* At this time, parts of the USSR were in the grip of a famine caused or exacerbated by the collectivisation of farms policy and the First Five Year Plan (1928–32) of the Communist Party under its General Secretary, Joseph Stalin. Between 6 and 8 million citizens died of hunger.
† Winifred Holtby and Phyllis Bentley were both novelists, best known for South Riding and Inheritance respectively. Holtby and Vera Brittain were lifelong friends and Holtby shared a home with Vera and her husband for many years.
* Virginia Woolf was reading The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, edited by Aldous Huxley, which was published in September 1932. The banned book may have referred to The Rainbow.
* In October 1932 Mosley, influenced by Mussolini in Italy, had recast the New Party as the British Union of Fascists; Nicolson left the New Party at that point.
* Kirsch Kopfer was a German company of which Leo Amery was a board member.
* Robert Vansittart was Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office from 1930 until 1938, when he was replaced by his Deputy, Alexander Cadogan. Vansittart was made ‘Chief Diplomatic Adviser’, creating a very uneasy relationship between the two ‘mandarins’.
* An explosion in October 1913 at the Universal Colliery, Glamorgan, was the worst mining disaster in the UK with the loss of 439 miners. At Gresford, Wrexham, twenty-one years later, on 22 September 1934, 266 men died.
* The 1934–35 Peace Ballot, though not an official referendum, was a nationwide questionnaire designed to gauge support for the League of Nations and international disarmament (organised by the League of Nations Union).
* A reference to the Hoare–Laval Pact, a proposal by the British Foreign Secretary Samuel Hoare and French Prime Minister Pierre Laval to end the Second Italo-Abyssinian War. Italy would be given control of southern Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), whilst Abyssinia would retain access to the sea via the port of Assab, a so-called ‘corridor for camels’. The proposal collapsed, causing Hoare to resign.
* George Gordon Catlin (known as Gordon), Vera Brittain’s husband and Shirley Williams’s father.
* The Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha was brother to Princess Alice, Countess of Athlone. Both were Victoria’s grandchildren.
* Wal Hannington was National Organiser of the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement, and a founder member of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
* On 26 February, in a short-lived insurrection in Tokyo, some 1,500 troops and young officers of the Japanese Imperial Army had attempted to overthrow the government. Several politicians, including the finance minister, were killed.
* A reference to Aldous Huxley and further League of Nations sanctions against Italy.
* The 1936 Arab Revolt was a nationalist uprising by Palestinian Arabs against the British colonial mandate of Palestine and mass Jewish immigration into the territory. The outbreak led to the establishment of the Palestine Royal Commission. The Commission ultimately recommended partition of Palestine between Arabs and Jews, a proposal initially endorsed by the British government, but later rejected as unworkable.
* Rudolph Holzmann (1910–92), a German composer who went to Lima in 1938 where he became known as an ethnomusicologist.
* John McGovern was one of five Independent Labour MPs elected in 1931. Independent-minded throughout his political career, he died in 1968.
† Paul Channon, who himself became a Conservative MP. He died in 2007.
* It is not clear which issue Britten was referring to, but it might be the German bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica.
* Moura Zakrevskaya (later Baroness Budberg) was a mistress of H. G. Wells and suspected of being a Russian double-agent. Her half-sister was the great-grandmother of Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democratic Party since 2007.
* Austria was invaded by Germany in March 1938 and incorporated into the German ‘Greater Reich’. Chips Channon, a Chamberlainite, had been appointed Parliamentary Private Secretary to Rab Butler, number two at the Foreign Office since February 1938 when Lord Halifax replaced Eden as Foreign Secretary.
† Joachim von Ribbentrop, Foreign Minister in Germany, 1938–45.
‡ In the General Election of 1935 Harold Nicolson was elected for Leicester West as a ‘National’ Labour MP (i.e. a ‘follower of Ramsay MacDonald’) with Conservative support. He was never comfortable in the role.
* LNU: League of Nations Union; PPU: Peace Pledge Union.
* Thomas Inskip, Minister for the Coordination of Defence, 1936–9.
* Malcolm MacDonald (son of Ramsay) was a National Labour MP who served in the National government of 1935–40. He was then Secretary of State for the Colonies and was moved to the Dominion Office, charged by Neville Chamberlain with resolving tensions in Palestine between Jews and Arabs.
* Munich: Prologue to Tragedy by John W. Wheeler-Bennett (London, 1948)
* Canon Charles Raven was Regius Professor of Divinity at Cambridge University; Dr Donald Soper was a Methodist minister, President of the Methodist Conference, 1953–4.
* On 31 March, the British and French governments announced a guarantee of Polish independence in the event of military invasion by Germany. This marked the official abandonment of appeasement by Chamberlain. This was followed in April by an Anglo-French guarantee to support Greece and Romania. On 15 April, ‘a period of fantastically complicated transactions’ between London, Paris and Moscow began for some sort of an agreement with the Soviet Union.
* Francis Williams was editor of the Labour paper, the Daily Herald. He would later serve as Controller of Press Censorship and News at the Ministry of Information.
* Robert Vansittart, Chief Diplomatic Adviser; Gladwyn Jebb, Private Secretary to Cadogan; and Ivone Kirkpatrick, who had returned to London from the British Embassy in Berlin.
* Arthur Greenwood, acting Leader of the Labour Party (Attlee was ill), and Archibald Sinclair, leader of the Liberal Party.
* The diarist John Colville was at this point Assistant Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain.
* Alec Dunglass (Alec Douglas-Home, later Lord Home) was Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain; this was a last attempt to persuade Lord Halifax, via his junior minister at the Foreign Office, R. A. ‘Rab’ Butler, to take on the premiership. Three days earlier, on 7 May, the House heard Leo Amery, a leading opponent of Chamberlain’s policy, denounce him in the ‘Norway debate’ (on Britain’s unsuccessful invasion of Norway) with the famous words, ‘In the name of God, go!’ Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty from September 1939 until 10 May.