Attlee, Bevin and the New Jerusalem

The next UK government will inherit a mess, but not as bad as Clement Attlee did in 1945. Yet the Attlee government not only coped. It made Britain better. Meanwhile his Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, played a key role in forging the Western security framework that has endured to this day. Who were these men, and what were they really like?

Attlee takes power in 1945 (Leslie Priest/AP)

When Labour came to power in July 1945, Britain was broke. Much of its gold reserves had been spent on the war, and the US had insisted, as part of its postwar loan agreement, that sterling be convertible within a few years. This was a huge financial bomb waiting to go off. Meanwhile the occupation of the British Zone of Germany was also costly; it was in a terrible state, not least because of Britain’s own bombing. 

At home, labour shortages in the mines restricted coal supplies and would immiserate everyone in the awful winter of 1947. There was a huge housing crisis; about 2 million houses had been destroyed or badly damaged across Britain, and an estimated 750,000 new houses were needed – quickly; according to the Royal British Legion, a staggering 4.2 million service personnel were to be demobilised by December 1946. Meanwhile there were about 400,000 German prisoners in Britain, and large numbers of Polish and other servicemen whose countries were about to come under Stalinist occupation. It was becoming clear that they would not be able to go home.

Abroad, India was ready to explode but the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, could not get Indian politicians to agree a path to independence. Britain was also still fighting in Greece, where left-wing forces could have taken the country into the Eastern bloc along with its neighbours. There was armed conflict in Palestine, which was still under the British mandate. In 1948 the emergency in Malaya would start.

Not all these problems would be solved. Some, especially Palestine, would leave a toxic legacy. The houses wouldn’t all be built. But in six years, Attlee would build a social democracy in which people’s basic needs mostly would be met. Abroad, despite some failures, his remarkable Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, would play a leading role in the postwar global order and in forging the Atlantic alliance. At home, he would guard Attlee’s back against rivals in Cabinet and keep it stable.

Who were these men?

***

Francis Beckett’s biography Clem Attlee was originally published in 1997 but reissued in an updated edition in 2015. It’s not alone; there are a number of well-regarded Attlee biographies, notably John Bew’s Citizen Clem and Michael Jago’s Clement Attlee: The Inevitable Prime Minister. But I think for most people Beckett’s will be all the Attlee they need.

Attlee has been seen as an accidental Prime Minister who was in the right place at the right time. In the schism and electoral rout of 1931 many of Labour’s ablest people either crossed over to the National Government or lost their seats or both. Attlee was one of the few survivors. Otherwise, it’s said, he would never have been deputy Labour leader and would not have become leader when Lansbury stepped down in 1935.  Biographer Michael Jago thought this was nonsense. Beckett agrees. Attlee, he argues, rose to the top on his considerable political skills and the strength of his beliefs. He was anything but an accident. Reading Beckett’s biography, I partly, but only partly, agree with this. Throughout his leadership, rivals such as Herbert Morrison and Hugh Dalton would deride him as a grey man and insist Labour needed a more charismatic leader (e.g. them). Without the events of 1931, he might have been a capable Minister but never Prime Minister; the post would have been filled by one of his “charismatic” rivals. It is our good fortune that it wasn’t, for the grey man did rather well.

Clement Attlee was born into a large middle-class family in Putney in 1883. His father was a Liberal barrister and Attlee himself went into the law after Oxford. But it bored him. One night in 1906 his younger brother took him to visit a club for disadvantaged boys in Stepney, then a very poor part of London where he would not normally have gone. The visit transformed his life and he ended up living in the East End as a social worker and campaigner, becoming involved in left-wing politics. In 1914 he joined the army and served with some distinction in the Gallipoli campaign and in the Middle East. In the former, he caught dysentery and was almost the last Allied soldier to be evacuated. In the Middle East he was badly wounded. Beckett says he felt strongly that the army and navy had mismanaged the Gallipoli campaign but that Churchill’s strategy had been sound. This would matter in 1940, when Attlee would bring Labour into Churchill’s wartime coalition.

Beckett obviously covers Attlee’s part in the wartime coalition and his subsequent premiership. He takes a broad-brush approach. I don’t think that’s a bad thing; the minutiae of long-ago governments do not always tell us much. Beckett does show that Attlee played a crucial role from the beginning, backing Churchill against Chamberlain and Halifax, who wanted to negotiate with Hitler. He also demonstrates that Attlee could restrain or influence Churchill, and did – but tactfully; he would have ‘a word with the PM’, rather than row with him in Cabinet. Beckett quotes several examples, not least Attlee’s defence of de Gaulle, who Churchill and Roosevelt loathed – not always without reason. But Attlee realised they had no right to remove him. At the same time Attlee quietly chaired the main committees concerned with postwar reconstruction, which helped him set the agenda for the government he would soon lead.

He was not to regret his part in the coalition. He later acquired the original of Low’s famous 1940 cartoon (“All behind you, Winston!”) and according to Beckett it was on the wall of his living room when he died in 1967.

***

Beckett takes the same broad brush to the postwar government. Here a little more detail might have been welcome, and there are some omissions, or matters covered briefly. The latter include the fuel problems that beset Britain in the very bad winter of 1947, and the constant plotting of Attlee’s rivals for the leadership – they are there but not in depth. Beckett may be right not to get into the weeds. Still, he could have said more about the pension and social security reforms, which were to have a huge positive impact, and their prime mover the Minister of National Insurance, Jim Griffiths. A Welshman who had left school at 13, he is largely forgotten now. But his work in that Attlee government had a positive and lasting impact on millions. He seems also to have been a likeable and capable figure.

Ellen Wilkinson
(Bassano Ltd./National Portrait Gallery)

What Beckett does bring out is Attlee’s magnanimity in government. Besides leadership rivals like Morrison and Dalton, he also brought in Aneurin Bevan, who had been a fierce critic throughout the war years, and Ellen Wilkinson, who was apparently Morrison’s mistress and had been involved in multiple plots against her new boss. (Beckett says she had a Damascene conversion about Attlee as soon as she was in government.) These decisions have sometimes been seen as wily plots to neutralise opposition. The reality, according to Beckett, was that Attlee felt all the best people were needed in government whether he liked them or not. 

And for the most part they did well. This was especially true of Bevan, although he could be difficult; and of Wilkinson, who implemented the important 1944 Education Act. Beckett covers her role fairly well. But he says little about her death in office in 1947, possibly by her own hand but more likely of an accidental overdose. This was a poignant episode; a charismatic woman with a gift for friendship, she was mourned on both sides of the House. Morrison did not attend her funeral.

There is one episode of Attlee’s premiership that was very grave, and about which Beckett is perhaps a little generous to him. This was India.

By 1945 it was clear that Britain could not keep control in India much longer. There was a Secretary of State for India and Burma; this was a Cabinet-level position in its own right, occupied by Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, a long-time Labour figure. However, he was by then 76 and besides, Attlee seems largely to have directed India policy himself – a legacy perhaps of his service on the Simon Commission in India in the 1920s. Early in 1947 he sacked the Viceroy, Lord Wavell, who had tried hard but failed to get Indian politicians to agree with each other on the shape of the transition to independence. Attlee replaced him with Lord Mountbatten, telling him to get the British out quickly and leave India as a single nation if possible but if not possible, to partition it. Mountbatten was given plenipotentiary powers to this effect. He chose Partition, and brought the date forward to just six months hence.  Attlee let him do it. Should he have done? It led to a huge, unplanned exchange of populations – something that might have been predicted. This left a million dead and is a difficult part of Attlee’s legacy.

Beckett is with the defence. By 1947, it is argued, Britain could not keep order and any delay would make things worse. This might be true. But perhaps Attlee should have given the same authority to Wavell when he came to power two years earlier. Wavell’s diaries were published in the 1970s and they do suggest that, given the same freedom of action as Mountbatten, he might have negotiated an agreed path to a united India.

But history is full of what-ifs; in the end they take you nowhere, and maybe Attlee was right. His support of partition may have sprung from his realisation, decades before others, that the Western model of democracy could not always be exported. In May 1943 he had circulated a remarkable paper to Cabinet in which he argued that in certain situations – Palestine, Ireland, South Africa – two groups might so distrust each other that one would oppose governance by the other under any circumstances, at least without an outside referee. Perhaps Attlee believed that in such a scenario the two parties must go their separate ways altogether. If so, Partition was the logical step. But the price was high, and it was not the British who paid it.

***

Attlee shaped Britain as no other single person has in modern times. But what was he like?

He lived quietly – and modestly; when he went to the Palace to kiss hands in 1945 it was in an eight-year-old Hillman 14 driven by his wife Violet, and the couple used the same car in the 1950 election campaign. For 1951 they had upgraded to a Humber Hawk, but Beckett says this was still prewar (other sources do say it was new). His wife Violet usually drove him on his election campaigns. He was moderate in his personal habits. The family home was a semi in Stanmore, north-west London, and he returned there whenever he could during the war years. He had married at nearly 40; the marriage seems to have been a devoted one, and lasted until Violet’s death in 1964. They had four children.

Outside the home, Attlee was a quiet, undemonstrative man. He was also almost weirdly calm and self-controlled. His years in government, as deputy and later Prime Minister, were the most crisis-ridden in modern British history, but he seems to have been completely unflappable (even when chauffeured by Violet, which is said to have been terrifying). He was also quite able to detach himself when the day’s work was done however crisis-ridden it had been, and read a book or write letters. He was concise to the point of abruptness; he never used two words where one would do and never used one word when he could grunt instead. He had little small talk. Ministers who did not perform were dismissed perhaps not rudely, but certainly without ceremony. One imagines that Ministers and civil servants might have respected rather than loved him.

There was however a more jocular face to Attlee’s government. This was his closest ally: his Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin. He, too, is now the subject of an accessible and absorbing biography – by a more recent Labour minister, Lord Adonis.

***

Ernest Bevin was born in Somerset in 1881. His mother was a widow; his father’s identity has never been known (though Adonis has evidence he was a local farmer). His home was very poor but not unhappy; however, his mother died when he was eight and at 11 he left school and worked as a labourer. By the age of 13 he had had enough of this, and went to Bristol, where he became a drayman and, in time, a Baptist lay preacher and union organiser.

Bevin: a 1945 portrait by
Thomas Cantrell Dugdale

In the latter role he did well and his influence grew. He started to travel, building links with trade unionists in Europe and elsewhere. During the First World War he visited the USA, where he had a cordial meeting with the powerful labour leader Samuel Gompers, who had helped found the American Federation of Labor.  Eventually Bevin founded Britain’s own first ‘super-union’, the Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU). By 1940 he had for some time been the country’s most important union figure. Distrustful of Labour intellectuals after 1931, he decided that Labour’s taciturn and business-like new Deputy Leader, Attlee, was the horse to back. The two men were a contrast; Attlee a silent ascetic to whom many found it hard to relate – and Bevin, big, bluff and sometimes a bully, forged in the furnace of labour negotiations and union politics. He was genial and ruthless.

In 1940 Attlee and Churchill found Bevin a seat and brought into the wartime coalition as Minister of Labour, believing this to be the best way of mobilising the workforce behind the war (wisely, they seem to have realised this was not a given). As wartime Minister of Labour, he played a key role in uniting the labour movement behind the war effort – something Churchill, no friend of the unions, could not have done without him. Finally, as Foreign Secretary from 1945, he was at least partly responsible for forging the US-European alliance against the USSR. Bevin was thus the father of the modern British union movement, a pillar of Attlee’s reforming government, and a key architect of the postwar global security settlement.

Given that these three legacies are now under threat, a new look at Bevin is timely. It arrived in 2021: Ernest Bevin: Labour's Churchill, by Andrew (Lord) Adonis, a strong New Labour figure and himself a Minister in the 200s. I have some reservations about this book (not least the title). But it is well worth reading. It isn’t the first Bevin biography; there are several, including Alan Bullock’s mighty three-volume account. For the casual reader, there’s Mark Stephens’s short book Ernest Bevin, written to mark Bevin’s centenary. However, Bullock’s would probably be too much for most readers. Stephens’s book is concise, but it was published by the T&G itself and is not especially critical (though it’s not a hagiography – and it is very well-written). Adonis’s book is short and lively enough to be readable. And it’s even-handed; Adonis clearly admires Bevin, but he is sometimes very critical, especially of Bevin’s period as Foreign Secretary.

The book is mostly not based on primary sources. Adonis draws heavily on the previous biographies (including Bullock’s) and other books germane to the period. I think that’s fine. He’s clearly trying to project a readable image of Bevin, not find out what he had for breakfast on a given day. Now and then he does rely rather heavily on one source. One chapter is partly an extract from the memoirs of Nicholas Henderson, who worked for Bevin at the Foreign Office and was later Ambassador to Washington. Adonis will certainly have sought permission for this, and it does add important background. But although he is scrupulous about quoting sources, they are sometimes hard to check as there is no reference list – an odd oversight.

Adonis credits Bevin with a great deal. The early parts of this book depict a determined man who was not expected, by background, to amount to much, but whose determination, occasional ruthlessness, showmanship and humour helped build a truly national trade union movement where none had existed. Then he became wartime Minister of Labour, and later the first postwar Foreign Secretary – both crucial roles at a time when things could have gone very wrong. In Bevin’s hands they mostly didn’t. Adonis also shows us someone who, although ruthless, could be very loyal. He always was to Attlee, and did much to buffer the rampant egotists in Cabinet who would have liked Attlee’s job – one which Bevin himself never sought. He must thus be credited at least in part with the stability and success of Attlee’s government, the more so as Attlee’s own personality sometimes did not help him.

Adonis also states that Bevin stiffened Western resistance to Stalin more or less alone, getting – he says – little help from a rather supine Truman administration. There is probably much truth in this. Truman’s Secretary of State was James F. Byrne, a Southern Democrat who had had a long and ambivalent career. He had been a segregationist in his native South Carolina but had also crossed swords with the Klu Klux Klan, and would do so again as the State’s Governor in the 1950s. He had also been a New Dealer and had opposed isolationism in the 1930s. But he was indeed ‘soft’ on Stalin; other sources also confirm this. In fact, Truman himself was worried about this, and sacked him in January 1947. Still, Adonis is very persuasive in arguing that Bevin helped forge a united Western front against Stalinism. He argues that Bevin’s background in union activism greatly influenced the way he saw Hitler in the 1930s and later saw Stalin, as his international union contacts meant he could see what fascist governments did to unionists in the 1930s. But was also keenly aware of communist tactics in the union movement, and loathed those as well.

I wonder if Bevin’s instant distrust of Stalin was also just native shrewdness. Bevin was no fool and knew a stinker when he met one. Also, Adonis doesn’t really discuss the poor relationship between the UK and the US immediately after the war and the US dislike and distrust of British imperialism. But they were important context for what happened in 1945-48. Even so, I think Adonis is on the money. Not all Labour MPs were happy with what they saw as Bevin’s warmongering, but his contribution to Western peace and security was immeasurable.

But Adonis is hard on Bevin in some respects, noting again that he did not like opposition. He is also very critical of some aspects of Bevin’s tenure at the Foreign Office. He takes a rather black-and-white view sometimes. Thus he is merciless in judging Bevin’s handling of Palestine. It is true that, on Bevin’s watch, Britain’s mandate over Palestine ended very badly. People in the region are still paying the price. But it is not always clear what Adonis thinks Bevin should have done. After all, the problem preceded Bevin and has not been solved since.

Adonis is also highly critical of Bevin’s imperialism. It’s true that Bevin regarded the colonies as an ongoing resource and neither he nor Attlee was interested in decolonisation. In Africa it would take a remarkable Conservative Colonial Secretary, Iain Macleod, to force the pace some years later. Again, I think Adonis has a point here. The Secretary of State for the Colonies, Arthur Creech-Jones, was a Cabinet minister in his own right and had a long-standing interest in colonial affairs. It may be that he would have liked to move faster and that Attlee and Bevin frustrated this.  (Bevin did not have responsibility for India.)

The Potsdam Conference, 1945; Attlee and Bevin had taken over
from Churchill and Eden during the conference itself.
Front row, Attlee, Truman and Stalin; at rear,
Truman's Chief of Staff, Admiral Leahy; Bevin; Secretary of
State Byrne; and Stalin's Foreign Minister, Vyacheslav Molotov
(US National Archives/NationalMuseumof the US Navy) 

Last but not least, Adonis deprecates Bevin’s lack of interest in the nascent European Union, in the shape of the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) formed in 1950. It is true that Bevin was negative towards British participation, partly because he wanted to protect Britain’s own coal and steel. 

But as he left the Foreign Office early in 1951 and died a few weeks later, he may be excused for not understanding just how consequential the ECSC would be. One could in fact argue that Britain’s absence from Europe was not culpable until its failure to attend the Messina Conference in 1955, a decision made by Anthony Eden’s Tory government, not by Bevin. And as Adonis himself records, Bevin had close contacts with European as well as American labour movements and travelled widely in Europe in the 1930s. But Adonis is right; Bevin failed to understand how Europe would develop and how important it was to be at its heart.

So did Attlee. He did not want Britain involved, then or later. Shortly before he died in 1967, he gave a brief speech in support of anti-Marketeer Douglas Jay. “The Common Market,” he said. “…Very recently this country spent a great deal of blood and treasure rescuing four of ’em from …the other two.” These attitudes were common in Britain then and have not disappeared. There is a contrast here with the graceful pragmatism and foresight shown by France and the Benelux countries, who understood the need to bury the hatchet forever. To be sure, Adonis – angry perhaps, like a lot of us, about Brexit – is judging Bevin from our own time; things looked different then. But his criticism is at least partly fair.

***

I would have liked Adonis to convey more of the private man. The chapter drawn from Henderson is quite vivid, and now and then Adonis does give us a glimpse into Bevin’s family life. We do learn that he lived for many years in suburban contentment in Golders Green – but didn’t mind a little luxury and some good booze. And Adonis quotes a splendid comment by a contemporary that Bevin, a very large man, both looked and dressed like an overstuffed sofa (pictures suggest this was accurate.) But something about the man is elusive here. His wife Flo appears in the book very little, although they had a long marriage. Neither do we really learn much about Bevin’s siblings, who like him were born working people and unlike him remained so. Still, Bevin came from a time when one’s private life was not on display, and maybe his remains hidden.

Adonis does tell us what Bevin was like to work with. His ally Attlee was decent to others but as we have seen he never dissembled, and used very few words, even in public; one imagines he could be a strain. Bevin, by contrast, was bluff, friendly and fun, fond of a good glass of wine and capable of great warmth and kindness. To be sure, he was ruthless with those who crossed him. But those who didn’t do so liked him, and his civil servants thought him a fine minister.

***

These books are both worth reading. They do contain some odd omissions, and Adonis is too swift to judge in some areas. But Beckett’s is a readable and thoughtful portrait of Attlee. He shows us clearly why Attlee succeeded where others might have failed. As for Adonis on Bevin, he provides an accessible picture of a remarkable man, and his book should be essential reading for anyone interested in Labour history.

And both books are a window into one of the most effective governments that Britain has ever had – one we should all try to understand. For all its flaws, it steered the country through one of the hardest periods in its modern history, played a key role in building postwar global institutions, and left the British with universal healthcare, social security and proper pensions for all. They had had none of these before. One of the most moving passages in Beckett’s comes in his discussion of Attlee’s Minister of Education, Ellen Wilkinson, who introduced free milk and school meals.

Before the war, private school children were noticeably taller, better built, healthier and stronger than state school children, because they were properly fed. …In the Fifties this was no longer the case, due to the provision of free school meals and school milk.

These were not perfect men, but they had the courage to make things better. It seems now we are too scared to try.

Mike Robbins’s latest book, On the Rim of the Sea, is now 

available as a paperback or ebook. More details here.

Being beastly to the Germans

On January 17 1947, a book review by George Orwell appeared in Tribune. “I hope everyone who can get access to a copy will take at least a glance at Victor Gollancz's recently published book, In Darkest Germany,” he wrote, and continued: “It is not a literary book, but a piece of brilliant journalism intended to shock the public of this country into some kind of consciousness of the hunger, disease, chaos and lunatic mismanagement prevailing in the British Zone."

Eilbek, Hamburg, in 1945 (Imperial War Museum/F/O J. Dowd)

He was not joking. The letters to newspapers and other documents that made up In Darkest Germany had already caused quite a rumpus. But its author liked a rumpus. Gollancz is remembered today as a publisher, but was as much an activist and polemicist. The Nazi regime was an early target. As early as 1933, the year Hitler came to power, he produced a pamphlet, The Brown Book of the Hitler Terror. During the war he published another, Let My People Go, in which he argued that “a million or two” Jews had already been murdered in Europe, and said, with chilling prescience, that six million would die. 

Gollancz's support for the Germans after the war will have surprised some. He was Jewish. Yet in the postwar years he would devote considerable energy to call for better treatment for German, as well as other European, people.  Although he was a successful as a publisher (producing Orwell’s first books, among others), in 1947 many people would have known him as a political activist. In the later 1930s he had followed the Moscow line, and had not published Homage to Catalonia, which cast doubt on the ‘official’ Left's view of Spain. But Gollancz himself would split with it over the Nazi-Soviet pact, and in later years was no-one's man but his own. 

In October and November 1946 Gollancz made a six-week visit to the British Zone. The resulting book, In Darkest Germany, was based on the letters, public and private, that he wrote during the visit.  It could therefore be rushed out quickly on his return. Nonetheless one is impressed at the speed with which it was done, at a time when books were set in hot metal and there were also austerity regulations for book production. The book is 128 pages, plus 144 photographs – the latter would each have required an individual block to be made.  But the book was out in January 1947. Moreover, my own copy shows it to be a second impression in the same month – suggesting that sales had been brisk.

The pictures are stark. Plates 4 and 5 are the heads of men lying on hospital beds. Plate 8 is a full-length picture of a naked man from the back; it is captioned, “Emaciation, not oedema. 56, looked 70. Was clearing rubble and got half heavy worker’s ration.”  Plates 14 and 15 show boys of about 10 or 11, though they may be older. They are stripped to the waist; according to the caption, at the author’s request.  They are thin; their ribs show, and they are clearly undernourished, which seems somehow wrong, because they are white.

Neither is the text easy reading, although the facts have long passed away. In Hamburg, Gollancz reports, about 100,000 people were suffering “from hunger oedema or the equivalent”.  In the same city, he stated, “active lung tuberculosis is at least five times as prevalent as before the war, and may even be 10 times as prevalent.” The reasons for the growth in TB, he argued, were twofold – malnutrition and overcrowding: “In the British zone 12,000 people with open, infectious tuberculosis live in the same room with others – sometimes in the same bed with children.” It should be said that he does not quote a source for this (though his own observations do seem to bear it out). But he does quote a survey under British auspices of around 1,000 Hamburg postal employees in which the incidence of hunger oedema was found to be 17% amongst males and 9% amongst females. Reproducing one of his own letters, he also gives a figure of 13,000 hospitalized cases of hunger oedema for Düsseldorf in September; this apparently was challenged, so he goes on to point out that the British colonel in command of the Düsseldorf district had said that the number of non-hospitalized cases was nearly double that.

The reason for this was not hard to see, according to Gollancz. The standard ration (that is, for people not doing heavy work) had recently been increased but was still just 1,550 calories, in contrast to the 2,650 that UNRRA had stated as necessary for “full health and efficiency” in a normal population. (Today Britain’s NHS says men need  about 2,500 to maintain body weight, women about 2,000.) However, most people in Düsseldorf were not even getting 1,550 calories a day as most basic foodstuffs were in short supply. Gollancz went so far as to say that those who could not or would not supplement their rations on the black market were managing on 400-1,000 calories a day. Once again, it is not clear where he got this figure; he is perhaps giving his own observations – but sometimes he is able to quote more official figures:

In the Control Commission’s information room at Bünde there is a chart ...showing a graph of seven diseases with March 30 1946 as the first date and September 14 as the last. Scarlet fever is about the same... diptheria is a trifle higher, gonorrhea considerably higher, syphillis much higher, tuberculosis about a third higher, and typhoid nearly double. But what really matters is a more generalised degeneration in the health and strength of the whole community.

A British health official, thinking Gollancz to be a visiting politician, let fly at him in a mess in Hamburg one afternoon. “What on earth are you politicians up to? ...Do you realise what’s going on here?” he asked. “An epidemic of any kind would sweep everything before it. ...If you...don’t do something about it two problems that seem to have been worrying you will be solved. The size of the German population and manure.”

II

Homeless in a Hamburg air-raid shelter (Imperial War Museum/Sgt Smith)

There can be no doubt that the refugees from the east worsened the situation. Gollancz recounts being shown a list of the clothing needs for those in Schleswig-Holstein. He calls them “expellees” and they will have included some who were literally expelled from what had been eastern Germany, but one suspects that many will have arrived earlier as part of Operation Hannibal, the German navy’s mass evacuation of the Eastern regions in the last few months of the war. They numbered 1.2 million out of Schleswig-Holstein’s 3 million population and needed 200,000 men’s overcoats, a million pairs of shoes, 800,000 undergarments and half a million blankets. Gollancz visits a ship and a camp in which expellees are housed, and sees “mostly stretchers, wooden bunks, and bundles of sordid beclothes on the floor: indeed ...I don’t recollect seeing a single bed.” Not that the people of Hamburg were doing much better; Gollancz enters one building and finds a woman and her four children living in a single room. The husband is a prisoner in Russia. Nearby, a couple, their seven children and a dog are living in a two-room makeshift shelter totalling 200 sq ft.

Rebuilding was clearly urgent. According to Gollancz, the cement works in the British Zone had a capacity of 7.7 million tons. But 25 cement works, accounting for about half of this total, were threatened with closure as reparations.  This was an iniquitous facet of the 1945 Potsdam four-power agreement under which plant and assets were not only to be seized as reparations, but also destroyed if they could be used in the future to make war. Cement could be used to construct docks for U-boats, fortifications etc., so must not be allowed – although it was not clear how ordinary Germans were to be housed without it.

This lunacy extended right across large parts of the economy, affecting even food production. Thus 13 fishing vessels at Bremerhaven had been used during the war as minelayers; the Germans wished to return them to their real purpose, but the British would not permit it. In another case, a fishing vessel was a metre longer than the permitted length. The Germans offered to reduce the vessel’s size, but the British refused and blew it up instead. “Meanwhile, the wretched German fish ration has been reduced,” writes Gollancz, “and we complain that the cost of feeding Germany is almost more than we can bear.”  He quotes other examples of this crass stupidity, and others were raised in Commons debate on November 27 1946, in which his reports were debated.

Gollancz regarded the destruction as wholly irrational – including the shipyards. He would, he said, be asked whether he had forgotten the weapons that Blohm & Voss  had built. No, he said, and indeed he had warned of the dangers of fascism in the 1930s (this was true; Gollancz had been a vigorous opponent of appeasement). “But I say that if there is one absolutely certain way of making a repetition of the last few years inevitable, it is to acquiesce in this godless destruction, and to drive a whole people, with whom we have to live, into hatred and despair.”

Why had the British Zone, with its 23 million inhabitants, got into such a state? Was this an act of revenge by the British for a war that they had not wanted?  Many British people were deeply angry with Germany well into my own lifetime (I was born in 1957). Was this a mass punishment-beating?

III

The evidence, at least for the British Zone, strongly suggests otherwise. To be sure, the Germans were not the flavour of the month. But there was genuine public concern in Britain about their conditions; much of it was humanitarian, and it was reflected in Parliament and in the Press. It is especially evident from the support Gollancz had for his campaign, which had begun in earnest only a few months after the war had ended. It focused initially on the mass expulsions of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia. The campaign was driven by vivid descriptions in the Daily Herald and the News Chronicle of the scenes around Berlin’s Stettiner Bahnhof, where refugees were arriving from the east. 

Aircraft at Flensburg airfield await disposal (Imperial War Museum/Saidman) 

The skill and energy with which Gollancz latched onto these events as a humanitarian cause has been recounted in an interesting and engaging 2006 article by Matthew Frank (The New Morality – Victor Gollancz, Save Europe Now and the German Refugee Crisis, 1945-1946, in Twentieth Century British History, 17:2). Frank describes the startling extent to which Gollancz managed to mobilise the chattering classes, and a big chunk of the political establishment on both right and left. Gollancz asked people to send in a postcard pledging their willingness to give up ration points in support of German refugees. Within just over a week he had received 20,000. One wonders how many signatures would have been received had one been able to respond online.

By mid-September 1945, according to Frank, the issue was receiving extensive coverage right across the British press, even the right-wing dailies (apart from the Beaverbrook group. And one newspaper that did support the campaign headed its leader “Feed the Brutes”).  On the left, J. B. Priestley, a writer so sympathetic to the USSR that Orwell later fingered him as a fellow-traveller, wrote a dispatch from Berlin for the News Chronicle. “Whatever happens to the German people this winter ...the world conscience must see to it that the children of Germany do not starve,” he rumbled.  To be sure, not all of this was compassion. Frank makes it clear that much of it was based on the argument that an epidemic or disorder in the British Zone meant trouble for Britain, for it would spread. Nonetheless there was a strong humanitarian undertone. The wave of sympathy and/or self-interest reached a peak at the end of November 1945, when Gollancz’s Save Europe Now (SEN) held its inaugural meeting at the Albert Hall. The crush was so great that there were two overflow meetings in the nearby church of the Holy Trinity, Brompton. The speakers included such diverse figures as the former Conservative minister Bob Boothby and the young left-wing MP and journalist Michael Foot.

Matthew Frank is unimpressed, seeing the moral crusade less as a humanitarian movement than as an affirmation of Britain’s image of itself. This is not entirely fair – but there is truth in it. However, what the SEN episode does suggest is that the British establishment, and for the most part the people, did not want unnecessary suffering for the Germans, however self-inflicted it might be. Their attitude was probably summed up in Noel Coward’s flippant and rather silly satire from 1943:

Don’t let’s be beastly to the Germans

When our victory is ultimately won...

Let's be meek to them

And turn the other cheek to them

And try to bring out their latent sense of fun

Let’s give them full air parity

And treat the rats with charity

But don’t let's be beastly to the Hun.

IV

The British, then, had no wish to make the Germans in their Zone miserable. So why the shambles?

Surprisingly little has been written about the British occupation of north-west Germany, an area of 23 million people. This is beginning to change as interest grows in the entire post-war era, and modern scholars of the occupation, such as Christopher Knowles, are not always so bleak about it. But Gollancz was right that the Germans under British occupation faced terrible hardship (though conditions elsewhere in Germany were scarcely better).

British Army of the Rhine headquarters inGermany (Imperial War Museum) 

There were several reasons. Perhaps the Attlee government simply did not pay enough attention to Germany. It was extremely busy – not just with Germany but with the crisis in India, which looked likely to explode at any minute if no agreed path to independence could be found. Britain was also still fighting in both Greece and Palestine. She was also broke; much of her gold reserves had been spent on the war, and the US had insisted, as part of its postwar loan agreement, that sterling be convertible within a few years. This was a huge financial bomb waiting to go off, and the occupation of north-west Germany was costly (in the end, reparations would cover just 2% of its cost). At home, labour shortages in the mines restricted coal supplies and would immiserate everyone in the winter of 1946-47, still the worst in Britain in living memory.

Moreover, the British found the Zone in a terrible state, not least because of their own bombing.  In a recent (2014) article in History and Policy, Knowles states that 66% of the houses in Cologne were destroyed, and in Düsseldorf 93% were uninhabitable – figures that confirm Gollancz’s own impressions.  The housing shortage was exacerbated by German refugees from what had been eastern Germany and from other parts of central and eastern Europe where Germans were no longer welcome. Meanwhile, the country was full of displaced persons (DPs), often former forced or slave labour brought forcibly to Germany by the Nazi regime. All were walking somewhere.  Knowles quotes Ivone Kirkpatrick, a British diplomat who later became head of the Foreign Office, describe his first impressions of Germany in 1945; there were “hundreds of thousands of Germans on foot, trekking in all directions … as if a giant ant-heap had suddenly been disturbed.”

The British authorities were also hamstrung by the Potsdam agreement in the summer of 1945, under which the four-power occupation had been agreed in detail. Potsdam had decreed the “orderly” transfer of populations (it was anything but orderly) but also had clauses on reparations and demilitarization. Clause 3(i) called for: “The complete disarmament and demilitarization of Germany and the elimination or control of all German industry that could be used for military production.” It was this clause that had led to the orgy of bureaucratic destruction that Gollancz had described. In fact, the agreement stated that Germany could retain industries essential for war to the extent that it needed them for its prewar peacetime economy. However, there was also a provision for reparations that was effectively a license to loot. Moreover it was specified that 10-15% of industrial plant from all three Western zones should be dismantled and sent to the USSR, meaning that even if the British had decided to remove nothing as reparations for themselves, they would still have had to dismantle some plant that the Germans really needed to keep.

There were other constraints. The Potsdam Agreement stated that occupied Germany should be treated as a single economic unit, but not everyone cooperated. Eventually, frustrated, the British and Americans would merge their zones. In 1948, failure to agree with the USSR on currency reform, among other things, would lead the Western allies to clear the way for the creation of the Deutschmark in the three western zones. At the time of Gollancz’s visit, however, the British zone was effectively an economy on its own. An industrial region, it could not import sufficient food from areas further east that had supplied it, even those that were still part of Germany – which they were often not.

V

Gollancz must have been aware of all this, but did not allow it to blunt his attacks. He was at least partly right not to; although the British administration in Germany faced a difficult situation, some of its problems were of its own making.

For a start, not everyone was as punctilious on Potsdam as the British, who could have taken it a little less literally. As the Conservative Bob Boothby put it in the Commons debate in November:  “Are we going to continue to sabotage industrial production in the British zone in Germany...  by carrying out the terms of an Agreement which most of us believe the other signatories are making not the slightest attempt to carry out? ” Besides, the British administration was not always up to it. This has been discussed by John E. Farquharson, in a paper in German History (The British Occupation of Germany 1945-6: A Badly Managed Disaster Area?, 1993, 11:3). Farquharson describes how authority was vested, after some confusion, with the Control Office for Germany and Austria, or COGA, which was based in London. (There was also a British Zone of Occupation in Austria, centred around Klagenfurt in Carinthia.) Not only was COGA not in Germany; it was headed by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, John Burns Hynd, who almost never went there, did not have Cabinet rank, and did not impress his contemporaries. (According to Farquharson, British staff in the Zone itself referred to COGA as “Hyndquarters”.)

The quality of the British control commission staff in Germany itself was mixed. They had no future when the occupation came to an end, and they would have to return to Britain, where the best jobs would already have been taken. So it was hard to get the best people. Farquharson quotes a London civil servant as saying in 1946 that they were mainly “a highly-paid army of retired drain inspectors, unsuccessful businessmen and idle ex-policemen.” Farquharson also refers to heavy drinking after wartime abstinence, and corruption (“Officials were making hay while the sun shone, as there was no real future in Germany”). Some of this may have been unfair. Some of it may have been all too fair. One staff member was the former star record-breaking pilot of the early 1930s, C.W.A. Scott; unable to handle loss of fame as the war approached, he struggled in later years, and eventually joined the control commission staff in 1946, perhaps for want of something better. Soon after arriving, he blew his brains out.

Gollancz himself encountered attitudes amongst the control commission staff that he did not like. “Though there are many fine exceptions, the general attitude varies from a disgusting offensiveness, through indifference... to that humane and almost unconsciously superior paternalism which is characteristic of the “white” attitude to “natives” at its best.” He quotes examples of misuse of privilege: a hairdresser keeps a British wife waiting for 20 minutes, and the next day is warned that her premises may be requisitioned; there are separate queues at the cinema. The building of a new headquarters and facilities in Hamburg, when the materials and labour were desperately needed to rehouse Germans, was especially iniquitous. As Benn Levy MP was to remark in the November 1946 Commons debate: “It is not good for a nation to be conquered. But it is also not good for people to be conquerors.”

VI

In Darkest Germany was not the end of Gollancz’s campaign. In August 1947 he was back in Germany; on his return to London he penned a 40-page pamphlet, Germany Revisited, in which he reported that, “during the Spring and Summer...  rations for the normal consumer of about 1,000 calories or even considerably less were common...”. “For 25 percent,” he added, the diet is a daily experience of dull and devitalising misery.” He once again expounded on shortages of underwear, shocking housing, wanton acts of destruction under the guise of reparations or demilitarisation, and the surreal bureacracy of denazification.  One wonders how the British administrators in the Zone saw him; probably as a pompous pain in the arse.

Lighter with a map of the British zone (Imperial War Museum)

But in the end, of course, Gollancz and the British administration were both moot. Most Germans would have known that they had got themselves into this situation and would have to get themselves out, and they did. In 1948 a currency reform ushered in the Deutschmark in the three Western zones, and the next year saw assumption of power by the new republic. 

From then on, the British army was only nominally an army of occupation; in reality, it became part of Germany’s defences. It will finally leave in 2019, after which it will likely be remembered chiefly as a traffic hazard. Meanwhile the Germans rebuilt their country with lightning speed. They may have had another, longer, journey, summed up perhaps in Heinrich Böll’s novella, The Bread of Those Early Years. But that journey they took alone.

What should we make of Gollancz’s extraordinary crusade, 70 years on? Like Orwell, he should not be seen as some sort of secular saint. (One remembers Orwell’s own comment in Reflections on Gandhi: “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent.”)  Although Gollancz split with the Communists after the Nazi-Soviet Pact, he had hitherto supported them, despite mounting evidence of their real nature from the war in Spain. His April 1945 pamphlet What Buchenwald Really Means, which appeared to pin as much blame for Hitler on the British as on the Germans, was premature and ill-judged, and drew a stinging rebuke from an Austrian former prisoner, Franz Burger.  Gollancz may also have been something of a gadfly, flying from one fight to another. By 1948 he had moved on to other causes, including relief for the Middle East and eventually the abolition of capital punishment.  In The New Morality, Matthew Frank quotes him thus:  “‘There is nothing so depressing’, Gollancz once told a veteran of one of his many campaigns, ‘as a movement which has attained its aims’.”

As for In Darkest Germany, it is a museum piece; it was not reprinted after 1947, and is now very hard to find. Victor Gollancz Ltd is now part of Orion, and publishes science fiction and fantasy. There is a Victor Gollancz  elementary school in Berlin, but one wonders if the pupils, or residents of the Gollanczstraße in which it stands, know who he was.

But perhaps that would not have bothered him greatly. One can view him as a gadfly or polemicist, but his actions were underpinned by a profound morality. He would probably have argued that his compassion towards the Germans was not in spite of his Judaism but because of it. In What Buchenwald Really Means he argues that the Judaeo-Christian tradition cannot compromise with fascism: “For the one the ultimate reality is the human soul, individual, unique, responsible to God and man, while for the other this ultimate reality is some abstraction – a State, Folk or Collective which men have created out of nothing, and which has no existence except in their vain imagination. ...This Judaeo-Christian tradition is our inner citadel.” In the end, Gollancz was at least touched by greatness – something the British state finally acknowledged with a knighthood in 1965, a year or so before his death at the age of 73.

One of the many, often upsetting, photographs in the book is taken in a hospital. It is a high-key print lit by a window that is just out of shot to the right; soft light catches the white blanket and sheets on the iron bed, on which there is a young boy. The caption reads: “Child of 10 dying from TB in the Town Hospital, Düsseldorf.” Above the bed stands a balding man with a moustache, round dark-rimmed glasses and a professorial air; he is dressed in a dark winter coat and scarf. It is hard to read his expression, but his distress seems real.  One wonders who his successors are today, and where one would find public intellectuals in British life who have made so clear a decision to serve good over evil.

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Mike Robbins’s latest book, Three Seasons: Three Stories of England in the Eighties, is available as an e-book or paperback from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Scribd and other online retailers, and can also be ordered from your local bookshop. Requests for review copies should be sent to thirdrailbooks (at) gmail.com, or to the author.