After the Victorians

by A. N. Wilson

  In time, even Churchill was recognizing over the airwaves that after the war Britain must change. Postwar Britain would need to draw her leaders ‘from every type of school and wearing every type of tie …’ Tradition must play its part, but ‘broader systems must now rule’.22

  The politicization of the electorate inevitably happened, partly as a result of classes mixing in the armed forces; partly because of their rubbing shoulders in food queues, makeshift air-raid shelters and the like; but also through the common experience of listening in. Such programmes as The Brains Trust were widely listened to. The diary of a worker in a chemical factory in November 1941 recorded ‘Favourite topic on Mondays seems to be the previous day’s Brains Trust session. Hardly anyone confesses that he didn’t hear it, or if they do, take care to give adequate reasons for so doing’23 It was a discussion programme between five people: usually C. E. M. Joad, head of the Philosophy Department at Birkbeck College, Julian Huxley, secretary of the Zoological Society, and Commander A. B. Campbell of the Merchant Navy, who represented the Voice of No Nonsense and Common Sense. There would then be a variable group of people from whom the other two members of the team were selected – Kenneth Clark, Gilbert Murray, Jennie Lee, Anna Neagle, Malcolm Sargent. Strict questions of religion and politics were avoided, but the general themes of religion and politics as they affected ordinary discourse could not be entirely sidestepped.

  Archbishop Lang complained that the discussions showed ‘an irreverent disregard for revealed truths in the Holy Scriptures’. Early questions included quite simple ones such as ‘What are the Seven Wonders of the World?’, but by 1943 they were being asked such questions as ‘What are the causes of anti-Semitism?’ and ‘What is the difference between a Liberal, a Socialist and a Conservative?’

  Many people found such discussions stimulating, and continued them in their own homes or workplaces. There was also the phenomenon of shared humour. The military passion for initials and acronyms spread even into radio comedy titles. The most famous of the comedy shows was ITMA, mainly written by Ted Kavanagh. It had an array of comic characters played by Dorothy Summers, Tommy Handley and Jack Train. Summers played a charlady called Mrs Mopp – ‘Can I do yer now, sir?’ Catch phrases from the programme entered the common language. ‘Tata for now, or TTFN.’ ‘I don’t mind if I do’, when offered a drink. ‘After you, Claude.’ ‘No, after you, Cecil.’24 Few of the jokes, if written down, seem remotely funny now. But then, things were different. Priestley’s description of the little boats now seems mawkish. Churchill’s full-blown rhetorical flights embarrassed sophisticated listeners even at the time. But in all these cases, one has to remember the heightened tension of the war, and the sense of a common danger threatening all. Irony did not work on the radio. When Noël Coward first sang ‘Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans’ at a party in 1943 Churchill thought it was so funny that he demanded several encores. ‘Though they’ve been a little naughty/To the Czechs and Poles and Dutch/I don’t suppose those countries really minded very much.’ But when he sang it on the wireless there were complaints by those who thought Coward was advocating conciliation with the enemy, and the BBC eventually decided to ban the song. United in a simpler form of laughter at the jokes of Tommy Handley, or in the new-found sense, inspired by Churchill, that they were all capable of rising to heroism, the wireless worked an alchemy on the spirit.

  Above all, perhaps, it was as a purveyor of music that the wireless made most impact. As a character remarks in one of Coward’s plays, Private Lives, it is funny how potent cheap music is. ‘Lili Marlene’ was popular with both sides, whether sung by Marlene Dietrich in America or by Anne Shelton in England. Vera Lynn was a plumber’s daughter from East Hackney. Her very strong voice (‘a gallery voice; she didn’t need a microphone to reach the gallery’, said Charlie Chester)25 had a megaphone obviousness which matched the mood of the age. There was certainly something erotic in the way her voice broke and caught, but like Churchill she did not mind pulling out the vox humana stops, and she was equally unafraid of obviousness.

  It is not surprising when you hear ‘We’ll Meet Again’ that she was the Forces’ Sweetheart for singing this song, or ‘White Cliffs of Dover’, ‘Wish Me Luck’, ‘It’s a Lovely Day Tomorrow’ – one of the saddest songs ever sung – and others to troops some of whose chances of meeting anyone again were as slender as those of their loved ones surviving aerial bombardment at home. It was the wireless which made Lynn’s voice so famous, just as it was the wireless which popularized jazz and Big Bands. B. E. Nicholls, the Reithian controller of programmes, implored the Variety Department to play ‘waltzes, marches and cheerful music’ rather than jazz. Reith shared Hitler’s hatred of jazz, though probably not for Hitler’s racialist reasons. But simple waltzes were not what people wanted to hear when they could be listening to Jack Payne, Geraldo, Joe Loss, Harry Roy, Victor Silvester, Billy Cotton, or the phenomenally popular Glenn Miller, who sacrificed a lucrative career to serve in the US army and who was lost, mysteriously, in a small plane just before the war ended. The hectic tones of Miller’s trombones and sax make even the stiffest and the shyest listener want to roll up the carpet and dance. But also, perhaps, it is possible to hear in the music a strength, a vigour, which is emblematic of the land from which it came, and the global power which the war was delivering into American hands.

  31

  The Special Relationship II

  King George V is said to have replied, when asked if he wanted to see a film, that he would see ‘anything except that damned Mouse’. Yet two years after his death, when the new American ambassador was having luncheon at Windsor Castle with the new King and Queen, George V’s granddaughter, Princess Elizabeth, was thrilled to hear that Mr Joe Kennedy had once worked in the movie business. She told him how much she liked Snow White, and especially the Seven Dwarves.1 Her fondness for Walt Disney, and for American films in general, reflected that of her future subjects. George V, as in so many respects, harked back to a vanished past.

  One of the most abidingly successful films of all time, which emerged from the MGM studios in the year that Britain went to war with Germany, was The Wizard of Oz. When Dorothy Gale emerges from the old black and white existence which she had inhabited before the tornado swept through her Aunt Em’s farm, she steps, clutching her faithful dog Toto, into a brightly lit, coloured world of Munchkins, yellow and red brick roads, witches, strange castles, a Technicolor Brothers Grimm world, a Europe gone mad, it may be thought. She stares around her, and she remarks to her little dog: ‘Something tells me we’re not in Kansas any more.’ Did anyone at the time see the film as allegorical – the innocent from a world which combined American Gothic and folksy rural ranchlife finding herself cast by the Munchkins as their deliverer because the farmhouse which had landed from the star called Kansas had inadvertently squashed the Wicked Witch of the East? There was one further battle to wage, the defeat of the Wicked Witch of the West, and the good American country girl must enlist some strange allies, a tin man, a straw man, and a cowardly lion, as she dances down the Yellow Brick Road to complete her adventures.

  Kipling had urged the United States, when it took possession of the Philippines, to Take Up the White Man’s Burden, but this, in the sense of becoming a colonialist power such as Britain, Belgium, Holland, Germany and France were, America always resolutely refused to do. It wanted to be a world power, and Roosevelt and his closest colleagues – Henry Morgenthau at the US Treasury, and Cordell Hull, Secretary of State, did their best to foster that power. But in some ways it could be said that power came to it automatically, through the defeat of Germany and the bankruptcy of Britain. That defeat and that bankruptcy were partly America’s doing, but they were partly self-inflicted. No one, after all, had asked Hitler to invade Poland and so provoke the war with Britain. No one asked him to take on both Britain and Russia, and to declare war on the United States. Thereafter, his defeat was all but inevitable. Britain’s bankruptcy was less in
evitable, perhaps, but given the way the Americans wished to play things, it became unavoidable.

  By the end of the war, Technicolor, which in The Wizard of Oz had seemed such an innovation, was commonplace. Princess Elizabeth had grown up, served in the ATS, fallen in love with a distant cousin, Prince Philip of Greece. ‘Their song’ was not some English lullaby, but a number from Oklahoma – ‘People Will Say We’re in Love’. ‘The Surrey with the Fringe on Top,’ ‘Oh, What a Beautiful Morning’ – the songs poured out of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II, who were undoubtedly the liveliest and most exciting duo in the golden age of musicals. South Pacific, of 1949, was the favourite of Princess Elizabeth’s sister, Princess Margaret Rose. There were no lyrics to match ‘Some Enchanted Evening’, ‘There Is Nothing Like a Dame’, ‘You’ve Gotta Have a Dream’ and ‘I’m Gonna Wash that Man Right Outa my Hair’. That particular musical reflected the postwar exuberance of an America almost innocently triumphant in its power, and, the Korean and Cold Wars notwithstanding, ecstatic at the coming of peace. As Secretary of State from 1947 to 1949, George Catlett Marshall instituted a plan of genuine liberality for which he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Rodgers and Hammerstein musicals reflect the joyousness, the energy, the self-love of the United States at this period. ‘Everthin’s up to date in Kansas City – They’ve gone about as far as they can go’ was a jokey piece. Everyone who sang along to it knew that the USA could go a whole lot further – to the Moon and back one day. These musicals are much the best thing which the twentieth century produced in the way of light music, easily as good, in their own way, as the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. But whereas Gilbert and Sullivan throve on poking mild fun at British institutions such as the Law, the House of Lords, the Police Force and the Royal Navy, Rodgers and Hammerstein are basically celebrations of America both at home in Oklahoma and abroad in the South Pacific. Their popularity in Britain reflected the way in which British culture had become subsumed to American, a process which has continued inexorably in the years since the Second World War.

  For most Britons and Americans, the relationship between the two countries has been friendly, but tinged with envy and suspicion. The GIs who came over to Europe did so to help liberate the Continent from Nazism, yes. But they also came, with dollars, nylons and cigarettes, to seduce our women and drive out our older way of doing things. And the jury is still out as to how far General Eisenhower brought blessing or disaster to Europe in his management of the final stages of the campaign to conquer and subdue the Germans.

  During the world crisis over Iraq in 2004, when President George W. Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair formed an alliance against a ruthless dictator, somewhat to the sceptical alarm of France and Germany, some sixty-year-old themes were replayed, sixty-year-old wounds reopened, sixty-year-old myths rehearsed. And once again, as in my chapter of 1940, it is perhaps necessary to stress that I am using the word ‘myth’ to connote a self-defining story told by a nation or group to itself, about itself. Secretary of State Donald Rumsfeld, and his supporters in the British Press, saw the caution of the French government in particular as a repetition of the moral collapse of France, accepting a Nazi victory: the creation of a collaborationist regime in Vichy under the leadership of Marshal Pétain and eventually Laval. The Americans and the British, it seemed, were the only ones prepared to stand up to tyranny, whether the date was 1941 or 2004. What was written by the New York Times at the beginning of the 1991 Gulf War, but could have been said by Winston Churchill in 1941, once again became the motto of the hawks in 2004: ‘The war has breathed new life into the “special relationship” between the United States and Britain.’2

  According to this version of events, old Europe was liberated from a great tyranny by the combined courage and altruism of the United States and the United Kingdom. The refusal of France and Germany to join in the war against Saddam Hussein in 2004 was seen on the one hand as an expression of ‘ingratitude’ for the precious gift of democracy, returned to the Western Europeans by the thousands of American GIs prepared to give their lives on the Second Front after 1944; and also as an example of the incorrigible ‘weakness’, which Henry James’s heroines saw in Europeans as far back as the 1880s – moral ambivalence, shiftiness. Consequently, French fries became Freedom fries for patriotic Americans. The extent to which such stereotypes were rehearsed by politicians and serious journalists was remarkable, given the fact that what was being discussed was a highly controversial and contentious campaign, involving the possibility of great civilian loss of life in Iraq in 2004, and having no obvious bearing on the dramatic, tragic state of Europe in 1941–4.

  Behind such thoughts as the pro-war party were expressing was a very strong unwillingness to engage with one of the central political questions of the Second World War. ‘At the root of that hypnotic spell’, wrote Warren F. Kimball, editor of the Churchill–Roosevelt correspondence, and professor at Rutgers University, ‘is a perception of the conflict as an unambiguous, just war against evident evil. That patriotic, idealized romantic image makes American students and the general public recoil, even half a century later, from evidence of selfish American war aims or even Anglo-American discord or competition for wartime glory and postwar advantage.’3

  Among the more uncritical supporters of the Special Relationship in our own day is an unpreparedness to see the devastating truth of Dean Acheson’s judgement, in his speech at the Military Academy, West Point, on 5 December 1962, which enraged Churchill so much, that after the war Great Britain had lost an empire and not yet found a role. Even in his extreme old age, Churchill would show profound resentment of Dean Acheson’s aperçu, obvious though the truth of it was. Indeed, it must be the obviousness of the truth which makes for the resentment. Churchill hated the idea of Britain playing only a ‘tame and minor role in the world’.4 This has led, over the last twenty years or so, to a division of opinion among right-wing commentary in Britain, over the whole question of the Anglo-American relationship. On the one hand, there have been those who saw Churchill’s alliance with the Americans as essentially destructive of British power and interest. More recently, there has been a tendency, particularly among Conservative-minded journalists, to read the Special Relationship in 1941–4 as a template of what is best in modern Anglo-American relations. For them, therefore, Churchill’s testiness with Acheson is forgotten, or played down. The undoubted truth of the Allied Victory is insisted upon as the thing which matters. Britain’s continued friendship with America is seen less as a pathetic piece of toadyism than a demonstration that Britain does indeed still have a ‘role’ in the world, alongside America and outside the inner circle of the European Union, defending such values as democracy and the free market. It is difficult, entirely, to rid oneself of present perceptions about the place of America in the twenty-first century when considering what she was doing, politically, in the early 1940s, sixty years ago. Because America is today the great superpower of the world, it is quite hard to reconstruct the extent, for example, of American isolationism in 1940. Equally, it would be a mistake to emphasize this to the exclusion of recognizing that many American politicians and strategists saw the entry of their country into the war as a moment of decisive change, the moment when isolationism became impossible, and the United States became in inescapable deed what President Wilson had tried to make it in theory in 1917–18, the leading nation of the West, supplanting Britain for better or worse.

  The US Senate was by no means in favour of America entering the war in 1940: only Pearl Harbor changed the political and national mood about that. Roosevelt’s cabinet was not wholly pro-war even then, and certainly not entirely pro-British. What almost united it was a sense that, if America had to be involved in a European war, it could at least seize the opportunity to neuter British power in the process, so that in the postwar world the dominant Western democracy would be, not the British Empire, but the United States. The Special Relationship during the 1940s was in part, like a lot of outwa
rdly successful marriages, an abusive relationship, in which Britain was quite decidedly the junior partner. Lord Halifax recalled, after the war, his appointment in 1940 as the British ambassador in Washington. He remembered being asked to dinner by a group of Republican senators to whom he was to make a short address. One of them said: ‘Before you speak, Mr Ambassador, I want you to know that everyone in this room regards Mr Roosevelt as a bigger dictator than Hitler or Mussolini. We believe he is taking this country to hell as quickly as he can.’5

  In such a land, Halifax was able to see, Churchill ‘seemed to them a museum piece, a rare relic. When he told them that he had not become First Minister of the Crown in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire, they felt they were listening to a voice out of the eighteenth century.’6

  The truth is, Britain could not have won the war without American help, but this help inevitably led the larger and richer of the two nations to emerge from the war stronger, and the smaller, poorer nation to emerge with its power irrecoverably reduced. Two vivid examples of the process are found in the scientific–technological aspects of the alliance, as forged by the Tizard Mission in 1940; and by the economic terms of Anglo-American friendship.