by James Philip
The Prime Minister had initially been reluctant to give the Army – now supported by RAF Regiment troops and ‘flying’ mobile detachments raised from the naval bases at Portsmouth, Portland and Plymouth – a free hand in the first days after the UKIEA began to operate in Cheltenham. Four days ago the gloves had come off.
Looters would be shot on sight.
Anybody obstructing the highway would be shot on sight.
Local ground commanders had even been given limited authority to call down air strikes in ‘exceptional circumstances’ to quell ‘local rebellions’; although mercifully no such ‘strikes’ had yet been carried out.
More insidious were the treacherous actions of several surviving trade union leaders. Many of the coal mines in Scotland and the North of England, the former completely untouched by the war and most of the latter still fully operational, had been shut down by the Marxist and Soviet sympathising leadership cadre of the National Union of Mineworkers, likewise regional groups of the main railway unions – the National Union of Railwaymen (NUR) and the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen (ASLEF) – had threatened, and in some areas brought what remained of the railway system to a virtual standstill. Latest estimates suggested that about half the membership of both unions: approximately one hundred and fifty thousand NUR men, and some thirty thousand of the critical ASLEF drivers and foot plate men, had failed to turn up for work in the last week. Dockyard workers had been called out on strike ‘against the war’ in both Portsmouth and Southampton where the response had been patchy, especially after the strikers were told by the General Officer commanding the Hampshire, Wiltshire and Dorset Area that strikers would be forced back to work at the point of a bayonet if necessary.
The trouble was that as many as three-quarters of all workers across the whole economy had simply stayed at home in the days after the war, and how on earth did one persuade them to abandon their families and return to work?
Tom Harding-Grayson knew the answer to that one; so did everybody but it went against the grain and fortunately, he was not the one who was going to have to impose the only, Draconian solution that was going to get results.
Food was scarce and growing scarcer by the day.
If working age adults, and if it came to it, older teenagers were unwilling to work, to pull their weight in this hour of direst national need then the Government would not – in fact, could not afford to – put food in their bellies or to continue to provide for their basic health and well-being.
Margaret Thatcher was the person who was actually going to have to implement that policy; and her small but rapidly expanding Staff was working on the plan at this minute.
The minor tantrums of the aggrieved parties over the imminent fate of the Cheltenham Race Course were as nothing in comparison to the small matter of getting the country fed, moving and back to work again.
‘Forgive me, Minister,’ he smiled, trying not to adopt a paternal pose because only an idiot risked coming across as patronising or condescending with this woman. The problem was that although they had just lived through, and survived, a nuclear war which had obliterated London and great tracts of the Home Counties, East Anglia and the North (so far as they knew), he was wrestling with how to warn the lady in a diplomatic way that an awful lot of people in the West Country placed a much higher value on the continuing integrity of the Cheltenham Race Course than the ‘perceived’ needs of the rest of the country, as articulated by the thirty-six year old upstart female Secretary of State for Supply, Energy and Transportation. ‘But not everybody agrees that your department’s proposal for the, er, development of this, er,’ he waved at the gloomy vista before them, ‘establishment.’
Margaret Thatcher threw up her arms: ‘Oh, for goodness sake!’
Tom Harding-Grayson had never been an aficionado of the turf, and frankly, he too was more than a little disenchanted with the energy a certain – somewhat hysterical - faction was devoting to ‘saving the race course’ when everybody ought to be pulling together and concentrating on making sure that there was not another war, and that the British people were sheltered and fed in the aftermath of the one the United Kingdom had just lost.
Henry Tomlinson had recounted the gist of an interview he had had with the Mayor of Cheltenham, Councillor Alfred Trigg pleading the case for the ‘town’s pride and joy’.
‘There has been organised horse racing in Cheltenham since 1815[39], and in 1818 on Cleeve Hill also. Thirty thousand people attended the July ‘Gold Cup Meeting’[40] as long ago as the 1820s.’
Apparently, the race course had moved to its current location, Prestbury Park in 1831 after religious objections to the racing, gambling and riotous behaviour of the crowds had led to such disorder that the grandstand was burned down at Cleeve Hill. Steeple-chasing, for which modern Cheltenham was renowned, had come to the course as late as 1898. The course was the home of the World-famous ‘Gold Cup’ and the ‘Champion Hurdle’; it was living, breathing history, a national treasure...
Margaret Thatcher turned on the man.
They were both of a height; Tom Harding-Grayson had not realised just how steely blue the lady’s eyes were...
‘This isn’t like 1939,’ she said as if she was a schoolmistress addressing a recalcitrant student. ‘We don’t have several years to gear up to face the challenges before us. We must act now!’
‘I agree.’
‘Oh, you do?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well then, why is your department attempting to delay the necessary works at the race course?’
‘We’re not,’ Tom Harding-Grayson countered amiably. ‘We won’t know if the project is even viable until the surveyors have done their jobs. The time to dig one’s trenches and to begin the battle is when one has something concrete to fight over, Minister.’
Expecting the woman to slap him down he paused.
She remained silent, brooding on what he had said.
‘In the final analysis,’ the man continued, ‘if the surveyors give us a green light then you can put your plans to the Prime Minister and if he backs it then it becomes, de facto, the law.’
‘Really?’ Margaret Thatcher frowned. ‘I qualified as a barrister some years ago. My practice was in taxation and related commercial matters. I have found that it is virtually impossible to get a government law officer to give one a straight answer about the powers vested in whom, and in what circumstances under the War Emergency Acts.’
‘That’s why Sir Henry Tomlinson is drafting – at the behest of the Prime Minister - a number of amendments to the aforementioned Act.’
Margaret Thatcher blinked.
‘Oh. I thought they’d sent you out here to talk me out of my plan?’
‘Good lord, no. Sir Alec is appalled, of course,’ Tom Harding-Grayson shrugged, ‘but then he’s appalled by practically everything at the moment but I have an open mind on the subject. Needs must and so forth; forgive me, the reason I came out here was to venture to offer you a little collegiate advice.’
Margaret Thatcher was suspicious.
Beware of Greeks bearing gifts...
Unlike many of his civil service fellows – most of whom were far too glad and relieved to have reached sanctuary to actually be very interested in doing their jobs and or performing their duties – Tom Harding-Grayson had a great deal of sympathy for the recently widowed mother of two nine year old children presently standing beside him.
She was the nation’s designated ‘rationing queen’ in a time of desperate hardship and ever shrinking food stocks. All the incoming reports indicated that there was no longer anything remotely resembling a National Health Service in southern or eastern England, that the rail network was paralysed, and that the London-based nationwide telephone system was largely inoperative. The list of woes literally went on forever.
Although very few power stations had been hit the electrical grid no longer existed across broad swaths of the land; road transport ought to still be op
erative but petrol and diesel stocks were already severely curtailed. Worse, with the Port of London gone and with it its strategic stockpiles – perhaps six weeks to three to four months of goods sufficient to supply a third of the country – lost, and other ports like Liverpool and Hull out of action, the former indefinitely, where would the vital food, fuel, medicines and thousand and one other things essential to sustain modern life come from now global maritime trade had virtually halted? Across the other side of the English Channel the devastation seemed total. Everything now depended on the Americans and everybody knew that whatever the Kennedy Administration promised, nothing could be taken for granted.
‘In the present circumstances in which getting things done is much more important than the debate about the ways and means,’ the Foreign Office man suggested, ‘the best policy is to do what needs to be done first and to worry about whether or not you were specifically empowered to do it later. I know that Oliver Franks[41] practically wrote ‘the book’ about how the Ministry of Supply ought to be run in wartime, but I think the big lesson of the thirty-nine war was that basically, one has to make things up as one goes along, Minister.’
Much to his surprise the woman seemed to accept this without rancour or resentment.
She nodded thoughtfully.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
Together they stared out across the famous old race course that the Ministry of Supply wanted to turn into RAF Cheltenham; a scheme that involved pouring several thousand tons of concrete across the faded green coat of Gloucestershire and burying the great icon of the Jump racing calendar beneath an ocean of asphalt. Under the scheme the present grandstand would become the arrivals, departures, cargo handling and administrative hub of the new airfield.
‘I must speak with Sir Alec about Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies’s cable,’ Margaret Thatcher told the man.
Tom Harding-Grayson smiled ruefully.
The lady had surprised him anew.
Report to the race course immediately!
Why are you obstructing my plans for the airport?
Actually, she had wanted to talk to him about how seriously to take the ‘concerns’ and the ‘suggestions’ of the grand old man of the Commonwealth of nations.
The lady was signalling that she was not about to let Tom Harding-Grayson’s political master have a free hand in the discussions about seeking Commonwealth assistance to the old country.
‘Sir Robert,’ he explained, ‘understands that while we export a substantial part of our industrial production that we must import at least twenty to thirty percent of our food year on year. In the circumstances of the war we shall struggle to feed even our reduced population once the surviving pre-war stockpiles are exhausted. Given that the World financial system is in a state of collapse, and global maritime trade has come to a standstill, like us, he is at a loss to know what can and must be done.’
The woman absorbed this, read the cautious nuances without halting to deconstruct their subtler messages.
‘Like me you don’t think the Americans will come to our rescue?’
Tom Harding-Grayson was a little disconcerted. A lot of people thought that; nobody said it out aloud!
‘I don’t know. We’re dealing with a country that just destroyed most of the Northern Hemisphere because of its paranoia about a few rockets on a Caribbean island. They won the war; they make up the rules and they get to write the first draft of history.’
Margaret Thatcher had turned to face the man.
‘A lot of our people are already hungry. In the coming weeks everybody will be hungry,’ her face creased with momentary pain ‘yet right now my people are drawing up plans designed to ensure that rations will only be allocated to productive mouths and their immediate dependents. We need every grain of rice, ear of wheat, cob of corn that the Commonwealth can send us. We need every drop of crude oil. We need anything and everything our friends overseas can spare and we need it as soon as possible. I do not trust the Americans and I will not plan on the basis of President Kennedy’s promises. If the Foreign Office plays games, or delays in any way the negotiations with Sir Robert Menzies and other Commonwealth leaders in the hope of currying favour with the Americans I will kick up merry Hell!’
A lesser man might have flinched. A lesser man would almost certainly have taken great exception. The veteran Foreign Office man took the warning in his stride.
If the Foreign Secretary, a decent and honourable man albeit one rather stuck in the past, ever emerged from his post-war daze and began to assert his faith in some notional ‘special relationship’ with the Americans, it would be a problem. No US Administration since the war had been willing to tolerate British Governments having more than one ‘special relationship’ at a time. That is, one with anybody other than the United States. Even after the humiliation of the Suez Crisis in 1956 when President Eisenhower had threatened to bankrupt the United Kingdom if it failed to pull out of Egypt and to recant its errors, there had been idiots – a lot of them – who still insisted on clinging to the Yankee coat tails. The fools had not realised that the US needed Britain as much, if not more than London needed Washington. There was no North Atlantic Treaty Organisation – NATO – alliance holding back the Soviet tide without the United Kingdom, without Britain the US had no reliable ally in Europe.
And now they were all – well, the survivors anyway – living with the consequences of trying to hide behind a US nuclear umbrella designed to protect North America not Europe.
Tom Harding-Grayson nodded.
People who stood too close to Margaret Thatcher were likely to get their fingers burned, he decided.
Chapter 12 | Commonwealth
The Empire is dead; long live the Commonwealth!
Even before the cataclysm of the October War those years at the end of the fifties and at the outset of the sixties were heady, dizzying times of change and transition.
Great Britain was becoming the United Kingdom; India and Ceylon were long gone, as were the unwanted responsibilities of nightmare ‘mandates’ like Palestine, and Burma, Malaya, Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Cyprus, Tanganyika, Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Uganda and Western Samoa[42] had all recently joined Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Pakistan as fully independent sovereign members of the new Commonwealth of Nations. Nevertheless that still left some three dozen[43] - give or take a remote islands here or there – so-called ‘dependent territories’, the legacy of empire, colonies, crown protectorates and the like, effectively ruled from or by the United Kingdom. Many of these ‘dependencies’ comprised straggling archipelagos, or commanded potentially valuable mineral or petroleum riches, others were strategically placed across the World’s shipping lanes, or key communications outposts.
In some of these islands or lands there was a genuine wish to break from the motherland, to be free, independent but by then most of the bigger, intrinsically viable national entities had already broken their imperial shackles. In remarkably few of the remaining dependencies was there any kind of deep-seated animus to the old country. True, in Aden and Borneo there were respectively theocratic and ideological ‘anti-imperialist’ insurgencies but elsewhere the heat had been adroitly taken out of the painful post colonialism process. Where people voted for independence it was theirs and Harold MacMillan’s government breathed a secret, collective sigh of relief with the departure of each of its needy former colonial ‘children’; much in the fashion of worriedly proud parents ‘seeing off’ their offspring into the great wide world. Viewed from Whitehall the de-colonisation programme had been going ‘nicely’ right up to the moment the first Soviet ICBM lit off over Richmond Park in South East London.
So, in October 1962 there was the free – independent – Commonwealth and there was the ‘dependent’, that is, dependent upon the Crown, Commonwealth which remained a globe-spanning and frankly, mind-boggling collection of peoples, places and cultures. Putting to one side the Isle of Man, next nearest to home were the Channel Islands
– the Bailiwicks of Jersey and Guernsey, this latter including Alderney, Sark and various other isles and islets under Guernsey’s ancient protection – the last remaining ancient spoils of the medieval wars with the French. These were of course ‘British’ places, farther afield nothing was that simple.
In fact the question of exactly how to classify the other ‘dependent territories’ – perish the thought that they could be grouped or described by any meaningful diplomatic shorthand, a thing that had always defeated the Foreign Office – was virtually impossible, to all intents irresolvable; so herein, for the record the author will list them alphabetically: Aden, The Bahamas, Barbados, Bermuda, Borneo (including North Borneo, Brunei, and Sarawak), British Guiana, British Honduras[44], the Cayman, and the Turks and Caicos Islands, East Africa (Kenya), The Falkland Islands (which also administered South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands possession of which reinforced Britain’s claims in Antarctica), Fiji, The Gambia, Gibraltar, The High Commission Territories of Southern Africa (Basutoland[45], Bechuanaland[46] and Swaziland[47]), Hong Kong, the Leeward and Windward Islands, the Maldives, Malta, Mauritius, Pitcairn Island, St Helena, The Seychelles, Singapore, Tonga, The Western Pacific High Commission (the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, the Solomon Islands and the New Hebrides), and...Zanzibar.
If one is breathless just from reading the list its very length and geographic coverage gives the lie to any claim that ‘the British could only hold down such an Empire’ by force alone; to the contrary very few of these lands had ever had any kind of significant ‘military’ presence inflicted upon them other than briefly in time of war. The British Empire had always been, like the new Commonwealth of Nations largely a conspiracy of the converted and the willing; it was an accommodation which seemed to be in everybody’s best interests.