Observing all this from his cottage in the Devil’s Punchbowl, Pyke had an idea. Less than a week after the Bishop of Bradford’s speech, with the country apparently divided between those who thought the King should marry and others calling for his abdication, Churchillians against Baldwinians, Cavaliers against Roundheads, Pyke wrote a letter to the New Statesman and Nation.
Under the heading ‘King and Country’ he called for ‘the anthropological study of our own civilisation of which we stand in such desperate need’. One of the reasons why the King’s potential marriage had turned into a crisis was that nobody quite knew what British public opinion was, and to what extent the press had reflected it or ‘evoked and moulded’ it. ‘Anthropologists and psychologists all over the world are studying the reactions of primitive tribes to sexual situations,’ Pyke wrote, so why not study the British tribe and its reaction to the Simpson affair, a sexual situation if ever there was one? Already it was clear that within this particular tribe many were ‘unable to tolerate the image of a Queen – whose chief function together with her Consort would be to be an object of idolisation – who has previously been married to two men who are still alive.’ A comprehensive study would build on observations like this to provide a mass of information about how the British thought and felt, which unconscious motives drove them in times like these and how politicians or newspaper editors were able to exploit them.
Perhaps a similar study could begin in the United States, if for no other reason than to understand how Americans were responding to British hostility towards ‘that woman’. Pyke’s worry was that some of those on the other side of the Atlantic might interpret this antipathy towards Mrs Simpson as ‘an aspersion on themselves’, leading to anti-British feeling that could manifest itself ‘on some future occasion’ in a ‘refusal to co-operate and perhaps a revengeful suspicion of motive’. Although there was at least a correlation between this idea and the American refusal three years later to join Britain against Nazi Germany, the thrust of Pyke’s letter lay elsewhere. He had called for an anthropological study of the British and, for once, he got exactly what he asked for.
The magazine which carried Pyke’s letter went on sale in London on a glum, cold morning, several days after the abdication of Edward VIII and only hours before his younger brother Bertie was sworn in as King George VI. In a house in Blackheath this letter was read with a mixture of excitement and anxiety by a group of Surrealist poets led by a Daily Mirror reporter, Charles Madge, and a young film-maker at the GPO Film Unit, Humphrey Jennings. Over the next few days both wrote to the New Statesman and Nation to say that they had been thinking along very similar lines to Pyke.
Their letter was seen in early January by Tom Harrisson, an Old Harrovian and self-taught anthropologist then labouring in a Bolton cotton mill while observing the local working class. He had picked up a copy of the magazine to admire his first (and last) published poem, ‘Coconut Moon’, a choppy Surrealist ode to his sweetheart, ‘Zita’, who had since run off with another man. It had appeared just below Madge and Jennings’s response to Pyke’s letter. Harrisson immediately contacted Madge and Jennings, and the trio wrote to the New Statesman and Nation with what was effectively a manifesto for what would become Mass Observation (M-O). Out of this suitably surreal juxtaposition of letter and poem, the kind of accidental textual bricolage which Madge, Jennings and Harrisson enjoyed so much, a new movement was born.
Acknowledging their debt to Pyke’s call for an ‘anthropology of our own people’, Madge, Jennings and Harrisson explained that their study of the British tribe would take on subjects like ‘shouts and gestures of motorists’, ‘the aspidistra cult’, ‘bathroom behaviour’, ‘female taboos about eating’ and, tellingly, ‘anti-Semitism’. Along with their underlying emphasis on gathering mountains of raw data, on observation and analysis as two distinct stages, this inclusion of anti-Semitism suggests a greater debt to Pyke. They would have read his piece several months earlier on anti-Semitism, and as former Cambridge undergraduates it was also likely that they knew about Malting House. M-O was to focus on what British people did as much as what they said. The children at Malting House were ‘under trained observation out of school hours as well as in them’ and ‘practically all that they do, and much of what they say, is recorded’.
M-O went on to become a unique and influential organisation dedicated to social research, and was employed during the war by the Ministry of Information. Pyke’s letter brought it into being. It is just about possible to call him the father of M-O, though he was an errant father at best, one who wanted nothing to do with the child’s upbringing. Madge kept him abreast of major developments and they corresponded briefly, but thereafter Pyke was never directly involved. By the time the three M-O founders had written their manifesto Pyke had moved on: indeed, by that point he had set himself a problem which made the Abdication crisis feel like an interesting but essentially parochial distraction. The question Pyke now sought to answer seemed to affect the very future of European civilisation.
Early in 1937 Pyke travelled up to London to take ‘preliminary soundings of opinion’ on an idea which seemed to him so obvious that he was amazed to learn that nobody else had yet thought of it. Imagining he would be gone for no more than a week he left his dog, Judy, with his landlord, and kept the cottage open. But one meeting led to another and more than two years later Pyke had still not returned to the Devil’s Punchbowl. Judy, presumably, spent the rest of her days with the landlord. No doubt Pyke missed her, but there was nothing he would not sacrifice for the sake of the cause he had taken on.
The scheme that would come to dominate his life was an attempt to change the way we give, a redefinition of voluntarism in the face of the fascist threat. Its target was Spain. The year before, a ‘Popular Front’ coalition of left-leaning parties had won the Spanish General Election by a whisker. A clique of army officers led by General Francisco Franco had subsequently risen up against the government and the country had spiralled into civil war. What followed was savage and complicated, a bloody maze of reprisals and score-settling, with neighbours turning on each other as a mosaic of regional and sectarian tensions was uncovered.
From afar it was something else entirely: a war of opposites in which democracy was pitted against fascism, atheism against religion, the proletariat versus the bourgeoisie. As the journalist Martha Gellhorn wrote, ‘it was one of those moments in history when there was no doubt’.
This grand narrative played to the throttled aspirations of Pyke’s generation, one which had grown up during a military apocalypse and had since lived through an economic meltdown of unparalleled proportions. For many this either suggested or confirmed that liberal democracy was not the answer. As support for the fascist and communist alternatives grew, so did the bitter enmity between the two camps. Within each was an irresistible and mounting sense that they were not only trying to lead humanity to the promised land but at the same time preventing it from being dragged down to perdition by the enemy. It was a millenarian age, an age of extremes, and in Spain the forces of good and evil seemed to be sharing a battlefield for the first time. This feeling was shored up by the idea that Franco’s ‘Nationalist’ rebels were being armed by Germany and Italy, while the left-wing ‘Republican’ government was backed by the Soviet Union.
In this sense, what had just begun in Spain appeared to be the first act in a new kind of struggle, an international civil war in which fascists all over the world would eventually line up against anti-fascists. If you were opposed to Mosley’s Blackshirts you were also at war with Franco’s Blueshirts, Mussolini’s Blackshirts, Hitler’s Brownshirts, Pelley’s Silvershirts in the United States or even O’Duffy’s Greenshirts in Ireland. Allegiance was determined not by nationality but by personal politics. ‘Never has there been a period when patriotism, in the sense of automatic loyalty to a citizen’s national government, counted for less,’ wrote the historian Eric Hobsbawm. Pyke was physically unable to fight, an impotence w
hich might have inspired his activism, but there was never any doubt in his mind about which side he belonged to.
In the weeks after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Baldwin’s Conservative government made the decision not to intervene, sparking the Aid Spain Movement, an alignment of charitable committees, organisations and other voluntary groups, ‘a de facto Popular Front’ geared towards providing the Spanish Republicans with everything the British government would not – except for arms. From the Cambridge Scientists Anti-War Group to the Basque Children’s Committee or Bloomsbury’s For Intellectual Liberty, these popular anti-fascist groups staged a crescendo of rallies and fundraisers across the country during the second half of 1936. Aid began to make its way to Spain and by the start of the following year ‘Spain Shops’ were sending money to the Republican government and British medical volunteers were making the journey to Spain. So were some 500 brave, idealistic young men who formed the British Battalion of the International Brigades. It seemed as if everything that could be done was being done. Or was it?
How to Get Aid to Spain for Free
In late 1936, Pyke had asked the mechanic who was fixing the clapped-out Armstrong car outside his cottage how much this vehicle was worth. The mechanic had explained that just then the second-hand car market was in a terrible state. The country was ‘covered with dumps of old motor vehicles of all types’ which could be ‘bought for a song’. But rather than being bought, reconditioned and put back on the road, most were broken up and sold off to scrap merchants. A growing proportion of this scrap metal was even ending up in Germany where Nazi rearmament had created a buoyant market.
Over the weeks that followed, Pyke combined three basic observations: in Britain there were heaps of cheap second-hand vehicles, the sale of which was inadvertently boosting Nazi rearmament; there was popular support for the Spanish Republicans among British factory workers; and in Spain there was a need for costly ambulances and transports. Out of these came an idea.
If he could get his hands on some of these old vans and trucks before they were scrapped and have them transported to engineers who identified with the Republican cause and were willing to volunteer some of their spare time, then perhaps these vehicles could be reconditioned, turned into ambulances and sent out to Spain, all for very little money. He could provide material aid at a fraction of the retail cost. Factory workers would be doing out-of-hours pro bono work in aid of the Spanish Republicans. Or, to put it another way, the British labour movement would be fighting fascism with labour, not with capital.
It was a beguiling concept, and one that could easily be extended. Perhaps there were factory owners who were prepared to credit workers’ overtime towards the cost of goods produced on their premises. Either Pyke would supply the raw materials to the workers, or volunteers would put in extra hours knowing that their employer would donate goods to the value of their labour (as well as donating the use of their machines and premises).
His plans for an institute devoted to the study of anti-Semitism had collapsed due to lack of funds, a failure which reflected in part the cause’s unfashionability. This new scheme was different. It required very little funding and was inspired by the political cause célèbre. Having come up with the idea it seemed that all that Pyke needed to do was publicise the scheme and coordinate the efforts of hundreds of willing volunteers.
Voluntary Industrial Aid for Spain (VIAS) was formed in February 1937 with Pyke as Honorary Secretary and almost no funds to its name. He turned for help first to Sage Bernal and his partner, the art collector Margaret Gardiner. They gave a cheque for £15 which allowed Pyke to take rooms at No. 32 Great Ormond Street in Bloomsbury, a flat that would double up as Pyke’s home and the VIAS headquarters.
His next step was to canvass further opinions, as he always did when approaching a new subject. He sought out Cambridge friends like Maurice Dobb, J. B. S. Haldane, the classicist F. L. Lucas, Kingsley Martin at the New Statesman and Nation and Harold Laski at LSE. All agreed that the idea was valuable and that he must first win over the trades unions. With no experience of the labour movement, Pyke went to Bernal for introductions and by the end of the month had cobbled together a VIAS Advisory Committee made up of fourteen high-powered union men and for added respectability the Labour peer Lord Faringdon.
Once the inspiration for Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Lord Parakeet’ in Decline and Fall, Faringdon, a camp and flamboyant figure, had swapped the studied nonchalance of the 1920s for the campaigning seriousness of the 1930s. As well as being Treasurer of VIAS, after the bombing of Guernica he would open his home to the children of Basque refugees. Yet even Faringdon’s involvement in Pyke’s committee failed to mask its political character. It was, as Pyke would admit, ‘hard-boiled’, with key figures like Joe Scott, Harry Adams and Jack Tanner either close to the Communist Party or card-carrying members. At the time this seemed unimportant. The idea behind the new ‘Popular Front’ mentality was that left-wing groups should pull together in the face of the fascist threat. But, as Pyke soon discovered, not everyone saw it like that.
Using new VIAS headed stationery he wrote to a high table of trades unions leaders explaining the concept, and persuaded Kingsley Martin to publish appeals in the letters section of the New Statesman and Nation. While eight of the unions he contacted agreed to become involved, others confessed that they could not agree to it until VIAS had the blessing of the all-powerful Trades Union Congress (TUC).
Depicted by the cartoonist Low as a lumbering carthorse, the TUC was slow to agree to anything, let alone an initiative dreamt up by a bearded bankrupt who had never done a day’s manual labour. Pyke met with various officials, including the TUC General Secretary, Walter Citrine, most of whom, ‘failed to respond with any trace of enthusiasm that I could detect’. In a letter to Bernal, he bemoaned this dilatory progress and ‘the complexity of the organisation of the Labour movement’. Little did he know that while he was writing that letter Citrine was busy contacting the eight unions which had agreed to Pyke’s plan to highlight what he believed to be a dangerous flaw.
The Amalgamated Society of Woodcutting Machinists agreed with Citrine that the voluntary manufacture of goods – no matter how worthy the cause – set a ‘very dangerous precedent’. Perhaps more alarming for Citrine was the political character of Pyke’s committee. The TUC leadership had resolved to avoid any endeavour which had communist associations, and in this regard, as one of his staff put it, the make-up of the VIAS Advisory Committee was ‘rather unfortunate’. Which was why the TUC formally rejected VIAS.
For Pyke, this was an obvious moment to abandon the project. In terms of time and money, he had lost very little, and it was now clear that it was going to be extremely difficult to get this scheme up and running. Letting go of the idea at this early stage was also prudent given his financial situation, which was now ‘desperate’. As he explained to Bernal and Gardiner, he was facing ‘complete destitution. I come under no insurance or other scheme, and though apparently intelligent, have no prospect of a job’. He did not like asking for money and had begun to exhaust the generosity of friends. But he kept going. Indeed, he redoubled his efforts to promote an organisation which depended entirely on voluntary aid.
He was driven by the failure of his anti-Semitism work and, perhaps more than this, what he felt to be the inadequacy of the Left’s response to the Spanish Civil War. Pyke was convinced that VIAS could do a better job of converting the popular sympathy for the Republican cause into actual aid. In the tone of his letters, as well as the quantity, it is clear that he was exasperated by other charities’ lack of imagination. Why didn’t they ask their members for ideas and labour, rather than just pressing them for more cash? It annoyed him on account of the seriousness of the fascist threat. Everything that might be done must be done. ‘To forego any reasonable experiment – social or mechanical which may help the Spanish people – is to betray them.’ Why did he keep going? Because by the end of 1937 Geoffrey Pyke had gone to war;
he was at war with fascism and as such he had no choice but to keep fighting.
Pyke in the early 1930s
In spite of TUC opposition and limited funds, Pyke’s brainchild began to fulfil some of its extraordinary promise. Over the coming months workers in factories dotted all over the country signed up to the scheme and formed VIAS cells. By October 1938, the charity had shipped to Spain some twenty-five vehicles including two mobile blood-transfusion units, and by the end of the war as many as seventy reconditioned vehicles had been donated. As well as mattresses for Basque refugees, ampoules of anaesthetic, anti-tetanus serum and novocaine they also sent microscopes. Employees at R. & J. Beck Instrument Makers, in Kentish Town, worked extra shifts on Sunday mornings until they had earned enough credit to send crates of microscopes out to Spain. Legend has it that while the ship carrying the first batch was torpedoed, other crates made it through and these instruments were thought to be the finest in Spain.
Every VIAS cell was different. The one in Cambridge, led by the sinologist and embryologist Joseph Needham, managed to produce just one reconditioned motorcycle, and even that was a struggle. Needham described the Sunday afternoon when the enormous Harley Davidson they had been working on shot out of the garage and crashed through a nearby fence, causing extensive damage. The Manchester cell, by contrast, was getting through so many motorcycles that they had to start using space behind the nearby Eccles Trade Council building.
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