Austerity Britain, 1945–51 (85 page)

Even so, the nub of the matter, taking the government and its advisers as a whole, was the nature of the Anglo-American relationship – and in particular the deep British desire to be treated by the Americans as something like equals. ‘There could not be a more useful demonstration of the United Kingdom’s capacity to act as a world power with the support of the Commonwealth and of its quickness to move when actions rather than words are necessary’ was a Foreign Office view of intervention only days after the 38th parallel had been crossed. Not long afterwards, on 17 July, the British ambassador in Washington, Sir Oliver Franks, warned Attlee that the capital was in a mood of such ‘emotional overdrive’ that the Americans would undoubtedly ‘test the quality of the partnership’ by the whole-heartedness or otherwise of the British military response. And a week later, he stressed again that any signs of negativity ‘could seriously impair the long-term relationship’.

Nevertheless, British intervention in Korea was not only about impressing the Americans; it was also about restraining them. The Americans, reflected Kenneth Younger (Bevin’s deputy) in his diary in early August, ‘seem to have decided that a war with “the communists” is virtually inevitable and likely to occur relatively soon, say within 3–5 years. They regard all communists alike, no matter what their nationality, and assume that they are all dancing to Moscow’s tune and are bound to do so in future . . .’ By contrast, the British, ‘despite growing pessimism, still give first place to the effort to prevent war. We do not accept it as inevitable . . .’ It was in the context of such fears, argues the historian Sean Greenwood on the basis of a close study of the records, that ‘the British found themselves sucked into seeking closer collaboration with Washington in order to find out more precisely what American intentions were as well as to douse an over-enthusiasm which might have perilous ramifications’.
¹³
It was, of course, a strategy based on an illusion about the rewards of sacrifice, but at least it was not held in defiance of more than half a century of evidence showing it to be a chimera.

A bipartisan consensus endorsed the government’s approach, as did Florence Speed in Brixton. ‘Situation in Korea “grave”,’ she recorded on 5 July, before going on with what was probably a fairly typical mixture of resignation and pride: ‘Reds still having it all their own way. Mr Churchill in a speech yesterday, said, if we do not win in Korea it is the beginning of the Third World War which so many people don’t want but think inevitable. It will end I expect in British soldiers replacing the Americans. Britain seems in all wars to carry the heaviest burden.’ Soon afterwards, with the first British casualties being announced, the pacifist diarist Frances Partridge, living in Lytton Strachey’s old house on the Wiltshire Downs, was struck by how ‘a sort of excitement seemed to possess our weekend visitors at the thought of the bravery of soldiers in wartime’, one of those visitors being a fellow-member of the Bloomsbury Group, Quentin Bell. ‘Talk is quite openly anti-foreign: all Germans are monsters impossible to shake by the hand, the Italians beneath contempt, and the French and Russians as bad as the Germans. Nor is this by any means meant as a joke.’

On 30 July the Prime Minister solemnly broadcast to the nation. ‘War creeps nearer and Mr Attlee points out our help in Korea will mean sacrifices,’ noted Judy Haines in Chingford that Sunday evening. ‘More rationing? and scrambling for food? Oh lor! Better that than bombs.’ Predictably, Gallup found in August that no fewer than 78 per cent backed the increased government spending on defence, even though 61 per cent accepted that this would lead to a reduced standard of living. Over the next six months, there remained from the government’s point of view an adequate degree of broad-based, patriotic support for the British intervention. ‘Our poor boys in Korea with the Americans are getting out of the jam they are in and I hope will reach the coast safely’ was how Vere Hodgson put it shortly before Christmas. That, though, was not quite everyone’s perspective. After a reference to ‘the filthy bomb-drunk Yanks’, Kingsley Amis went on in a letter to Philip Larkin early in the New Year: ‘Anybody over here now who is not pro-Chink wants his arse filled with celluloid and a match applied to his arse-hairs.’
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Amis by this time was probably no longer the fervent, card-carrying Communist he had been during the Second World War, but he still broadly held the faith.

The Korean War intensified the Cold War atmosphere. Typical was the reaction in August 1950 of the Archbishop of York, Cyril Garbett, to the Stockholm Peace Petition, endorsed by church leaders in the Communist bloc and demanding a ban on nuclear weapons. ‘I am suspicious of the origin and motive of this particular petition,’ he told his diocese, ‘it is widely believed its promoters are communists or fellow-travellers, if this is so its purpose would be to weaken the resolution of the nation, and to encourage appeasement.’ With the Archbishop of Canterbury, Geoffrey Fisher, similarly hostile, clerical support for the petition soon dropped away sharply. That autumn, the government, under pressure from the fiercely anti-Communist TGWU leader Arthur Deakin, considered banning the Communist Party before rejecting the idea as impractical. However, two episodes showed the extent to which freedom of speech was fraying at the edges.

The first concerned
Picture Post
, for which the journalist James Cameron filed a story in September that, accompanied by graphic Bert Hardy photos, highlighted the ill-treatment of prisoners by the South Koreans. The anti-American implications were too much for the magazine’s increasingly right-wing proprietor, Edward Hulton, who not only refused to let the story appear but sacked the longstanding editor, Tom Hopkinson. Thereafter,
Picture Post
never regained the cutting edge that for 12 years had made it such a unique, agenda-setting phenomenon. The other episode was the semi-farcical story of the Second World Peace Congress, due to take place in Sheffield City Hall in November. Between them the government (denouncing it as a Communist front and refusing to issue visas to ‘undesirable’ delegates) and the local Council managed to prevent it taking place – though some delegates, including Pablo Picasso, did turn up. There were no such problems for the British Society for Cultural Freedom, which met for the first time in January 1951 (two months before the London County Council banned all Communists from its employ) and whose very purpose was to try to counter the influence of Communism. The venue was the Authors’ Club, Whitehall, with the poet and critic Stephen Spender in the chair. Just over a year earlier, he had contributed to Richard Crossman’s
The God That Failed
, a widely read anthology of intellectuals describing how they had fallen out of love with Communism; now he was poised to emerge as the emblematic, ubiquitous Cold War liberal.
¹⁵

For the Communist Party of Great Britain, the early 1950s were difficult times. In the February 1950 election it managed a pitiful 0. 3 per cent of the popular vote, in the process losing its two MPs. And when, a year later, it published
The British Road to Socialism
, the impact was at best muted. ‘Its leaden formulas,’ observes the biographer of the party’s leader, Harry Pollitt, ‘did not so much distil the lessons of the British experience as plagiarise those of Eastern Europe.’ Or, as one party member subsequently remarked, an apter title would have been
The Russian Road to Socialism, Done into English
. Moreover, the document’s claim that the party was now independent from Moscow met for the most part with well-justified scepticism. Indeed, for one member, the writer Mervyn Jones, this was the point at which several years of private doubts came to a head; he left the party after witnessing a draft being changed as a direct result of pressure from Moscow.

Another writer also had her moment of epiphany. ‘It is the spring of 1951,’ the poet and critic John Jones remembered over half a century later:

Iris and I are in the Lamb and Flag pub in Oxford. We have finished our game of composing a joint sonnet, writing alternate lines. She looks across the dark silent public bar at a solitary drinker of Guinness and says, ‘I want to tell you my ancient mariner tale.’ She begins, making no sense to me, with ‘Roy Jenkins was right and I was wrong’. Then she plunges into an account of Communist Party organisation . . .

Iris Murdoch was referring to ten years earlier, when her fellow-undergraduate at Oxford had started a Democratic Socialist Club as a breakaway from the Labour Club, which was loyally Stalinist and had Murdoch as chairman. For the young Lionel Blue, himself an Oxford undergraduate by the time of the pub confession, the scales had already fallen. ‘Early in 1950, marching in a procession which was bawling the names of Communist leaders, I suddenly asked myself what I was doing in it,’ he recalled. ‘This wasn’t rational. This was idol worship and all the Jew in me revolted. It was cruder juju than poor old Grandma’s. I left the procession, dived into an Indo-Pak restaurant and – fortified by two portions of curry – ceased to be a Stalinist/Marxist and never marched for anyone again.’
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Lawrence Daly – in his mid-20s, still working down the Glencraig pit in Fife, assiduously selling the
Daily Worker
there every day, recently elected chairman of the Scottish TUC Youth Advisory Council – felt no such qualms about the Communist faith into which he had virtually been born. If anything, the Korean War served to redouble his zeal and sense of certainty. His papers include a letter written to him in October 1950 by James Callaghan, by this time a junior minister at the Admiralty, in reply to Daly’s ‘long letter’, apparently about whether the blame for what Callaghan called ‘the present tension’ rested with the United States or Russia. ‘I am bound to say that I have reached the conclusion, with great regret, that the major responsibility lies with the U.S.S.R. and I disagree with what you say that their attitude has remained unchanged,’ wrote Callaghan. ‘Is it not clear that Russia has got to the stage now (which I believe to be different from her position in 1945) when everyone in every other country must subordinate his own views to the interests of the U.S.S.R.?’ And he cited Russia’s build-up of ‘the largest submarine fleet that the world has ever seen’.

None of which perturbed young Daly, to judge by his diary soon afterwards:

3
November (Friday)
. Renée [his middle-class wife] & I set out to listen to ‘Venus Observed’ – I fell asleep. Then read some of Stalin’s ‘Leninism’. Renée said play was excellent.

5
November
. Read some of Joe’s ‘Marxism & National & Colonial Question’ – delightfully sensible.

6
November
. Went into Cowdenbeath at 4 p.m. for meeting with M. Taylor to discuss work of Party Branch. M. presented powerful analysis of cause of defects in our work – in a blunt & insulting fashion – rightly so.

9
November
. Tonight I started to read chapter of Marx’s ‘Capital’ &have been delightfully surprised by its readability & wealth of information.

10
November
. Put bills for Pollitt meeting in canteen & baths [ie at the pit] this morning. As expected baths one was torn down by finishing time. This inevitably happens with Party notices & even TU ones which are suspected of being Communistic. The culprit or culprits must be violently intolerant, probably miserably cowardly, & pitiably ignorant.

Daly was only a spasmodic diarist, and a week later the final entry in this sequence was more personal: ‘Lady gave Rannoch [his son] shilling just after we got off the train this morning for being such a well-behaved boy!’
¹⁷

There was an economic as well as an ideological dimension to the war. Here at least, ministers could hardly be accused of going in with their eyes shut. ‘Rearmament will compete with exports for our production, and at the same time the rapidly rising price of imported raw materials is causing a further deterioration in the terms of trade,’ Bevin and Gaitskell noted solemnly in their October 1950 joint assessment of the financial aspect. ‘It will therefore become increasingly difficult to avoid a deficit on the United Kingdom overall balance of payments, which will show itself in a rise in our overseas sterling liabilities.’ So it proved: not only did Britain’s balance-of-payments situation sharply deteriorate over the next year, but there was also a major stockpiling crisis, in the context of the rapidly rising price of imported raw materials. It did not take long for the conventional wisdom to emerge that Britain’s post-war export-led recovery had been halted in its tracks by the decision to intervene in Korea. ‘Important sectors of the engineering industries are heavily engaged in defence work when they might otherwise be concentrating their main energies on the export trade,’ lamented the Economic Survey in 1953 (by which time the war was drawing to an end). Five years later, Andrew Shonfield, in his survey of post-war economic policy, reckoned that the rearmament programme, by having ‘used up all the resources in sight and more’, had ‘continued to exercise an unfavourable influence on economic development long after the event’.

Economic historians have not, on the whole, much dissented. For Correlli Barnett, this cavalier diversion of resources from exports and investment was graphic testimony to how ‘the British governing elite suffered not only from the reflexes of a rich man and a grandee but also from those of a school prefect’, in other words high-mindedly trying to set the world to rights. Even Jim Tomlinson, the best-informed, most convincing advocate of the Attlee government across a range of economic issues, concedes that doubling defence expenditure – even before the war comprising 7 per cent of GNP – was ‘a reckless gamble’. Significantly, though, a study by Peter Burnham of the war’s impact on the British vehicle industry (in particular Leyland Motors) reveals that the ‘more astute’ sections of the industry (including cars as well as commercial vehicles) were able in the early 1950s ‘to increase their industrial infrastructure and secure a high rate of guaranteed profit at the direct expense of the state in a manner which would not have been possible but for rearmament’. And he argues, convincingly, that ‘the reasons for long-term decline must be sought in the market structure and practices of firms themselves in addition to looking at the effects of government policy’.
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The Korean War was, in short, all too easily used as an alibi for more fundamental economic failings.