I am sure this Jesus will not do,

Either for Englishman or Jew.

                  WILLIAM BLAKE

EASILY the most terrifying thing which can happen to any political party on the threshold of its first real power is to find itself saddled with a saint. Mercifully for politics and tragically for mankind, such things are rare. Between 1924, when King George V braced himself to send for Ramsay MacDonald, and 1935, when Ernest Bevin martyred him in full view of the annual party conference as cruelly as only he knew how, the Labour Party found itself with a Saint George with far more dragons and chivalry to his credit than the national hero ever had. Was the Labour Party delighted with this flesh and blood moral capital? Of course not. Political parties like it to be naturally assumed that they have a soul just as they prefer it to be assumed that they have a programme. The last thing they want is a big noisy old man too stupid to appreciate the occasional divergencies of policy from probity.

George Lansbury had no fear, no conceit, no interest in money, no chip on his broad shoulder, no puritanism and no doubt at all that Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ vision of England would one day find its place amongst the Government’s measures in the Gracious Speech from the Throne. The worst thing which could be said about him was that he could be silly, and naturally this was said quite often. It was said most by those too spiritually illiterate to understand the subtle connection between silliness and goodness. After all, who could be sillier than St. Francis? Or General Booth? Or Lord Russell? Not that the Labour Party wasn’t proud of Lansbury; it was. It had to be. It was immeasurably in his debt. It was he who had provided its dignity in the early days, its heart when Beatrice Webb was icily theorizing and its virtue when Ramsay MacDonald ran about London in search of duchesses. Never once did Lansbury, in all his long, overworked life, take an unprincipled short-cut to a political objective.

He was the son of a railway navigator or ‘navvy’ and lived nearly every minute of his life in Bow Road, yet the natural patrician element in his character gave him a noticeable social ease and whenever he shook hands with the King (with mutual chumminess) or with Lady Astor’s guests at Cliveden (to their amusement) or with the endless crocodile of Cockney supplicants shuffling through his front room (to its near-adoration), the English class structure would wobble uncertainly. He called himself an East Ender and never moved from Bow after a single disastrous attempt to settle in Australia during his early twenties, but in fact he was a countryman, born in a tollgate cottage on a lonely Suffolk road near Halesworth. He retained the high colour and brilliant pale eyes of the East Anglian, though none of the countryman’s aloofness and restraint. He was gregarious. Humanity seethed, pullulated around him and he loved it. There were twelve children of his happy and candidly sensual marriage. There were workhouses, prisons, rallies, marches, congregations, emigrant ships, hospitals, parks, Parliament, palaces and they were all full of people. Reformers are always said to love people, though often what they love is tidiness. Lansbury never sacrificed human happiness to hatred of litter or to lawn-worship. Everywhere he went he broke down fences. Spiritually and idealistically, the flowers were there to pick—particularly if one happened to be the nit-headed inmate of an L.C.C. orphanage. The Victorians had made public property sacred and public money holy. Lansbury refused to be impressed. Parks and institutions were social abstractions and were there for the convenience of mankind. He genuinely loved his neighbour as himself and by so doing he introduced an unmanageable element into political life for which his party was most ungrateful.

The Lansburys came to the East End in the sixties when George was a small boy. Bow and Poplar were then stridently English, with scarcely any Jewish or other foreign elements. The smoke-blackened streets were packed with illiterate multitudes through which jaunted the boisterous racing cavalcades on their way to Epsom. The working-class population, undocketed, stunted, Crookshankian, stayed alive through sheer bird-like ebullience. The Lansbury children enjoyed this human tumult and sharpened their wits on it. Miracles occurred. While the neighbours were being scorched into salvation by Mrs. Booth’s terrifying hellfire oratory the young Lansburys had the extraordinary good fortune to encounter the Oxford Movement in the saintly though scrupulously aesthetic person of the Reverend J. F. Kitto, a man of the utmost taste and goodness who delighted his gaudy congregations with his Anglican pageantry. Mr. Kitto’s influence on George was profound. He provided a window through which the gawky East End youth could stare at the fields of the earthly paradise. To begin life by being on nodding terms with the angels is not a bad training for a working man whose duties would include occasional visits to Buckingham Palace. Mr. Kitto’s Christianity was quite unconstricting. It left George spiritually sensuous. It gave him the eagle-view of mortal affairs and a heavenly vision which naturally put any reward earth might offer among the booby prizes. On top of this spiritual lead George possessed striking human advantages. He was tall and handsome and very strong. He had a deafening voice and a command of the affection of others which would have been dangerous in a lesser man. He was not so much one of nature’s gentlemen as one of nature’s royalty. In any primitive society he would unquestionably have assumed the chieftainship. As he grew older his moustache and his sideburns met in a beautifully barbered loop of beard which divided his face, making it look as though it were visored. His dandyism, once assumed, stood still all his long life at blue serge, white linen and brightly polished boots. His expression was tranquil and sentimentally benign but those who tried to break through it, expecting to find a kind of pliant Sunday-school-superintendent cosiness, encountered a steely strength.

In 1880 Lansbury married Bessie Brine, a very pretty girl whose father, albeit that he was descended from James Brine the Tolpuddle Martyr, made it no secret that he considered his new son-in-law beneath him. George was twenty and Bessie was nineteen. In 1884 they succumbed to the immigration touts and sailed for Australia, taking with them their three babies and George’s twelve-year-old brother. The nightmare of the emigrant ship was only succeeded by the nightmare of what awaited them at Brisbane. As soon as he could collect enough money together George returned home to breathe fire and thunder at the callous colonial authorities who were shipping thousands of trusting, simple people into conditions which were outrageous and indecent. The colonists tried to silence him by calling him workshy but George, who was later rather sadly to confess that he was entirely free of ‘the gift of laziness’, let fly in one of his social fabric-renting tirades which finished off his enemies and caused his local M.P., who was present, to suggest that he stand for Parliament.

Someone else who was beginning to notice the benevolent but raucous George was H. M. Hyndman, who was the friend Karl Marx had left behind in England to lead the ‘glorious revolution’, should it occur. Hyndman, who always drove to his soap-box in Hyde Park exquisitely dressed in a frock-coat and top-hat to rouse the rabble, provided Lansbury with the entrée into late Victorian radicalism. In no time at all the £3-a-week worker for a Whitechapel timber yard was meeting William Morris, the Webbs, the absurdly vain John Burn, kind Ben Tillett and, eventually, Lenin himself. He also met Shaw and the dazzling H. G. Wells, though brotherliness met its Waterloo here. G.B. and H.G. found George embarrassing and emotional, and he found them too clever by half. Their incompatibility was one of the earliest instances of the schizophrenic cleavage between heart and head which has played havoc with British socialism ever since.

In 1895 old Mr. Brine died and George took over the timber yard. He was thirty-six and the intensification of his political activities and the added fillip of being an employer instead of an employee made him feel keen to start turning the world upside-down. His method was a dramatic, though never egotistical identification with each social problem. He thrust his good-looking person and boisterous arguments into a series of brilliant tableaux vivants which instantly reduced wordy radical theorizing to a workable reality, and Bumbledom to horrified silence. Dickens had exposed the workhouse system but all that had happened was that those who enjoyed looking could look. Lansbury destroyed this ‘charitable’ voyeurism, threw out the monstrous entertainers and rehabilitated their victims, the paupers. The Prince of Wales, apprehensively presiding at one of Lansbury’s meetings during the nineties, called to discuss the extraordinary problem of the many thousands of innocent people virtually imprisoned in orphanages and workhouses, handed round cigars and nervously referred to the question of underclothes. ‘Certainly they need those, just like you and I do,’ George boomed at him severely.

In 1904 Lansbury made an important new friend—Joseph Fels, a Jewish-American millionaire who had made his pile out of Fels-Naphtha soap. Fels used to tell his critics, ‘I shall go on making as much money as I can: and I will use it to prevent people like you and me being allowed to do so any longer.’ The beginning of Mr. Fels’s perverse policy was the founding of the Vacant Land Cultivation Society. When Keir Hardie introduced Fels to George, George didn’t like him a bit at first. It was the camel and the eye of the needle all over again. But eventually rich Mr. Fels managed to wriggle through into the socialist heaven, where his unerring business sense proved to be a godsend. Lansbury and he became very close friends and the soap profits could be said, as Raymond Postgate, Lansbury’s son-in-law, has remarked, to have altered the whole course of world history. For had it not been for a £500 donation, the Russian Social-Democratic conference which took place in London in 1907 might never have been concluded, nor might its delegates ever have got home. As this was the meeting at which Lenin the Bolshevik carried the day against Martov the Menshevik there is no knowing what vast issues hung upon Mr. Fels’s modest sub. Was there a bat’s squeak hint of the wrath to come that the soap merchant should require some moral assurance that it was a good cause before he advanced the money? It was a very trivial sum to him, after all. But saying, ‘I must first consult my almoner,’ Fels went to Lansbury and so Lenin was able to leave for Russia with his mandate for the Revolution.

Lansbury then began to use the soap profits for buying up derelict farms and turning them into little self-sufficient agricultural colonies for some of the human rubbish he rescued from Poor Law. The biggest of these colonies was Hollesley Bay, a wild and beautiful farm on the Suffolk coast which was eventually to edge its way into literature as Brendan Behan’s borstal.

In 1910 Lansbury put up for Parliament and beat his waspish Tory opponent, L. S. Amery, by 863 votes. Lansbury was fifty-one and so encumbered with office that it was hard to see how he would be able to take on this latest and greatest one. His reputation was settling down to that of the patriarchal tribal chief of magical goodness. The Bow Road house saw a ceaseless procession of visitors, from the youthful Nehru to aged costermongers. Between meetings, Lansbury wrote all his own correspondence in a laborious self-taught hand and read everything which came into the house in the way of printed matter in the rather impressed and wasteful manner of one who was aware of an endless process of self-improvement. His energy was only exceeded by his kindness.

The year 1912 saw the first really big strike of the century and it tempted Lansbury to gather up his scattered reforms and to declare war on the class structure. But some antiquated notion of gallantry caused him to place himself wholly at the service of women’s suffrage instead. He had the Victorian’s mystic worship of women. But while the Pankhursts and the Pethick-Lawrences found him useful, they didn’t want their somewhat stylish campaign too closely linked with Lansbury’s proletarian activities. They constantly reminded Lansbury of their ‘lady’ status and when he virtually gave away his parliamentary seat as a courtly gesture to publicize their political plight, they scarcely thanked him. It taught him a lesson. The ladies would have been astounded that he should have taken it all to heart so. ‘But the cause, Mr. Lansbury!’ Christobel would have screeched.

In 1913 Lansbury became editor of a new newspaper, the Daily Herald. It was a case of the amateur genius. He had no experience of journalism and his writing was very hit-or-miss, but his editing was brilliant. The Herald started as a strike sheet and the first edition sold 13,000 copies. Most of those who contributed to it weren’t socialists at all but simply used it as a platform for their personal literary anarchy. The suffragists used it shamelessly. Someone said that it contained the noblest aspirations and the basest adjectives in the English language. There were moments of high comedy such as when the wistfully Priapic Frank Harris was brought all the way from the Riviera by poor Ben Tillett to help edit it. Harris said that he would edit it according to Christ’s teaching but when he learnt what the salary was he soon changed his mind. The Herald’s tone was spiteful and harsh but running like a thread of gold through all the journalistic ballyhoo was Lansbury’s faith in the doctrine of love and its deus ex machina, universal socialism.

The First World War wounded the Herald grievously. It had neither the money nor the professionalism to get war news like the rest of Fleet Street and it shrivelled up into a skimpy weekly. As its pacifism developed, so did its distinguished contributors drop away. As the carnage mounted, and with it the necessary jingoism to make it acceptable, the Herald began to take such a dangerous anti-war line that plans were made to suppress it, though this never happened. Instead Lansbury had breakfast with Lloyd George at which the wily Prime Minister told the Cockney saint that he knew Haig was a butcher who massacred soldiers uselessly, but he wasn’t able to do anything about it because of the Conservatives.

The Herald was now read by many thoughtful people who were far from being socialists because it was the only newspaper whose information was undistorted by blood-lust and chauvinism, and because George Lansbury, seen in the context of men like Bottomley and Northcliffe, stood out like a rose in a sewage bed. But still nobody recognized in Lansbury’s ideals a perfectly valid and workable form of Christian politics—that is, until it was too late and pacifism began to sweep through the rank and file of British socialism. When more than 17,000 people crushed in and about the Albert Hall to hear Lansbury welcome the Russian Revolution in March, 1918, a less sentimental view had to be taken of him.

The war ended at last and on March 31st, 1919, with a fat kitty of some £200,000 collected from the unions and co-operative societies, the Daily Herald was re-born as a daily. The reactions of scores of young demobbed intellectuals against the repellent journalism of the Tory Press during the fighting years brought the Herald more dazzling talent than it had room for. There were regular contributions from Rose Macaulay, E. M. Forster, Aldous Huxley, Walter de la Mare and Robert Graves. In 1919 the Herald’s vigorous intervention did much to avert an Anglo-Russian war and Bonar Law was urged to consider the prosecution of the paper. A memo was circulated to all commanding officers in the armed forces ordering them to burn the Daily Herald, ‘with as little publicity as possible’, should it ever arrive at their camps, which led to a leader in free-verse by Osbert Sitwell which began,

In 1920 Lansbury went to Russia, the brief-lived and hopeful Russia of Lenin and the nascent Revolution, as different, as Raymond Postgate has said, from the Russia of Stalin as was the Empire of Bonaparte and Fouché from the France of the Convention. Lenin and he chatted in a cold little room in the Czar’s palace. They both thought that it would be only a matter of months before all the socialist groups in the world would merge with the new Soviets in a thankful tide of brotherly love. When Lansbury returned home he tried to tempt all the varied British socialist organizations to join the Internationale en bloc and he put the idea before the annual Labour Party conference. The motion was massively defeated and the political isolation of Lansbury began.

It was easier said than done. Lansbury’s post-war position in the Labour Party had become so extraordinary that any direct action taken against him at once assumed sacrilegious and patricidal associations. To avoid these feelings, which ranged between the deepest blood-guilt and mere bad taste, the Party began to isolate him, leaving him alone on his own little island, from which he radiated his unflinching message of mountain-moving love. It became the custom to treat Lansbury with an almost ceremonious respect and this soon turned into veneration.

Towards the end of 1923 Stanley Baldwin, the Prime Minister, held a general election, the result of which was: Conservatives, 258 seats; Liberals, 158 and Labour, 191. The Liberal Party, to the very real terror of the country, used its dying strength to turn out the Tories and put the Socialists in. The sensation throughout Britain was indescribable. The upper classes found the prospect of railway-men and Scottish peasants in Downing Street hilarious and sufficiently bizarre to be in keeping with the wildness of the decade. But the middle classes, with whom the Royal Family was morally identified, were genuinely frightened. Baldwin and the King clung together in an unconstitutional status quo in their effort to postpone Nemesis. The Socialists were affronted by this and Lansbury, whose resonant voice had no difficulty in penetrating the Palace, was heard reminding the King that this kind of interference had ended with Charles I. As he had also, on another occasion, spoken of the King as ‘George Five’ and was notorious for his friendship with Lenin, the Court believed that Lansbury’s—of all people—was the voice of bloody revolution. The King hung on and hung on until he could decently do so no longer. Then, putting on a red tie, he sent for Ramsay MacDonald. The relief was as great as it was mutual. The King met a courtly, handsome old Highland goat and the new Prime Minister met a tetchy, kindly little royal papa. In no time at all they discovered a subject of profoundly shared interest and were able to settle one of the most pressing questions which had occupied His Majesty’s mind above all else when the Labour Government became a reality—would it wear court dress when it came to kiss hands? Most certainly, said MacDonald, who, as Malcolm Muggeridge later remarked, could hardly wait to get into his.

MacDonald offered Lansbury the Ministry of Transport, a non-Cabinet post. Lansbury believed that this was entirely the King’s doing; he wasn’t going to have somebody in the Cabinet who boomed threats about cutting off his head. Lansbury was bitterly disappointed and refused the offer. The first Labour Government was neither exhilarating nor competent. Its efforts to play down its early ardour by a display of pin stripes and winged collars made it merely frowsty. Eventually it was witless enough to allow itself to be toppled by a letter in the Daily Mail signed by Zinoviev, which told the British Communist Party how to control the British Labour Party and thus start an armed revolution. This letter was almost undoubtedly a political hoax de luxe, but MacDonald fell for it, and so the Government fell because of it.

The Zinoviev Letter was yet one more factor in the isolating process which went on around Lansbury after the war. There were those amongst his colleagues who took care not to stand too near him for fear that his particular brotherhood-of-man redness might brush off on to them. And even those of his friends who saw his beliefs in the best Christian sense realized that they were hardly the kind of thing one could go to the country with. But if they had been able to see beneath what they thought was little more than Lansbury’s dated socialist-Christian sentimentality and recognized the daring idea growing there they would have had genuine cause for alarm. For Lansbury was moving towards an absolute acceptance of the great untried doctrine of Christian pacifism, something which every sound Anglican knew was a notoriously unworkable part of the Faith. But to Lansbury it was the key. All through the twenties, as the stench from the trenches was gradually superseded by the smell of despair as the dole queues multiplied, he mulled over the thrilling possibilities of a political application of Christ’s rule of non-violence. In 1926 he was absorbed in it and the General Strike passed him by. In August of that year he took his wife to Russia. He wasn’t well. He talked to Trotsky and was fooled by the beginnings of Stalinism. He even went so far as to ask himself why he wasn’t a Communist. The answer, as he later realized, was that in applied Christianity he had all he needed to change the world. By 1928 the ‘respect’ which was fast becoming the custom for people of all classes and parties to offer him reached its apogee. In fact he was immobilized by it; like a Roman policeman at Christmas he couldn’t move for tributes. The Labour Party, since it could hardly do less, elected him its Chairman and he poured into its sour councils and anaemic blood the old heady hopefulness. In 1929 the Party won the election against the Conservatives by twenty-nine seats and once again the Liberals held the balance of power.

Lansbury, who was now seventy, knew that he wasn’t wanted in the Cabinet and pretended he didn’t care. He said he thought it would be nice if they made him an ambassador and sent him to Moscow. Instead, he was made First Commissioner of Works, one of the smallest departments in the Government to carry Cabinet rank. He was to look after parks and palaces. To add to the joke, a flashy young upper-class assistant called Oswald Mosley was allotted to him. Nor did the comedy cease there, for no sooner had this been announced than Ramsay’s great wail of but-what-shall-we-wear-when-we-go-to-see-the-King was heard in Downing Street. Blue serge, said Lansbury. And brightly polished boots. Knee breeches, said MacDonald. And the great issue raged. While unemployment spilt over into millions and Germany became a land of sick and dying children because of the Geddes vindictive squeeze-until-the-pips-squeak policy, the first action of the first socialist Prime Minister of Great Britain on taking office was to work himself up into a paddy because the man in charge of the tulips in Regent’s Park and the flagpole at Windsor wouldn’t wear fancy dress.

Lansbury might have been forgiven if he treated the Office of Works as a sinecure but this wasn’t his way. He used this curious appointment parabolically. He tore down miles of railings and the people flocked in—to tear down the gardens, said The Times. Nothing happened. All through 1930 he busied himself with what was in effect a miniature of how he would deal with dreary officialdom versus the natural pleasures of the world, were they in his power. He carved his credo on the unlikely material offered to him and to the astonishment of his colleagues, who thought they had silenced him, it worked. He built the Lido by the Serpentine and allowed mixed bathing. ‘Grotesque and horrible’, shuddered The Times, whose correspondents concerned themselves to an astonishing extent with the ending of the male privilege of swimming in the nude. Lansbury merely said, ‘I should myself not object to men and women bathing in a state of nature if what are described as morality and public opinion would allow me to give permission.’ After this The Times probably had no option in calling the handsome, pure-minded old Minister of Works the ‘Caliban of the Parks’ and the other papers carried shocked descriptions of the bare arms and legs of young Londoners. A body without the least official backing set itself up as the Parks Purity Police and issued a report of such morbid salacity that Lansbury forgot his restraint and blasted it out of existence.

All the business about the parks brought him into considerable contact with the King, who, as Ranger, expected to be consulted on everything. Their meetings were odd. They were both men who had made a religion of family life. Each had, for more than half a century and in his different way, been conditioned by the hyperbolic respect of his fellow creatures. And each had, beneath his cultivated hierarchic façade, a racy pre-Victorian unshockable knowledge of humanity. Each, too, was confused by the generally understood class issues. The King, simply by fact of being King, was forced to reflect in public a great many bourgeois virtues which could not have any place in his private life, while Lansbury’s approach to life was assured and in its way, aristocratic, and particularly so when he was at his most ostentatiously plebeian. To appreciate the full meaning of this one has only to measure him against Ramsay MacDonald. A courtier, worried about one of Lansbury’s time-oblivious audiences with the King, crept in to find the two old men sitting side by side ‘like charwomen’ and the King saying indignantly, ‘… but they called it a minor operation, Mr. Lansbury, and they opened me from here to here’.

All through 1930 unemployment soared, while the Government did nothing. Worse, Philip Snowden the socialist Chancellor began to talk like the meanest-minded financier. Wall Street and Threadneedle Street were slimy with slump and the younger unemployed began to walk out of the sordid towns towards the hills and moors. Wandervogeling became the great craze. There was a great burst of hiking, camping, sunbathing and youth hostelling and Lansbury became much identified with fresh air. In 1931, although it might have been thought impossible, the economic crisis grew worse. Plans for reform, including a quite reasonable one by Oswald Mosley, were frustrated by the sheer lassitude which the disaster generated. Montagu Norman, the bearded, sinister and supremely arrogant Governor of the Bank of England, who was as near to being an E. Phillips Oppenheim character as to make no difference, began to take a scandalous hand in national affairs, treating cabinet ministers like clerks and quite often disappearing for personal reasons for days on end while the nation waited.

By June 1931 unemployment reached the two and three-quarter million mark and Philip Snowden told a shocked country that the British Government was virtually bankrupt. Savings of £96 million had to be made at once and £66 million of this would have to be got by cutting the dole. Almost at the same moment that Snowden announced this the great Kreditanstalt bank in Austria failed and had to close its doors, and cold fear swept through Europe. After scores of meetings and what might be called ‘non-meetings’, the Labour Government resigned. Only not quite. Calling all his old colleagues together one notorious Monday morning, Ramsay MacDonald shattered them with the news that although they had all lost their posts, he had not. The King was going to let him form a National Government with Stanley Baldwin and Herbert Samuel. And so Lansbury left his unlikely niche at the Ministry of Works. His office had been brief and there would be no more of it. The only thing by his hand to reach the Statute Book during a long lifetime of public service was a bill to safeguard the ancient monuments of Britain.

Ramsay MacDonald’s abandonment of his colleagues was no more than the inevitable sequel to what had been slowly and obviously happening to him for years. One of Saki’s characters remarked of a young adventurer ‘that he had sprung from the people, but he hadn’t sprung far enough’. By the ruthlessness with which he forsook his friends in their blackest hour it was obvious that MacDonald wasn’t going to risk having such a thing said of him. Lansbury, who was not without the inspired malice of the saintly, said of him that he had ‘reaped the harvest of his apostasy’—which Thomas Jones called ‘a cruel verdict’.

The Economy Bill was passed, the Gold Standard was abandoned and, crowning horror, there was insubordination in the Royal Navy of such proportions that it was prevented from going on manœuvres. In October there was the famous ‘Coupon’ election in which the Labour Party’s seats were decimated, only forty-six socialists being returned. Nearly everybody supported the coalition. George Lansbury was the only cabinet minister to retain his seat, and so he became Leader of the Labour Party. His task was unenviable. He had to sit on the Front Bench like God’s Good Man and act as a kind of sublime corrective to the abysmal shortcomings of his Party when it had known power. He represented political decency and hope to the now three million unemployed. There were those who found him anathema—Winston, for instance, who occasionally abandoned his hod at Chartwell to drop a brick at Westminster. He and Lansbury clashed scurrilously. ‘Hold your tongue!’ the old man would boom, and Winston was heard mumbling furiously something about ‘a perfect cataract of semi-coherent insults from the so-called head of the so-called opposition….’

The National Government discovered a new way to chop the dole estimates—the Means Test. No one seemed to appreciate what this cost in terms of simple human dignity. Ramsay MacDonald got better and better looking, and vaguer and vaguer. He and Lansbury headed the processions which swept to and from the House of Lords on great occasions. They made a fine couple. On one such trip Ramsay turned to his old colleague and whispered, ‘George, do you feel your age now? I do. I do not always know what I mean to do. … Often I am speaking and I have no idea how the sentence I am saying should finish….’

In 1932 Japan attacked China and the Government refused to back the League of Nations’ proposed boycott in the form of economic non-co-operation with the aggressor, so inaugurating the appalling policy which was to lead straight to the Second World War. Cripps and Attlee, both brilliant men and true, but devoid of platform magic, now began to close upon the venerable Lansbury. The three made a strange bridge which stretched from Tolstoy’s humane romanticism to the new Fabianism of G. D. H. Cole and Harold Laski. The bridge was slight and idealistically precarious. There was no room on it for MacDonald, Clynes, Snowden or even Miss Bondfield; nor for many another Labour brother who had lost his head when shown the political heights. Although the world of 1932 was as black as black could be, Lansbury, red-faced and good as an archangel between Attlee and Cripps, his pallid disciples, experienced a new surge of his old vision. And it gave all three a formidable energy, just when energy was needed. Fascism, as compulsive and as exciting as sex to those with a taste for it, had crossed the Channel and was percolating down from the dinner tables of country houses to sinks in the East End. Soon, Lansbury and his friends found themselves having to defend the most elementary civil liberties. They became watchdogs and took to questioning everything which took place in Parliament and the Press.

In 1933 Bessie Lansbury died and later that year George broke his thigh falling off a platform at Gainsborough Town Hall. But as he had absolute certainty that he and Bessie would meet again in a Thaxted-like Heaven full of country dancing and Mr. Kitto’s spiky gaiety, and as his accident carried with it no superstitious portents, he was able to proceed to the final and most extraordinary phase of his life with equanimity. His illness had a similar sentimental impact on the country as that of the King’s a few years earlier and brought him the kind of popularity most politicians would give their right arms to possess. The masses had become a trusting sparrow in his fatherly old hand and first to the amusement and then to the consternation of the Labour Party he soothed the people with lullabies of Peace.

Popular pacifism in 1933 tended to be treated by the authorities like popular anything else. It was just a craze, like playing yo-yo or ‘all this hiking’, and it would die out. But this didn’t happen. Even when the Oxford Union, on February 9th, voted by 275 votes to 153, ‘that this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country’ it was thought that the phase had merely taken a typically undergraduate turn. But soon after this Peace began to create havoc at the hustings. At a by-election at East Fulham the pro-armaments Tory was roundly defeated by a destroy-all-the-weapons Socialist. Also, quite ordinary people who weren’t supposed to know much about such things were making a great fuss about the Government’s failure to back the League’s policy towards Japan. On January 30th of this strange year Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich and on March 28th, to the annoyance of practically everybody, Winston thanked God publicly for the French army.

On October 14th, the Disarmament Conference, which had begun the year before, was resumed and the delegates patiently waited for Hitler’s signature. Instead, it got a telegram telling it that Germany was not only withdrawing from the Conference but also from the League itself. Hitler had taken a risk but nothing happened. The French didn’t seize the Ruhr and the Poles didn’t seize East Prussia. So he took this to mean that in future he could do what he liked, and it became merely a matter of how long it would suit his convenience to prepare for the Second World War. This terrible inevitability was not—could not—be accepted by a Europe only fifteen years away from the carnage of the Western Front. The sheer obscenity of the idea made people look around for some untried alternative, and so doing they saw George Lansbury and the League of Nations. Both were immediately deified. ‘Leaguomania’ became a cult and Lansbury became a saviour.

In October, 1934, Canon Dick Sheppard of St. Martin-in-the-Fields invited people to write the following words on a postcard and send it to him:

And so was born the Peace Pledge Union which, by June 1936, had over a hundred thousand male members. The foundations of the Peace Pledge Union had been laid a year earlier, on June 27th, 1935, when the results of an enormous Peace Ballot gained by a nation-wide house-to-house canvass were announced. This ballot had been organized by a body called the National Declaration Committee, headed by Lord Cecil and it was in league with the League. The answers to the five questions asked all came down massively on the side of Peace and as the Ballot had the approval of 11½ million votes it made a record as the greatest private referendum ever held. The Peace Ballot of 1935 marked the pinnacle of thirties pacifism and at the same time revealed the limitations of the League of Nations. This nation-wide knocking on doors and beating of breasts quite drowned the sounds from German dockyards, where the Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, Bismarck and Tirpitz were being laid down.

The Labour Party held its annual conference that year at the Dome in Brighton. The main debate, which was the longest debate in the Party’s history, was on the resolution calling on Baldwin’s National Government to support the League in preventing Mussolini from attacking the medieval African kingdom of Abyssinia for no other reason than to make a Roman triumph. Stafford Cripps opposed the resolution because he distrusted the League, which he called ‘the international burglars’ union’ and also because he thought sanctions against Italy would involve Labour in a capitalist war. He was now deeply committed to Lansbury’s vision of universal brotherhood and he wasn’t going to do anything which might precipitate working people into conflict with each other for the sake of such things as money or militarism. When Lansbury rose to make his great speech against the resolution he was given an amazing reception. Affection seemed to rush at his dignified old body from all sides of the huge room, the entire conference rose to its feet and sang ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow’ and Lansbury, all unaware that this warm embrace concealed the kiss of death, was encouraged not only to give his reasons for not supporting the resolution but to make his speech an occasion for his personal apologia pro vita sua. It was superb. It was the best and most thrilling argument for applying the great doctrine of Christian pacifism to statecraft ever heard on a political platform. The Conference was mesmerized by the transparent fidelity of the old man and when he at last sat down its love for him rose in storms of applause.

One man didn’t clap. When, at long last, there was silence, this man lumbered up to the front of the room, and those that watched saw, as he did so, the platform of hope slowly turn into a scaffold. Executioners are not called upon to be kind, considerate or even just. Only efficient. Ernest Bevin was this pre-eminently. He saw the Labour Party soothed into silvery happiness by its saint and the sight made him sick. The aspirates flew, the awkward flesh rolled in fury and the small sagacious eyes glittered. He sneered at Cripps, he cocked his snook at the Blake-like hopefulness and slowly but surely he brought the bludgeon of his wrath nearer and nearer to the holy one. And there, in full view of the great movement he had helped to found and at the zenith of his moral influence, George Lansbury was martyred.

‘It is placing the Executive and the Movement in an absolutely wrong position,’ Bevin roared at the deathly pale Lansbury, ‘to be hawking your conscience round from body to body asking to be told what you ought to do with it….’

For minutes after the uproar which followed, Lansbury’s bewildered eyes swept the sea of faces as he waited for at least one single soul out of all the vast concourse which had clapped him so short a time since to stand up in his favour. No one did. He had preached his faith and he had died his death: there was to be no resurrection. Though sickened by what it had seen, the Party wasn’t so enfeebled as not to be able to rally to expediency and the resolution in support of sanctions against Italy was carried by 2,168,000 to 102,000. Lansbury then rose and the Executive let him shuffle past without a glance, without a gesture. All except Herbert Morrison, who suddenly leant forward and took his hand and murmured something about ‘standing by your beliefs’.

The next day Lansbury resigned from the Leadership and Major Attlee took his place. The Tories, enchanted and exhilarated by the fact that the Socialists had slaughtered their greatest vote-collector, immediately announced a general election, with the result that the National Government was formidably strengthened, the League of Nations was thrown on the junk heap and Italy was ‘allowed’ Abyssinia.

And so the cowards-in-Cabinet tottered on towards the abyss. And so, too, did George Lansbury, who now seemed to be ageing daily. He had four more years to live. He had practically no money, never having bothered to claim his ex-cabinet minister’s pension and being vague about most other money matters. The house in Bow Road continued to be full of letters and people. He wrote a lot of flaccid journalism for magazines like John Bull and the literary process somehow contrived to turn the noble heart-warming oratory into a sentimental mish-mash which could only appeal to the very simple or the very charitable. He had an enjoyable, energy-giving row with Sir John Reith. And when news of the rigged Trotskyite trials filtered out of Russia, he faced up to the failure of Stalinist communism. The issues of the Spanish Civil War were such as to make any man question pacifism and Lansbury never quite allowed himself to understand them. As the Second World War drew nearer and nearer, he continued to repeat the truism that the causes of war were financial, and he pressed for an economic peace conference. Now that he was reckoned ‘harmless’ he was allowed unusual privileges both inside and outside the House for speaking his mind. He could not see the mixture of condescension and courtesy which existed behind this attitude towards him and believed that he was making some kind of come-back. And this rather pathetic assumption renewed much of his old pre-Bevin verve and set him on a last Quixotic crusade.

In 1935 he had lent his name to a pacifist group called the Fellowship of Reconciliation which was run by a number of Christian pacifists which included Dick Sheppard, Canon Raven and Percy Bartlett. The idea of the Fellowship was explained by Lansbury in a letter to The Times. Certain people should undertake personal ‘embassies of reconciliation’. But the unfortunate thing was that, when it came down to brass tacks, Lansbury was the only ambassador who turned out to be persona grata. And so, at seventy-seven, and with released doves swirling about him wherever he went, he toured the United States in the oratorical circus which the Americans call a lecture-tour. His message was nothing less than the message of Boyd Orr ten sickening years later, that the over-fed countries must share their food and wealth with the under-fed countries and that there should be world-help committees.

He followed up this American triumph by a round of visits to distinguished European social democrats and liberals like Leon Blum, Van Zeeland and the famous old socialist Prime Minister of Denmark, Thorvald Stauning, who belonged to the age of socialist giants like Jaurès and Liebknecht, and who, like Lansbury, was rapidly becoming a morally displaced person. Of course, all these leaders spoke peace, peace—who didn’t? Even Hitler mouthed the word for talismanic effect. Lansbury took train after train and went from frontier to frontier, full of excitement, full of hope. But when he came home the Commons laughed at him—only in its best jolly way, of course—but even when they yelled, ‘Go and tell that to Hitler!’ he took the banter gamely.

The Government was now forfeiting its decency piecemeal and men like Lansbury no longer had to even pretend that they were dealing with ‘Right Hon. Gentlemen’ other than in the mere convention of the phrase. The latest and most beastly concession to the Nazis was the suspension in Britain of the age-old right of asylum. The number of victims added to the gas chambers by this smug policy will never be known. Only what were called ‘special cases’ were admitted and Lansbury showed an almost comic invention in deluging Sir John Anderson with his ‘special cases’. How many lives the old man saved by this personal effort is something else which will never be known. Nor was Lansbury the only man in Parliament to draw in his skirts before the mess of expediency which was to lead to Munich. Eden, Cripps and Duff Cooper all shrank with disgust from the official line.

‘I think my work for the Party, as a party, is finished. I see life ever so much broader than in the days gone by….’ Lansbury wrote to Stafford Cripps. And like D. H. Lawrence in another context, he added, ‘The Party nearly chokes me: I want to shout out against them.’

He went to the Foreign Office and half-demanded, half-requested that it should make arrangements for him to meet the Führer. The meeting took place in Berlin on April 19th, 1937. Lansbury was accompanied by two Quakers, Percy Bartlett and Corder Catchpole. Their appointment with Hitler was for one o’clock on Monday. On Sunday they all went to pray at the Friends’ Meeting House, while the world’s Press reporters buzzed outside, fascinated by the impending conjunction of light and darkness. Lansbury entered the lion’s den alone, except for the interpreter, Herr Schmidt, and a nervous Foreign Office man. They were together for two hours and the Führer demanded, for what must have been for him a charade in the Austro-Hungarian manner, the privileges attached to a ‘private meeting’, which meant that no statement would be released. Lansbury honoured the Führer’s wishes and no full account of what took place exists. There was a platitudinous outline of common courtesies. Hitler was restrained and didn’t shout or bite the carpet. Lansbury’s disingenuous thumbnail sketch of him was that he was ‘a mixture-dreamer and a fanatic, that he appeared free of personal ambition, that he wasn’t ashamed of his humble start in life, that he was a vegetarian and lived in the country rather than in town, that he was a bachelor who liked children and old people, and that he was obviously lonely’. ‘I wished,’ added Lansbury, ‘that I could have gone to Berchtesgaden and stayed with him for a little while. I felt that Christianity in its purest sense might have a chance with him.’

The following day was Hitler’s birthday and rather than watch a Krupp’s benefit make its way along the Unter den Linden Lansbury and his friends turned their attention to the Berlin slums. There the poor folk and children besieged them with parrot cries of Peace! The visit caused a great sensation all over the world and was praised or condemned in the most extravagant language.

After Berlin, Rome. Count Grandi arranged it. About eight weeks later, on July 8th, Lansbury went to talk peace with Mussolini. Dick Sheppard saw him off at Victoria Station. He was greeted at Rome by an army of reporters and photographers and was taken straightway to the Palazzo Venezia, from whose balcony the Duce made his Caesarean announcements. Mussolini’s customary manner of receiving human beings was to remain seated behind an heroic desk at the far end of a great room, the idea being that the supplicant would mislay his resolution while crossing the formidable intervening floor-space. But when Lansbury was shown in, damp and tired from the long train ride, Mussolini hurried to the door to meet him, saw that he was exhausted and immediately arranged another meeting to take place when the old man had rested. He seemed to affect the Duce like a truth drug. The Dictator spoke English. Lansbury told him that 1935 was no time to be building empires and Mussolini was puzzled. How was it right to build them in 1835 and not right in 1935? Lansbury, who had been wandering round Rome’s Christian monuments, lectured the Duce severely on Love. The Duce listened and listened. But when Lansbury had the temerity to point out that it was the Nazarene and not the Julian family which dominated the Eternal City, it was too much. Saying, ‘Good night, we must do the best we can’, he once more walked the length of his megalomaniac’s audience chamber and showed Lansbury out. He stayed in Rome for a few days, swamped by the beautiful Italian children all screaming, ‘Peace! peace!’ and returning their Fascist salutes with the Boy Scout salute. He talked to Marconi, who was old and disillusioned and most upset, like Colonel Moore-Brabazon, that such a marvellous invention as the aeroplane should have been turned into a horror weapon by the militarists.

He returned home to hear Winston urging the Government to arm at once and to accuse it of having lost the years that the locust hath eaten. Baldwin said that he had no mandate for rearmament, to which Winston replied, ‘The responsibility of ministers for the public safety is absolute and needs no mandate.’ Everybody was reading a lively exposé of the Tories called Guilty Men and plans were being made to distribute gas masks. Lansbury listened to the clamour for a while and then packed his bags and set off for Prague, for Warsaw, for Vienna. In each capital it was the same, best manners in front of the old man, glib concurrence with the idea of Peace as a desirable abstraction, then fun with the children. Lansbury was far from being a holy fool but he did have a genius for dragons’ lairs. As he approached, hard-bitten careerists, tyrants, and monsters would automatically rummage about in their sub-consciences for fragments of human decency and youthful idealism.

On March 7th, 1936, Hitler marched into the Rhineland. Germany’s arms expenditure had reached the terrifying figure of a thousand millions a year while the United Kingdom’s figure was a mere £186 millions. To increase this Chamberlain proposed a patriotic tax called the National Defence Contribution (NDC) on business people. The City at once called this ‘socialism’ and was furious—so furious that N.D.C. was never tried. In March, 1938, Hitler invaded Austria and in August that year he mobilized for the descent on Czechoslovakia. Chamberlain at once flew to Berchtesgaden to talk to Hitler and returned with ‘Peace in our time’. Lansbury, like the vast majority of people, saw Munich as a triumph. He was now the President of the Peace Pledge Union. When the end came, on September 3rd, 1939, he went to the Commons and acknowledged the crushed olive branch and the crippled dove.

A few months later he died and soon afterwards the bombs of the ‘Mixture-dreamer’ obliterated number 39 Bow Road as thoroughly as eleven and a half million pacifists were obliterating their pledges.