The Thirties: An Intimate History of Britain. Juliet Gardiner

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СКАЧАТЬ more news — including some investigative ‘scoops’ — the odd photograph of Gracie Fields, film reviews, excellent cartoons and a women’s page with recipes and knitting patterns, it was some time before racing tips, which had disappeared after the first few issues, were allowed back; they remained a distinct selling point for much of the century.

      In January 1933, Hitler’s assumption of the German chancellorship led to a change in the class-against-class policy, and in the summer of 1935 the Seventh (and last) Congress of the International affirmed the Soviet intention ‘to establish a united front on a national as well as an international scale’ against fascism — a front that it was argued should include democratic political parties across a wide spectrum. This was not to be a call to which the British Labour Party responded, though the change of policy did bring the CPGB new recruits, among them engineers, railwaymen, textile workers, builders and some in the distributive trades. Jack Gaster, who had previously regarded the Party as ‘ultra sectarian … their concept of a United Front was “We’ll unite with anyone who unites with us,”’ and had helped expel ‘a secret group of Communist Party members within the ILP’, had himself lost patience with the ILP by 1935 and joined the CPGB, undertaking frequent legal work for the Party.

      Although the CPGB remained an overwhelmingly working-class party, it had always attracted a small number of intellectuals, particularly scientists, and in the 1930s it gradually drew in a coterie of undergraduates and recent graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, sometimes referred to sneeringly by Rose Macaulay as ‘the not-so-very intelligentsia’, or, as Beatrice Webb labelled them, ‘the mild-mannered desperadoes’.

      In 1931 David Guest, son of the Labour peer Lord Haden-Guest, returned to Trinity College, Cambridge, after a year studying in Germany, where he had become convinced that the threat of fascism was dangerously real, and that communism was the only hope, and set about organising the Cambridge branch of the CPGB. This attracted his fellow philosophy student Maurice Cornforth, the poet Charles Madge, John Cornford, James Klugmann and Guy Burgess, all of whom were mentored by Maurice Dobb, an economist and Fellow of Trinity College who had been a member of the Party since 1923, and who had suffered professionally for his affiliation.

      The best-known, most-heard (if most tenuously linked) of those Oxbridge students and ex-students who were drawn to communism in the mid 1930s were the ‘MacSpaundays’ — the poets and would-be poets W.H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender and Cecil Day Lewis. ‘Tell us about the Thirties,’ a group of Cambridge undergraduates urged Day Lewis after the Second World War; ‘… it seems to be the last time that anyone believed in anything.’ ‘We were singularly fortunate compared with the young of today,’ acknowledged the poet, ‘in believing that something could be done about the social and political evils confronting us … no one who did not go through this political experience during the Thirties can quite realise how much hope there was in the air then, how radiant for some of us was the illusion that man could, under Communism put the world to rights.’

      What communism offered such young intellectuals was ‘substitutes for a faith, heterogeneous ideas which served to plug “the hollow in the breast where God should be”’. Most of Day Lewis’s friends who became active in left-wing movements, or sympathetic to them, had similar backgrounds. All had been to public schools, ‘with their tradition of both authoritarianism and service to the community’. Three were the sons clergymen — Day Lewis himself, Louis MacNeice and Rex Warner — while W.H. Auden had ‘a devout Anglo-Catholic mother … we had all lapsed from the Christian faith, and tended to despair of Liberalism as an effective instrument for dealing with the problems of our day, if not despise it as an outworn creed’.

      For Day Lewis the attraction to communism had both a religious and a romantic dimension: ‘My susceptibility to the heroic, played upon by Russian films in which the worker, mounted upon his magnificent tractor, chugged steadily towards the dawn and the new world, joined up with my natural partisanship of the underdog to create a picture, romantic and apocalyptic, of the British worker at last coming into his own.’ Nevertheless, he was, he admitted, ‘an extremely odd recruit to the Party’ in Cheltenham, where he was teaching at the time (though with a ‘gentlemanly refusal to indoctrinate my pupils with Left-Wing ideas’). The CPGB cell there resembled ‘more of a combined study-group of a nonconformist chapel than of a revolutionary body’, consisting as it did of ‘one or two school teachers, a waiter, and several men who worked at the Gloucester aircraft factory … as an “intellectual” I was given the job of political education. Never can there have been a more signal instance of the blind leading the shortsighted. I mugged up Das Kapital, The Communist Manifesto, the writings of Lenin, and endeavoured to teach dialectical materialism and economic theories I only half understood to people who lived their lives right up against the fact of economic necessity.’

      Although Auden issued a clarion call to his generation to stop ‘lecturing on navigation while the ship is going down’, he did not join the CPGB. Nor did MacNeice, another ‘Marxist of the Heart’ for whom ‘comrade became a more tender term than lover’. Despite this, MacNeice could see communism’s attraction after the ‘jogtrot’ left of the Labour Party, which was ‘notoriously lacking in glamour’, and he could appreciate why ‘these young poets had turned to the tomb of Lenin … The strongest appeal of the Communist Party was that it demanded sacrifice; you had to sink your ego.’ Though he was ‘repelled by the idolisation of the state’, MacNeice was able to console himself with Marx and Engels’ dictum that it would soon ‘wither away’. Spender did actually sign up, but his membership was short-lived.

      Other Cambridge Communist sympathisers who would later gain notoriety for their espionage activities on behalf of the USSR included Donald MacLean, H.A.R. (Kim) Philby and Anthony Blunt, who was always ‘thought of as a fellow-traveller, never as a Party member [and who made] extremely cynical remarks about Communism that went beyond the call of duty in suppressing the fact that he was one’.

      But there were those who were prepared to make the commitment. In December 1931 the October Club (named after the Bolshevik revolution of 1917) was started in Oxford by an American Rhodes scholar, Frank Meyer, who subsequently translated to the London School of Economics, where he remained active in student politics until he was deported by the government. By January 1933 it could boast three hundred members, though not all of these were card-carrying Communists. However, by 1934 Communists had effectively succeeded in taking over the Oxford Labour Club, hanging a huge portrait of Lenin on the wall of the club’s meeting house to signal their entryism. Not everyone advertised their affiliation, but Philip Toynbee, the son of the Oxford historian Arnold Toynbee and grandson of the classicist Gilbert Murray, who had joined the CPGB at the end of his first term at Oxford and ‘retired deeper and deeper into this secretive hive … was not a clandestine member, but sat on a little iceberg peak above the submarine majority, revealing, as we used to say, “the Face of the Party”’. Toynbee exemplified the song ‘we would ruefully sing at our evening socials [the Bromley branch members would, no doubt, have joined in] :

      Dan, Dan, Dan!

      The Communist Party man Working underground all day. In and out of meetings, Bringing fraternal greetings, Never sees the light of day.

      His undergraduate life consisted largely of sitting through interminable committee meetings, sometimes lasting ‘from lunchtime until eight or nine in the evening’, leafleting, demonstrating in support of strikes in Oxford factories, taking part in ‘slogan-shouting marches through London’, attending international Communist Party conferences, going to work alongside the miners in the Rhondda Valley, soaking up ‘the whole lively atmosphere of purpose and intrigue’. In 1938 he was elected the first Communist President of the Oxford Union (to be succeeded by Edward Heath two terms later).

      While there were probably around two hundred card-carrying Oxford undergraduates, in Cambridge several dons were members of the CPGB, including Dobb, the biochemist ‘Doggy’ Woolf and the literary scholar Roy Pascal. By 1935 the Cambridge Socialist Society СКАЧАТЬ