fn4 To friends they had been describing themselves as engaged for some time. Gordon Scotney remembered meeting up with Roy at Waterloo on the way to join their unit in Salisbury in August 1942. Roy turned up with ‘a radiant looking young girl on his arm’ whom he introduced as his fiancée. ‘They were obviously very much in love. Jennifer was astonishingly beautiful and vivacious – a real catch.’ Characteristically they all went off to tea at Fortnum & Mason.35
fn5 Maurice Allen was a Balliol economics don who had an unspecified role in Intelligence during the war. After the war he became an adviser to the Bank of England and a director of the Bank when Jenkins was Chancellor, where he still enjoyed a somewhat mysterious reputation.
fn6 There survives in his papers, however, an invitation from the Wrens of ‘C’ Watch requesting the pleasure of the company of Captain R. Jenkins at their dance on Thursday 9 November at Woburn Town Hall. The fact that he kept it suggests that he went.
fn7 This was typically ingenious, but incorrect. Even as the crow flies, Oxford is twenty-eight miles from Bletchley.
fn8 Jim Griffiths was the MP for Llanelli, soon to be Minister of National Insurance in Attlee’s Cabinet and much later the first Secretary of State for Wales in 1964.
fn9 Jennifer had been ill at home in Henley for ten days in October, during which time Roy visited her at least once.
5
False Starts
AS THE WAR ended, Jenkins had only one ambition: to make up for lost time and join his father in the House of Commons as soon as possible. With the first General Election for ten years likely to be held as soon as practicable after Germany surrendered, an unusually large number of veterans retiring and many ambitious young hopefuls like Tony Crosland still abroad, he should have had a good chance of finding a winnable seat. He was not only the obviously able son of a respected father, with a First Class degree and a good record in university politics, but he had excellent contacts in the party leadership. One drawback may have been that, since he could not mention Bletchley Park, he could not boast a particularly impressive service record: Captain Jenkins had already lost out to Major Wyatt at Aston. Yet others – Harold Wilson, for one – managed to secure safe seats without having been in uniform at all. Whatever the reason, Jenkins failed to secure a constituency that gave him a real chance. He came closest in another Birmingham seat, Sparkbrook, at the time a Tory-held marginal, where he lost by a single vote to a popular local councillor who went on to win the seat and held it until his death in 1959.fn1 Had he won that extra vote, Jenkins’ career might well have taken off rather earlier than it did, since Attlee would surely have given him office sometime before 1951.
But it was better to win his spurs by fighting a hopeless seat than to have no constituency to fight at all; so he was relieved finally to be selected – again by a single vote – for Solihull, an overwhelmingly middle-class suburb of Birmingham where the Tory majority in 1935 was 31,000. He was selected at the end of April 1945, a couple of weeks before VE Day. Two weeks after that Labour withdrew from the coalition government and Churchill called the election for 7 July. As prospective candidate for Solihull, Jenkins attended the Labour party conference at Blackpool in May, where he would have heard, among other blood-curdling speeches, Major Denis Healey, the candidate for Pudsey and Otley, deliver a fierce denunciation of the international capitalist class – ‘selfish, depraved, dissolute and decadent’ – which must now be overthrown.1 Jenkins did not get to speak; but he and Healey were photographed together, both in uniform, as promising representatives of Labour’s new generation. Then, like other serving officer-candidates, he was given five weeks’ leave from Bletchley to fight the election. He launched his campaign jointly with the candidates for two adjoining seats at the Fox and Goose pub in Washwood Heath on 17 June. Attlee spoke at Birmingham Town Hall on 19 June and came to Solihull the next day – clearly a personal favour, since it was scarcely a marginal seat. Over the next two weeks Captain Jenkins, as he was billed, held meetings nearly every day, mainly in schools, but sometimes outside pubs at closing time. With Jennifer at his side when she could get the time off work, he had what he recalled as ‘an educative few weeks’, learning to speak to audiences ‘less self-consciously precious than the Oxford Union’.2 He eschewed class-war rhetoric, but hammered home Labour’s message that the same sort of planning that had won the war was equally necessary to win the peace. The response was so positive that he and Jennifer actually dared to believe that he could win – as he claimed confidently at his eve-of-poll meeting: ‘Capt. Roy Jenkins . . . said he had fought and, he believed, won, the election largely on the question of jobs for all. Col. Lindsay appeared to have fought largely on what Mr Lansbury said in 1932.’fn2
Here in Solihull the issue is clear. It is the future against the past. I am fighting for new factories, new houses, new schools, new hospitals. I want equal opportunity for children, freedom from drudgery for housewives, security of employment and hope of promotion for men, and a decent living with dignity for the aged. The alternative for Solihull is to vote [for] old promises, catchwords, nightmares and the eternal Tory line.3
In order to allow time to collect the forces’ ballots, the count was delayed for three weeks until 26 July. In the interval Roy and Jennifer enjoyed a lazy holiday in Cornwall and made a sentimental return to Dartington. Then Roy went back to Solihull, via Pontypool, to await the result, while Jennifer returned to London. From Pontypool he wrote her his first letter for six weeks:
The holiday was certainly wonderful, darling and I am beginning to feel horribly nostalgic for Fowey . . . I do hope that you enjoyed Dartington & Totnes and that, on reflection, you do not think it to have been a mistake going there. It was bound to make one feel rather sad but, for me, it produced at least one moment of extreme happiness, and had re-awakened some incredibly good memories. I am sure that our first seaside holiday tog[ether] was a great success and that we will not disagree too violently about what we want to do.4
The same day, she wrote him a letter to await him in Solihull:
You won’t get this till Wednesday afternoon or evening, by which time I expect that you will be feeling pretty apprehensive. It will be rather an unpleasant ordeal and I wish I could be there to console you. It will be absolutely wonderful if all goes well and you win. It will be a great achievement to win a place like Solihull and so young. We will have some terrific celebrations.
She too thought their holiday a success. ‘We will be able to have some jolly good holidays in the next few years.’ Now back at work – attending a conference on the training of blind people under the Disabled Persons Act – she felt ‘very depressed all day and longed to be in Fowey – bathing, sailing and lying in the sun together’. She ended: ‘All my love my Darling – and I’ll be waiting for you to ring on Thursday – except between 1.10 and 1.40. I shan’t be able to think of anything else till then. Jennifer.’5
Roy wrote again on the train from Pontypool to Birmingham. At Greenlands he had found his father ‘a good deal less well’, which had helped take his mind off the election result. He too wished they were back in Cornwall. But ‘I am now reconciled to the fact that there can be no further peace or rest or holiday until it is over and so I wish no longer to postpone it.’ Then he reverted to Dartington with a Proustian sense of temps perdu:
I do not think our visit to Dartington in any way pricked the bubble. In many ways it has made my feeling for the place even stronger and has certainly heightened the dangerous desire to go back and stay in the school for a week. There is a real danger, of course, that as time goes on we will remember, not the actual ‘gate’ scene, but its many reconstructions.
I hope that you will not feel that I was in any way peeved or hurt by your sadness on Saturday evening. I felt much too nearly the same way myself for that. Our love is now obviously far deeper and our dependence on each other far greater than it was in 1940. But, for all that, one can never quite recapture the delirious feeling of that August
and it is an infinitely sad thing. At the time, of course, there was no sadness and yet there was real reason for it; for we had used up something quite irrevocably. In some ways there was far more reason for regret than there is on becoming 30, or coming down from university or passing any of the other stages that normally cause people to mourn their youth!
The count was now expected to be quicker than anticipated, ‘so you may expect the fateful telephone call rather earlier. If it does not come by midday,’ he added, ‘I think you may assume that we are enduring the agony of a recount.’6
That was wildly optimistic. In fact Jenkins did exceptionally well, but not nearly well enough, achieving a swing of 20 per cent (against the national average of 11.8 per cent) and cutting his opponent’s majority to just over 5,000:
Lt-Col. Martin Lindsay (Conservative) 26,696
Capt. Roy Jenkins (Labour) 21,647
Conservative majority
5,0497
But he was bitterly disappointed, since so many of his contemporaries had been elected. With 393 members against just 213 Tories and twelve Liberals, Labour had achieved an historic and – it seemed at the time – possibly permanent revolution. Amid the exhilaration of Labour’s sweeping triumph, Jenkins feared that he had missed the bus. He was despondent not to be one of the avalanche of new Members ushering in the socialist millennium.
Not yet demobilised, he had no choice but to go back to Bletchley. Though married, he and Jennifer could not yet live together: she was still working for the Ministry of Labour and living in Chelsea. It was a frustrating and demoralising time, especially since the work at Bletchley had become simultaneously less urgent and more difficult. The Russians had captured the German ‘Fish’ machines, changed the settings and were using them to communicate with their armies ‘liberating’ eastern Europe. Transferred to the ‘Newmanry’, Jenkins found himself out of his mathematical depth. Eventually, however, with less and less to do, he found a useful way to occupy his time. Finding a quiet room where he was not disturbed, he settled down to read, one after another, the ‘tombstone’ biographies (most of them multi-volume) of all the major figures of late-Victorian and Edwardian politics: Gladstone, Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Randolph Churchill, Salisbury, Asquith and half a dozen more. This concentrated crash course laid the foundation of what was to become his major intellectual hobby for the rest of his life and the basis of his secondary career.
Meanwhile he had to decide what to do when he was finally released, since politics was for the moment closed to him. Had the war not intervened, he would ‘almost certainly’ have read for the Bar on coming down from Oxford in 1941;8 and Arthur still thought this was what he should do, as he wrote slightly testily to Roy and Jennifer in July. (He clearly did not expect Roy to win Solihull.)
When do you propose to start reading for the Bar? A decision will soon have to be taken on that. If Jennifer will join ‘Pony’ & me in that I think we might soon force a decision.
Yours ever, ‘Jumbo’9
By 1945, however, Roy had had enough of exams.
The other possibility was academia. Back in 1943, when Sandy Lindsay was pulling strings to get him into Intelligence, there was talk of Roy getting a scholarship to America, then coming back to Balliol to take a doctorate before concentrating on politics, ‘because that is your natural bent’.10 ‘The Master,’ Arthur told Roy, ‘does not think you should go to Harvard but to a university in the Middle West.’11 Roy would certainly rather have gone to Harvard. Failing that, he applied – with 167 others – for the job of International Secretary of the Labour Party: a consolation prize secured by Denis Healey, who had narrowly failed to win Pudsey and Otley.12 In the end, however, Roy found a job through another of his father’s useful contacts. William Piercy was one of those shadowy but powerful figures who flitted between business and public service between the wars. During the Great War he had worked in Lloyd George’s Ministry of Munitions and helped set up the Ministry of Food; between the wars he helped establish the first unit trusts; during the Second World War he returned to Whitehall to work for Attlee. Then in early 1945 he was chosen to head a new organisation, the Industrial and Commercial Finance Corporation (ICFC), established by the Bank of England to raise investment for small and medium-sized business. Needing to recruit from scratch, Piercy offered a job to Arthur’s economist son.
The attraction for Roy was that it carried with it early release from the army. He was demobilised on 1 January 1946 and started work three weeks later as an assistant economist on a salary of £500 a year for a five-and-a-half-day week. The downside was that he was not in the least interested in banking. On paper it should have been useful experience for an aspiring politician whose knowledge of economics had so far been entirely academic. If not exactly socialism, the ICFC – privately funded and independent of the government – was the acceptable face of capitalism: a perfect expression of Keynesianism in action, harnessing City finance to fuel the economic growth that Labour badly needed. But Jenkins was quickly bored by the work and got on badly with his first two bosses, who found him irritatingly superior. Years later one of them recalled feeling ‘slightly resentful’ at Roy’s powerful connections. ‘I remember the day I said to him, “You must not be under the impression that dining at Number 10 on Wednesday night absolves you from doing the filing on Thursday morning.” But I don’t think he agreed with me.’13 Eventually Roy found a manager with whom he did get on: the senior controller, John Kinross, who became a lifelong friend. In his memoirs Kinross wrote that Jenkins ‘did first-rate work’ and claimed to have seen him even then as a future Chancellor.14 In turn, Jenkins recalled in his memorial address for Kinross in 1989 that ‘Working for John Kinross not only engaged my loyalty and affection but also seized my imagination and fully engaged my mind.’15, fn3 His most memorable achievement working with Kinross was lending Charles Forte the money – £168,000 – to expand his catering business from milk bars to hotels.
Meanwhile Jennifer had left the Ministry of Labour and got a job with Political and Economic Planning (PEP) – an early think tank – working on manpower needs on a salary of £400 a year. Their combined incomes enabled them, a year after they were married, to settle down at last to life together, first in a bedsit in Kensington but soon moving to a modest flat above a snack bar, surrounded by bomb sites, in Marsham Street, five minutes from the House of Commons. By the standards of the time they were by no means badly off. They went to the cinema and the theatre and ate out quite regularly: Roy’s pocket diaries for these early post-war years contain the phone numbers of several of their favourite London restaurants, including the White Tower (MUS 2181), Martinez (REG 5066) and Boulestin (TEM 7061). Despite severe restrictions on taking money out of the country they also managed several foreign holidays: to Ascona on Lake Maggiore in 1946, with a quick trip down to Milan; to Paris in June 1947, and to Venice and Lake Garda in September, the beginning of a lifelong love of Italy. Nearer home they spent weekends with Jennifer’s parents, even after the Parker Morrises had moved back from Henley to Hampstead Garden Suburb: in the great freeze of 1947 they enjoyed ‘four or five successive Saturdays and Sundays of intensive toboganning on Hampstead Heath’.17
Trying to get away from banking, Roy still saw possibilities in academia and applied for two university jobs. The first, for which he was recommended by Lindsay despite his poor mark in philosophy in his Schools, was a philosophy lectureship at Manchester: this he described in his memoirs as ‘a lucky escape’.18 The second was still more ill-advised. Like many others whose university careers had been interrupted by the war, Tony Crosland had taken up the option to return to Oxford at the mature age of twenty-seven. He switched to PPE and took his degree – a First, naturally – in a single year, at the same time resuming the chairmanship of the OUDSC and becoming a somewhat elderly president of the Union. On graduating he became an economics lecturer at Trinity, but was quickly elected a Fellow, leaving his lectureship vacant. Tony suggested that Roy should take i
t over. Roy duly applied, and by his own account wanted very much to get it. Fortunately the college chose someone else – Fred Atkinson, later chief economic adviser to the Treasury. As Roy later realised, ‘it would have been a great mistake for me to have worked directly under Crosland, close and on the whole happy though our relationship was in those days’.19 But it is striking that he was still so influenced by Tony. Indeed, he showed little independent initiative of any sort at this period. Everything he did was at someone else’s prompting: his father, Lindsay or Crosland. The same was true also of his next lucky escape.
After seven years’ loyal service to the deputy Prime Minister, Arthur had been appointed Under-Secretary in the Ministry of Town and Country Planning in the last days of the coalition government in March 1945 – though Attlee had to insist in order to get Churchill to agree.20 But his health was already failing, and he only got through the election ‘with considerable difficulty’.21 Attlee nevertheless promoted him to Parliamentary Secretary at Education under Ellen Wilkinson; but almost immediately Arthur was ill again. Prostate trouble that would be easily treated today was neglected and spread to his kidneys. He only narrowly survived what was then a major operation in September and resigned from the government in late October. He battled on, and as late as March 1946 was the main speaker at a conference in Pontypool presciently aimed at bringing new industries to the eastern valley. But very soon afterwards he underwent a second operation which he did not survive. He died at St Thomas’ hospital, just across the river from the House of Commons, on 25 April, aged sixty-three.
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