The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain

The NUWM also organised social events for the unemployed: country rambles, football matches, whist drives, socials, study circles, concerts and dances. ‘The jiggin’, the dancin’ was right popular — many of the best dancers in town went. Well, you could say that the unemployed got plenty o’ time to practise! They got quite a good band together … they could go up to town and at the Palais de Danse they could have held their own wi’ the best o’ them.’ Then there were days out for the children of the unemployed — including an outing to Battery Park near Greenock for 4,700 children who were provided with milk and buns and a bag of toffees to take home.

The charge stuck, however, of a movement controlled from Moscow, financed by ‘red gold’ and aiming at revolution. Yet if the NUWM attracted only relatively small numbers, the Communist Party certainly did no better. By August 1930 membership, which had peaked at 12,000 immediately after the General Strike in 1926, had fallen to fewer than 2,500, while the Labour Party had around 200,000 individual members. Since 1929 the CPGB had been pursuing the Communist International (Comintern)-dictated ‘class against class’ policy, identifying the Labour Party as the ‘third capitalist party’ and ‘social fascists’, and had severed links with other left-wing organisations including the ILP.

Villages such as Mardy at the head of the Rhondda Valley and Lumphinnans in the West Fife coalfield were demonised as ‘Little Moscows’ for their industrial militancy, opposition to the coal owners — and to the capitalist system in general — and their supposed unwavering support for communism (though the ‘class against class’ policy had eroded cooperation in local politics with Labour built up over a decade — as it closed so many doors — and reduced the CP to an opposition party). Miners formed the hard core of the membership, but the party was strongest in London and Scotland. While most CPGB members were relatively young, working-class men, by late 1932, 60 per cent of them were out of work, and that figure was higher in Scotland. There were few female members, since women had been ‘completely neglected’ in the drive to grow a mass party, and the Young Communist League could only claim two or three hundred members.

Moreover, the avenues of persuasion could be narrow. In Bolton, members of the Communist Party petitioned the central library to subscribe to the Daily Worker and periodicals such as The USSR in Construction and Labour Monthly, as well as to purchase what the local press dubbed ‘red’ books (such as Lenin’s Complete Works and Plekanoff’s Fundamental Problems of Marxism). The chief librarian circulated sample copies for a month, but the Library Committee gave hardly an inch, agreeing only that Labour Monthly could be placed in the reading room — and that for a trial period of six months only.

Nevertheless, the decision had been taken not only to try to grow a mass working-class revolutionary movement, but also to engage in electoral politics. However, Communist candidates performed poorly, and seemed unable to capitalise on growing disappointment first with the Labour, and then with the National Government. Even in Seaham, Ramsay MacDonald’s own constituency, disgust with the ‘great betrayer’ did not translate into support for the Communist candidate, who only picked up 677 votes. The Party’s most solid support was in London and the depressed mining areas, particularly those in Scotland and South Wales, and at the depth of the Depression in January 1932 membership had risen to 9,000. Yet in the Merthyr Tydfil by-election in 1934, Wal Hannington only managed to pick up 9.4 per cent of the votes, and the Communists were hardly more successful in local elections. In Gateshead even a local ‘Douglas Credit’ candidate polled more votes than the Communist contender, and no council in England was ever controlled by Communists. Although Communist participation in elections was of considerable ‘nuisance value’, splitting the left vote and sometimes, as in Whitechapel in London’s East End, West Fife and a Sheffield seat, letting in a Conservative or National candidate, it was not until the 1935 election that the Party managed to send an MP to Westminster, when Willie Gallacher won West Fife and Harry Pollitt, the General Secretary, came within a whisker of being returned for East Rhondda.

Attempts to build an industrial base met with little success either: the Minority Movement, the Communist industrial organisation, urged the setting up of alternative unions to rival existing trade unions, but only two ever came into being: the United Mineworkers of Scotland, based in the coal mines of Fife, and the short-lived United Clothing Workers of East London. The Minority Movement never attracted more than seven hundred members, and when it was finally wound up in 1933 it could claim only 550 party members organised in eighty-two factory cells.

The Party’s greatest problem in the early 1930s was its retention rate: if the NUWM leached members, so did the CPGB, partly due to ‘rotten’ organisation, and partly to the rigour and commitment demanded of recruits to the cause. An anonymous member of the Bromley Communist Party in Kent recalled that it had been ‘a serious decision’ when, after much discussion, eight people ‘decided that the time had come to make a commitment to the Communist Party … for one thing the police, including the special branch, took a great interest in the activities, however trivial, of even rank and file members of the party. Secondly, a great many employers refused to employ anyone known to be associated with the party, and lastly, it meant virtual segregation and exclusion from the work of the Labour Party and even some Trade Unions.’ Cut off from the rest of the ‘reformist’ left, the CPGB built itself something of a world within a world. ‘Like practising Catholics or Orthodox Jews, we lived in a little private world of our own … a tight … self-referential group,’ frequenting cafés such as Meg’s in Parton Street in London and the Clarion in Market Street, Manchester (‘Communists met in cafés rather than pubs: there was quite a strong inhibition against drink’), the pro-Soviet Scala cinema in Charlotte Street in London, Henderson’s ‘bomb shop’ (which became Collet’s bookshop) and others in King Street and the Farringdon Road, as well as meeting at dances and whist drives organised by the Friends of the Soviet Union, the League of Socialist Freethinkers, the Rebel Players and the Federation of Student Societies, and the activities of the Workers’ Theatre Movement and the British Workers’ Sports Federation. They rambled collectively at weekends, took holidays at Socialist youth camps or Communist guest houses, or stayed in youth hostels as part of hiking trips (some YHA wardens were rumoured to be ‘sympathisers’). If the expenditure of £5 was feasible, they might take a week’s holiday with the Workers’ Travel Association in the Lake District, or maybe the Trossachs.

Certainly a great deal was asked of a Communist: attending frequent meetings, organising, speaking, selling Party literature, trade union activities, membership of other outside bodies and ‘front’ organisations. Ernest Trory suggests the level of commitment required: ‘I had become engaged to a girl who was not at all interested in the Party. The engagement was later broken off but in the meantime I began to spend more time dancing and taking her to the pictures than was consistent with Party work … To make matters worse, I frequented the Empire Club. A real sink of iniquity … spending my time gambling and playing cards, when I was needed by the Party at a critical time …’

As well as regular attendance at ‘advanced political training lectures’, the Bromley Communists were expected to sell the weekend edition of the Daily Worker (produced in its early days in an unheated office without electricity, the editor typing articles by candlelight) outside Woolworths and Marks & Spencer’s in the town centre, although they found they could shift more copies late on Saturday evenings, ‘when the bus crews returned to Bromley garage at the end of a day’s work’. However, ‘sales were not very great, twenty to thirty copies being considered adequate compensation for the long hours worked’. Perhaps that was hardly surprising, since at the time the Daily Worker, the first issue of which had appeared on 1 January 1930, echoed the Communist Party’s dilemma. It was to contain none of the ‘frills … dazzle … corruption and entertainment’ of the popular press, so as not to distract readers from the struggle. But Harry Pollitt, the Party’s General Secretary since 1929, was prepared to venture that he thought the paper was ‘dull and dismal’, and suggested that those who produced it should study the ‘techniques of the capitalist press’. ‘We constantly talk about being close to the masses,’ Pollitt argued in June 1930 when the paper was selling a maximum of 10,000 copies and haemorrhaging some £500 each week from Party funds, ‘but no one can say we carry this out in regard to the paper.’ What the ‘masses’ wanted was more general news, sport, humour and topical features, but what they got in the pages of the Daily Worker was ‘nothing save struggle and death on every page’. Two journalists, one from the Daily Mail, the other from the Daily Express, were invited to moonlight on the Daily Worker to teach the staff how to use capitalism’s skills against the capitalists. However, faced with the edict of the CPGB’s severe theoretician, R. Palme Dutt, that ‘The task is to destroy (not to take over) … so-called “general news” and “sport” … and replace it by working-class technique,’ the pair scuttled back to their day jobs. Despite a gradual dilution of the paper’s strict on-message stance with more news — including some investigative ‘scoops’ — the odd photograph of Gracie Fields, film reviews, excellent cartoons and a women’s page with recipes and knitting patterns, it was some time before racing tips, which had disappeared after the first few issues, were allowed back; they remained a distinct selling point for much of the century.

In January 1933, Hitler’s assumption of the German chancellorship led to a change in the class-against-class policy, and in the summer of 1935 the Seventh (and last) Congress of the International affirmed the Soviet intention ‘to establish a united front on a national as well as an international scale’ against fascism — a front that it was argued should include democratic political parties across a wide spectrum. This was not to be a call to which the British Labour Party responded, though the change of policy did bring the CPGB new recruits, among them engineers, railwaymen, textile workers, builders and some in the distributive trades. Jack Gaster, who had previously regarded the Party as ‘ultra sectarian … their concept of a United Front was “We’ll unite with anyone who unites with us,”’ and had helped expel ‘a secret group of Communist Party members within the ILP’, had himself lost patience with the ILP by 1935 and joined the CPGB, undertaking frequent legal work for the Party.

Although the CPGB remained an overwhelmingly working-class party, it had always attracted a small number of intellectuals, particularly scientists, and in the 1930s it gradually drew in a coterie of undergraduates and recent graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, sometimes referred to sneeringly by Rose Macaulay as ‘the not-so-very intelligentsia’, or, as Beatrice Webb labelled them, ‘the mild-mannered desperadoes’.

In 1931 David Guest, son of the Labour peer Lord Haden-Guest, returned to Trinity College, Cambridge, after a year studying in Germany, where he had become convinced that the threat of fascism was dangerously real, and that communism was the only hope, and set about organising the Cambridge branch of the CPGB. This attracted his fellow philosophy student Maurice Cornforth, the poet Charles Madge, John Cornford, James Klugmann and Guy Burgess, all of whom were mentored by Maurice Dobb, an economist and Fellow of Trinity College who had been a member of the Party since 1923, and who had suffered professionally for his affiliation.

The best-known, most-heard (if most tenuously linked) of those Oxbridge students and ex-students who were drawn to communism in the mid 1930s were the ‘MacSpaundays’ — the poets and would-be poets W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis. ‘Tell us about the Thirties,’ a group of Cambridge undergraduates urged Day Lewis after the Second World War; ‘… it seems to be the last time that anyone believed in anything.’ ‘We were singularly fortunate compared with the young of today,’ acknowledged the poet, ‘in believing that something could be done about the social and political evils confronting us … no one who did not go through this political experience during the Thirties can quite realise how much hope there was in the air then, how radiant for some of us was the illusion that man could, under Communism put the world to rights.’

What communism offered such young intellectuals was ‘substitutes for a faith, heterogeneous ideas which served to plug “the hollow in the breast where God should be”’. Most of Day Lewis’s friends who became active in left-wing movements, or sympathetic to them, had similar backgrounds. All had been to public schools, ‘with their tradition of both authoritarianism and service to the community’. Three were the sons clergymen — Day Lewis himself, Louis MacNeice and Rex Warner — while W.H. Auden had ‘a devout Anglo-Catholic mother … we had all lapsed from the Christian faith, and tended to despair of Liberalism as an effective instrument for dealing with the problems of our day, if not despise it as an outworn creed’.

For Day Lewis the attraction to communism had both a religious and a romantic dimension: ‘My susceptibility to the heroic, played upon by Russian films in which the worker, mounted upon his magnificent tractor, chugged steadily towards the dawn and the new world, joined up with my natural partisanship of the underdog to create a picture, romantic and apocalyptic, of the British worker at last coming into his own.’ Nevertheless, he was, he admitted, ‘an extremely odd recruit to the Party’ in Cheltenham, where he was teaching at the time (though with a ‘gentlemanly refusal to indoctrinate my pupils with Left-Wing ideas’). The CPGB cell there resembled ‘more of a combined study-group of a nonconformist chapel than of a revolutionary body’, consisting as it did of ‘one or two school teachers, a waiter, and several men who worked at the Gloucester aircraft factory … as an “intellectual” I was given the job of political education. Never can there have been a more signal instance of the blind leading the shortsighted. I mugged up Das Kapital, The Communist Manifesto, the writings of Lenin, and endeavoured to teach dialectical materialism and economic theories I only half understood to people who lived their lives right up against the fact of economic necessity.’

Although Auden issued a clarion call to his generation to stop ‘lecturing on navigation while the ship is going down’, he did not join the CPGB. Nor did MacNeice, another ‘Marxist of the Heart’ for whom ‘comrade became a more tender term than lover’. Despite this, MacNeice could see communism’s attraction after the ‘jogtrot’ left of the Labour Party, which was ‘notoriously lacking in glamour’, and he could appreciate why ‘these young poets had turned to the tomb of Lenin … The strongest appeal of the Communist Party was that it demanded sacrifice; you had to sink your ego.’ Though he was ‘repelled by the idolisation of the state’, MacNeice was able to console himself with Marx and Engels’ dictum that it would soon ‘wither away’. Spender did actually sign up, but his membership was short-lived.

Other Cambridge Communist sympathisers who would later gain notoriety for their espionage activities on behalf of the USSR included Donald MacLean, H.A.R. (Kim) Philby and Anthony Blunt, who was always ‘thought of as a fellow-traveller, never as a Party member [and who made] extremely cynical remarks about Communism that went beyond the call of duty in suppressing the fact that he was one’.

But there were those who were prepared to make the commitment. In December 1931 the October Club (named after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917) was started in Oxford by an American Rhodes scholar, Frank Meyer, who subsequently translated to the London School of Economics, where he remained active in student politics until he was deported by the government. By January 1933 it could boast three hundred members, though not all of these were card-carrying Communists. However, by 1934 Communists had effectively succeeded in taking over the Oxford Labour Club, hanging a huge portrait of Lenin on the wall of the club’s meeting house to signal their entryism. Not everyone advertised their affiliation, but Philip Toynbee, the son of the Oxford historian Arnold Toynbee and grandson of the classicist Gilbert Murray, who had joined the CPGB at the end of his first term at Oxford and ‘retired deeper and deeper into this secretive hive … was not a clandestine member, but sat on a little iceberg peak above the submarine majority, revealing, as we used to say, “the Face of the Party”’. Toynbee exemplified the song ‘we would ruefully sing at our evening socials [the Bromley branch members would, no doubt, have joined in] :

Dan, Dan, Dan!

The Communist Party man

Working underground all day.

In and out of meetings,

Bringing fraternal greetings,

Never sees the light of day.

His undergraduate life consisted largely of sitting through interminable committee meetings, sometimes lasting ‘from lunchtime until eight or nine in the evening’, leafleting, demonstrating in support of strikes in Oxford factories, taking part in ‘slogan-shouting marches through London’, attending international Communist Party conferences, going to work alongside the miners in the Rhondda Valley, soaking up ‘the whole lively atmosphere of purpose and intrigue’. In 1938 he was elected the first Communist President of the Oxford Union (to be succeeded by Edward Heath two terms later).

While there were probably around two hundred card-carrying Oxford undergraduates, in Cambridge several dons were members of the CPGB, including Dobb, the biochemist ‘Doggy’ Woolf and the literary scholar Roy Pascal. By 1935 the Cambridge Socialist Society of around five hundred members was dominated by Communists, of whom again some two hundred were Party members. The Cambridge cell, centred on Trinity and King’s colleges, was active in the town organising anti-war demonstrations, supporting CP candidates at elections and welcoming the Hunger Marchers in February 1934 (Margot Heinemann owed her conversion to an encounter while at Newnham with the wan and down-at-heel marchers, and remained a Party member all her life), as well as within the colleges agitating for better pay and conditions for college servants, distributing leaflets and selling copies of the Daily Worker.

But despite this varied and gifted glitterati, ‘traitors to their class’ until the Party line changed, the ‘entry of the intellectuals’ remained something of a trickle, and for every student, scientist or poet who declared for communism there were hundreds of workers. Though the membership of the CPGB rose to a pre-war peak of 18,000 in December 1938, the vast majority of members were working-class. Moreover, distrust of the eggheads did not fade easily: in 1938 one veteran at the fifteenth Party Congress railed against ‘these unscrupulous semi-intellectuals who pose as left revolutionaries, who put their “r”s in barricades, instead of putting their arse on the barricades’.

NINE Primers for the Age

I regard Nature as perhaps the most important weekly printed in English, far more important than any political weekly.

Arnold Bennett, November 1930

Mr [H.G.] Wells at one time appeared to think that the scientists might save us. Then more recently it was going to be international financiers. But so many committed suicide. So now it is going to be aviators. Perhaps soon we will be told to pin our hopes on a dictatorship of midwives.

Professor F.S. Blackett, ‘The Frustration of Science’ (1935)

In October 1933 the writer H.G. Wells gave a dinner party. Since he had invited too many guests to fit round the table in his flat in Chiltern Court, off Baker Street, the party dined first at the Quo Vadis restaurant in Dean Street, Soho — a building in which Karl Marx had once rented rooms — and then repaired to the flat, where it was promised that Moura Budberg (a Russian aristocrat and probably the common-law wife of the writer Maxim Gorky, who had to come to London as Wells’ mistress, but continued to maintain distinctly shady links with the Soviet Union) would entertain the assembled company by playing the harp. It was a glamorous evening, with the socialite Lady Emerald Cunard ‘in ermine, almost invisible under pearls and diamonds, scenting out the lions’, the novelist Enid Bagnold, now married to the head of Reuter’s, Sir Roderick Jones, ‘brazening out’ a nettle rash by covering her face with an orange veil, Harold Nicolson, Max Beerbohm, and ‘H.G. at the centre, rosily smiling, all the guests talking at once’.

Unfortunately a number of the guests, including Moura Budberg, were taken ill with food poisoning, so there was no music that night, but there was endless discussion, as there always was at Wells’ soirées, including one the month before, assembled ‘to discuss a magnificent idea he has, to unite science to save the world against all its growing dangers: Fascism, Communism, Japanism, Americanism and Journalism … H.G. “chaired” the meeting in his squeaky voice, which becomes quite a handicap in such circumstances. Nothing was decided, naturally, except the need for something, and H.G. will go on giving dinner parties to discuss saving the world.’

‘Saving the world’ from the list of spectres Wells evoked, as well as those of the economic slump and intractable unemployment at home, was something discussed at a lot of top people’s dinner tables in the 1930s. And scientists were at the forefront of such debate, as many were convinced that scientific methods would come up with solutions that inexpert, ill-informed, blundering politicians seemed utterly unable to locate.

Although he was primarily interested at the time in ‘the reproductive physiology of monkeys and apes, and the bearing of any evidence on the evolutionary interrelationship of monkeys, apes and man’, which he was well placed to research as Prosecutor, or research fellow, at the Zoological Society in Regent’s Park (a post he had achieved at the young age of twenty-four), Solly Zuckerman also had a wider range of interests. The atmosphere of the time encouraged him to discuss with some friends, including the young political economist (and great joiner of discussion groups) Hugh Gaitskell and G.P. ‘Gip’ Wells, the zoologist son of H.G., the idea of forming a small dining club. In the autumn of 1931 ‘Tots and Quots’, an abbreviation and inversion of the phrase in Terence’s Phormio: ‘Quot homines, tot sententiae’ — ‘So many men, so many opinions’ — convened for the first time at Pagani’s restaurant in Great Portland Street.

It was a distinguished (entirely male) table: the robustly confident young scientists who assembled to ‘let ideas roam’ over the question of ‘what role science might play in social development’ included the physicist and crys-tallographer J.D. Bernal (reverentially known as ‘the sage’ although he confessed that even his encyclopaedic knowledge had lacunae when it came to ‘fourth century Roumania’), who believed that science ‘held the key to the future’, while socialism had the ability to turn it; the geneticist J.B.S. Haldane, perhaps ‘the last man to know all there was to be known’, with a matchless ability to communicate the complex in public lectures, books and his regular science columns in the Daily Worker; the biologist and author of the best-selling Mathematics for the Million and Science for the Citizen, books he described as ‘primers for an age of plenty’ intended to equip their readers with sufficient knowledge to become effective citizens in a scientific age, Lancelot Hogben, a conscientious objector in the First World War whose acute mind challenged everything; the prehistorian Gordon Childe (another success with what he referred to as the ‘bookstall public’); the sinologist and historian of science Joseph Needham; the zoologist J.Z. Young; the Cambridge economic historian M.M. Postan and the Oxford economist Roy Harrod. Others, such as the literary critic I.A. Richards and the geneticist Lionel Penrose, declined to join but volunteered to ‘clock in’ as guests when the subject under discussion interested them.