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The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain
Theirs was a tiring trip, so tiring for a couple whose joint ages totalled 147 years that Beatrice managed to write little more than headings in the black notebook labelled ‘Russian Tour. 10 shillings Reward if Lost’. Sidney had viewed the Soviet Union ‘with the relish of a scientist whose theoretical proposition has stood the test of practical experiment: “See, see, it works, it works.”’ Beatrice too felt a sense of satisfaction: ‘The problem we have been seeking to solve for the last fifty years — poverty in the midst of plenty — is today being solved, and very much as we should have solved it, if we had had our way.’ But her enthusiasm was tempered: she queried, ‘How far can you disentangle what is good in Russia from what is bad? … Can you take the economic organization of Soviet Russia and reject the “dictatorship” of a creed or caste? … These are the sorts of problems which have to be solved by those who wish to supersede, in their own country, capitalist profit-making by the equalitarian production, distribution and exchange of the wealth of the nation.’
George Bernard Shaw paid a visit in July 1931 and was refused permission by his minders to see what he wanted, so Reader Bullard took him to the Kazan Cathedral (which he did ‘not find very interesting’) and St Isaac’s Cathedral (‘the anti-religious museum’), then invited the Fabian playwright back for tea at the Consulate, where ‘he talked for two hours and told us all a lot about Russia … just waving away anything that did not fit in with his preconceptions’. Hugh Dalton (former Labour Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs and future Chancellor of the Exchequer) and Frederick Pethwick-Lawrence (from the Treasury, and a keen suffragette-supporter) tipped up in that busy summer of 1932. ‘They have come to look at Soviet finance,’ noted Bullard. The feminist author and journalist Cicely Hamilton, one of the few visitors to speak any Russian, arrived in June, intending to write an article about the country (which she found drab, though she approved of the way young Soviet children in nursery schools were dressed alike and had their hair cropped so that you could not tell their sex) for Time and Tide. A vinegar merchant, one Mr Cook, arrived with a letter from the Mayor of Leeds addressed to the President of the Soviet Union, ‘whom he had been unable to see’, so the Consul invited him to dinner, at which ‘the innocent’ praised a factory canteen he had just seen as ‘better than anything in Leeds’.
Naomi Mitchison, a tireless traveller and writer, the sister of J.B.S. Haldane and the wife of a future Labour MP, was one of the Fabian Dalton/Pethwick Lawrence group that also included the formidable bookshop-owner Christina Foyle. Mitchison arrived in Leningrad wearing a garment of her own invention, a white jacket with ‘pockets all around it like purses in a belt’, and professing that her interest was mainly archaeological — though she made a particular point of finding out about birth control, and also about abortion practices, since Russia was the only country in which abortion was legal. ‘She’ll be pretty closely watched,’ commented Bullard darkly. On her return Mitchison was overheard ‘advocating a revolution for England’.
J.D. Bernal had been among a party of English doctors and scientists the previous summer. His enthusiasm for the USSR had been aroused by the unexpected visit to London a few weeks previously of Nikolai Bukharin, a close associate of Lenin and head of the Academy of Science’s section on the history of science and the Director of Research for the Supreme Economic Council, who led a delegation of Soviet scientists to the second International Congress of the History of Science and Technology. Bukharin (who would perish in Stalin’s ‘great purge’ in March 1938) had somewhat dominated proceedings, speaking of how ‘a new science’ to parallel the new economic system had been born in the Soviet Union. Bernal, who considered the Congress ‘the most important meeting of ideas that has occurred since the Revolution’, could not wait to see this ‘new science’ for himself.
Two tours — in July and August 1931- were organised by the Manchester Guardian’s science correspondent, J.G. Crowther, under the auspices of the Society for Cultural Relations. The doctors — some of whom were shocked to see women undergoing abortions in state clinics in Moscow without benefit of anaesthetics, which was normal practice — were in the majority, but Julian Huxley, who was very impressed that the Soviet authorities were ‘preparing to increase expenditure on pure scientific research far beyond that attempted in any capitalist country’, was one of the handful of scientists. In July Bukharin had hosted a lavish banquet (paid for by the Soviet government) at the Dynamo sports stadium in Moscow; the August party was rather less sumptuously entertained, and Bernal ‘saw very much of the difficulties as well as of [the] achievements. I saw the construction camps for the Dnieper dam, and at the same time saw something of the hard times that were produced in the period of early collectivisation … and yet there was no mistaking the sense of purpose and achievement in the Soviet Union … It was grim but great. Our hardships in England were less: theirs were deliberate and undergone in an assurance of building a better future. Their hardships were compensated for by a reasonable hope.’
Bernal was to return to the USSR several times, once in 1934 with his then lover Margaret Gardiner, who soon got bored with the November celebrations in Moscow, watching ‘column after marching column, gun carriages, tanks, all the grisly paraphernalia of power and war, with that row of grey men sitting there hour after hour to take the salute and acknowledge the applause’. Although Gardiner found Russia ‘drab’, she detected a feeling of hope, and was distressed and disturbed when, during her and Bernal’s visit, Sergey Kirov, the Communist Party leader in Leningrad and a member of the Politburo, was assassinated — possibly on the orders of Stalin.
The art critic and travel writer Robert Byron set off for Russia in January 1932, determined to concentrate on the paintings and buildings he wanted to see, and to ignore politics: ‘I almost went out of my way to avoid the state manifestation of communism — factories, clubs etc … as for Bolshevism and the Five Year Plan and all that — it seems too uninteresting to bother with … though I daresay I shall become interested.’ Ten days later he had indeed become very interested:
No more shall I be deceived by English intellectuals who all come on conducted tours — by our standards it is all evil… If the five-year plan works, it will be the industrial barbarism come true — apes in possession of machines, violently, madly nationalistic, hating and hated by the opposing human beings. But will the five-year plan work? It may seem stupid to write like this after a fortnight here — but there is the other side. They have cast so much off, all the futilities and extravagances that hamper us — somehow in spite of the devil worship one breathes a fresher air, and however much their experiment may menace our civilisation, one can’t wish it different or fail to wish them success up to a point. In fact one’s mind is filled with a flat contradiction — apparently insoluble, and the only concrete impression is simply one of intense interest.
Robert Haslam, a comfortably-off businessman, joined the rush to check out a (relatively) new social experiment, leaving his home in Bolton ‘in the Rolls’ in August 1932, bound for Hay’s Wharf in London and thence to the Soviet Union. He spent a month travelling around on a trip arranged by Intourist, but found little to commend post-Revolutionary Russia, with its generally poor food, lukewarm baths, unflushable lavatories, uncomfortable trains and what he decided were hopelessly inefficient factories — though he was impressed by a pioneer camp near Yalta. Haslam found it ‘increasingly difficult to come to an opinion on much of it, but I do feel there is no stability’. Defiantly he wrote in the visitors’ book of the Russian ship that bore his party back to Britain: ‘St George for Merrie England/No Soviets for me/I quite enjoyed the Sibier/But then, thank God, I’m free!’
Malcolm Muggeridge had shared the intellectual left’s enthusiasm for the Soviet Union. Disillusioned with his work on the Manchester Guardian’ and with Britain under the new National Government, he resolved in 1931 ‘to go where I thought a new age was coming to pass; to Moscow and the future of mankind’, as the newspaper’s Russian correspondent. Muggeridge and his wife Kitty (a niece of Beatrice Webb, who considered that she and Malcolm were ‘the most gifted and certainly the most “proletarian” of my nieces and nephews’) ‘sold off pretty well everything we had, making, as it were, a bonfire of our bourgeois trappings: my dinner jacket, for instance, Kitty’s only long dress … as well as most of our books, which we considered to be bourgeois literature of no relevance in a Workers’ State … We even wound up our bank account. What possible use would a bank account be in a country where bankers along with industrialists, landlords and priests had all been eliminated? … Kitty was pregnant again, so that our next child would be born a Soviet citizen [the Muggeridges had left their three-year-old son Leonard behind at school in the Lake District]. It all seemed wonderful.’
But it wasn’t. Soon Muggeridge grew impatient with life in the Soviet Union: ‘We might as well have been back in Didsbury. Revolutions, like wars, upset things far less than might be superficially supposed. As the very word “revolution” implies, they have a way of ending up where they began.’ He grew wearily amused too, as did Bullard, by the endless procession of distinguished visitors and their pronouncements:
Shaw, accompanied by Lady Astor (who was photographed cutting his hair), declaring that he was delighted to find that there was no food shortage in the USSR [the Ukraine in particular was enduring a famine at the time]. Or [Harold] Laski singing the praises of Stalin’s new Soviet constitution [though Laski, who visited in 1934, tempered his enthusiasm for Russia as ‘a land of hope’ with concern about the repressive nature of the regime, declaring that he was sure that ‘if I lived in Russia I should court difficulty from my sense of the need to form a Council of Civil Liberties’]. Or Julian Huxley describing how a ‘German town-planning expert was travelling over the huge Siberian spaces in a special train with a staff of assistants, stopping every now and again to lay down the broad outlines of a future city, and then pushing on, leaving the details to be filled in by architects and engineers who remained behind … I shall treasure until I die as a blessed memory the spectacle of them travelling with radiant optimism through a famished countryside, wandering in happy bands about squalid, over-crowded towns. Listening with unshakeable faith to the fatuous patter of carefully trained and indoctrinated guides, repeating like schoolchildren a multiplication table, the bogus statistics and mindless slogans endlessly intoned to them.
Within months of his arrival Muggeridge left the country of which he had entertained such high expectations and travelled to Montreux in Switzerland, where he and Kitty had decided to run a guest house for the Workers’ Travel Association (a Labour Party tourist agency). Before he left, Muggeridge had written a series of articles for the Manchester Guardian which were published in March 1933. ‘“We must collectivize agriculture,” or “We must root out the Kulaks” (the rich peasants). How simple it sounds! How logical! But what is going on in the remote villages? In the small households of the peasants? What does the collectivization of agriculture mean in practice in the lives of the peasants? What results has the “new drive” produced? … That is what I wanted to find out.’ What he found was that ‘the civilian population was obviously starving in its absolute sense: Not undernourished as, for instance … some unemployed workers in Europe … There had been no bread for three months … The only edible thing [in the markets] in the lowest European standards was chicken … the rest of the food offered for sale was revolting and would be thought unfit, in the ordinary way to be offered to animals.’ It was ‘the same story in the Ukraine — cattle and horses dead; fields neglected; meagre harvests despite moderately good climate conditions; all the grain produced was taken by the Government; now no bread at all, no bread anywhere, nothing much else either; despair and bewilderment’.
Muggeridge’s reports, which were confirmed by Gareth Jones, a former Political Secretary of Lloyd George who had gone on a walking tour of Russia that same year, were the first accounts of the famine by a Western journalist, the first indication that collectivisation, far from being a socialist dream, was turning into a nightmare. But not everyone wanted to hear them: the editor of the Manchester Guardian was lukewarm, wishing that Muggeridge had restricted himself to ‘plain, matter-of-fact statements of what you saw … If we denounce we are apt to be in unpleasant company.’ George Bernard Shaw (who, Jones reported, was ‘after Stalin the most hated man in Russia’) had written to the Guardian after an earlier report from Muggeridge, describing his comments as ‘a particularly offensive and ridiculous attempt to portray the lot of the workers as one of slavery and starvation. We the undersigned are recent visitors to the USSR … We desire to record that we saw nowhere evidence of such economic slavery, privation, unemployment … Everywhere we saw a hopeful and enthusiastic working class, self-respecting, free up to the limits imposed on them by nature and the terrible inheritance from the tyranny and incompetence of their former rulers … setting an example of industry and conduct which would greatly enrich us if our system supplied our workers with any incentive to follow it.’
Muggeridge, despairing, ‘discarded the Manchester Guardian and wrote a further series of articles, ‘as bitter and satirical as I knew how to make them’, about what he had seen, which he sent off to the Morning Post, a ‘reputable Tory newspaper of the extreme Right’ (which was taken over by the Daily Telegraph in 1937).
Some who kept the faith in the Soviet model had a disquieting time as news of Stalin’s purges and show trials became known, while others were able to accept these as the inevitable ‘infantile disease’ of a revolutionary society; the few who lost their faith found the disillusion hard, and felt rudderless as they drifted through the crises of capitalism, their lodestar tarnished.
PROLOGUE Follies
When the journalist Henry Vollam Morton (known as Harry), encouraged by the warm reception and almost bi-monthly reprints of his book In Search of England set off In Search of Wales in 1932, his route wound round the mountains of Snowdonia and along the craggy coast of what he called the ‘Land’s End of Wales’; he met the ex-Liberal Prime Minister David Lloyd George, ‘a strong wind in the war years’, walking down a lane in his home village of Criccieth. Morton then struck inland through the Llanberis Pass, bound ‘through the thin rain’ for the small town of Betws-y-Coed. Had he instead stuck to the coastal route, he would have come across a strange private fantasy demesne, a sliver of Italianate Surrealism that clung to the Merioneth Peninsula.
Aber Iâ (‘estuary of glass’) had been bought in the mid-1920s by the ‘intuitive’ (that is, virtually untrained) architect Clough Williams-Ellis, the son of a local Welsh squarson, whose professional training amounted to three months’ study at the Architectural Association in London. He intended to make an imaginative gesture by building a ‘holiday retreat for the more discerning’ among the ‘cliffs and woodland rides and paths that crisscross the whole headland between high crags’, replete with ‘an exuberant jungle of exotic and subtropical flowering shrubs (mainly rhododendrons)’. Portmeirion, as Williams-Ellis christened his fiefdom, owed nothing to prevailing notions of functional architecture; rather it was a Mediterranean extravaganza of campaniles, piazzas, an observatory tower which incorporated a camera obscura, Regency-type colonnades, colour-washed baroque houses, a vaguely Jacobean-style town hall, trompe l’oeils, pillars, obelisks, orbs, ponds, terraces, grilles and a range of architectural jokes and whimsies.
A hotel opened for visitors in 1926, and throughout the 1930s Williams-Ellis extended Portmeirion with fifteen more buildings, many incorporating architectural salvage that he had acquired over the years. In that decade (and indeed during the Second World War too) the resort served as a retreat for celebrities such as Noël Coward (who would write Blithe Spirit during a week’s stay in 1941), George Bernard Shaw, Augustus John (who liked to speak Romany with a gypsy who lived in a tent in the woods until he was killed by a motorcyclist leaving the car park), Bertrand Russell (who wrote Freedom and Organisation, 1814—1914 at Portmeirion in 1934) and the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VIII), who also spent time there in 1934, and required that a bath and lavatory be installed in his bedroom, since it was not appropriate for a royal to share such facilities. Williams-Ellis even acquired a hotel, renaming it the Mytton and Mermaid, near Shrewsbury, so that those travelling from London and the South-East could break their journey for a night. Visitors could come for the day, too, and paid on a sliding scale: the more people there were, the higher the entrance fee. Usually the entrance fee was around one shilling, but it rose to a dizzying ten shillings (around £25 in today’s money) when the Prince of Wales was in residence.
Williams-Ellis admitted that while he had ‘an acute inborn instinct for architecture’, he remained ‘in some respects half-baked as a technician’, and many saw him less as an architect and more as a stage designer. Few if any of his exuberant excesses would have been possible had he followed his own precepts, as set out in a letter to the Manchester Guardian while he was on leave from France during the First World War: ‘Anyone who cares for England must be interested in national planning, the provision of a comprehensive co-ordinated and compulsory development and conservation scheme for the country as a whole, urban and rural, public and private.’ In fact the building of Portmeirion was only possible because there were then ‘no Building Regulations, no Town & Country Planning Act, no regulations about Historic Buildings’. Although Williams-Ellis thought there ought to be all these things (and said so repeatedly), ‘privately, secretly, he relished their absence’, wrote his wife. So effective was Williams-Ellis at ‘calling my own tune’ that when Snowdonia was declared a national park just after the Second World War, something he had long agitated for, its boundaries were drawn to exclude Portmeirion.
No planning permission was needed, or sought, for another ‘world-class folly’ that opened to the public for the first time in the summer of 1929. Roland Callingham, a London accountant, owned a large house and garden in the leafy commuter suburb of Beaconsfield in Buckinghamshire. Callingham was a model-railway enthusiast, and commissioned the largest outdoor Gauge 1 railway layout in England for his garden, dragooning his gardener and other household servants, family and friends into making scale models of houses, shops, a castle, pubs, a cinema, a station and a church to set alongside his railway line, constructing roads and streets to connect them, and fashioning Lilliputian-sized people to inhabit his construction. Named ‘Beckonscot’ (an amalgam of Beaconsfield and Ascot, where Callingham’s railway collaborator lived), the first model village in the world covered a site of around two acres. It was visited by Princess Elizabeth on the eve of her eighth birthday in April 1934 with her grandmother Queen Mary, wife of the by then ailing King George V. The serious-looking, cloche-hatted, white-gloved child, third in line to the throne, peered through shop windows at the miniature goods for sale, watched 1:12-scale trains leaving from Maryloo (an amalgam of Marylebone and Waterloo) station, listened to the ‘choir’ singing in one of the several churches (they would later include a model of one built in Beaconsfield as a memorial to G.K. Chesterton, who died in 1936), and took it upon herself to rearrange the sheep in the fields.
By May 1937, when the American magazine National Geographic featured Beckonscot, the miniature country town was attracting over 57,000 visitors a year, and boasted a racecourse (Epwood — combining Epsom and Goodwood) a fairground, docks and an Art Deco aerodrome which looked remarkably similar to a miniaturised Croydon airfield.
The intention was that Beckonscot should grow and develop just like any other town, so as the decades passed, modern concrete slabs were erected in place of some of the pargeted buildings, elaborate ironwork at the railway station was replaced by concrete and glass, and the original steam trains gave way to diesel. But in 1992 it was decided that the ‘progress’ of the past sixty years should be reversed, and Beckonscot returned to how it had been when Princess Elizabeth (who by then had been on the throne for nearly forty years) had visited. 1960s-style blocks of flats were torn down, concrete offices destroyed, glass and metal bus shelters uprooted, all to be replaced by workshops and mock-Tudor cottages, while individual shops, many modelled on actual Beaconsfield establishments of the 1930s, replaced a supermarket and all the buildings were repainted in ‘the drab colours relevant to the time’. The children’s author Enid Blyton, creator of Noddy and Big Ears, had moved to Beaconsfield in 1938, and a replica of her house, Green Hedges, was recreated as part of a village that now stands in a perfect 1930s time-warp, viewed through binoculars the wrong way round, with its tea-drinking matrons sitting under shady umbrellas, its edge-of-town roadhouse next to the tiled swimming pool with its two-foot diving tower with five springboards, its eternally grazing cows, sheep and horses and more exotic animals in the zoo, its pink-coated huntsmen permanently in full Tally ho!, its polo field, its miller perpetually carrying sacks of grain into the windmill, watched by two archetypal figures from the 1930s countryside, hikers in shorts with rucksacks on their backs and carrying stout sticks.
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