Michael Foot: A Life

Isaac Foot, Michael’s father, was the sixth of eight children, of whom five were to live to a considerable age.2 He was a memorable personality of dominating influence. As its patriarch, he was passionate in his defence of the Foot family. When he wrote to congratulate Michael on a fine maiden speech in Parliament in August 1945, at the same time he condemned Churchill for not appointing his other son Dingle to the Privy Council after his service at the Ministry of Economic Warfare: ‘I shall never forgive him for that. Now the Foot family move to the attack. When folk attack the Foot family, they are biting granite.’3 His outlook and lifestyle were challenging and highly individual. Of all the seven children of this Liberal patriarch it was Michael who was said most to resemble him. Until his nineties Michael would readily turn to his father’s views on politics and literature, on Cromwell or Napoleon, on Swift or Hazlitt or Burke, to bolster his own line of argument. Isaac Foot had been a radical youth, and at the age of eighteen was attracted to H. M. Hyndman’s Marxist party the Social Democratic Federation (SDF),4 but not for long. He was one of many young professional men stirred by the Liberal landslide victory in the general election of January 1906, when both the two Plymouth seats were captured by Liberals from the Conservatives. In 1907 he was elected a Liberal councillor and rose to become Deputy Mayor in 1920, at hand to take an enthusiastic part in the celebrations of the tercentenary of the sailing from the city of the Mayflower. He was basically an old Liberal, committed to the traditional battles with the bishop, the squire and especially the brewer. He shared to the full the nonconformist crusade for civic equality which made Devon, Cornwall and (to a lesser degree) Somerset more similar to the political outlook of rural Wales than to the rest of southern England. But Isaac responded very positively also to Lloyd George’s social radicalism, his ‘People’s Budget’ of 1909 with its new taxes to pay for social reform, which the Lords rejected, and the successful battle with the Upper House in 1909–11, resulting in the passage of the Parliament Act. Despite the huge Liberal schism created later by the ‘coupon election’ in December 1918, when Lloyd George and his followers continued in coalition with the Unionists (Conservatives), the Welshman remained something of a Foot family talisman from then on. Isaac Foot actually stood for Parliament in January 1910 as Liberal candidate for Totnes, but was heavily defeated by the Conservative. He stood again in December 1910, this time for Bodmin, a seat held by another Liberal the previous January by the slender margin of fifty votes, and was defeated there by an even narrower margin, just forty-one votes. The turnout was 86.6 per cent in this traditionally hard-fought seat, and Foot stayed on as candidate.

During the war he was among those numerous West Country Liberals who took the side of the fallen Asquith after Lloyd George had ousted the Prime Minister in a putsch involving leading Conservatives and press men like Max Aitken (soon to become Lord Beaverbrook) in December 1916. Isaac Foot had in any case been a strong critic on libertarian grounds of the conscription measure passed by the Asquith coalition that May, and defended many conscientious objectors in tribunals during the war. This was not popular, and ensured his heavy defeat in a second contest for Bodmin in the general election of December 1918; he also failed in a by-election in Plymouth in 1919, after which the successful Conservative candidate Nancy, Lady Astor became the first woman MP to take her seat in Parliament. But Isaac hung on, and eventually won Bodmin in a by-election in February 1922 with a strong majority of over three thousand. He held on to the seat in the general elections of 1922 and 1923, lost in 1924 and was returned again to represent the same constituency in 1929 and then in 1931 when (from 3 September) he served in Ramsay MacDonald’s National Government as Minister for the Mines.

Isaac Foot was in every sense a prominent figure in the political and civic life of Plymouth and the West Country. In all he fought Bodmin seven times, and established himself as a powerful politician of charisma and pugnacity. As an orator (and later a broadcaster) he was remarkable, drawing from his lay preaching in Cornish chapels a revivalist style and a vivid vocabulary with which righteously to smite the opposing Philistines. In the 1930s he was to become Vice-President of the Methodist Conference. But for all his devout Methodism and moralism, he showed little compunction in using fair means or foul to make his political points. ‘He fought with the gloves off,’ was his son’s later reflection. He threw himself into electioneering with gusto, taunting the Tories such as the Astor family interest in Plymouth with popular refrains such as ‘Who’s that knocking at my door?’. He was a fund of political and other jokes, and was liable to break into comic songs, sung in a rich Devonian accent.

He showed himself to be equally forceful in following one of his main private interests, the Cromwell Association, of which he was a founder member and which he served as secretary from 1938 and chairman until 1951. Here he would staunchly defend Oliver’s reputation and integrity against all comers. There is reference to Isaac on the monument unveiled in 1939 to mark Cromwell’s great victory at Marston Moor in 1644. Here indeed, as Michael Foot was to describe him, was ‘a Rupert for the Roundheads’.5 Episcopal opponents were particularly relished. On 20 February 1949, in his seventieth year, Isaac had a ferocious duel in the Observer with the Bishop of London, who had dared to impugn Cromwell’s reputation as a champion of liberty and toleration. Isaac swept the charges contemptuously back in his face. The Bishop’s accusation that Cromwell had condemned prelacy was, however, joyfully endorsed.6 Isaac flung at him one of Cromwell’s contemporaries, who scorned

You reverend prelates, clothed in sleeve of lawn

Too meek to murmur, and too proud to fawn

Who, still submissive in their Maker’s nod

Adore their Sovereign and respect their God.

In Isaac’s mind, old flames of controversy over tithe, church rate, university tests or Welsh disestablishment still burned fiercely. Cromwell’s reputation went through many vicissitudes over the centuries, from Whigs hailing the champion of parliamentary liberties, to Victorians who saw his Major-Generals as the last refuge of military rule in Britain, on to working-class radicals who revered ‘the People’s Oliver’. For Isaac, Cromwell was simply the great liberator, Milton’s ‘chief of men’, in peace and in war. In 1941 he published with Oxford University Press Cromwell Speaks!, a compendium of militant and patriotic quotations from the great man’s letters and speeches, to help in sustaining the national morale at a time of supreme crisis. His Cromwell Association made a point of honouring their hero’s statue on Cromwell Green in front of the Palace of Westminster, a memorial which had been bitterly attacked by Irish MPs in the 1890s. Isaac Foot was a true believer. He celebrated Cromwell and Milton in the same passionate vein as another Liberal politician, the late-Victorian man of letters Augustine Birrell, did in his 1905 biography of Andrew Marvell. John Gross has written that, for thousands of old Liberals, ‘the seventeenth century was alive with an intensity that now seems hard to credit’.7 It might have been Isaac – indeed all the Foots down the generations – that he had in mind.

Michael fully inherited this Cromwellian creed, without the roundhead puritanism. Like his elder brother John, he later became a Vice-President of the Cromwell Association, and he gave an eloquent address to it on 2 September 1995, in part a tribute to his father. He had assured the Chairman beforehand (surely quite unnecessarily), ‘My remarks will not be critical in any sense and would not offend members of the Cromwell Association.’ At the age of eighty-two, the ardour of the old believer was quite undimmed. A wreath was laid at Cromwell’s statue (the main theme of Foot’s speech), there were readings from the psalms and the singing of Bunyan’s imperishable hymn, so evocative to a Plymouth pilgrim, ‘He who would true valour see’. As late as September 2005 Michael attended the Cromwell Day service in the chapel of Central Hall, Westminster, and wrote warmly to the Association to convey his pleasure at the event: ‘I trust that several members of our family will be joining the Association soon.’8 On the other hand, he was sufficiently the disciple of his friend H. N. Brailsford to recognize fully the force behind the progressive egalitarian doctrines of the Levellers as well. Michael drew from his father not simply a cult of Cromwell, the popular tribune who brought blessings like the abolition of the House of Lords or tolerance towards the Jews, but also the need to defend his heroes with the maximum of pugnacity. When he himself entered Parliament, his father encouraged a creed of fortiter in re, not to confine his blows upon opponents to the regions above the belt, but to fight either dirty or clean as circumstances dictated, and Michael duly responded. Isaac Foot remained a keen observer of all his sons’ political progress, but Michael, who advanced from Cromwellian republicanism into a Labour Party of self-proclaimed levellers, was perhaps the most cherished of them all. Isaac would surely have endorsed Michael’s warm commendation in November 2005 of a book by his own former legal adviser, the civil rights lawyer Geoffrey Robertson QC. This commemorated John Cooke, who successfully prosecuted the trial of Charles I for treason which led to the King’s execution in 1649. It was an event of which Michael Foot, humanist and opponent of capital punishment, strongly approved.

This bond between father and son was illustrated by Isaac’s splendid lecture comparing Oliver Cromwell and Abraham Lincoln given to the Royal Society of Literature in April 1944. Michael Foot’s copy of the published version was inscribed ‘To Michael with love and Cromwellian Salutations from Dad, 23 February 1945’. It seems almost as if Cromwell was a member of the family, a particularly cherished great-uncle. Dingle Foot was to recall that there were twenty to thirty busts or portraits of Oliver in their home. The Cromwellian aspect was obviously well absorbed by Michael. Lincoln, however, he found less appealing, perhaps too conservatively inclined, especially on race questions, and indeed American inspiration generally was less influential on a politician so robustly English. By far the most attractive American for the young Michael was Thomas Jefferson, not so much in his role as an American revolutionary as that of a transatlantic voice for western European enlightenment.

For all his partisanship, Isaac’s cheerful, generous personality won him good friends across a wide spectrum, and indeed these came to include the much-abused Astors themselves. He was always active in the municipal life of Plymouth, and became its Lord Mayor after the end of the war in 1945. He patronized the city’s religious and musical life, and also sporting events in football and cricket: Isaac began a unanimous Foot tradition of supporting Plymouth Argyle FC, based at Home Park and elected to the Football League in 1920. It was a family link that continued from Isaac’s vocal terrace support in the 1920s to Michael’s becoming a club director in the 1980s.

But Isaac’s main influence on his sons and daughters, and especially on Michael, lay not in politics but in books. From his early years he was, as Michael was frequently to describe him, a ‘bibliophilial drunkard’ whose appetite was ‘gargantuan and insatiable’.9 He had an obsession for rare and other books of all kinds, especially historical, literary and religious. His collecting began when, as a young clerk in London, he spent as much as he could of his fourteen shillings weekly pay in the second-hand bookshops of Charing Cross Road. In his later years every room in his large home at Pencrebar, even (improbably) the laundry room, was crammed full of carefully arranged and notated volumes. He would read for four or five hours every day; he would read as he walked to work, he read in his bath, he would have read in his sleep were it possible. Much of his library was sold off to the University of California, Santa Barbara, for a surprisingly low figure of £50,000 after his death in 1960,10 less than £1 per book. Other materials went to Berkeley and UC Los Angeles, so sadly the library was dispersed: it had expanded to perhaps sixty thousand books, including no fewer than 240 Bibles, among them priceless octavo and quarto editions of Tyndale’s New Testament of 1536, and many medieval illuminated manuscripts, along with an immense range of antiquarian works by or about Shakespeare, Montaigne (130 volumes), Milton, Swift, Pope, Johnson, Burke, Hazlitt, Wordsworth, Carlyle, Hardy, Conrad and some unexpected intruders onto the old puritan’s shelves, such as the sonnets of Oscar Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The inventory of UC Santa Barbara library listed three thousand English Civil War tracts, over two thousand volumes on the French Revolutionary period, and over a thousand on the American Civil War, amongst his historical collection. A colossal holding on literature included over three hundred volumes on and by Milton, including first and second editions of Paradise Lost and a first edition of Areopagitica. The religious holdings were equally immense, including titles on and by Luther and Calvin, a hundred contemporary Erasmus imprints, vast collections on Richard Baxter’s Congregationalism, and a Quaker collection of more than two hundred volumes. Isaac Foot also ranged around the classics: one especially priceless book was the 1488 edition of Homer printed in Florence.

Somehow all these volumes were crammed into Pencrebar, though only just. Isaac designated a Bible room and a French Revolution room; when he developed an interest in Abraham Lincoln later in life there was an American Congress room. Many books were extremely rare, yet there was apparently the minimum of security against fire or theft. His home was a shrine to what George Gissing had called ‘the shadow of the valley of books’. So extreme was his mania for collection that A. L. Rowse, a historian at All Souls, Oxford, and no inconsiderable bibliophile himself, claimed that Isaac Foot’s second wife was in tears as one room after another was annexed for his literary stockpiling, supplemented by bookcases to occupy what little room remained. ‘He has the obstinacy of a senile fixation,’ was Rowse’s harsh verdict.11 But clearly for the young (and middle-aged) Michael his father’s passion for the printed word was breathtakingly exciting, the key to a civilized life. In return, Isaac delighted in Michael’s own emerging skills as a powerful writer of serious literary books. The publication of The Pen and the Sword in 1957, written after Michael had lost his Devonport seat in the 1955 general election, perhaps gave Isaac more pleasure than any other feature of his son’s career. ‘Let the boy be known for his books,’ he lovingly observed.

Isaac’s influence was profound on all his children, but on Michael most of all. Michael’s journey into the Labour Party, a unique adventure for the Foot family, did not threaten their relationship; if anything, it made it stronger. Isaac responded by offering Michael the example of Hazlitt as the supreme inspiration any real radical could ever want. He gave him a passion for language, written and spoken; Michael’s politics were politics of the book. He spelled out for the readers of the Evening Standard (1 June 1964) his philosophy of life, drawn from the critic Logan Pearsall Smith: ‘To read and to act is not achieved by many. And yet to act and not to read is barbarism.’ It was books, as much as the sufferings of his fellow men, that made Michael a socialist and nurtured his unique brilliance as a communicator. More specifically, it was Isaac who directed him to the unique qualities of Swift and Hazlitt, Michael Foot’s prime allies in his assaults on twentieth-century political opponents, his friends in good times and bad. The more measured influence of Montaigne, the cool, sceptical essayist of sixteenth-century France, but also the mentor of Foot’s hero Swift, was another legacy from Isaac when Michael turned to Montaigne’s essays in hospital after a serious car crash in 1963. Another hero was John Milton, not only a matchless poet but in Areopagitica a timeless champion of a free press.

On the other hand, Michael’s growing love of literature was self-nurtured also. Isaac’s literary enthusiasms were mainly pre-Romantic and shaped by a puritan heritage. Michael’s own passionate temperament gave him heroes of a different kind, in particular his beloved Byron, for whose poetry Isaac had no particular regard and which had been fiercely criticized by one of Michael’s own heroes, Hazlitt. Without Isaac’s affection and inspiration, Michael Foot’s career would have been far less distinctive. But it might also have been less dogmatic and he might have been more open to argument from others. Isaac’s literary giants, it seemed, were almost gods, to be treated with near-sanctity. None of them could be lightly impugned. There was also a curious formality, almost a distance, between father and son. When Isaac ran into debt as a result of his solicitor’s business being disrupted during the war when his offices in Plymouth were bombed out, quite apart from his manic book purchasing, Michael, now with a good income from the Evening Standard, loaned him successive sums of money to help him out, ranging from £110 in May 1940 to £875 in March 1941. Each was accompanied by a highly detailed formal IOU drawn up in legalistic terms by Isaac. An IOU of £2,095 up to September 1942 set out both the capital sum and the interest upon it at £4 per annum as a first charge on Isaac’s estate, a strangely formal arrangement perhaps between a father and a son.12 Having Isaac as a father was both an inspiration and a challenge, but without doubt he contributed most of the components of his son’s passionate but unquestionably bookish socialism.

Michael Foot’s mother, Eva Mackintosh, was also a powerful personality in her way, even if tending to be swamped at home and in spirit by Isaac’s intemperate bibliophilia. Born in 1878 and a year and a half older than Isaac, she was of Scottish and Cornish background, and a strong Methodist like her husband. Indeed, it was on a Wesleyan Guild Methodist outing that Isaac first set eyes on her. With a characteristic Foot blend of impulsiveness and caution, he proposed to her almost immediately and was accepted, but then remained engaged for three years while he built up his solicitor’s practice. They married in 1904, in Callington, a village a few miles north of Plymouth where Eva had latterly lived. It was a long and immensely happy marriage, ended only when Eva unexpectedly died in May 1946, after which Isaac somewhat disconcertingly for the family married a second time. Eva had traditional non-feminist views, which clearly extended to her two daughters, Jennifer and Sally, both of whom had somewhat restricted lives. Her son John’s egalitarian-minded American fiancée evidently found this disturbing when she first visited the Foot household.

Five of Eva’s seven children, including Michael, were given the second name Mackintosh (an allegedly useful asset when brother Dingle stood as Liberal candidate in Dundee). She wrote occasional letters to the local Western Morning News under the thinly-concealed nom de plume of ‘Mother of Seven’. Hugh Foot wrote in his memoirs of how his mother made them all laugh ‘at ourselves and at each other’.13 Eva was not only happy being a warm and spirited mother, but also gave every encouragement to the professional careers of her talented sons. She was thoroughly at home in a political setting, being herself a robust Liberal, and perhaps more instinctively attracted to radicalism of the Lloyd George type than other members of the family. Michael’s defection to Labour in 1934 was a shock for them all, but Eva appears to have taken the news better than some. When Michael campaigned for Devonport as a Labour candidate in 1945, a meeting was interrupted by the delivery of a large Cornish pasty from his mother, a Methodist’s material peace offering and also a signal that her socialist son was no less favoured than husband Isaac and sons Dingle and John, all Liberal candidates in 1945 (and, unlike Michael, all defeated).

The family background of the Foots is of quite exceptional importance: the historian John Vincent once called their home, referring to the Hertfordshire seat of the Cecils, ‘a West Country Hatfield’. There were five sons: the eldest Dingle (1905–78), the second Hugh (1907–90), the third John (1909–99), the fourth son and fifth child, Michael (born in 1913), and the youngest son and sixth child, Christopher (1918–84). All went on to have, to varying degrees, fulfilling professional careers. By contrast the daughters, Margaret Elizabeth, known as Sally (1911–65), and Jennifer (1916–2002), had lives that were domestically confined. Jennifer married, but Sally never did. It was a large and lively household, with much family fun and frivolity and a high degree of competitiveness in the playing of games, especially cricket and football, in which Isaac enthusiastically joined. They lived in Lipson Terrace from 1904 until in 1927 they moved to a large white Victorian manor house, Pencrebar, near Callington, some eight miles north of Plymouth, overlooking the Cornish moorland. With its ‘wide sashed windows, large rooms and wide sweeping lawns and shrubberies’, it became a focal point for West Country nonconformist Liberalism and a much-loved family home, as well as a depository for Isaac’s vast library.14

It was in every sense a close-knit family which made demands of all the children, but enriched them too. They all recalled a cheerful and secure childhood. Hugh noted that ‘we had and needed few outside friends’. The eldest boy, Dingle, with whom Michael had little to do at first because of the eight-year gap between them, immediately showed himself to be talented. He was thought to be the ablest Foot at the time, and Michael later considered him the funniest orator amongst them.15 As all the Foot boys did, he went to a private secondary school, in his case Bembridge School on the Isle of Wight, where he was taught by a former Liberal MP, J. H. Whitehouse, who was now the school’s headmaster. Dingle went on to Balliol College, Oxford, where he became President of the Liberal Club in 1927 and rose to be President of the Union in 1928, also gaining a second-class honours degree in law. He entered chambers in 1930, becoming a barrister of international distinction, and in 1931 he was elected as Liberal (though pro-government) MP for Dundee, which he represented until 1945. One problem was the physical disability of a tubercular arm. The second son, Hugh, went to Leighton Park, the famous Quaker school near Reading which Michael later attended, and then on to St John’s College, Cambridge, where he showed a notably un-Foot-like enthusiasm for the college rowing club but also became President of the Liberal Club and of the Cambridge Union. There was some fraternal joshing about his alleged relative lack of intellectual sharpness – Michael described him caustically and unfairly in the Evening Standard in 1961 as ‘never considered the brightest of the brood’. But Hugh, like his brothers, ended up with a second-class degree. In fact Michael always had a strong relationship with ‘Mac’, as Hugh came to be known, including a cheerful period as the lodger of Hugh and his wife in the later 1930s. His assessment of his brother concluded: ‘All in all a credit to the family and I can’t say fairer than that, can I?’ With Hugh’s son Paul, the friendship was to be stronger still.

John, the third son and another charming and eloquent Liberal, seemed as talented as any of them. He too went to Bembridge School and Balliol College like Dingle, took a degree in law and also became President of the Liberal Club and the Union, a remarkable dynastic achievement which Michael was soon to extend. He became a solicitor and in due time took over from Isaac as senior partner in the family firm Foot & Bowden. But his political antennae seemed no less acute than those of his two brothers, and he was four times a Liberal candidate, for Basingstoke in 1934 and 1935, and for his father’s old stamping ground of Bodmin in 1945 and 1950. Unexpectedly he failed to win the latter, and ended up as Baron Foot of Buckland Monachorum, though with a radical outlook on social and defence issues very similar to those of his firebrand brother Michael. The two were both Cromwellian enthusiasts, and were very close. Michael would say of John, ‘He was the best speaker of the lot of us.’16 The two daughters, Jennifer and Sally, as mentioned, were not encouraged to develop their talents, while the youngest son, Christopher, settled down, none too happily, as a local solicitor.