The pacifist George Lansbury was Labour Party leader from 1932 to 1935, coming to power in the aftermath of the disastrous 1931 general election to face Ramsay MacDonald and the massed ranks of the National Government at Westminster. John Shepherd argues that Lansbury was a much-beloved politician, highly effective at organising a depleted parliamentary party of only forty-six Labour MPs, as well as restoring the morale of the wider labour movement. In his three years at the helm, during which time party organisation was strengthened, Labour gained ten seats in by-elections, and eventually returned 154 MPs at the 1935 general election. However, though Lansbury did much to preserve party unity, he had been unable to prevent the ILP’s disaffiliation. He is often described as having been driven from leadership, following a brutal attack by the trade union leader Ernie Bevin at the party conference in 1935. Shepherd, however, contends that George Lansbury had already considered resigning, since his absolute Christian pacifism was irreconcilable with Labour foreign policy in the face of international fascism.

• • •

The Christian socialist and pacifist George Lansbury (1859–1940), who led the Labour Party from 1932 to 1935, was described by A. J. P. Taylor as ‘the most lovable figure in modern politics’.240 In 1965, Taylor’s memorable portrayal of this socialist pioneer evoked memories of Lansbury’s immense personal popularity and his exceptional ability to connect with ordinary people, which always characterised his politics. Lansbury spent most of his political life in the Labour Party. He campaigned for social justice for working people and the unemployed, women’s suffrage, world disarmament and the abolition of imperialism. Imprisoned twice for his political beliefs, he was often the party rebel par excellence, and a thorn in the side of Ramsay MacDonald, Labour’s first Prime Minister. However, Lansbury was never seen as a candidate for party leadership, nor did he aspire to the position.241

Yet, unexpectedly, George Lansbury was destined to take on the party leadership with Labour fortunes at their nadir after the second Labour government’s downfall and the party’s rout at the 1931 general election.242 In 1931, Lansbury was elected unanimously as chairman of the PLP at Westminster. He formed a short-lived dual leadership with the party leader, Arthur Henderson, who was out of Parliament after losing his seat. In October 1932, on Henderson’s resignation, Lansbury succeeded him as party leader, combining both roles until his own resignation in 1935.

A year before, at the 1934 Labour Party conference at Southport, George Lansbury spoke openly about the party leadership and his possible resignation with considerable honesty:

I never dreamed in my wildest imagining that I would ever be called upon to act as the [party] spokesman. I have never considered myself the leader – but as spokesman of my colleagues in the House of Commons, I have been proud to be one of that little band. I am proud to have been chosen to speak for them whenever it was necessary for me to speak on behalf of the party … It was an accident that put me there – the accident of the last general election – I am only there as long as my colleagues think it wise for me to be there. When they think change is needed, then I shall go.243

This chapter examines the circumstances in which George Lansbury, seemingly as poacher turned gamekeeper, became leader of the Labour Party, at seventy-two, during a worldwide economic crisis, the rise of international fascism and major political realignment in Britain. It assesses the qualities and skills of a politician who never fought a general election as party leader and was regarded by many as merely an elderly stop-gap between the major figures of Ramsay MacDonald and Clement Attlee in the Labour pantheon. Finally, the chapter reviews Lansbury’s resignation as party leader after his celebrated clash with the trade union boss, Ernie Bevin, as hailstones thundered down on the Dome at the 1935 Brighton party conference.

POLITICAL CAREER: FROM LIBERALISM TO LABOUR

As a committed Christian socialist, George Lansbury’s political trajectory was often tempestuous, from his early days as a Gladstonian Liberal Party agent to his leadership of the British Labour Party during the Depression years of the 1930s.244

Like many Labour pioneers, George Lansbury’s early political loyalties were with Gladstonian Liberalism. In the late 1880s, Lansbury earned a significant reputation as the local Liberal Party agent with unflagging energy and political acuity, who had secured three Liberal election triumphs, including Jane Cobden’s successful campaign to be returned to the newly founded London county council. As a young labourer (from the age of sixteen to eighteen), Lansbury had been a regular spectator in the Strangers’ Gallery at Westminster, witnessing the parliamentary debates between Gladstone and Disraeli. As a young Christian radical, he was drawn to the individual liberty, freedom for subject peoples and community of interest of different social classes that characterised Gladstonian Liberalism. A highly traumatic emigration to Australia in 1884–85, with his wife Bessie and their young family, launched Lansbury into British politics on their return.

However, by the early 1890s, after declining Liberal patronage to pursue a parliamentary career, a disenchanted Lansbury had switched to socialism. He left the Liberals to form the Bow & Bromley branch of the Marxist SDF. He had increasingly realised that democracy, political reform and increased Labour representation would not be achieved in the late-Victorian party. He later observed: ‘Liberalism would progress just so far as the capitalist money bags would allow it to progress, and so I took the plunge and joined the SDF.’245

Lansbury’s long political career comprised nearly a lifetime of selfless public service to ordinary people, during which he held every elective office: local councillor; county councillor; Poor Law guardian for over thirty years; and, from 1910 to 1912, and 1922 to 1940, MP for Bow & Bromley.

In the SDF, he was elected as a Poor Law guardian – an office he held continuously until its abolition in 1928. In 1895, he became the SDF’s national organiser, touring Britain as a propagandist for socialism. According to SDF leader Henry M. Hyndman, Lansbury was ‘the best organiser the federation had ever had’. In the 1890s, George Lansbury temporarily lost his Christian faith, and with his wife and family joined the East London Ethical Society. However, Lansbury eventually became a leading figure in the Church Socialist League.246 Lansbury also stood unsuccessfully for Parliament for the SDF twice in 1895, with further election defeats in 1900, 1906, January 1910, and the 1912 by-election.

By around 1904, Lansbury had joined the ranks of Labour via the ILP, as well as being associated with the Fabian Society. Lansbury’s reforming work as a Poor Law guardian led to his membership of the Royal Commission on the Poor Laws and Relief of Distress 1905–19. He was a co-signatory of the famous Minority Report with Beatrice Webb, which demonstrated Lansbury’s public standing as a working-class representative on the Victorian Poor Law.

In 1906, Lansbury finished bottom of the poll at Middlesbrough (the only time he was a parliamentary candidate outside London), where his election agent Marion Coates Hansen – a member of the local ILP and a feminist – encouraged him to include ‘votes for women’ in his election manifesto. Lansbury entered Parliament on his fifth attempt, in December 1910, but, disenchanted with Ramsay MacDonald’s parliamentary leadership, resigned his seat to force a by-election over ‘votes for women’ in 1912 – the only occasion an MP has resigned over women’s rights. For Lansbury, a popular champion of the women’s cause, gender superseded social class in his political advocacy.247

Previously, the Speaker had suspended him from Parliament for his outburst of rage in the House against the Liberal Prime Minister H. H. Asquith over the forcible feeding of imprisoned suffragettes. While Lansbury and members of his family had been highly visible in the women’s suffrage movement, the resignation of his seat also reflected his growing disenchantment with the Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald’s close association with the Liberals. Lansbury lost the ‘suffragettes’ by-election’ and did not return to Parliament until 1922. In 1913, Lansbury’s fervent speech at the Albert Hall, defending suffragette militancy, resulted in his prosecution and imprisonment.

Clement Attlee called GL (as Lansbury was often affectionately known) ‘Lansbury of London’, owing to his close identification with the East End, which shaped his political identity.248 As a local politician and MP for Bow & Bromley, his family home, based in his impoverished constituency, became a haven of political activity. He travelled by public transport, particularly as a Cabinet minister and Leader of the Opposition. The charismatic Lansbury cut a distinctive figure: a large-framed man with a kind face, embellished by mutton-chop whiskers, who carried a booming voice. At first he preached the merits of socialism on street corners (and in nearby Victoria Park), but, by the First World War and beyond, his reputation as a politician on the left commanded large audiences, such as at the Albert Hall rallies.

Out of Parliament for ten years, Lansbury embarked on a new career as editor-proprietor of the newly founded socialist Daily Herald, which became the newspaper of the movement – more important than the Labour Party’s relatively short-lived Daily Citizen. Lansbury showed astute business acumen in running his paper, employing a galaxy of writers and intellectuals, including the brilliant Australian political cartoonist Will Dyson. The Daily Herald survived regular financial crises and its columns were open to a wide spectrum of dissenting groups. During the First World War, the paper was published as a pacifist weekly. In 1922, Lansbury arranged for the paper to be taken over by the Labour Party/TUC, and it eventually survived as a commercial daily until 1964.

In 1919, Labour won control of Poplar council for the first time, with George Lansbury, aged sixty, elected as the first Labour mayor in one of the poorest parts of London. As a significant municipal employer, the councillors were determined to tackle unemployment and improve working conditions through an extensive programme of social reforms, including equal pay for women workers and a minimum £4 weekly wage for council employees.

In 1921, Lansbury took the leading role in the ‘Poplar Rates Revolt’, infamously known to opponents as ‘Poplarism’. It was a defining episode in the political life of George Lansbury and his family. Thirty Poplar councillors, including Lansbury’s son Edgar and daughter-in-law Minnie, willingly went to prison with him to defend their poor East End constituents in defiance of the government, the courts and the leadership of the Labour Party. The Poplar councillors, who were mainly local manual workers, aimed to end the unreformed rating system that favoured the wealthier west London boroughs to the disadvantage of the poorer East End. It was a battle that included dramatic scenes of public support on the street, as the councillors marched to the High Court, and their eventual conviction, resulting in six weeks in prison.249

Ramsay MacDonald always remembered the class warrior and republican George Lansbury as ‘the brawling vestryman from Poplar’, for his role in the Rates Revolt. Also, members of the Lansbury family were members of, or associated with, the British Communist Party. Though not a member of the Communist Party in Britain, Lansbury himself had visited Russia and met Lenin and other prominent Bolsheviks.250 When MacDonald formed his minority 1924 government, partly in deference to King George V, there was no Cabinet place for the popular Lansbury.251 According to the Fabian socialist Sidney Webb, it was ‘the most glaring omission’.

After the left’s disappointment with the 1924 Labour government, George Lansbury was nominated by the ILP to stand against MacDonald for the PLP chairmanship, but Lansbury refused to allow his nomination to go forward. While he demonstrated no ambition for the party leadership, Lansbury’s personal popularity saw him elected top of the PLP executive with sixty-seven votes, compared to Arthur Henderson’s relatively poor showing in eleventh place with thirty-eight votes.252 The idealist Lansbury was also a pragmatist, needing the Labour Party as much as the party needed him. In his autobiography, he criticised the Labour leadership and the power of the party machine, but, as chairman of the 1928 Labour Party conference, he appealed for party unity and backed Labour and the Nation – Labour’s policy for the next election.253

In 1929, MacDonald brought Lansbury into his second Labour Cabinet as First Commissioner of Works – traditionally a minor office concerned with historical monuments and with little scope for public expenditure. The energetic Lansbury distinguished himself by fundraising to promote a popular programme of recreational activities for the Royal Parks, including ‘Lansbury’s Lido’ on the Serpentine in Hyde Park, which A. J. P. Taylor later described as the minority administration’s only memorable achievement. Lansbury was also given a limited role under the ineffective J. H. Thomas, along with Oswald Mosley and Tom Johnston, advising on strategies for dealing with mass unemployment following the Wall Street Crash of 1929. In 1931, the second Labour government resigned following the financial and political crisis of 19–24 August, when a substantial minority of the Cabinet (nine votes to eleven) refused to accept the 10 per cent reduction in unemployment benefits. Lansbury had been one of the first ministers to oppose this proposal. As events developed daily, Lansbury’s Whitehall office became the meeting place for Cabinet ministers opposed to the expenditure cuts. The crisis of 1931 resulted in the controversial formation of the National Government, led by Ramsay MacDonald, and the realignment of political parties, which placed George Lansbury unexpectedly in the role of Labour leader.

LABOUR LEADER

The general election of 1931 marked the all-time low of Labour electoral fortunes, and was by far Labour’s greatest defeat of the twentieth century. The National Government had secured a landslide victory, winning a gargantuan total of 554 out of the 615 seats in the new Parliament, as well as 67 per cent of the total votes cast. Labour’s parliamentary representation was virtually annihilated, reduced to only forty-six MPs, plus six unendorsed ILP members, from the 267 MPs they had when the election was called.

In addition, the 1931 election caused a major reversal in the party hierarchy. The old order of Labour leaders, who did not accompany MacDonald into the National Government ranks, had been devastated in the electoral avalanche.254 In this unprecedented parliamentary rout, a total of fourteen Labour Cabinet members and twenty-one other members and party whips had been defeated at the hands of the electors. Arthur Henderson, who was out of Parliament after losing Burnley by 8,200 votes, was re-elected unopposed as party leader.

On 3 November 1931, the septuagenarian George Lansbury was unanimously elected as chairman of the PLP – there appeared to be literally no other choice. George Lansbury was the only former Cabinet member (on the Labour side) among His Majesty’s Opposition to salvage his parliamentary seat, albeit he held Bow & Bromley with a largely reduced majority of 4,664 after an 11.1 per cent swing to his Tory opponent – his narrowest winning margin in the five elections of the inter-war years.255

With Clement Attlee and Stafford Cripps, George Lansbury formed a socialist triumvirate that played an important role in running the PLP. The former Solicitor General, Stafford Cripps, had been the only Labour member returned in the west of England (Bristol East). Clement Attlee, the ex-Postmaster General, only just hung on at Stepney (by 551 votes). Attlee later recalled: ‘On going to the first party meeting after the election, I had a message from Arthur Henderson that George Lansbury would be proposed as leader and myself as deputy. These nominations went through without opposition.’256

As PLP chairman, Lansbury led the opposition to the National Government at Westminister. However, for eleven months, Henderson –without a seat in Parliament – was the Labour Party leader as well as party secretary and part-time party treasurer. Aged sixty-seven, Henderson was obviously in continuingly poor health. A great part of his time was devoted to presiding over the World Disarmament Conference in Geneva, where it was feared ‘he might die in the chair’. However, he steadfastly continued with this new role, for which he received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1934. Henderson played, at most, a nominal role as Labour leader, and found himself increasingly out of touch with the leftward direction of this party. After being shouted down at the party conference in October 1932, Henderson resigned on 18 October. Lansbury was elected unopposed as party leader in his place.257

With Henderson’s prolonged absences abroad, George Lansbury had increasingly taken over many of his leadership duties, including giving keynote speeches on Britain and the world situation. Addressing the annual conference of Labour women, Lansbury declared: ‘Few movements could have stood the desertion of some of its chief leaders … in spite of unparalleled difficulties, the Labour organisation remained intact.’258 On India, he pronounced: ‘There could be no peace in India without the Congress. Conferences without Gandhi were like the play without Hamlet.’259 On the Far East, Lansbury looked to the League of Nations ‘to settle the dispute [between China and Japan] peacefully and amicably’.260 George Lansbury also undertook morale-raising visits to constituencies throughout Britain, using the oratorical skills he had first honed as an itinerant socialist propagandist for the SDF over thirty years before.

It is difficult today to imagine the anger and disillusionment experienced by rank-and-file Labour members following Ramsay MacDonald’s decision to break with his colleagues and form the National Government, not to mention the impact of the 1931 election catastrophe. For many, MacDonald – Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister, with his handsome aura and socialist oratory about the New Jerusalem – had been an iconic leader, and one of the architects of the Labour Party. But, in 1931, odium was heaped on him, with accusations of treachery and betrayal for collaboration with the party’s political opponents in order to form the National Government, which held power in the Depression years of the 1930s. Vi Willis, from a working-class Labour family in Ilford, recalled her father’s fury as he destroyed the portrait of MacDonald that hung in the hallway. He was no longer her father’s idol as he had ‘killed the Labour Party’.261 There was deep distrust of intellectuals within the labour movement, including among trade union bosses, such as Ernest Bevin.

In leading HM Opposition, George Lansbury cut a different political figure to MacDonald, whom he faced across the despatch box after the so-called 1931 ‘Great Betrayal’. Lansbury provided a sharp contrast to MacDonald’s Olympian style of leadership. ‘If George Lansbury had left us, I should have doubted Christ himself,’ was how miners’ leader and parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Labour (1929–31), Jack Lawson, underlined their new leader’s value to the Labour Party.262

Lansbury embraced long-held ideas of working-class participation in a political democracy. He declared: ‘Leaders may be necessary, but the best kind of leader is one who leads from the centre of those he speaks for; in fact, it is not possible for me to imagine the need for leadership in a educated democracy.’

In 1931, George Lansbury brought an encouragingly defiant tone about the party’s future. Sir Charles Trevelyan had written despairingly to Lansbury from his Northumberland estate: ‘A puzzled, deceived and rather frightened nation has played for safety. I am afraid it will have a bitter period to repent in.’ But the former Labour Secretary of State for Education also added: ‘My fine friend, this later work of yours, which seems to have been thrust upon you, may be the greatest you ever had to do.’263

Lansbury later confided to Trevelyan: ‘As a matter of fact … I honestly believe the movement is going to be purer and stronger for the very defeat we have sustained.’264 In public, Lansbury remained unwavering in the face of the massive National Government victory at the polls. He replied to the press:

Most emphatically I do not believe that this means the smashing of the labour movement. I have lived through too many terrible defeats of Labour to despair. After the election of 1906, the Tories were reduced, I think, to 130 members, but they soon revived again. So will it be with us.265

Hugh Dalton, whose leadership ambitions had been dashed by his defeat in the 1931 catastrophe, gave his description of the Lansbury–Attlee–Cripps triumvirate:

The parliamentary party is a poor little affair, isolated from the national executive [committee], whose only MP is Lansbury. Attlee is the deputy leader of the parliamentary party – a purely accidental position as someone puts it – and he and Cripps, who are in close touch with [G. D. H.] Cole, sit in Lansbury’s room at the House [of Commons] all day and all night and continually influence the old man. With none of these are Henderson’s relations close or cordial.266

Though often held in great esteem, George Lansbury was not without other critics. ‘His bleedy heart has run away with his bloody head,’ was one common criticism. ‘No bloody brains to speak of,’ was Beatrice Webb’s acidic verdict, though the intellectual Marxist Harold Laski admired him.267 Also, as party leader, Lansbury could appear muddle-headed, particularly when he seemed to publicly support the hated means test imposed by the National Government. It was a fatal error, which the champion of the unemployed and marginalised constantly had to defend during his leadership.268

However, Attlee provided a very different perspective. He wrote to his brother Tom:

I had a very strenuous time during the session, having to speak on something or other every day almost. GL makes an excellent leader. He has far more idea of teamwork than JRM ever had. We are quite a happy family. GL, Cripps and I inhabit the Leader of the Opposition’s room and get on excellently.269

MacDonald’s leadership had been criticised for him being, at times, moody and aloof, which often distanced him from his backbenchers. Under Lansbury’s leadership, there were at least weekly meetings of the PLP, and its executive met daily to plan parliamentary strategy. In addition, Lansbury, Attlee and Cripps worked closely, often changing schedules, to ensure one of them was always on duty on the front bench.

Even so, at Westminster, Lansbury faced the challenge of leading a PLP that was greatly reduced in numbers and quality of personnel. At the outset, Lansbury had despatched a personal appeal to every member of the PLP to keep up attendances, votes, questions and speeches on behalf of the constituents who had returned them to Westminster in 1931, so that, in his words, ‘as sure as the sun rises, victory, full and complete, will in the near future come to the cause we represent’.270

Half of the PLP were trade union-sponsored MPs, mainly older miners from the Welsh and Yorkshire coalfields, who played relatively little part in parliamentary business at Westminster. As Attlee reflected, they ‘could not contribute much beyond their votes’. A great deal of the work, especially for the debates on national and international policy, rested squarely on the shoulders of Lansbury, Attlee and Cripps. In February 1932, Attlee confided to his brother Tom: ‘We have been having a very strenuous time in the House. I have to spend hours on the bench. The government are very cheap in their arguments.’271

In the Commons, the leadership could draw on active support from only around thirty of the forty-six PLP members as effective parliamentary performers, including the charismatic Nye Bevan. He had entered Parliament in 1929 and, for a while, was Lansbury’s personal private secretary.272 There were examples of significant initiatives by the opposition against incredible odds. The press calculated that the hard-working Tom Williams, Labour spokesman on agriculture, in 1932 ‘filled no fewer than 274 columns of Hansard … asked 607 oral questions and sixty-seven written ones’.273 At the same time, Attlee maintained his high regard for Lansbury’s collective leadership, observing:

Our fellows have done extraordinarily well, especially our miners, George Hall, Tom Williams and David Grenfell. The last two, especially, promoted to the front bench have risen to the occasion and made themselves conversant with all kinds of subjects … GL has been splendid all through and Stafford Cripps a tower of strength.274

In these circumstances, Lansbury repeatedly proved to be an effective and revered leader, especially in bolstering the morale of his small parliamentary band. His son-in-law and first biographer observed Lansbury’s ‘brilliantly successful’ technique of organising the small PLP like a propaganda meeting from his SDF days in the 1890s. Singing of ‘The Red Flag’ often rang out in the parliamentary lobbies, and, for those speaking in the Commons but lacking in parliamentary oratory, Lansbury was invariably beside them, whispering guidance in his characteristic booming voice (which could often be heard in the press gallery).275

During the 1931–35 parliament, though the greatly diminished Labour opposition had no prospect of defeating the National Government outright, the PLP maintained a robust and disciplined scrutiny of considerable amounts of government legislation and business, such as the expenditure cuts on public services in 1931, the taxation of cooperative profits in 1933 and the Unemployment Bill of 1934.276

Lansbury’s main task in rebuilding the party for the future was to keep Labour united, avoiding further departures following the earlier defections of Oswald Mosley, Ramsay MacDonald and their supporters.277 An immediate problem was the worsening relationship with the ILP, which had developed well before Lansbury took over the party helm. In 1931, in a swift but unproductive move, Lansbury invited the ILP leader, the charismatic James Maxton, to take his seat alongside Lansbury on the Labour front bench. Before 1914, Lansbury had been a leading ILP figure, and also associated, in the 1920s, with Maxton and the ILP Clydesiders in their criticism of MacDonald’s moderate gradualist policies. During the second Labour government, the disenchanted left wing of the ILP had been in open revolt over party discipline and the observation of PLP standing orders, which did not permit an individual MP to vote against the party line.

Despite intensive negotiations and a special meeting with his former friend Fenner Brockway (the new ILP leader) at his Bow home, George Lansbury could do nothing to resolve the injurious conflict between the two parties.278 Lansbury had confided to Trevelyan: ‘I want very much unity with the ILP, and especially unity in the House – but I am now convinced that this is hopeless.’279 Twenty years before, Lansbury had clashed with his party’s leadership over his independent stand on women’s suffrage. As Labour leader, Lansbury now firmly believed that the ILP had become ‘a party within a party’. In the end, this widening gulf led to the controversial and momentous decision by the ILP, the largest socialist grouping, to disaffiliate from the Labour Party at its special conference in July 1932 in Bradford – its birthplace in 1893.280

During these years, his commitments as leader of the PLP curtailed George Lansbury’s attendance of NEC meetings, where he was the only MP. He was present at fifteen out of twenty-four meetings in 1931–32, and fifteen out of twenty-two in 1932–33, while his serious illness after his accident in December 1933 meant he attended only ten NEC meetings that year. However, on his return to the party leadership in 1934–35, Lansbury missed only seven out of the twenty-seven NEC meetings.281

Lansbury’s leadership must also be considered in the context of a significant power struggle between different groupings over Labour policy and political strategy. As Ben Pimlott has written, a new and younger generation gained control in the Labour Party following the changes brought about by the 1931 election. In reality, during Lansbury’s years as leader, there were two separate centres of power, often in conflict over policy: one at Transport House, dominated by the NEC; and the other the PLP and its executive at Westminster. There was also an evolving alliance between moderates in the political and industrial wings of the labour movement, as seen in the revived National Joint Council (later renamed the National Council of Labour).

Outside Parliament, the NEC, with Hugh Dalton and Herbert Morrison dominant, established a new policy committee and sub-committees, which brought together politicians like them with trade union leaders, including Ernest Bevin and Walter Citrine. In 1932, the founding of the Socialist League attracted leading left-wing intellectuals among a membership of 3,000, and had some influence at party conferences.282

Politically, the leadership of Lansbury, Attlee and Cripps was therefore well to the left of the NEC, and far more sympathetic with party activists in the wider movement. The 1932 party conference at Leicester witnessed successful resolutions on the public ownership of the Bank of England, including the joint stock banks, and workers’ control of the nationalised industries. In 1933, at Hastings, conference passed Trevelyan’s resolution, binding a future Labour government to advance ‘definite socialist legislation’.

As party leader, George Lansbury – by working with differing personalities across the political spectrum, as well as by lifting the spirits of the wider movement – held his party together for a future return to office. During this time, no one directly challenged his position. In March 1932, the NEC quickly quelled press speculation about a change in leadership before Arthur Greenwood’s victory at the Wakefield by-election that same month. The strain of leadership at times took its toll, with an exhausted Lansbury confessing to Cripps that he had ‘felt like joining the communists’. However, he took inspiration from his socialist faith in seeking a Christian solution to contemporary social and economic difficulties.283

As party leader, George Lansbury suffered ill health and family bereavements – devastating blows that were to seriously affect him personally, as well as the management of the Labour opposition. On 23 March 1933, his wife Bessie died at the age of seventy-two. The importance of their marriage to the Labour leader cannot be stressed enough. For over fifty years, Bessie Lansbury – also a strong socialist and internationalist – had supported her husband through every vicissitude of political life, including his imprisonments and the constant pressures of being Leader of the Opposition. Attlee informed his brother Tom: ‘Lloyd George had never known such a wave of sympathy in the House and the country’ – an indication of the public standing of the Lansburys in national life. In May 1935, George Lansbury’s son Edgar predeceased him after a serious illness.284

In December 1933, the major injury of a broken leg, sustained at a Labour Party gathering at Gainsborough, had taken Lansbury out of front-line politics for seven months, and the hard-working Attlee took over his role. In the main, historians have tended to disregard Lansbury’s absence from the party leadership – in some cases, not mentioning it. Though his accident had brought him close to death, he had no doubts about continuing as party leader on his recovery. While he remained in touch with Labour politics, his enforced stay in hospital was a turning point in George Lansbury’s life. He produced a new Christian socialist manifesto for the British people, published in the Clarion, with his book My England based on these articles. Above all, his religious faith was reaffirmed and he returned determined to secure the abolition of fascism, imperialism and war. At the same time, the serious deterioration in the international situation had important implications for Labour Party foreign policy.285

LEADERSHIP CRISIS AND RESIGNATION

As party leader, George Lansbury is probably remembered most for the manner of his departure from the leadership, following his clash with the general secretary of the TGWU, Ernie Bevin – the most powerful union leader in Britain – in the longest and most highly charged two-day debate at the 1935 party conference. In a memorable encounter in British politics, the pugnacious Ernie Bevin attacked the pacifist George Lansbury with a brutal speech, sharpened by accusations of betrayal of party loyalty, which reduced Virginia Woolf, in the audience at the Dome, to tears.286 A week later, Lansbury met the PLP to resign. Leonard Woolf commented that Bevin had ‘battered the poor man to political death’.287 According to Professor McKenzie, it was ‘the only clear-cut instance of a Labour leader being driven from office’.288

However, the circumstances surrounding Lansbury’s resignation are more complex. Far from being driven out of office, relinquishing the party leadership was very much Lansbury’s decision alone. He had been an out-and-out pacifist throughout his political life, and his pacifism was well known when he was elected Labour leader. He willingly admitted: ‘In 1931, when I became leader of the Labour Party, I was up against the difficulty of squaring my pacifist principles with the policy of my party.’289

Moreover, Lansbury realised his pacifism was increasingly distancing him from the party he led. In the weeks before the 1935 conference, Lansbury made a number of public statements at speaking engagements in Britain. In Ipswich, he addressed an audience of over 3,000 as part of a ‘Victory for socialism’ campaign: ‘If I had my way, I would stand up before the world unarmed. But that, I am told and I know, is not the result of a show of force, but because of the spirit of good behaviour, which is in the heart of everyone.’290

On 19 August, he had written to The Times calling on the Pope and the Archbishops to convene a convocation of all religions in the Holy Land. Campaigning in the Dumfries by-election in September, he gave a press interview:

During the whole period I have been serving as leader of the Labour Party, I have made it quite clear that under no circumstances could I support the use of armed force, either by the League of Nations or by individual nations. However anomalous the position may appear to be, it has been accepted by the parliamentary party and by the national executive [committee] of the Labour Party.291

Lansbury came under increasing pressure when, before the Brighton conference, the pacifist Arthur Ponsonby resigned his Labour leadership in the Lords, and Stafford Cripps resigned from the NEC. Lansbury took the opportunity at the NEC meeting on 19 September to raise his own position, but was informed this was a matter for the PLP – although, ‘in the opinion of the NEC, there is no reason why he should tender his resignation’.

On a number of occasions, his desire and willingness to resign was made clear. Shortly before the 1935 party conference, Lansbury wrote privately to the new party secretary Jim Middleton:

On 30 September 1935, delegates gathered for the Labour Party conference against the background of the international tensions surrounding the Italy–Abyssinia dispute, and Hugh Dalton moved the NEC five-paragraph resolution, which called on the British government and other nations ‘to use necessary measures provided by the covenant [of the League of Nations] to prevent Italy’s unjust and rapacious attack upon the territory of a fellow member of the League’.293

Lansbury’s impassioned speech on his dilemma as a Christian pacifist and the leader of the Labour Party was greeted at the outset with loud and prolonged applause, accompanied by the singing of ‘For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow’.

Bevin, who had been sitting with his trade union delegation in the main body of the conference hall, replied angrily to Lansbury’s conflict of loyalties between personal conscience and political party, with accusations of betrayal. Bevin argued that Lansbury had participated in the collective discussions on socialism and peace and could not go back on a decision he had not voted against. According to the official party conference report, Bevin added: ‘It is placing the executive and the movement in an absolutely wrong position to be taking your conscience round from body to body asking to be told what you ought to do with it.’ Bevin’s sneer has often been seen as the spark that ignited Lansbury’s resignation, particularly as some present in the Dome recalled pugilistic Bevin accusing Christian, pacifist Lansbury of ‘hawking your conscience’. If so, in Bevin’s abrasive and odious language, ‘hawking’ meant ‘selling for money’ – and, in Lansbury’s case, nothing was further from the truth. At the end of Bevin’s speech, Lansbury was unable to reply and was reduced to calling out a few points when the microphones had been switched off. The journalist Trevor Evans recalled that Lansbury stood nearby, wringing his hands in disbelief and anguish over ‘hawking his conscience’.294 The thirty-year-old Socialist League delegate Lionel Elvin, who had also spoken at the 1935 conference, was adamant that Bevin had used this taunt.295 An unapologetic Bevin commented: ‘Lansbury’s been dressed in saint’s clothes for years, waiting for martyrdom. All I did was set fire to the faggots.’296

A week later, George Lansbury attended the PLP meeting he had summoned before the conference, and, after explaining his position for an hour, resigned the party leadership and withdrew from the room. Remarkably, on Lansbury’s return, the PLP, by thirty-eight votes to seven (with five abstentions), asked him to continue as their leader, though Lansbury then insisted on resigning. After his resignation, George Lansbury wrote: ‘No single one of my colleagues who had urged me to remain, or anyone else, said a word in my defence.’ Far from being driven from the leadership, George Lansbury is probably the only Labour leader in the party’s history whose colleagues would not let him leave the fray. Within two weeks, Stanley Baldwin, who had replaced Ramsay MacDonald, called the 1935 general election. Though Labour had gained ten seats in by-elections under Lansbury’s leadership – and there was an improved performance at the polls, with 154 Labour MPs returned – the National Government still had a large and commanding majority of 429 MPs.

However, George Lansbury was re-elected as the pacifist MP for Bow & Bromley. In his final years, until his death in 1940, he undertook a tireless international peace crusade throughout the United States, Canada and Europe, including visits to Hitler and Mussolini in an attempt to prevent the advent of the Second World War.297

George Lansbury’s unforeseen stint as party leader against seemingly impossible odds still echoes today in Labour’s circles. In 2013, in rediscovering the party’s lost traditions, Jon Cruddas MP, shadow Cabinet member and head of Labour’s Policy Review, proclaimed the East End socialist as ‘the greatest Labour Leader of the Opposition’. For future party leaders in the post-war years, George Lansbury’s unique legacy was ‘to leave a party for them to inherit and subsequently lead’.298

240 A. J. P. Taylor, English History 1914–1945, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1965, p. 142, n. 3.

241 For modern studies of George Lansbury, see Raymond Postgate, The Life of George Lansbury, London, Longmans, Green & Co., 1951; Jonathan Schneer, George Lansbury, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1991; John Shepherd, George Lansbury: At the Heart of Old Labour, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2004. See also: Andrew Thorpe, ‘George Lansbury 1931–1935’ in Jefferys, op. cit., pp. 61–79; Peter Shore, Leading the Left, London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1993, pp. 17–34.

242 The position of leader of the Labour Party was created in 1922. Ramsay MacDonald defeated J. R. Clynes narrowly in the first leadership contest. Previously, the chairman of the PLP led the party – a position that MacDonald himself, among others, had held.

243 The Labour Party, ‘Report of the Annual Conference’, 1934, p. 146.

244 John Shepherd, ‘A Life on the Left: George Lansbury (1859–1940): A Case Study in Recent Labour Biography’, Labour History: A Journal of Labour and Social History, No. 87, November 2004, p. 147.

245 George Lansbury, ‘How I Became a Socialist’, Labour Leader, 17 May 1912.

246 Shepherd, op. cit., 2004, pp. 40–41, 97.

247 Ibid., Chapter 7.

248 See Clement Attlee’s review in The Observer (30 December 1951) of Raymond Postgate, The Life of George Lansbury, London and New York, Longmans, 1951, in Frank Field, Attlee’s Great Contemporaries: The Politics of Character, London, Continuum, 2009, pp. 1–3. For important glimpses of family life, see Edgar Lansbury, George Lansbury, My Father, London, Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1934.

249 For ‘Poplarism’, see: Noreen Branson, Poplarism, 1919–1925: George Lansbury and the Councillors’ Revolt, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 1979; Shepherd, op. cit., 2004, Chapter 11.

250 For the Lansbury family and British communism, see Kevin Morgan, Labour Legends and Russian Gold, London, Lawrence & Wishart, 2006, Chapter 4.

251 John Shepherd and Keith Laybourn, Britain’s First Labour Government, Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006, pp. 62-64.

252 Howell, op. cit., 2002, pp. 33–4.

253 Shepherd, op. cit., 2004, pp. 222, 248–51.

254 Ben Pimlott, Labour and the Left in the 1930s, London, Allen & Unwin, 1986, pp. 15–17, 21.

255 Shepherd, op. cit., 2004, pp. 282–3.

256 Clement Attlee, As It Happened, London, Heinemann, 1954, p. 75.

257 Leventhal, op. cit., pp. 200–201; Wrigley, op. cit., 1990, pp. 179–82.

258 The Times, 16 June 1932.

259 Ibid., 11 January 1932.

260 Ibid., 1 February, 4 February 1932.

261 Vi Willis, quoted in Daniel Weinbren, Generating Socialism: Recollections of Life in the Labour Party, Stroud, Sutton, 1997, p. 86.

262 ‘George Lansbury by Jack Lawson’ typescript, May 1940 (Lawson Papers, Box 5).

263 Charles Trevelyan to George Lansbury, 29 October 1931 (Lansbury Papers, Vol. 8, fos 172–3).

264 George Lansbury to Charles Trevelyan, 5 January 1932 (Trevelyan Papers, CPT 145).

265 Manchester Guardian, 29 October 1931.

266 Ben Pimlott, Hugh Dalton, London: Papermac, 1985, pp. 203–5. See also: diary entry, 8 October 1932 (Dalton Papers); Ben Pimlott ed., The Political Diary of Hugh Dalton 1918–40, 1945–60, London, Jonathan Cape (in association with the London School of Economics and Political Science), 1986, p. 169.

267 Harold Joseph Laski, ‘Why I am a Marxist’, Nation, 14 January 1931, p. 59.

268 For more detail, see Shepherd, op. cit., 2004, pp. 300-2.

269 Clement Attlee to Tom Attlee, 18 December 1931 (Attlee Papers, fo. 45).

270 Daily Herald, 9 November 1931.

271 Clement Attlee to Tom Attlee, 29 February 1932 (Attlee Papers, fo.46).

272 Andrew Thorpe, ‘George Lansbury 1932–1935’ in Jefferys, op. cit., pp. 65–6.

273 C. R. Attlee’s ‘Foreword’ in Lord (Thomas) Williams of Barnburgh, Digging for Britain, London, Hutchinson, 1965, pp. 7–8.

274 Clement Attlee to Tom Attlee, 15 July 1931 (Attlee Papers, fo.46).

275 Raymond Postgate, The Life of George Lansbury, London: Longmans, 1951, p. 279.

276 Andrew Thorpe, ‘George Lansbury 1932–35’ in Jefferys, op. cit., pp. 65–6.; Shepherd, op. cit., 2004, p. 295–6.

277 Lansbury publicly ruled out an electoral pact with the Lloyd George Liberals, despite former Labour Cabinet colleague Christopher Addison’s attempts as an intermediary. Kenneth O. Morgan and Jane Morgan, Portrait of a Progressive: The Political Career of Christopher, Viscount Addison, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1980, pp. 215–17.

278 Fenner Brockway, Inside the Left: Thirty Years of Platform, Press, Prison and Parliament, London, 1942, p. 238.

279 George Lansbury to Charles Trevelyan, 5 January 1932 (Trevelyan Papers, CPT 145).

280 For an excellent account, see Keith Laybourn, ‘“Suicide During a Fit of Insanity” or the Defence of Socialism?’, The Bradford Antiquary, 3rd ser., No. 5, 1991, pp. 41–53.

281 See Thorpe in Jefferys, op. cit., p. 67.

282 Pimlott, op. cit., 1986, pp. 17–20.

283 Interview with Michael Foot, 7 August 1999; Morgan, op. cit., 1987, pp. 97–8; Pimlott, op. cit., 1985, Chapter 14.

284 Clement Attlee to Tom Attlee, 3 April 1933 (Attlee Papers, fo. 58). For an excellent study of the interrelationship between illness and political life by a physician and senior politician, see David Owen, In Sickness and In Power: Illness In Heads of Government During The Last 100 Years, London, Methuen, 2008.

285 Shepherd, op. cit., 2004, pp. 298–9.

286 Anne Olivier Bell and Andrew McNellie ed., The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1982,.p. 345 (entry for 2 October 1935).

287 Leonard Woolf, Downhill All the Way: An Autobiography of the Years 1919–1939, New York, Harcourt, Brace & World, 1967, p. 244–5.

288 Robert Trelford McKenzie, The British Political Parties: The Distribution of Power within the Conservative and Labour Parties, London, Heinemann, 1964, p. 378.

289 George Lansbury, My Quest for Peace, London, Michael Joseph, 1938, p. 16.

290 Daily Herald, 6 April 1935.

291 Manchester Guardian, 9 September 1935.

292 George Lansbury to Jim Middleton, September 1935 (Middleton Papers, MID 54).

293 The Labour Party, ‘Report of the Thirty-Fifth Annual Conference’, 1935.

294 T. Evans, ‘Peace Issue at the 1935 Labour Conference’, BBC Sound Archives. I am grateful to the late Ivan Howlett (BBC Radio 4) for a copy of this recording.

295 Interview: Professor Lionel Elvin, 30 May 2001. For more on the Lansbury–Bevin confrontation, see Shepherd, op. cit., 2004, pp. 320–28.

296 Francis Williams, Nothing So Strange: An Autobiography, London, Cassell, 1970, p. 139.

297 George Lansbury, ‘A Page of History’ (Lansbury Papers, fo. 214); for Lansbury’s peace journeys, see D. Lukowitz, ‘George Lansbury’s Peace Missions to Hitler and Mussolini in 1937’, Canadian Journal of History, 15, 1980, pp. 67–82.

298 Jon Cruddas, ‘George Lansbury Memorial Lecture’, New Statesman, 7 November 2013, accessed 31 May 2015.