As it was with the nation, the Party’s doubts and schisms gave place to increasing confidence and resolve as the war went on. The expansion of meetings gave a sense of crusade, and the apparent success of propaganda work made the conviction of getting somewhere almost irresistable. The truth was that the war was a boom-time for all anti-war factions. The number of pacifists and dissidents, while small when written as a percentage of the total population, was nevertheless large enough for the minorities which represented them to be thriving ones.
People whose pacifism was ordinarily passive became active, newly conscious of affinities with one another; they attended one another’s meetings, fraternized with one another’s organizations, and bought one another’s papers. Peace News, the ILP’s New Leader, and the Socialist Standard enjoyed high circulations all through the war (though the most exciting of the anti-war papers, because it took least notice of the Defence Regulations, was the anarchists’ War Commentary).
To speak of the growth of purposefulness does not mean the Party membership did not view the war earnestly at first. The ones who took it most seriously were the dedicated, lifelong local members, on whom it imposed special obligations in their behaviour towards the world at large. In Glasgow, some of the older men refused to comply with any of the directions of authority, even those which were directed towards their own safety. For the first few weeks of the war they appeared regularly in court to be fined for not blacking-out their windows, and dropped it only because the eventual alternative would have been to spend the rest of the war in jail. And when John Higgins went, to the branch meeting carrying his gas-mask, the members promptly moved his expulsion from the Party.
It may be hard to convey how seriously most of the SPGB looked at everything, in war and peace alike. What they took most seriously, of course, was not the world but themselves. Everybody watched his own and other members’ words, because a lapse might indicate unsound thinking. In my own early days a member who, from force of the habit of calling goods ‘commodities’ under capitalism, spoke of commodities under socialism, apologized profusely. I had thought nothing of it, but
he talked of the dangers of such a slip and how one must always be on guard, and quoted Marx: ‘the wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails presents itself as an immense accumulation of commodities’, to prove that he really knew. Nor was he imagining things. These lapses, or even mild jocosities in political talk, were often remembered and quoted years later, specially if their authors found disfavour with the Party. ‘I remember a word that man used fifteen years ago,’ someone would say, ‘and it proved to me that he did not understand.’
An even higher degree of earnestness was applied to written words; a continual part of the task of the editors of the Socialist Standard was to eliminate unsound terminology. When I first began writing for the Standard, the editors warned me against using irony because the members took words literally. I had mentioned the foreign villains and simpleton black men omnipresent in boys’ comics, and remarked that apparently the English-speaking nations bred the only reliable types. ‘If we published this,’ Hardy said, ‘we should get numer¬ous letters accusing us of nationalism and racial prejudice.’ I found plentiful evidence afterwards that this was so. Hardy’s own favourite story was of Baritz telephoning and begging him as from a sick-bed to come at once: ‘Hardy, I’m dying ! ’ Alarmed, Hardy rushed to Baritz at once — and found Moses in the best of health. ‘What I want,’ he said, ‘is to speak to you about a few words in your article this month . . .’
The Glasgow members, however, were the most exigent of all. Scots dourness, no doubt; but principally it was the political climate of Glasgow in general. London speakers going there were invariably struck by an almost Victorian atmosphere — indeed, the Londoners were thought too smart and superficial. Nowhere else could a speaker end his peroration by announcing as the great challenge of the age the increasing ratio of constant to variable capital, and sit down to a round of applause. Every left-wing organization and school of thought from the last hundred years seemed to survive in Glasgow, and the questions to speakers were often breath-taking: ‘Mister speaker, you’ll be acquainted with the fact that on page thirty-six of The Eighteenth Brumaire Marx says . . .’
Few southern members could match this austerity, but they took the war seriously enough. They held themselves to be the only genuine war-resisters: the others, the pacifists and anarchists and humanitarians, were not reckoned because they did not understand the cause of war and its solution. At the beginning one or two — Waite, in parti¬cular — took an interest in the work of the Central Board for Conscientious Objectors, a voluntary organization which existed to watch
legislation and trends and see as far as possible that pacifists were not victimized. There is not much doubt that but for the CBCO the SPGB members would have found the path of war-resistance much rougher.
All the same, it was an organization in which confusionists and reformers served, and at its first wartime Conference the Party rejected any idea of sympathy with it:
‘The Conference holds that affiliation to the CBCO, and SPGB representation on a joint board along with representatives of political parties to whom we are opposed and other non-socialist organizations, is directly in conflict with the hostility clause of the Declaration of Principles; and therefore opposes such action. ’
There were not many members of military age who did not make their stand as conscientious objectors. A small number found it imposs¬ible for family reasons to do so, but these men usually resigned — although the Party did not require it — before they were called-up. The pressures were by no means imaginary. At the least, a man might find his wife continually hostile to what he was doing, and at worst he could find his job gone and the Labour Exchange refusing to pay him benefit because he declined work which was directly concerned with the war. In ordinary times several members of the Party used false names to cover their activities, and there was justification for this. One man who held a responsible job with a great public corporation had to choose between Party and job when the titled chairman of the company announced that he would have no ‘bloody Bolshy’ in charge of one of his departments.
The treatment of conscientious objectors by the government in wartime was surprisingly reasonable. After registering, a man was sent a form on which to state the grounds of his objection, and a few weeks later would have to attend one of the tribunals to be questioned on it.
In rare cases complete exemption was given from military service, but generally the outcome was either a conditional exemption or a rejection of the plea. The next step was to appeal, and the appellate tribunal would virtually consider the case over again. What was usually hoped for in an appeal was the varying of a complete rejection by the local tribunal to conditional exemption — the conditions being employment for the rest of the war in a hospital, ARP or the fire service, or on the land.
If both attempts failed, the applicant would be sent notice to report for his medical examination for the army. When he failed to go, another notice was sent; and after the third, he was served with a sum¬mons from the local magistrates’ court. From the court he was taken to a military centre and asked if he were willing to be medically exam¬ined, and if he refused he was taken back to court and his case was dealt with. The offence was not conscientious objection as such, but
the refusal to submit to the medical examination, and the usual out¬come was six months’ imprisonment.
Most conscientious objectors belonged to organizations whose tenets became well-known to the tribunals. Besides the SPGB there were the Quakers, the Christadelphians, the Brethren, Jehovah’s Witnesses,
ILP members, anarchists, and a number of Methodists. The unattached objectors were usually either ‘Bible students’, individuals who reasoned similarly to the fundamentalist religious groups, or humanitarians whose pacifism had come through reading the popular anti-war thinkers of the time. At the hearings an applicant could have friends to address the tribunal in his support, and could even if he wished have his case presented by another person.
Thus not only the organizations but their members became familiar. The permitting of supporting speakers, indeed the whole system of organized advice and assistance to conscientious objectors, was often criticized as a means of encouraging men to dodge the column. It is understandable that people should have felt this, but there could have been very few who saw the inconveniences and the degree of hero-ism involved in conscientious objection as offering any great advantage over military service; most dodgers sought to fail in their medical examination or to obtain employment in one of the reserved occupations.
And on the other hand there were many objectors whose sincerity could not do justice to itself in words, particularly against the sophisticated arguments advanced by the tribunals; it would have been grossly unfair if they had been denied help.
Most of the Party members sought, and obtained, Turner to speak for them at the tribunals. As persuasive in this kind of advocacy as he was when addressing hundreds from the platform, Turner won conditional exemptions for innumerable members. The technique usually — in London, at least — was for a member to establish his adhesion to the SPGB’s case, which was then argued by Turner; and the tribunal in turn would try continually to find some flaw in the applicant’s fidelity to Turner’s argument. The members were advised to conduct themselves courteously and most of them did so, despite the alluring fact that the tribunals were not courts of law and could not indict for contempt. However, there were always those who were incapable of even a show of humility, and when speakers known for fiery eloquence appeared they rarely disappointed the members who crowded the public seats to listen to the fun.
The members usually stated their objection as a humanitarian one. The tribunals did not recognize political objections to taking part in war. The only valid cases were those which rejected fighting, regardless
of contingency, for religious, ethical or humanitarian reasons. A political objection was by definition a matter of expediency, and the local tribunals did not allow exemption to men who would be willing to fight in other circumstances.23 The most strongly fundamental of the religious anti-war sects, Jehovah’s Witnesses, were always refused exemption because they admitted willingness to fight in a holy war. Communists, when they were opposing the war, were never able to present a case in the tribunals. Usually they accepted military service without argument, though in 1942 a leading member of the Young Communist League created something of a fashion when he was discharged from the army after announcing that he would use his service to spread Communist propaganda.
This rule of the tribunals provided a difficulty for the SPGB members. Despite the rejection of the case put forward by Jacomb and Reynolds, the sixth clause of the Declaration of Principles still stood as a clear statement that the Party aimed at using the armed forces as an agent of emancipation’. The tribunals saw this, of course; they asked each member who came before them about it, and about the word hostile’. But what was under enquiry was the individual’s conscience, not the Party’s. Almost unfailingly, the members replied that whatever the Principles appeared to say they would not fight, even for socialism.
The only member who answered otherwise was a man named Goldberg – he was struck off the register of conscientious objectors and was killed fighting in the Italian campaign.
The Party had already been half-convinced by the eve-of-war controversy that it had always been pacifist, and that its sixth Principle merely lent itself to false interpretation. Many of the members were telling the truth, insofar as they regarded this as being part of their feel¬ing towards society, when they said they would not take up arms to win socialism. The others, however, were put in a difficulty by the tribunals’ demand for complete pacifism. They would have rejected it as a socialist standpoint; now, their chances depended on it. Reynolds, in one of his last contributions to the Standard, hinted artfully that the difficulty was of the members’ own making. Ostensibly he was quoting a tribunal chairman who had said he would recognize political objections equally with others, and Reynolds hoped that view would spread. His implica¬tion was that a stand on expediency — ‘an attitude’ — could still be made, and was altogether more desirable than the ‘policy’ principle.
A certain number went to prison and some went on the run, but the Party’s success-rate at the tribunals was high. There were many applicants for membership, and it insistently made itself difficult to join. Despite the efforts it grew, however, and its recruitment had more
to do with wartime than anything else. If a generalization is sought, the joiners were probably in the main people who normally would ‘sym¬pathize’ and no more, but in the excitement of the time felt that they must do something. By the end of the war there were about eight hundred members, twice as many as the previous thirty-five years had gained. And when the membership at last began to fall after 1950; it was quickly observed that those who were dropping out were almost entirely from the wartime influx.
The common employment of a large number of the members in the war was work on the land. By far the majority of conscientious objectors who gained exemption had it on this condition, and it was generally understood that men who had served prison sentences for resisting call-up, though technically they were still liable, would not be troubled again if they took up one of the conditional occupations. Thus, every county round London had its gangs of conscientious objectors, organized under the War Agricultural Committee and directed from one farm to another for periods to do unskilled jobs — usually, hedging and ditching.
The gangs comprised every kind of war-resister. As well as the SPGB members there were anarchists, hot-gospel men, devotees of pacifist philosophers, and men evading the military machine for no reasons but their own. Intellectually, land work was a joy. As little work as possible was done; groups sat all day in barns and ditches discussing life and ideas. Towards the end of the war an essay competition on ‘Why I do not want my conditions to end’, set by Peace News, was won by a man who described the liberal education he had had among ‘bishops without gaiters, and politicians without corrupting power’. Squatting under hedges, the SPGB men expounded Marx while the anarchists countered with Bakunin and Proudhon, and both fought endless wordy battles with the religionists and philosophers.
The pleasant academic quality of this life was tempered by the fact that land work was appallingly badly paid. The average man’s wage was not much more than three pounds a week, and men with family commitments had great hardship from being conscientious objectors. The hours were too long, and the work too often at some distance from home, to allow much scope for making sideline incomes and virtually the only possibility of higher pay was to become a ganger. Though it meant an extra fifteen shillings a week, very few of the political object¬ors were willing; in almost everyone’s eyes it meant a departure from group loyalty. Those who did become gangers usually hoped to be recognized as benevolent rulers, but the co-operation on which the hope relied was never given. ‘I wanted to make it easy for the chaps,’ one
man said after the war, ‘but when I became ganger they brought alarm clocks and just slept all day.’
The conscientious objectors did a great deal, in fact, towards improving the abysmal conditions of agricultural work. They packed into the branches of the farm-workers’ union. Men who had learned to talk and marshal facts in the SPGB and other organizations took office and led uncompromising campaigns for improvement, and they were un-affected by the near-feudal fear of landowners and farmers that inhibited underpaid men in rural districts. The farmers had never been so disrespectfully treated, and all attempts to single out ringleaders were met by relentless solidarity in the gangs. Any group of men sitting talking would announce, when challenged, that they were a duly-constituted union meeting; and when the farmer asked the subject of the meeting, it was always to complain — of him.
The paramount effect of the SPGB’s new profession of pacifism was not apparent at this time. Beatrice Webb noted in her diary the effect that opposition to the 1914-18 war had on the ILP: ‘It has dropped about 10,000 of its working-class membership and added as many hundreds of middle-class adherents.’ The fact is that pacifism was, and remains, almost entirely a middle-class attitude. Probably the only working-class pacifists were the poor emotion-starved creatures in the fanatical religious sects, stuffed with apocalyptic texts and calls for repentance. Ethical or political pacifism was a sophisticated, more or less detached attitude. A man who said (and this remained the classic, square-of-the-hypotenuse problem posed by the tribunals) that he would reason with a German who wanted to murder his wife had already reasoned himself far beyond normal reactions and judgements.
The Party’s anti-war case still rested on working-class interests: this was the theme of every propagandist speech. However, it had allowed inroads to be made by pacifism of the personal, ‘enlightened’ kind which accepts no justification for war. That is not to denigrate pacifism, but to draw attention to something which would have far-reaching conseq¬uences. The Speakers’ Test at the time included a special question — what would be the harm in letting people join who agreed with the Party’s opposition to war ? The answer was the risk of a weight of mem¬bers who had no time for working-class politics in other respects. That was more than true, but the rot was already there; in a few years’ time the SPGB would be asked to abandon class militancy and adopt humanitarianism instead.
The Party’s activity reached fresh heights as the war moved on and talk began of the brave new world to come. Debates, which had disappear¬ed since the beginning of the war, came back in spate as the great projects
for post-war reconstruction arose. The case for Federal Union, first popularized by a sixpenny Penguin Special book in 1939, now gained impetus from the anticipation of some world authority to try once more to keep the peace among nations. In 1940 Hardy had debated with Mrs Barbara (later Baroness) Wootton on whether socialists should support the Federal Union movement. The debate was published as a pamphlet, and reads as a quite remarkable display by two highly-skilled dialecticians.
If Federal Union was only a hope, the social security scheme first announced as ‘the Beveridge Plan’ in 1942 was a fact. This was to bear more strongly on the post-war future of the socialist movement than anything else. Except for the war periods, mass unemployment hail been chronic all through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the perpetual million of unemployed were spoken of as ‘the industrial reserve army’, and the indictment of capitalism started from the in¬security from which the working class was never free. The ideal of social ] reformers had been, if the abolition of unemployment was beyond human ingenuity, to provide a decent living standard for everyone in the face of social or personal misfortune. In the nineteen-thirties a number of Labour Party propagandists had been advocating that everybody should be given the necessities of life, free.
The development of such schemes had been presaged by E. R. A. Seligman in 1921. Describing the insecurity of wage-earners as ‘that very great evil’, he went on to say:
‘[It is] entirely susceptible of being eradicated by the same principle that we have applied to accidents, that we have applied to many other evils, namely, the Insurance principle . . . We have already today in the unemployment insurance law of England the faint beginn¬ings of a movement which I am convinced will spread within the next three or four decades like wildfire throughout the world. ’
What is important is that Seligman was not speaking with any pretension to socialism. On the contrary, he was proposing, in a public debate in New York, ‘that capitalism has more to offer to the workers of the United States than has socialism’.24
The SPGB attacked the social security plan, of course. Besides the debates and meetings in which it was taken up as a fresh theme for attack on capitalism, the Party produced two pamphlets, Beveridge Re- , organizes Poverty and Family Allowances: A Socialist Analysis. These condemned the scheme on two counts. First and foremost, it was a sop offered to the working class, a new attempt to allay discontent. Besides this, however, it was claimed to be an attempt to depress wages. The Family Allowances pamphlet pointed out that, while adult wages had to assume that every worker was supporting a family of average size, the Iasi
census analysis had shown that over sixty per cent of the male population over 20 were bachelors or were married without dependent children:
‘Here then from the employer’s point of view is an anomaly that should be adjusted. He is paying what is to him a fair market price for a commodity and in at least 60 cases out of a hundred being cheated on the scales ! ’
The family allowance plan, in this light, was a means to push down basic wages to the level of unmarried men’s subsistence and see that the 'family’ wage was paid only where families in fact existed.
This had indeed been urged by Beveridge, and earlier by Eleanor Rathbone, as part of the scheme for family allowances. The SPGB cited them, and statements like Professor Seligman’s, to prove that what Labour Party reformers were seeking, so far from having any socialist content, was good capitalistic practice. On the same basis it disvalued the post-war Welfare State as a whole. No-one shared its view: even the most radical of the left have regarded the Welfare State as a special bounty somehow got from capitalism — I heard an anarchist speaker in 1966 except it from his damnations of the system and the state. Today, economists and trade unionists alike would acknowledge the realism of the SPGB’s view.
Besides the plans for the post-war world, there were new things all the time demanding the Socialist Party’s attention. There was the splash made, while its sponsor’s funds lasted, by Common Wealth, a new party which won an election and broke the wartime truce between the parties in Parliament, and presented an idealized programme of state control. The Communist Party demanded attention, too. With Russia on Britain’s side from 1942 onwards, the lesson had to be taught over again that the Soviet Union was not a socialist utopia at all. Baroness Wootton, in her debate with the Party, did not understand the applause with which the members greeted Hardy’s statement that there were no socialist countries in the world:
'The supreme achievement of the Socialist Party of Great Britain . . . which is greeted with applause, is that there are not, and never have been, any Socialist countries in the world ! I think that there is something wrong there. It seems to me a very odd statement to applaud, unless it was applauded by those who do not want to see any Socialist countries in the world, which I do not think is possible in this audience. ’
In the matter of Russia the SPGB deserves every credit for its consistency. The rapid face-changes of the press and the politicians in Britain may have been expedient, but they were appalling — and appear all the more so after over thirty years — in their cynicism. Between 1939,
when the Russo-German pact was signed, and 1941 Russia was shown as a land of illiterate, bestial peasants ruled by evil and terror. After the German invasion which made Russia Britain’s ally, the image changed literally overnight to one of wise, benevolent government and an admir¬able culture — to be altered again as soon as the war with Germany had ended.
The Communists would almost never debate with the SPGB, and they showed exceptional vindictiveness in the rare formal contacts made, In 1943, when the Party had booked a hall in Soho Square for its annual Conference, the Daily Worker announced that a fascist organization was conferring at that place on those dates, and hinted strongly that loyal Britons could do worse than smash up the proceedings. When approa¬ches were made for a debate in West Ham, the local Communist secret¬ary replied in quite astonishing terms:
‘The Communist Party has NO dealings with murderers, liars, renegades or assassins.
The SPGB, which associates itself with followers of Trotsky, the friend of Hess, has always followed a policy which would mean disaster for the British working class. They have consistently poured vile slanders on Joseph Stalin and the Communist Party, told filthy lies about the Red Army, the Soviet people and its leaders, gloated over the assassinat¬ion of Kirov and other Soviet leaders, applauded the wrecking activities of Trotskyite saboteurs in the Soviet Union, and are in short agents of Fascism in Great Britain.
The CPGB refuses with disgust to deal with such renegades. We treat them as vipers, to be destroyed. ’
The figures which dominated the Party as it grew through the war were those of its speakers. Groves, supercilious and merciless, was the supreme debater. He flayed his opponents, ridiculing and insulting them in his high-pitched clanging voice. He prepared assiduously for each debate, tracing the opponent’s political career to its beginning and confronting him with every immature speech, every self-contradiction. When he opposed F. A. Ridley in 1943 he read out Ridley’s own con-demnations of the ILP, the party he was now representing, from years and years before. ‘He says “fifty per cent Trotskyists, fifty per cent milk- and-water reformists”. I agree with his statement,’ Groves screeched. ‘Which half does he belong to ? ’ It was typical of the SPGB’s debating technique. The members loved this kind of thing and flocked to hear it. Groves, interestingly, had no illusion about what he was doing. ‘There is practically no propaganda value in a debate,’ he said once. ‘It’s a night out for the members, watching an opponent being kicked.’
The halls were, nevertheless, packed for these meetings. Even
more people thronged Hyde Park on Sundays to listen to the SPGB
speakers there. It was accepted that only the Party’s best took the platform in Hyde Park. There was Sammy Cash, untidy, lean and beaky, holding the sympathy as well as the attention of his audiences. There was Harry Young, who might have made a great reputation as a music-hall artiste: stout and red-faced, he had a remarkable gift of humour and could entertain audiences endlessly (I have been his co-speaker at an indoor meeting and sat, like the audience, helpless with laughter).
Above everyone else, however, there was Turner. Every speaker save place to him, or had to. His stature as an orator was now at its full height. All through the summer he spoke to two thousand people every Sunday in Hyde Park. He had brought every rhetorical technique to his fingertips. The old complaint that he was unoriginal (in the ’thirties it was murmured that what Kohn said Sunday mornings was said again by Turner on Sunday evenings) had gone: now he was all originality, and other speakers strove to imitate him. The crowds went to hear not the Party but Turner; to thousands, the SPGB was ‘Tony Turner’s Party’.
It would be hard to analyze and find what made him the orator he was. The superb, rasping voice, the extraordinary vitality and confidence, the acquired skills were only the instruments. Other speakers had equipment which, piece by piece, was hardly inferior. Like Groves, he had an incredible memory for facts, instances and quotations; like Wilmott and Young, he produced verbal responses with astonishing agility; like Anderson and the great religious preachers, he spoke with terrifying conviction and passion. Possibly his was simply an ideal combination of all the attributes, but there remains something undefinable which their aggregate would not include. For Turner communicated with his hearers, thrust his personality against theirs. Though not many were led to the Party by it, few of them did not feel a personal impact even from the back of the crowd.
There were resentments, of course, in the Party. Some speakers were jealous, and other members feared a growth of ‘the cult of the individual’. When someone wrote a piece for the Western Socialist describing Turner’s eclat, the Executive Committee reminded their American comrades sharply that it was not in the Party’s tradition to praise individuals. Though the majority of the members worshipped Turner, most of them took care not to talk as if they did; someone was bound to speak of ‘Turneritis’, and make the word sound as if it really was a disabling disease. Nor did Turner himself repudiate the worship or disengage from the hostility. When Groves had debated against an advocate of Family Allowances, Turner openly approached the opposing speaker, Mrs Eva Hubback, and advised her how she might have disconcerted Groves.
There was to be a time of reckoning for all this, when the accumulated resentments were to make fuel for a great fire for the heretic Turner. In the meanwhile, the Party drew abundant vitality from him. The excitement of his indoor meetings was tremendous. When he drew up his shoulders and began the denouncement of an unfortunate antagonist, the members became wild with delight — old men stood up shouting: ‘Give it to him, Tony ! Give him what for ! ’ His opponents began with an almost insuperable handicap. One remembers a sweltering summer night and a crammed town hall in Edmonton. Evan Durbin, in braces and soaked shirt, his face streaming sweat, floundering through his defence of Labour; Turner sitting grinning insolently at him, eating cherries and spitting stones over the platform, and finally leaping to his feet to pour out damnation of Durbin, Labour and the capitalist system.
The war brought its tragedies as well as its satisfactions to the Party. The Treasurer for many years, sturdy Jack Butler, was killed by a bomb at his home — sitting in the air raid shelter, with a pencil behind his ear and a Party accounts book in front of him. A woman member, Eva Torf Judd, was killed in an air raid too. She was writing an autobiographical novel about an East End childhood. Several years later I saw the incomplete manuscript in the house of old Mrs Hollingshead, to whom it had somehow passed: it would have been a fine, sensitive novel.
And the offices in Great Dover Street were demolished by a bomb. It happened in April 1941, near the end of the London blitz. No one was in the house, but most of the Party’s belongings were lost. The most important records, the minute-books going back to 1904, had gone to a member’s house outside London, but practically everything else was destroyed. The Party found a temporary home in two rooms at 33 Gloucester Place. Then in April 1943 a lease was taken of the Electrical Trades Union’s old offices in Rugby Chambers, Holborn. Thorn was a big room for the Executive meetings and the classes, another big room for the library and the arguments, two little offices, a basement, and a Victorian lavatory in the corridor that was shared with the inhabitants of the flats above.
These were to be the SPGB’s headquarters for eight years. When it left them, the golden age would have ended and an era of doubts begun
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