There was no question of the stand the SPGB would take. It would oppose the war, and the members would refuse to take part.
What was not known was the number of members who might seek to compromise the Party in some way. It was obvious that Jacomb was prepared to support a war against the totalitarian states, but the position of others was undetermined.
There were some who felt that the Party could not afford to stand apart from the crisis of civilization which they believed was coming. In 1936 Stella Jackson had resigned with a letter about the Party’s Principles in which she assailed, among other things, the phrase ‘diametrically opposed’. The daughter of T. A. Jackson, she was the most outstanding of the relatively few women in the Party’s history. The Party gave little importance to her strictures, attributing them merely to the influence of a father who had been a Party renegade.
An attempt to make the Party consider this view was made at the annual Easter Conference in 1938. Wilmott and Reynolds (Party controversies sometimes brought such shotgun marriages) prompted a young woman member named May Otway to bring forward a resolution that, in the event of a European war, the Party should at once call a conference of working-class organizations. What was envisaged was a search for common ground with, for example, the ILP and the pacifist organizations which, if not explicitly political in character, leaned towards the left.
The motion was never discussed. Groves, the chairman of the Conference for that year, refused to admit it because it was in conflict with the clause in the Declaration of Principles that demanded diamet¬rical opposition to all other parties. The condition of membership was acceptance of the Principles in their entirety, and discussion of a pro¬posal to violate them was not permissible. When the Executive Committee met after the Conference it endorsed Groves’s attitude, and summoned May Otway to explain herself to a subsequent meeting. The girl had been stung by Groves’s rancorous manner at the Conference, and retaliated with spirit before the EC; Groves in turn moved a resolut¬ion which was sheer vindictiveness, beginning ‘Comrade Otway is
irresponsible’, and proposing that she should be barred from any position in the Party. It was an evening of uproar at Great Dover Street, the kind of row that made a legend, but the questions from which it had sprung were passed by. Reynolds and Wilmott knew better than to pursue this line further — and May Otway died not long afterwards.
The actual question of opposition to war was raised to its eventual level by Turner. Through the arguments he had taken the attitude of the complete pacifist to whom no war could ever be justified. He claimed that he had chosen the SPGB and not the Communist Party because the SPGB did not countenance force as an instrument of policy. It was untrue of the Party, and Reynolds hunted now with this as his weapon. Though Reynolds had joined forces with Wilmott, his dislike of Turner was implacable, and the Party’s sixth clause did pre¬sume the use of armed force for socialist purposes.
In the autumn of 1938, Turner gave a lecture at Bloomsbury branch on Chamberlain’s Munich Agreement policy. The lectures given
regularly at most branches were chiefly for the information and diversion
of the branches’ own members, and the audiences were small unless there was some factor creating unusual interest. This one was special because its subject-matter invoked the point of controversy which was concerning the Party; the audience went for not the lecture but the questions. Turner was asked by a member if he thought the Party, when it had taken political power to establish socialism, would make war on recalcitrants. He answered equivocally, knowing what the question was for. He could not, he said, imagine that the situation would arise: how could there be resisters to the arrival of the good society ?
From somewhere in the room Reynolds shouted: ‘Never mind what you imagine — tell us what you think ! ’ Forced thus into a corner, Turner said finally no, he would not agree to war even for the revolution — means had to harmonize with ends. Without doubt, he was rebutting the proposition of the Party Principles. The Party did not take him up because its problem was not the distant revolution but the imminent war. Reynolds was trying to establish that the Party was not opposed to war in all circumstances, and could conceivably support hostilities in which working-class interests were involved — or, more simply, that it might support the coming war against Germany.
And a few weeks later, Reynolds himself was cornered. He too lectured at Bloomsbury and was questioned on the war issue. Reynolds may have been over-confident. At any rate, asked for his view of the Party’s policy for war, he answered that it did not have one: it had only an attitude to each war as it happened. The questioner wrote to the Executive at once. Over words, the Party was prepared to cry wordy
havoc. Had the Party an attitude, or had it a policy ? The die was cast.
The Executive could no longer avoid coming down on one side or the other. Whatever either word may be thought to have meant, Reynolds’ word had to be wrong because it implied the possibility that the Party might support the war. The EC moved, and carried, a long resolution disowning ‘attitude’ and claiming a policy over war.
There is no doubt that Reynolds’ argument from the Party’s teaching and its precedents was a strong one. It had never been pacifist; its doctrine of political power as the means to revolution proposed taking the state’s coercive instruments on behalf of the working class, and if necessary using them. There was therefore no standing policy against armed force. Instead, said Reynolds, the Party should — and in his view did – consider any war in the same light as it considered any reform: in relation to its object, the expression of working-class interests in the achievement of socialism.
The SPGB’s stand in the 1914-18 war could be described as a policy. It appealed to the workers of the world to recognize their affinity as exploited people and stop fighting. The praise of the Bolsheviks at the time of the Russian revolution was associated with their having got the Russian workers out of the war. The employment of this kind of active sentiment had not happened since those years — ‘attitude’ was the more descriptive word for what the Party had said about the Spanish war. It was, in fact, the same attitude that the Party had come to take towards every problem: determination that they should not be involved in partisanship for anything but the struggle for socialist understanding.
In the short space between the later stages of the Spanish war and September 1939, the Spanish situation was rationalized enough to allay doubts which may have remained in members’ minds about the issues. The German and Italian intervention was said to have been imperi¬alistic, not ideological: the Standard referred to ‘rich mineral wealth and strategic points’ in Spain. The position of the Jewish members was discredited by insistent whispers that they were unreliable anyway — Jews first, socialists afterwards. The Standard repeatedly exposed British politicians’ concern for democracy by drawing attention to such things as the annexations in southern Arabia as evidence that democrats were as bad as totalitarians.
Underlying all this was a comprehensible and hard-headed view which need not have been wrapped in so much theoretical debate.
Except for the disputing faction, the members would have said that their concern and duty were to keep the Socialist Party in existence; they were a minority, and were unwilling either to be killed off in a war or in see the Party submerged in the alliances it would have made inevitable.
Whatever Reynolds’ dialectic, it was not going to alter this. The Executive’s resolution started with a warning to him that the words he had used would not be tolerated, and went on to say that the SPGB had a clear-cut policy of opposition to the prosecution of any war. Not was this policy merely negative; it aimed at ‘influencing the actions of war-making governments’ by spreading disaffection which, on a big enough scale, could make it impossible for a war to continue.
Many members, ready as they were to accept whatever form the EC’s repudiation of Reynolds might take, must have been aware of the new position thus taken up. Turner’s pacifist avowal had gone unchallenged; now, the Executive’s statement of policy was saying something very close to the classic pacifist argument that, if everyone refused to fight, there could be no war. Wilmott made a final attempt to regain lost ground and keep the argument alive. Two weeks later, on the Executive he moved the rescindment of the policy resolution.
It was the end of the year. The annual election of the Executive Committee had some time before been moved from Easter to December. There was always a tendency at this time to leave business over to the incoming Committee; members — particularly those whose election was marginal — did not trouble a great deal about attending. On this night there was a small and unrepresentative attendance, made up mainly of the dissenters from the policy statement. The rescindment was carried.
The news was all round the Party in two or three days. By the following Tuesday, seven had resigned from the Executive to protest against the rescindment. It is interesting that almost none of them was a pacifist. Fifteen years later, when Turner’s own membership was in question over — among other things — the clause in the Principles that recognized armed force, almost all of them condemned him. Ambridge, whose resignation came first in 1938, was cited on the application of this clause for Turner’s embarrassment by an anarchist in public debate in 1953. But the issue here was the condemnation of Reynolds’ views; uncondemned, they created a situation which the Party would not have
The resignations turned the election of the 1939 Executive into a Party vote on the war question. Overwhelmingly, the ‘policy’ sup¬porters won the day. Their representatives were voted back handsom¬ely, and the supporters of the rescindment either lost their seats or scraped in at the bottom of the poll. The question was put to a final vote of confidence at the Conference at Easter, and the delegates re¬affirmed the decision:
‘The Conference upholds the view that the SPGB has a policy on war and records its regret that the 35th EC should have rescinded its
resolution of October 4th. We urge that the present EC take immediate steps to re-establish this ruling, and that failure to comply by any member will be dealt with sternly. ’
The controversy was over, and Jacomb and Reynolds now were merely renegades. Reynolds remained in the Party another year and then, in 1940, resigned with a dignified letter in which he said that the Party was not what it had been when he joined it nearly thirty years before.
The majority of the Islington branch left too. Jacomb persisted, was expelled, and died in 1946. He had hoped that there might be young men who would listen to him and form a new party to put socialism right, as he and the others had done in 1904. But only a few old members used to go and see him on his little poultry farm at Collier Row in Essex, and they were remembering the times that had gone long before.
On the Sunday the war began, the Executive met at Great Dover Street and Turner spoke in Hyde Park. There was little in fact that the EC could do beyond reaffirming and hoping. The yearly Autumn Delegate Meeting was due in four weeks, and then — if delegates arrived an idea would be gained of how things were with the membership.
Conscription had already begun in the summer before the war. There were posters in the streets saying KEEP CALM — AND DIG ! ; in the parks and commons men were digging desperately, cutting deep trenches between the banks of thrown-up brown earth to provide some shelter from the bombs when they came. The Executive itself was reduced; many members felt, like the general public, that every man had to look after himself.
But 3 September 1939 was Turner’s day. Just before he left the Party, disgraced by ‘unsoundness’, one of his accusers recalled ‘with pride and affection the stirring days of 1939, when like Casabianca he stood on the burning deck whence all but he had fled’. The trite and melodramatic simile evoked the feeling of that day as more sophisticated phrases might not have. All the parties had their platforms in Hyde Park in state their attitudes and make their appeals; Government and Labour speakers, the Communists, the minorities. Throughout the morning and afternoon great crowds stood listening, moving on and swelling round fewer platforms as one after another speaker ended his message and closed down. Turner began in the morning. The scene, and the impression it made — ‘the greatest individual performance by a Hyde Park orator’ — were described in an article in the magazine Clubman in 1955, by Dale Kenway:
‘ “A plague on both your houses”, growled Turner in his husky bass;. He mocked his silent audience. “Men and women, what business is it of yours if the German bosses oust Nuffield and Imperial Chemicals ?
What does it matter to you what landlord charges you rent ? ” He was taking it easy, welcoming interruptions to rest his voice . . . The Labour Party platform yielded and closed late in the afternoon, by which time its audience was near four thousand; the vast crowd moved on to the two remaining platforms.
And then a strange feeling came over that audience. The two remaining platforms were vying with each other for the last word; the Communist Party speaker was willy-nilly the last remaining advocate of the war against Germany. The Government platform and the Labour Party representative had passed the torch of resistance to the Nazi menace to him; with all the vast experience of outdoor speaking at his command he strove to hold the great crowd.
The shadows lengthened, the sun dropped low in the sky, and still the rival speakers chanted their litanies, their testaments of faith.
The outskirts of the crowds moved and receded like a tide; tea at the Corner House, or ice-cream and ginger beer from the vendors thinned out the audience a little, but by nightfall, refreshed and rested, they stood there in their ranks like a vast army. By nightfall, the Communist speaker’s voice was a whisper, a shadow; it cracked and fell silent.
The whole of his audience surged across to the opposite platform, the platform of the SPGB. An audience of ten thousand stretching as far as the eye could see, silent and solemn, the soldiers and sailors and airmen of tomorrow, the wives and mothers of departed men, listening with the deepest attention, the most complete respect, and on the day of the declaration of war, to a pacifist speaker.
Like a sprinter who has been saving just that extra burst of speed for the last lap, Turner thundered out his denunciations in a climaxing bout of oratory during which he called them every kind of imbecile and willing dupe. Then the meeting was closed. A burst of applause greeted his closing remarks, and in silence the great army streamed out of the Park homewards.
The ways of democracy are many and strange, but I can recall nothing to equal this in its pure irony. ’
Though there was hostility, the scenes of 1914 were never repeated. Such demonstrations as there were against anti-war speakers took place in the first week or two of the war; there after, the Party was able to state its case with confidence. There were several reasons for this. One was that war-fever is notably a disease of non-combatants — in this war, home and ‘the front’ were not separate worlds as they had been in 1914. Another was that opposition to the war no longer appeared as an astonishing impertinence. The existence of pacifist organizations was known and accepted, and the starting of conscription before the
war had made it known that there would be conscientious objectors.
More than anything, however, there was little or no passionate enthusiasm for the war with ordinary people. Romantic conceptions of soldiering had been killed in the previous world war; the phrase ‘horrors of war’ was taken at its full value. While accepting that the war must be fought most people had the feeling of having been led into it by governments which were either cynical or incompetent. Only three or four weeks before the outbreak in 1939 I was in an East London cinema packed to watch ‘All Quiet on the Western Front’. When the German soldier proposed that princes and politicians be put in a field to have their fights out by themselves, there was a spontaneous burst of cheer¬ing the words expressed what everyone was feeling. The passion and purposefulness did not come until after the Churchill government had taken over in 1940. It is worth noting that the first war novels to become widely popular, This Above All and The Last Enemy, both dealt with an individual’s doubts over whether the war was for him.
The only department of the Party’s propaganda which was hamstrung was its literature. The Defence Regulations introduced by Sir John Anderson in May 1940 were directed specifically against printed matter which persuaded its readers against support for the war:
‘If the Secretary of State is satisfied that there is, in any newspaper, a systematic publication of matter which is, in his opinion, calculated to foment opposition to the prosecution to a successful issue of any war in which His Majesty is engaged, he may by order apply the provisions of this regulation to that newspaper. ’
The penalties under the Regulations were seven years’ penal servitude, a fine of £500, or both. The Executive Committee, after weighing how much it meant, decided not to risk the suppression of the Socialist Standard and the penalties. The Party’s 1936 pamphlet, War and the Working Class, was withheld, no further copies being printed to replace the sold-out edition, and from June 1940 the Standard no longer printed anti-war material. Events proved the decision to have been sensible. In 1941 the Daily Worker was suppressed, and later the Daily
Mirror was warned severely about the nature of its commentaries.
The void in the Standard was filled chiefly by theoretical and historical articles. Goldstein, a brilliant young East Londoner, wrote a series reviewing the history of economic theories called ‘The Importance of Marxism’. The most prolific writer in this vein, however, was Gilbert McClatchie, who had already been contributing to the Standard for nearly thirty years. Ancient history was his passion, and he took the opportunity to write lengthily about it at this time. The subjects were all mildly related to contemporary trends and intended to describe early
stages in the evolution of modern forms. ‘The Civil Service in Ancient Rome’ was one series, and ‘War — Methods of Offence and Defence’ another. The members were not completely appreciative. ‘Bombs, mines and incendiaries falling,’ said a member during the Blitz, ‘and we’re publishing articles about catapults and battering rams.’
On the eve of the declaration of war, the Party had twenty-two branches. One was the Central Branch, the postal section of scattered members, three were in Scotland, and fifteen were in the London area, Almost all the London branches ceased to meet when the war began, and for a time it was hard to know what was going on. Many of the public buildings and centres where branches took rooms for their weekly meetings were closed, and travelling even short distances at night in blacked-out towns was difficult and dangerous.
Two dozen members turned up for the Delegate Meeting in October, 1939. To consider them as branches’ representatives would have been ludicrous, but they meant the best gathering of members’ opinion that could be obtained at the time. They made four resolutions directing the Executive about the conduct of Party affairs;
‘That the EC be granted no further power than they have;
That the funds . . . shall not be utilized for the purpose of assisting members affected by the Military Service Acts or victimization arising from the war;
That applications for membership be vouched for by two Party members; and
That the question of membership of the Party and association with ARP be left for the EC to review, and cases be dealt with on their merits. ’
The third and fourth of these touched on difficult questions. Applications for membership had to be watched carefully for two reasons. It was known that police agents joined subversive organizations and remained in them often for several years as a means for the author¬ities to keep closely in touch with developments and plans, and all the more likely that the observation would be redoubled in wartime. An even more important consideration, however, was that the Party should neither be exploited by men seeking support for claims for exemption from military service nor flooded by people concerned only with the anti-war aspect of its case.
All through the war, the SPGB was more than cautious over the acceptance of new members, particularly if they were of military age. There were many conscientious objectors who knew that their chances of gaining exemption would be enhanced by membership of one or other of the organizations whose resistance to war was long-established. Besides
this, there was the feeling among pacifists that unity was strength and that they should join a party while the war was on. While the SPGB was prepared to encourage people to oppose themselves to the war, it was unwilling to take in anyone whose purpose was not the Party’s. The sponsorship by two members was not a formality; if there was any doubt, the applicant would be told to get the business of his conscientious objection over and then come back to join.
ARP involved a different kind of difficulty. There was little place in this war for condemnatory measures against members who joined the services. Conscription had begun before the outbreak of war and one age-group after another at short intervals had to register to be called-up. In 1932 the Party Conference had upheld an Executive Committee ruling that, since many workers were compelled by economic pressures to enlist in the armed forces, such employment should not prevent their becoming members of the SPGB. Despite persistent opposition by a minority, this decision was reaffirmed six or seven times by the Conferences and Delegate Meetings. When the war began it was taken for granted that members called-up under the National Service Act were not to be held to have committed an offence against the Party and, similarly, that men already serving in the forces might become members.
ARP — what later became known as ‘civil defence’ work — was considered as helping the war machine, and to that extent was not favoured. At the same time, it was obvious that war-resisters were not lining to be able to pick and choose their employment. The few members who entered ARP early in the war were told there was no objection, and the matter was resolved when entry to ARP became one of the regular conditions allotted by tribunals for exemption from military service.
There was one other difficulty in the first winter of the war that could hardly be met by any administrative decision. Where no other local meetings could be held, often a member would keep a little group together with weekly gatherings in his house. If the ordinary public was not worried by pacifists, it took thoughts of espionage more seriously. The man down the road who kept himself to himself, and now let in a few others in the dark once a week . . . Chinks in the window black- outs; were turned by imaginative gossip into signals flashed at night to reconnaissance aircraft, and the casual remarks thrown out to neighbours and shopkeepers were recalled in all their subversive significance. More than one house was visited by policemen after reports that groups of spies were assembling, and the men discussing the law of capitalist accumulation had to explain themselves.
Nevertheless, the Party slowly re-formed itself. By the autumn of
1940 nine of the London branches were operating again. Outdoor meetings resumed; they were impossible at night-time now, of course, but on Saturdays and Sundays and at lunch-times in the business and factory areas the speakers did everything they could. Only a handful were available at first — Turner, Cash, Rubin, Lestor, Goldstein and one or two others did the work of twenty. Soon others joined them, and by the summer of 1940 the platforms were in full cry once more. Even old Augustus Snellgrove, retired from headmastership now, took to the platform again. He was snapped magnificently in Hyde Park by a Press photographer; his severe, intent face, caught in a burst of oratory, appeared in Lilliput opposite the picture of a shy nude girl, with the caption ‘Susannah — and the Elder’.
Some speakers were lost, for the time or permanently. Groves was not heard of for several months, and Baritz had died not long before the war. The arrangement with Lew Davies, a travelling speaker who had become the Party’s paid representative in north-east England, was dropped. Kohn, who had spoken regularly on Sundays at Hyde Park in the ’thirties, became ill with TB and died in a sanatorium in Wales. Before his death, there was a curious incident about Kohn. He had kept contact with many people in America, and in 1941 letters from him were published in a left-wing paper there. The letters criticized the illogicality of the SPGB’s attitude towards the war; they had not been sent for publication, but were simply part of private correspondence between Kohn and the paper’s editor. Embarrassed, the SPGB Executive finally dismissed the matter as a breach of confidence by the editor, but the sense of betrayal remained. Yet another of the Party’s intellectual giants had shown himself, in the end, unsound.
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