The political spirit of the nineteen-thirties extended over not one decade but two. Held in suspension for six years by the war, the climax of its expression was the sweeping Labour victory in 1945, and the ‘political apathy’ of the ’fifties was simply the aftermath of its going. What is remarkable in the SPGB’s history is that scarcely any of the figures of this burning epoch survived it as members. The older generation remained; but Wilmott, Turner, Benjamin, Walsby, Isbitsky, Stella Jackson, Cash, almost all the tearaway socialists of the ’thirties found scientific socialism in the end unacceptable.
No doubt they were more sensitive to social and cultural innovation, since they were themselves its products. The Party did not admit to changes in the capitalist system. From the nineteen-twenties onward it was continually under pressure to say that things were not as they had been in 1904, to identify innovation with modification or improvement — the self-styling of most left-wing radicals in the ’twenties and ’thirties was ‘progressive’. The Party’s response was always that the Declaration of Principles described capitalism for as long as capitalism lasted; to say otherwise was to invite the Fabian fallacy with the whole pack of reformists behind.
In the eyes of many members there was not even any addition to knowledge worth considering in the Party’s lifetime. Economists, psy¬chologists, anthropologists and historians, if they were not outright charlatans, built from standpoints where no understanding was to be had. Indeed, reading outside the known sound works was discouraged implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, in the SPGB. Sammy Cash once recounted how he had asked Fitzgerald’s opinion as to the value of reading Freud and been told: ‘You might as well read that rubbish as any other.’ And when in the early ’thirties Frank Evans was proposed as a useful man to take Party classes since he had just obtained his degree in economics, the EC was unanimous: the degree conveyed to them that Evans knew no economics at all.
This sentiment ran through the labour movement generally.
The discovery that school-book history, for example, was only the upper class’s version was both critical and exhilarating to countless
young people: there was a ready market for books like A Worker Looks at History and The Common People, and cheap pamphlets on working- class history. Thus, the Party members’ books represented ammunition in the class struggle rather than any desire for knowledge for its own sake. Marx and Engels, the publications of Charles H. Kerr’s company, and volumes of the Socialist Standard were universal. Almost invariably there would be The Origin of Species, Spencer’s First Principles, and Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe — mightiest weapons in the war against superstition — and a tiny volume in the ‘Temple Primers’ series called A History of Politics, by Edward Jenks. Most members had, too, something by William Morris and Jack London, The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists by Robert Tressell, and copies of the only poetry highly regarded by Marxist materialists — Shelley, and Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Though second-hand books could be bought for pennies and twopences, few socialists had any larger collection than this.
The nineteen-thirties’ generation was to be undone, from the Party’s point of view, largely by reading of the kind that led to ‘confusion’ and ‘intellectual anarchy’; perhaps by the desire to explain social nuances for which theories abound. In the meantime, however, there was the demand for involvement in the political drama of the ’thirties: and involved they were. The reckless hurly-burly of outdoor politics, and of living with nothing to lose, created innumerable fantastic situations in which effrontery and plausibility were paramount. There was never any lack of impudent fun, even in the serious business of staging meetings. When the black-coated audiences at City lunch-hour meetings chided Turner for not being in work himself, he appeared in a bowler and striped trousers and began ‘We City workers . . .’ If an audience was hard to get at the beginning, a member who not uncommonly was the speaker waiting to ‘do’ the meeting would pose as a raucous heckler, shout abuse at the chairman until a crowd collected, and then jump on the platform to address them.
There were continual brawls with Communists, to whom the SPGB was a perpetual goad, since it attacked them with the Marxist doctrine they dared not deny. Here the SPGB held, without doubt, all the aces — but at least one member carried additional ones. A sad-faced Cockney humourist, he composed his own quotations from Marx and Engels to confound the most learned Communist, and recommended others to do the same. ‘Twist the book,’ he would yell: ‘twist the book, so the Party always wins !’ Often fisticuffs developed from the argu¬ments. Turner was once rescued by Dawe impersonating a plain-clothes policeman and ‘arresting’ him. At one period, when Hardy was regularly writing articles in the Standard that were damaging to the CP, a group
of Communists resolved to discover and put paid to the author. Hardy’s response to the news indicated not only personal courage but a linguistic gulf in the Party. ‘I don’t understand,’ he is reputed to have said. ‘Does “doing me up” mean buying me some new clothes ?’
They were all out of work, of course. The tricks were played on the Labour Exchanges, Public Assistance was squeezed for its maximum pittances, but there remained endless subterfuges and shifts. Eyes were always open for free meals. One chain of cheap restaurants had its waitresses issue tickets for all the items consumed, to be handed-in at the cash desk. A group could have a banquet and surrender and pay for only a quarter of the tickets. (The same great firm had to pay for the false teeth a member needed, after a startling plum-tart episode carefully rehearsed by him.) The cash-desk system in general was too full of possibilities which hungry men could not ignore. There was always a watching commissionaire to see that customers visited the desk before they left; how was he to know that some were buying only packets of Woodbines, with the bills for their good meals in their pockets ?
When everything else failed, there remained the pills and powders. The whole process from manufacture to the wholesale and retail distribution is described fully by Cameron in The Day is Coming. Briefly, it was the selling from door to door of bath salts, shampoos, tooth-powders and pills in packets almost identical with those of famous brands. They were obtained from mobile amateur wholesalers, and their origins would have been hard to trace — back rooms and kitchens, the chemistry done in coppers and sinks. It is likely enough that, as Alf Catchpenny claims in Cameron’s book, the ingredients were no different from those of the genuine articles.
More than one former Member of Parliament sold shampoos and bath-salts in the ’thirties, after the Labour government collapsed.
At half the price of the brands they imitated, most of the goods were not difficult to sell. In most people’s minds, if shampoos turned out to be a doorstep swindle not much was lost, but pills were a different thing. The ability to sell them was the height of this sort of salesman¬ship; even Turner had little success, and Michael Stewart refused to try. Stewart was a university man whose manner at once commanded respect and would have charmed birds from trees. It was always said that he could bum from the bums themselves — and possibly it was this reputation he was unwilling to risk by failure at selling the pills.
It may be difficult to reconcile these tragi-comic shifts with the thought that these were men with ability and brains. What the difficulty really involves for later generations is imagining the whole situation in which they occurred. Of course there was wild incongruity in it all.
Wilmott lecturing on economic theory and next morning lining-up for Assistance, was incongruous; so was Turner debating a rich Conservative, and the next day selling bath-salts in the strange garment they called ‘the dead ostler’s coat’ (‘An old ostler died, see’, said Dawe, ‘and left this old-fashioned coat to keep his horse warm, but Tony nicked it off the horse’s back and the poor horse died.’).
But the paradox was social, not personal. The wastage of talents in the depression years was appalling. Men with degrees worked in the docks and rode ice-cream tricycles; the best brains and the finest skills had no appeal from the ubiquitous factory-gate notice ‘No Hands Wanted’. It is possible that, for all the meetings held and all the literature distributed by the SPGB, more members were recruited round Labour Exchanges than by any other means in the ’thirties. (Sometimes things were not what they seemed to be. Dave Russell took pity on one man in the queue whose bare toes showed through broken shoes — bought him cups of tea, and gave him Standards so that he should learn the cause of his destitution. Ten years later Dave met the man again, in uniform; he was a policeman, whose duty had been to mingle with the dole crowds and look for promoters of discontent.) Because this was the common plight, it would have been impossible for the depression generation of Party members not to be touched by it. Two of them were to produce remarkable novels about the working-class life of their time. William Cameron wrote The Day is Coming during the war, and Sid Rubin — as ‘George Camden’ — My Time, My Life at the end of it.
The man who perhaps best represented the humanistic tendency in the Party was Samuel Cash. An able orator and a willing worker, Sammy was unceasingly the centre of controversy. He was fallible — which to the Party meant ‘unsound’. He had, indeed, a passion for lost causes; he was prepared to consider any criticism of the Party and to acknowledge other people’s logic. He was, too, unashamedly interested in subjects of which the Party disapproved: penal reform, progressive education, psychology, all the signposts to reformism. He had left the SPGB at one time to join the Communist Party, and then came back and lectured on ‘Why I left the Communist Party’. In the General Strike he had been sent to prison for a characteristic offence. There had been some breaking-in to small shops for food; from his platform Sammy condemned it sternly, and recommended instead the big shops where the owners could afford the loss and the food was better.
Sammy was a taxi-driver, but he was continually starting businesses designed to serve his fellow-men as well as benefit himself.
The most extraordinary of them was the Humanitarian Restaurant, a joint venture of Sammy and an anarchist named Bill Gape who had
founded a trade union for tramps. It was a coffee-shop where cups of tea were cheap in any event but free to the unemployed. It is almost tin necessary to say that hardly any customer admitted to being employed, and that the business for its short lifetime was subsidized by Sammy’s working overtime in his cab.
But not all individual vagaries in the Party arose from ideas of working-class welfare taken too far. There were for a number of years several members in one of the main Post Office depots. One of them was put in charge of a section of men, to whom he explained his view of his new situation. Through economic necessity, he had had to accept a managerial office. As a socialist he knew that all bosses must grind down the workers, and so must their hireling foremen and managers; that was the materialist conception of history. He was as good as his word, and in due course the exasperated workmen wrote to the Party Executive — asking if it were really true that socialist teaching gave a licence to ride them rough-shod. The EC asked him to resign his membership.
It may be useful here to say something about the composition of the Party in the years before the second world war. Its characteristic figure remained the self-educated man, his personal and political inde¬pendence as rigorous as ever. I have written about the unemployed, hand-to-mouth members whose fraternity made a university of the streets. However, there was also a section holding prestige by long standing in the organization reinforced by respectability. The last word obviously needs an explanation. It is that many of the older members took their cue from, or agreed with, Fitzgerald that the best thing for an individual to do was work for as secure a spot as he could find in the capitalist scheme.
Thus, these members had jobs or even small businesses; and, inevitably, it was they who maintained the organization and set its tone. In simple terms, they were more reliable because they were better placed. This, together with prestige, made their influence the dominant one on what the Party should be like. That is not to say there were not conflicts over it. Orderly administrative proposals were met with gibes of ‘shop¬keeper mentality’ on one side; while, on the other, the part-deliberate brashness of the Wilmott coterie was put down as doing the Party no good at all.
A few more things must be picked from the ’thirties before going on to their strongest drama. The first is a minor incident full of uproar¬ious seriousness, with a hint at the end that the SPGB could sometimes smile at itself. It concerns an East London member with a passion for Jewish liturgical music. Recordings were either unobtainable or beyond his means; there was only one kind of place where he could listen to it.
with astonishment, members heard that one of their number appeared to have developed religious mania. Some hung about near synagogues to see, and noted his furtive manner as he went in and out. The case was taken to the EC for action. The member, distraught, explained that all he wanted was the music; the EC advised that he keep away from synagogues, but otherwise let the matter rest.
One aspect of the Party’s economic case was developed and given precision in the early ’thirties. It had always been part of the Marxist analysis that capitalism fettered production by restricting it to the market and through the demands of armaments, bureaucracy and the money economy. The SPGB had asserted in 1904 that going over to socialism would double the production of useful goods immediately. Now, in articles in the Socialist Standard, Hardy showed that growth under capitalism was held to an erratic snail’s pace: ‘waste’ was beside the point. The Party adopted this as its explicit view, to make the attack on capitalism in future not for its application of what was produced but for its failure to produce. This standpoint was in contradistinction to that of the Fabians and most radicals, who assumed the cake to be there awaiting only a just system of distribution.
A little later, trade-union struggles found a prominent place in the Standard. It was a subject the Party had mostly left alone, replying to questions in the broad terms formulated in 1905. The General Strike had been dealt with, of course, but the lesson the Party had to point out was the futility of attempted confrontations with the powers of government. (A lesson many militants had learned; the membership of the Communist Party, which soared in the General Strike, fell catastrop¬hically in the five years after it.) The interest in industrial action now came from a Dagenham member named Bill Waters, a bus-driver and a keen trade unionist. Busmen were to the fore in making demands in the ’thirties, and any threatened strike by them was news because of the disruptive effect it would have.
Waters, a capable speaker and writer, contributed several articles in the Standard on the busmen’s position. Despite their topicality, the Party — or most of it — looked at them with misgivings. The general statement that the SPGB recognized workers’ need to struggle seemed to be extended too close to the Communists’ aim of making political capital from any industrial dispute. Waters suggested that, to avoid in¬conveniencing and alienating other workers, a busmen’s strike should take the form of running the buses but not collecting fares; this was involving the Party too much. Over several years the busmen — Waters had one or two associates — pressed their concern, culminating in the suggestion after the war of a socialist ‘cell’, but it was rejected as not what the Party existed for.
Clifford Groves — ‘Two-Shirt Groves’ — quickly became a dominant figure in the SPGB. He had been in the Salvation Army and played in a dance band, and was always well-to-do; tall and handsome, he had a high-voiced, deliberate speech that was very effective from the platform, and combined it with unrelenting hostility to all opponents, he would not even shake hands with the other side’s representative before or after a debate: ‘We have no time’ — emphasizing every word until it resounded like a hammer on stone — ‘no time at all for hypocritical gestures’. The arrogant, overbearing manner which he cultivated was for members as well as opponents. Groves delighted in making anyone look and feel small; only occasionally did one see, beneath the bitter¬ness, a shy man who had wanted a family.
Groves was the candidate in the Party’s first Parliamentary election campaign, which began in 1937 but, deferred by the war, did not reach the polls until 1945. It presented an intensely exciting pro¬spect to the Party. Representation in Parliament would be the first visible step to fulfilment of the socialist dream, the sending of class-¬conscious delegates to Westminster to enact the abolition of private property and of wage-slavery. It had waited thirty-three years for the Party to have enough money for deposit and campaign; now, with the prospect in sight, members contributed all they could to the Parliamentary Fund which was set up.
The choice of constituencies was small. With only three or four hundred members in the whole of Britain, there were not many towns even in the London area which had the ten necessary to sign the candi¬date’s nomination paper. The constituency taken was East Ham North, on the outskirts of East London. Originally a member named Grainger was chosen to be candidate. After a few months he suddenly withdrew, and Groves was appointed in his place. Up to the outbreak of war there was intensive activity in East Ham North. Meetings were held three, four and five times a week, and members plodded round assiduously to expound the Party’s case on every doorstep.
Determined that a man who spoke for it in Parliament should have no flaw in his socialist judgement, the Party demanded a new and more rigorous test of knowledge for prospective candidates. Groves was examined publicly by the Executive Committee from a prepared list of points. To economic theory and history were added special questions about the workings of government, the economics of taxation, and national finance in general.
Despite this safeguard, it is hard to imagine how the Party would have adjusted to the situation if its member had ever been elected to Parliament. On one hand, the structure and purpose of the SPGB
denied autonomy to any member; on the other, its machinery for
decision-making was incredibly cumbersome, involving discussion and voting at every level and finality only in the annual Conference. Had Groves won a seat, he would have had to refer back to the Party for instruction on almost every question. One visualizes at once the resurgence of the whole argument about reforms, with endless disputation which might well have disrupted the Party completely.
In fact, the SPGB was disrupted in the late nineteen-thirties by what was, in another form, the same question. All the controversies, the latterly-contested issues throughout its history, had been over hypotheses. Industrial unionism had been a hypothesis of trade-union organization in a form it had never been likely to take. The ‘reform’ dispute of 1910 had centred on the supposition of a single socialist in Parlia¬ment. The recurrent argument over whether soldiers should be allowed to join supposed, as Reynolds once said, ‘the entire brigade of Guards lining up for membership’. The Party had preserved its attitude while refusing involvement in everyday political issues. Representation in Parliament might have caused disruption by forcing the consideration of issues; as it happened, issues were forced on the Party by the history of the nineteen-thirties.
The outbreak of the Spanish Civil War brought the question of democracy before everyone’s eyes. For the Party, all wars were economic conflicts — ‘armed extensions of the policies of peace’. The international wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had been inevitable quarrels between the capitalists of rival countries over resources, markets and trade routes. The apparently idealistic struggles in history, like the English and American Civil Wars and the religious wars in Europe, had been fundamentally economic ones arising from the conflicts of old and new ruling classes with opposite material interests. Even the case of Helen of Troy had the socio-economic explanation of women as private property in the ancient world. ‘We cannot judge an epoch by its own consciousness’, Marx had said.
Spain, however, involved none of these considerations. A govern¬ment elected by the majority was challenged by an armed force seeking to impose its own will. Moreover, the insurgents had the backing of the Catholic Church and the dictator states, Italy and Germany; what was attacked was not just a government but the institution of democracy.
The situation, in fact, was one in which the Party had envisaged itself.
Its concept of the establishment of socialism rested on the election of a majority expressing the will of the working class. If, after that, the minority tried violence, the Party had always indicated that it would defend the revolution with force.
This was too close to what was happening in Spain. There was a further consideration in some members’ minds: the persecution of Jews by the Nazi government in Germany. The SPGB’s argument that the nature of governments made no difference to the working class did not ring true here. The left-wing minorities tended to attract Jews, and the Party had its share: to most of them, it was only too obvious that it mattered a great deal who governed Germany and whether the Nazi creed extended to other countries. The Fascists in Britain were crudely vicious in their anti-semitism. Young louts in black shirts marched through the streets singing their version of A Tavern in the Town:
A Jew, a Jew a Jew a Jew a Jew a Jew,
A dirty, thieving, stinking Jew . . .
Thus Kohn, Cash and other Jewish members were quick to state their view of the issues involved. They had support from other quarters, however. A. E. Jacomb, who had been in near-retirement for several years through heart trouble, came forward with an argument, reasoned from the basis of working-class interests, for the defence of democracy. Essentially, it was a development of what Fitzgerald had said in answer to the Provisional Committee in 1910. In one of the printed leaflets he sent round to members, Jacomb wrote:
‘Democracy opens up a new vista to the working class. Socialist parties can precede democracy, hut they cannot have the character de¬manded by working-class interests when the workers have attained political power ... It is only because all necessary reforms have been won by reformers, and democracy has in consequence become a perfect political instrument for working-class political ends, that it is possible to organize the workers in a political party on non-reform, independent, hostile, class lines. ’
Reynolds supported Jacomb, and in turn was supported by his branch, Islington. The Party was divided.
The question of Spain itself was not resolved. A statement ap¬peared in the Socialist Standard in March, 1937, which was presented as the Party’s official view. It stated categorically that the SPGB was on the side of ‘the main body of workers’ against ‘those, headed by Franco, who threaten to deprive the workers of the power to organize politically and industrially in their own interests’. But it said also that since the Party was concerned only with establishing socialism it ‘only gives material support to Socialist organizations’ — of which the Spanish government was not one. And it ended by referring to the Spanish government’s resistance to Franco as the Spaniards’ own affair:
‘It must be assumed that the Spanish workers weighed up the situation and counted the cost before deciding their course of action.
that is a matter upon which their judgement should be better than that of people outside the country. ’
No stand was made or decision taken that would have rendered anyone’s position untenable in the Party. If no-one was answered, it might be said also that everyone was answered: the Party had said it was on the side of the Spanish government, and it had said also that it would not support the Spanish government. Nevertheless, the nature of the victory which had been won was clearly understood. The Party had been asked to support a war for democracy, and had refused. It became discreditable to have supported the Spanish war — thirteen years after its outbreak, I heard Cash condemned in argument for his ‘mistake’.
But the issue remained. For a time the battle was between the letters which Jacomb wrote regularly to the Executive Committee or the membership and Hardy’s answers to them. Hardy had become by this time the undisputed king-pin of the Party. He and McClatchie had been editors of the Socialist Standard since the nineteen-twenties — the editorial committee consisted of three, with Harry Waite as the third member in the ’thirties — but Hardy was at all times the predominant figure. He had insuperable advantages in argument. Employed in a trade union’s research department, he was able to produce statistics and facts while others had to seek them where they could.
The crucial point in the controversy was put in brief by Hardy: 'Democracy cannot be defended by fighting for it.’ Jacomb flew at the statement, tearing at it:
‘If democracy cannot be defended by force then the power be¬hind the machine-gun can (unless there is some other way of defending democracy) withdraw all democratic rights at will. If in these circumstances democracy, once lost, cannot be recovered, then the SP must accept their own conclusion that the workers can never free themselves. ’ But articles appeared in the Standard reiterating what Hardy had said; the Party had already made up its mind. At nearly forty years’ distance, Jacomb’s argument appears beside the point not only of the 1939-45 war but of much of the history of civilization since that time. Then, it came as a challenge to each member to see where he stood, and was to close bitterly the story of a sincere and kindly man who had been with the Party from the beginning in 1904.
The bigger consideration, however, was the imminence of a world war. For how long everyone had accepted its inevitability, it would be hard to say. F. A. Ridley has told me that in 1938 he made bets with Wilmott and Kohn on the date of the outbreak; while I was still at school, perhaps in 1936,1 heard a lecture on defence against poison gas. The anticipation in those two or three years was scarcely less awful
than the later fear of atomic war. It was believed that European civilisation might be annihilated by bombing, and populations exterminated by gas. The Party had, for the only time, allowed a non-member to write articles in the Standard on ‘The Menace of Aerial Warfare’, and had appointed an Emergency Committee of dependable members to try to preserve contact if the worst happened.
Against this background, the controversy on war and democracy
grew.
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