Cabinet's Finest Hour

The Hidden Agenda of May 1940

David Owen

• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781910376898, 9781910376553
• eBook ISBN: 9781910376591
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia del mundo

In May 1940, the British War Cabinet debated over the course of nine meetings a simple question: Should Britain fight on in the face of overwhelming odds, sacrificing hundreds of thousands of lives, or seek a negotiated peace? Using Cabinet papers from the United Kingdom's National Archives, David Owen illuminates in fascinating detail this little-known, yet pivotal, chapter in the history of World War II.

Eight months into the war, defeat seemed to many a certainty. With the United States still a year and half away from entering, Britain found itself in a perilous position, and foreign secretary Lord Halifax pushed prime minister Winston Churchill to explore the possibility of a negotiated peace with Hitler, using Mussolini as a conduit. Speaking for England is the story of Churchill's triumph in the face of this pressure, but it is also about how collective debate and discussion won the day—had Churchill been alone, Owen argues, he would almost certainly have lost to Halifax, changing the course of history. Instead, the Cabinet system, all too often disparaged as messy and cumbersome, worked in Britain's interests and ensured that a democracy on the brink of defeat had the courage to fight on.
 

1

Speak for England

On Saturday 2 September 1939, after rushing through the Military Service Bill, followed by a long wait until nearly eight o’clock in the evening, the Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain made a short statement to a House of Commons expectant of a declaration of war on Germany. Instead, according to the Conservative MP, Leo Amery, he “came to tell us in a flat, embarrassed voice, first of all that Mussolini’s project for a conference could not be entertained while Poland was subject to invasion; secondly that we were discussing with the French.”¹ There was a deep sense of frustration in the Commons when Chamberlain sat down. In part, such feeling stemmed from the assumption that we were already at war. And yet here was Chamberlain ready only to speak about a delayed reply from Hitler to the British message delivered a day before to his Foreign Secretary, Ribbentrop.

Few, if any, MPs were even the slightest bit interested to hear about a proposal from the Italian Government for a conference, believing, correctly, that even Chamberlain would find it impossible to take part. It was a House of Commons seething with frustration; Poland was being subjected to invasion, her towns under bombardment and Danzig made the subject of a unilateral settlement by force. The House of Commons very rarely sits on a Saturday; the only recent precedents have been 3 November 1956 during the Suez Crisis, and 3 April 1982 when Margaret Thatcher announced that in response to an Argentinian landing on the Falkland Islands, a task force would sail for the South Atlantic on the Monday.²

Suddenly, though unrecorded in Hansard – the supposedly verbatim report of what is said in the Commons – Leo Amery, one of Chamberlain’s foremost critics, First Lord of the Admiralty from 1922 to 1924 and a very successful Colonial Secretary from 1924 to 1929, called out to Arthur Greenwood on the opposite bench as he rose to reply to the Prime Minister, “Speak for England, Arthur!” Amery “dreaded a purely partisan speech” and afterwards felt that “no one could have done it better”.³

Greenwood was deputising for the Labour leader, Clement Attlee, who was away from Parliament recovering from an operation on his prostate. Attlee’s total trust and confidence in Greenwood is revealed through his determination to keep to his doctor’s orders and not cut short his convalescence. So he was sitting on the beach with his children on 23 August 1939 when the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact was signed; he was playing golf on 1 September when Hitler sent his forces into Poland; and was back on the beach on this day, 2 September, when Chamberlain made his statement to Parliament and Greenwood made his speech. Attlee had told Greenwood to protest furiously that Britain had not yet fulfilled its obligations to Poland. The two communicated constantly by telegram while Attlee was absent, though one rather important telegram was torn up by the Attlee family dog, Ting, and only when pieced together read “War imminent. Arthur.” ⁴

Amery’s words carried the clear implication to everyone in the House that Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain had not spoken for England – the effect was electric. Greenwood at the despatch box was a tall and, on this occasion, a commanding figure, who only a few years later would still be able to beat off a knife attack from an assailant outside the Commons late at night. On such occasions as these the House becomes a cockpit, with a theatrical atmosphere that cannot be reproduced when it is half empty. It is a moment when reputations are made as well as broken.

Speaking with a new authority to a crammed chamber, Greenwood began, “This is indeed a grave moment. (Cheers) I believe the whole House is perturbed by the right hon. gentleman’s statement. There is a growing feeling, I believe, in all quarters of the House that this incessant strain must end sooner or later – and, in a sense, the sooner the better (Cries of “Now”). But if we are to march, I hope we shall march in complete unity and march with France.” A maverick backbench MP, John McGovern, then interjected with a sneer: “You people do not intend to march – not one of you.”⁵ Greenwood wisely did not deal with the charge, intent on maximising unity amongst all MPs and appealing to the better nature of everyone. John McGovern had sat as an independent MP for the Scottish seat, Glasgow Shettleston, while retaining membership of the Independent Labour Party [ILP] since a by-election in 1922. He was a combative figure who maintained his passionate commitment to peace throughout the war, and was described as someone capable of causing hackles to rise on the left as well as the right.

Greenwood continued, “I am speaking under very difficult circumstances – (Cheers) with no opportunity to think about what I should say; and I speak what is in my heart at this moment. I am gravely disturbed. An act of aggression took place 38 hours ago. The moment that act of aggression took place, one of the most important treaties of modern times automatically came into operation (Opposition Cheers)”. He ended by saying, “I believe that the die is cast, and we want to know in time.”⁶

In a revealing letter to his sister Ida seven days later on 20 September 1939, Chamberlain explained that the “long drawn out agonies that preceded the actual declaration of war” were due to “three complications”.⁷ Firstly, secret communications that a neutral intermediary conducted between Hitler and Göring and himself and his Foreign Secretary Halifax which he had found “rather promising”. Though “they gave the impression, probably with intention, that it was possible to persuade Hitler to accept a peaceful and reasonable solution of the Polish question in order to get an Anglo-German agreement”. Once again, Chamberlain was not ready to accept the reality that Hitler was intent on war. What Chamberlain wrote was that until Hitler “disappears and his system collapses there can be no peace … What I hope for is not a military victory – I very much doubt the possibility of that – but a collapse of the German home front.” Still in November Chamberlain thought the war would be over by the Spring with “the German realisation they can’t win”.⁸

Many MPs were surprised by the effectiveness of Greenwood’s speech, but he was a far more significant figure in the Labour Party than many Conservative MPs and right-wing political commentators had hitherto recognised. From his position as Head of Economics at Huddersfield Technical College and the economics department at Leeds University he had written in the Economic Journal, the Journal of the Royal Statistical Society and Political Quarterly. Greenwood, besides a long-standing expertise in education, left Leeds to become Secretary to the Council for the Study of International Relations for which he contributed to a book The War and Democracy,⁹ published in 1914, writing at the end: “Today is seed-time. But the harvest will not be gathered without sweat and toil. The times are pregnant with great possibilities, but their realisation depends upon the united wisdom of the people.” He became a civil servant in the Ministry of Reconstruction where he worked with Christopher Addison and Arthur Henderson. Besides all this, he produced a report on adult education with R H Tawney. This gave him well-rounded experience and sufficient knowledge to deal with international crises as well as domestic issues.

In September 1916 he spoke at a conference which was written up in The Athenaeum, a monthly journal he was closely associated with. He spoke about the news of partially disabled soldiers and the important question of women, all in consideration to the question of Reconstruction after the war. The Athenaeum in January and February 1917 was critical of the five-man War Cabinet that the new Prime Minister Lloyd George had established, fearing that either way they must bring in other members of the Government to unify general policy or they must seek the advice of people less responsible, which would certainly lead to dissension and confusion. Greenwood was secretary of the Labour Party’s research department from 1920, before being elected as MP for Nelson and Colne in Lancashire at the general election on 15 November 1922. This was precipitated by the disowning of Prime Minister David Lloyd George by his Conservative coalition partners at the earlier ‘Carlton Club meeting’. That was also the same election in which Attlee became the MP for Limehouse. The two men were destined to be key partners from 1935–40 in bringing the Labour Party back to being a major political force, a force which deserved to serve again in government. They would both be ready to participate in and weld together a cross-party grouping in May 1940, among the first to remove Chamberlain as Prime Minister and then to be Labour’s two members of the five-member War Cabinet formed by Churchill on 10 May 1940.

As his biographer Beckett has written, Attlee “came to socialism slowly and reluctantly, by painstakingly eliminating all possible alternatives, through his heart first and his head afterwards, mentioning (but only privately, never publicly) the ‘burning anger which I felt at the wrongs which I could see around me’.”¹⁰ Attlee quietly dropped the Christianity that had played a major role in his family life growing up, and became a social worker. But Attlee wanted political action, not talk of theory. He became a member of the Independent Labour Party and joined the only union for which he was eligible – the National Union of Clerks. When he joined it had 887 branches, 22,000 members and 30 MPs. It was not Marxist but linked to the Social Democratic Federation, and it did not talk the language of class war.

Attlee started to build a reputation in the ILP in London as a whole. Then in 1914 Britain was at war with Germany. The ILP was divided; it had previously declared that in the event of war as socialists they should refuse to fight. Ramsay MacDonald, the Labour leader, was in favour of refusing yet Arthur Henderson supported the war. Attlee enlisted in the army two days after war was declared.

By September, Attlee was a lieutenant in the 6th South Lancashire Regiment in Tidworth. He became in temporary command of a company of seven officers and 250 men from Liverpool, Wigan and Warrington. He was made a Captain early in 1915 and, in June, he and his company of men set sail for Turkey stopping off en route in Valletta in Malta and in Alexandria in Egypt. After arriving at the port of embarkations, Mudros Harbour, he, as part of a battalion, went up the peninsular to find themselves in trenches stinking from Turkish corpses, and water which tasted of sand in the dreadful heat and flies. Soon the main enemy was dysentery which Attlee eventually caught; he ended up on a stretcher, unconscious, on a hospital ship where he was dropped off to recover in Malta. In his absence, the South Lancashires fought in the battle of Sari Bair and 500 of them were killed. He rejoined his men on 16 November and they held the final lines, embarking on HMS Princess Irene on 19 December. Attlee was the last but one to leave Gallipoli, the last being Major General FS Maude.

The fascinating and important historical consequence of Attlee’s fight against the Turks and the strategy of the Eastern Front, with which First Sea Lord Winston Churchill will always be identified, was that he fully supported the concept of taking the pressure off the Western Front in France. “It was a bold strategy and controversy still rages about whether it was a good one, but Attlee never had any doubt. It gave him his lifelong admiration for Churchill as a military strategist, an admiration which contributed enormously to their working relationship in the Second World War.”¹¹

Attlee came back to England and was promoted to Major Attlee in February 1917. From then on many people continued to call him Major Attlee and, more affectionately, in Limehouse ‘the Major’.

In June 1918 Attlee was sent to France and discharged from the army on 16 January 1919. In the ‘coupon’ general election called by Lloyd George, sometimes referred to as the ‘khaki election’, the Government list of MPs numbered 473. Three hundred and twenty two were conservative; Labour had 57. Attlee became Mayor of Stepney, appointed by the new Labour Council after the local elections in November 1919.

In October 1922 Attlee, as the prospective candidate for Limehouse for the ILP, fought the sitting Conservative MP whose majority was 6,000. On 15 November 1922, the day after the election, it was announced Attlee had 9,688 votes – a majority of 1,899. Labour now had 142 MPs, a majority of which came from the ILP.

In 1923 there was another general election, surprisingly called by the new Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin. Attlee won his Limehouse constituency with a large majority of 6,185 and Greenwood was also successful. While the Conservatives had the largest number of MPs, at 258, it no longer had the largest overall majority. Labour, who had 191, united with the Liberals and Ramsay MacDonald became Prime Minister in January 1924 when the king asked him to form the first Labour Government, albeit a minority one. It was destined to only last for a short time.

At this point Arthur Greenwood was made parliamentary secretary to the Ministry of Health and Clement Attlee became Under Secretary of State at the War Office. Forty-nine new Labour MPs were elected and there was a considerable increase in the number of ILP members, both being part of the Labour Representation Committee first convened on 27 Novem...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Preface
• 1 Speak for England
• 2 In the Name of God, Go!
• 3 The Politics of the Coalition Government
• 4 The Hidden Agenda
• 5 Speaking for All of Us
• 6 Dunkirk and Defiance
• 7 Epilogue: Prime Minister to President - conflict and the post-war Cabinets
• Index