Making Friends With Hitler

Britain, as the most powerful of the European victors of World War One, had a unique responsibility to maintain the peace in the aftermath of the Treaty of Versailles. The outbreak of a second, even more catastrophic war in 1939 has therefore always raised painful questions about Britain's failure to deal with Nazism. Could some other course of action have destroyed Hitler when he was still weak? In this highly disturbing new book, Ian Kershaw examines this crucial issue. He concentrates on the figure of Lord Londonderry - grandee, patriot, cousin of Churchill and the government minister responsible for the RAF at a crucial point in its existence. Londonderry's reaction to the rise of Hitler-to pursue friendship with the Nazis at all costs-raises fundamental questions about Britain's role in the 1930s and whether in practice there was ever any possibility of preventing Hitler's leading Europe once again into war. Prologue: A Patrician's Progress 'One can't use a man's hospitality and not give him a job if he wants it'. Sir Cuthbert Headlam, on Londonderry's appointment to a Cabinet post, 1928 No country could endure anything like the four long years of suffering and slaughter in the Great War between 1914 and 1918 and emerge with its social fabric and mentalities unaltered. Before the descent into the unimaginable carnage in the muds of Flanders and northern France, Great Britain's social order, resting upon age-old hierarchies and status divisions, had appeared resilient to change, its structures immutable. The backbone of the social order, and of Britain's ruling caste, headed by a monarchy enjoying a peak of popularity, was the landed aristocracy. Its dominance still seemed assured. Those with wealth and titles rooted in ownership of vast landed property, their immense income now often augmented by revenue derived from commercial or industrial capital, remained at the top of society's hierarchy. A sense of public duty rested upon social power. It translated often into a hand in running the affairs of state, or, at a more parochial level, presiding paternalistically over matters of local government. Beyond British shores, the high-tide of imperial grandeur offered further opportunities of public service - with added rank, status and power - in the world Empire, quite especially in the prized possession of India. Land, Crown and country. Empire - and Church (meaning the established Church of England) - formed the ideological props of an aristocracy conscious of its inherited right to rule, underpinned by traditional liberties - themselves seen as upheld only by the preservation of hierarchy and social inequality. Appearances were in some ways deceptive. Many members of the privileged landed aristocracy were less self-assured than they seemed. Some looked gloomily to a future in which land and birthright would be threatened. Britain's industrial strength, from which they profited hugely, already posed perceptible and growing challenges to social power resting upon traditional hierarchy. Britain was by the eve of the First World War the most industrialized and urbanized country in the world. More than three-quarters of its population lived in densely populated towns and cities. The vast majority of urban dwellers were manual workers, often housed in slums and eking out a bare existence through back-breaking labour in workshops, factories and mines. Women, mainly, also provided an unceasing supply of domestic servants for the better-off from the burgeoning commercial and professional classes as well as the grander echelons of society, the 'men of property', whose fine houses in the more salubrious parts of the cities marked the symbols of their acquired opulence. By the end of the nineteenth century, the political changes which reflected the longer-term social and economic transformation in an industrialized nation were making themselves felt. The politics of mass democracy had begun - and once begun could not be halted. Most men had been given the vote in the 1884 Reform Act. The remainder would acquire it just before the first post-war election in December 1918, when most (though still not all) women were allowed to vote, the last barriers to women's franchise on equal terms with men falling only in 1928. Though there could be no return to the narrow politics of deference and patronage, rigidly controlled by local landholders and lacking any genuine form of mass representation, the running of the two main political parties before 1914 - those of the Conservatives and the Liberals - remained largely in the hands of the traditional oligarchies, the landowners and, increasingly, businessmen who formed Britain's political establishment. But the House of Lords, the unelected second chamber of Parliament and bastion of landed privilege, saw its powers seriously curtailed in the Parliament Act of 1911, when the rights of the Lords to veto legislation emanating from the elected House of Commons were removed at one blow. And with the loss of these rights, the political power of the aristocracy was significantly undermined. A sign of a possible future challenge to the Conservative and Liberal duopoly of political power was the growth - still modest before the war - of the Labour Party, which by 1910 had forty-two Members of Parliament. The growth of trade unionism seemed a further indicator that organized labour could pose a political threat to the traditional political order. Only a quarter of the work force belonged to a union as Britain approached war. But this was a major advance on the 1870s, when only 4 per cent had done so, and there had been over a five-fold increase in union membership since the beginning of the 1890s. Twenty million working days a year lost in strikes between 1911 and 1913 conjured up a spectre for those in power of a growing threat from labour militancy. The existing social order, then, was intact but the days when its existing hierarchies were taken for granted were passing. R. H. Tawney, later a leading socialist intellectual and eminent historian, sensed the mood when he wrote in 1912: 'there has rarely been a period when the existing social order was regarded with so much dissatisfaction by so many intelligent and respectable citizens as it is at the present day'. This was the social order with which Britain had entered the First World War in 1914. When the Armistice of November 1918 signalled an end to the bloodshed and devastation, the same social order had survived. Given victory, even at colossal human cost, there was no revolution, such as swept through many parts of Europe. British institutions had come through unscathed. The social pyramid on which they rested was still in place. One-third of national wealth was owned by 0.1 per cent of the population. Much of it remained in the hands of the hereditary caste of great landowning families, which retained both social power and political influence. The old aristocracy was replenished by newly created peerages - some sold for handsome contributions to party funds. Of the 700 or so members of the aristocracy in the 1920s, around a fifth were recent creations. Immense landed estates, imposing stately homes staffed by armies of servants and grand town houses close to the seat of power were the outward trappings of social standing. So were the traditions of lavish hospitality and visible extravagance. Photos of the aristocracy at weekend shooting parties, hunt meets or points on the sporting calendar like Ascot horse-racing (in the presence of the monarch) or the traditional cricket match at Lords between the top public schools, Eton and Harrow, were still regularly to be found in newspapers and magazines. Nor was aristocratic influence at the heart of national government a thing of the past. Seven peers occupied high offices of state in the early 19208 in the first Conservative government after the war. Beneath the facade of continuity, nevertheless, the social and political landscape was changing. The decline of the aristocracy, largely masked before the war, was more in evidence. Some great estates were broken up, a number of country houses sold off. There was less of the glitter and glamour of the pre-war high society. And there was more defensiveness about title and privilege in the face of a Labour Party whose rapid rise reflected the appeal of doctrines of social equality. Over 4 million people had voted for the Labour Party in 1922 - almost double the figure in 1918 - and by 1924 this had risen to 5.5 million. Though it lasted only a few months in office, in 1924 a Labour government took power for the first time. The members of this government, headed by James Ramsay MacDonald, born in poverty in Scotland and a pacifist during the war, were scarcely revolutionaries. MacDonald himself, as we shall have cause to see, was deferential towards the high and mighty. There was little in practice to fear on the part of the aristocracy. But fears, even if not well founded, have their own form of reality. In upper-class eyes, a socialist government in power in Britain, even if for a short time, could, only bode ill for the future. It seemed a harbinger of worse to come. And left-wing militancy outside Parliament was more noticeable. Forty million working days a year had been lost in strikes between 1919 and 1921 - double the already high level of the years of industrial unrest just prior to the war. Little of this had to do with Britain's Communists, who were few in number, organized in a tiny party established in the wake of Lenin's success in Russia and almost wholly ineffectual. But that was not the entire picture from the perspective of British aristocrats. Though the Russian Revolution had happened far away, in a country with a long tradition of violence and none of democracy, the ferocious bloodletting accompanying the Bolshevik triumph in 1917 had sent shock waves of horror reverberating through Europe, reaching even the British Isles. With the shock waves had come, in much of Europe, an upsurge in anti-Semitism, as Jews were portrayed in many countries in the violent fabrications of scurrilous publications and radical racist newspapers as the carriers of revolution and social upheaval. Such noxious publications had little circulation or influence in Britain. But in some grand houses of the British aristocracy, a residual feeling was indirectly fostered through the new wave of anti-Semitism: that Jews were somehow an alien body, not quite fully British, and possessing links to dangerous international forces which threatened the social order. It was never a powerful or mainstream political force. Magnates, such as the 8th Duke of Northumberland, giving voice to notions of a 'Jewish-Bolshevik' conspiracy, were not representative. But the imagined threat of Communism helped to sustain prejudice, more latent than outward, towards Jews within the British upper class. The image of what was in store if Bolshevism spread and triumphed was certainly real enough, and the leaders of the British Left, moderate as they were and not remotely to be associated with such barbarity, seemed to offer a possible doorway - or at best were unlikely to pose in the long run a sufficient bulwark - to Communism's progress. A stronger force seemed necessary to counter, and destroy, the threat from the Left, should it become acute, at home as well as abroad. This was one reason why, though distinctly 'un-British' in character, a new style of political party and a new type of political leader in Italy could gain much approval among Britain's social elite once Benito Mussolini's Fascists had destroyed the Left in establishing power. Similar plaudits would later be won by another dictator, Adolf Hitler, in Germany.