packers: ‘We are going to go on printing news sheets. All the news to be crammed into 1600 words. I wish I was able to come down in that car tomorrow … And I wish I’d got my MSS here. I could get a good lot done. O Blast! They’ve just asked for volunteers to take the place of the packers who are on strike.’

  Whenever danger subsided so did Greene’s pleasure in the situation. Writing on the second day, he complained: ‘Of course, there wasn’t even excitement last night. We had 20 police to guard us, & the Union Men melted before them.’ On the third day (5 May) he briefly wrote: ‘Darling, I can’t answer your letter now, I’m dog tired. I started work yesterday at 4.15 p.m. & finished this morning at 8 a.m. – 16 solid hours, just counting papers & putting them in piles. The whole staff, except the editorial’s on strike, & we had to do every thing. I’m going to go to bed now for a little while, before walking back for another night of it.’fn1

  As the only newspaper being published, The Times, as it reported itself, became ‘the very centre of fashion’. Members of Parliament and half the clubs in London, undergraduates and schoolboys offered their services. Volunteer motor-drivers included directors of banks and public companies. A Governor-elect put in some strenuous work as a packer.9 There was precious little sub-editing needed to produce a single sheet and volunteers and editorial staff took on the business of lifting unending bundles of paper from the machines, transporting them to the publishing department, tying them into parcels, loading them into cars and being in fact general dogsbodies. The strain was considerable. Writing to Vivien, Greene said that ‘if the 16 hour day continues for the next week, there’ll be nothing left of The Times staff.’

  On 5 May he wrote: ‘There’ll be trouble tonight, I think, from disappointed strikers. There was a very large crowd collecting on the Nine Elms side of [Vauxhall] bridge.’10 The following day he wrote to Vivien:

  Great triumph! Last night we got off a properly printed four page paper, with one machine working. The only paper in London to do it. The strikers are getting nasty though. Last night about 9.30 they set us on fire with the help of some petrol & a squirt, but we got it out all right, almost before the brigade arrived. We had a bit of trouble about 1:30 this morning. The police seem to have disappeared & we had to carry parcels of papers to private cars lined up along Victoria St to carry them into the country, Oxford, Margate, Bournemouth, Dover etc. There was a bit of a scrimmage then. I didn’t get hurt at all, but one man got a slight concussion from a blow on the head from his own parcel – they tipped him up & got hold of it – & another had his jaw cut & there were a number of bruises. Later the police arrived in greater force & they were held at a distance, but they’d already tampered with some of the cars.11

  His account of the fire in his autobiography gives the atmosphere of The Times:

  The bell rang once, twice, three times. Someone asked with mild curiosity, ‘A Fire?’. After a while the assistant chief subeditor, Colonel Maude, rose and moved with his usual elegant and leisurely gait into the corridor … when he returned to the room and sat down, it took quite a time to realize The Times – so he was telling us – had been set on fire.12

  Colonel Maude recalled: ‘I was walking towards The Times when two men I saw were peering in through the crack of the basement. I took no notice of them, but after we got in a fire broke out and the alarm bell went. Going out of the room I met Ackerman, the acting manager. He seemed perfectly amused and said casually, “The offices are afire.” I snatched a fire extinguisher, I was young then, but when we got down into the basement there was only lots and lots of burnt paper in the machine room.’13 The newspaper’s own account of this historic fire is less bland: ‘a great blaze of flame’ roaring up ‘to a height of nearly 30 feet’.14

  The incident was reported by a New York Times correspondent, who witnessed it from an upper window of The Times and wrote of the assistant foreign editor getting ‘into a furious fist fight with three or four strikers’ sending ‘smashing blows to his face and body’.15 Greene’s account is probably the more reliable – he was involved as one of The Times’s ‘shock troops’. A photograph of the shock troops appeared in a book privately printed by The Times, providing a record of how the newspaper carried on during the strike while the rest of Fleet Street was
shut down. Greene, among those photographed, looks very young and slightly impish. He sent a copy to Vivien and turned his looks to account: ‘If I’m looking pensive in the photo it’s probably because I’m thinking of you.’16 The day after the fire he told her: ‘We are trying to produce a five page paper tonight. But either there’ll be no trouble at all or else last night’s fire and scrimmage will be a mild opening. It’s all very exciting.’17

  The Graham Greene who was to identify later with the victims of society, had not yet surfaced. Not only was he a strike-breaker and one of The Times’s shock troops, he also became a special constable. In his autobiography he explains that he did this, ‘More from curiosity than from any wish to support the Establishment’, and this is no doubt true – it was an opportunity to explore another area of experience, but it was a superficial exploration and without any true understanding or sympathy on his part for the strikers. In the morning he would parade with ‘a genuine policeman the length of Vauxhall Bridge.’18 The two-man patrol ‘always ceased at the south end, for beyond lay the enemy streets where groups of strikers stood outside the public houses.’

  Vivien was a strong Conservative then and she seems to have suspected that Greene’s sympathies lay with the wrong side, for on 7 May we find him defending himself: ‘Darling, you talk as if I was Labour. I’m not. I’m really Conservative now – especially after Labour tried to burn us all.’ But in the same letter he does make a criticism of Vivien’s employer, Basil Blackwell – there was talk of his putting his staff on half pay during the strike: ‘It’s scandalous … you couldn’t possibly live on half what you are getting now. That sort of thing makes me furious. Presumably some of the girls at B’s, do depend on their salary. I feel more inclined to kick B.B. than any striker.’ What did concern him about the strike as it affected The Times was ‘that most [of the strikers] are our own men, who were awfully decent, cheerful & contented, when we had met in the canteen etc. They didn’t want to strike, but now they’ve struck they’ve entirely changed, & of course no filth is bad enough to describe us and our parentage.’ In his autobiography he recognises his own – and his own class’s – ignorance at that time: ‘A few years later my sympathies would have lain with them, but the great depression was still some years away: the middle-class had not yet been educated by the hunger-marchers.’19