A Gathering Storm

How the Spanish Civil War helped to turn the tide of British pacifism

War memorial in Dodworth, South Yorkshire (photo credit BarnsleyHistorian)

There is no doubt that the slaughter and horror of the First World War created several generations of pacifists in Britain: not just among those who had lived through it, and lost loved ones, or who had fought in it, and bore the scars, but among the next generation, the children of the war years. These were the ones whose parents’ mantelpieces held photographs of lost uncles and brothers; who sat in church every Sunday, or in school assemblies, and looked at the plaques on the wall, the Rolls of Honour; who stood round the local war memorial every Armistice Day wearing a poppy. They may not have heard the stories - veterans kept their nightmares to themselves - but they would have seen the maimed and blind on the streets. As they grew older they may have read Vera Brittain’s heartbreaking Testament of Youth, or seen a production of RC Sherriff’s Journey’s End. They would have read the poetry of Owen and Sassoon. And they would have joined in their parents’ and politicians’ fervent cries of ‘Never Again’.

The Roll of Honour, Barnsley Grammar School, photo credit Nigel Croft

When the politicians at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference created the League of Nations, in the vain hope that it would have the power to bring hostile countries to the table and force them to negotiate their way out of wars, they tapped into a population only too willing to believe their promises. By 1931 over 400,000 Brits had joined the League of Nations Union, a London-based organisation which aimed to promote and support the ideals of the League. The idea was that the League, being a new and transparent system of governing international relations, would replace the more traditional approaches to peacekeeping such as the creation of power blocs through secret treaties, and would work for world peace through disarmament. The Union organised educational events in schools and held well-publicised conferences: their membership spanned the political spectrum, from Labour Party intellectuals such as Hugh Dalton, to Tory grandees such as Austen Chamberlain and Lord Robert Cecil.

By 1935, the powers of the League of Nations had been sorely tested and found wanting by the actions of increasingly aggressive governments: furthermore, Germany and Italy left the League in 1933, and the United States had never joined, a crucial flaw. The Union called for a public ballot, to remind the National Government how strongly the British population felt: called the Peace Ballot, nearly half a million volunteers went from door to door, with a questionnaire:

In this Ballot you are asked to vote only for peace or war - whether you approve of the League of Nations or not, whether you are in favour of international disarmament or not. And by voting for the League of Nations you are helping not only your country, but the other countries of the World to maintain Peace and abolish war with all its horrors.

Photo courtesy of The Welsh Centre for International Affairs

The response was substantial and, by an overwhelming majority, in favour of continued support for the League of Nations and for pursuing a policy of international disarmament: 11.6 million people voted, representing 38% of the adult population. The results were announced at a huge rally at the Royal Albert Hall, chaired by the Archbishop of Canterbury. However, the final question was the one seized upon by anti-appeasers such as Winston Churchill: 75% of those asked were prepared to take military action to stop an aggressor if all else had failed. A hesitant support for a defensive war.

By the outbreak of the Second World War, in 1939, public opinion had shifted dramatically. Of course for many the overwhelming emotions were fear and despair; no-one wanted to re-live the horrors of 1914-18, and this time there was the added terror of what destruction and death an aerial bombardment might wreak on the civilian population. But, to take one simple example of the change in attitude, we need a trip to the university city of Oxford in the autumn of 1938, as seen through the eyes of two students, Edna Edmunds and Edward Heath.

Edna, later to be Edna Healey, was studying English at St Hugh’s College, and wrote about her experiences in her wonderful memoir Part of the Pattern.

Edna Healey, courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery

When she first arrived in Oxford in the autumn of 1936, she was pretty unconcerned with politics: Westminster had seemed a long way away from her home in Coleford in the Forest of Dean. But she had friends who were Quakers, and had studied the war poets, and so like the majority of idealistic youth, she considered herself a pacifist. But the three years she spent at St Hugh’s College changed her views, and her life, for ever.

For us students it was a period of constant excitement, fervent marches and demonstrations, and a passionate desire to save a whole world that stretched from China in the Far east to Europe on our doorstep. My first political meeting, in 1936, was a Labour Club gathering held to declare opposition to Japan’s aggression in China, which it had invaded in 1934. It was a Sunday night, so I wore my Sunday coat and a hat which was quickly removed by my mocking new friends. We were to burn our silk stockings in protest. Since I had never possessed a pair, I could happily agree.

The other interesting memoir of the time belongs to Edward Heath, the Balliol Organ Scholar, studying Politics, Philosophy and Economics. By the 1970s it would have been hard to find people further apart on the political spectrum than Edna Healey and her husband Denis, Labour’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Ted Heath, leader of the Tory Party. But in October 1938 they marched together…

The young Ted Heath

Although Ted was already a committed member of the Conservative Party when he arrived in Oxford, he was beginning to have doubts about the appeasement policies being pursued by the National Government in regards to Germany, Italy and Franco’s Spain. He describes in his autobiography, The Course of my Life, what he and his contemporaries believed was important in life:

True freedom - freedom of thought and expression, freedom from the knock on the door in the middle of the night, freedom from nuisance and harrassment, freedom to develop and to live a fulfilling life - these were the freedoms which inspired me and so many of my generation in the 1930s.

By the time Edna arrived in Oxford in 1936, Ted was beginning to make a strong case at the Oxford Union Debating Society for an end to appeasement, encouraged by a speech given there by Winston Churchill who called for urgent re-armament. Within the Labour Party there was movement as well, the pacifist leader George Lansbury had been ousted by a campaign led by the more hawkish Ernie Bevin, with Trade Union backing, and (Major) Clement Attlee had taken his place. Edna rapidly became politicised: ‘The Spanish Civil War had been for me, as for so many of our generation, a political birth.’ She marched through Oxford carrying banners bearing portraits of Spanish Civil War heroes. The Republican Government was the symbol for resistance against the tide of Fascism sweeping Europe. ‘I saw the conflict quite simply as a battle against evil.’ Ted Heath later wrote ‘We were to witness a conflict which aroused, in our generation, passions every bit as fierce as those stirred up by the Vietnam War thirty years later.’

Ted Heath had particular reason to fear the rise of Nazi Germany: in the summer of 1937 he had travelled through Germany on an exchange trip, culminating in an invitation to attend a series of Nazi party rallies in Nuremburg, and to attend a cocktail party where he saw Goring, Goebbels and Himmler at close quarters. He realised it was dangerous and foolhardy to underestimate the Germans’ determination and their efficiency. The following year, as President of the Federation of University Conservative Associations, he was invited by the Spanish Republicans to visit Barcelona, where he met representatives of the International Brigade, including the future trade union leader, Jack Jones.

Suddenly, in the weeks following Chamberlain’s return from Munich and his abdication of responsibility to protect the Czechs from a German invasion, an opportunity came for Oxford’s students to send an unequivocal message to Downing Street. Heath had already tried to lodge a protest in the form of an Oxford Union debate ‘This House deplores the Government’s policy of Peace without Honour’, critical of the ‘peace which passeth all understanding’, as Heath called it, and accusing Chamberlain of having turned ‘all four cheeks’ to Hitler, which caused some shocked hilarity among the audience. But a Union debate, in an all-male institution which was a bastion of privilege, would do little to shake the MPs sitting in the House of Commons. Watching a Tory seat nearly fall to an independent anti-appeasement candidate, however, would make many MPs re-consider their position.

In September 1938, the Conservative MP for Oxford died. A by-election was called for 27 October, and the massed ranks of the student and academic population turned out to give Neville Chamberlain a bloody nose, in what was historically a very safe seat. The Tory candidate was Quintin Hogg, a barrister and Fellow of All Souls College. Ted Heath was determined to oppose him, and after some debate it was agreed that both the Liberal and Labour candidates would stand down and Sandy Lindsay, the Master of Balliol, a well-loved and highly respected Christian Socialist, took the nomination to stand as an anti-appeasement Independent Progressive candidate. Tory grandees including Harold Macmillan and Winston Churchill lent loud support. Edna Edmunds, Denis Healey, together with another Balliol undergraduate, Roy Jenkins, and Ted Heath, electioneered, canvassed and leafleted side by side. Edna said that she heard Ted Heath address many meetings and was impressed by his confidence and persuasiveness. The national press covered the campaign in detail. Here is an extract from Lindsay’s election address:

Along with men and women of all parties I deplored the irresolution and tardiness of a Government which never made clear to Germany where this country was prepared to take a stand. I look with the deepest misgiving at the prospect before us . . . all of us passionately desire a lasting peace .. . but we want a sense of security, a life worth living for ourselves and our children: not a breathing space to prepare for the next war.

AD Lindsay, Master of Balliol and Founder of Keele University

Hogg won, but saw his majority slashed from 6,645 to 3,434. The message was heard loud and clear in Westminster: we’ve had enough of appeasement! Edna and her fellow students were not allowed out of college after midnight to hear the vote announced, but it was arranged that friends would cycle past and shout the result through the window. The philosophy don asked to be told the news ‘Oh I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I did want Dr Lindsay to win - though I voted for Mr Hogg.’

Denis Healey volunteered as soon as war broke out, and although he was sent back to Oxford to finish his degree, he would later serve as a beachmaster in the Italian landings with great bravery and distinction. Edward Heath was called up in 1940 and served in the Royal Artillery in the Normandy Landings. As Edna wrote:

This was the pattern for many of our friends who had been pacifists in their youth, had argued against conscription, but now saw this as a conflict between good and evil. Perhaps nothing would ever seem so clear cut again.

To read more about the British response to the Spanish Civil War: