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Kitabı oku: «Michael Foot: A Life», sayfa 4
Several of them became close friends of Michael Foot. Among them were men of high talent (women were marginalized in a highly chauvinist university at that time). Frank Hardie, President of the Union in Hilary term 1933 during the King and Country debate, was a charismatic President of the University Labour Club. Anthony Greenwood, President of the Union in Trinity term 1933 and a handsome man popular with women undergraduates, saw the pro-Communist October Club founded in his rooms in Balliol – and later suppressed by the proctors. Paul Reilly of Hertford College, the son of a famous architect, was another young man of the far left, and a long-term friend of Michael Foot. He was later to be an important figure in industrial design and director of the Design Council. Foot’s most important close friendship was with John Cripps of Balliol College. He was a patrician socialist with whom Foot shared a house in his final year at Oxford and with whom he was to visit America on a debating tour in 1934, and who was to become a major figure in countryside matters. Unlike his friends Reilly and Foot, he gained a first in the Schools. It was through John’s father, Sir Stafford Cripps, an outspoken MP and voice of far-left views after the collapse of the Labour government (in which he had served as Solicitor-General) in 1931, that Michael Foot was to secure his first important entrée into the Labour Party.
For Michael the Union, as the focus of Oxford social and political life, was the institution to conquer, and he made astonishingly swift progress. Dingle and John had both been Presidents in the twenties, and as it happened both spoke in Union debates in the Trinity term of 1932. A speech of John’s was described as ‘stupendous’ in the Oxford Magazine.44 As for Michael, his brand of revivalist Liberal oratory swept opponents aside. Elected early on to the Library Committee, he was elected Treasurer for Hilary term 1932, then became Librarian, and in June 1933 defeated David Graham, ex-Librarian, in winning the presidency by a large majority. Anthony Greenwood graciously wrote a balanced and delicate appraisal of his election: ‘He would do well to pay a little more attention to the serious parts of his speeches. At present he seldom really deals with the subject. But it was a great oratorical effort and fully justified the result of the polling. I hope that Mr Foot will have a very happy term in the chair which has become almost a monopoly of his family.’ Foot’s election brought much joy. Greenwood wrote privately to congratulate him: ‘I thought your speech last Thursday was first rate, as it was in the Eights Week debate.’45 His mother Eva wrote with almost a sense of inevitability: ‘Do you think Graham really thought of getting it?’ Isaac combined paternal warmth with practicality:
The Foot colours have been kept flying high. I send you a cheque for ten pounds and made a further pull in the overdraft. If invested in the Abbey Road it will be worth about eighty pounds at the age of ninety. No swollen head, my lad.46
In the event, Michael’s term as President passed by satisfactorily, though inevitably silently on his part. He returned to debating the following term in loud support of a motion that ‘the presence of four hundred and seventy Conservatives in the House is a national disaster’. Towards Tories, Foot observed, he had ‘an inflexible loathing’.
His experiences in the Oxford Union profoundly shaped Foot’s political image. The Union nurtured his particular style of oratory, heavily sarcastic towards opponents, the swift marshalling of key points of an argument, the deliberate focus on the opposition’s strongest point before destroying it, the inexorable advance towards an unanswerable conclusion. Reinforced by ample quotations from historical and literary eminences, Foot’s speeches were hard to rebut. From this time on he was to become celebrated as an incomparable revivalist stump speaker. Equally, the sometimes more measured approach necessary in House of Commons debates, or in television interviews, was much harder to capture. But his unique debating style, with a distinctive rhythm and cadences, and unorthodox changes of emphasis that made him hard to interrupt, was central to his political fame.
The dominant theme of his speeches at the time was always resistance to war. Foot is a good example of the rebellion of the young in the later twenties and earlier thirties, responding eagerly to anti-war works like All Quiet on the Western Front or Goodbye to All That, using images that exposed ‘merchants of death’, denouncing the ‘system of Versailles’ and calling for a new international order with open covenants openly arrived at. One book on the wartime experience that made a particularly deep impression on him was the poet Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War (1928). Foot’s credo came out very clearly in a compilation of four essays by recent Oxford undergraduates, Young Oxford and War, published by Selwyn Blount in 1934, under the unexpected editorship of a rising Indian politician, V. K. Krishna Menon, and with a brief foreword by Harold Laski.47 The authors were a varied group. R. G. Freeman was a Communist and President of the short-lived October Club. Frank Hardie, the former Union President, wrote ‘as a pacifist and a socialist’. Keith Steel-Maitland, whose chapter was easily the most practical and down-to-earth, was a moderate Conservative.
Finally there was Michael Foot, writing passionately as a near-pacifist Liberal. He condemned the rise of militarism in schools and universities in recent years: ‘There can be no real distinction between defence and offence in the modern world.’ He quoted freely from anti-war Union of Democratic Control authors like G. Lowes Dickinson and Norman Angell, author of International Anarchy, a phrase which appeared with much frequency in Foot’s early writings. He applauded the pacifist arguments advanced by Quakers and others, and pointed to the success of German Protestants in, so he claimed, resisting Hitler. Pacifism implied ‘unilateral disarmament’ and argued that evil should not be resisted with evil. The broad pacifist movement was plagued by internal divisions but could focus on ending international anarchy and ‘the elimination of force from the conduct of international affairs’. His was by no means a complete or unqualified pacifist argument. A properly constituted collective peace force to provide a backing of law ‘does not contain the elements objected to by the pacifist’. But instances in which resort to arms could ever be accepted by one of Foot’s outlook seemed hard to spell out in practical terms. It was a young man’s tract, rich in idealism, uncertain in logic, lacking in any kind of practical detail. But it embodied themes that were constantly to recur in Foot’s later career.
Foot emerged from Oxford with a glowing reputation as a potential young politician, even perhaps a future minister, Cripps and others thought. As noted, he announced his release from Oxford life with a trip to Paris with his brother John, spent in part breaking their vow of abstinence from alcohol, in part pursuing in vain a pretty young French girl Michael had met at Pencrebar the previous year. His student days had officially come to an end, but there was an interesting coda that autumn. With his close friend John Cripps he went to the United States for the first time in a debating tour on behalf of the Oxford Union. America was neither a country nor a culture that had impinged greatly on Michael’s early years, although he enjoyed aspects of its artistic life such as the films of Walt Disney and the voluptuous Mae West, and had some emerging interest in writers such as Emerson and Thoreau. Politically, like many young Englishmen, he had much enthusiasm for Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal programme, which he regarded as an attempt to shore up social welfare and progressive economics against backwoods Republican reactionaries during the Great Depression, and indeed as an inspiration to the world. But it belonged ‘over there’, and had little directly to offer the young Foot (though this was equally true of young Labour economists like Hugh Gaitskell, Douglas Jay or Evan Durbin at the same period).
It was a gruelling visit, with twenty-two debates between 26 October and 4 December 1934.48 They went mostly to universities on the eastern seaboard, ranging from Yale and Penn State to Bates College, Maine. The last two debates took them almost seven hundred miles west, as far as Michigan. Michael Foot and John Cripps, ‘two quiet young chaps wearing glasses’, as they were described in the Atlanta Journal,49 were usually given left-wing motions to defend, which they both did with much success, defending trade unions, condemning military training in schools, attacking isolationism in American foreign policy. The old Liberal in Foot emerged in a robust attack on American trade policy at New Rochelle, New York, on 26 November: ‘If you uphold an isolationist policy, you can no longer remain a great creditor nation, you can no longer remain a great exporting nation.’ The result would be the same economic collapse and mass unemployment that were then so visible in Britain. He and Cripps were invariably triumphant in these debating jousts, and a succession of student newspapers wrote in praise of their wit and eloquence. Foot’s ‘brilliant rebuttal’ in a motion on the need for trade unions was praised in Yale News,50 although there were some murmurs that the Oxford Union seemed a bit facetious by American standards. There were also random interviews in which Michael told the Americans of the importance of Mickey Mouse to the British view of transatlantic culture.51 The tour was, in its way, an important episode for Foot. America was never so appealing that it shaped his political or other views: despite his enthusiasm for most aspects of Roosevelt’s New Deal, he was too intensely English for that. But the visit enlarged his vision in many respects. For instance, one aspect he noticed was the apparently much greater prominence of women in higher education in the US, notably in some distinguished women’s colleges at which he and Cripps spoke. The trip took him out of his familiar English radical world for a while, and helped him to grow up.
Michael Foot’s early years made him a distinctive, perhaps unique, kind of politician. He somehow bridged new and old, the brave new world radicalism of the post-war generation alongside the cultural depth of a Victorian man of letters. He was in many ways an old young man; equally he remained an eternally youthful spirit well into extreme old age. He drew from his origins a passionate attachment to the traditions of his family, and of Plymouth and the West Country more generally. He acquired an immense stock of vivid, easily mobilized political and literary influences and allusions. An apt quotation from Foot could spear opponents at will. His political connections were strong, first with Lloyd Georgian Liberalism, though perhaps Stafford Cripps might direct him towards new horizons. As a young debater at Oxford he acquired a fluency and poise in debate, buttressed by a kind of cultural confidence that pushed him towards a public career. He discovered that he could speak and he could write, with passion, conviction and often brilliance. He had all the idealistic fervour of a young anti-war radical at that time. Yet perhaps the abiding legacy from his younger days was an ability to place himself in historical context. When he reflected on current political and social issues, Drake and Cromwell, Tom Paine and Hazlitt, even aberrant turncoats like Edmund Burke, were at his shoulder. He felt himself to be somehow their heir, a past and future king of libertarian dissent, but searching still for a coherent movement to lead or even to join. But, whatever his future, he would share with the inspirational Isaac a demonic energy to pursue great causes. For ‘He trespasses upon his duty who sleeps upon his watch.’ No Foot ever dared do that.
2 CRIPPS TO BEAVERBROOK (1934–1940)
When Michael Foot’s hero, David Lloyd George, came to London as a young man at the age of seventeen in November 1880, he set eyes on the House of Commons for the first time. In his diary he admitted to having ‘eyed the assembly in a spirit similar to that in which William the Conqueror eyed England on his visit to Edward the Confessor, the region of his future domain. Oh, vanity!’1 Five years later he unveiled to his future wife, Maggie Owen, the force of his terrifying ambition: ‘My supreme idea is to get on … I am prepared to thrust even love itself under the wheels of my juggernaut if it obstructs the way,’2 and he was as good as his word. Michael Foot, by contrast, felt no such overpowering urge. Although the son and brother of Liberal MPs (and possessed of a good deal more historical knowledge of the Norman Conquest than Lloyd George), he had no driving political ambition. To none of his friends did he suggest that he might consider becoming a parliamentary candidate. Indeed, when he came down from Oxford in June 1934, even when he returned from the United States six months later, he had no idea of what he might do in life. His brothers were finding their feet professionally, Dingle in chambers as a barrister as well as being an MP, Hugh in the Colonial Service, John in the solicitors’ firm Foot & Bowden back in Plymouth. But none of these routine occupations appealed to Michael’s imagination even though he too, in his way, sought ‘to get on’.
In fact he spent his first six months after graduating very much on the move. There was the jolly visit to Paris with John mentioned earlier, on which he spent a small legacy of £50 from his grandfather, a reward for earlier abstemiousness, successfully chasing culture, less successfully chasing girls, gleefully downing his windfall with glasses of Pernod. There followed a far more significant trip for the longer term when he went on across Europe, taking a train to Venice – very much his cherished city in later years – and then a boat from Trieste to Haifa to join his elder brother Hugh (‘Mac’), now serving in the Colonial Service amongst the continuing tensions of Palestine. Hitherto Michael had had no particular interest in the tensions between Jews and Arabs, although most British Liberals, from Lloyd George downwards, had a broad sympathy for the Jews and for the Zionist movement. Churchill’s philo-Semitism when a pre-war Liberal MP was well known. But Michael Foot’s trip in 1934 had a major impact upon him. It was to stimulate the first of many controversial crusades. He first became aware of the qualities of the Jews on the slow boat to Haifa, since virtually all the other passengers on it were Jewish. One of them was an ardent chess player with whom Foot first played serious chess. On this voyage his Jewish friend won every time, but Foot was to become ‘one of the strongest players in the House of Commons’ in later years.3
When he reached Palestine Michael stayed with his brother Hugh at Nablus, in the famous biblical region of Samaria. For one hellfire Welsh nonconformist preacher the very name had been a symbol of communal turbulence: ‘What was Samaria? Samaria was the Merthyr Tydfil of the land of Canaan.’4 In 1934 it was no more tranquil, with a small number of Jewish settlers in a prolonged stand-off with a large Arab community scattered throughout desert villages. Michael quickly realized the complexities of the situation in Palestine, a region left in conflict and possible chaos after the ambiguous pledges to both communities made by Lloyd George’s government after the disastrously imprecise Balfour Declaration of 1917. But whereas brother Hugh, like most in the Colonial Service, was a warm sympathizer with the Arabs, it was the plight of the beleaguered Jewish minority that haunted Michael all his life. After a few tense weeks in Nablus he returned home by a circuitous route, including a cheap ship from Beirut, his first flight, from Athens to Salonika, and a stopping train through Yugoslavia and back to England. There followed his debating tour in America with John Cripps. He returned home just in time for Christmas, after which the more practical problems of getting and spending had to be resolved.
The way that things worked out for him had a critical effect on his entire life. In the absence of any attractive alternative his thoughts turned to writing a work of history, in which the present-day moral would emerge. His chosen area was the life of Charles James Fox, to whom he had been pointed by his reading of George Otto Trevelyan and others, and who had interested him when working for prizes at Leighton Park school. Fox had much appeal as a subject. He was a critic of the overmighty authority of George III and his King’s Friends. He was a colourful personality, sexually liberated – usually a feature of Foot’s chosen heroes, including Hazlitt, Byron and H. G. Wells. He was a literate apostle of the Enlightenment. Above all, he championed the ideals of the French Revolution and of civil liberty through dark times in peace and in war. Foot was always a passionate supporter of the revolutionaries of 1789: they drew him to Tom Paine and to Hazlitt in his reading. A fellow chess enthusiast, Charles James Fox inspired Foot as an essential link in a native English radical tradition that bound the Levellers in Putney church to Cobden and Bright and Lloyd George and Bertrand Russell and the anti-war apostles of the Union of Democratic Control in 1914: the relationship of all this to the separate complexities of the socialist tradition was something he had yet to work out. Fox was naturally opposition-minded; he was seen by A. J. P. Taylor as the founder of the dynasty of ‘trouble-makers’ which his 1957 Ford’s Lectures at Oxford celebrated, and whose steps the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament consciously followed. Fox had kept alive the red flame of radical courage during the bleak Pittite years. He was the most natural of subjects for the post-Oxford idealist Michael Foot.
But the book never happened. Foot had no money, no publisher, not even a synopsis to wave around. Instead he found himself trapped in a humdrum office job, which was to change his life. It was to become a central point of self-reference and self-definition in his own later interpretation of his career. This arose from his friendship with John Cripps, which led him to spend much time in vacations at ‘Goodfellows’ in the west Oxfordshire village of Filkins, the squire’s home of John’s father, the famous advocate and by now socialist firebrand Sir Stafford Cripps. He also went on holiday with the Cripps family to the Scilly Isles. Foot’s relationship with Stafford Cripps soon became a decisive one. He needed a hero and a patron: in Cripps, as later in Beaverbrook, he found both. ‘Goodfellows’ fascinated him with its array of visiting Labour, trade union and socialist celebrities. He met George Lansbury, Labour’s current evangelistic pacifist leader, whose pacifism appeared even to Foot surreal, but with whom he became friendly in Lansbury’s last years. He was impressed by Ernest Bevin, the Transport and General Workers Union’s General Secretary, as an authentic working-class leader of much strength of personality; much less so by the taciturn Clem Attlee. A far more potent influence than either was one occasional visitor, the young Welsh MP Aneurin Bevan, who was to shape his destiny for ever. There were also young people like Geoffrey Wilson, an idealistic Quaker who was to become Stafford Cripps’s private secretary on his ambassadorial visit to Moscow in 1940. Clearly, amidst such company Foot’s traditional Liberalism would be facing a severe challenge. But Cripps was attracted by his son’s interesting and knowledgeable young friend, anxious to help him forward and to enlist his literary and oratorical talents for his own versions of the socialist cause. Cripps’s brother Leonard, a ship-owner and a director of the Holt shipping firm’s Blue Funnel Line which traded with southern Africa and the Far East, needed a personal assistant. His nephew John had been pencilled in for this post, but John (a caustic critic of his uncle’s right-wing views) suggested his friend Michael instead. Thus it was that on 1 January 1935 the impressionable young Foot began work amidst the cranes and bunkers of the alien shipyards of Liverpool’s docks.
Michael Foot’s time in industrial Liverpool was not a relaxed one, and he left after barely nine months. But for ever afterwards he would give this period a legendary Damascus-like status as the time when he first witnessed social hardship and became a left-wing socialist. It is important to try to establish how far the poverty of working-class Liverpool was pivotal in this conversion, and indeed what kind of socialism it was to which he was drawn. Certainly he found his job in the Blue Funnel Line boring and undemanding. He used as much time as he could in making notes on the back of business correspondence on the career and ideas of Charles James Fox. He had hoped that his new job might entail some overseas travel, for which he had now acquired a taste, but none was forthcoming and he was office-bound. Foot told his mother how heartily he disliked all the people he worked with and for. Leonard Cripps was boring, Sir Richard Holt ‘the last word in malignant density’. Others had ‘stunted intelligences’, while the routine duties were ‘dull as ditchwater’.5
But Liverpool, the first industrial working-class city of which he had any experience, was far more compelling. He found lodgings in a Yiddish-speaking Jewish home which his recent visit to Palestine made congenial. He spent time exploring the shabby backstreets of the dock-side areas. He also transferred his footballing interests, at least for a time, to supporting Everton at Goodison Park. He treasured in later life an ‘Ode to Everton’ that he composed in 1935, which was printed in the Liverpool Daily Post. It laid particular emphasis on ‘Dixie’s priceless head’, a reference to the prolific goal-scoring centre-forward ‘Dixie’ Dean.6 But crucially, within a month of arriving on Merseyside the old West Country Liberal had joined the Labour Party as an active, ardent crusader and canvasser. (Oddly, in accounts of his career he tends to give 1934, not 1935, as the date of his conversion.) Michael had got religion, and wanted the world to know. Soon he was an energetic participant in the committee meetings and street-corner campaigning of the Liverpool Labour Party. He met congenial comrades here, including two future parliamentary colleagues, Sydney Silverman, an eloquent Jewish lawyer, and the formidable and pugnacious Bessie Braddock and her husband Jack, both ex-Communists. To what extent Michael’s conversion was the consequence of empirical observation might, however, be examined. After all, commentators have wondered how far George Orwell’s famous book of the same period was actually the product of first-hand observation of Wigan Pier. John Vincent once commented in an Observer book review that ‘a man who describes as flabby Lancashire cheese which is crumbly gives himself away at once’.
Without doubt, Michael Foot’s compassionate heart and soul were deeply stirred by the poverty he saw in the dockside community and in Liverpool’s backstreets. It was a maritime city with a weak manufacturing base, and thus very high unemployment, painfully evident on street corners amidst its shabby terraces. Equally clearly, his speeches and articles while at Oxford show a young man moving rapidly leftwards in his revulsion for militarism and dictatorship. His criticisms of socialism in ‘Why I am a Liberal’ are half-hearted questionings of the merits of centralization. Most of his close friends at Oxford – John Cripps, Paul Reilly, Tony Greenwood – were emphatically Labour. And without doubt his acquaintance with Stafford Cripps and the bracing radical atmosphere of ‘Goodfellows’ were a powerful influence too. But, most characteristically, Michael’s conversion came through the medium of books – and indeed not sober works of socio-economic analysis, but imaginative works of fiction. While crawling to his office on Liverpool’s trams, his mind was focused not only on the slums through which he passed but on the books he read on his journey. Arnold Bennett was a particularly powerful stimulant: his How to Live on Twenty-Four Hours a Day (1910) made a lasting impact on the young socialist. It is actually a short book, not at all one of Bennett’s masterpieces, but Foot no doubt appreciated the chapter on ‘Serious Reading’, which lavished great praise on Hazlitt’s essay ‘Poetry in General’ – ‘the best thing of its kind in English’.7 Foot also read extensively the novels of H. G. Wells, destined to loom alongside Cripps and Bevan as supreme inspirations. Tono-Bungay’s relatively brief account of socialist ideas was exciting to him, more perhaps for its subtle exposé of the immoralities of free-market competitive capitalism. Bernard Shaw was another important influence, though he was less favoured because of his criticisms of Wells’s Short History of the World.8 Foot’s was an undoctrinaire ethical socialism, a gospel of words and ideas, similar to that which had impelled young men like Attlee or Dalton into the Independent Labour Party. On more immediate matters, Foot was excited by Bertrand Russell’s Proposed Roads to Freedom. Economic theory does not seem to have interested him. At first he was innocent of connections with Marxism, although by 1937 he was instructing the equally young Barbara Betts (the future Barbara Castle) in the intellectual delights of Das Kapital. His ideology, such as it was, kept its distance from the formal programmes of the Labour Party, still in 1935 trying to redefine its policies after the catastrophe of 1931 had laid bare the emptiness of its economic notions, and perhaps also the wider problem of attempting to modify and humanize a capitalist order which it ultimately wished to abolish.
Nor was Michael Foot a Fabian. He had met Beatrice Webb at Stafford Cripps’s home, and did not take to her admonitory style. He did not become a socialist in order to promote orderly administration by a bureaucratic elite; nor, without a background in local government at any level, was he inspired by the heady vision of ‘gas and water socialism’. The first book by the Webbs that he read, and indeed responded to positively, was their Industrial Democracy, which he read together with Barbara Betts at her Bloomsbury flat. Years later, in 1959, he took sharp issue with the Fabian historian Margaret Cole on the Webbs’ vision of socialism: ‘I think there is running through a great deal of what they wrote … a strong bureaucratic, anti-libertarian attitude which often reveals what I think is a real contempt for those who are engaged in Socialist agitation, protest and activities of that nature.’ He pointed out Beatrice’s patrician absence of interest in the great propaganda work of Robert Blatchford, editor of the early socialist newspaper the Clarion (he might have added her contempt for Keir Hardie and George Lansbury as well). For much of their career the Webbs were unconvinced that the Labour movement was the instrument of change, rather than a generally-defined ‘permeation’ and gradualism. Revealingly, Foot added as a criticism the Webbs’ uncritical adulation of the Soviet Union and Communist doctrine, in contrast to the far more critical approach of his old journalist friend and mentor H. N. Brailsford, historian and intellectual guru of the socialist left.9 Foot’s conclusions appear to endorse many of H. G. Wells’s assaults on the Fabian high command in the Edwardian period, and the general line of criticism indicated in one of his favourite books, The New Machiavelli. It was a battle of the books which Margaret Cole was most unlikely ever to win. For Foot, then, socialism was a greater liberalism, a doctrine of social and aesthetic liberation. It implied new values and a new society. It made Michael in time the natural disciple of the imaginative crusader Aneurin Bevan and the natural husband of the cultural socialist, Jill.
In this quest, Stafford Cripps seemed at this period the natural messiah. Since the 1931 schism, with the defection of MacDonald and his Chancellor Philip Snowden to become allies of the Tories, Cripps had led a sharp advance to the left. He preached a style of socialism that went far beyond the cautious parliamentary parameters within which Labour had grown up. He joined the far-left Socialist League, a movement of middle-class intellectuals, formed in 1932, in large part from the ILP when it disaffiliated from the Labour Party. It was a movement in which Michael Foot was shortly to enlist. Cripps campaigned to promote a new foreign policy in alliance with the Soviet Union: the League of Nations was dismissed as ‘the International Burglars’ Union’. He also pressed for the social ownership of all major industries and utilities, based not on state nationalization but on workers’ control. At the 1933 party conference Cripps proclaimed in Marxist terms that a socialist government would never receive fair treatment under capitalism, with the City, the Civil Service and the establishment all ranged against it. He called for some form of emergency government to entrench socialism in our time. In January 1934 he caused even greater alarm and shock by suggesting that Buckingham Palace would be foremost amongst the institutions seeking to defeat an incoming Labour government. This doctrine horrified leaders such as Dalton, Attlee and Morrison: Beatrice Webb thought him an extremist and his ideas revolutionary. By the 1935 general election Cripps’s erratic behaviour meant that his star was soon to wane. He himself recognized the fact by giving private financial help to Clem Attlee as assistant party leader in Lansbury’s last phase. But to the young Michael Foot, a books-driven evangelist yearning for a cause, Cripps was the most obvious instrument of creating a new socialist society.
