After 1918 power ebbed away from the Liberal Party, from British imperialism (slowly) and from unearned wealth, and moved towards organised Labour (fleetingly), the United States of America, the new Soviet Union, and the mighty press proprietors. There was no shortage of diarists to record this fundamentally changing post-war world.
Beatrice Webb – intellectual, well connected and rich – embodied the new creed of socialist paternalism, from which the Labour Party has never escaped; Walter Citrine, an electrician who became a masterful trade union organiser, found himself at the head of the first ‘general’ strike of labour in 1926. Despite their diametrically opposite origins, their diaries show them united in concluding that the labour movement needed more authoritarian leadership in order to succeed.
For the MPs or future MPs who kept diaries, such as Leo Amery, Harold Nicolson, Henry ‘Chips’ Channon and Alfred Duff Cooper, it was clear that, personally, they felt their privileges and position under threat, and that politically the Great War and the Treaty of Versailles which followed it had resulted in discontent at home and trouble abroad, particularly in Europe, where even then some saw that the post-war settlement had already created the conditions for the next world war.
Others on the fringes of public life, or beginning their journeys into it, were well placed to observe the sublime and the ridiculous: Lt. Louis Mountbatten, Violet Bonham Carter (daughter of H. H. Asquith, the former prime minister), John Reith (future Director General of the BBC); George Riddell (Lloyd George’s media man, an early cross between Rupert Murdoch and Alastair Campbell), Frances Stevenson (Lloyd George’s mistress), Thomas Jones (senior civil servant), Robert Bruce Lockhart (diplomat, journalist and spy), the writer/publisher Virginia Woolf, and the novelists Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell.
The collapse of the Liberal Party arose in part from the events of December 1916. Herbert Asquith, whose eldest son had been killed three months earlier in France, was struggling to lead the country in what was a European war for imperial supremacy. Supported by The Times and Daily Mail,* David Lloyd George, Asquith’s Liberal colleague in the Cabinet, replaced Asquith as Prime Minister (but not as Liberal Party leader) and emerged in 1918 as the political hero who had turned disaster into victory – a victory that had cost the lives of over a million British and Empire subjects.
In the General Election that followed, the ‘Asquith Liberals’ refused to join Lloyd George’s new ‘Lib–Con’ coalition government, which lasted for four years.† By 1926, a number of senior Liberal MPs had transferred allegiance to the new Labour Party. The Asquith–Lloyd George split endured into the next decades, and the party almost died from its wounds. The ‘women’s war’ which had indeed been waged along the lines of a military campaign, entered a ‘truce’ for the duration of the war and the procrastination and prevarication of the politicians over votes for women could not be sustained after 1918.
By 1922 the Labour Party, resting on the three pillars of socialism, trade unionism and Christianity, had become a political force under the organisational brilliance of its elected chairman and leader, James Ramsay MacDonald. An inconclusive result in the General Election in 1923 led to MacDonald becoming the first Labour Prime Minister of a minority administration. He was a lonely and unhappy figure at Number 10: widowed in 1911 with five children to bring up, he never remarried. This first ever Labour government lasted only a year, to be replaced by the Conservatives who remained the dominant influence in British politics for the next two decades. When Labour returned briefly to government in 1929, interest in the policies and parties of National Socialism on the German and Italian models began to attract some leading politicians from the mainstream parties.
As the first chapter opens, Lloyd George is into the third year of his Coalition – a Liberal Prime Minister depending on Conservative support.
Sunday, 30 January 1921
10 Downing Street
The Prime Minister asked me to come round at 8 o’clock to have some dinner and to sing Welsh hymns.
Miss Stevenson joined us at dinner upstairs and the conversation somehow got quickly on to Victor Hugo. I confessed I had never read any of the novels and this set the PM going and with great eloquence he told us the story of Les Miserables – ‘the greatest book ever written not excepting Holy Writ. I have read it twenty times …’
Sometime during dinner the German indemnity was mentioned. The PM said they could pay the hundred millions a year easily enough. I suggested it was less than the capital of Lord Leverhulme’s companies* and that he (the PM) could minimise it by speaking of it in that fashion.
We adjourned to the drawing room and for an hour Miss Stevenson played Welsh music.
Thomas Jones
Tuesday, 8 February 1921
The growing unemployment has added to the ferment of rebellious discontentment. The wonder is that there is not more outward sign of angry resentment. Perhaps it is due to the fact that for the first time some sort of weekly allowance is being received without the stigma of pauperism … The principle of deterrence is completely discarded: no one suggests that unemployment is to be punished.
The Labour Party alone has had its enquiry and report (into unemployment) – the Labour Party is more and more taking the position of the only alternative Government to Lloyd George.
Beatrice Webb
Friday, 15 April 1921
Richmond-on-Thames
At 10 tonight, unless something happens meanwhile, all trains, trams, buses, mines and perhaps electric light works come to an end. The servants have been to the Co-ops and brought back a weeks groceries. We have a bundle of candles. Our most serious lack is coal, as Nelly forgot to order any. We burn coke in the drawing room and cook on gas. Still heaven knows why, I don’t believe the strike will happen.*
Virginia Woolf
Sunday, 17 April 1921
And I was perfectly right. The strike didn’t happen. About 7 o’clock L[eonard] rang up Margaret and heard that the Triple Alliance had split: the railwaymen and transport workers refusing to go on with it, and leaving the miners by themselves. Nothing is yet accurately known. Presumably the miners will have to give in, and I shall get my hot bath, and bake home made bread again; yet it seems a pity somehow – if they’re to be forced back and the mine owners triumphant. I think this is my genuine feeling, though not very profound.
Virginia Woolf
Coal. The opinion in general is that the owners ought never to have put forward such a big cut in wages and that some scheme for graduating the fall should have been devised … This has been Churchill and Montagu’s line and they are right.
Luckily for the Government, the miners confused the issue by flooding the mines and clamouring for a subsidy. The PM [Lloyd George] fastened on this and rode off on the back of the poor pit pony and pulled round … Then came the collapse of the Triple Alliance and the Red Revolution was postponed once more. It was the most exciting day since the armistice – three Cabinet meetings and endless comings and goings, the PM in great form as the day went on in his favour. The Strike Committee very sick … The Strike books had been issued … the troops were steaming in ship and train from Ireland, from Malta, from Silesia to defend us from the men of Fife. The Duke of Northumberland was lecturing about Moscow and the Miners in the Morning Post … I think we shall slide into at any rate a temporary settlement, the owners going without profits for 3 or 4 months, the men putting up with a reduction of from 2 to 3 shillings per day …
Thomas Jones
Monday, 27 June 1921
Today the manual working class is descending rapidly into destitution: not far off, relatively to the standard they attained during the war, from the destitution they suffered in 1840–50 … The universal lowering of the wages of the factory operative and the mechanic, and the sweeping away of the Agricultural Wages Board has completed the disillusionment; and the miners are now proved to have been right when they told the other trade unionists that if they were beaten it would be a rout for the whole working class.
Beatrice Webb
Thursday, 14 July 1921
10 Downing Street, Irish negotiations
De Valera has gone, after having been with D[avid Lloyd George] nearly 3 hours. I have never seen D so excited as he was before De Valera arrived, at 4.30. He kept walking in and out of my room and I could see he was working out the best way of dealing with DeV. As I told him afterwards, he was bringing up all his guns! He had a big map of the British empire hung up on the wall in the Cabinet room, with great blotches of red all over it. This was to impress DeV. In fact, D says that the aim of these talks is to impress upon DeV the greatness of the B.E. and to get him to recognise it, and the King. In the course of conversation today D said to DeV: ‘The B.E. is a sisterhood of nations – the greatest in the world. Look at this table: There sits Africa – English and Boer; there sits Canada – French, Scotch and English; there sits Australia, representing many races – even Maoris; there sits India; there sit the representatives of England, Scotland and Wales; all we ask you to do is to take your place in this sisterhood of free nations. It is an invitation, Mr De Valera: we invite you here.’
D said he was very difficult to keep to the point – he kept going off at a tangent and talking formulas and refusing to face facts. And every time D seemed to be getting him and De Valera appeared to be warming, he suddenly drew back as if frightened and timid. D says he is the man with the most limited vocabulary he has ever met!
D turned to another tack and said, ‘I shall be sorry if this conference fails: terrible as events have been in Ireland, it is nothing to what they will be if we fail to come to an agreement … I hesitate to think of the horror if war breaks out again in Ireland.’
‘But,’ said De Valera, getting very excited: ‘This is a threat of force – of coercion.’ ‘No, Mr De Valera,’ said D, ‘I am simply forecasting what will inevitably happen if these conversations fail, and if you refuse our invitation to join us.’
Frances Stevenson
Monday, 29 August 1921
Scotland
With LG and Mrs LG to Blair Atholl where we remained until Wednesday, when we motored to Inverness. The Duke and Duchess most kind and hospitable. It was interesting to see the relics of the chieftain system – kilted pipers after dinner, kilted gamekeepers and servants – all most impressive.
The Duke says he has to pay 18s 7d in the £ in taxation and fears he will be unable to continue to live at Blair Atholl. As it is, for a part of the year he occupies a small house on the estate. The Duchess is a talented person and a hard worker. She is a brilliant pianist and has composed some excellent music.
George Riddell
Lord Louis Mountbatten accompanied David, the Prince of Wales (later Edward VIII) on a naval tour which took them to India and Japan – both of which countries were especially significant for the young sub-lieutenant.
Thursday, 17 November 1921
HMS Renown
We anchored in Bombay Harbour at 6.30 am. I dressed in white full dress at once, as there was a lot to do.
At 9.00 H. E. the naval C-in-C came on board. He left after ten minutes and then the Viceroy, accompanied by Lord Rawlinson (the military C-in-C) and 7 of the Ruling Princes attached to the staff, paid his official call. The Ruling Princes were dressed in their full state clothes and looked magnificent …
When this was all over the official procession started. This was done on a magnificent scale (rather too magnificent to be to David’s liking, I fear) … The reception he got was really rather wonderful considering that Mr Mahatma Gandhi had arrived at 7 o’clock this morning and was putting all his forces in the field to boycott David.
Louis Mountbatten
Wednesday, 7 December 1921
The amazing skill with which Lloyd George has carried through the negotiations with his own Cabinet and with Sinn Fein has revolutionised the political situation. Whether or not it be true, few enlightened persons, even among the Liberals and Labour men, believe that any other man could have got this peace by understanding; no other leader could have whipped the Tories to heel and compelled them to recognise the inevitability of Irish independence.
Beatrice Webb
A question of conscience has been agitating my mind these days. I read those gruesome accounts of the Russian famine and wonder whether we are not brutes in failing to give all our available income, over and above the requirements for our own work, to the Russian Famine Fund? … The always present doubt whether, by saving a Chinese or Russian child from dying this year, you will prevent it dying next year, together with the larger question of whether those races are desirable inhabitants, compared to other races, paralyses the charitable impulse. Have we not English children dying from lack of milk? Obviously one would not spend one’s available income in saving a Central African negro from starving or dying from disease; I am not certain that I would deny myself to save a Frenchman.
Beatrice Webb
Wednesday, 12 April 1922
Japan
On looking out of the bathroom scuttle at 6.45 a.m. I was able to catch my first glimpse of the famous Fujiyama.
I came on deck in time to see the Japanese First Fleet fire their 21-gun salute. Next to our own service I have never seen such fine ships; any one of them could have taken us on, on equal terms … I received the impression that here was a power to be reckoned with in a way in which no one who has not been here and seen for himself can possibly conceive … As we entered the breakwater a flight of aeroplanes flew out to meet us. It is largely owing to General Woodroffe’s efforts, when he was last out here, that our R.A.F. are teaching the Naval Air Service here, and most of our officers in the mission are ex-R.N.A.S. men … Our own people say that the Japanese do not make good pilots.
Louis Mountbatten
Wednesday, 10 May 1922
It was still quite cool today. I think we are all sorry to be leaving such an interesting and picturesque place as Japan, but there can be no doubt about everyone’s joy at the prospect of returning home, especially mine! The return voyage is expected to last exactly six weeks.
As regards Japan from the point of view of a world power – my visit has been an eye opener to me as regards her resources, her ships, her army. Their Navy is a crib of ours, their Army bears the unmistakable stamp of Prussia, their newspapers and police are revoltingly American and their ladies copy the latest Paris fashions. Nevertheless they are losing their old stoicism and unless considerable improvement in pay and conditions of living are granted to the services, they will have a mutiny. Japan is paying the penalty of taking civilisation upon her. Unrest is growing among the working classes. Strikes and May Day disturbances have already started. A war might save them, as the people are still ultra patriotic: this is the war I fear.
Louis Mountbatten
Thursday, 22 June 1922
Just heard the sad news about Henry Wilson* – Will the Irish troubles never end? D[avid Lloyd George] very upset as we all are. Whatever he has done lately, he was a most lovable person, and we were very near him during the war. Can scarcely believe the news. It will put the whole Irish question back into the melting pot again. D had been warned … that there were dangerous Irishmen in London … but we had been rather inclined to discount the warning at this juncture.
Frances Stevenson
Saturday, 22 July 1922
To Chequers where I remained until Monday morning.
Much talk about trade conditions. The PM most anxious for facts that would confirm his opinion that Germany is on the edge of bankruptcy. Not getting these from Mond or Geddes† he did not pursue the subject. Geddes said that the Dunlop Company, of which he is chairman, have a big bicycle tyre factory in Germany and that one of the best tests of a country’s prosperity is the number of bicycle tyres required. Just now his factory cannot turn out enough, which leads him to think the German working classes, notwithstanding the fall of the mark, are not doing so badly. This was a shock to LG but on the other hand it may well be that the tyres are being exported. Who can tell?
George Riddell
Wednesday, 16 August 1922
I should be reading Ulysses and fabricating my case for and against. I have read 200 pages so far – not a third; and have been amused, stimulated, charmed, interested by the first 2 or 3 chapters – to the end of the Cemetery scene; and then puzzled, bored, irritated, and disillusioned as by a queasy undergraduate scratching his pimples. And Tom, great Tom [T. S. Eliot], thinks this on a par with War and Peace! An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me …
Virginia Woolf
The Coalition government of Conservatives and Liberals under Lloyd George ended in October 1922, and a General Election was held on 15 November.
Monday, 23 October–late November 1922
Scotland
I felt a very different atmosphere about [the election in] Paisley altogether this time. There were 5,000 unemployed out in the streets and great distress. Coming out of a schoolhouse meeting, a woman said to me ‘Could you bring up your children on 15/- a week?’ – I said, ‘No, I couldn’t.’ She said, ‘Well why should you have so much and I so little?’ a question to which there is obviously no answer. I never hated anything more than this ‘straight fight with Labour’ and feeling that they regarded one as a sleek canting capitalist. One might criticise their rudeness – their unfairness – their inaccuracy – their lack of good humour and all of our sense of the courtesies of a fight – but yet emotionally we felt that in their shoes we wld have voted Labour every time. The tide of one’s emotions was – however wrongly and unreasonably – with them.
Violet Bonham Carter
This morning I had the interview about the BBC. Sir William Noble* came out to get me and he was smiling in a confidential sort of way. Present were [representatives of the wireless manufacturers]. I put it all before God last night. They didn’t ask me many questions and some they did I didn’t know the meaning of. (The fact is I hadn’t the remotest idea as to what broadcasting was and I hadn’t troubled to find out. If I had tried I should probably have found difficulty in discovering anyone who knew.) I think they had more or less made up their minds that I was the man before they saw me and that it was chiefly a matter of confirmation.
They asked me what salary I wanted and I said £2,000.
John Reith
Thursday, 28 December 1922
I told Mother I wanted her to live to see me a knight anyhow. I feel if this job succeeds and I am given grace to succeed in it, I might not be far off this. I do want a title for dear Mother’s sake and Muriel’s [Reith’s wife] and other similar reasons. May I never forget dear Mother’s prayer. I must take Christ with me from the very beginning and all through this difficult work. I cannot succeed otherwise. I can do all things through Christ.
John Reith
Wednesday, 17 January 1923
I spent a couple of hours talking with LG. Labour is the only properly organised party. Their organisation is about as good as it can be, while that of the other parties is old-fashioned and inappropriate to present conditions.
LG said that his difficulty was that if he organised his own party, that would tend to intensify the differences between him on the one hand and the Conservatives and Asquithian Liberals on the other. He said he did not propose to go to the House of Commons much this session, but intended to help the Government. The position of the nation was far too dangerous for him to oppose rational measures. We required a united front.
George Riddell
Thursday, 1 March–Friday, 2 March 1923
Berlin
Up in the grey dawn of 5.30 and into a crowded train. Dirty plush carriages 3rds converted into 2nds – and 2nds into Firsts. We crawled off very slowly (coal being bad in quality and insufficient in quantity I was told) … In my carriage was a nice Englishwoman – three intolerable and grotesque music hall Americans and a rather quiet German. The Americans made me very shy by joking all the time about the exchange – ‘5,000 marks – that’s a nickel’ – ‘shall I give you a million marks or so – that’s two American dollars’ etc. We got out at the frontier … I changed £2 for which I received 2,000,000 marks – great bundles of paper chase money which I could hardly carry.
Outwardly everything appears absolutely normal in Berlin.
Big luxury shops full of jewels, furs and flowers – just like the ones in Bond St or Rue de la Paix … Under the surface, terrible quiet tragedies go on, mostly in respectable middle class homes. People who starve and are ashamed of starving poison themselves every day.
Violet Bonham Carter
Saturday, 28 July 1923
Durham
We have fought our war, we are victorious amid our peace and today there are more men under arms, more reasons for future war, more insecurity, more desire to fight and more standing armies in spite of the hundreds of acres of graveyards strewn over Central Europe … the one security for peace and for national existence is disarmament.
Ramsay MacDonald
We are just about to bring off the connecting up of Savoy Hill [BBC HQ] to all the stations by telephone line at 6.00 pm each night. This is the beginning of SB (Simultaneous Broadcasting) and will bring wonderful results all over.
John Reith
Wednesday, 29 August 1923
I read the news bulletin at 7.00 pm – the first real SB. The switchboard is quite thrilling. Everything went successfully.
John Reith
Monday, 10 September 1923
Everything is now in shape for the BBC Magazine and from various alternatives I chose Radio Times for the title.
John Reith
Monday, 3 December 1923
Seaham, Durham – General Election
After an hour’s address the other night I found myself being asked a series of questions which seemed to be about every department of foreign and home affairs – our present relations to Russia, the character of the Soviet Government, the capital levy, the Treaty of Versailles, the cure for unemployment, the possibility of protective tariffs, the state of education. I answered to the best of my ability – exactly as I should have done at the London School of Economics. I discovered afterwards that these were the questions with which they had been plying the unfortunate Tory candidate, who tried to evade them and ended by flatly refusing to answer. ‘Even our candidate’s wife can answer our questions – leave alone our candidate,’ shouted one miner at the Tory candidate to the delight of the hostile audience.
Beatrice Webb
J. R. Macdonald is apparently not capable of personal intimacy: he never had ‘loves’ among his colleagues. What has happened to him in the blaze of success is that he has lost his hatreds. All men and women are to him just circumstances – an attitude in a leader which I can readily understand and do not altogether disapprove! It is not unlikely that J. R. M. and Sidney will end in a sort of intimacy based on the common task of discovering the great measure of administrative and political efficiency.
Beatrice Webb
Saturday, 5 January 1924
Sussex
A fine still morning and not too cold. The country was looking lovely in its austerest winter garb. The birds were fairly plentiful in the morning and I never shot better – nor indeed so well. Mason says he will probably give up the shoot next year. He can’t afford it with a Labour Government in. This will be very sad. We had a capital lunch – Chambertin 1904 – and I was able to shoot three drives in the afternoon where there were not many birds.
Duff Cooper
Tuesday, 8 January 1924
In the evening I went to the Albert Hall to see what was called the Labour Victory demonstration. It was a very tame show. It struck no note of revolution but rather one of respectable middle-class nonconformity. They sang hymns between the speeches which were all about God.
Duff Cooper
Friday, 18 January 1924
Sidney [Webb] came away feeling that the Cabinet would err on the side of respectability – too many outsiders and too many peers.
… The Inner Cabinet – J. R. MacDonald, Clynes, Snowden, Thomas, Webb, Henderson and Ben Spoor as Chief Whip – met this morning in J. R. M.’s room … As Sidney expected the Cabinet, which J.R.M. had limited to 14, was now 20 – various important persons having refused to take office unless in Cabinet. S is to take Board of Trade on ground that he is to preside over unemployment; Tom Shaw is to be Labour; Wheatley Minister of Health* – both excellent appointments from trade union and left sections standpoints.
Beatrice Webb
Saturday, 26 January 1924
I gather that an unexpected difficulty has occurred regarding the recognition of Russia which MacDonald wishes to effect immediately. It appears that the King [George V] absolutely refused to receive a Soviet Ambassador as that would entail shaking hands with him. It was then suggested that a Minister should be received – but here again the King was adamant. He is an obstinate and outspoken little man.
Harold Nicolson
Monday, 3 March 1924
Mr Asquith, benign, beautiful and patriarchal, presided at the end of the long table and talked, in his clear bell-like Jacobean English, with a wealth of metaphor. Mrs Asquith, distraite, smoked and read the papers during luncheon, and occasionally said something startling like, a propos of spiritualism, ‘I always knew the living talked rot, but it is nothing to the nonsense the dead talk.’ She also said she could not help being sorry for ghosts – ‘Their appearances are so against them.’
Henry ‘Chips’ Channon
Friday, 7 March 1924
Have a long talk with Ramsay MacDonald in the morning regarding Anglo-Italian relations. He sits there puffing at a pipe and very dour and sad and disillusioned. He waggles his leg with impatience, perplexity or despair, and yet he does not seem to wish to hurry the conversation, but goes slowly, slowly. Rather tentative are his remarks and very Scotch in sound. He flares up at once at the thought of Mussolini. His eyes give a sudden flash: ‘The greatest rascal in the world.’
Harold Nicolson
Saturday, 15 March 1924
What interests me as a student of the British Constitution is the unlimited autocracy of the British P.M. – if he chooses to be autocratic or slips into it through inertia or dislike of discussion. It was MacDonald who alone determined who should be in his Cabinet; it is MacDonald who alone is determining what the Parliamentary Labour Party shall stand for in the country. So far as I gather from S and other members of the Cabinet, they are not consulted about what shall be the attitude towards France; certainly no documents are circulated prior to despatch … The PM alone determines what line he takes toward other countries.
MacDonald wants 8 million voters behind him and means to get them even if this entails shedding the Independent Labour Party, the idealistically revolutionary section who pushed him into power. That ladder will be kicked down!
Beatrice Webb
Saturday, 17 May 1924
I have had two miners’ wives from the Seaham Division staying with me for the Women’s Conference.
What interested me was the moral refinement and perfect manners of these two women who had never seen London before and never stayed in a house with servants. One of them was a delicate, excitable and intellectual woman – the other a phlegmatic Scot – they were attractively clothed and their talk was mostly about public affairs – the one emotionally stirred by the Socialist faith and familiar with all its shibboleths; the other shrewd, cautious and matter-of-fact … They were completely at their ease and their attitude to their host and hostess was more towards a class teacher and a minister of religion than to social superiors.
Beatrice Webb
Just back … from Knole, where indeed I was invited to lunch alone with his Lordship.* His Lordship lives in the kernel of a vast nut. You perambulate miles of galleries; skip endless treasures – chairs that Shakespeare might have sat on – tapestries, pictures, floors made of the halves of oaks; and penetrate at length to a round shiny table with a cover laid for one. A dozen glasses form a circle, each with a red rose in it. What can one human being do to decorate itself in such a setting? One feels that one ought to be an elephant able to consume flocks and be hung about with whole blossoming trees – whereas one solitary peer sits lunching by himself in the centre, with his napkin folded into the shape of a lotus flower …
It’s the breeding of Vita’s that I took away with me as an impression, carrying her and Knole in my eye as I travelled up with the lower middle classes, through slums. There is Knole, capable of housing all the desperate poor of Judd Street, and with only that one solitary earl in the kernel.
Virginia Woolf
Wednesday, 29 October 1924
Here ends the episode of a Labour Government and also of a Minority Government – an episode which Sidney thinks, on the whole, good for the education of the Party – and as far as he is concerned, a good joke, which like most good jokes, ought not to be repeated. J R MacDonald remains an enigma: we certainly did not expect and cannot now explain either the brilliant success of his handling of the Franco-German situation or the shocking fiasco of the last phase of his Premiership – culminating in the complete collapse of any Cabinet leadership during the General Election.
Beatrice Webb
In the General Election of 29 October 1924, the Conservatives were returned with a 200-plus majority of MPs. For the Liberal Party, the results spelled the end, with only forty Liberals of all hues elected.
Sunday, 1 February 1925
We have suffered a severe blow from this government … Actually behaving far worse to us at the Admiralty than the Labour Party. Of course it is all Winston as Chancellor. He has gone economy mad, and the result is that the Govt are not proposing to build any cruisers at all. Well, this obviously has to be fought, and if I have never done anything else of value for my country I must withstand this at all costs.
[Admiral] David Beatty
Thursday, 27 March 1925
Muriel and I dined at No. 10 with the PM and Mrs Baldwin; no one else was there. They were very friendly. I think I did some useful work for Broadcasting. Going to Savoy Hill (BBC Headquarters) there was a detective in the front of the car and the PM was very funny about him. He said it was one of the great perquisites of the office and that he thought he had obtained true eminence when his car drove down the wrong side of Piccadilly one day when he was in a hurry. I suggested that my ability to broadcast from my own study was also greatness in a form, to which he agreed. The PM said he would like to have a [broadcasting set-up] at Chequers, so I said we would supply him with one, or would he prefer to pay for it. He said he does not like sponging on anyone but quite frankly he would like to have it given to him, and that he was overdrawn at the bank. He said he used to be quite well to do but there was no money in his present job.
John Reith
Spring 1925
Miners’ Conference
Arthur Cook,* excitable and fiery, hammered home his points vehemently, in contrast with Herbert Smith, the miners’ president. I liked this old man. Smith was as straight as a die. I liked his calm way of looking at difficulties. Always cool and steady, he never got flustered. There he sat in his blue suit and soft collar, with his little moustache turning grey, and his high balding forehead, with his spectacles resting on the end of his nose.
Practically all of [the miners’ delegates] with the exception of Cook and Noah Ablett, and I think two others, were past middle-age. There was old Straker of Northumberland, neatly dressed – boots well-polished, hair carefully parted at the side and his little goatee beard trimmed well, sitting quiet – more like a Sunday-school teacher than anything else, one of the most vigorous opponents of the new agreements. Then there was Tom Richards from South Wales, trembling of head and hand like a man with shell-shock. I don’t know what is the matter with him but he is always the same – old and evidently not in very good health but with a perfectly clear mind – always to the point. Then old Finney of Staffordshire – brown eyes with a mild expression in them – more like a kindly grandfather than a vigorous, aggressive trade unionist. Yet these are the men who in a few weeks from now will be denounced as Bolshevists and extremists.
Old and young are marked with the bluish powder and coal dust of shot-firing, which identifies the miner at once.
Walter Citrine
Wednesday, 12 August 1925
For three months I have written nothing …
During the summer I read a paper on Egypt to the Institute of International Affairs, spoke on the League of Nations at East Ham, addressed an assembly of teachers, went to Walsall for a Conservative fete, went twice to Oldham and spoke twice in the House.
I wanted to speak on the naval debate – against the construction of the cruisers – but I couldn’t get in.
We had a heavenly Whitsuntide at the cottage in Bognor – one of the best weeks I have ever had. I saw Daisy and Dollie once or twice but had no other affairs.
Duff Cooper
Rodmell, Sussex
A disgraceful fact – I am writing this at 10 in the morning in bed in the little room looking into the garden, the sun beaming steady, the vine leaves transparent green …
We have been in the throes of the usual servant crisis … Nelly says Lottie wants to come back; we offer to have her; she denies it – to Karin …
But we are on the laps of the Gods: we don’t intend to raise a finger either way.
Virginia Woolf
Tuesday, 15 September 1925
After we had drunk some beer in a slum bar we went on to Mary’s where we found some very odd painters quite drunk and rather naked. They were for the most part what Mary called ‘Paris Queers’. The party was given in honour of a negro who is acting in a play called Emperor Jones but he had a fit in his dressing-room.
Evelyn Waugh
Thursday, 24 September 1925
Rodmell, Sussex
Sad to think a week only left of this partially wrecked summer … Maynard and Lydia* came here yesterday – Maynard in Tolstoi’s blouse and Russian cap of black astrachan – A fair sight both of them to meet on the high road! … my heart, in this autumn of my age, slightly warms to him, whom I’ve known all these years, so truculently pugnaciously and unintimately. We had very brisk talk of Russia: such a hotch-potch, such a mad jumble, M says, of good and bad, and the most extreme things that he can make no composition of it – can’t yet see how it goes. Briefly, spies everywhere, no liberty of speech, greed for money eradicated, people living in common, yet some, L[ydia]’s mother for instance with servants, peasants contented because they own land, no sign of revolution …
But to tell the truth I am exacerbated this morning … Lily is a wide-eyed sheep dog girl who comes from Iford to ‘do’; but can’t scramble an egg or bake a potato, and is thus ill armed for life, so far as I can see.
Virginia Woolf
Saturday, 26 September 1925
Midland Hotel, Manchester
I spent the morning in my room reading and preparing a speech, and after a fortifying luncheon I proceeded in the train and the rain to Oldham where I stood on the step of the Town Hall while 2,500 boy scouts filed past. Thence I went to the Blue Coat School and then to a terrible tea which lasted from five to seven in Greenacres Hall. Then I had to make my speech to this enormous audience of small boys. I hadn’t realised what it would be and had prepared quite the wrong sort of speech. It was a failure but I doubt it could have been a success. I knew I wasn’t holding their attention – a terrible feeling which I have never had before. Afterwards I attended a small meeting of the chief members of my executive committee, whom I found very dissatisfied and critical of the [Conservative] Government. Their main grounds of criticism are: 1. The failure to deal with the political levy 2. The settlement of the French debt 3. The subsidy to the miners 4. The alleged weakness in dealing with the Reds. I did my best to satisfy them. The Hall porter this morning told me to back Seredella for the Newbury Cup.
Duff Cooper
Sunday, 18 April 1926
During the last few days I have been allowing people to arouse me to the fact that there is probably going to be a general coal strike at the end of the month and the hope that its consequences are incalculable. And I have begun to think whether perhaps April 1926 may not in time rank with 1914 for the staging of house parties in sociological novels. I suppose that the desire to merge one’s individual destiny in forces outside oneself, which seems to me deeply rooted in most people and shows itself in social service and mysticism and in some manner debauchery, is really only a consciousness that this is already the real mechanism of life which requires so much concentration to perceive that one wishes to objectify it in more immediate (and themselves subordinate) forces. How badly I write when there is no audience to arrange my thoughts for.
Evelyn Waugh
Tuesday, 4 May 1926
Although the strike did not actually start until midnight, many of the workers had been coming out in anticipation. It appears that the article which should have appeared in the Mail denounced the TUC General Council and the trade union movement as enemies of the King. It is alleged that we were out to smash the constitution and starve the women and children. The men would not print it and it was sent round to the Evening News. The compositors there refused to set it and came out.
The movement spread, with the consequence that last evening, there was not a single newspaper in the city …
The strike is complete. The reports are simply marvellous. Everywhere the utmost solidarity and eagerness to respond to the Council’s instructions.
There has been an attempt to print The Times and the police have drawn a cordon across the road to Printing House Square, and are constantly preventing the pickets getting near the place. I phoned the Superintendent in charge and he agreed to allow six pickets to pass, so that two could picket at each of the three doors of the building.
Walter Citrine
Wednesday, 5 May 1926
The emergency news service is getting under way. I am vetting every item of every bulletin.
Things are really badly muddled and Churchill [Chancellor of the Exchequer] wants to commandeer the BBC. I met [the Home Secretary] who broadcast an appeal for 5,000 special constables. I had a talk with him after about the BBC position and got him to agree to what I wanted.
John Reith
This morning we had a telegram from the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions of Russia and a cheque from their bank for £26,000. We decided we could not accept this and to return the money.
A heated discussion took place this morning at the General Council because of speeches by Cook and Herbert Smith, who insisted that the miners should be included in discussions that were taking place with Samuel.* Bromley, of the locomotive men, was very emphatic. ‘By God we are all in this now and I want to say to the miners in a brotherly, comradely spirit, but straight – that this is not a miners’ fight now. I am willing to fight right along with them and to suffer as a consequence, but I am not going to be strangled by my friends.’
Walter Citrine
Sunday, 9 May 1926
Baldwin broadcast last night: he rolls his rs; tries to put more than mortal strength into his words. ‘Have faith in me. You elected me 18 months ago. What have I done to forfeit your confidence? Can you not trust me to see justice done between man and man?’ …
No I don’t trust him: I don’t trust any human being, however loud they bellow and roll their rs.
Virginia Woolf
Tuesday, 11 May 1926
On Wednesday reports of rioting had come in from all big towns and they have gone on ever since. Richard and I had gone down to Hammersmith to see what was going on but arrived too late, after the police had made a baton charge and recaptured six motor buses which the strikers had broken.
Evelyn Waugh
We have had our General Strike. Imperfect as it has been, mechanically and in the evolution of policy, it has been the most magnificent effort of rank-and-file solidarity that the British movement has ever displayed. Never again will the Congress undertake the custodianship of any movement without the clear, specific and unalterable understanding that the General Council and the General Council alone shall have the free untrammelled right to determine policy.
How can we, with the millions of interests and considerations to review, allow our policy to be dominated entirely by considerations of one union only [the miners]?
Were we to continue the disruption and dismemberment of the railway and transport unions? To bleed white the organisations who had thrown their all into the melting pot? To sacrifice the individual members who, faced by heavy penalties for breach of contract, had responded with unparalleled loyalty to the call of the movement?
The outstanding lesson of the General Strike of 1926 is that authority must be vested exclusively and entirely in the directing body.
Walter Citrine
May 1926
For the British Trade Union Movement I see a day of terrible disillusionment. The failure of the General Strike of 1926 will be one of the most significant landmarks in the history of the British working class. Future historians will I think regard it as the death gasp of that pernicious doctrine of ‘workers’ control’ of public affairs through the trade unions, and by the method of direct action. This absurd doctrine was introduced into British working class life by Tom Mann and the Guild Socialists* and preached insistently before the War, by the Daily Herald and George Lansbury. In Russia it was quickly repudiated by Lenin and the Soviets …
On the whole I think it was a proletarian distemper which had to run its course and like other distempers it is well to have it over and done with at the cost of a lengthy convalescence.
Beatrice Webb
Last night D[avid Lloyd George] dined with me. I left the office about 6.30 and he was to come on at 7.30. He was a little late, and came in very excitedly, so that I could see something had happened. ‘I have been expelled from the Party.’ … The Asquith women are of course at the bottom of it. My chief concern last night was to get D into a calm frame of mind. It was a blow for him – rather a cruel one. It faced him with a crisis the like of which he had not quite experienced before. He has now before him a fight for his political life.*
Frances Stevenson
Friday, 16 July 1926
I do hope you won’t make Mummy nervous by being too wild. Of course men must work, and women must weep, but all the same I do hope that you will remember that Mummy is a frightful coward and does fuss dreadfully about you. It is a good rule always to ask before you do anything awfully dangerous. Thus if you say, ‘Mummy, may I try and walk on the roof of the green-house on my stilts?’, she will probably say ‘Of course darling’, since she is not in any way a narrow-minded woman. And if you say, ‘Mummy, may I light a fire in my bed?’, she will again say, ‘Certainly, Niggs.’ It is only that she likes being told about these things beforehand.
Harold Nicolson to Nigel (aged nine)
Wednesday, 10 November 1926
The poor [Liberal] Party seems faced with two alternatives – to starve or be bought. I believe that without LlG and his corrupting fund in the background,† it could have saved itself by its own efforts and lived as the Labour Party does – more cheaply – but on democratic finance – but with doles and bribes, fantastic salaries and champagne lunches flung in all directions it cannot possibly do so.
It is so different from the feeling one had in 1918. The Party was clean – we had no Jonah on board.
Violet Bonham Carter
Monday, 7 February 1927
Passfield Corner
Ellen Wilkinson reached here on Friday for lunch, in a state of collapse from over-speaking at great mass meetings mainly about China.
The daughter of a Lancashire cotton-spinner of rebellious temper and religious outlook she passed from the elementary school to the pupil-teacher centre from thence on a scholarship into Manchester University where she took a good degree … and finally landed herself in the House of Commons in 1924 as MP for Middlesbrough.
She believes the present trend of trade unionism is towards one big Union! She believes it because it is the catchword of today – just as ‘workers control’ was the catchword of yesterday. Certainly one big union is inconsistent with workers’ control; but that does not trouble her.
If the Labour Movement fails to provide the right environment for the development of statesmanship, the government of the country will remain during long periods in the hands of the present governing class who have both brains and leisure; with short futile intervals of Labour Cabinets, tossed in and out of power by conflicting waves of rebellious doctrine, each successive term ending in apathy or disillusionment and party disintegration.
Beatrice Webb
Sunday, 14 August 1927
Dined with ‘Tommy’ [Lady Rosslyn], Hamish … and Twiston. After dinner, talked to the two boys who made my hair curl with stories about immorality and drinking at Eton and Oxford. The modern youth seems to grow up much more quickly than in my day.
Robert Bruce Lockhart
[Sidney and I] have started an investigation into the present administration of outdoor relief to the able-bodied up and down the country.
Can we discover the new issues and gauge the new proportions of the problems involved e.g. chronic unemployment? And is there any practicable solution, should this unemployment prove not only to be chronic but also progressive? If such a disaster is imminent will any change in administration, policy and procedure avail to alter the result? Might it not be a question of muddling through, curbing and checking the present Poor Law administration until a lowered birth rate, emigration and even a higher death-rate brought about a new equilibrium of population with national resources?
Beatrice Webb
Friday, 13 April 1928
Winston Churchill asked me to go and see him at the Treasury this afternoon. I was there for about an hour, he giving me tea. Churchill was anxious to know what we were going to do about the Budget. I said we were ready to broadcast from the House of Commons direct, but that it had been turned down. He asked me to have another try for this with the PM and added that I had a great influence with him. I told him what we were going to do otherwise, and he said he would like to come to the studio and speak for 15 minutes the next night, factual and uncontroversial. Much discussion about the handling of political controversy. He asked if the rumours of my leaving the BBC were true and said he was very thankful they were not. He said he thought I had about the biggest job in the country.
John Reith
Wednesday, 2 May 1928
There has been an event lurking in the background of our life – intensely interesting but unimportant to us personally – the break-up of the Christian church in Great Britain. The rejection of the revised Prayer Book by Parliament and the consequent unseemly controversy which has raged among the ecclesiastics – the revelation of an indifferent and almost scornful public opinion – has awakened the English public to the fact that the English are no longer Christians in any real sense of the word. No one troubles to assert this fact, and no one denies it. What is becoming something near a public scandal is the paucity of candidates alike for the Anglican priesthood and for the Free Church ministry. Meanwhile Dean Inge openly advises in the pages of a profane journal, that no candidate for order now believes in the supernatural element in the Christian faith … How long this queer state of mind, the Church, with its creed and its rites, its pomps and its ceremonies, can continue part of the British Constitution is difficult to foretell!
Beatrice Webb
Sunday, 23 September 1928
Evening Standard, London
Had a long talk with Lord Beaverbrook this morning about foreign politics. He is very anti-League (of Nations), thinks that war in Europe is inevitable and that, if we stay out, a European war might be just as advantageous to us as the last war was to America. Therefore we must pull out of the League. I think he is wrong. The way to get war is to say it is coming, and I doubt if we could keep out of a big European war.
Robert Bruce Lockhart
Sunday, 7 October 1928
The Labour Party is doing well in the country: J R MacDonald and Henderson and the Evolutionists have swept Communism and left-wingism out of the way, Maxton and Cook have fizzled out and Liberalism shows little signs of being a powerful rival for progressive support. All’s well for electoral purposes. Whether it is equally well for the business of government, if or when the LP gets into power is another question! It depends on the young men of the party and the persistency of the British working-class and the self-devotion of the brain-working adherents to Socialist principles.
Beatrice Webb
Friday, 19 October 1928
Lloyd George’s day. Great speech in morning on tactics of party and great speech at night on foreign policy. Latter was very dramatic. He came down to hall, armed with a copy of the treaty of Versailles, said we ourselves went to war for a scrap of paper, and now we had not kept our own word with Germany.
LG is still the greatest dynamic force in British politics.
Robert Bruce Lockhart
Thursday, 6 December 1928
Letter to the Prince of Wales from his younger brother*
My dear old David
Since writing to you this evening I have seen Dawson.† Papa’s temperature has gone up again tonight which is a worry but has not altered papa’s condition very materially …
There is a lovely story going about which emanated from the East End that the reason of your rushing home is that in the event of anything happening to Papa I am going to bag the throne in your absence!!!! Just like the Middle Ages …
Ever yours
Bertie
The General Election of 30 May 1929 returned 288 Labour MPs – its best result since its formation – but without an overall majority, the Liberals (relatively united) holding the balance. During the short-lived Labour government, negotiations were held in London to agree self-imposed limits on the world’s greatest naval powers: Great Britain, the USA, Japan, France and Italy. Britain and the USA were to retain supremacy in numbers of ships and tonnage. There were also talks aimed at finding a compromise on Indian self-rule.
Lord Beaverbrook (Max Aitken), ally of Lloyd George in the First World War, and of Churchill in the Second, campaigned through his newspapers for a policy of ‘imperial preference’ in trade during the inter-war years, though the Conservative Party was not entirely in favour. Harold Nicolson found himself working for Beaverbrook’s papers, the Evening Standard and Daily Express. Leo Amery, a minister in Conservative governments in the 1920s, turned to business in the 1930s, and was also an early proponent of Zionism in the Conservative Party.
Friday, 31 May 1929
London
The oculist said to me this afternoon ‘Perhaps you’re not as young as you were.’ This is the first time that has been said to me: and it seemed to me an astonishing statement. It means that one now seems to a stranger not a woman, but an elderly woman. Yet even so, though I felt wrinkled and aged for an hour, and put on a manner of great wisdom and toleration … even so I forgot it soon; and am ‘a woman’ again.
Coming up Southampton Row, a man snapped me and then said stop; and made me pay 6d for a silly little damp film, which I did not want … my face marked me for his victim.
‘We are winning’ Nelly [a servant] said at tea. I was shocked to think that we both desire the Labour Party to win – why? Partly that I don’t want to be ruled by Nelly. I think to be ruled by Nelly and Lottie would be a disaster.
Virginia Woolf
Thursday, 27 June 1929
Talk with Neville Chamberlain the first I have had with any of my late colleagues about the situation. He told me that Lloyd George is very anxious to bring about the fall of the present (Labour) Government at the earliest possible moment, his fear being that if they continue for two or three years and behave moderately half the Liberal party will join them. His notion is to get us in some way to cooperate on some committee dealing with electoral reform. I hoped that we would have no truck with any such scheme both because of my general objection to coalitionism and because I felt sure that the only immediate result would be indignation among the working classes that even a moderate Labour government had been ejected by capitalist intrigue.
Leo Amery
A good talk with Chancellor (after lunch). He [Philip Snowden] was rather anxious at the extent to which the Zionists are letting in a Communist type of Jew as well as by the growing restlessness of the Arabs and thinks some sort of nominated council will have to be created.
Leo Amery
Tuesday, 22 October 1929
I meet First Lord of the Admiralty [A. V. Alexander], in Whitehall. The Admirals, I fear, have got a firm grip on him.
He has been to sea with the Battle Fleet, and believes that there is a new gun which will shoot down aeroplanes from the sky. ‘I could fire it myself,’ he says, ‘and write my name in the sky in letters of smoke. No aeroplane could live under such fire.’ He denounces the Air Force. They are very dangerous. They have the ear of the Cabinet, of every Cabinet.
Hugh Dalton
Wednesday, 4 December 1929
[William] Wedgwood Benn and Phil [Noel-Baker] to lunch to talk Five Power Conference and battleships in particular. Wedgwood Benn is to be our fourth principal delegate … I think Wedgwood Benn will be on the side of the Angels. He says truly that the leaders of our Party have talked so long, without having the power to act, that now they are excessively timid in action.
Phil and I press on him the need to cut down battleships, thus making a Peace gesture and saving money. We must never lay down a battleship again. We haven’t done so since 1922 and it would be intolerable to start again in 1931, even the smaller, cheaper kind which our Admiralty propose.
Hugh Dalton
Thursday, 23 January 1930
I was summoned by Lord Beaverbrook … (found him) alone writing a cross letter to his son about bills. In a few minutes Winston Churchill slouched in. Very changed from when I last saw him. A great round face like a blister. Incredibly aged … His spirits also have declined and he sighs that he has lost his old fighting power.
They talked the whole time about Empire free trade. Winston says that he has abandoned all his convictions and clings to the conviction of free trade as the only one which is left to him. But he is clearly disturbed at the effect on the country of Beaverbrook’s propaganda. He feels too old to fight it. ‘Thirty years ago,’ he said, ‘I should have welcomed such a combat: now I dread it.’ He seems to think Baldwin absolutely hopeless …
Beaverbrook uses every wile to secure if not his support then at least his agreement not to oppose. I must say he is rather impressive. Young and nervous he walks about the room piling argument on argument and statistic on statistic. There is no question but that he is passionately sincere and has really studied his subject.
Harold Nicolson
Wednesday, 26 March 1930
On to the Daily Express office … I see an intolerable man who treats me and literature as if they were both dirt.
To make it worse I am sent out to represent the Standard at the Knights of the Round Table dinner. There is no seat for me and I creep away in dismay and humiliation. I never foresaw that writing for the Press would actually be so degrading.
Harold Nicolson
Wednesday, 21 May 1930
Mosley resigns [from Government over unemployment policy]. If the Government survives this summer it will be by the tacit connivance of the other two parties who are not ready for an election. Also public opinion is against it on the ground that Great Britain mustn’t show division of opinion now it is confronted with revolution in India.
Beatrice Webb
Has MacDonald found his superseder in Oswald Mosley? MacDonald owes his pre-eminence largely to the fact that he’s the only artist, the only aristocrat by temperament and talent in a party of plebeians and plain men. Hitherto he has had no competitor in personal charm and good looks, delightful voice and the gift of oratory. But Mosley has all these, with the élan of youth, wealth and social position added to them. Like MacDonald Mosley began as a Utopian but today he is a disillusioned Utopian, while Mosley has still a young man’s zeal and is, I think, able to use other men’s brains.
Beatrice Webb
Wednesday, 9 July 1930
Lady Astor had been tittle-tattling all round the lobbies about MacDonald and Lady Londonderry. And Virginia Woolf – with whom we dined on 11th July – supported this: MacDonald and Lady L. had withdrawn after dinner into a half-darkened room and sat together – the common herd being herded into another, more brightly lit chamber.
What easy prey some of our people are! And how they are laughed at behind their backs, and ignored when they are out of office!
Virginia Woolf quoted Beatrice Webb to her, ‘Marriage is the waste-paper basket of the emotions.’
Hugh Dalton
Saturday, 23 August 1930
At the Sitwells’ home
Went to Renishaw. The household was very full of plots. Almost everything was a secret and most of the conversations deliberately engineered in prosecution of some private joke. Ginger, for instance, was told that Ankaret’s two subjects were arctic exploration and ecclesiastical instruments; also that Alastair played the violin. Sachie liked talking about sex. Osbert was very shy. Edith wholly ignorant …
The servants very curious. They live on terms of feudal familiarity, e.g. a message brought by footman to assembled family that her ladyship wanted to see Miss Edith upstairs. ‘I can’t go, I’ve been with her all day, Osbert, you go.’ ‘Georgia, you go’ etc. Footman: ‘Well, come on. One of you’s got to go.’
Evelyn Waugh
Tuesday, 9 September 1930
Baldwin must wish to hurry on a General Election before he is dismissed by Beaverbrook and Rothermere. The Labour Party will be decisively beaten at the polls and I think JRM will cease to be leader and Arthur Henderson will succeed him. Great Britain will become protectionist under Neville Chamberlain’s premiership …
With two million unemployed there is as yet not the remotest sign of urgent discontent, no soup kitchens, no newspaper agitation, no frantic appeals for money, no growth in the Communist Party … have large bodies of men become reconciled to an idle life on a secure but low level of consumption?
Beatrice Webb
Saturday, 4 October 1930
Passfield Corner
A spate of high-class social functions this week – I avoid two dinners and receptions at Lancaster House but got through two lunches and an afternoon gathering in a little over 24 hours, and a Buckingham Palace state dinner on Friday, returning here for the middle of the week to rest and write letters.
Beatrice Webb
Sunday, 5 October 1930
We start off at 10 to motor to Chequers. On passing through Bromley we half-see a poster blown by the wind which looks like ‘Airship destroyed.’ We stop later and buy a paper. We find that the R.101 has crashed near Beauvais and that [the Air Secretary, Lord] Thomson with 43 other people have been burnt alive.
When we arrive we find that the PM is up in London. Ishbel (his daughter) says he will be in a dreadful state. He arrives about 1.30. He looks very ill and worn. Bennett, the Prime Minister of Canada is there. Ramsay begins to introduce him to Vita but forgets his name. He makes a hopeless gesture – his hand upon his white hair – ‘My brain is going’, he says, ‘my brain is going.’ It is all rather embarrassing. He then tells us that the bell beside his bed had rung that morning … he dashed up to London in 55 minutes.
The King was in a dreadful state. Ramsay seemed more worried about the King’s dismay than about anything else.
The PM pours out to Vita the miseries of his soul: he cannot sleep: two hours a night is all he gets: he can do no work: ‘the moment I disentangle my foot from one strand of barbed wire it becomes entangled in another. If God were to come to me and say “Ramsay, would you rather be a country gentleman than Prime Minister?” I should reply, “Please God, a country gentleman.”’ He is a tired, exhausted man. Bless him.
Harold Nicolson
Monday, 22 December 1930
Bertram Mills gives a luncheon for 1,100 people at Olympia. I am about to enter when I hear a voice behind me. It is Ramsay MacDonald. He says, ‘Well this is my one holiday in the year, I love circuses.’ At that moment they hand him a telegram. He opens it. He hands it to me with the words, ‘Keep this, my dear Harold, and read it if ever you think you wish to be Prime Minister.’ It is a telegram from some crank society abusing him for attending a luncheon in honour of a circus proprietor – since performing animals are cruel. He is disgusted and his pleasure spoiled.
Harold Nicolson
Wednesday, 25 February 1931
An amazing act of arrogance, Oswald Mosley’s melodramatic defection from the Labour Party, slamming the door with a bang to resound throughout the political world. His one remaining chance is to become the He-man of the Newspaper Lords in their campaign against Baldwin’s leadership of the Conservative Party. But Mosley’s egotism would presently clash with Beaverbrook’s and they would part company. As an orator – as a platform performer in a political circus – he would be pre-eminent. A foreign journalist at the Labour Party Conference nicknamed him the ‘English Hitler’. But the British electorate would not stand a Hitler. Mosley has bad health, a slight intelligence and an unstable character – I doubt whether he has the tenacity of a Hitler. He also lacks genuine fanaticism. Deep down in his heart he is a cynic. He will be beaten and retire. In the chaos of our political life today there will still be many meteors passing through the firmament. There is still Winston Churchill to be accounted for. Have there ever been so many political personages on the loose?
Beatrice Webb
Wednesday, 29 April 1931
I drove back with Margot* who, as usual, is very bitter about everything. She is furious with me for joining [Mosley’s] New Party and tries to imply that this is a personal disloyalty to the memory of old Asquith. When I said that it would be equally disloyal to my affection for that old man, to have joined Lloyd George, she merely pinched me very hard with a long, claw-like hand and tells me not to become tiresome …
Dined with Clive Bell and Keynes. Keynes is very helpful about the economics of the New Party. He says that he would, without question, vote for it. The attitude of the Labour Party on the Sunday Cinema Bill … has disgusted him. He feels that our Party may really do an immense amount of good and that our Programme is more sound and certainly more daring than that which any other party can advance.
Harold Nicolson
Tuesday, 30 June 1931
One of the reasons given for the alleged decline of Great Britain and her approaching doom is that the Englishman has lost his love of money. Now it so happens that the Russians, whether rich or poor, were before the revolution one of the most dishonest and dishonourable of peoples. Hence the terrific discipline enforced by the Communist party – the summary shooting of officials who defraud or steal. Communism represents a frantic effort to make the Russian people honest and disinterested, punctual and assiduous in the service of the community – on these issues it is intensely and fanatically puritan. In this devotion to a State, Communist Russia is exactly opposite to the USA with its amazing laxness and tolerance of fraud and self interest in public officials … the millionaire gangsters have become popular heroes.
Beatrice Webb
Thursday, 23 July 1931
I am working at the Evening Standard office when at about 11 a.m., Tom [Oswald Mosley] rings me up and says will I come round at once. He had, at that moment received letters from John Strachey and Allan Young* resigning from the Party. I go round at 12.30 and find the Council gathered together in gloom. We try to get hold of our two delinquents but they are out and will not return till 6.0 … We adjourn for luncheon.
Back at the office, I begin drafting statements to the Press in order to meet John’s impending announcement. While thus engaged a letter comes in containing that announcement. It says they have resigned because Tom, on such subjects as the Youth Movement, Unemployment Insurance, India and Russia, was adopting a fascist tendency. On all these points, except Russia (where John’s memo was idiotic) they have had their way.
At 5.30 we at last find they have returned … Tremulous and uncouth, John Strachey sits down … He then begins, quivering with emotion to indicate some of the directions in which Tom has of late abandoned the sacred cause of the worker. He says that … [Tom] is acquiring a Tory mind … [that Tom] considers socialism a ‘pathological condition’. John much dislikes being pathological. His great hirsute hands twitch neurotically as he explained to us, with trembling voice, how unpathological he really was.
Undoubtedly the defection of John … will do enormous electoral harm to the Party. Politically, however, it will place Tom in a position where, with greater ease, he can adhere to Lloyd George and Winston.
Harold Nicolson
Today we have the great outstanding contradiction that while there is capacity in the country and throughout the world to turn out wealth at a greater rate than mankind has ever known, every great capitalist country is slowly but surely having its wheels of industry brought to a standstill.
The great capitalist powers have just met* to try to save one of their number from bankruptcy, not because of any special love they have for that one country but because of their sure and certain knowledge that if the country’s economic system crashes, the others would topple over with it.
James Maxton
Saturday, 15 August 1931
Harold [Nicolson] is starting a new paper Action on Oct 1st; costing 2d. Cold, wet, lights at luncheon. The cat kittened in the coalhole; the valuable spaniel bitch died in childbed next door. A wet wild August; the coldest for 14 years; and the farmers here burning their hay. Meanwhile the country is in the throes of a crisis. Great events are brewing. Maynard visits Downing Street and spreads sensational rumours. Are we living then through a crisis; and am I fiddling? And will future ages, as they say, behold our predicament (financial) with horror? Sometimes I feel the world desperate; then walk among the Downs.
Virginia Woolf
Monday, 24 August 1931
Warsaw
From a newspaper which someone else was reading I gathered there was something by way of a political crisis at home, so when I got to the hotel I put through a call … A little later a wire which Miss Nash had sent informed me that the Labour Government had resigned, that MacDonald was Prime Minister of a National government, and giving the names of the Cabinet.
John Reith
Wednesday, 26 August 1931
Pay a round of visits … to the [Foreign Office] and say goodbye to officials …
Shall I, one day, return as Secretary of State? It is not impossible, but politics are a queer uncertain business. The prospects of all of us ‘younger’ men are, however, much improved by the defections and the clearance at the top …
Rumour later confirmed, puts Lord Reading* at the Foreign Office. Precedents are indeed being broken. First a Secretary of State who has had no university education. Now one who has no foreskin.
Hugh Dalton
Thursday, 27 August 1931
I don’t believe that Mac[Donald] deliberately led the Cabinet into a trap: tried to get them into agreeing to economies in the process of bargaining with the USA financiers, all the time intending to throw his colleagues over and form a National Government – but he drifted into doing it – largely because he is secretive – he never can be frank – yet he will let the cat out of the bag in a moment of queer indiscretions to someone who is a comparative stranger … or even an enemy like Lansbury. I trust the Labour Party is quit of him, finally and completely, and I wish him well among the Duke and Duchesses.
Beatrice Webb
Sunday, 30 August 1931
Kent
We went on through Sevenoaks to Seal and a man we met advised us to try for a job at Mitchell’s farm about three miles further on. We went there but the farmer told us he could not give us a job as he had nowhere where we could live and the Government inspectors had been snouting round to see that all hop-pickers had ‘proper accommodation.’ (These inspectors, by the way, managed to prevent some hundreds of unemployed from getting jobs in the hop fields this year. Not having ‘proper accommodation’ to offer to pickers, the farmers could only employ local people who lived in their own houses.)
George Orwell
Wednesday, 2 September – Saturday, 19 September 1931
Most of the people who go down hopping have done it every year since they were children and they pick like lightning. And know all the tricks such as shaking the hops up to make them lie loose in the bin etc. The most successful pickers are families who have two or three adults to strip the vines, and a couple of children to pick up the fallen hops and clear the odd strands. The laws about child labour are disregarded utterly and some of the people drive their children pretty hard. The woman in the next bin to us, a regular old-fashioned East Ender, kept her grandchildren at it like slaves. – ‘Go on, Rose, you lazy little cat, pick the ’ops up. I’ll warm your arse if I get up to you’ etc until the children, aged from 6 to 10, used to drop and fall asleep on the ground. But they liked the work and I don’t suppose it did them more harm than school.
George Orwell
Tuesday, 22 September 1931
Party meeting at 11.30. We discuss fascism … The worst of it is that the communists will collar our imaginative appeal to youth, novelty and excitement. We decide to call the Youth Movement the Volts (Vigour-Order-Loyalty-Triumph).
Harold Nicolson
Monday, 26 October 1931
I have passed an announcement to be made in all news bulletins today pointing out the duty of people to vote and that the future prosperity etc. of the country depends on them. I have no doubt that this will be regarded as tendentious by the Labour party.
John Reith
In the recriminations that followed the end of the 1929–31 Labour government, Ramsay MacDonald was held to blame for the ‘betrayal’ of the Labour Party. His reputation never recovered. In the election that followed, on 27 October 1931, thirteen ‘National Labour’ MPs were elected, remaining with MacDonald to serve in the newly constituted National Government, and were expelled from the Labour Party. Only fifty-two ‘real’ Labour MPs were elected – a massacre for the party; and Oswald Mosley’s New Party put up twenty-four candidates (including Mosley) though none was elected.