The Times Great Lives
The Times Great Lives
Anna Temkin
The Times obituaries have given readers throughout the world an instant picture of a life for over 150 years. The Times Great Lives is a selection of 124 of these pieces, each obituary has been updated and reproduced in their entirety, by Anna Temkin, The Times assistant obituaries editor.The Times register provides a rich store of information and opinion on the most influential characters of the twentieth and early twenty-first century – be they politicians, sportspeople, musicians, writers, artists, pop stars or military personnel.Major figures of influence from our times and from recent history such as Sigmund Freud, Pablo Picasso and Diana, Princess of Wales are included. This updated second edition includes some of the greatest figures of the modern era such as Nelson Mandela, Steve Jobs, Neil Armstrong and Margaret Thatcher.Authoritative, fascinating, insightful and endlessly engaging, The Times Great Lives is a must for anyone with an interest in the history and people of the twentieth century.
GREAT LIVES
GREAT LIVES
a century in obituaries
Edited by Anna Temkin
Times Books
Published by Times Books
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
Westerhill Road
Bishopbriggs
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www.harpercollins.co.uk
Ebook first edition 2015
© Times Newspapers Ltd 2015
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Ebook Edition © September 2015 ISBN: 978-0-00-816480-5, version 2015-08-18
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Cover Image © Louise Gubb
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Introduction (#u707698da-b19a-5c4b-a823-0e3762289261)
Abridged Introduction (#u92aca38a-2787-5121-9361-a8cfaa1ba05a)
Contents (#ubcee2d6e-f30e-5b5f-832f-1dd55f8b4f93)
Lord Kitchener (#uf28759ee-71f7-5f2b-b52f-67cd341b5134)
V. I. Lenin (#u726e5d6e-d122-558f-b98f-c401bc58b90f)
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Sir Edward Elgar (#ude337a1c-9a79-5b30-8564-2dd49edad901)
Marie Curie (#u90700d90-aa7c-5be2-8b7e-bbb35f62691f)
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President John F. Kennedy (#litres_trial_promo)
Lord Beaverbrook (#litres_trial_promo)
Ian Fleming (#litres_trial_promo)
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Sir Winston Churchill (#litres_trial_promo)
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Martin Luther King (#litres_trial_promo)
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Pablo Picasso (#litres_trial_promo)
Charles Lindbergh (#litres_trial_promo)
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Mao Tse-tung (#litres_trial_promo)
Benjamin Britten (#litres_trial_promo)
Elvis Presley (#litres_trial_promo)
Maria Callas (#litres_trial_promo)
Charlie Chaplin (#litres_trial_promo)
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John Lennon (#litres_trial_promo)
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Orson Welles (#litres_trial_promo)
Henry Moore (#litres_trial_promo)
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Jacqueline du Pré (#litres_trial_promo)
Sir Frederick Ashton (#litres_trial_promo)
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Laurence Olivier (#litres_trial_promo)
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Menachem Begin (#litres_trial_promo)
Francis Bacon (#litres_trial_promo)
Elizabeth David (#litres_trial_promo)
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Rudolf Nureyev (#litres_trial_promo)
Richard Nixon (#litres_trial_promo)
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Fred Perry (#litres_trial_promo)
Harold Wilson (#litres_trial_promo)
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Diana, Princess of Wales (#litres_trial_promo)
Mother Teresa (#litres_trial_promo)
Frank Sinatra (#litres_trial_promo)
Iris Murdoch (#litres_trial_promo)
Stanley Kubrick (#litres_trial_promo)
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Sir Alf Ramsey (#litres_trial_promo)
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Sir Stanley Matthews (#litres_trial_promo)
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Sir John Gielgud (#litres_trial_promo)
Sir Alec Guinness (#litres_trial_promo)
Don Bradman (#litres_trial_promo)
Christiaan Barnard (#litres_trial_promo)
Spike Milligan (#litres_trial_promo)
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother (#litres_trial_promo)
Ronald Reagan (#litres_trial_promo)
Francis Crick (#litres_trial_promo)
Pope John Paul II (#litres_trial_promo)
Rosa Parks (#litres_trial_promo)
Luciano Pavarotti (#litres_trial_promo)
Sir Edmund Hillary (#litres_trial_promo)
Michael Jackson (#litres_trial_promo)
Elizabeth Taylor (#litres_trial_promo)
Steve Jobs (#litres_trial_promo)
Sir Bernard Lovell (#litres_trial_promo)
Neil Armstrong (#litres_trial_promo)
Baroness Thatcher (#litres_trial_promo)
Seamus Heaney (#litres_trial_promo)
Sir David Frost (#litres_trial_promo)
Nelson Mandela (#litres_trial_promo)
Lady Soames (#litres_trial_promo)
Lord Attenborough (#litres_trial_promo)
Sir Terry Pratchett (#litres_trial_promo)
Lee Kuan Yew (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Introduction
Anna Temkin
Assistant Obituaries Editor, The Times
Perhaps the most effective way to study history is to read the obituaries of those who have shaped it. Many would agree there is no better place to do so than in the pages of The Times. Its notices have long been a prime source for scholars; to this day, contributors to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography are invariably advised to start their research by consulting the relevant Times obituary.
The pieces chronologically assembled here, from Lord Kitchener to Lee Kuan Yew, form an enthralling snapshot of the past 100 years. Over that period The Times house style has of course changed – to include details of survivors, for example, and a final paragraph recording the date of birth and date of death. The comprehensive first edition of Great Lives, edited by Ian Brunskill, was published in 2005 and closed with the obituary of Pope John Paul II. In the ten years since, great lives have continued to be recorded in The Times. Many of these would be worthy of appearing in this second edition and the selection process has necessarily involved making invidious choices. Who to include and who to exclude, while still giving due coverage to the worlds of entertainment, sport et al? Apart from the two most high profile deaths in recent years – those of Baroness Thatcher and Nelson Mandela – the new contenders were generally open to debate. Choosing which to add and which, very reluctantly, to remove meant avoiding a number of risks: too many politicians (farewell Earl Attlee), too few writers (stay put Enid Blyton), too much music (so long Glenn Gould), not enough science (welcome Sir Bernard Lovell). All these were important considerations when updating this edition.
Rosa Parks, who died in 2007, was at the forefront of the civil rights movement and, appropriately, is now among the vanguard of the new obituaries in this compendium. Between the Iron Lady and South Africa’s much-loved ‘Madiba’, the world also lost Seamus Heaney, whose poetry caused nothing short of a literary sensation, and the doyen of television interrogators Sir David Frost, who famously teased a confession out of President Nixon over Watergate. Sir Edmund Hillary modestly described his life as merely a ‘constant battle against boredom’ but Britain held its breath as he became the first climber to reach the summit of Everest. Again, how could anyone forget the visionary Steve Jobs whose name will forever be synonymous with the ubiquitous Apple?
The perennial power of the obituary is that it brings the dead to life. At its most compelling, it combines biography and historical context with anecdotes and telling quotations; such is the art of the skilled obituarist. The majority of Times notices are written in house, but when necessary the paper avails itself of specialist knowledge from outsiders. All, however, are unsigned. This policy of anonymity ultimately allows for a fairer, fuller account of the subject’s life and the obituarist need not fear any backlash following publication. After Nubar Gulbenkian, the Armenian business magnate, was embroiled in a bitter feud with his father, a famous oil millionaire, he was concerned which side of the dispute his obituary in The Times would take. He therefore invited members of the paper’s staff for lunch at the Ritz, offering them £1000 for a view of his draft obituary. He never saw it and when the notice actually appeared in 1972, it gave a balanced portrayal of the family feud. That kind of proportional representation, as it were, is exemplified in many of the pieces reproduced here. Michael Jackson’s obituary, for instance, acknowledges his reputation as the king of pop while also addressing the sensational allegations of impropriety levelled at him.
These pages contain some of the most extraordinary lives that have defined the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; within them are stories of genius, innovation, adversity and, at times, sheer eccentricity. Thomas Carlyle declared, ‘History is the essence of innumerable biographies’. His ‘Great Man’ theory that the past can be explained by the influence of leaders and heroes may not be infallible (after all, some of the most significant could not be regarded as either noble or heroic). Yet there is no doubt that all the men and women of this collection left an indelible mark on both the world they knew and the one that we now inhabit. Their obituaries have stood the test of time and are, in that sense, a fitting reflection of The Times itself.
Abridged Introduction
to the First Edition
Ian Brunskill
Former Obituaries Editor, The Times
From its beginnings in 1785 The Times has recorded significant deaths. Often in the early days this amounted to little more than a list of names of people who had died, and on more than one occasion The Times simply plagiarized a notice from another paper if it had none of its own. It was under John Thadeus Delane, Editor of The Times from 1841 to 1877, that this began to change. Delane clearly recognized that the death of a leading figure on the national stage was an event that would seize the public imagination as almost nothing else could, and that it demanded more than just a brief notice recording the demise. ‘Wellington’s death,’ Delane told a colleague, ‘will be the only topic’.
Delane instituted the practice of preparing detailed, authoritative – and often very long – obituaries of the more important and influential personalities of the day while they were still alive. The resulting increase in the quality and scope of the major notices ensured that, even if the paper’s day-to-day obituary coverage remained erratic, The Times in the second half of the 19th century rose to the big occasion far better than its rivals could. The investment of effort and resources was not hard to justify. The Times obituaries not only found a ready following among readers of the paper but were soon being collected and republished in book form too. Six volumes of ‘Biographies of Eminent Persons’ covered the period 1870-1894.
It was not until 1920, however, that The Times appointed its first obituary editor, and it was some years later still before the paper began to run a daily obituary page. As late as 1956, the publisher Rupert Hart-Davis could complain in a letter to the retired Eton schoolmaster George Lyttelton: ‘The obituary arrangements at The Times are haphazard and unsatisfactory. The smallest civil servant – Sewage Disposal Officer in Uppingham – automatically has at least half a column about him in standing type at the office, but writers and artists are not provided for until they are eighty.’
That was a little unfair, even at the time, but if matters have improved since then, it is in large part due to the efforts of the late Colin Watson, who took over as obituaries editor in the year Hart-Davis expressed that disparaging view and who remained in the post for 25 years. He built up and maintained the stock of advance notices so that there were usually about 5,000 on file at any one time, a figure that has remained more or less constant ever since.
Watson, in an article written on his retirement, gave a revealing and only half-frivolous account of what the whole business involves. It was – is – a relentless, if rewarding, task: ‘You may read and read and read,’ he wrote, ‘particularly history; turn on the radio; listen for rumours of ill-health (never laugh at so much as a chesty cold); and you may write endless letters – but never dare say you are on top.’
If Watson may in many respects be said to have brought the obituary department into the modern world, it fell to his successors, particularly John Higgins and Anthony Howard, to show how effectively the paper could respond when other newspapers, from the mid-1980s, began to expand their obituary coverage to match that of The Times. There were some elsewhere who claimed, in the course of this expansion, to have invented or reinvented the newspaper obituary in its modern form – chiefly, it often seemed, by treating all their subjects like amusing minor characters in the novels of Anthony Powell. In fact, as I hope this collection shows, the obituary form as practised for more than a century in The Times had at its best always been both broader in range and livelier in approach than may generally have been assumed.
Lord Kitchener
5 June 1916
Horatio Herbert Kitchener was born at Gunsborough House, near Listowel, in County Kerry, on June 24, 1850. He was the second son of Lieutenant-Colonel H. H. Kitchener, of Cossington, Leicestershire, by his marriage with Frances, daughter of the Rev. John Chevallier, dd, of Aspall Hall, Suffolk, and was therefore of English descent though born in Ireland.
He was educated privately by tutors until the age of 13, when he was sent with his three brothers to Villeneuve, on the Lake of Geneva, where he was in the charge of the Rev. J. Bennett. From Villeneuve, after some further travels abroad, he returned to London, and was prepared for the Army by the Rev. George Frost of Kensington Square. He entered the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich in 1868 and obtained a commission in the Royal Engineers in January, 1871. During the short interval between passing out of Woolwich and joining the Engineers he was on a visit to his father at Dinan, and volunteered for service with the French Army. He served under Chanzy for a short time, but was struck down by pneumonia and invalided home. He now applied himself vigorously to the technical work of his branch, and laboured incessantly at Chatham and Aldershot to succeed in his profession.
Palestine and Cyprus
His first chance of adventure arose owing to a vacancy on the staff of the Palestine Exploration Society. Kitchener was offered the post in 1874 and at once accepted it. He remained in the Holy Land until the year 1878, engaged first as assistant to Lieutenant Conder, re, in mapping 1,600 square miles of Judah and Philistia, and then in sole charge during the year 1877 surveying that part of Western Palestine which still remained unmapped. The work was done with the thoroughness which distinguished Kitchener’s methods in his subsequent career. He rejoined Conder in London in January, 1878, and by the following September the scheme of the Society was carried through, and a map of Western Palestine on a scale of one inch to a mile was satisfactorily completed. The work entailed considerable hardship, and even danger. Kitchener suffered from sun-stroke and fever. He and his surveying parties were frequently attacked by bands of marauders, and on one of these occasions both Conder and he barely escaped with their lives. On another occasion Kitchener pluckily rescued his comrade from drowning. His survey work in Palestine led directly to his nomination for similar work in Cyprus, where he began the map of the island which was eventually published in 1885.
Egypt and the Red Sea
Realising that trouble was brewing in Egypt, Kitchener managed to be at Alexandria on leave at the time of Arabi’s revolt. He served through the campaign of 1882, and, thanks largely to his knowledge of Arabic, became second in command of the Egyptian Cavalry when Sir Evelyn Wood was made Sirdar of the Egyptian Army. He left Suez in November, 1883, to take part in the survey of the Sinai Peninsula, but almost immediately returned for service in the Intelligence branch. He was sent southward after the defeat of Hicks Pasha in order to win over the tribes and prevent the further spread of disaffection. His personality and influence did much. The Mudir of Dongola in response to Kitchener’s appeal, fell upon the dervishes at Korti and defeated them. But the tide of Mahdi-ism was still flowing strongly. By July, 1884, Khartum was invested, and upon Kitchener fell the duty of keeping touch between Gordon and the expedition all too tardily dispatched for his relief.
Kitchener was now a major and daa and qmc on the Intelligence Staff. In December, 1884, Wolseley and his troops reached Korti. Kitchener accompanied Sir Herbert Stewart’s column on its march to Metemmeh, but only as far as Gakdul Wells, and consequently he was not at Abu Klea. When the expedition recoiled, it became Kitchener’s painful duty to piece together an account of the storming of Khartum and the death of Gordon. For Kitchener’s services in this arduous and disappointing campaign there came a mention in dispatches, a medal and clasp, and the Khedive’s star. In June, 1885, he was promoted lieutenant-colonel. In the summer the Mahdi died and the Khalifa Abdullahi succeeded him. Kitchener had resigned his commission in the Egyptian Army and had returned to England, but he was almost at once sent off to Zanzibar on a boundary commission and was subsequently appointed Governor-General of the Red Sea littoral and Commandant at Suakin in August, 1886. Here he soon found himself at grips with the famous Emir Osman Digna.
After some desultory fighting round Suakin Kitchener marched out one morning, surprised Osman’s camp at Handont, and carried it with the Sudanese. But in the course of the action he was severely wounded by a bullet in the neck, and was subsequently invalided home. The bullet caused him serious inconvenience until it was at last extracted. In June, 1888, he became colonel and adc to her Majesty Queen Victoria, who had formed a high and just estimate of Kitchener’s talents and ever displayed towards him a gracious regard. He rejoined the Egyptian Army as Adjutant-General, and was in command of a brigade of Sudanese when Sir Francis Grenfell stormed Osman Digna’s line at Gemaizeh. Toski, in the following summer, was another success, and Kitchener’s share in it at the head of 1,500 mounted troops won for him a cb.
Three less eventful years now went by while the Egyptian Army, encouraged by its successes in the Geld, grew in strength and efficiency. In 1892 Kitchener succeeded Grenfell as Sirdar, and in 1894 was made a kcmg.
The Reconquest of the Sudan
Lord Salisbury’s Government decided on March 12, 1896, that the time had come for a forward movement on the Nile. Their immediate object was to make a diversion in favour of Italy, whose troops had just been totally defeated by the Abyssinians at Adowa, but the natural impetus of the advance carried the Sirdar and his army eventually to Khartum. Kitchener was ready when the order to advance was given. He had 10,000 men on the frontier, rails ready to follow them to Kerma, and all preparations made for supply. At Firket he surprised the dervishes at dawn, and at a cost of only 100 casualties caused the enemy a loss of 800 dead and 1,000 prisoners. A period of unavoidable inactivity ensued to admit of the construction of the railway, the accumulation of supplies, and the preparation of a fleet of steamers to accompany the advance. Cholera ravaged the camp and sandstorms of a furious character impeded operations, but the advance was at last resumed, and after sharp fights at Hafir and Dongola, the latter town was occupied on September 23, and the first stage of the reconquest of the Sudan was at an end. Kitchener was promoted major-general, with a very good, but not yet assured, prospect of completing the work which he had begun so well.
From the various lines of further advance open to him Kitchener chose the direct line from Wady Halfa to Abu Hamed, and formed the audacious project of spanning this arid and apparently waterless desert, 230 miles broad, with a railway, as he advanced. The first rails of this line were laid in January, 1897, and 130 miles were completed by July. Abu Hamed was captured on August 7 by Hunter with a flying column from Merowi, and Berber on August 31. The remaining 100 miles of the desert railway were then completed. Fortune favoured Kitchener at this period. Water was found by boring in the desert, but the construction of the line was still a triumph of imagination and resource. There were risks in the general situation at this moment, for the position of the army was temporarily far from favourable. There was a specially difficult period towards the close of 1897, when large dervish forces were massed at Metemmeh and a dash to the north seemed on the cards. But the Khalifa delayed his stroke, and when in February, 1898, the Khalifa’s lieutenant Mahmud began to march to the north Kitchener was ready for him.
The Atbara
Mahmud and Osman Digna, with some 12,000 good fighting men and several notable Emirs, had concentrated on the eastern bank of the Nile round Shendy, and marching across the desert had struck the Atbara at Nakheila, about 35 miles from its confluence with the Nile. Kitchener, while holding the junction point of the rivers at Atbara Fort, massed the remainder of his force at Res el Hudi on the Atbara, prepared either to attack the dervishes in flank if they moved north or to fall on them in their camp if they remained inert. The reconnaissances showed that the dervishes had fortified their camp in the thick scrub, and that the dem could best be attacked from the desert side. An attack seemed likely to be costly, and Kitchener hoped that the dervishes, who were short of food, would either attack the Anglo-Egyptian zariba or offer a fight in the open field. The dervishes did not move, and not even a successful raid on Shendy by the gunboats carrying troops affected their decision. After some telegraphic communications with Lord Cromer, Kitchener drew nearer to his enemy, advancing first to Abadar and then to Umdabia. Here he was within striking distance, and in the evening of April 7 the whole force marched silently out into the desert, and after a well-executed night march came within sight of Mahmud’s lines at 3 a.m. on the morning of Good Friday, April 8. A halt was made about 600 yards from the trenches and the artillery opened fire, while the infantry was reformed for the assault, Hunter’s Sudanese on the right and the British on the left. At 7.40 a.m. Kitchener ordered the advance. A sustained fire of musketry broke out from the dervish entrenchments and was returned with interest by the British and Sudanese, who advanced firing without halting and as steadily as on parade. The din was terrific and the attack irresistible. In less than a quarter of an hour the dervish zariba was torn aside and Kitchener’s troops inundated the defences. The dervishes stood well and even attempted counter-attacks, but they were swept out of the dem into the river and the bush, leaving 1,700 dead in the trenches, including many Emirs. The wily Osman escaped, but Mahmud was made prisoner, while comparatively few of the dervishes who escaped regained Khartum. In this brief but fierce and decisive action the Anglo-Egyptian force suffered 551 casualties.
As Kitchener rode up to greet and to thank the regiments while they were reforming the men received him with resounding cheers. He may not have won their love, for no man, not even Wellington, ever less sought by arts and graces to cultivate popularity among his men, but he had given them a fight after their own hearts, and their confidence in him was unbounded and complete.
Omdurman
By June, 1898, the rails reached the Atbara, and preparations were continued for the final advance at the next high Nile. The army was gradually concentrated by road and river at Wad Hamed, on the west bank of the Nile, 60 miles from Khartum. From this point, 22,000 strong, it set out in gallant array, on a broad front, covered and flanked by the gunboats and the mounted troops. The sun was scorching and the marching hard, but the men were in fine condition and their spirit was superb. By September 1 the plain of Kerreri was reached – the plain which, according to prophecy, was to be whitened by skulls – and the cavalry now reported that the enemy was advancing. Kitchener drew up his troops in crescent formation, their flanks resting on the river, the British brigades on the left. A night attack by the dervishes was expected and might have proved dangerous, but fortunately it was not attempted, and when dawn came on September 2 the fate of the Khalifa’s host was sealed. Kitchener had ridden forward at dawn to Jebel Surgam, a high hill which concealed the two armies from each other, and returned in serious mood, for he had seen some 52,000 dervishes advancing in ordered masses to the attack, and their aspect was formidable. Well marshalled and well led, they swept away the Egyptian cavalry and camel corps, hurling them down the hill, and then turned towards the river and came down upon Kitchener with flags waving, shouting their war cries, and led right gallantly by their Emirs. It was very brave but very hopeless.Kitchener gave the order to open fire when the dervish masses were within 1,700 yards. There was a clear field of fire with scarcely cover for a mouse. The hail of bullets from guns, rifles, and maxims smote the great host of barbarism and shattered it from end to end. The dervish fire was comparatively ineffective, and though individual fanatics struggled up to within short range no formed body came near enough to charge. Completely repulsed with frightful losses the masses melted away, the survivors reeled back, and the fire temporarily ceased.
Kitchener now ordered an advance upon Omdurman in échelon of brigades from the left, and this brought on the second phase of the battle. In the échelon formation Macdonald’s Egyptian brigade on the right was farthest out in the desert, and, as the advance began, the dervish reserves and other masses which had been recalled from the pursuit of the cavalry closed upon Macdonald and delivered a furious attack. The coolness of the commander and the steadiness of his troops saved the situation. Wauchope hurried to his support, while the other brigades wheeled to their right and drove the remnants of the Khalifa’s army away into the desert. A gallant attack by the 21st Lancers under Colonel Martin upon a large body of dervishes in a khor was a stirring incident of the fight on the left, but placed the Lancers out of court for pursuit. The army resumed its march, halted at the Khor Sambat to reform, and then entered Omdurman without allowing time for the enemy to recover and line the walls. Kitchener and his staff, after wandering about the town in some danger from fire, which continued intermittently throughout the night, sought shelter with Lyttelton’s brigade, which bivouacked in quarter-column protected by pickets on the desert side of the town, and from this bivouack ‘à la belle étoile’ the commander wrote the dispatch announcing the victory.
In this great spectacular, but all too one-sided battle there fell 10,700 gallant dervishes, while twice as many more left the field with wounds. The Anglo-Egyptian losses were 386 all told. The Khalifa’s great black flag, now at Windsor Castle, was captured, and if the Khalifa himself escaped for the time being it was not long before he and his remaining Emirs fell victims to Wingate’s troops. Mahdi-ism was smashed to pieces, Gordon was avenged, and the intolerable miseries of a rule which had reduced the population by some seven million souls were brought at last to an end. Two days after the victory a memorial service was held amidst the ruins of Gordon’s old Palace at Khartum. The British and Egyptian flags were hoisted on the walls close to the spot where Gordon fell. As Kitchener stood under the shade of the great tree on the river front to receive the congratulations of his officers, all the sternness had died out of him, for the aim of 14 long years of effort had been attained. He returned home to receive the honours and rewards which England does not stint to those who serve her well in war. He was raised to the peerage under the title of Baron Kitchener of Khartum, received the gcb, and was granted £30,000 and the thanks of both Houses of Parliament. The total cost of the campaigns of 1896–98 was only £2,354,000, of which £1,355,000 was spent on railways and gunboats. Of the total sum, rather less than £800,000 was paid by the British Government.
South Africa
Kitchener was not long left to enjoy his well-merited honours in peace. The Black Week of December, 1899, in South Africa caused Lord Roberts to be appointed Commander-in-Chief in the field, and with him there went out Lord Kitchener as Chief of Staff. During the time that Lord Roberts remained in South Africa Kitchener as much as possible effaced himself, and though always ready with counsel and assistance never gave a thought to his own aggrandizement. He was a model lieutenant and gave throughout a fine example of loyalty to his chief. He took part in all the marches and operations which carried the British flag from the Orange River by Paardeberg to Bloemfontein and Pretoria, and displayed energy in performing every duty that Lord Roberts saw fit to confide in him.
Paardeberg
When Cronje left his lines at Magersfontein and retreated eastward up the Modder, Lord Roberts was temporarily indisposed and Kitchener was virtually in command. When the morning of February 18, 1900, found Cronje still in laager at Wolvekraal, in a hollow encircled by commanding heights, upon Kitchener, in co-operation with French, devolved the duty of tackling him. Kitchener decided to strike while the enemy was within reach and issued orders for an advance upon the laager from east and west and by both banks of the river. The Boer position was bad. But the river bed afforded excellent cover and there was a good field of fire on both banks. Moreover, large bodies of Boers came up from the south and east throughout the day in order to extricate Cronje, and interfered materially with the orderly conduct of the fight. A long, wearing, and somewhat disconnected fight raged throughout the day, at the close of which the British troops had suffered 1,262 casualties without having penetrated the enemy’s lines. Kitchener rode rapidly during the day from one point of the battlefield to another endeavouring to electrify all with his own devouring activity. If the conduct of the fight was open to criticism it had this supreme merit – namely, that it was furiously energetic, and if it did not succeed in its immediate object it glued Cronje to his laager and drove away the Boers who were attempting to succour a comrade in distress. There are incidents in this fight which are still remembered with regret so far as Kitchener’s leading is concerned, but it is fair to say that in looking only to the main object set before him – namely, the destruction of Cronje’s force before it could escape or be reinforced – Kitchener was guided by correct principles, and that the subsequent surrender of the Boer force was largely due to the energetic manner in which Kitchener had smitten and hustled the enemy from the first.
The Guerilla War
When Lord Roberts handed over the command to Kitchener in November, 1900, it was generally supposed that the war was at an end. All the organized forces of the Boers had been dispersed, and nearly all the chief towns were in British occupation. But under the guidance of enterprising leaders the spirit of resistance rose superior to misfortune. On all sides guerilla bands sprang up and began a war of raids, ambuscades, and surprises with which a regular army is rarely fitted to cope on equal terms. There were still about 60,000 Boers, foreigners, and rebels in the field, and although they were not all, nor always, engaged in fighting, a fairly accountable force could usually be collected for any specific enterprise by a local leader of note. Their resolution, their field-craft, and the help of every kind which they drew from the countryside made them most formidable enemies. Their subjugation, in view of the wide area over which they operated, was one of the most arduous tasks that has ever been entrusted to a British commander. Of the 210,000 men under Kitchener more than half were disseminated along the railways and in isolated garrisons. The new commander did not possess that numerous force of efficient mounted troops which was indispensable to bring the war to a conclusion.
Into the active conduct of the war, and into the reorganization of his army, Kitchener threw the whole weight of his immense personal influence. He instilled a new spirit into the war when he dashed off to Bloemfontein to hurry along columns for the pursuit of De Wet, and he left no stone unturned to improve the quality of his army. He raided clubs, hotels, and rest camps to beat up loiterers, appealed to all parts of the Empire for mounted men, stimulated the purchase of remounts, raised mounted men from his infantry and artillery, created a new defence force in Cape Colony, and in every possible way prepared to meet like with like and to impart a new spirit of energy and enterprise into the conduct of the war.
The first months of 1901 were marked by the invasion of Cape Colony by De Wet and other leaders, and by a great driving operation in the Eastern Transvaal under French. Both movements failed to entrap the main Boer forces engaged, but the active conduct of the operations, and the losses suffered by the Boers, began that process of moral and material attrition by which the war was ultimately brought to an end.
The winter campaign from May to September, 1901, eliminated about 9,000 Boer fighters, leaving 35,000 still in the field, but this number was much under-estimated at the time. With the spring rains there was a general renewal of the war on the part of the burghers, their leading idea consisting of diversions in Cape Colony and Natal. Severe fighting followed in many places. As the months wore on both the offensive and the defensive virtues of Kitchener’s system became more striking. The blockhouse lines became more solid and began to extend over fixed areas of the country. Strengthened by infantry, they flanked the great drives, and became the nets into which the Boer commandos were driven. There came at last a dawning of perception in the Boer mind that further resistance, however honourable, was hopeless.
The Peace
An offer of mediation made by the Netherlands Government on January 25, 1902, gave an excuse to both sides for ending the war. Though this offer was not accepted, a copy of the correspondence which followed it was transmitted to the Transvaal Government on March 7, without any covering letter, explanation, or suggestion. It produced an immediate effect. President Schalk Burger asked for a safe-conduct for himself and others to enable them to meet the Free State Government to discuss terms, and a meeting took place in Kitchener’s house on April 12. A Convention at Vereeniging was arranged. Sixty Boer delegates there assembled on May 15. Terms were at last agreed to by the delegates in concert with Lord Kitchener and Lord Milner, and, after revision by the British Government, were finally accepted by 54 votes to 6 on May 31, only half an hour before the expiry of the time of grace.
Returning once more to England Kitchener was made a Viscount, and received the Order of Merit, the thanks of both Houses of Parliament, and a substantial grant of public money. Once again he was not allowed to enjoy for long his new honours in peace, and was appointed Commander-in-Chief in India in the same year that he had returned home.
Work in India
At the time when Kitchener reached India, the army in India, though possessing many war-like qualities, was suffering from serious organic and administrative defects. It did not present the offensive value which might have been expected from its numbers and its cost. It did not exploit all the martial races available for its service. The distribution of the troops had not been altered to correspond with new railway facilities and a changed strategical situation. It was not self-supporting in material of war, and the armament of the troops was behind the times. There was scarcely a single military requisite that had been completely supplied to the four poorly-organized divisions which formed the inadequate field army, and scarcely any provision had been made for maintaining the army in the field. The content of the Indian Army had not been inspired by adequate provision for its material well-being. Lastly, the higher administration of the Army was under a system of dual control, which produced conflicts between the responsibility pertaining to the Commander-in-Chief and the power which rested in the Military Department.
The history of Kitchener’s seven years in India is a history of sustained and in the end almost completely successful efforts to overcome these serious defects. He did not act in a hurry. He began by making extended tours over India, including a journey of 1,500 miles on horseback and on foot round the North-West frontier, and he consulted every officer of eminence and experience in India. Lord Curzon, who had urged Kitchener’s appointment, was heartily with him in his plans for Army reform up to the unfortunate moment when a difference of opinion arose between Viceroy and Commander-in-Chief on the question of the Military Department and the higher administration of the Army. The difference gave rise at last to a serious crisis. Kitchener fought his own battle alone and unsupported in the Governor-General’s Council, and the decision of Mr Balfour’s Government and the settlement finally made by Lord Morley were in his favour. Mr Brodrick’s dispatch of May 31, 1905, placed the Commander-in-Chief in India in charge of a newly-named Army Department, which became in the end invested with most of the rights and duties of the old Military Department, but large powers were reserved for the Secretary to the Army Department. Lord Curzon resigned in 1905.
Kitchener’s projects for the reform of the Army had begun to take shape in 1904. On October 28 of that year an Army Order divided the country into nine territorial divisional areas, and arranged the forces contained in them into nine divisions and three independent brigades, exclusive of Burma and Aden. The plan was to redistribute the troops according to the requirements of the defence of India, to train all arms together at suitable centres, and to promote decentralization of work and devolution of authority. Kitchener proposed to secure thorough training for war in recognized war formations, to enable the whole of the nine divisions to take the field in a high state of efficiency, to expand the reserve which would maintain them in the field, and to have behind them sufficient troops to support the civil power with garrisons and mobile columns. In May, 1907, another Army Order created a Northern and a Southern Army. The commanders of these Armies became inspectors whose duty was to ensure uniformity of training and discipline. The administrative work was delegated to officers commanding divisions.
Kitchener’s plan for the redistribution of the Army was much attacked because it was misrepresented and misunderstood. The cantonments given up were those which no longer required troops. The troops were not massed by divisions but by divisional areas, and in drawing up his plans for obligatory garrisons and the support of the civil power Kitchener worked closely with the civil authorities and left unguarded no likely centre of disaffection. The new distribution corresponded with strategical exigencies, and the various divisions were échelonned behind each other in a manner to utilize to the full the carrying capacity of the railways. There was no concentration on the frontier as was popularly supposed. The point of both Armies was directed to the North-West frontier, but there was nothing to prevent a concentration in any other direction.
Kitchener’s scheme was not one for increasing the Army, but for utilizing better existing material. He improved and widened the recruiting grounds of the Army. He did much for the pay, pensions, and allowances of the Indian Army, established grass and dairy farms all over India, and was very successful through his medical service in combating disease. It was his object, as it was that of Lord Lawrence, not only to make the Army formidable, but to make it safe. The principle of keeping the artillery mainly in the hands of Europeans was maintained. By creating the Quetta Staff College Kitchener enabled India to train her own Staff Officers, and by building factories he rendered the Army self-supporting in material of war. The total cost of these reforms was £8,216,000.
Australasian Defence
Kitchener, who was made Field Marshal on September 10, 1909, returned home by way of Australasia, having been invited to examine the land forces and the new Military laws of Australia and New Zealand and to suggest improvements in them. He did his work as thoroughly as usual. He left behind him a memorandum of a very impressive character, and had the satisfaction to learn that his recommendations were approved. On his return home he was made a kp, and was appointed High Commissioner and Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean in succession to the Duke of Connaught, who had resigned. Kitchener only accepted this post at the desire of King Edward, and when the King released him from the obligation, he resigned the appointment. In 1911 he purchased Broome Park, with 550 acres, near Canterbury, and occupied his unaccustomed leisure in beautifying and rearranging the house and grounds. The failure of the Government to employ Kitchener aroused unfavourable public comment, but in 1911 the death of Sir Eldon Gorst created a vacancy in Egypt, and Kitchener was offered, and accepted, the post of British Agent and Consul-General.
Egypt and the Sudan
Kitchener landed at Alexandria on September 27, 1911. He arrived in a cruiser, and this fact did not fail to make an impression (upon which he had doubtless calculated) on the natives, who had already been somewhat chastened by the news of his appointment as British Agent.
When Kitchener assumed office at Kasr-el-Doubara, he found a fierce religious controversy still raging between the Copts and the Moslems, and political unrest and seditious journalism still sufficiently active to cause some anxiety. Scarcely had he had time to take stock of his surroundings than there broke out the Italo-Turkish War, which, since its seat was at Egypt’s door, threatened to create in this country a situation which might at any moment have become very serious owing to the large Italian colony and the community of religion, and in many cases of interest, that binds the Egyptians to Turkey.
There seems little doubt that Kitchener’s presence and his prestige were solely responsible for the safe passage of Egypt through the critical periods of the Tripoli and the two Balkan Wars. But for him, the Egyptian Government would not have been able to prevent collisions between the Greek and Italian colonies and the natives, and certainly it would not have succeeded in forcing the Egyptian Moslems to maintain the neutrality which was obviously so essential to the country’s welfare. From the very outset he dealt most firmly with the malcontents and the seditious Press. The tone and the higher standard of the vernacular Press today are an all-sufficient justification of his ruthless enforcement of the Press Law.
Whilst the adoption of a strong policy had a great deal to do with the pacification of the country, there was undoubtedly one other important determining factor. Kitchener came to the conclusion that the best means of counteracting the exciting influence of the Turkish wars and of cutting the ground from under the feet of the sedition-mongers was to keep the country occupied with the contemplation of matters of a more personal and local nature. He therefore initiated a policy of economic reform which, owing to its far-reaching character, should make its beneficial effects felt generations hence.
A beginning was made with the savings bank system, which was extended to the villages, where the local tax collector was authorized to receive deposits, the idea being to encourage the fellaheen to pay in part of the proceeds of their crops against the day when the taxes fall due, and so prevent their squandering the money and having to borrow to pay the imposts. A Usuary Law was introduced forbidding the lending of money at more than three per cent and empowering the courts to inflict fines and imprisonment on infringers of the law. Kitchener also caused Government cotton halekas (markets) to be opened all over the country, which remedied the exploiting of the fellah by the local dealers in the matter of short weight and market prices of cotton. Next he introduced the Five Feddan or Homestead Law, which briefly laid down that distraint could not be levied on the agricultural property of a cultivator, consisting of five feddans or less, and which thus tended to create a system of homesteads. As a companion to his schemes for improving the material lot of the fellah Kitchener caused to be created a new form of jurisdiction, called the Cantonal Courts, which dispense to the fellaheen justice according to local custom. Local notables sit on the bench and this system of village justice for the people by the people has proved a great success.
With a view to protecting the country from the evil results of the fellah’s ignorance, Kitchener gave much attention to the consideration of the agricultural question. He supported through thick and thin the then newly formed Department of Agriculture, and in due course had it transformed into a Ministry. Since Egypt depends entirely on the cotton crop, every aspect of the question was studied. Cotton seed was distributed on a large scale by the Government in order to stop adulteration. Laws were introduced for combating the various pests that attack the crop; demonstration farms were created at strategic points to show the fellah the best means of cultivating the land, and a hundred and one measures have been, and are being, taken to safeguard and effect a permanent improvement in the agricultural position of the country. The remainder of Kitchener’s economic policy is represented by the gigantic drainage and land reclamation work that is being carried out in the Delta. For years a scheme had been talked of, but it remained for Kitchener to put it into execution. The cost will be about £2,500,000, but most of this will be reimbursed from the sale of land and the increase in the rate of taxation.
On the political side Kitchener was no less successful. He attempted what every one admitted to be an urgent necessity, but what all his predecessors had feared to undertake – viz., the reform of the management of the Wakfs – Moslem endowments – and he transferred the control from the hands of a Director-General nominated by the Khedive to those of a Minister directly responsible to the Council of Ministers and controlled by a superior board nominated by the Government. The reform was hailed with unbounded delight by the entire population. His other great achievement was the reform of the system of representative government.
Meanwhile, Kitchener did not neglect the military situation. He pushed to the utmost the construction of roads throughout the Delta, thus increasing the mobility of the troops; he stopped the Khedive from selling the Mariut Railway to a Triple Alliance syndicate, and by enabling the Egyptian Government to purchase it placed at its disposal (and at that of Great Britain) a line of communication of great potential strategic value in the future. The army of occupation was increased by the bringing of every battalion up to full strength. Points of vantage for strategic purposes were secured in Cairo under the guise of town-planning reforms.
Secretary of State for War
On August 5, 1914, Kitchener, who happened to be in England at the moment, was appointed Secretary of State for War. The post, as will be remembered, had been held since the end of the previous March by Mr Asquith, who now, ‘in consequence of the pressure of other duties’, handed it over to a man in whom the country at large placed perfect confidence. The fact that, for the first time, a soldier with no Cabinet experience was to become War Minister was seen to be an advantage rather than otherwise. What was needed was not a politician but an organizer – and organization was believed to be Kitchener’s especial gift. He was, too, exceptional in not under-rating his enemy. His first act as Minister was to demand a vote of credit for £100,000,000, and an increase of the Army of half a million men. In an interview with an American journalist, published in December, he was reported to have expressed his opinion that the war would last at least three years. In an official denial next day, ‘the remarks attributed to the Secretary of State’ were declared to be ‘imaginary’. In any case, it is certain that in the appeal which he issued, within two days of his appointment, for 100,000 men, the terms of service were given, as ‘for a period of three years or until the war is concluded’. In an article published in The Times of August 15, the reason why his plans had been based upon a long war were explained, and the wisdom of this recognition, at a moment when the world in general, including the Germans, cherished the belief that the war would be soon over, should always be remembered in forming any estimate of Kitchener’s work as Minister of War.
The curious inability of the authorities to come straight to the point, which was to dog the steps of the voluntary system as long as it lasted, at first concealed the fact that these 100,000 men were to be not an expansion, it was supposed, of the Territorial Force, nor even an addition to the Regular Army, but the beginning of an entirely new Army, to which common parlance quickly gave the name of ‘Kitchener’s’. Considerable difference of opinion existed in military circles as to the wisdom of Kitchener’s method of creating it. Many eminent officers, including Lord Roberts, considered that he would have been better advised if he had merely expanded the Territorial Force, the cadres of which would have provided a ready-made organization. But Kitchener preferred to do things in his own way.
In spite of the difficulties inevitable in the absence of machinery capable of coping with a rush some 50 times greater than any contemplated in normal circumstances, he was able by August 25, on his first appearance as a Minister of the Crown, to inform the House of Lords that his 100,000 recruits had been ‘already practically secured’. He added:
‘I cannot at this stage say what will be the limits of the forces required, or what measures may eventually become necessary to supply and maintain them. The scale of the Field Army which we are now calling into being is large and may rise in the course of the next six or seven months to a total of 30 divisions continually maintained in the field.’
It would be an ungrateful task to recall the series of appeals, misunderstandings, and recriminations which attended the course of the recruiting campaign. Its varying fortunes seem trivial enough today, when the task is complete. Kitchener was a sincere believer in the voluntary service which had given him the Armies with which he had won his fame. And amid the chaos of political controversies which surrounded him in the Cabinet he applied himself unsparingly to the task of raising men.
At the beginning of the war he lived at Lady Wantage’s house in Carlton House Terrace, but early in 1915 he went into residence at York House, St James’s Palace, which was placed at his disposal by the King. He worked all day and every day, only spending a few hours occasionally at Broome Park. Of relaxation he took practically none, unless the inspecting of troops maybe described by that name.
As time went on it became evident that Kitchener was attempting more than lay in the power of any one man. In May of last year the disclosures of the Military Correspondent of The Times as to the shortage of shells at the front came as a sudden shock to the country, although they were merely the culmination of a series of previous warnings. It is proof of the immense belief which Kitchener inspired in the country that The Times was falsely accused of ‘attacking’ him in calling attention to an admitted deficiency. But the prompt institution of the Ministry of Munitions relieved him of that part at least of his heavy burden, and enabled him to devote himself more strenuously than ever to the attempt to maintain under the voluntary system the enormous Army gradually assembling in the field. With the reconstitution at the beginning of October, 1915, of the General Staff Kitchener was relieved of yet another part of his overgrown duties, and the War Office gradually assumed shape and organization.
Kitchener naturally paid several visits to France on tours of inspection. He was also present at the Allied Conferences at Calais and Paris, where his knowledge of French, superior to that of most of his colleagues, gave him a certain advantage in the discussions.
In November last the announcement that, ‘at the request of his colleagues’, Kitchener had left England for a short visit to the Eastern theatre of war brought home to the general public the seriousness of the situation in Gallipoli. The part played by him in the military aspects of the decisions arrived at before and during the Dardanelles Expedition can only be conjectured. After a short stay in Paris, he visited the Dardanelles, and later had an audience of King Constantine in Athens, returning home by way of Rome, the Italian front, and Paris. The result of Kitchener’s investigations, confirming as they did the recommendations of General Monro, was the evacuation of Gallipoli.
The remarkable and unprecedented occasion on which, five days ago, he received a considerable proportion of the members of the House of Commons, making a statement to them and replying to recent criticisms of Army administration, is fresh in the public memory.
Kitchener was made a kg in 1915. During the war he also received the Grand Cordon of the Legion of Honour and of the Order of Leopold. He was never married. The earldom which was conferred on him in July, 1914, passes by special remainder to his elder brother, Colonel Henry Elliott Chevallier Kitchener, who was born in 1846. The new peer served in Burma and with the Manipur Expedition in 1891, being mentioned in dispatches. At the outbreak of the present war he offered his services to the Government, took part in the campaign in South-West Africa, and is now on his way home. He is a widower, and has one son, Commander H. F. C. Kitchener, rn; and a daughter.
V. I. Lenin
Dictator of Soviet Russia.
World revolution as goal.
21 January 1924
Nikolai Lenin, whose death is announced on another page, was the pseudonym of Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov, the dictator of Soviet Russia. His real name has almost passed into oblivion. It was under his nom de guerre that he became famous. It is as Lenin that he will pass into history.
This extraordinary figure was first and foremost a professional revolutionary and conspirator. He had no other occupation; in and by revolution he lived. Authorship and the social and economic studies to which he devoted his time were to him but the means for collecting fuel for a world conflagration. The hope of that calamity haunted this cold dreamer from his schooldays. His is a striking instance of a purpose that from early youth marched unflinchingly towards a chosen goal, undisturbed by weariness or intellectual doubt, never halting at crime, knowing no compunction. The goal was the universal social revolution.
Lenin was born on April 10, 1870, at Simbirsk, a little town set on a hill that overlooks the middle Volga and the eastward rolling steppes. His father, born of a humble family in Astrakhan, had risen to the position of district director of schools under the Ministry of Education. The atmosphere of the home was that of the middle-class urban intelligentsia, which ardently cultivated book-learning, was keenly interested in abstract ideas, but had little care for the arts and was at best indifferent to the Russian national tradition.
Of Lenin’s early life little is known. He attended the local high school, the headmaster of which was Feodor Kerensky, father of Alexander Kerensky, whom Lenin was one day to overthrow from political power. The boy appears to have been diligent in his studies, but retiring and morose. In 1887 his elder brother was executed for taking part in an attempt on the life of Alexander iii. This event may possibly have intensified Lenin’s revolutionary sentiments, though emotion never played a great part in his personal life. He was guided by cold logic though he well knew how to work on the feelings of others and to transform them into the motive power he required for his own purposes.
From the high school he passed on into the University of Kazan where he became a student in the faculty of law. Here he came under the suspicion of the authorities, and was expelled from the university on account of his ‘unsound political views’. He continued his studies privately, and finally took his degree at the University of St Petersburg.
Marxism in Action
In the early ’nineties the radical intellectual circles in St Petersburg were stirred by a new development of the Socialist movement. From the ’forties onward Socialism had been the accepted creed of a large proportion of Russian intellectuals, but it was a romantic Socialism, mainly of an agrarian character, and based on an extraordinary sympathy for an idealized peasantry. At the beginning of the ’nineties a small group of young men became enthusiastic advocates of what was known as the scientific Socialism of Karl Marx, and, in articles in reviews and in the theoretical public debates on economic subjects that the autocracy permitted at that time they raised a revolt against the ‘Populist’ Socialism that had become traditional in the intelligentsia. Peter Struve, who later became a Liberal, and even developed Conservative leanings, and Michael Tugan-Baranovsky, who in the end became a popular and highly respected Professor of Political Economy, were the leaders of the Marxian group. Lenin joined them and was greatly assisted by them in his early, literary, efforts, which consisted of polemical articles on the aspects of Socialism that were then in debate. At that time he wrote under the pseudonym of Ilyin.
Lenin never wrote a first-class scientific work. He was not primarily a theorist or a writer but a propagandist. For him articles and books were but means to an end. It was when the Marxists turned from theoretical discussion to the organization of party effort that Lenin found his true vocation. In 1898 the Russian Social Democratic Party came into being. It was of course a conspirative organization. Political activities were under the ban. No political parties, whether Liberal, Conservative, or Socialist, were permitted publicly to exist. The secret parties, or rather clubs, organized by the revolutionaries, recruited their adherents among the intelligentsia, and only to a very small extent among the workmen and peasants. The Marxists organized among the workmen of St Petersburg and other towns clandestine classes for instruction in Socialist doctrine.
It was dangerous work, but Russian revolutionaries were never deterred by the fear of imprisonment or exile. Lenin began his career as an active revolutionary in this comparatively innocuous form of effort. He was caught by the police, as many others were, imprisoned, and sent to Siberia. As compared with many others, his experience of police persecution was brief indeed, but it is significant that during his banishment in Siberia his character as a deliberate fomenter of discord among the revolutionary parties was already, sharply, revealed. The older exiles, who held fast to the ‘Populist’ tradition, were for the most part gentle, humane, and easy going. They formed a class apart with a strong esprit de corps, with fixed habits of comradely intercourse. When Lenin and the other Marxists came, the peace was broken, a new aggressive tone was introduced, and perpetual intrigue led to perpetual dissension and suspicion.
How Bolshevism Began
Lenin escaped from Siberia to Western Europe in 1900, and took up his abode in Switzerland. Here he became one of the leaders in the revolutionary activities of the band of refugees organized under the name of the Russian Social Democratic Party, and in 1901 he joined the editorial staff of their review, Iskra (the Spark). The party retained until the Bolshevist Revolution the title of ‘The One (or United) Russian Social Democratic Party’. As a matter of fact it was not long before Lenin himself split the party into two warring sections. At the second congress of the party, held in London in 1903, a fierce discussion arose over questions of tactics, and ended in a vote which yielded a majority (bolshinstvo) for the view advocated by Lenin. The supporters of the majority view came to be known as Bolsheviki, while the adherents of the minority (menshinstvo) were called Mensheviki. Lenin stood at this conference for an extreme centralization of the party organization and for the adoption of direct revolutionary methods, as opposed to the educational and evolutionary tactics advocated by the other side. He displayed then the temperament that moulded his career. A man of iron will and inflexible ambition, he had no scruple about means and treated human beings as mere material for his purpose. Trotsky, then Lenin’s opponent on the question of tactics, and later his chief colleague in the Council of People’s Commissaries, has given a vivid description of Lenin’s conduct on this occasion.
At the second congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party (he wrote) this man with his habitual talent and energy played the part of disorganizer of the party… Comrade Lenin made a mental review of the membership of the party, and came to the conclusion that the iron hand needed for organization belonged to him. He was right. The leadership of Social Democracy in the struggle for liberty meant in reality the leadership of Lenin over Social Democracy.
Dictatorship as a Principle
It is unnecessary to dwell at length on the theoretical side of the controversy between Lenin and the Menshevists. Both sides published in support of their views a large number of fiercely polemical articles and pamphlets, which for the uninitiated make extremely dull reading, though for the patient historian they may provide a vivid illustration of revolutionary mentality. Lenin’s idea was that the Central Committee should absolutely dominate every individual, and every local group in the party. He was opposed to any sort of democratic equality or local autonomy in the party organization. Dictatorship by a compact central group was the principle on which he worked. ‘Give us an organization consisting of true revolutionaries,’ he wrote, ‘and we will turn Russia upside down.’ He regarded his opponents in the party as opportunists and no true revolutionaries. He was for direct action, for cutting loose from all entangling compromise with Liberals and more cautious Socialists.
The Social Democrats argued vehemently and incessantly, but this did not prevent them from agitating, organizing, and conspiring in Russia. While the rival party, the Socialist Revolutionaries, agitated among the peasantry and planned and carried out a series of terrorist acts, of which several Ministers, Governors, and the Grand Duke Serge were the victims, the Social Democrats developed their propaganda among the factory workmen, with but slight success until 1906, when the discontent caused by the Japanese War and the shooting of workmen in St Petersburg on Red Sunday, January 22, provoked an openly revolutionary movement throughout Russia. The movement culminated in the granting of a Constitution on October 30, 1905. During the months immediately preceding and following this event the Socialist agitation was at its height. Then, for the first time, the masses of the Russian people became acquainted with Socialist principles, and the agitators gained experience in dealing with the masses.
Propaganda at Work
Lenin’s name was not prominent during the first Revolution. He was very active behind the scenes, organizing, directing, pushing things in his own direction, noting the readiness of the masses to respond to extreme and demoralizing watchwords, sneering at all hints of compromise, at every stage forcing a disruption between the Social Democrats and the bourgeois parties. It is curious that he refused to become a member of the first short-lived St Petersburg Council of Workmen’s Deputies, formed after the promulgation of the Constitution. Trotsky played a prominent part in this Soviet. It is characteristic of Lenin that he only adopted the Soviet idea at the moment – 12 years later – when it suited his own purposes.
From 1905 to 1907 Lenin lived in Russia under an assumed name, endeavouring to keep alive and to organize the revolutionary movement, which, in the end, the Stolypin Government ruthlessly suppressed. His name is connected with several cases of ‘expropriation’. Apparently he did not personally organize these armed raids on banks and post-offices, but considerable sums seized in such robberies were handed over to the Bolshevists and used by Lenin to develop his propaganda at home and abroad. He left Russia when the collapse of the 1905 Revolution became apparent and resumed his activities in Geneva. On the whole his position among the revolutionaries had been greatly strengthened and among the mixed crowd of new exiles who had been thrown out of Russia by the failure of the first revolutionary offensive he found many instruments suitable for his unscrupulous purpose.
In 1912 he moved to Cracow so as to be in closer touch with his agents in Russia. A singular episode, characteristic of his contempt for bourgeois morality, was his intrigue, in collusion with the Secret Police, to split the small Social Democratic Party in the Duma through a certain Malinovsky, who visited him in Cracow with the knowledge of the Head of the Department of Police.
In 1914, at the outbreak of war, Lenin was in Galicia. As a Russian subject he was arrested by the Austrian authorities, but he was released when it was discovered that he would be a useful agent in the task of weakening Russia. He returned to Switzerland, where he carried on defeatist propaganda with the object of transforming the war between the nations into a revolutionary civil war within each nation. He was joined by defeatist Socialists from various countries. The funds for these operations were perhaps provided by Germany, since the sums Lenin had received from expropriations during the first revolution were exhausted. The activities of this little group of Socialists were hardly noticed amid the great events of the war. The conferences of Zimmerwald and Kienthal in 1915 had the appearance of insignificant gatherings of crazy fanatics. Yet they drafted the defeatist revolutionary programme and framed the watchwords which later acquired enormous power in Russia and influenced the working classes throughout Europe. Lenin regarded the vicissitudes of the war purely from the standpoint of revolutionary tactics. He noted the lessons of war, industry, and State-control, and the effects of war on mass-psychology.
The Revolution of 1917
The revolution that suddenly broke out in Russia in March, 1917, gave Lenin his long-sought-for opportunity. The Provisional Government formed after the abdication of the Emperor Nicholas proclaimed unrestricted liberty and encouraged the return of the political exiles, who came flocking back in thousands. There was some difference of opinion in the Government about permitting the return of such a notorious defeatist as Lenin. He came nevertheless, transported through Germany with the help of the German General Staff. Ludendorff considered that he was likely to be a most effective agent in disorganizing the Russian Army, and wrecking the Russian front. In this he was not mistaken; what he did not foresee was that Lenin would provoke a violent revolutionary movement that was later to react on Germany herself.
Lenin was received in Petrograd with all revolutionary honours. Searchlights from armoured cars lighted up the Finland railway station, which was thronged with people. Socialists of all parties made speeches, but Lenin was not to be led away by any external success. He wanted real power. On April 14, the day after his arrival, he laid his programme before the Social Democratic Conference, a programme which six months afterwards he carried out to the letter in his decrees. At the time his speech was ridiculed by the moderate Socialists. Only a small group of Bolshevists applauded their leader when he declared that peace with the Germans must be concluded, at once, a Soviet Republic founded, the banks closed, that all power must be given to the workers, and that the Social-Democrats must henceforth call themselves Communists. His motion was rejected by 115 to 20.
Lenin had at his back a compact organization well equipped with money. The Bolshevists displayed extraordinary activity in demoralizing the Army and the workmen and in provoking riots among the peasantry. There was no power to restrain them. In Petrograd, Lenin took up his quarters in the house of the dancer Kaszesinska, and from the balcony addressed large crowds day after day. In July he attempted a coup d’état, but failed. He went into hiding, but continued to direct subversive movement. The Provisional Government under Kerensky shrank from coercive measures. The Socialist Revolutionaries and Social-Democrats who controlled the Petrograd Soviet partly sympathized with the Bolshevists, partly feared them, but in their appeals to the masses they were always outbid by Lenin’s followers, and speedily they lost ground.
After the failure of Korniloff’s attempt in August to re-establish law and order the general demoralization increased. The Army went to pieces and, taking advantage of this disorganized host of armed men, to whom he promised immediate peace, Lenin effected a coup d’état on November 7, 1917, this time without any difficulty. Lenin appeared with his followers in a Congress of Soviets, and was acclaimed as Dictator. The members of the Provisional Government were imprisoned, all but Kerensky, who escaped. There was a sharp struggle in Moscow, where for several days boys from officers’ training schools defended the Kremlin, but they finally succumbed.
Master of the Terror
Lenin took up his residence in the Kremlin, and from that ancient citadel of autocracy and orthodoxy launched his propaganda, of world-revolution. Outwardly he lived as modestly as when he had been an obscure political refugee. Both he and his wife – he had married late in the ’nineties Nadiezhda Krupskaya – had the scorn of sectarians for bourgeois inventions and comforts. Short and sturdy, with a bald head, small beard, and keen, bright, deep-set eyes, Lenin looked like a small tradesman. When he spoke at meetings his ill-fitting suit, his crooked tie, his generally nondescript appearance, disposed the crowd in his favour. ‘He is not one of the gentle-folk,’ they would say, ‘he is one of us.’
This is not the place to describe in detail the terrible achievements of Bolshevism – the shameful peace with Germany, the plundering of the educated and propertied classes, the long-continued terror with its thousands of innocent victims, the Communist experiment carried to the point of suppressing private trade, and making practically all the adult population of the towns servants and slaves of the Soviet Government; the civil war, the creation and strengthening of the Red Army, the fights with the border peoples, the Ukraine, with Koltchak and Denikin and with Poland, culminating in 1920 in the defeat of the White Armies and the conclusion of peace with Poland. Never in modern times has any great country passed through such a convulsion as that brought about by Lenin’s implacable effort to establish Communism in Russia, and thence to spread it throughout the world.
In the light of these world-shaking events Lenin’s personality acquired an immense significance. He retained control. He was the directive force. He was in effect Bolshevism. His associates were pygmies compared with him. Even Trotsky, who displayed great energy and ability in organizing the Red Army, deferred to Lenin. Both the Communist Party and the Council of People’s Commissaries were completely under Lenin’s control. It happened sometimes that after listening to a discussion of two conflicting motions in some meeting under his chairmanship Lenin would dictate to the secretary, without troubling to argue his point some third resolution entirely his own. He had an uncanny skill in detecting the weaknesses of his adversaries, and his associates regarded him with awe as a supreme tactician. His judgment was final.
He was ultimately responsible for the terror as for all the other main lines of Bolshevist policy. He presided over the meeting of the Council of People’s Commissaries which, in July, 1918, approved the foul murder of Nicholas ii and his family by the Ekaterinburg Soviet.
The Communist experiment brought Russia to economic ruin, famine, and barbarism. Under Soviet rule the Russian people suffered unheard of calamity. To Lenin, this mattered little. When the famine came in 1921 he remarked, with a scornful smile, ‘It’s a trifle if twenty millions or so die.’
He did realize, however, that the effort to maintain undiluted Communism was endangering the existence of his Government. In March, 1921, he called a halt. Against the wishes of the majority of his followers he proclaimed a new economic policy, consisting of a temporary compromise between Socialism and Capitalism, with the Communist movement in complete control. His hope was that this policy would secure a breathing space during which the Communists might rally for a new attack on world capitalism.
The famine raged. Russia sank deeper and deeper into the mire. The resources of the Soviet Government, the gold reserve of the Imperial Government which they had squandered in their wild propaganda and in their feeble pretence of foreign trade, were almost exhausted. Their one hope lay in bluffing Europe, and to this task they set themselves with great zest and incomparable skill.
Last Illness
In the midst of the rapid crumbling of all his plans, Lenin fell ill towards the end of 1921, and for many weeks was unable to take any public part in affairs. The nature of his complaint was obscure. Experts were summoned from Germany, and a bullet was extracted that had been fired on Lenin when an attempt was made on his life by the Jewish socialist revolutionary, Dora Kaplan, in 1918. There was a brief interval, during which Lenin’s health was apparently restored, and he made speeches declaring that the new economic policy would go no farther, and that concessions to capitalists were at an end. He was unable to attend the Genoa Conference, and shortly after the conclusion of the Conference the reports as to his health became more alarming. German specialists were again summoned, and his condition became so grave that steps were taken by his associates to establish a directorate, to carry on his functions.
One paralytic stroke followed another, and it became clear that Lenin would never return to affairs, that his days were numbered. He was removed to a country house near Moscow, where, under the care of nurses, he lingered on till his name grew shadowy and his party was divided by an open dispute for the succession.
Giacomo Puccini
A famous opera composer
29 November 1924
Giacomo Puccini, whose death is announced on another page, had held first place among the composers of opera in his generation so decisively that to the majority of opera-goers he seemed to stand alone. Musicians may find among his contemporaries a dozen or more names whose works for the stage they will prefer before his. Humperdinck, Strauss, Charpentier, Bruneau, and Debussy have all displayed qualities which in their different ways are beyond the range of Puccini’s art, yet no one of them competes for his position of favour in the eyes of the general public. A conservative operatic management such as we have known in London may try experiments in one or other; ever since the success of La Bohème there have been no experiments in Puccini. The only question was how quickly each new work could be hurried on to the stage. In fact, an opera of his entitled Turandot was announced for production next spring; and he had almost finished it.
Once he was regarded as a member of a group of brilliant and sensational representatives of Young Italy. The comparatively early death of Leoncavallo, the failure of Mascagni to follow up the meteoric success of Cavalleria, and the lack of any decisive characteristics in Giordano enabled Puccini to outdistance his companions in that group, and Italian opera still has the advantage in the world over that of any other country in that it rallies to its standard the great voices, whether those voices are the product of Italy or of Australia, or Ireland or America.
Puccini was born at Lucca in the same year as Leoncavallo (1858) and was, like Bach and Mozart, the inheritor of a family tradition of musicianship. He represented the fifth generation of musical Puccinis, the earliest of whom, his great-great-grandfather, bore the same Christian name, Giacomo, and, was a friend of Martini, the master of Mozart. Puccini’s father dying when the boy was six years old, it was through the determination and sacrifice of his mother, who was left poor, that he was given the opportunity of study at the Milan Conservatory. There he worked at composition with Bazzini and with Ponchielli, the composer of La Gioconda. The production of a student work, a Capriccio for orchestra, called forth praise of his possibilities as a symphonic writer, but Puccini never mistook that as an indication that he should write symphonies. He subsequently put his powers in this direction to good use in devising those running orchestral commentaries which, supporting the dialogues of his characters on the stage, form the links between the great lyrical outbursts.
For some time Puccini lived in Milan with his brother and a fellow-student, enjoying the delights and sorrows of a Bohemian existence, enduring a sufficient amount of hardship to give him a place in the long roll of struggling geniuses, and incidentally storing up memories which were to give him the right local colour for his first accepted masterpiece.
His first opera, Le Villi, a modest work suggested to him by Ponchielli, was given at the Teatro dal Verme in Milan in 1884. Its production was an important moment in his career and the success was considerable, even if one discounts something from the tone of the telegram which he sent off to his mother after the first performance: ‘Theatre packed, immense success; anticipations exceeded; 18 calls; finale of first act thrice encored.’ The substantial part of it was that Le Villi was bought for a small sum by Messrs. Ricordi, who published it eventually, but not until Puccini’s fame had been established by his subsequent works.
Le Villi in an enlarged form brought Puccini on to the stage of La Scala in the following year, but it was not until 1889 that his second opera, Edgar, arrived and was actually produced there. Edgar was a failure, the one decisive and permanent failure which Puccini ever encountered. Possibly it helped him, as many such failures have helped, to realize the necessity of making ‘every stroke tell’, as Weber said in another connection. At any rate, Puccini must have seen in it the error of accepting too readily a weak libretto, for he became exceedingly fastidious, and each one of the works by which he is known is the result of a personal choice of subject framed to his wishes by his librettists, of whom L. Illica and G. Giacosa have been the chief.
The first was Manon Lescaut, which was produced at Turin in 1893, the drama of which, like its successor, La Bohème, is treated rather as a series of episodes than as a whole. Considering how well known the Abbé Prevost’s novel was, the operatic version might have carried this treatment further. Indeed, the attempt to remodel the story so as to make the deportation of Manon in the third act consequent upon the events of the second produces considerable incongruity. As the opera stands there is either too much or too little connection between its parts to be dramatically satisfactory. Outside Italy it had at first to contend with the popularity of Massenet’s opera, but in this country at any rate it has steadily increased in popularity, and its success rests largely on the skilful musical handling of details, such as the scene of Manon’s levée, and on the passionate love music of the last act, which Caruso first realized to the full.
From the time of the production of Manon onwards Puccini’s most famous operas follow in a series with three to four years between each. La Bohème, also at Turin, came in 1896, La Tosca at Rome in 1900, Madama Butterfly at Milan in 1904. The Carl Rosa Opera Company first brought La Bohème to England and performed it in English a couple of years before it was produced at Covent Garden at the instigation of Mme Melba. Puccini came to England for the first performance of The Bohemians at the Theatre Royal in Manchester, on which occasion, it may be remarked, he was much amused by the makeshift fashion in which the brass and drums of the orchestra had to be accommodated in boxes. La Bohème having won its way both in London and the provinces, La Tosca was quickly secured and was given at Covent Garden in 1900 with Mme Ternina in the principal part. The extraordinary ill treatment which Madama Butterfly received from the Milanese public on its production at La Scala in 1904 really had very little effect on Puccini’s position with the wider public. The performance under Signor Campanini had scarcely begun when it was interrupted by hisses and cries of disapproval; it was carried through in spite of continued disturbance, and at the end Puccini took the score away with him, refusing to risk a second performance there. Yet so firmly fixed was he in the estimation of the English public that the Covent Garden authorities did not hesitate to stage it in the following year with the distinguished cast (Mme Destinn and Signori Caruso and Scotti) who were its most famous interpreters.
It is on these three works that Puccini’s fame most principally rests, and, while each of them possesses to the full his salient characteristics of glowing melody and strong characterization, the variety of their subject matter brings wide differences of musical treatment. There is a freshness and simplicity about La Bohème which does not fade with frequent repetition. La Tosca, at first rather looked askance at by serious musicians for the crudity of its melodrama, yet contains some of the most forcible musical moments in the whole of Puccini’s work. The broad tune with which the orchestra pictures Tosca’s sense of horror after the murder of Scarpia is in itself enough to proclaim Puccini’s genius for emotional melody. The whole of the music of the later scenes of Madama Butterfly, depicting the phases of hope, fear, disillusionment, heroism, shows an insight for which neither of the previous operas prepares us.
After this there was an interval of seven years before Puccini wrote another opera. He was said to have considered a number of subjects, including the story of Marie Antoinette. When one thinks of the increasing power with which he had delineated the characters of women, it seems a pity that he turned aside from his subject. When the opportunity came of a production in America he was seized by a play of David Belasco’s, which had been successful in New York, one of those hectic romances of California, in which rascality and sentiment alternate with bewildering rapidity. La Fanciulla del West was announced in the autumn of 1910 for simultaneous production in New York, Boston, and Chicago, and the composer went to New York to superintend the performance there, for which Mme Destinn and Caruso were engaged. In the circumstances it is hardly necessary to say that the arts of advertisement were used to the full and that the work was clamoured for in the principal opera houses of Europe. It is refreshing to find that the benefits of advertisement are, after all, comparatively short lived, for the boom given to The Girl of the Golden West, to quote the original title, did not blind anyone to the fact that, in spite of moments of beauty and a wealth of striking detail, it was not to be placed in the same class with its predecessors.
A still longer interval divided it from the set of three one-act operas which was completed in 1919 and which was given at Covent Garden in 1920 after performance in Italy and America. In planning his triptych, Puccini sought an opportunity to display again his power of dealing with widely different situations, involving strongly contrasted types of emotion. Il Tabarro is one of those pieces of sordid violence which have attracted all Italian composers since Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. Suor Angelica aims at an atmosphere of religious mysticism, and Gianni Schicchi is caustic comedy. In the first he was doing again what he and others had already done with success. In the second he failed by mistaking a self-conscious sentiment for a real emotion. In the third he succeeded in what for him was an entirely new genre and produced a masterpiece of opera buffa which captivated every one; that this was the general opinion in England was shown by what happened at Covent Garden. For the first few performances the three were given in sequence, and it was pointed out that Puccini wished them to be given together; then Suor Angelica was dropped, and finally Gianni Schicchi alone remained, the places of the others being filled by performances of the Russian Ballet.
In one respect Puccini set a practical example by which other composers might profit. He always gave his personal supervision to the first productions of his works, and he never conducted them. In this way he was able to assure himself that the regular conductors had a sympathetic understanding of his musical intentions and could secure what he wanted in his absence. He was ready to acknowledge the great debt which he owed to his interpreters, both conductors and singers, and his appreciation of their efforts went hand in hand with an unerring instinct for gauging their capabilities. By writing music which it was a joy to sing he could be certain that the singer would convey his own pleasure in it to the hearers. Puccini could use his orchestra for any thing that he wanted to say, either to describe the draught by which Mimi’s candle was extinguished or to enhance the first ardours of Rodolfo’s love. Even in the most lurid moments of La Tosca and Il Tabarro he handled the orchestra without a sense of effort. He knew all the tricks of modern orchestration, yet rarely, save in some passages of La Fanciulla del West, seemed to set much store by them. His unerring sense of what would be effective in the theatre was a power shared by most composers of his country, but he employed it to finer purpose than the majority in his generation. If Puccini’s was not the greatest music, at least there could never be any doubt that it was music.
Claude Monet
The great painter of light
5 December 1926
Judged by the nature and extent of his influence, Claude Oscar Monet, whose death is announced on another page, was the most important artist within living memory. Others, such as Manet and Renoir, may have excelled him in personal achievement and even in the number of their evident followers, but for what may be called infective and pervasive effects upon the body of painting there is nobody to compare with him except Cézanne, whom he long outlived, and Cézanne was not his equal in accomplishment. Monet did not invent a new thing; he would hardly have had such a widespreading influence if he did; but, happening to be born at the right moment with an instinctive bent for that expression of light which both Turner and Constable had attempted, he carried it on to fulfilment and dominated the field of painting until Cézanne, inheriting his gains, recalled the attention of artists to the claims of solid earth. He may be said to have irradiated landscape painting, and the gleams penetrated into quarters where any conscious acceptance of his influence would have been hotly disclaimed.
Though he came to be associated with the North of France, Normandy in particular, Monet was actually born in Paris, in the Rue Laffitte, on November 14, 1840 – the same day as his future friend, Auguste Rodin – his mother being a member of a Lyons family. His childhood was spent at Havre, where caricatures drawn by him and exhibited in a shop window attracted the attention of Eugène Boudin, who initiated him into painting in the open air. As early as 1856 the two were exhibiting together at Rouen, and Monet always spoke of Boudin with gratitude, saying that he had ‘dashed the scales from his eyes and shown him the beauties of land and sea painting’. The following year Monet went to Paris, but without immediate results, and in 1860 he left for Algeria to complete his military service in the Chasseurs d’Afrique. He returned invalided, with his instinct for light further confirmed. Back at Havre he fell in with Jongkind, the Dutch artist, who, like Boudin, may be said to have prepared the way for Impressionism, and the three of them worked together.
In 1863 Monet went again to Paris with the intention of entering the studio of Gleyre, and here he made the acquaintance of Renoir, Sisley, and other painters, who, with differences, were carrying on the tradition of the Barbizon group, Corot in particular. Monet quickly decided to work out his own salvation. He made his first appearance in the Salon of 1865 with two marine subjects – ‘Pointe de la Hève’ and ‘Embouchure de la Seine à Honfleur’. His work at this period showed affinities with both Boudin and Jongkind, and also with Manet – a broadening of the facts under the influence of light into atmospheric values, but without any decided attempt to realize light itself on the canvas. Its characters may be seen in ‘Plage de Trouville’, in the Courtauld collection at the Tate Gallery, though that picture was not painted until 1870.
Monet’s first attempt to paint a large landscape with figures in the open air bore the same title as a famous picture by Manet, ‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe’. It introduced him to Courbet and the two men became fast friends. An amusing story is told of a visit paid by them to Alexandre Dumas the Elder, who was stopping in Havre. This was in 1866, when Monet’s ‘Camille’, afterwards known as ‘Dame en Vert’, was attracting attention in the Salon. Neither of the artists had met Dumas, but Courbet insisted that they should call. At first they were told that Dumas was not at home, but Courbet said: ‘Tell him that it is Courbet who asks for him; he will be in.’ Dumas came out in shirt and trousers; he and Courbet embraced with tears; and the two painters were invited to lunch, cooked by Dumas himself, who afterwards paraded them through the streets of Havre in his carriage.
The following year Monet’s ‘Women in a Garden’ was rejected by the Salon, and its exhibition in a shop window brought him the acquaintance of Manet and introduced him to the group of writers, including Zola, who were then championing Manet and his friends. It was between this date and the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War that the informal association of artists began which, consolidated by the attitude of the Salon, led to the Impressionist school. They included Monet, Camille Pissarro, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Sisley, Cézanne, Berthe Morisot, who was Manet’s sister-in-law, and Mary Cassatt among others. Not all these artists were Impressionists, as the word came to be understood, but they had common sympathies in refusing to be bound by authority.
Visit to England
During the siege of Paris, in 1870–71, Monet and Pissarro paid a visit to England, and there can be little doubt that the acquaintance with Turner and Constable which they made then had considerable influence in confirming their aims – just as the exhibition of Constable’s ‘Hay Wain’ in Paris had profoundly affected an earlier generation of French painters. It was in 1874 that the word ‘Impressionism’ was first coined, and by accident. Under the title of ‘Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs du 15 avril au 15 mai 1874’, the artists already named, with others, arranged a collective exhibition at Nadar’s, in the Boulevard des Capucines. Among the works by Monet there was one entitled ‘Sunrise, an Impression’, merely by way of description. The word ‘Impressionists’ was seized upon as a term of ridicule for the whole group, and though many of them had nothing in common with Monet they cheerfully accepted it as a battle-cry. Financially the exhibition was a disaster, the works being sold by auction the following year at prices averaging about 100 francs. It was at this time that Manet, who was well off, suggested to Duvet a way of helping Monet, then very poor, by buying ten of his pictures between them for 1,000 francs without disclosing the purchasers.
The Impressionists, as they were now called, continued to hold exhibitions, being supported by Durand-Ruel and other dealers with the courage of their convictions, and little by little, with the aid of intelligent criticism, hostility was overcome and the aims of Monet and his associates began to be understood. It was not, however, until 1889, when he shared an exhibition with Rodin at the Georges Petit Gallery, that Monet had a substantial success, his first one-man show in 1880 having been a failure.
With his studies of the Gare Saint Lazare in the third group exhibition of 1877, Monet had already begun the series of the same or similar subjects – railway stations, cathedrals, hay-ricks, river banks, poplars, water-lilies – under different conditions of light which were to establish his fame, and from 1889 onward his artistic reputation steadily increased. In 1883 he had settled at Giverny, in the department of the Eure, Normandy, and he remained there for the rest of his life, with occasional visits abroad, quietly and happily producing his pictures. Monet never received any honour from the State, though a tardy offer was made to him of a seat on the Académie des Beaux Arts, which he declined, and such pictures of his as are to be found in French national collections, at the Luxembourg Museum and elsewhere, are gifts or bequests. He himself presented to the French nation a series of 19 ‘Water-Lily’ paintings, and in 1923, at the age of 83, in the company of his old friend, M. Clemenceau, who was a supporter of the Impressionists in the stormy days of the ’seventies, Monet visited the Tuileries Gardens to inspect the building which was being specially constituted to contain them.
London Views
His work has been frequently shown in London, at the Goupil Gallery, the Leicester Galleries, the Lefèvre Galleries, the French Gallery, the Independent Gallery, and elsewhere, and some years ago an association of English and foreign artists was formed in London called the ‘Monarro Group’, combining the names of Monet and Pissarro as heads of the movement with which they found themselves in sympathy. In connection with Monet’s visits to England his views of the Thames, including ‘Waterloo Bridge’ and ‘The Houses of Parliament’, must not be forgotten. He is represented in the Modern Foreign Section of the Tate Gallery by two pictures only: ‘Plage de Trouville’, painted in 1870, purchased in 1924 by the Trustees of the Courtauld Fund; and ‘Vetheuil: Sunshine and Snow’, painted in 1881, included in the Lane Bequest of 1917.
Monet’s artistic progress may be described as the more and more purely æsthetic organization of his technical conquest of light and atmosphere. He did not follow the so-called neo-Impressionists into the formal dotting which was the logical outcome, or scientific application, of his own system of laying strokes or touches of pure colour side by side, eliminating all browns from the palette, but contented himself with a method which produced the effects he desired; and it was the æsthetic value, the poetry, rather than the mere realization of light that inspired him. Nor, though he was a pioneer in the discovery of ‘colour in shadow’, was he a decorative colourist by intention; he painted colour for the sake of light rather than light for the sake of colour. His work has been called lacking in design, but the charge cannot be supported. It stands to reason that if an artist is designing in atmospheric values, in veils of light, the design will not be so emphatic, so easily grasped, as if he were designing in solid forms, but nobody can look with attention at a picture by Monet and regard it as a mere representation of the facts and conditions. In this respect his work might well be compared to the music of his countryman Claude Debussy, in which, under an atmospheric shimmer, the melodies are not so immediately recognizable as they are in the works of Bach or Beethoven, but are nevertheless present to the attentive ear.
At the same time it must be allowed that the aim and methods of Monet were better adapted to some subjects than others, and with due appreciation of his cathedrals, railway stations, and Venetian scenes, we find his happiest expression in those river subjects in which a leafy garland of poplars reflects the influence of sky and water, such as the beautiful ‘Poplars on the Epte’, in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, or in the arabesques of water lilies. A fair description of the emotional effect of a typical work of Monet at his best would be that of a ‘sunny smile’. It was inevitable that after so much trafficking in airy regions painting should come to earth again, and the concern for plastic volumes and a more emphatic design instituted by Cézanne and other leaders of the movement conveniently known as Post-Impressionism was as natural a sequence to the Impressionism of Monet, as is the desire for physical exercise after loitering in a garden. But, so far as it is humanly possible to judge, Monet left a gleam upon the surface of painting which will never entirely disappear. Monet has been the subject of many writings, including an exhaustive study by M. Camille Mauclair.
Emmeline Pankhurst
A pioneer of woman suffrage
14 June 1928
Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst, whose death is announced on another page, was born in Manchester on July 14, 1858. In her early childhood she was brought into close touch with those who had inherited the spirit of the Manchester reformers. Her father, Mr Robert Goulden, a calico-printer, was keenly interested in the reform question and the dawn of the movement for woman’s suffrage; her grandfather nearly lost his life in the Peterloo franchise riots in 1819. At the age of 13, soon after she had been taken to her first woman suffrage meeting by her mother, she went to school in Paris, where she found a girl-friend of her own way of thinking in the daughter of Henri Rochefort. In 1879 she married Dr R. M. Pankhurst, a man many years older than herself. An intimate friend of John Stuart Mill and an able lawyer, he shared and helped to mould his wife’s political views. She served with him on the committee which promoted the Married Women’s Property Act, and was at the same time a member of the Manchester Women’s Suffrage Committee. In 1889 she helped in forming the Women’s Franchise League, which, however, was discontinued after a few years. She remained a Liberal until 1892, when she joined the Independent Labour Party. After being defeated for the Manchester School Board, she was elected at the head of the poll for the board of guardians and served for five years. When her husband died, in 1898, she was left not well off, and with three girls and a boy to bring up. Accordingly she found work as registrar of births and deaths at Chorlton-on-Medlock, but her propaganda activities were considered inconsistent with her official position and she resigned.
In 1903 her interest in the cause of woman suffrage was reawakened by the enthusiasm of her daughter Christabel and she formed the Women’s Social and Political Union, the first meeting of which was held in her house in Manchester in October of that year. Two years later the militant movement was started as the immediate result of the treatment received by Miss Christabel Pankhurst and Miss Annie Kenney, two members of the union who endeavoured to question Sir Edward Grey on the prospects of woman suffrage, at a political meeting held in Manchester. In 1906 Mrs Pankhurst and her union began a series of pilgrimages to the House of Commons, which resulted in conflicts with the police and the imprisonment of large numbers of the members. In October, 1906, she was present at the first of these demonstrations, when 11 women were arrested. In January, 1908, she was pelted with eggs and rolled in the mud during the Mid-Devon election at Newton Abbot, and a month later she was arrested when carrying a petition to the Prime Minister at the House of Commons, but was released after undergoing five of the six weeks’ imprisonment to which she was sentenced. Some months later, in October, a warrant was issued for her arrest, together with Miss Pankhurst and Mrs Drummond, for inciting the public to ‘rush’ the House of Commons. During her three months’ imprisonment in Holloway Gaol she led a revolt of her followers against the rules of prison discipline, demanding that they should be treated as political prisoners. In 1909, the year in which the ‘hunger strike’ and ‘forcible feeding’ were first practised in connection with these cases, she was once more arrested at the door of the House of Commons, and after her trial, and pending an appeal founded on the Bill of Rights and a statute of Charles, dealing with petitions to the Crown, she went to America and Canada on a lecturing tour; two days before her return her fine was paid by some unknown person, so that she did not go to prison.
As soon, however, as she was back in England, she again devoted her energies to the encouragement of the campaign of pin-pricks and violence to which she was committed and by which she hoped to further the cause which she had at heart. In 1912, for her own share in those lawless acts, she was twice imprisoned, but in each case served only five weeks of the periods of two months and nine months – for conspiracy to break windows – to which she was sentenced. A year later she was arrested on the more serious charge of inciting to commit a felony, in connection with the blowing-up of Mr Lloyd George’s country house at Walton. In spite of the ability with which she conducted her own defence the jury found her guilty – though with a strong recommendation to mercy – and she was sentenced by Mr Justice Lush to three years’ penal servitude. On the tenth day of the hunger strike which she at once began (to be followed later on by a thirst strike) she was temporarily released, under the terms of the measure introduced by Mr McKenna commonly known as the Cat and Mouse Act, because of the condition of extreme weakness to which she was reduced. At the end of five months, during which she was several times released and rearrested, she went to Paris, and then to America (after a detention of 2½ days on Ellis Island), having served not quite three weeks of her three years’ sentence. On her return to England the same cat-and-mouse policy was resumed by the authorities – and accompanied by more and more violent outbreaks on the part of Mrs Pankhurst’s militant followers – until at last, in the summer of 1914, after she had been arrested and released nine or ten times on the one charge, it was finally abandoned, and the remainder of her term of three years’ penal servitude allowed to lapse.
Whether, but for the outbreak of the Great War, the militant movement would have resulted in the establishment of woman suffrage is a point on which opinions will probably always differ. But there is no question that the coming of the vote, which Mrs Pankhurst claimed as the right of her sex, was sensibly hastened by the general feeling that after the extraordinary courage and devotion shown by women of all classes in the nation’s emergency there must be no risk of a renewal of the feminist strife of the days of militancy. When the War was over it was remembered that on its outbreak Mrs Pankhurst, with her daughter Christabel and the rest of the militant leaders, declared an immediate suffrage truce and gave herself up to the claims of national service and devoted her talents as a speaker to the encouragement of recruiting, first in this country and then in the United States. A visit to Russia in 1917, where she formed strong opinions on the evils of Bolshevism, was followed by a residence of some years in Canada and afterwards in Bermuda for the benefit of her health. Since she came home, at the end of 1925, she had taken a deep interest in public life and politics, and had some thoughts of standing for Parliament, though she declined Lady Astor’s offer to give up to her her seat in Plymouth.
Whatever views may be held as to the righteousness of the cause to which she gave her life and the methods by which she tried to bring about its achievement, there can be no doubt about the singleness of her aim and the remarkable strength and nobility of her character. She was inclined to be autocratic and liked to go her own way. But that was because she was honestly convinced that her own way was the only way. The end that she had in view was the emancipation of women from what she believed, with passionate sincerity, to be a condition of harmful subjection. She was convinced that she was working for the salvation of the world, as well as of her sex. She was a public speaker of very remarkable force and ability, with a power of stimulating and swaying her audience possessed by no other woman of her generation, and was regarded with devoted admiration by many people outside the members of her union. With all her autocracy and her grievous mistakes, she was a humble-minded, large-hearted, unselfish woman, of the stuff of which martyrs are made. Quite deliberately, and having counted the cost, she undertook a warfare against the forces of law and order the strain of which her slight and fragile body was unable to bear. It will be remembered of her that whatever peril and suffering she called on followers to endure, up to the extreme indignity of forcible feeding, she herself was ready to face, and did face, with unfailing courage and endurance of body and mind.
D. H. Lawrence
A writer of genius
2 March 1930
David Herbert Lawrence, whose death is announced on another page, was born at Eastwood, near Nottingham, on September 11, 1885. His novel Sons and Lovers and his play The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd are at least so far biographical as to tell the world that his father was a coalminer and his mother a woman of finer grain. At the age of 12 the boy won a county council scholarship; but the sum was scarcely enough to pay the fees at the Nottingham High School and the fares to and fro. At 16 he began to earn his living as a clerk. When his ill-health put an end to that, he taught in a school for miners’ boys.
At 19 he won another scholarship, of which he could not avail himself, as he had no money, to pay the necessary entrance fee; but at 21 he went to Nottingham University College, and after two years there he came to London and took up teaching again. It was in these years that he wrote, under the name of Lawrence H. Davidson, some books on history. He had begun also the writing of fiction, and his first novel, The White Peacock, was published about a month after his mother’s death had robbed him of his best and dearest friend.
Sons and Lovers, published when he was 28, brought him fame. Many years of poverty were to pass before his work began to make him financially comfortable; and even then the collapse of a publishing firm in America deprived him of some of the fruits of his labours. But this revolt against society which fills his books had its counterpart in his life, in his travels, and especially in his attempt to found, in 1923, an intellectual and community settlement in New Mexico.
Undoubtedly he had genius. He could create characters which are even obtrusively real. His ruthless interpretation of certain sides of the nature of women was recognized by some women to be just. Every one of his novels, as well as his books of travel, contains passages of description so fine that they command the admiration of people whom much of his work disgusts. His powers range from a rich simplicity, a delicacy almost like that of Mr W. H. Davies, to turbulent clangour, and from tenderness to savage irony and gross brutality. There was that in his intellect which might have made him one of England’s greatest writers, and did indeed make him the writer of some things worthy of the best of English literature. But as time went on and his disease took firmer hold, his rage and his fear grew upon him. He confused decency with hypocrisy, and honesty with the free and public use of vulgar words. At once fascinated and horrified by physical passion, he paraded his disgust and fear in the trappings of a showy masculinity. And, not content with words, he turned to painting in order to exhibit more clearly still his contempt for all reticence.
It was inevitable (though it was regrettable) that such a man should come into conflict with the law over his novel The Rainbow, over some manuscripts sent through the post to his agent in London and over an exhibition of his paintings. But a graver cause for regret is that the author of Sons and Lovers, of Amores, and the other books of poems, of Aaron’s Rod, the short stories published as The Prussian Officer, Ladybird, and Kangaroo should have missed the place among the very best which his genius might have won.
In 1914 Lawrence married Frieda von Richthofen, who survives him. He left no children.
Dame Nellie Melba
A great prima donna
23 February 1931
Melba, to use the name by which she was universally known until the prefix of Dame Nellie was attached to it, whose death we regret to announce this morning, was born near Melbourne in 1859, and began her career as Helen Porter Mitchell. Her Scottish parents, who had settled in Australia, had themselves some musical proclivities. But it was not until after her early marriage to Mr Charles Armstrong that it became clear that her gifts must be taken seriously.
It was largely by her own efforts that she came to England in 1885 with the intention of cultivating her voice. When she arrived the experts to whom she appealed in London did not realize her possibilities. It is amusing to record that she was refused work in the Savoy Opera Company by Sullivan, though probably he did her and the world at large the greatest service by his refusal. She went to Paris, and to Mme Mathilde Marchesi belongs the credit of having instantly recognized that, to quote her own phrase, she ‘had found a star’.
A year of study and of close companionship with this great teacher was all that was needed to give Nellie Armstrong a brilliant début at ‘La Monnaie’ in Brussels as Mme Melba. She made her first appearance there on October 13, 1887, in the part of Gilda in Rigoletto. Her second part was Violetta in La Traviata, so that from the first she was identified with the earlier phases of Verdi, in which she has been pre-eminent ever since. Although, contrary to the traditions of the Brussels theatre, she sang in Italian, she aroused such enthusiasm that when a little later she was to sing Lakmé, and the question arose as to whether her French accent was sufficiently secure, the composer Délibes, is said to have exclaimed, ‘Qu’elle chante Lakmé en français, en italien, en allemand, en anglais, ou en chinois, cela m’est égal, mais qu’elle la chante.’
Her first appearance at Covent Garden on May 24, 1888, in Lucia di Lammermoor, was a more qualified success. Curiously enough, she was more commended at first for some supposed dramatic power than for the only two things which have ever really mattered in her case – the exquisite voice and the perfect use of it. From London she returned to the more congenial atmosphere of Brussels, and in the following year, 1889, proceeded to the conquest of Paris, where she triumphed as Ophélie in Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet. In Paris Mme Melba had the advantage of studying the parts of Marguerite in Faust and of Juliette with Gounod, and she took part in the first performance of Roméo et Juliette in French at Covent Garden in 1889.
From this time onward Mme Melba had only to visit one country after another to be acclaimed. From St Petersburg, where she sang before the Tsar in 1891, to Chicago, where in 1893 her singing with the de Reszkes was one of the features of the ‘World’s Fair’, the tale of her triumphs was virtually the same. But from the musical point of view a more important episode was her prolonged visit to Italy between these two events. Here she met the veteran Verdi and the young Puccini. Verdi helped her in the study of Aïda and of Desdemona (Otello). She made the acquaintance of Puccini’s Manon, but La Bohème, the only one of his operas with which she was to be identified, was not yet written. Another young composer who begged leave to be presented was Leoncavallo. She sang Nedda in the first London performance of I Pagliacci a little later.
Mme Melba’s early American appearances recall her few experiments with Wagner. She sang Elisabeth in Tannhäuser at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, during her first season there, and it was later in America that she made her single appearance as Brünnhilde. She had previously sung Elsa (Lohengrin) at Covent Garden, but she quite rightly realized that Wagner’s music was not for her. The only pity, when one recalls her repertory, is that either lack of opportunity or of inclination prevented her from turning to Mozart instead.
Her actual repertory amounted to 25 operas, of which, however, only some 10 parts are those which will be remembered as her own. La Bohème was the last of these to be added, and she first sang in it at Philadelphia in 1898, having studied it with the composer in Italy earlier in the year. She was so much in love with the music that she would not rest until she had brought it to London, and it was largely by her personal influence that it was accepted at Covent Garden. Indeed, she persuaded the management to stage La Bohème with the promise to sing some favourite scena from her repertory in addition on each night that she appeared in it until the success of the opera was assured. She kept the promise, though the rapid success of the opera soon justified her faith. To most of the present generation of opera-goers ‘Melba nights’ meant La Bohéme nights, and, for several seasons before the War and when Covent Garden reopened after it, there could not be too many of them for the public. She bade farewell to Covent Garden on June 8, 1926, when, in the presence of the King and Queen, she sang in acts from Roméo et Juliette, Otello, and La Bohème. Actually her last appearance in London was at a charity concert in 1929.
It is difficult now to realize that 30 years or so ago La Bohème seemed to offer few opportunities for the special characteristics of Mme Melba’s art, intimately associated as it then was with Donizetti, the earlier Verdi, and Gounod. But those characteristics in reality had full play in all music based on the expression of a pure vocal cantilena, and could appear in the simply held note at the end of the first act of La Bohème as completely as in the fioritura of ‘Caro nome’ or ‘The Jewel Song’. The essence of her power was due to such an ease in the production of pure tone in all parts of the voice and in all circumstances that there was no barrier between the music and the listener.
It is unnecessary to enlarge on the personal popularity of Melba here, or the almost passionate devotion which she inspired among her own countrymen on the various occasions when she revisited Australia. Her book of reminiscences, Melodies and Memories (1925), was disappointing, for it contained too little about her methods and experiences. She was generous in giving her services for good causes, and her work for War charities is remembered in the title conferred in 1918. She was then created dbe, and gbe in 1927.
Sir Edward Elgar
The laureate of English music
23 February 1934
The number of musicians of whom it can safely be said that the general public needs no explanation of their importance and asks for no justification of the place which their fellows accord them is small. Among composers this country has possessed two in the last century – Sullivan and Elgar. Of these the case of Elgar, who died yesterday at his home at Worcester at the age of 76, is the more remarkable because his genius was devoted to the larger forms of the musical art with which the ordinary man is supposed to sympathize least readily – the symphony, the concerto, and the oratorio. He never associated himself with the theatre in any close way; he never held any dominating official position in the musical life of the country, he rather stood aloof from institutions of any sort. Through nearly half his working life he was entirely unknown; during the remainder he was unhesitatingly accepted as our musical laureate.
In these days when the term ‘British composer’ is on everyone’s lips it is worth while remarking that Elgar by descent, upbringing, and education was entirely English. His father, a native of Dover, had settled in Worcester, where he kept a music shop and was organist to the Roman Catholic church of St George. His mother, Ann Greening, came from Herefordshire.
Edward William Elgar (he entirely dropped the second name in later years) was born at Broadheath, a village about four miles from Worcester, on June 2, 1857, and spent his youth in the typically English environment of the cathedral town and its surrounding country. Much has been said of Elgar’s upbringing as a member of the Roman Catholic Church and of the inspiration which it brought to his greatest choral work, The Dream of Gerontius, all of which is natural and true. But Elgar used to resent the idea that these influences in any way cut him off from others. As a boy he was constantly in and out of the cathedral listening to the music of its daily services and drawing many of his earliest and most treasured experiences from them. The Three Choirs Festivals at Worcester were sources of the most vivid delight to him. Indeed, it was characteristic of him at all times, that he loved to show himself knowledgeable on whatever others were inclined to think might lie a little outside his sphere of interest.
Early Compositions
Young Elgar had no systematic musical education, but he entered into all the musical activities of his father, which were many. He played the organ at St George’s, and, indeed, succeeded his father as regular organist there; he played the bassoon in a wind quintet (which perhaps accounts for the bassoon solo in the ‘Enigma’ Variations No. 111), but more particularly the violin, his thorough knowledge of which certainly had something to do with the brilliant passage-work of the famous concerto. He took an active part in all local music, particularly the concerts of the Worcester Glee Club, whose members gave him a bow for his violin in recognition of his services. Above all, he composed constantly, and some of the music now known in the orchestral suites, The Wand of Youth, dates from his boyhood. Pieces for violin and piano, part-songs, a motet, slight essays for the orchestra, are chief among such early works as survive. The interesting thing about them is that among much that is obvious and some that is trite one comes across turns of melody and harmony which are unmistakably the voice of Elgar. Even the first phrase of ‘Salut d’Amour’ must be allowed to be one of them.
Elgar was 32 years of age when he married, in 1889, Caroline Alice, only daughter of General Sir Henry Gee Roberts. This is hardly the place to write particularly of his wife’s influence on his career, but beyond question her unfaltering faith in him both as man and as artist sustained him through all the disappointments of his isolated position and enabled him to hold the difficult course towards success to which his helm was set.
In one respect his marriage rather emphasized the difficulties, for it caused him to live in London for the first time, and to discover how unready were musicians, publishers, and concert givers to take any interest in his music. The neglect of genius is always a fruitful theme for commentators who are wise after the event. Elgar was a genius, he lived two years in London unrecognized; these commentators cry ‘shame!’ but it is difficult to see what there was to recognize between 1889 and 1891. He had written none of the great works which have made him famous since. It may be remarked that Mr Bernard Shaw’s recently published Music in London, 1890–1894 does not contain the name of Elgar. True his overture ‘Froissart’ was produced at the Worcester Festival in 1890, and some people realized that here was something fresh and original.
Festival Works
In 1891 Elgar returned to the West Country and settled at Malvern, where he began his serious work in the composition of a number of pieces for choir and orchestra which were produced at various festivals in the succeeding years. The Black Knight, characteristically described as ‘a symphony for chorus and orchestra’, came out in 1893. Scenes from the Saga of King Olaf, Scenes from the Bavarian Highlands and an oratorio, The Light of Life, all appeared in 1896, the first at the North Staffordshire Musical Festival, the other two at Worcester. Here indeed was proof positive of the new voice in music, more than a hint of that mystical imagination, that sensitiveness to tone-colour, and that elusive yet individual gift of melody which were to seize his hearers so powerfully a little later. A patriotic cantata, The Banner of St George, for the Diamond Jubilee year, and Caractacus, written for the Leeds Festival of 1898, emphasized another side of Elgar’s musical character, an alert and nervous energy, the love of pageantry, the discovery of the poetry underlying external splendour. One finds here the Elgar of the ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ marches, the Coronation march, and the Scherzo of the Second Symphony.
The invitation to write for the Leeds Festival (this was the last festival conducted by Sullivan) was in Elgar’s case, as in that of several other English composers, the sign that he had ‘arrived’. A still more decisive landmark in his career was the production by Richter of the ‘Enigma’ Variations for orchestra in London in the following year, and it is indeed difficult to understand how, amid these signal proofs of his qualities, The Dream of Gerontius could have missed fire as it did at Birmingham in 1900. No doubt its very originality stood in its way. Choral singers accustomed to solid oratorio choruses could not understand these paeans of angels and frenzied outcries of demons. It was held to be extremely difficult. Common opinion declared that while it had beautiful moments it was a failure as a whole. That opinion has now been reversed. Every one realizes that The Dream of Gerontius has some perilously weak moments, but that as a whole it is one of the great imaginative creations of musical art.
The failure at Birmingham, however, was a step towards Elgar’s recognition outside his own country. A. J. Jaeger, an early enthusiast for Elgar’s music, and at that time reader to Messrs. Novello and Co., was instrumental in getting Gerontius accepted for performance at the Lower Rhine Festival at Düsseldorf, where it was most enthusiastically acclaimed. The approval of a keenly critical German public led to its revival at Worcester in 1902, with the result that everyone knows. Birmingham made amends by producing the two companion oratorios, The Apostles and The Kingdom, at its two subsequent festivals (1903 and 1906); the London Choral Society was formed to give the first public performance of The Dream of Gerontius in London (1903), and a special festival consisting entirely of Elgar’s music was arranged at Covent Garden in 1904. In the following year he paid his first visit to the United States, where his works were received with enthusiasm.
The Symphonies: Public Acclaim
With these triumphs the first period of Elgar’s success as a composer of choral and orchestral works on the largest scale was completed. A second and equally brilliant instrumental period was to begin with the production of the first symphony in 1908. The Variations and several concert overtures, notably the popular ‘Cockaigne’ and ‘In the South’, together with the beautiful ‘Introduction and Allegro’ for strings, had contributed to the assurance that Elgar would reach his most individual expression in some work of the symphonic type; but he was even slower than Brahms in committing himself to a symphony. When the first symphony in A flat was announced for a concert of the Hallé Orchestra under Richter at Manchester excitement ran high. The broad melody with which it opens, the restless surge of its first allegro, the delicate merging of the scherzo into the slow movement and the triumphant progress of the finale to an apotheosis of the opening theme, would have carried away an audience less thrilled with expectancy than was that which crowded the Free Trade Hall on December 3, 1908.
Never has a symphony become so instantly ‘the rage’ with the ordinary British public as did this. For some time the regular orchestras of London could not play it often enough, special concerts were arranged for it, enterprising commercialists even engaged orchestras to play it in their lounges and palm courts as an attraction to their winter sales of underwear. The ‘boom’ was as absurd as such things usually are, and as short-lived, but it was based on something real. Here at last the public had found a composer whom experts acknowledged to be a master and whom they could understand. Elgar had caught the ear of the public for big music, apart from words or voice or drama.
That the violin concerto produced by Kreisler in 1910 should have been received in the same spirit is less remarkable, for the solo work has all the advantage of personal virtuosity which the symphony lacks. Both it and the second symphony in E flat, dedicated to the memory of King Edward vii, were felt by musicians to be of a finer fibre than the first, but the quiet, reflective ending of the second symphony was in itself sufficient to prevent the work being sought for as the first had been. The majestic funeral march of this symphony and the lofty but restrained dignity of the finale make it rank very high, however, in the estimation of musicians.
The War and After
It is not surprising that a period of comparative unproductiveness should have followed on these years. The Music Makers, a short choral work of a sentimental cast, in which themes from all Elgar’s chief works were freely quoted, rather emphasized his decline in energy. One further orchestral work, the symphonic poem ‘Falstaff’, however, showed that his invention was by no means exhausted. The War came, and various pièces d’occasion, sincerely felt and fervently expressed, occupied him. Such were the music to Cammaerts’s poem ‘Carillon’ and three commemorative odes (Laurence Binyon), of which ‘For the Fallen’ was the most impressive. He turned also to the composition of chamber music, and brought out together several works of that class, a violin sonata of rather unequal texture, a delicate string quartet, and a fine quintet for piano and strings. With these came in 1919 the concerto for violoncello, which though scored for a normally full orchestra has more in common with the intimate mood of the chamber works than with that of his big orchestral period.
In the spring of 1920 the death of Lady Elgar broke the composer’s life. For some time he lived very much in retirement; but among the few occasions on which he was willing to make a public appearance were always the Three Choirs Festivals of his native West Country. But for him those festivals might not have been restored after the War, and certainly could never have enjoyed the prosperity of the last decade without the attraction of Elgar’s music given under his own direction. In 1924 the King appointed him to the traditional office, without specific duties, of Master of the King’s Musick.
There was presently some talk of his finishing the trilogy of oratorios begun with The Apostles, possibly for a Gloucester festival, but that scheme did not mature. A few minor compositions, however, were thrown off, and in the summer of 1932 Elgar mentioned casually in conversation the existence in his desk of a Third Symphony. He was persuaded to promise it to the bbc Orchestra, and it was announced for production this year. The Third Symphony, however, was not in his desk, but in his head, when he spoke of it, and, like many a great composer before him, he spoke of it as ‘practically written’ when he had made only a few sketches. Though Elgar made considerable progress with it after the offer of the bbc was accepted, ill-health last year prevented him from bringing it into a condition from which it could be finished by anyone else. During his last illness he spoke of his anxiety lest an attempt should be made by another hand to finish his work. His wishes in regard to the fragments must be respected. There is not a single movement which is near completion, though some passages have been fully scored.
Elgar was a man of many interests outside music, and as years increased they tended to absorb more of his time and attention. He loved travel, experimental chemistry, heraldry, literature, and the racecourse. Sometimes he seemed to take a whimsical pleasure in persuading himself (though he could never persuade others) that these were the serious preoccupations of his life and that the writing of symphonies was only a frivolous hobby. He was fond of saying that he knew very little about music, was not particularly interested in the performances of his works, and never read what the papers said of them. This sometimes seemed an affectation, but was really an armour of defence. He suffered much from the adulation of indiscriminate admirers and often yearned to get out of the limelight at the very moment when he deliberately walked into it. He was like his music, essentially simple and spontaneous, though the simplicity might be occasionally clouded, by decorative details. Indeed it was his power of expressing himself in his music which made so extraordinarily direct an appeal. Through all the diversity of the subjects he treated the same mind speaks. A tune of two bars or a progression of two chords is enough to reveal him. It is impossible to imagine him writing like anyone else or even purposely maintaining a disguise through a page of score.
Many Honours
Elgar received many honours both at home and abroad. He was knighted in 1904 by King Edward, and on the occasion of King George’s coronation the Order of Merit was conferred on him, a distinction never previously bestowed on a musician. In 1928 he was made kcvo, in 1931 he was created a baronet, and he was promoted to gcvo last year. The University of Cambridge led the way in the many offers of academic distinctions, honoris causa. It was at the instance of Stanford that Elgar became a Doctor of Music of Cambridge on November 22, 1900. Academic institutions of France, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, and the United States of America have paid him their several tributes. But the greatest tribute is the extent to which his music has travelled to foreign countries and has been performed by artists of the first rank. While there have been plenty of critics able to discover that his music is not a thousand things which the ideal symphony or the ideal oratorio ought to be, Elgar has been everywhere appreciated as one of the most individual composers of modern times, and distinguished from many of his contemporaries in the fact that music for him was always first and foremost beautiful sound.
Sir Edward Elgar leaves an only daughter, Carice Irene, who was married to Mr S. H. Blake in 1922.
Marie Curie
The discoverer of radium
4 July 1934
Mme Curie, whose death we announce with regret on another page, had a worldwide reputation as the most distinguished woman investigator of our times. Her claim to fame rests primarily on her researches in connection with the radioactive bodies and particularly for her discovery and separation of the new element rad-ium, which showed radiating properties to a marked degree. This was a discovery of the first importance, for it provided scientific men with a powerful source of radiation which has been instrumental in extending widely our knowledge not only of radioactivity but of the structure of atoms in general. Radium has also found an extensive application in hospitals for therapeutic purposes, and particularly for the treatment of cancerous growths by the action of the penetrating radiation emitted spontaneously from this element.
Marie Sklodowska, as she was before her marriage, was born on November 7, 1867, at Warsaw, and received her education there. She early showed a deep interest in science, and went to Paris to attend lectures in the Sorbonne. She had small financial resources, and had to teach in schools to earn sufficient money to pay her expenses. In 1895 she married Pierre Curie, a young scientist of great promise, who had already made several notable discoveries in magnetism and in the physics of crystals. Mme Curie continued her scientific work in collaboration with her husband, but the direction of their work was changed as the result of the famous discovery of Henri Becquerel in 1896, who found that the element uranium showed the surprising property of emitting penetrating types of radiation, which blackened a photographic plate and discharged an electrified body.
Examination of Pitchblende
Mme Curie made further investigations of this remarkable property using the electric method as a method of analysis. She showed that the radioactivity of uranium was an atomic property, as it depended only on the amount of uranium present and was unaffected by the combination of uranium with other elements. She also observed the striking fact that the uranium minerals from which uranium was separated showed an activity four to five times the amount to be expected from the uranium present. She correctly concluded that there must be present in uranium minerals another substance or substances far more active than uranium. With great boldness she undertook the laborious work of the chemical examination of the radioactive mineral pitchblende, and discovered a new strongly active substance which she named polonium, after the country of her birth. Later she discovered another new element, allied in chemical properties to barium, which she happily named radium. This element is present in minerals only in about one part in 3,000,000 compared with uranium, and shows radioactive properties more than a million times that of an equal weight of uranium. The Austrian Government presented Mme Curie with the radioactive residues necessary for the separation of radium in quantity, and she was in this way able to obtain sufficient material to determine the atomic weight and physical and chemical properties of the new element.
The importance of this discovery was at once recognized by the scientific world. In 1903 the Davy Medal of the Royal Society was awarded jointly to Professor and Mme Curie, while in 1904 they shared a Nobel Prize with Henri Becquerel. After the death of Pierre Curie in a street accident in Paris in 1906 Mme Curie was awarded in 1911 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery and isolation of the element radium. In 1906 she was appointed to a special Chair in the Sorbonne and was the first woman to obtain this distinction. Later a special Radium Institute, called the Pierre Curie Institute, was founded for investigations in radioactivity, and Mme Curie became the first director. She held this post at the time of her death.
Classes at the Sorbonne
In the course of the last 20 years this institute has been an important centre of research, where students of many nationalities have carried out investigations under her supervision. Mme Curie was a clear and inspiring lecturer, and her classes at the Sorbonne were widely attended. Her scientific work was all of a high order. She was a careful and accurate experimenter, and showed marked power of critical judgment in interpreting scientific facts. She retained an enthusiastic interest in her science throughout her life, and was a regular attendant at international conferences, taking an active and valuable part in scientific discussions.
She had a deep interest in the application of radium for therapeutic work both in France and abroad, and during the War actively helped in this work. She was twice invited to visit the United States and was received with acclamation, while the women of that country presented her with a gram of radium, to allow her to extend her researches. In 1922 she was appointed a member of the International Committee for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations and took an active part in their deliberations.
Mme Curie left two children. The elder, Irene, early showed marked scientific ability and married a co-worker in the Radium Institute, M. Joliot. It was a source of great satisfaction and pride to Mme Curie in her later years to follow the splendid researches made by her daughter and her husband, for they have made notable contributions to our knowledge of neutrons and transformations. During the present year, they observed that a number of elements became radioactive by bombardment with the particles from radium, and have thus opened up a new method for study of the transformation of the atoms of matter.
The many friends of Mme Curie of all nations, and the scientific world as a whole, will greatly lament the removal of one who was held in such great honour for her splendid discoveries in science, and one who by strength of character and personality left a deep impression on all those who met her.
Sigmund Freud
Psycho-analysis
23 September 1939
Professor Sigmund Freud, md, originator of the science of psycho-analysis, died at his son’s London home at Hampstead on Saturday night at the age of 83. From 1902 until recently he was Professor of Neurology in the University of Vienna. When the Germans violated Austria last year he was compelled to fly to England, where he had lived ever since.
Freud was one of the most challenging figures in modern medicine. Indeed, though his work was primarily medical, there is something incongruous in speaking of him as a doctor. Rather he was a philosopher, using the methods of science to achieve therapeutic ends. Philosophy, science, and medicine all paid him the tributes of excessive admiration and excessive hostility.
The truth would seem to be that even at this late date the time has not yet arrived when a just estimate of psycho-analysis and its founder is possible. The atmosphere is too highly charged with controversy. Supporters and opponents are still in too bitter a mood. One can neither affirm that Freud’s teaching will stand the test of time, nor deny that it may change permanently the whole conception of the operations of the human mind. Psycho-analysis, whatever it may have become in alien hands, possesses at least the merit of having been given to the world as a treatment of disease and not as a moral law. Freud, indeed, though he took great liberties with philosophy, though he was himself a philosopher malgré lui, always wrote and spoke as a man of science. He did not pretend to have invented his remarkable view of mental processes: he asserted that he had discovered it.
But Freud, the man, was clearly bigger than his detractors are usually ready to admit. His influence has pervaded the world within the space of but a few years. It can be discerned today in almost every branch of human thought, and notably in education, and some of his terms have become part of everyday language, ‘the inferiority complex’ for example.
Misunderstanding dogged Freud’s steps from the beginning. He spoke of sex in that large sense which includes the love of parents for their children, the love of children for their parents, the labours of a man to provide for his family, the tenderness of a grown man towards his mother, and so on: and immediately his intention was narrowed by his critics to their own partial view. They accused him of attempting to undermine the moral law. Again, he indicated his belief that natural impulses which have been suppressed have not, by that act, been annihilated. They remain in what he called the ‘unconscious mind’ to vex and trouble their possessors. At once the cry was raised that this man preached a doctrine of unbridled libertinism. Those raising it overlooked the fact that Freud had placed side by side with his doctrine of repression his doctrine of ‘sublimation’. We must not, he taught, regard a natural impulse as, of itself, wrong or unworthy. To do so is to abhor the law of Nature and so the order of the universe. Rather we must take that impulse and apply it to the noblest purposes of which we are capable.
This, it may be admitted, was a little like saying that a negative produces a positive, and that man owes his spiritual development to racial and social taboos. It was a doctrine which appealed strongly to Puritanical minds, with the result that Freud’s supporters, like his opponents, included persons of the most diverse views. Psycho-analysis thus became not one but a dozen battle-grounds on which the combatants fought with the fierceness of zealots. There is indeed, in all Freud’s writing, a haunting echo of theological controversy. His conception included, under other names, many ancient doctrines and dogmas. Thus there is but little real distinction between ‘original sin’ and the ‘natural impulse’ of the Viennese professor. Freud, too, adjured his patients to recognize their human nature as the necessary first step to cure; not merely the knowledge but the conviction of sin was essential to a change of heart. Again, he bade his followers know themselves by every means and devised astonishing new methods of self-knowledge or ‘self-analysis’. Thus was the evil spirit of a suppressed emotion or desire unmasked and released to be transmuted into the good spirit serving as a mainspring of action.
The famous theory of dreams and the various ‘complexes’ resolve themselves, when viewed as Freud meant them to be viewed, into observations of the activities of the ‘natural man’ imprisoned and ignored yet always alive within us. This original sin, if denied, possesses, he believed, the power to ‘attach’ itself to or ‘associate’ itself with other, apparently good and innocent thoughts, lending them, thereby, its own passionate energy. Hence the innumerable ‘anxieties’ and fears (‘phobias’) of the mentally sick: hence their strange apings of physical disease, their perverted ideas, their unreasoning prejudices. To resurrect this natural man and yoke his powers to fresh and useful enterprises was the life-aim of the physician.
There are those, today, who deny the very existence of the ‘unconscious mind’ – though their numbers are diminishing. There are others who see in nervous ailments only the failure of will power, whereby they think we hold our instincts in wholesome restraint. Finally, there are many who believe that an actual physical lesion, a disease of the body, underlies every abnormality of the mind. Freud’s doctrine is anathema to all such. His doctrine, moreover, has been modified and changed, notably by Jung, who laid far less stress than Freud on the sexual character of emotional impulse. The controversy is apt to become a barren one.
Freud was born at Freiberg, in Moravia, on May 6, 1856, and studied in Vienna and at the Salpêtrière in Paris, graduating md in 1881. Most of his numerous works have been translated into English and other languages, and he was editor of Internationale zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse and of Imago, and director of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. Last year he was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, and many years ago he received the honorary degree of ll.d from Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts. Professor Freud married in 1886, and had three sons and three daughters.
Amy Johnson
A great airwoman
6 January 1941
Miss Amy Johnson, cbe, whose death is now confirmed, will always be remembered as the first woman to fly alone from England to Australia. That flight took place in 1930 and her name at once became world-famous.
In the early days of the war she was employed in ‘ferrying’ material to France for the raf. Her cool courage, flying unarmed through the danger zone, was much admired by the raf pilots. Since that time she had flown a variety of aircraft many thousands of miles and she met her death while serving her country.
Amy Johnson was of Danish origin. Her grandfather, Anders Jörgensen, shipped to Hull when he was 16, settled there, changed his name to Johnson, and married a Yorkshire woman named Mary Holmes. One of their sons, the father of Amy, became a successful owner of Hull trawlers. Amy graduated ba at Sheffield University, and then went to London to learn to fly at the London Flying Club at Stag Lane, Edgware. After taking her ‘A’ licence she passed the Air Ministry examination to qualify as a ground engineer. Before starting on her flight to Australia her only considerable experience of cross-country flying was one flight from London to Hull.
Having acquired a secondhand Moth with Gipsy engine, she started from Croydon on May 5, 1930, on an attempt to beat the light aeroplane record of 15½ days from England to Australia. Considering her lack of experience at that time as a navigator, it was a marvel that she found her way so well. She arrived safely at Darwin on May 24. Thence she flew to Brisbane, where, probably through her exhausted condition, she overshot the aerodrome and crashed her Moth rather badly. Australian National Airways Limited arranged for her to fly as a passenger in one of their machines to Sydney, and in the pilot of that machine she met her future husband, Mr J. A. Mollison. She was accorded a great reception in Australia, and was received at Government House. King George V conferred on her the cbe and the Daily Mail made her a present of £10,000. On her return to England she was met at Croydon by the Secretary of State for Air, the late Lord Thomson, in person.
In 1931 she made a fine flight to Tokyo across Siberia, and then back to England, and in 1932 she started off in another Puss Moth, Desert Cloud, to beat her husband’s record to the Cape, which she did by nearly 10½ hours. The skill with which she crossed Africa proved that she had become a first-class pilot. In 1933 she and her husband acquired a D. H. Dragon aeroplane and set out to fly to New York. They successfully crossed the Atlantic, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Maine, and Massachusetts, but when they were approaching New York their petrol ran short and they therefore landed at Bridgeport, 60 miles short of New York, in the dark. The Dragon ran into a swamp, and overturned. It was extensively damaged, and both of them were bruised and scratched. Her flight to the Cape and back in May, 1936, will rank as one of her greatest achievements. She beat the outward and the homeward records, the record for the double journey, and the capital to capital record. The Royal Aero Club conferred its gold medal upon her in October, 1936, in recognition of her Empire flights. Her book Sky Roads of the World was published in September, 1939.
Her marriage took place in 1932, but in 1936 she resumed her maiden name for the purposes of her career, and in 1938 the marriage was dissolved.
Virginia Woolf
Novelist, essayist, and critic
28 March 1941
The death of Mrs Virginia Woolf, which must now be presumed, and is announced on another page, is a serious loss to English letters. As a novelist she showed a highly original form of sensitivity to mental impressions, the flux of which, in an intelligent mind, she managed to convey with remarkable force and beauty. Adeline Virginia Stephen was born at Hyde Park Gate, London, in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen (then editor of the Cornhill and later of the DNB) by his second wife, Julia Prinsep Duckworth (a widow, born Jackson). She was related to the Darwins, the Maitlands, the Symondses, and the Stracheys; her godfather was James Russell Lowell; and the whole force of heredity and environment was deeply literary. Virginia was a delicate child, never able to stand the rough-and-tumble of a normal schooling. She was reared partly in London and partly in Cornwall, where she imbibed that love of the sea which so often appears in her titles and her novels. Her chief companion was her sister Vanessa (later to become Mrs Clive Bell, and a distinguished painter). Her home studies included the unrestricted use of Sir Leslie’s splendid library, and as she grew up she was able to enjoy the conversation of distinguished visitors like Hardy, Ruskin, Morley, and Gosse. She devoured Hakluyt’s Voyages at a very juvenile age, and early acquired a love of the whole Elizabethan period that never left her. Her mother died when she was 13 and her father in 1904, when she was 22. After Sir Leslie Stephen’s death Virginia, Vanessa, and two brothers set up house together at Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, and as time went on the sisters, with Mr Clive Bell, the late Lytton Strachey, Mr T. S. Eliot, and some others, formed a group with which the name of that London district was associated, sometimes with ill-natured implications. But, so far as Virginia Woolf was concerned, she would have done honour to any district. She very soon displayed a keen and catholic critical sense which found expression in those brilliant and human articles written for The Times Literary Supplement, many of which are contained in her book, The Common Reader. In 1912 she married Mr Leonard Woolf, the critic and political writer, and went to live at Richmond, Surrey.
The marriage led to much joint work, literary and in publishing; but Mrs Woolf’s private interests remained primarily artistic rather than political. Despite friendships with Mrs Fawcett, the Pankhursts, and Lady Constance Lytton, she took no active part in the movement for woman suffrage, though as she showed in A Room of One’s Own, she passionately sympathized with the movement to secure for women a proper place in the community’s life. It was not until she was 33 (in 1915) that she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, which was a recension of a manuscript dating back some nine years. It was an immature work, but very interesting prophetically, as can be seen by comparing it with To the Lighthouse. By this time Mr and Mrs Woolf had set up as publishers at Hogarth House, Richmond, calling their firm the Hogarth Press. The high level of the works published by this press is universally recognized. Among them are some of the best early works of Katherine Mansfield, Middleton Murry, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, besides the works of Mrs Woolf herself. Later transferred to Bloomsbury, the Press acquired an additional reputation for the issue of books having a political trend to the Left.
In 1919 Mrs Woolf brought out a second novel, Night and Day, which was still by way of being ’prentice work, but with Jacob’s Room (1922) she became widely recognized as a novelist of subtle apprehensions and delicate reactions to life, with a method of her own and a finely wrought and musical style. Her subsequent novels, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves, rightly earned her an international reputation. These books broke away from the orderly narrative style of the traditional English novel, and are sometimes baffling to minds less agile than hers: but their subtle poetry and their power of inspiring intense mental excitement in imaginative minds are qualities which far outweigh occasional obscurity. The flux of perceptions and the inexorable movement of time were two of her chief themes; and if there is some truth in the criticism that her characters are little more than states of mind, it is also true that they are very highly individualized by the author’s remarkable power of observation. Above all, she had a perfect sense of form and of the unity – even if its expression were unattainable – underlying the whole strange process which we call human life. Mrs Woolf’s last book, published in 1940, was a profoundly interesting biography of Roger Fry.
David Lloyd George
National leadership in war and peace. A pioneer of social reform.
26 March 1945
The death of Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor, which is announced on another page, marks the loss of one of the most controversial and commanding figures in British political life. Though for many years he had been out of office, he left an indelible mark on his country’s history both as a protagonist of social reform and as an indomitable leader during the war of 1914–18.
The Right Hon. David Lloyd George, pc, om, first Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor, and Viscount Gwynedd, of Dwyfor in the county of Caernarvon, in the Peerage of the United Kingdom, was born in Hulme, Manchester, on January 17, 1863. His father, William, came of a stock of substantial farmers in South Wales, but, preferring books to the plough, left the farm and became a wandering missionary of education, teaching in many places, of which Manchester was the last. His mother was a Lloyd, daughter of a Baptist minister who lived at Llanystumdwy, near Criccieth, in Caernarvonshire. The father died when he was 42, leaving the mother to bring up David, then a baby of 18 months, a daughter, who was older, and another son, who was born posthumously. Hearing of her plight her brother, Richard Lloyd, at once left his workshop – he was a master bootmaker – and took his sister and her children back to live with him at Llanystumdwy. He treated his sister’s children as his own, and sent them to the village school. David at school is said to have been quick rather than industrious, and his best subjects were geography and mathematics.
Start as a Lawyer
The Georges had known Mr Goffey, a Liverpool solicitor, and in the family councils about the boy’s future it was finally decided, thanks mainly to his mother’s insistence, to make him a lawyer. At 16 he was articled to a firm of solicitors in Portmadoc. Five years later he had started as a solicitor on his own account at Criccieth, to which the family had by then removed, and his uncle’s back parlour was his first chambers. He began to get work, and in 1885 he and his younger brother William had offices in the main street of Portmadoc. Three years later – just after his twenty-fifth birthday – the young solicitor was doing well enough to marry Margaret Owen, who belonged to a prosperous yeoman family just outside Criccieth. The marriage was happy and helpful.
Lloyd George’s boyhood was cast in the great days of the Welsh national revival, which for tactical reasons looked to the Liberal rather than to the Conservative Party. Always a Nationalist and a Democrat, in this respect a typical Welshman, he had no part in the traditions of either party, and his politics were rooted in incidents and accidents of the early struggles of Welsh Nationalism. He said later in life that the chapel was his secondary school and university, and with the sap of the new national life rising in its services and in its institutions it was one not to be despised. ‘How the past holds you here!’ he exclaimed when he visited Oxford after the South African War, ‘I am glad I never came here.’
At an early age, when most boys are content to reflect the commonplaces of their school-books, he was the Hampden of the village politics. At 18 he was writing over the name ‘Brutus’ in a local newspaper articles showing a curious detachment of political judgment, but inclining strongly to the Radical wing of the Liberals. Early in 1886 he was on the first Irish Home Rule platform at Festiniog, and greatly impressed Michael Davitt by his speech. Two years later he was adopted as the Liberal candidate for Caernarvon Boroughs, and in 1890 was elected at a by-election by a narrow majority.
He did not speak frequently, and at first men noted chiefly the pleasant softness of his voice and his turn for personal quips. It was a platform speech on Welsh Disestablishment at the Metropolitan Tabernacle that first made him famous outside Wales, but he wisely stuck to his Parliamentary work, and presently became the most active among the Welsh Parliamentary rebels. He made an unsuccessful effort to create an independent Welsh Nationalist Party, with an organization of its own, and he used every device of the mutinous Parliamentarian to force the Rosebery Government to bring in a Welsh Disestablishment Bill and pass it through the Commons.
South African War
After the cordite vote of 1895, when the Liberal Government was defeated by a chance vote on the insufficiency of small-arm ammunition, the Liberals were in opposition for 10 years. Up to then a Welsh Nationalist, hardly interested in party controversy except in so far as it served Wales, Lloyd George in the 1896 Parliament became the leader of the Left Wing Liberals. Foiled in his ambition to be the Parnell of all Wales, he now threw himself with ardour into English politics. He opposed the Agricultural Rates Bill with such vigour that he got himself suspended. This was the opposition of the peasant, ‘cottage-bred’ man to the landlord who, he alleged, was subsidized by this measure.
Local feeling had run very high in his election in 1892 and 1895, but his resistance to the South African War made him the most unpopular man in the country. He conducted a campaign for the conclusion of peace, and it was almost the rule for him to have his meetings broken up. But the worst riot, and one which brought him within peril of his life, was that in Birmingham in the week before Christmas, 1901, from which he only escaped under escort by dressing in the uniform of a policeman. Yet it may be doubted whether he was ever so thoroughly happy as he was at this period of his life. He took the risks quite deliberately, believing that he was right; and he had his reward in the reputation for courage and constancy acquired at this time.
The end of the South African War marked also the end of the long period during which he had bothered or opposed his own party almost as much as their rivals. The Conservative Education Bill of 1902 gave him his first real chance to emerge as a leader of the whole Liberal Party. The Bill, which proposed to give public assistance to all voluntary schools, whether sectarian or not, offended the cardinal principle of the Nonconformists that denominational teaching should not be fostered by the State, and rallied practically all Liberals against the principle of granting public funds without imposing public control. He had full scope for his gifts of industry and oratory during every stage of the Bill, and he used them to such purpose that he won a tribute during the closing stages from Balfour himself. His efforts during 1902 procured for him a position and reputation which made his inclusion in the next Liberal Government certain.
From 1906, when the Liberals came into power, he held office continuously for more than 15 eventful years. His conduct of the Board of Trade, to which office he was appointed in 1906, was a complete surprise to all his old enemies who knew him only by his agitation in the South African War and expected to find him an intransigent, unpractical extremist. On the contrary, he was accessible to argument, ingenious in compromise, and much more independent of his officials than most Ministers. Not only was he ready to hear what the interests affected had to say on a measure that he was preparing, but he made it a practice – and here his procedure was quite original – himself to seek them out, call them in conference, and embody their criticisms, if he thought them valid, while the measure was still in the drafting stage. In this way he not only secured the more rapid passage of Bills through Parliament, but when they became law he had the cooperation of the interests affected in making them a success.
The Merchant Shipping Act, the Port of London Act, and the Patents Act (which, by the way, offended the strait-laced free-traders) were all remarkable products of this new method of legislation, which completely broke with bureaucratic tradition. Broadly, it would probably be true to say that he always had an imperfect sympathy with the orthodox Civil Service habit of mind, and, while he relied on it to administer existing law, he despaired of its giving him new ideas and looked elsewhere for them. Here was the germ of what was later known as the new bureaucracy. While he was at the Board of Trade, too, he showed his ingenuity as a mediator by settling the railway strike of 1907. His industrial settlements, however, had a way of being opportunist rather than permanent. The loss of his eldest daughter a few weeks after the strike ended was a sore grief to him.
Chancellor of the Exchequer
The 1909 Budget
In 1908 Campbell-Bannerman died. Asquith succeeded him as Prime Minister and was succeeded as Chancellor of the Exchequer by Lloyd George. At this time, and for some years later, Lloyd George was in very close association with Mr Winston Churchill. Mr Churchill, who succeeded Lloyd George at the Board of Trade, contributed a minimum wage in sweated industries, a weekly half-holiday for shop workers, and the Labour Exchanges. Lloyd George, on going to the Treasury, found an Old Age Pensions Bill already drafted by his predecessor, and after he had carried this through he turned his thought towards schemes of national insurance against sickness and unemployment, and visited Germany in the autumn of 1908 to study the German insurance system. The combination in one pair of hands of responsibility for national finance and of directing a vigorous policy of social reform was unique.
His first Budget, brought in on April 29, 1909, was described by its author as a ‘war budget’, the war being against poverty and squalor, and it dominated politics for the next two years. The speech in which it was introduced was the longest and one of the least successful that he ever made, and with its central idea of taxing the increment on land values, or at any rate with the machinery for doing this, his advisers at the Treasury are believed to have been in very imperfect sympathy, and the Bill was very badly pulled about during the eight months of unclosured debate that it consumed in passing through the Commons. Fierce as was the controversy in the Commons, it was still fiercer in the country, and rarely in our modern politics have such hard words been used on both sides. A speech at Limehouse, made by Lloyd George in July which added a new verb to the English language, is probably the best statement of his case; another at Newcastle in November described the proposals as fraught with ‘rare and refreshing fruit for the parched lips of the multitude’.
In invective and abuse Lloyd George was surpassed by his critics, and future generations re-reading the speeches of 1909 will marvel that so much sound and fury should have been generated over taxes whose yield never approached the cost of collection and which disappeared almost unregretted 10 years later. Lloyd George undoubtedly thought that the country was with him, and when the Lords threw out the Finance Bill he is alleged to have exclaimed: ‘I have them now.’ But the comparatively small majority of 124 at the first election of 1910 was almost equivalent to a defeat, for the Liberals had lost 115 seats, or 230 votes.
Leaders’ Conference
This election had a profound effect on his future. Perhaps it was now that he was converted to coalition. At any rate, it was he who, after the death of King Edward vii, made the first suggestion of the conference of party leaders that followed. It is known that Lloyd George and Balfour were in agreement at the conference, and, had their views been accepted, something like the party truce that was concluded in 1914 would have been concluded at the end of 1910. Among the terms of the concordat it is believed that Lloyd George was willing to withdraw his opposition to McKenna’s shipbuilding programme, and even to consent to some form of compulsory service. During the General Election at the end of 1910 (the second of the year) Lloyd George had the throat trouble which impaired the early beauty and flexibility of his voice.
In the next year he introduced and carried his Insurance Bill. There could be no doubt of the genuineness of his sympathy with the trials of poverty; and he was astonished at the strength of the opposition aroused. It remains, however, the most important of his legislative achievements. He proposed in the next years to attack the problem of the reform of land tenure, but his studies were interrupted by the shadows of the coming war with Germany and of the Marconi scandal. This last was the worst trouble of his political life, but no one imputed worse to him than carelessness and an imperfect sense of what was expected from one holding his high office.
Foreign Policy
It remains to gather up the threads of Lloyd George’s views on foreign policy before war came. He entered the Liberal Government in 1906 with a violent prejudice against the Liberal League and all its works, and with some good personal reason, for it had been founded as a check on the Liberal Left, of which he was the leader. He belonged to the Campbell-Bannerman wing of the party and adopted without questioning the old Liberal objections to expenditure on armaments, and pleaded for its diversion to social reform.
On this as on other matters the conference of 1910 seems to have induced a certain change of opinion. At any rate, in 1911, after the dispatch of the Panther to Agadir, he made at the Guildhall banquet a remarkable speech, in the course of which he declared that if Germany were to treat this country as of no account in the comity of nations then peace at such a price would be an intolerable humiliation for our great country. But he remained fundamentally unconvinced of the German menace. As late as January 1, 1914, in a newspaper interview, the authenticity of which was never denied, he said that he felt convinced that if Germany ever had any idea of challenging our supremacy at sea, the exigencies of the military situation must necessarily put it out of her head. He said that our relations with her were more friendly than they had been for years, and he looked forward to the spread of a revolt against militarism all over western Europe.
When the crisis began in July Lloyd George was the leader of the peace party, which was in an actual majority as late as July 31. By August 2, after (and doubtless in consequence of) the letter from the Conservative Party leaders, the Cabinet had agreed to a limited intervention in case the German fleet came into the Channel to conduct operations against the French coasts. It was to weaken this resolve that von Kühlmann issued his statement to the Press that if Great Britain remained neutral Germany would not conduct naval operations against the French coast, and this promise made some impression on Lloyd George. He told an interviewer that after such a guarantee ‘I would not have been a party to a declaration of war had Belgium not been invaded, and I think I can say the same thing for most, if not all, of my colleagues.’ In his opinion, a poll of the electors on Saturday (August 1) would have shown 95 per cent against embroiling this country in hostilities, whereas by the Tuesday after a poll would have resulted in a vote of 99 per cent in favour of war. Equally logical and equally consistent with his reluctance to enter the war was his determination that once in the war we could not afford to come out of it except as unequivocal victors.
He soon emerged as the most ardent war spirit in the Government. His early war speeches lacked Asquith’s fine mastery of phrase, but were more stirring, and two speeches, one at the Queen’s Hall in September and another at the City Temple in November, are fit to be included in any anthology of militant British oratory. Lloyd George was a member of a committee formed in October to advise the War Office on the best means of providing the guns and ammunition that were required. All countries, including Germany, had under-estimated the expenditure of shells, and, though progress was made in increasing the supplies, it fell far short of our requirements, particularly after trench war had begun. Lloyd George was at first disposed to put the blame on the ‘lure of drink’. We were fighting, he said on March 17, Germany, Austria, and drink, and the greatest enemy was drink. The final result of the offensive against this antagonist was the appointment of the Liquor Control Board.
Munitions for the Troops; Policy for Ministry
But it was evident that, however hard men worked, the output of guns and shells could only be assured by relaxation of union restrictions. ‘This is an engineers’ war,’ said Lloyd George on February 28, and on March 17 he urged a conference of trade union leaders to accept certain proposals for the dilution of labour, including the admission of women to workshops. Thus early was outlined the policy which three months later led to the formation of the Ministry of Munitions and the Munitions Act.
His energy was so much valued by the Army that when French decided in May to appeal to Caesar for a better supply of munitions, and in particular of high explosives, he sent copies of his correspondence with the Government through Captain Guest, one of his adcs and formerly a Junior Whip in the Government, to Lloyd George, and also to Bonar Law and Balfour. Colonel Repington, then Military Correspondent of The Times, was the vehicle of the appeal to the nation as a whole. It is almost forgotten that Lloyd George in a speech to the House of Commons on April 21 said much the same about our manufacture of war munitions as Asquith in his much-criticized speech at Newcastle the day before, but French’s reason for choosing Lloyd George was a just one. He had, as he said, shown by his special interest in this subject that he grasped the military nature of our necessities. There may have been other reasons, too, for the choice, for Lloyd George, a coalitionist at heart since 1910, very early in the war began to doubt whether a party Government could do everything that was required for victory.
Coalition Formed
Lloyd George, who from the South African War days took a very keen interest in military campaigns, was one of the first to shed the facile optimism which was fashionable in the first year of the war, and the likelihood that conscription and grinding taxation would be necessary soon began to oppress him. How could a party Government propose such measures? Was it not necessary to form a coalition of parties if the Government was to have the requisite moral authority? This new crisis matured about the same time as the failure, attributed to lack of munitions, of the attack on the Aubers Ridge. On May 12, 1915, Mr Handel Booth – whose relations with Lloyd George had been fairly close – suggested that the time had come when leaders of the other two parties should be admitted to the Government; three days later Lord Fisher resigned, and on May 17 Asquith, in a letter to Bonar Law, consented to the formation of a Coalition Government. There can be little doubt that Lloyd George inspired this change, which was both necessary for the successful prosecution of the war and accorded with Lloyd George’s political views, and it was certainly he who quelled the Liberal opposition. In the new Ministry, completed by the end of the first week in June, Lloyd George was Minister of Munitions, and a year later we had definitely established an ascendancy over Germany in the manufacture of munitions.
The formation of the Ministry of Munitions and the substitution of a Coalition for a Liberal Government did not exhaust Lloyd George’s energies in this wonderful first year of the war. He also had views on strategy. He saw the incipient weakness of Russia, and was one of the few who appreciated the magnitude of Hindenburg’s victories over Russia at Tannenberg and in the spring of 1915 at its true value. Mackensen’s victory over Russia at Gorlice sharpened his opinion that the chief danger was in the East, and that our sound strategy was to concentrate our offensive efforts against the weaker member of the Central Alliance. He and Mr Churchill thought alike, but whereas Mr Churchill worked for the Dardanelles enterprise, Lloyd George, as early as January, 1915, advocated the dispatch of an expedition to the Balkans to cooperate with Serbia. Briand was of the same general opinion. But the project of a French Army of the East, which it was at first intended should cooperate on the Asiatic shores of the Dardanelles, was opposed by Joffre, and by the time Briand had succeeded the military situation in Serbia was so bad, owing to the entry of Bulgaria, that our General Staff advised that there was no possibility of saving Serbia. It also advised that the employment of troops at Salonika was a dissipation of our strength. In this, however, the Cabinet was over-persuaded by Lloyd George and by the urgent appeals of the French, and the decision to land at Salonika was taken.
Prime Minister
The Change of Office
On the death of Lord Kitchener in June 1916, Lloyd George became War Minister, though it was understood that Asquith made the appointment not without reluctance. There was already widespread dissatisfaction with Asquith’s Government. It is unnecessary to consider whether or not Lloyd George now deliberately planned to supplant Asquith as Prime Minister. He did not believe that Asquith possessed the vigour and vision necessary to win the war, whereas he was confident that he himself did; and he sincerely believed, not without justification, that he was the one man best able to push the war through to victory.
The breach between the two men arose out of negotiations for the formation of a War Committee of the Cabinet, the control of which Lloyd George already wished to keep out of Asquith’s hands. On December 4, 1916, The Times published an accurate account of these negotiations in a leading article. Asquith seems to have believed that the article was inspired by Lloyd George, though in fact its contents were quite familiar in the inner circle of politics. In any case he at once wrote a letter insisting that the Prime Minister, while not a member of the Committee, must have ‘supreme and effective control of war policy’, by supervising the agenda of the Committee and having all its conclusions subject to his approval or veto. Lloyd George repudiated this interpretation of what was afoot, and accepted Asquith’s construction of the arrangement, ‘subject to personnel’, a proviso inserted partly in the interests of Carson, who shared Lloyd George’s views on Balkan strategy. In spite of this letter, Asquith, having consulted his Liberal colleagues, wrote that evening insisting that the Prime Minister must be chairman. Lloyd George then resigned. Asquith followed suit, and with the active support of Bonar Law a new Government was constituted under Lloyd George as Prime Minister, and from then on his will was practically supreme in the conduct of the war. His energy, his own buoyant confidence and courage, and his ability to impart confidence and courage to others were of immense importance.
The end of the war left Lloyd George in a position of commanding, almost dictatorial power; and that position he proceeded at once to consolidate by getting a new mandate from the constituencies for the continuance of the Coalition. The same Government which had won the war, the people were told, was necessary to reconstruct the country and make sure that the new England was to be a fit land for heroes to live in.
Whatever may have been his intention, he allowed the General Election of 1918 to degenerate into an outburst of hysteria. He returned to power with the two potential embarrassments of extravagant promises and an immense majority. They caused him moments of annoyance from the very beginning, but it was fully three years before they seriously impaired a position of personal supremacy such as no British Prime Minister had ever before enjoyed. He dominated the Government of England at a moment when, probably, England’s power in the world was greater than it had ever been.
The Versailles Treaty
Meanwhile the Peace Conference assembled in Paris. This is not the place to examine the faults or the merits of the provisions of the Versailles Treaty, but it must be noted that the longer the conference continued the more did the world lose faith in Lloyd George. All observers paid tribute to his courage in debate, his versatility, his power to win over the other negotiators and to smooth out differences between them, his extraordinary nimbleness and dialectical skill; and all alike grew to disbelieve in the fixity of his convictions or the permanence of any position which he might take up. This impression, which incidents of the next few years did little to dispel, was no less unfortunate for the reputation of Great Britain and of British diplomacy than it was for Lloyd George himself.
At home, Lloyd George attacked the problems of peace in precisely the same spirit as he had attacked those of the war. In his letter to Bonar Law of November 2, 1918, inviting the cooperation of the Unionist Party in the continuation of the Coalition, he said that the problems of peace would be ‘hardly less pressing and will require hardly less drastic action’ than those of the war itself; and for that action the unity of the Coalition was as necessary as ever.
His speeches at this time reflected a mind filled with generous visions of the new and splendid world which was to be built up on the ruins of the war. But like most men of imagination he was inclined to be contemptuous of awkward facts.
Deepening Depression
Only slowly did it become evident how completely the fabric of all societies had been shattered. Lloyd George and his colleagues were not alone in dreaming of a world turning eagerly to the pursuits of peace, and (what was of the first importance for Great Britain’s prosperity) crying hungrily for all those manufactured goods which during the war they had been compelled to deny themselves. But as month after month and year after year the financial conditions of the world grew more chaotic, and the purchasing power of the peoples of the world smaller, commercial depression in England deepened until by 1922 there were normally from 1,250,000 persons unemployed, and the burden of unemployment insurance became heavy alike upon industry and upon the taxpayer.
The Government attempted to struggle on with its schemes of national regeneration and at the same time to parry the onset of economic depression. It showed the utmost fertility in devising palliatives, and there was no branch of public effort directed towards the encouragement of trade or the relief of unemployment during the years between the two wars which did not owe its inception to the Coalition Government. But some portions of the Government’s policy, such as the Agriculture Act and the Addison Housing Scheme, had to be abandoned. Others were allowed to wither, and the general impression was created that the Government was being forced into economy, which was indeed no solution whatsoever, rather than leading the nation towards it.
Dissatisfaction with the foreign policies of the Coalition was even deeper than with its conduct of affairs at home. The costly adventure into Mesopotamia was extremely unpopular. The early encouragement of the Greeks in their operations against Turkey and the half-hearted policy – neither entire abandonment nor a continuance of active help – after King Constantine’s return showed irresolution and lack of any guiding principle. Above all, our relations with France grew less and less friendly. Neither Lloyd George nor the Coalition was to blame for the withdrawal of the United States from the pact to guarantee the security of France or for the German recalcitrancy in the matter of reparation payments, any more than they were to blame for the worldwide unrest and disorganization which followed the war.
No Prime Minister and no Government could, probably, have kept the confidence of the country through these troubled years of disillusionment and distress. All Governments must bear the blame for many things which are beyond their control, and never were Lloyd George’s better qualities more conspicuously displayed. His courage, his versatility, his buoyancy of spirit, and, almost more than all, his amazing physical energy were the wonder of his enemies and the delight of his friends. He had largely superseded the established methods of diplomatic negotiation through the recognized channels by round-table discussions by the heads or plenipotentiary representatives of the various Governments. Over each of the conferences summoned in pursuance of this plan he established an extraordinary personal ascendancy which was something more than the respect necessarily paid to the man who stood for the might of Great Britain. The conferences never attained anything like the objects for which they had been called, but, making the most of what little achievement there was, Lloyd George succeeded in representing each as better than a failure and in keeping hope alive to the next; and at critical moments his speeches in the House of Commons were triumphs. Read in print, the speeches lose much of their magic. In his treatment of France, of Germany, of Russia, of Greece, of the League of Nations, of the Treaty of Versailles itself, Lloyd George was always ready to put everything aside in favour of his own inspiration of the moment.
The Irish Troubles; Discontent with Government
Among the various causes which contributed to the growing discontent with the Coalition Government were the troubles in Ireland. For some reason the Irish question seems never to have especially interested Lloyd George. Soon after the Armistice he spoke vaguely of the Government’s intention to ‘satisfy Irish aspirations’, without injury to the rights and claims of Ulster: but he seems to have been far from comprehending how far Irish sentiment had travelled since the days of 1914. Prudence demanded that the Irish question should be taken up at once and in the most liberal spirit. The Times strongly advocated a measure of self-government for Ireland, without compulsion upon Ulster, and was the first to urge this measure on a reluctant Government. But the Cabinet (certainly its hands were full) dallied and postponed action while every month made the situation more difficult. It was the old fable of the Sibylline books. The price at which Irish peace might have been bought immediately after the war was contemptuously rejected at the beginning of 1920. Then followed one of the most terrible chapters of Ireland’s terrible history, a chapter of civil war, of murder, of repression and reprisals and when the final ‘settlement’ was made it was on terms and in a spirit which would have been incredible three years earlier.
The importance of the influence of the Irish settlement on the fate of the Lloyd George Government was not so much that it aroused any especial popular disapproval as that it definitely alienated an influential section of the Unionist Party. Lloyd George, when he superseded Asquith, had split the Liberal Party in two and he had no more embittered enemies than that half of the party which still followed Asquith. In spite of the concessions which he had made to the wage-earners during and immediately after the war, he had now lost the confidence of Labour as a whole, by a policy which, as in other spheres, lacked consistent principle. The predominant partner in the Coalition was the Unionist Party. On his ability to hold Conservative support the fate of his Government rested. The antagonism aroused among Conservatives by his Irish policy, therefore, was of serious importance. Its extent, however, should not be exaggerated. The policy which culminated in the Treaty of 1922 was loyally supported and indeed largely created by Conservative Ministers; and although a certain section of Conservatives doubtless found in it justification for a revival of their traditional mistrust of Lloyd George, the malcontents would not have been strong enough to overthrow him without allies from quite a different part of the Conservative camp.
Fall of the Coalition
What precipitated Lloyd George’s fall was the crisis in the Near East, with the Kemalist victory over the Greeks, the capture of Smyrna, and the Turkish threat to Constantinople and the little British force, now deserted by its allies, on the Dardanelles. The first intimation that the general public had of the seriousness of the situation was from a clumsily worded communication from the Government to the self-governing Dominions asking them whether Great Britain could count on their military support in case of war. The country was alarmed, and inevitably turned its wrath against the Government, which, outside of Parliament, had by now few friends.
In spite of the endeavours of Austen Chamberlain to keep the party in line, a conference of the Unionist members of the House of Commons held at the Carlton Club in November, 1922, decided by a vote of 186 to 87 in favour of party independence, and Bonar Law, recently recovered from serious illness, consented to act as the party leader. The decisive nature of this vote was due to the growing belief among a number of the younger Conservatives that the choice before them was neither more nor less than whether or not Lloyd George should become the leader of the Conservative Party. They were not in close personal touch with him and not under the spell of his personality. They were repelled rather than attracted by his dramatic and dictatorial methods of doing business. Bonar Law’s emergence gave them an alternative leader and their mistrust of Lloyd George became revolt. At the General Election, which followed immediately, the Coalition Liberals (now calling themselves National Liberals) returned less than 60 members against 344 Unionists. When the new Parliament assembled Lloyd George found himself in the corner seat behind the gangway, at the head of the smallest of the four parties. The official representation of the Opposition passed to the Labour Party.
Re-entry into Party
The result of the election undoubtedly surprised and wounded Lloyd George, who appears to have expected that he would be able to assert over a vast electorate that personal supremacy which he had consistently exercised for so long over smaller bodies. He lost little time, however, in repining, and was soon buoyantly at work trying to effect his re-entry into the Liberal Party. Although he had antagonized many to whom the Coalition was anathema, he was still in a strong position. He had his own powerful organization, equipped with the Coalition Liberal share of the party funds which had been collected to finance a national campaign, and his hold on the Welsh electorate gave him a strong territorial basis for claiming the leadership of a revived Liberal Party.
His efforts to reidentify himself with Liberalism continued to the end of his career with a success which was more apparent than real. He was readmitted to the fold, and, after the transference of Asquith to the House of Lords, consistently elected leader of the Liberal Parliamentary Party. But his leadership was always subject to fragmentary challenges and widespread distrust. The fund which came to be associated with his name was hated by a large section of Liberals even though it was being employed for the use of the Liberal Party. His failure to establish himself as a sectional leader was perhaps due to the same faults of character as had led to his downfall as a national leader, but it is at least doubtful whether the task would not have been beyond any man’s powers. He had to make an effective political force out of a party subject to suction both from the Right and from the Left, every item of whose policy might be claimed as its own by the one or the other of two parties, both of which had clearly a much better chance of carrying it out. The task before him was not merely to overcome prejudice against him within the Liberal Party; it was to transform a centre party into a focus of recruitment for itself rather than a source of recruitment for its rivals.
In this task he never succeeded. His committees of political research produced an agricultural and an urban policy in 1923. He himself produced an unemployment policy in 1929. In all these social and economic schemes he was undoubtedly the anticipator of the agreed and accepted policies of today, as he was the successor of the Liberal policies of the years before the war of 1914-18: but the only real electoral success – that of 1923 – was due not to new plans but to the old associations of Liberals with free trade. Between 1931 and the outbreak of the present war, he gradually retired into the position of an elder statesman, whose occasional irruptions into active politics continued to command more interest than agreement. Perhaps some of this shadow was due to the fact that his voice did not come well over the wireless. But in conversation his personality and his tongue remained as vivid as ever. For example, when asked what he thought of Mr Chamberlain’s visit to Munich, he grimly remarked: ‘In my day they came to see me.’ But it would not be unfair to say that he viewed all Governments with almost equal disfavour, and that he never felt that he himself could usefully fit into any possible team. At least he played no great part in public life either in the years immediately preceding the present war or in the war itself. He was greatly affected by the death of his first wife, Dame Margaret Lloyd George, in 1941. One source of great pleasure to him, however, was the success of his two children, Major Gwilym Lloyd George and Miss Megan Lloyd George, in their political careers. Between them and him there existed the very closest bonds of affection and devotion.
Looking back over Lloyd George’s remarkable career, it appears to fall quite clearly into three parts. In the first he appears as the crusading Radical, finding his inspiration in an ever-widening circle of problems and opportunities. In the second he is still a crusader, but a crusader on behalf of the whole nation. In the third he is trying to persuade himself that he is still a crusader, when he has become in fact a tactician. In every one of these phases his gifts of charm, of wit, of courage moved and attracted audiences, but in the last the prophetic power and hold had vanished. None the less, one of his political opponents once said of him that throughout the bitterest times of their controversy he had always felt that Lloyd George was on the side of the underdog, and this remained true to the end.
His countrymen at least will remember that he wrought greatly and daringly for them in dark times, in peace and in war, and will admit without distinction of class or party that a great man has passed away.
In 1919 he received the om, in 1920 the Grand Cordon of the Legion of Honour, and he was an honorary dcl of Oxford and an honorary ll.d of Edinburgh. He married, in 1888, Margaret, daughter of Richard Owen, of Mynyddednyfed, Criccieth. She was created a gbe, and died in 1941, leaving two sons and two daughters. Secondly he married, in 1943, Miss Frances Louise Stevenson, cbe, who had been his private secretary from 1913.
Earl Lloyd George’s elder son, Viscount Gwynedd, known until recently as Major Richard Lloyd George, now succeeds as second earl. In 1917 he married Roberta Ida Freeman (fifth daughter of Sir Robert McAlpine, first baronet), who divorced him in 1933, having had a son and a daughter. He married a second time, and his present wife is a line controller of the London Transport Welfare Department. The first earl’s second son is Major the Right Hon. Gwilym Lloyd George, Minister of Fuel and Power; his elder daughter is Lady Olwen Carey-Evans, wife of Major Sir Thomas Carey-Evans, mc, frcs; and his younger daughter is Lady Megan Lloyd George, mp for Anglesey.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt
Four times chief executive of United States.
Service in freedom’s cause.
12 April 1945
The death of President Roosevelt from cerebral haemorrhage on Thursday afternoon at Warm Springs, Georgia, as announced in the later editions of The Times yesterday, robs the United States of its Chief Executive within less than six months of his election to serve a fourth term of office at the White House – a term without precedent in American history. Throughout yesterday the people of the United States, of the United Nations, and of all peace-loving States mourned the passing of a leader whose influence for good had extended far beyond his national boundaries.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the thirty-first President of the United States, was, as his whole life attested, a man of destiny. From one fate to another he was called. Through two great and prolonged crises in his country’s history he set its course and steered it through. Each of them provided a searching test of character and statecraft, and each made its own demands upon the Chief Executive. In both of them, however, he retained the confidence and was upheld by the support of an immense majority of his fellow-countrymen. The place in history which he will fill in relation to the greatest of his predecessors has yet to be decided but one of the determining factors in regard to it will be that he alone of them was invested by his fellow-countrymen with a fourth term of office and at his elections secured more decisive votes than any Presidential candidate before him. It will be remembered also that his pre-eminence was by no means due to lack of opposition, for many of his policies were carried in the teeth of a resistance by powerful and vocal sections of the American public. He was in fact during his first three terms master of Congress for only one comparatively brief period, and after that was opposed as strongly by some important groups in his party as by the Republicans. He had often, therefore, to use outside opinion to force his own supporters to follow him. His ability to do so was one of the truest measures of his stature. His like can, indeed, only be sought among those whose idealism made a comparable appeal to his people, and whose actions were equally justified in the event.
Rights of Democracy
The world was first to hear of Franklin Roosevelt, the second of his blood and familiar name to occupy the White House, as a champion of the rights of democracy. In this he was a true heir to the traditions of his country. Sensitive as he always was to the feelings of those near him he seemed able to enlarge the range of his sympathy and understanding until it embraced a huge and diversified nation. To him, a man of generous though sometimes hasty instincts, distress, suffering, and insecurity were standing challenges. He had an aristocrat’s magnanimity and angry inability to see unnecessary pain inflicted, and the ‘New Deal’ was a supreme assertion of the claim of all mankind to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. ‘Every man has the right to live; and this means that he has the right to a comfortable living’ was both the expression of a genuine belief and a continuing directive of policy. To many millions of Americans it became a sufficing and unquestioned gospel. Even if the Fates had had no more to ask of him than the mighty struggle against the depression of the early 1930s which it inspired, his place in the first rank of Presidents would be secure. At the end of four years of it faith in his leadership had actually increased, and even after four more survived in a remarkable degree.
Roosevelt was required, however, not only to protect the fruits of his advanced Liberalism from internal enemies, but also against a far more formidable menace from without. His aims demanded that he should be a man of peace. Peace, however, was not to continue in his time. He did within the limitations of his position all he could to avert the calamity of war, and both before and after its outbreak displayed, in addition to an astonishing gift of judging his own people, almost as remarkable a one for seeing deep into the Axis leaders. Totalitarianism was the antithesis of all he stood for. He never concealed his personal hatred of it; but he determined with cautious statesmanship to move only as fast as his own countrymen could be led to travel with him. There were in the early stages of the war cross currents in American opinion, and it was not until Pearl Harbour that he had a united people behind him. In foresight he was from the first far ahead of most of them: but he understood the American temper much too well to force the pace, and in this way he succeeded in maintaining the position of a trusted interpreter of world events. When, therefore, Japan struck and he was free from the restrictions which had fettered him, he moved instantaneously into that not merely of a commander-in-chief in war, but of a national war-leader as well. He had, moreover, by this time not only armed his country, but had insured the capacity of Great Britain to hold Germany. It was, in fact, in the years immediately before Japan’s attack no less than in the years after it that his life’s battle for democracy was won.
Atlantic Crossings
It is true that, when pressed by his own party in 1940 to seek a third term and opposed by Mr Wendell Willkie, he failed to register as tremendous a victory as in 1936; but it is true also that it was a contest chiefly upon domestic issues, for Mr Willkie was broadly in agreement with him on the wider and more pressing ones of war. Thus during the years of America’s belligerency he was in fact the supreme head of an embattled people, and in authority the equal in vital matters of the great national figures with whom he cooperated. When, therefore, in the course of the long conflict he crossed the Atlantic to join in allied councils of war he went with all the prestige of his standing in the nation he represented as well as that of his own transcendent personality.
Roosevelt was a statesman in virtually every direction open to a truly democratic leader. As President he had immense powers and exercised them freely. Thus at times he would initiate and act with daring, and at others hold and caution. Occasionally he would move ahead of his people: but, if he found he had gone too far he would fall quietly into step with them again. He thus displayed the resiliency of his fibrous strength. Sprung of long lines of American ancestors, he was so deep rooted in the American soil and so steeped in American sentiment that he had no sense of inferiority to any man or people upon earth and could therefore be completely spontaneous. So American was he, indeed, that he seemed instinctively to realize the ideals which, however inarticulately, were stirring in his fellow-countrymen, and, since they were usually his own as well, it became his delight to translate them into concrete political forms. He became, moreover, in virtue chiefly of the accuracy of his intuitions, the shrewdest and most adroit of politicians. He had also the rare power of making government appear interesting and exciting, especially to the younger generation. He had, of course, his weaknesses and incapacities, though they were perhaps the inevitable concomitants of his virtues. He was assailed, for example, as a reckless spender, a plotter against the Constitution, a dictator, and an enemy of sound finance; but when due allowance is made for political animus, the substance of such charges seems small indeed beside his achievements. Added, moreover, to his many other qualifications for his exalted office he had an abounding vitality and exuberance of spirit, and, by no means least of his powers, he was a sound judge and a natural attractor of men. No doubt he was a favoured child of fortune; and yet the man who had fought and conquered a fell disease had, it seemed, wrung from that grim struggle the secret of all human victories.
Early Life
Wish to Be a Sailor
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born at Hyde Park, in Dutchess County, New York, on January 30, 1882. He was the only son of an affluent and long-established family well and widely related. President Theodore Roosevelt was his distant cousin. In him Dutch, French, Scottish, and Irish strains were mingled, but all of them had been seasoned for generations in the United States. His father, James Roosevelt, was both a man of business and a country gentleman. His mother, a remarkable woman who was to exert a great influence upon his life, was Sara Delano, a member of a French family which had left Leyden in the early seventeenth century. Although delicate he had a happy childhood, during which he was taken a number of times to Europe. Then rather late he was sent to school at Groton. As a boy he had wanted to enter the Navy – his love of ships remained with him always – but instead he went to Harvard. There, although he moved in a largely Republican set, he was known as a strong Democrat, the political faith of his immediate family; he also gained distinction by being managing editor of The Crimson, an undergraduate newspaper. After taking a full share in the university life and sports he graduated in 1904.
On St Patrick’s Day, 1905, when he was studying law at Columbia University he married Eleanor Roosevelt, the niece of the famous Republican President. She was only a girl: but he seemed to have divined the quality of one who, herself a woman of remarkable ability, was to become a potent factor in his career and the most prominent and active mistress the White House has ever known. The young couple settled in New York, and in 1907 he was admitted to the Bar and joined the important legal firm of Carter, Ledyard and Milburn, of that city. Then in 1910 he yielded to the suggestion that he should stand for the State Senate as candidate for the Dutchess County District which for years had been a Republican stronghold. At the election his immense vitality, charm, and good humour won the day and his brilliant political career began. At its outset he made his name, for he became the central figure in a courageous and successful revolt against Tammany Hall over the election of a Senator to Washington.
Navy Assistant Secretary
When in 1912 Woodrow Wilson became President, Roosevelt was offered a choice of two places in the administration; but neither appealed to him. Then, however, Josephus Daniels, the new Secretary of the Navy, asked him if he would take the congenial post of Navy Assistant Secretary and he readily consented. Daniels was a pacifist of puritanical mind, but the two men got on well together, and Roosevelt, who was much the more popular with the service, was, in his capable and vigorous way, able to do a great deal to increase the efficiency of the fleet. He found, however, that the President was less helpful than he might have been. Wilson liked and admired Roosevelt, who continued to hold him in deep regard, but he hesitated to give signs of preparation for war. It was indeed only in 1916 that he consented to an increased navy, and thus gave the Assistant Secretary his chance. In June, 1918, Roosevelt was offered a nomination for the governorship of New York but refused it. Then in the next month he went in pursuit of his duties to England and afterwards to France. He was eager at the time to play a combatant’s part, but this was not to be. In London he created an admirable impression and made many friends. After the Armistice he went to Europe again.
At the Democratic Convention of 1920, which was held at San Francisco, Governor Cox, of Ohio, was nominated to succeed Wilson, and, much to his surprise and pleasure, the convention agreed that Roosevelt should go forward for the Vice-Presidency. It was a strenuous campaign; but the fate of the Democrats was sealed, and he retired into private life with good humour and, in spite of the defeat of his party, a high reputation. He thereupon resumed his legal practice, and as an occupation for his spare time undertook to reorganize the Boy Scout movement in New York. He had, however, been subjected to a long and unbroken strain, and in the next year was smitten with poliomyelitis, a form of infantile paralysis. It might well have ended his career, but, bearing its pain and deprivation with superb courage, he triumphed first over the disease itself and then by degrees over the physical incapacity it left. ‘I’ll beat this thing,’ he said. He was never in fact to regain the full use of his legs, and to him, who had the physique and habit of an athlete, swimming was to remain his only locomotive exercise. Owing, however, to his iron will and magnificent resistance he was able to do some work in 1922, and in 1924 played a prominent part in the Democratic Convention of that year. All who knew him seemed to have agreed that his ordeal had deepened as well as strengthened a character already strong.
Governor of New York
By 1928 much benefited by prolonged treatment at Warm Springs, in Western Georgia, where he later established a foundation for the treatment of infantile paralysis, he was able to stand without crutches, and once again to bear the strain of active politics. It was he, therefore, who nominated his old friend ‘Al’ Smith as Democratic candidate to the Presidency, and himself on Smith’s strong persuasion stood for the governorship of the State of New York. His election to it was in the circumstances of the time a triumph, for even Smith himself failed for the first time to carry his Empire State. This important office, which raised him to Presidential status, he was to hold for two terms of two years each. His was in many ways a notable administration, for he found himself in a laboratory in which he could test the reforms he was afterwards to apply to the country as a whole. He also developed his own political technique, and it was at this period that he was among the first to exploit the political uses of the broadcast, a medium of which he became perhaps the most skilled and effective exponent of his time. Perhaps the greatest of his many problems was the administration of New York City, and when in view of certain scandals he instituted an extensive investigation into its municipal affairs, events were to show that his action had been justified. By the end of the second period of office he had greatly increased his reputation in the country at large by the just and fearless performance of his official duties.
Elected President
New Deal Promised
Meanwhile the economic condition of the nation, gripped in the ever-deepening depression of those years, was going from bad to worse. The unemployment figures, in so far as they could be estimated, ran to many millions. Values were sinking to fantastic levels, factories were without orders, and a dreadful paralysis was encroaching on every normal national activity. It was against this background of gloom and widespread sense of hopelessness that the Presidential election of 1932 was held. At it the Republicans, who felt bound to vindicate their President by their votes, decided to put Herbert Hoover forward for a second time. At the Democratic Convention at Chicago there was a good deal of initial manoeuvring, but eventually Roosevelt was nominated, and once his campaign had started there was little question of the result. In it he was helped immensely by the work of the group of chosen experts known as the ‘Brain Trust’, whom he had employed to advise him, and to ensure that the votes his policy might gain would not be obtained by false pretences. Apart from the fact that the Hoover regime had failed to master the depression, there were many circumstances in his favour. The Democratic platform was, in defiance of all precedent, brief and definite; conditions generally could scarcely have been more desperate; and the refusal of prohibition was a popular Democratic plank. Moreover, as the campaign progressed Roosevelt’s inspired nomination pledge of ‘a new deal for the American people’ began to catch the public imagination: Hoover, indeed, was beaten from the first; but the result when it came was unparalleled in American history – a majority of 4,000,000 votes and 480 out of 531 in the electoral college. On this there followed the four months of impotence which the constitution imposed when there was nothing for him to do except to watch the increasing difficulties of the country and to mature the Brain Trust’s plans. In February, when he was in Florida, a crazy Italian made an attempt upon his life, and his companion, Anton Cermak, the Mayor of Chicago, was killed.
On the eve of his inauguration the nation long lost to hope was on the point of panic. Banks had been closing all over the country and it was rumoured that those of New York and Chicago would shut the next day. It was a moment of culmination at which Roosevelt alone seemed to stand between the people and complete despair. At such a time he was at his greatest, and as he drove with his tired predecessor through the streets of the capital to the inauguration ceremonies, he appeared to radiate courage and assurance. His speech was brief and foreshadowed immediate and strenuous action. Before evening every member of his Cabinet was sworn in, and almost at once came his proclamation of a four-day banking holiday. He called Congress together at the earliest possible moment and with his overwhelming support there was able to pass through a vast programme of reform. His plans for national recovery covered the whole range of industry. Huge schemes of public relief works were launched and the Budget rose to a total unprecedented even in the years of war. Since taxation could not cover it, he had to borrow. In finance his plan was to move towards a managed currency, and his aim a dollar which would not change in its purchasing or debt-paying power during the succeeding generation. There was to be constant talk of a balanced Budget in some year not too far ahead, but the figures and estimates were scarcely to point in that direction. With the huge defence programme which developed later all hope of it expired.
Fireside Chats
There were three aspects of the President’s ‘New Deal’. The first was to avert abuses by imposing drastic limitations on all big industrial organizations; the second to develop national resources by such means as huge dams and hydro-electric plants; the third to establish social security in one grand sweep. Nothing in regard to it was particularly new except the immensity of its scale and speed with which it was attempted to put it through. At every stage, moreover, he sought to carry the country with him, and to this end kept it informed of both his aims and achievements by his ‘Fireside Chats’, a system of direct personal contact which developed into an unprecedented intimacy between President and people.
There were, of course, loud complaints from business and other interests, and those who felt themselves to be prejudiced or endangered by the new legislation. But apart from some checks and some dissension the President’s proposals were carried through on a broad tide of popular support. Even after what has been called the first ‘honeymoon’ year everything continued to go smoothly enough. Then, however, the ‘codes’ which Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 had imposed upon employers were condemned by the Supreme Court and rendered invalid. His Agricultural Adjustment Act was also to suffer the same fate. It was the beginning of a sharp constitutional conflict. In spite, however, of a tendency in some quarters to make it a political issue, the President, to whom opposition was always a stimulant, faced the difficulty calmly, and, in trying to save what he could, succeeded beyond expectation. In spite, therefore, of the loss of legislation which incidentally had served a great deal of its purpose, the ‘New Deal’ went on.
The new President had also been faced with serious problems of foreign policy. War debts provided one of them and disarmament another. In April, 1933, Mr Ramsay MacDonald went to see him at Washington to discuss the whole world situation, and in May he issued an important message to the heads of the 54 States concerned in the disarmament and economic conferences of that year. In it he appealed for a common understanding and suggested a definite non-aggression pact. It appeared indeed at the time that he contemplated a closer participation of representatives of the United States in international conferences, and as a step in that direction made Mr Norman Davis his Ambassador at large to various countries of Europe. Unfortunately, however, owing to American failure to see eye to eye with some of the European countries in regard to the stability of international exchange, the high hopes which had been formed were to remain unrealized, for the economic conference proved abortive. Thereafter for some years the United States was to lapse into an increasing detachment.
Plea for Broader Outlook
By 1935 the President was able to claim that his basic programme was substantially complete. Apart from its material effects it had undoubtedly exerted a remarkable educative influence on the people, and in the same year he stated that the objective of the nation had greatly changed, and that clearer thinking and understanding were leading to a broader and therefore a less selfish outlook. By that year also the economic skies had begun to lighten. It was, therefore, with the confidence of great achievements and substantial hopes that he entered his campaign of 1936. The Republicans had chosen Mr Alfred Landon, the Governor of Kansas, to oppose him – by no means a formidable champion. It was, none the less, a bitter combat, in which, except for his party organization, the President seemed to stand alone. Against him were arrayed all the massed strength and resources of financial and industrial leadership, some of the clergy, more than three-quarters of the nation’s newspapers, and the film industry. Relying, however, upon the record of his administration he toured the country. The result was remarkable indeed. All that his opponents could do and say counted, as The Times said, for no more than Mrs Partington’s mop. It was observed at the time that everybody was against him except the electorate; but it returned him with a majority of 8,593,130 popular votes and with only Maine and Vermont against him in the Electoral College. It was a victory beyond all precedent and a supreme vindication of American democracy.
Second Term
A Remarkable Prophecy
Entering upon his second term in January, Roosevelt put forward proposals for a radical reorganization of the Executive Branch directed towards increasing the effectiveness of the office of President. He also turned to the Supreme Court, which had proved so great an obstacle to his plans, and proposed to elect an additional judge above the nine who were then sitting for every one of them who had passed the age of 72. He was at once accused of tampering with the constitution, and the storm which followed was by no means confined to the Opposition. He had, therefore, to forgo his scheme. Fate was, however, to come to his assistance, for several judges were soon to die, and in a few more years the Bench was to be composed of men with greater sympathy for his social legislation.
The second term, however, was to be full of other than domestic preoccupations. In his Inaugural Address he did not mention foreign affairs; but in the next October he sounded a warning note and said that the epidemic of world lawlessness was spreading. ‘Let no one imagine,’ he added, ‘that America will escape, that America may expect mercy; that this Western Hemisphere will not be attacked; and that it will continue tranquilly and peacefully to carry on the ethics and the arts of civilisation.’ It was remarkable prophecy; but perhaps even more remarkable, the prophet himself proceeded to act upon it.
Dictators Denounced
With, therefore, all the prestige of his election behind him, he proceeded to take what steps he could to reinforce the cause of peace. One of them was to continue patiently to foster his ‘good neighbour’ policy in regard to the South American countries. When in 1941 Japan struck her blow he was to reap the advantage of the wise course Washington in his days had pursued towards the Latin American nations and of the established machinery of Pan-American cooperation. Nine Caribbean republics joined in at once in North America’s war of defence, and what had formerly been an almost hostile attitude on the part of South America towards its northern neighbour was as time passed to be one of increasing friendliness. As a result, America as a whole was to become the most disappointing of all continents to the Axis, and what might have been a fruitful field for the tares of Nazi diplomacy was very largely denied to it. Neither, however, the ‘good neighbour’ policy nor his desire to prevent war was to keep him from forceful comment on the increasingly aggressive and tyrannical acts of the German and Italian dictators, and he denounced Germany’s disregard of treaties soundly. When, moreover, he went to Canada in 1938 to open the new international bridge over the St Lawrence he made the historic pledge: ‘I give you the assurance that the people of the United States will not stand idly by if Canadian soil is threatened by any other Empire.’
In 1938 also Roosevelt began more fully to employ his influence in the affairs of Europe. Consequently when the crisis in regard to Czechoslovakia was at its height he addressed messages to both sides begging them to reach a peaceful solution by negotiation: and not to break off their deliberations. He sent, too, a second appeal to Hitler urging the maintenance of peace and then, when all negotiations seemed to have broken down at Godesberg, he established touch with Mussolini and had a hand in bringing about the Munich Conference, thus delaying war for a season. Throughout, however, the several critical years before it came he had no illusions in regard to the sinister nature of the dictators’ policies. ‘It is no accident,’ he had said, when he visited Buenos Aires for the Pan-American Conference, ‘that the nations which have carried the process of erecting trade barriers the farthest are those which proclaim most loudly that they require war as an instrument of policy.’ Incidentally, he concluded on that occasion with the remarkable words, ‘We took from our ancestors a great dream. We offer it back as a great unified reality. We offer hope for peace and more abundant life to the peoples of the world.’
Opposition to Hitler
Roosevelt saw far too deeply into the European situation to be set at rest by the achievement of Munich. At the beginning of 1939 he told Congress that he would go to any length short of war to stop the aggressor, and added that there were effective means of doing so. His speeches during the months which followed contained strong declarations for peace, but still more powerful vindications of democracy. His policy, he declared, was the defence of civilization against militarism. Thus he opposed to the morbid race theory and overweening demands of Hitler the broad and humane sanity of his democratic faith. At the same time he proceeded to strengthen the material defences of the United States and, as a precaution, ordered a comprehensive survey of American industry.
When in March Hitler seized what remained of Bohemia he sent messages to him and Mussolini as a ‘friendly intermediary’ asking them to give a guarantee not to attack for 10 years a specified list of nations. If they agreed he said he would be prepared to ask for reciprocal guarantees and call an international conference to which the United States would give every support in order to try to reach a settlement of all international difficulties. It was, in fact his last great bid; but Hitler would have none of it.
During the summer of 1939 the King and Queen toured Canada and took the opportunity of visiting the United States. The President and Mrs Roosevelt received them at Washington and were their hosts at the White House and then for a weekend at Hyde Park. It was a happy interlude in grave and anxious days. Then, as towards the end of August war drew nearer, Roosevelt appealed twice to Hitler to preserve peace and to the President of Poland to continue negotiations. He also sent a personal message to the King of Italy asking him to use his influence in promoting negotiations. Next, on September 1 when war seemed inevitable, he begged the Powers concerned to declare publicly that they would not bomb civilian populations or unfortified cities. The German answer was the devastation of open Polish towns and villages. After this there was nothing for him to do except to fulfil his obligation to proclaim neutrality, and, under the laws which had been adopted in recent years with the purpose of keeping America out of war, he had to forbid American ships to enter the zone of combat, to warn Americans not to travel there, and to preclude the supply of ammunition or armaments to the belligerents and the raising of loans by those who still owed war debts in America. In the autumn, however, on his urgent insistence, the ban on armaments was relaxed so as to permit the sale of aeroplanes, munitions, and weapons to France and Great Britain under the ‘cash and carry’ plan. In this country it was a very welcome amendment, and was the beginning of the pro-allied legislation which he was determined to enact. He had indeed many weapons in his armoury and was prepared to use them all. He could warn and thunder and impose embargoes and trade sanctions but he lacked the only one to which Hitler might have paid attention, for he could not offer the threat of war. A biographer has written of him that at this time he was ‘a crusader wielding a sheathed sword’.
National Defence
With the overrunning of Europe and the fall of France the attitude of the people of the United States began to change. Demands for a vast programme of national defence arose, and Roosevelt, responsive as ever to national feeling, announced that there could only be peace ‘if we are prepared to meet force with force if the challenge is ever made’. The last despairing appeal of France moved him deeply; but he was compelled to point out that assistance by armed forces was not for him but for Congress to give. By June, 1940, American opinion had moved so far that he was able to say of Italy that ‘the hand that held the dagger had struck it into the back of its neighbour’ and to add that America sent forward her prayers and hopes ‘to those beyond the seas who are maintaining with magnificent valour the battle for freedom’. In July, 1940, at a Press conference he defined the ‘five freedoms’, the aims to be realized if peace were to return to the earth.
In the election of 1940 Mr Wendell Willkie was the Republican candidate. There was an honoured and unbroken tradition which forbade a third term to any President, and for a long time Roosevelt refused to say whether he would be prepared to stand. At last, however, having made it clear that he had no desire to do so, he yielded to a unanimous request from the convention at Chicago. Willkie was a strong opponent of the New Deal and of most of Roosevelt’s internal legislation. He was, however, in general agreement with him on a more vigorous defence policy and fuller aid for Britain. It was therefore to those matters that the President confined his attention, inaugurating meanwhile a huge programme for the production of munitions with the aid of leading businessmen whom he called in to assist and advise. He also took two leading Republicans, Colonels Knox and Stimson, into the Cabinet, transferred 50 destroyers to Great Britain in return for naval bases, and worked out a defence policy with Canada. He thus fulfilled his slogan ‘Full speed ahead’ in war production. In the campaign itself, however, he took little part and made only a few speeches towards its close, when he said he had been misrepresented.
Third Time President
Once again, although Mr Willkie did better against him than either Mr Hoover or Mr Landon, he won handsomely – he was elected by a majority of some 5,000,000 on the popular vote – and thus opened up new fields of leadership. Almost immediately he brought forward his lend-lease proposals, which were embodied in a measure entitled ‘An Act to promote the defense of the United States’. These proposals were to enable him to provide war supplies for Great Britain and in fact for ‘the government of any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States’. Thereafter he kept on enlarging his production plans and stated that America would be ‘the arsenal of democracy’. He also pushed her naval patrols farther into the ocean than they had gone in defence of neutrality, and, after the Italians had been driven from Eritrea, sent American supply ships to the Red Sea. Calling for ‘unqualified immediate all-out aid for Britain, increased and again increased until total victory has been won’, he urged that there should be no idle machine and that they should operate 24 hours a day and seven days a week. Speaking in May at the birthplace of Woodrow Wilson, he said: ‘He taught us that democracy could not survive in isolation. We applaud his judgment. We applaud his faith.’ Thus, by arming his country for its own defence and in the meantime sustaining the resistance of Great Britain, he served what was in fact the single purpose of saving democracy.
On May 27, 1941, Roosevelt delivered one of the most momentous broadcasts of his career. He reasserted the American doctrine of the freedom of the seas and announced that he had issued a Proclamation to the effect that an unlimited national emergency existed which required strengthening of the defences of the United States to the extreme limit of national power and authority. He pointed to the sinkings of merchant shipping, and said that all measures necessary to the delivery to Great Britain of the supplies she needed would be taken. ‘This can be done. It must be done. It will be done.’ In June, Lord Halifax, as Chancellor of Oxford University, conferred the degree of dcl upon him, the first time that a Chancellor had officiated at a Convocation outside the walls of Oxford.
Pearl Harbour; Entry into the War
As the year progressed the President became even more assertive in word and action. American troops were sent to Iceland, and in August he met Mr Churchill at sea. The Atlantic Charter recorded their agreement. There were attacks upon the American Navy, and he replied to them with a warning that Axis warships would enter American defensive waters at their peril. A little later he went to Congress to seek a revision of the Neutrality Act. Meanwhile German hatred of him found expression in a crescendo of abuse. Ever since the attack upon Russia he had shown his determination to uphold her resistance, and in November a credit of $100,000,000 was extended to her. Thus as the situation in both the Western and Eastern Hemispheres grew tenser he appeared to be gathering his strength against an inevitable collision. It came on December 7. He had just sent a message to the Emperor of Japan couched in persuasive terms, but protesting against the flooding of Japanese forces into Indo-China. One hour before the reply was delivered by the Japanese Ambassador Pearl Harbour was in smoke and ruin. The next day he gave in person a message to Congress and called for a declaration of war. Except for one member of the House of Representatives the answer was unanimous. ‘With confidence, ’ he said, ‘in our armed forces, with the unbounded determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.’ And so when a few days later Congress no less readily accepted the challenge of Germany and Italy, Roosevelt entered upon the war leadership supported by the national confidence to which his wise and patient handling of a long-drawn crisis had so richly entitled him.
Hotfoot upon the belligerency of the United States Mr Churchill went to Washington to plan for unity of action, and stayed at the White House. It was the beginning of a wartime association founded upon a well-established mutual regard and doubly proofed against external efforts to break it. Never before in history had the leaders of two great democracies worked together on the fraternal terms which came to exist between the President and the Prime Minister. Each stood high in the opinions of the other’s people, and as a result each strengthened the other’s hand. Roosevelt and Churchill together were a combination of scarcely precedented power.
Faith and Courage; All Resources Mobilized
The President’s message to Congress at the beginning of 1942 showed that the attack by Japan had not only failed to stun him but that he had reacted in much the same way as to the economic perils of 1932. In both cases his response was a programme of immediate action on a nationwide scale. All the vast resources of the United States were mobilized for war. A people which justly prided itself upon the largeness of its conceptions was given an almost unlimited scope for effort. The estimated cost was staggering, but the nation accepted it. He was close on 60 and his birthday at the end of the month brought many messages which indicated the regard of the allied peoples for him. He was already in the ninth year of the immense labours in which his own faith and courage had been his chief sustenance.
As Commander-in-Chief of the United States it was Roosevelt’s task to make a peaceful and largely self-centred people strategically minded, and to interpret the war to them as a world conflict rather than an opportunity for the counter-strike they longed to deal Japan. Isolationism was his greatest obstacle, and he said of those who still proclaimed its merits that they wanted the American Eagle to imitate the ostrich. Thus in firm but good-humoured fashion he led his people on, and the fact that the great majority were brought to take the broad, patient, and unselfish view which the character of the war demanded was due primarily to him. Despite, however, the huge measure of support he commanded, he continued to be exposed to a running fire of criticism from sections of the public and the Press.
In April he proposed a seven-point programme to combat the rise which had taken place in the cost of living and included a large increase in taxation. The fear of inflation had begun and was to continue to haunt him, but he was to find Congress somewhat reluctant to incur electoral unpopularity by supporting him in drastic measures. Another danger which he sought to avert was a light-hearted but, as he knew, unfounded optimism on the part of the people. By the summer, however, he was in a position to say that America’s reservoir of resources was reaching a flood stage, and vast amounts of material were being sent over-sea to the assistance of the allies. It was a vindication of his own far-sightedness. His lend-lease agreements were already taking shape as key instruments of national policy and he was beginning to realize his world statesman’s aim of distributing the financial burdens of the war. In June he welcomed Mr Churchill once again and found that they were still at one upon the major problems of the war. In September he made a quick tour of 11 States in order to test the spirit of the nation and reported it ‘unbeatable’. In November came the landing in North Africa – Mr Churchill attributed the authorship of it to him – and what he regarded as the turning point of the war.
Casablanca
The President’s New Year address in 1943 to a new Congress will probably rank among the greatest of many great utterances, for in it he was the inspired realist. He looked backward with a well justified satisfaction and forward with a lively hope. He said it was necessary to keep in mind not only the evil things against which America was fighting but the good things she was fighting for. Never indeed did he stand forth so clearly as the leader of his people’s thought as well as the ruler of their actions or as the possessor of a grasp wide enough to encompass the whole of the struggle for civilization. Then hard up on this call to thought and action came the bill for it – a Budget of $100,000,000,000. These preliminaries to the year performed, he was before the month had ended at Casablanca, when he conferred with Mr Churchill and the Fighting French at what, remembering General Grant, he called the ‘Unconditional Surrender Meeting’. The momentous conversations lasted for some 10 days and every aspect of the war was reviewed at them. Nothing like this had ever happened before, for he was the first President who had ever left his country in wartime. On the way home he stopped at Brazil for a discussion with the President. By thus breaking with tradition and adopting Mr Churchill’s practice of going himself to a vital centre of action Roosevelt achieved a master-stroke of leadership, for not only did he enhance his own authority as war leader but drew the beam of national interest after him. Paramount, however, though his authority was he continued to be engaged by efforts to keep prices down in spite of the hesitancy of Congress and the recalcitrance of active labour interests. In April he went to Mexico to discuss post-war cooperation. It was the first time the chief executives of the two countries had met. At the same time he visited the American forces in the Southern States.
In May Mr Churchill, at the President’s invitation, paid his fourth wartime visit to the United States, and it was widely noted that such occasions were the presage of great events. In this case the communiqué announced a full agreement on all points ‘from Great Britain to New Britain and beyond’. At the same time Roosevelt found himself in one of his recurrent troubles with labour – in this case, the miners – and handled it with characteristic firmness. He was not, however, to receive the support he desired from Congress, for late in June an Anti-Strike Bill which he vetoed was passed in spite of him. It was one of a series of setbacks in domestic policy. They were offset by occasional victories; but his supreme task of directing American strategy continued to be complicated by distractions due to the attitude of an increasingly difficult Legislature.
With the collapse of Italy the war entered on a new, and hopeful phase; but he refused to limit his aims even to a total victory over the Axis, and looked beyond it to another over all the forces of oppression, intolerance, insecurity, and injustice which had impeded the forward march of civilization. In August he went to Quebec for yet another meeting with Mr Churchill in which his old friend Mr Mackenzie King sat with them. Then, he travelled westwards to Ottawa, where he addressed the two Houses of the Canadian Parliament. It was the first time an American President had been there, and in his speech he stated that during the Quebec Conference things had been talked over and ways and means discussed ‘in the manner of members of the same family’, a phrase in true accord with both the theory and practice of the ‘good neighbour’ policy.
In November, 1943, Roosevelt left the United States for the series of historic conferences by which the leaders of the Allied Nations sought to consolidate their aims and efforts. At the first meetings in Cairo he and Mr Churchill met Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and discussed future military operations against Japan. They declared that she should be stripped of all her island gains in the Pacific as well as the territories she had stolen from China and other spoils of her aggression. To this end it was agreed to continue to persevere in the serious and prolonged efforts necessary to secure her unconditional surrender. The President with the Prime Minister moved next to Teheran, where for four intensive days they were in council with Marshal Stalin, whom Roosevelt then met for the first time. There in most amicable discussion the three leaders shaped and confirmed their international policy and announced jointly that they recognized their responsibility for a peace that would command the good will of the overwhelming masses of the peoples of the world. Thereupon the President with Mr Churchill went back to Cairo for discussions with M. Ismet Inönü, the President of the Turkish Republic. On the return journey Roosevelt visited both Malta and Sicily, arriving eventually at the White House bronzed and cheerful. One of his last actions of the year was to order the Secretary of State for War to take over the railways where trouble had been threatening.
In early January, 1944, Mr and Mrs Roosevelt presented their homestead at Hyde Park to the United States Government as a historical national site with a proviso that the immediate family might use it. It followed upon an earlier gift of the Roosevelt Library there. Then a few days later the President’s message to Congress embodied his programme for still further mobilization of the resources of the nation. In it he referred scathingly to the ‘pressure groups’ and others who, while he had been abroad, had been busy in the pursuit of interests which he regarded as only secondary to the supreme task of winning the war. This corrective he accompanied by yet another Budget for $100,000,000,000.
In the New Year there were to be still further difficulties with Congress. In late February he vetoed the Tax Bill, and thereby lost one of his staunchest supporters, Senator Barkley, of Kentucky, the Democratic Leader in the Senate, only to be overridden by large majorities in both Houses. It was a protest against what were regarded as the encroachments of the Administration. The obedient Legislature of his earlier years had long since been replaced by one largely hostile to his social policy. The result was the cat and dog relationship between President and Congress which the American Constitution permits, and his caustic description of the Bill as relief ‘not for the needy but for the greedy’ was an appeal over the head of the legislators to the people.
Senator Truman
As the spring lengthened the probability of his running for a fourth term seemed steadily to grow greater. In April, 1944, he had to take a rest, but in May be was back at the White House, himself again, clear of eye and voice. Simultaneously with his return to it the chairman of the Democratic National Committee asserted that he would accept the party’s nomination; but he himself refused to be drawn. At the end of the month, when reminded on one occasion of his support of President Wilson, he stated that he contemplated a new and better League of Nations in the post-war world and a little later outlined the American plan for a world security organization. On July 11 he broke his silence and announced that if elected he would serve a fourth term as President. The news was received calmly because it was widely expected. On July 20 the Democratic Convention at Chicago nominated him with loud applause and the waving of many banners ensigned with his name. Senator Truman was, however, chosen instead of his associate, Mr Wallace, to run for the Vice-Presidency.
In July the President was in Honolulu for a three days’ conference. On his way back he visited the Aleutians and Alaska, and dramatically broadcast from a warship on the Pacific coast. Then in September he went to Quebec to meet Mr Churchill. The discussions, which ranged over a wide field, were conducted, as Mr Churchill said, ‘in a blaze of friendship’. It was only after his return from Quebec that he made the first political speech of his campaign; but his wartime activities as Commander-in-Chief pleaded as strongly for him with the electorate as any words he could have uttered. Things were, indeed, beginning to go well for him, and on October 16 the New York Times came down in his favour. On October 22 he made a 51-mile tour of the City of New York in cold and rain. Meanwhile, his opponent, Mr Dewey, sought to mobilize every hostile and dissentient element against him. The President, however, standing foursquare upon his record, but dealing chiefly with foreign affairs, hit back upon occasion as hard as he had ever done.
Fourth Term
A Landslide Victory
The result of the election was once again a victory for Roosevelt so decisive as to be in fact a landslide. Such strength as Mr Dewey showed was in the rural districts; the workers in the great towns and cities were overwhelmingly for the President. In both the Senate and the House of Representatives he had comfortable majorities. Thus, not only unique in American history but triumphantly so, he prepared himself to enter on his fourth term.
No sooner was Roosevelt back at the White House than suggestions that he would shortly confer with Mr Churchill and Marshal Stalin filled the American Press, but arrangements had still to be made. In the meantime, therefore, he attended to the preparations for his fourth term, and spent a holiday at Warm Springs, in Georgia. On his return he took occasion to allay some disquietude in regard to the validity of the Atlantic Charter by declaring that its objectives were sound and as valid as when they were framed.
Early in 1945 his message on the state of the Union was read to a joint session of Congress. It was of exceptional length and great significance, and, after a masterly and comprehensive review of the military situation, in which he paid a vigorous personal tribute to General Eisenhower, went on to state that his country could not and would not shrink from the responsibilities which follow in the wake of battle. He followed it on January 20 by his fourth inaugural address, delivered from the south portico of the White House. On this occasion he spoke for only 14 minutes, though it was historical indeed as the first wartime Presidential inauguration since that of Abraham Lincoln. Then the next important news of him came from the Black Sea, when on February 8 the Press announced that he, Mr Churchill, and Marshal Stalin had reached complete agreement for joint military operations in the final phase of the war against Germany. In a few days the famous Yalta declaration, which disclosed the full extent of the agreement reached among the three national leaders, was given to the world. For him personally, no less than for the other two, it was a crowning triumph of wisdom and political capacity.
Crimea Conference
On March 1 Roosevelt made what he called his ‘personal report’ of the Crimea conference to the Senate and the House of Representatives and, by broadcast, to the American people. He had, so far as any United States President could, accepted joint responsibility with Great Britain and Russia for the solution of the political problems in Europe – a responsibility, he said, the shirking of which would be ‘our own tragic loss’ – and he asked for approval of the decisions made by political leaders and public opinion. He looked forward with hope to the San Francisco conference. He believed that the three great centres of military power would be able to achieve their aims for security; and in this mood of confidence he approached the full and intricate problems involved in America’s collaboration with the rest of the world. Thus he worked to the end.
Roosevelt was a tall and handsome man with a fine head. In compensation for his weakened lower limbs he had developed a great torso and immense strength in his arms. A direct speaker of remarkable precision and clarity, he had a clear voice with a ring of music in it, which helped him particularly in broadcasting. Instinctively friendly and sympathetic, he was the most approachable of men and had an engaging smile for all. At his Press conferences, which he managed in a fashion of his own, he was the familiar of all who attended them; but nowhere were his immense skill and clever touch in human relationships more apparent. At them he was open to direct viva voce examination and permitted himself a frankness which only the observance by the American Press of the strict code of honour embodied in the words ‘Off the record’ could have rendered possible. He had many interests. In his latter days he was particularly fond of deep sea fishing, and often went for long fishing trips; but his chief hobbies were ships – he had a remarkable collection of prints of them – and philately.
He leaves four sons, James, Elliot, Franklin, and John, all of whom have served in the armed forces, and a daughter who is married to Mr John Boetiger, a journalist, who is now on war service.
Adolf Hitler
Dictator of Germany. Twelve years of force and tyranny.
30 April 1945
Few men in the whole of history and none in modern times have been the cause of human suffering on so large a scale as Hitler, who died in Berlin yesterday. If history judges to be greatest those who fill most of her pages, Hitler was a very great man; and the house-painter who became for a while master of Europe cannot be denied the most remarkable talents. He found Germans depressed, bewildered, aimless. After five years in office he had united the German race in a single Reich, abolished regional diversities of administration, and got rid of unemployment. But these achievements were merely instruments of an overwhelming lust for power. Nazi domination over Germany was a stepping stone towards the domination of Nazi Germany over the world. The process was continuous, and the methods were the same. Hitler effected the triumph of the Nazi Party in Germany by a mixture of deceit and violence; he then employed the same devices to destroy other nations. From the time he became master of Germany he made lies, cruelty, and terror his principal means to achieve his ends; and he became in the eyes of virtually the whole world an incarnation of absolute evil.
Hitler was unimpressive to meet on informal occasions, but became transformed when he was face to face with a crowd, especially if it was an audience of his followers. He would speak to them like a man possessed and give the appearance of utter exhaustion when his speech was over. His speeches betrayed few if any original ideas, and even his belief in the suggestive power of reiteration scarcely justified the repetitions of past history with which most of his public orations were overladen. He was, however, a propagandist of the first order, and his uncannily subtle and acute understanding of the mind of his own people was the ultimate source of his power for evil.
Early Years
Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, at Braunau-am-Inn, on the frontier, as he said himself, of the two German States, the reunion of which he regarded as a work worthy to be accomplished by any and every means. His parents were of Bavarian, and perhaps Bohemian, peasant descent, and his father – who until his fortieth year was known as Schicklgruber – was a Customs officer in the Austrian service and married three times – Adolf being the only son of his young third wife. Adolf was sent to the best school available, being intended for the Government service, though he himself had artistic inclinations. In 1902 his father died suddenly, leaving no resources available for the continued education of his son.
From 1904 to 1909 the young Hitler lived a life of hardship. He moved after the loss of his mother to Vienna where he had dreams of becoming an architect, but could earn only a hazardous livelihood as assistant to a house-painter and by selling sketches. For three years he lived the life of the poorest man in Vienna, sleeping in a men’s hostel, eating the bread of charity at a monastery, occasionally reduced to begging. The food for thought also presented gratuitously by life in a great city, to such as care to receive it, was not left untasted by him. Hazy legends like the Nordic saga jostled in his mind with illusions regarding the ennobling effect of war and with more rational dreams of German national unity. He saw and hated the growing Slav ascendancy and the enfeeblement of the German elements in the racially mixed Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. He drank in the pan-Germanism of Luege, in which all the original elements of ‘Hitlerism’ are to be found. He read assiduously the works of Marx and his disciples, and thoroughly disagreed with their conclusions. He discovered the Jews and acquired a fanatical aversion to them. By 1910 he had so far improved his professional position as to be able to set up as an independent draughtsman; and, still hoping to become an architect, removed to Munich thinking to find wider scope in the Bavarian capital.
A year or two later the 1914–18 war broke out, and Hitler, preferring to enrol himself in the German national army rather than in the polyglot forces of the Hapsburgs, although he was an Austrian subject, joined the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment as a volunteer. His war service was meritorious, but not distinguished. He won the Iron Cross, and rose to the rank of corporal. He was wounded in the battle of the Somme in 1916, and badly gassed in the later stages of the war. It was while lying in a Berlin hospital, temporarily blinded, that he learned of the events known as the November Revolution of 1918.
Political Career Begun
On leaving hospital he returned to Munich. That pleasant city soon became the prey of his enemies the Marxists. The reaction against their regime made a breeding-ground for Fascism. It was at that moment that Hitler began his political career. Thousands of bewildered and workless young Germans were meeting and talking and propounding every sort of theory and scheme. Hitler possessed what most of these fumblers lacked, a few definite ideas and a knowledge of the value and of the art of propaganda. One night he attended in Munich a meeting of a newly formed German Workers’ Party, and decided to join it. He was its seventh member, and was not long in making himself its leader and his nationalist and anti-Marxist creed its programme. The movement soon took hold in Bavaria.
Hitler discovered his remarkable oratorical powers and proved himself an adept in the management of large meetings. He realized to the full the value of repetition and of reiterating a single theme over and over again in a slightly different form. ‘All propaganda,’ he said, ‘should adapt its intellectual level to the receptive ability of the least intellectual of those whom it is desired to address.’ A pillar of strength in these days was Captain Röhm, a staff officer at Munich and a valued organizer in the councils of his military superiors. He won for Hitler the tacit approval of the local high command and certain financial resources without which two-fold help little progress could have been achieved.
Thus supported and encouraged, Hitler, in conjunction with Röhm, Göring, General Ludendorff, and others, made his first attempt to seize power in the notorious Munich Putsch of November 10, 1923. They were met outside the Feldherrnhalle by police, who fired upon them, killing Hitler’s nearest companion and 15 others. Hitler lay flat on his face. Only Ludendorff marched straight on. As soon as the firing slackened Hitler, with a dislocated shoulder, fled in a motor-car, but was arrested two days later and imprisoned in the fortress of Landsberg. During the nine months he spent there he wrote the greater part of Mein Kampf, that turgid, rambling, remarkable book of nearly 1,000 pages, which became the Bible of the Nazi movement.
Hitler’s authority declined after the fiasco of Munich, and for a while Gregor Strasser, the creator of the Nazi Party in North Germany, counted for more than he in the party ranks, whose strength in the Berlin Reichstag was no more than 12. Hitler gradually reasserted himself, however, and in the elections of 1930, when Dr Brüning was Chancellor, and when the economic crisis was already creating widespread unemployment and distress, the number of National-Socialist Deputies jumped to 107.
The political situation rapidly deteriorated. Faced by the growth of the extremist vote and the chaotic state of the party system, the Chancellor was forced increasingly to govern by decree, and though his intentions were most genuinely liberal, he led Germany far along the road to dictatorship. On May 30, 1932, he fell after dealing Hitler two shrewd blows – the dissolution of the Brown Army and the re-election of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg as Reichspräsident in face of the fully mobilized Nazi vote in support of Hitler’s own candidature. Hitler regarded himself as heir to the Chancellorship. But he had still 10 months to wait, 10 months of crisis during which he was thwarted, not by the now impotent Liberal and Socialist vote, not even by the vociferous Communists, who by their threats to the bourgeoisie were indirectly a help, but by the veiled resistance of the Right Wing of the old regime, with its backing of Junkers, trade magnates, Monarchists, and the entourage of the now senile Reichspräsident.
The appointment of the shifty von Papen as Chancellor to succeed Brüning was followed by the rescinding of the latter’s ban on the Brown Army as a bait to catch the Nazi support, and by a general election. At the polls Hitler more than doubled his vote, being returned with 230 followers, the largest party in the Reichstag. He demanded the Chancellorship, but Papen manoeuvred him into an interview with the Field Marshal, where Hitler, who was nervous and showed to little advantage, received a pre-arranged rebuff. His prestige suffered considerably thereby, but worse was to follow. After three months of hopeless struggle in a hostile Reichstag Papen held another election. The Nazis lost 2,000,000 votes. A feeling of defeat spread throughout the party. Some of the leaders were in despair. In Germany and abroad it was thought that Hitler had passed his zenith.
In the meantime the affairs of Germany prospered little better than those of the Bavarian ex-corporal. Papen had to resign in November, 1932, and was followed by General Kurt von Schleicher, the last Chancellor of the old regime, a clever man, who came near to destroying Hitler and paid the forfeit on June 30, 1934. Schleicher had the confidence of the Army, and, as far as anyone could, that of President von Hindenburg, but he had no Parliamentary support, and was threatened by Papen, who regarded him as the cause of his own fall from power. Schleicher in December made a bid for independence. He thought to propitiate the Nazi strength by attracting to himself in a semi-Socialist administration Gregor Strasser.
Chancellor at Last
Reichstag Fire
It was a critical moment. Hitler, who had borne the recent setbacks with surprising calm, now lost heart. ‘If the party breaks up,’ he confided to Goebbels, ‘I’ll end matters with my pistol in three minutes.’ Schism indeed seemed imminent. But Strasser himself spoilt the scheme. He dallied and hesitated. The discussions were deferred, and before they could be resumed Schleicher had fallen. The tables had been suddenly turned by von Papen, who in January made an alliance with Hitler in order to overthrow Schleicher. The Nazi leader, whom he regarded as humbled by recent ill-fortune, was to be Chancellor and he himself Vice-Chancellor, with a majority of non-Nazi colleagues, the good will of the President, and, he confidently hoped, the real power. The plan took shape, and on January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was formally invested with the seals of office as Reichskanzler.
The new Government was a minority one, and decided to dissolve the Reichstag and hold another election, the third in nine months. In an unparalleled propaganda campaign, in which the opposition parties had to remain passive observers, voters were belaboured with the Communist menace. Yet the voting gave an absolute majority only to the combined Nazi and Nationalist Parties, and the uneasy alliance between Hitler and Hugenberg, the Nationalist leader, would perhaps have continued but for an event of the first importance, the Reichstag fire. Whoever lit the match, it was the Nazis who arranged and profited by this act of incendiarism. Interpreted by them as a Communist act of terrorism, it was made the pretext for the suspension of all constitutional liberties and the setting up of the Nazi dictatorship under Hitler.
The seizure of power by the Nazis in March, 1933, brought to an end the hollow alliance with the Nationalists under Hugenberg, who was forced to resign shortly afterwards. At the same time the German Press was muzzled and put under the control of Goebbels. Unhampered by Parliamentary restrictions or Press criticism, Hitler and his lieutenants pushed on with the Nazi revolution. Force and unity were the guiding ideals, and every element within or outside Germany which withstood the overriding claims of German nationalism was marked down for destruction.
The long struggle for power was now ended. The National-Socialist Party was faced with the task of consolidation, and this was set about with more zeal than unity of conception or purpose. The position of Röhm’s Brown Army in the State and its relation to the Reichswehr and the position of the Stahlhelm, the armed organization of the Nationalists, were among the most thorny problems and involved much bitterness and heart-burning.
The ‘Blood Bath’; Shooting of Röhm
On July 1, 1934, the civilized world learnt with horror of the killings that had taken place the day before and have since been known as the purge or the ‘blood bath’. How many people lost their lives will never be known. The outstanding victims were Röhm, Schleicher, and Strasser. On the night of June 29 Hitler flew from the Rhineland to Munich and on to the place where Röhm was staying. Röhm was taken from his bed to Munich and shot. All over Germany similar scenes were being enacted. Leading officials of the party and comparative nonentities alike lost their lives. Many an act of private revenge was carried out that night. Hitler, in his statement to the Reichstag, said he had saved Germany from a plot of reactionaries, dissolute members of the Brown Army and the agents of a foreign Power. The reason for the massacre of June 30 may never be exactly known, but apart from private rancours and rivalries it is generally believed that Röhm aimed at having the Reichswehr embodied in his sa organization – which Hitler had the sense to refuse.
The ‘blood bath’ was officially approved by Field Marshal von Hindenburg, who probably understood nothing of it. A month later, on August 2, the old man died, and within an hour Adolf Hitler was declared his successor. He abjured the title of Reichspräsident and elected to be known as Führer and Kanzler. The poor man of Vienna was now the master of Germany, absolute lord of 60,000,000 Europeans.
Armaments
Hitler’s advent heralded a series of increasingly grave breaches of treaty obligations and challenges to European opinion. Dr Brüning had already claimed equality in armaments. This claim was vigorously repeated by Hitler, and it was on the pretext that it had been too tardily admitted by the Powers that he abruptly left the League of Nations in October, 1933. Franco-British discussions in London in February, 1935, for a general settlement were brusquely forestalled by Hitler’s announcement of conscription for an army of half a million and the creation of an Air Force. The British Government joined the French and Italian Governments in condemning the unilateral repudiation of treaty obligations, but a few weeks later, in June, 1935, it concluded a naval agreement with Hitler granting him 35 per cent of the naval strength of Great Britain and equality in submarines. To ‘his people’, as he now called the Germans, it looked as though their Führer’s tactics paid, while Europe could no longer ignore the fact that Germany was again a great Power.
In March, 1936, Adolf Hitler, taking advantage of the embroilment of Great Britain and France with Italy over Abyssinia, suddenly occupied the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland, at the same time denouncing the Treaty of Locarno, which he claimed had already been abrogated by the formation of the Franco-Russian Alliance. The military occupation of the Rhineland was the most serious as well as the most spectacular breach made so far in the facade of the Versailles Treaty. In conjunction with the introduction of conscription it transformed the military situation. It deprived the Western Powers in one moment of the strongest weapon in their armoury, one that had been used in early post-war years, the freedom of entry into German territory. Henceforward Hitler could hope to hold off an attack on his western front with one hand, while the other was free elsewhere.
The occupation of the Rhineland was accompanied by a series of proposals addressed by Hitler to the world at large, and for the special attention of the French and British peoples. He offered a 25-year non-aggression pact, an aid pact for Western Europe, non-aggression pacts with his eastern neighbours, and he even announced his readiness to return to the League of Nations under certain conditions. None of these proposals was taken seriously enough by the outside world for any concrete result to follow.
Suspicion of Hitler was now growing, though the world did not yet grasp the full baseness of Nazi technique, with its deliberate use of the lie as an instrument of policy whereby to lull future victims into a sense of security while some nefarious scheme was being developed elsewhere. Yet the Führer and Chancellor himself had asserted that the bigger the lie the better the chance of its being believed.
The Rhineland coup was followed by two years of digestion and consolidation, during which time German military preparations were pushed forward with increasing activity, and an economic reorganization aiming at self-sufficiency was undertaken. Events outside Germany in 1936 and 1937 increased the nervous tension in Europe and did much to strengthen Hitler’s position. The policy of sanctions against Italy incompletely carried out through the machinery of the League of Nations made the worst of both worlds. It fell short of what was needed to save Ethiopia, but served to turn Mussolini from friendship and collaboration with the Western Powers to an increasingly close connection with Hitler, the foremost critic in Europe of the League of Nations. This understanding was given substantive form by the support accorded by the two totalitarian States to General Franco’s cause in Spain, and was finally registered by the official establishment in September, 1937, of the Rome–Berlin Axis. By this diplomatic revolution Hitler won an important European ally at the expense of the Powers of the Versailles ‘Diktat’, whose prestige, both moral and material, had as a result of these various events suffered a considerable diminution.
Seizure of Austria
Entry into Vienna
In the early weeks of 1938 the storm centre of Europe shifted back to Berlin. Hitler engineered an abrupt crisis in Austro-German relations, which ended on March 11 by the violation of the frontier by the German Army and the forcible incorporation of Austria in the Reich. Mussolini, who in 1934, on the murder of Herr Dollfuss, had massed troops on the Brenner frontier, made no move, and received the effusive thanks of the Führer: ‘Mussolini: Ich soll es Ilnen nie vergessen.’ Hitler’s dramatic entry into Vienna a few days later, after nearly a quarter of a century’s absence, during which he had experienced every vicissitude of hope, despair, and triumph, was watched with curiosity and even sympathy by millions of people outside the Reich, whose Governments had in the past resoundingly refused to the constitutional requests of both Berlin and Vienna the union which the German Dictator had now achieved by force.
The union of the Reich and the Ostmark, as Austria was now called, immediately raised the problem of Czechoslovakia, which contained a minority of some 3,500,000 Germans and was now surrounded by German territory on three sides. The question asked all over Europe was how soon would Bohemia share the fate of Austria. Hitler’s assurance to the Czech Government that it had nothing to fear did not allay suspicion. A series of communal elections throughout Czechoslovakia in May raised to fever-pitch the excitement created in the German minority by the inclusion in the Reich of their Austrian co-racialists. At the annual meeting in September of the National-Socialist Party at Nuremberg Hitler stood as the avowed champion of the Sudeten Germans, and their demands immediately precipitated an acute European crisis involving the imminent risk of general war. Hitler, with the German Army mobilized, his western front approaching a state of impregnability, faced by potential opponents who were mentally bewildered and militarily unprepared, and divided both geographically and ideologically, was in a position to dictate his terms. In conferences at Berchtesgaden and Godesberg with Mr Neville Chamberlain, and then at Munich, where M. Daladier and Mussolini, as well as Mr Chamberlain, were present, he put forward demands that France and Britain were not in a position to refuse. To save the peace of the world and to avoid their own destruction the Czechs were told that they must submit to the arrangements made by the four Great Powers at Munich, whereby all the German districts of Bohemia, together with the immense fortifications of the Erzgebirge, were handed over absolutely to Germany. In eight months Hitler had added 10,000,000 of Germans to the Third Reich, had broken the only formidable bastion to German expansion south-eastwards, and had made himself the most powerful individual in Europe since Napoleon i.
Czechoslovakia a ‘protectorate’
In the course of his conversations with Mr Chamberlain Hitler had assured him that he had no more territorial claims to make in Europe – a phrase he had also used after the seizure of Austria. On March 15, 1939, the world was, however, startled to hear that the German Army was invading and overwhelming Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia, all that remained of the independent Republic. President Hacha, who under German pressure had succeeded Dr Benesh in the autumn, was summoned to Berlin and forced to accept terms which made his country a ‘Protectorate’ of the Reich. Hitler went to Prague to proclaim there another bloodless victory and then while the going was good travelled to Memel, which had been ceded under the Versailles Treaty to Lithuania, and announced its annexation on March 23.
Poland had profited from the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia by being allowed to annex the disputed region of Teschen. But she was marked down as the next victim. While German troops were still moving into Slovakia Hitler proposed to the Polish Government that Danzig should be returned to Germany and that Germany should build and own a road connecting East Prussia with the rest of the Reich, in return for which Germany would guarantee the Polish frontiers for 25 years – though a 10-year treaty of non-aggression already existed between the two countries, of which five years had still to run. Poland rejected the proposals and appealed to Great Britain and France for support. These countries at once gave Poland pledges to defend her independence, if necessary by war. The action of the Western Powers came as a shock to Hitler, who was further alarmed by negotiations shortly afterwards set on foot in Moscow by the French and British with the Soviet Government. The spectre of war on two fronts again arose to damp the German ardour for acquisition. Hitler, faced with the prospect of a check and a rebuff, fatal contingencies for an aspiring dictator, made his decision. Rather than give up his cherished, and indeed loudly proclaimed design of seizing Danzig and the Polish Corridor, he was prepared to eat every word he had uttered in condemnation, derision, and defiance of the Bolshevist regime, and to invite the Russians to agree to a non-aggression pact. Stalin on his side, finding the danger of a German attack suddenly exorcized, and distrusting the constancy of the Western Powers, was not unwilling to accept Hitler’s overtures, and the Pact was signed on August 23.
Hitler Starts War
With the disappearance of any likelihood of Russian assistance being given to the western allies Hitler saw no further obstacle in the way of an immediate attack on Poland, and on August 31, 1939, he ordered the German Armies to cross the frontier. The Second World War had begun. With typical falsity Hitler and Ribbentrop – now his intimate and most pernicious adviser – had offered the Polish Ambassador terms of settlement, and broadcast them to the world, a few hours before the soldiers began the invasion, without, however, allowing the Ambassador time or means to convey them to his Government.
The attack on Poland gave the world its first taste of the horrors of a German Blitzkrieg. Hitler went East to superintend the slaughter in person. It was a swift and terrible war which he waged in bitter hatred and, when the issue was clear, with crude boastings and gross lies at the expense of a broken nation. In a speech at Danzig on September 19 he had the effrontery to declare that: ‘Poland has worked for this war’ and ‘peace was prevented by a handful of (British) warmongers’. On the same occasion he took up what he called the British ‘challenge’ to a three years’ conflict and announced that Germany possessed a new weapon. The grim business was over in a few weeks. Warsaw surrendered on September 24 and on October 5 Hitler visited it and swaggered among the ruins which were garlanded for the occasion.
The next day, speaking in the Reichstag, he made what he called his last offer to the allies. It was a remarkable rhetorical performance, though, obviously nervous, he hurried through the phrases in which he described his new friendship with the Russians. As a plea for peace it could, if only one of its premises had been sound and one of its promises could have been believed, scarcely have been bettered; but he had by that time to pay the price of his habitual contempt for truth. In early November he made a speech at Munich, on the anniversary of the Putsch of 1923, in which he said that he had given Göring orders to prepare for a five years’ war. He ended earlier than had been expected and left the Burgerbräu beer cellar in which he made it for Berlin. Shortly afterwards there was an explosion in which six people were killed and over 60 injured. The official German News Agency claimed that the attempt had been inspired by foreign agents and offered a reward of half a million marks for the discovery of the instigators. One George Elsen was arrested. Official Germans were infuriated with The Times for suggesting that the explosion was no surprise to the Führer and that he had left early to avoid it.
France Crushed
On New Year’s Day, 1940, Hitler declared that he was fighting for ‘a new Europe’. On March 18 he met Mussolini on the Brenner, a presage, as it was later recognized to be, of great events. In April came the invasions of Norway and Denmark, and in early May he was congratulating his troops on their success and authorizing decorations for them. On May 10 his armies invaded Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg, and on the same day he went to the Western Front. On the morrow he proclaimed that the hour for the decisive battle for the future of the German nation had come. In less than a month the bells were rung in Germany to celebrate the victorious conclusion of what he called ‘the greatest battle of all time’. A few days later he congratulated Mussolini on the entry of Italy into the war. On June 22 the Armistice with France was signed. At that moment Hitler stood at the zenith of his success and power. Western Europe was his and there remained no one there to crush except Great Britain, weakened by her losses on the Continent and without an effective ally. As usual Goebbels was turned on to prepare the way.
Battle of Britain
Victory Promised for 1941
On July 19, speaking in the Reichstag, Hitler ‘as a victor’ made his final appeal to ‘common sense’ before proceeding with his campaign against her. He spoke with an unusual sobriety, but there was no mistaking his threats. He had his answer from a united and determined Empire. On September 4 he reiterated his menaces. Then he unleashed the Luftwaffe and the Battle of Britain began in earnest. On October 4 after a month of it he was back at the Brenner to talk things over with Mussolini. In a few days his troops entered Rumania. A little later he went to the Spanish frontier for a discussion with General Franco with a view, it was thought, to tightening the blockade of Great Britain. Before the end of the month he was back with Mussolini in Florence. He seemed about this time to understand that Great Britain could not be conquered from the air and to think increasingly in terms of U-boats. He described himself as the ‘hardest man the German people have had for decades and, perhaps, for centuries’.
In his New Year’s proclamation to the army Hitler promised victory over Great Britain in 1941 and added that every Power which ate of democracy should die of it. He continued, for he always seemed uneasy on this score, to place the blame for unrestricted air warfare on Mr Churchill, and he kept on expressing his confidence in the U-boat. All that spring, indeed, he seemed particularly eager to encourage his followers. In April he invaded Yugoslavia and Greece and went to join his advancing armies. And all the time he kept hammering at Great Britain from the air and striking under water at her supply lines.
On June 3, 1941, there was another meeting of the dictators on the Brenner Pass, and it was suggested that there would be an immediate start in the organization of a Continental peace; but on June 22 he cast aside his mask and struck at Russia. Once again the Soviet Government became the ‘Jewish-Bolshevist clique’, and once again he was free to indulge his inherent hatred of the Slav. There were the usual lengthy and disingenuous explanations; but they were not calculated to deceive close readers of Mein Kampf. For at least five years, indeed, he had contemplated this particular volte face, for in 1934 he had taken Dr Rauschning into his confidence in regard to his intention if necessary to employ a Russian alliance as a trump card. In August he and Mussolini visited the Eastern Front. As a gage of affection he presented his brother-in-arms with a great astronomical observatory. After a long silence he spoke on October 4 at the opening meeting of the Winter Help Campaign and announced a ‘gigantic operation’ which would help to defeat Russia. A few days later he was boasting that he had smashed her.
The Supreme Command
Brauchitsch Dismissed
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour of December 7 most of the world was in the conflict. In announcing his declaration of war on the United States to the Reichstag Hitler abused President Roosevelt and said that America had planned to attack Germany in 1943. Just before Christmas he dismissed Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, his Commander-in-Chief, and took supreme command himself. A promise which he had made two months before to capture Moscow had not been fulfilled, and his own troops were retiring before the Red Army. He felt, perhaps, that he had to find a culprit for the failure and also to put heart into his own troops. He spent Christmas at his headquarters in Eastern Europe, not as previously, among his front line troops.
Hitler’s New Year message for 1942 was far less confident than that of 1941. ‘Let us all,’ he said, ‘pray to God that the year 1942 will bring a decision.’ There were rumours of disagreement with his generals and of pressure from the radicals within the Nazi ranks. In March he appointed Bormann to keep the party and the State authorities in close cooperation. He was making strenuous efforts to build up the home front, to increase the number of foreign workers in Germany, and to procure the forces for a spring offensive.
In April he received from the obedient Reichstag the title of ‘Supreme War Lord’ and measured the duration of the Reich by the mystical number of a thousand years. The tremendous eastward thrust of the summer of 1942 was delivered, reached the Volga, and went deep into the Caucasus. In September he claimed that Germany had vastly extended the living space of the people of Europe and called on his own to do their duty in the fourth winter of the war. On October 1, at the Sportspalast, he taunted, boasted, and promised the capture of Stalingrad. His effort to make good his word in the end cost Germany a tremendous loss of lives and material. He seemed, however, at this period to be more inclined to talk about the inability of the allies to defeat him than to prophesy a German victory. In November, after the allied landings in North Africa, his troops overran unoccupied France and seized Toulon.
A Chastened Man
In the New Year order of the day for 1943 he prophesied that the year would perhaps be difficult but not harder than the one before. He was certainly a much chastened Führer. The industrial effort of Germany was being seriously disrupted by air attack, and Russia was pressing perilously hard. On the tenth anniversary of his accession to power he did not speak, but entrusted Goebbels with a proclamation to read for him. His silence gave rise to rumours, some to the effect that he was giving up his command of the army, others that he was dead. On February 25, instead of speaking, he issued another proclamation to celebrate the birthday of the party. It added fresh fuel to the rumours.
On March 21 Hitler at last broke silence. The manner of his speech was lifeless and almost perfunctory. The matter, even for one as prone as he to endless reiteration, was all too familiar. His only news was that he had started to rearm not in 1936 but in 1933.
Mussolini’s Fall
The Italian Capitulation
Hitler, in his appeal on the anniversary of the Winter Help scheme on May 20, told the German people that the army had faced a crisis during the winter in Russia – a crisis, he said, which would have broken any other army in the world. Soon another crisis faced the Germans. On July 25 Mussolini fell from power, four days after it had been announced that Hitler and Mussolini had met in northern Italy where it was believed Mussolini had demanded more help from Germany in the defence of Italy. But Italy was not to be kept at Germany’s side, and on September 8 Marshal Badoglio, who had succeeded Mussolini, announced in a broadcast that his Government had requested an armistice from the allies. Hitler reacted in characteristic manner. He told the Germans that the collapse of Italy had been foreseen for a long time, not because Italy had not the necessary means of defending herself effectively, or because the necessary German support was not forthcoming but rather as a result of the failure or the absence of will of those elements in Italy who, to crown their systematic sabotage, had now brought about the capitulation. Though Hitler was able to claim this foreknowledge of events in Italy, it was clear from his speech, which was direct and effective, that he did not underestimate the seriousness of his new problem.
Hitler seemed still to have the collapse of Italy in mind when he emerged from his headquarters on November 8 to spend a few hours with the ‘Old Comrades’ of the National-Socialist Party at Munich. He spoke deliberately and forcefully. He was loudly cheered when he declared that the hour of retaliation would come. He said that everything was possible in the war but that he should lose his nerve, and he assured his audience that however long the war lasted Germany would never capitulate. She would not give in at the eleventh hour; she would go on fighting past 12 o’clock. At the beginning of his twelfth year in power – on January 20 – Hitler spoke of the danger from Russia. ‘There will be only one victor in this war, and that will be either Germany or Soviet Russia.’
In the late afternoon of July 20 it was announced that an attempt had been made on Hitler’s life. The attempt was a deep and well-laid plan by a group of generals and officers to end Hitler’s regime and the military command. General Beck, who was Chief of the General Staff until November, 1938, when he was dismissed, was declared to have been the chief conspirator. It was added that he was ‘no longer among the living’. On August 5 a purge of the Army was announced from Hitler’s headquarters. ‘At the request of the Army,’ the announcement said, Hitler had set up a court of honour to inquire into the antecedents of field marshals and generals and to find out who took part in the attempt on his life. It was disclosed that several officers had already been executed. Further executions were announced on August 8.
In a proclamation issued on November 12 as part of the annual commemoration of the Nazis who fell in the Putsch of 1923, Hitler declared that Germany was fighting for her life. Throughout the proclamation there were references to his own life and to its unimportance compared with the achievement of German aims. ‘If, in these days,’ Hitler said, ‘I have but few and rare words for you, the German people, that is only because I am working unremittingly towards the fulfilment of the tasks imposed upon me, tasks which must be fulfilled if we are to overcome fate.’ In the spring the gravity of Germany’s crisis became clear. The Russians reached the Oder; the British and Americans crossed the Rhine. On April 23 Marshal Stalin confirmed that the Russians had broken through the defences covering Berlin from the east. The battle for Berlin had begun, and Hitler, the man who brought ruin to so many of Europe’s cities, was, according to Hamburg radio, facing the enemy in his own capital, and there he came to his end.
General G. S. Patton
Brilliant American war leader
21 December 1945
General George S. Patton Junior, commander of the United States Fifteenth Army, whose death is announced on another page, was one of the most brilliant and successful leaders whom the war produced. It was he who led the American attack on Casablanca, forged his way through to effect a juncture with the Eighth Army near Gafsa, commanded the Seventh Army in Sicily, and then swept at the head of the Third from Brittany to Metz and onwards.
George Smith Patton, a cavalryman by training and instinct, became a tank expert. Brave, thrustful, and determined in action, he was a remarkable personality, who taught his men both to fear and to admire him. At the same time he was a serious and thoughtful soldier. He was an early advocate of the employment of armour in swiftly moving masses to exploit the break-through, and was finally able, with the help of American methods of mass-production, to realize his theories in practice. A great athlete in his earlier days, he had also a taste for philosophy, literature, and poetry. He was the son of a California pioneer, and was born at San Gabriel, in that State, on November 11, 1885. Soldiering was in his blood for he was the great-grandson of General Hugh Mercer, who served under Washington, and his grandfather died in the Civil War. It was natural, therefore, that he should find his way to the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he graduated in 1909. After great achievements on the track at West Point he was to be placed fifth in the cross-country run of the Modern Pentathlon (in the main a military event) at the Olympic Games of 1912. He was also to be known as a fine horseman and show rider and a crack pistol shot. He developed a flamboyant and emotional character for which his men found expression in the sobriquet ‘Old Blood-and-Guts’, but he was a born military leader.
Commissioned in the cavalry, Patton served first at Fort Sheridan, Illinois. A little later he went to France to study the sabre there and after his return served as Master of the Sword at the Mounted Service School at Fort Riley, Kansas. In 1916 he was aide-de-camp to General Pershing on the punitive expedition into Mexico. Then, when America entered the 1914–18 war he, by that time a captain, went on Pershing’s staff to France, where, in November, 1917, he was detailed to the Tank Corps and attended a course at the French Tank School and he was present when the British tanks were launched at Cambrai. After this he organized the American Tank Centre at Langres and later the 304th Brigade of the Tank Corps, which he commanded with much distinction in the St Mihiel offensive of September, 1918. Having been transferred with his brigade to the Meuse-Argonne sector he was wounded on the first day of the offensive; for his services he was awarded the dsc and dsm and at the time of the Armistice was a temporary colonel.
Returning to the United States in early 1919, Patton in 1920 was given command as a permanent captain of a squadron of the 3rd Cavalry at Fort Myer. Then he was detailed to the general staff corps and served for four years at the headquarters of the First Corps area at Boston and in the Hawaiian Islands. After four more years at Washington he was ordered to Fort Myer, where, as a permanent lieutenant-colonel, he remained on duty with the 3rd Cavalry until 1935.
Patton received command of the 2nd Armoured Division in October, 1940, with the temporary rank of brigadier-general, becoming in the next year commanding general of the First Armoured Corps. While he was thus employed Patton learned that they might be required in North Africa. He therefore set up a large training centre in California, where he built up a coordinated striking force. At last his opportunity came and as commander of the Western Task Force he and his men succeeded in their swift descent in occupying Casablanca. He himself had a narrow escape, for the landing craft which was to take him ashore was shattered. Later, when the American Second Corps were in difficulties at Kasserine Pass, Patton was sent to retrieve the situation and, with timely British aid, not only did so but carried it on to Gafsa, near which it made contact with the Eighth Army. Thus it was that he was chosen to command the Seventh Army in the invasion of Sicily. It was while he was visiting a field hospital in that island that, suspecting a soldier of being a malingerer, he struck him. The incident was reported and General Eisenhower made it clear that such conduct could not be tolerated; but Patton, who made generous apology, was far too valuable a man to lose when hard fighting lay ahead, and a little later he was nominated to the permanent rank of major-general.
In April, 1944, he arrived in the European theatre of operations, and he took command of the Third Army, which went into action in France on August 1. With it he cut off the Brittany peninsula, played his part in the trapping of the Germans and drove on to Paris. In October he had another of his narrow escapes when a heavy shell landed near him but failed to explode. Driving on relentlessly towards the German frontier, it fell to Patton to reconquer Metz, and in recognition of this victory he received the Bronze Star. His next outstanding performance was in late December when the Third Army drove in to relieve the First and helped to hold Bastogne. He was famous for the speed of his operations, but surpassing himself on this occasion, he surprised the Germans, and slowed down and eventually checked the advance of Rundstedt’s southern column. One of his most striking feats was when in the advance to the Rhine, he moved towards that river with his right flank on the Moselle. The Germans were apparently expecting him to force a crossing of the Rhine, but instead he suddenly crossed the Moselle near the confluence, taking the enemy ‘on the wrong foot’ and completely smashing up his array. In Germany his armoured divisions made the deepest advances of all, penetrating in the end into Czechoslovakia. A German staff officer, captured in the final stages, reported that his general had asked him each morning as a first question what was the latest news about Patton.
In April this year President Truman nominated Patton to be a full general. The Third Army occupied Bavaria last July, and in September Patton was ordered to appear before General Eisenhower to report on his stewardship of Bavaria. The summons was a result of Patton’s statements to a Press conference that Nazi politics are just like a Republican and Democratic election in the United States, and that he saw no need for the de-Nazification programme in the occupation of Germany. In October General Eisenhower announced that General Patton had been removed from the command of the Third Army and had been transferred to the command of the Fifteenth Army, a skeleton force.
Patton, in spite of many idiosyncrasies, which included the free use of a cavalryman’s tongue – ‘You have never lived until you have been bawled out by General Patton’ his men used to say – was a fundamentally serious soldier, offensively minded and bent on the single object of defeating his enemy. He affected a smart and sometimes striking turnout, and was insistent that those under him should also maintain a smart and soldierly appearance.
John Maynard Keynes
A great economist
21 April 1946
Lord Keynes, the great economist, died at Tilton, Firle, Sussex, yesterday from a heart attack.
By his death the country has lost a very great Englishman. He was a man of genius, who as a political economist had a worldwide influence on the thinking both of specialists and of the general public, and he was also master of a variety of other subjects which he pursued through life. He was a man of action, as well as of thought, who intervened on occasion with critical effect in the great affairs of state, and carried on efficiently a number of practical business activities which would have filled the life of an ordinary man. And he was not merely a prodigy of intellect; he had civic virtues – courage, steadfastness, and a humane outlook; he had private virtues –he was a good son, a devoted member of his college, a loyal and affectionate friend, and a lavish and unwearying helper of young men of promise.
The Right Hon. John Maynard Keynes, cb, Baron Keynes, of Tilton, Sussex, in the Peerage of the United Kingdom, was born on June 5, 1883, son of Dr John Neville Keynes, for many years Registrary of Cambridge University. His mother was Mayor of Cambridge as lately as 1932. He was brought up in the most intellectual society of Cambridge. He was in college at Eton, which he dearly loved, and he was proud of being nominated by the masters to be their representative governor later in life. He won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, in mathematics and classics, writing his essay on Héloïse and Abelard. He was President of the Cambridge Union, won the Members’ English Essay Prize for an essay on the political opinions of Burke, and was twelfth wrangler in the mathematical tripos. Although he did not take another tripos, he studied deeply in philosophy and economics and was influenced by such men as Sidgwick, Whitehead, W. E. Johnson, G. E. Moore, and, of course, Alfred Marshall.
In 1906 he passed second into the Civil Service, getting his worst mark in economics – ‘the examiners presumably knew less than I did’ – and chose the India Office, partly out of regard for John Morley and partly because in those days of a smooth working gold standard, the Indian currency was the livest monetary issue and had been the subject of Royal Commissions and classic controversies. During his two years there he was working on his fellowship dissertation on ‘Probability’ which gained him a prize fellowship at King’s. This did not oblige him to resign from the Civil Service, but Marshall was anxious to get him to Cambridge, and, as token, paid him £100 a year out of his private pocket to supplement the exiguous fellowship dividend – those were before the days of his bursarship of the college. Anyhow, his real heart lay in Cambridge. He lectured on money. He was a member of the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance (1913–14). He served in the Treasury (1915–19), went with the first Lord Reading’s mission to the United States, and was principal representative of the Treasury at the Paris Peace Conference and deputy for the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Supreme Economic Council. After his resignation he returned to teaching and to his bursar’s duties at King’s, but he always spent part of his time in London. He was a member of the Macmillan Committee on Finance and Industry, and parts of its classic report bear the stamp of his mind.
In 1940 he was made a member of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Consultative Council and played an important part in Treasury business. He was appointed a director of the Bank of England. In 1942 he was created Lord Keynes, of Tilton, and made some valuable contributions to debate in the Upper House. He became High Steward of Cambridge (Borough) in 1943. His continued interest in the arts was marked by his trusteeship of the National Gallery and chairmanship of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (cema). In 1925 he married Lydia Lopokova, renowned star of the Russian Imperial Ballet – ‘the best thing Maynard ever did’, according to the aged Mrs Alfred Marshall. She made a delightful home for him, and in the years after his serious heart attack in 1937 was a tireless nurse and vigilant guardian against the pressures of the outside world.
Lord Keynes’s genius was expressed in his important contributions to the fundamentals of economic science; in his power of winning public interest in the practical application of economics on critical occasions; in his English prose style – his description of the protagonists at the Versailles Conference, first fully published in his Essays in Biography (1933), is likely long to remain a classic – and, perhaps it should be added, in the brilliant wit, the wisdom, and the range of his private conversation, which would have made him a valued member of any intellectual salon or coterie in the great ages of polished discussion.
In practical affairs his activities in addition to his important public services were legion. As bursar of King’s he administered the college finances with unflagging attention to detail. By segregating a fund which could be invested outside trustee securities he greatly enlarged the resources of the college, and, unlike most college bursars, he was continually urging the college to spend more money on current needs. From 1912 he was editor of the Economic Journal, which grew and flourished under his guidance, and from 1921 to 1938 he was chairman of the National Mutual Life Assurance Society. He ran an investment company. He organised the Camargo Ballet. He built and opened the Arts Theatre at Cambridge and, having himself supervised and financed it during its period of teething troubles, he handed it over, when it was established as a paying concern, as a gift to ex-officio trustees drawn from the university and city. He became chairman of cema in 1942 and of the Arts Council in 1945. He was chairman of the Nation, and later, when the merger took place, of the New Statesman; but he had too scrupulous a regard for editorial freedom for that paper to be in any sense a reflection of his own opinions. He also did duty as a teacher of undergraduates at King’s College and played an important and inspiring part in the development of the Economics faculty at Cambridge. The better students saw him at his most brilliant in his Political Economy Club. He was interested in university business and his evidence before the Royal Commission (1919–22) was an important influence in causing it to recommend that the financial powers of the university should give it greater influence over the colleges.
To find an economist of comparable influence one would have to go back to Adam Smith. His early interest was primarily in money and foreign exchange, and there is an austere school of thought which regards his Indian Currency and Finance (1912) as his best book. After the 1914–18 war his interest in the relation between monetary deflation and trade depression led him on to reconsider the traditional theory about the broad economic forces which govern the total level of employment and activity in a society. He concluded that, to make a free system work at optimum capacity – and so provide ‘full employment’ – it would be necessary to have deliberate central control of the rate of interest and also, in certain cases, to stimulate capital development. These conclusions rest on a very subtle and intricate analysis of the working of the whole system, which is still being debated wherever economics is seriously studied.
Popularly he was supposed to have the vice of inconsistency. Serious students of his work are not inclined to endorse this estimate. His views changed in the sense that they developed. He would perceive that some particular theory had a wider application. He was always feeling his way to the larger synthesis. The new generalization grew out of the old. But he regarded words as private property which he would define and redefine. Unlike most professional theorists, he was very quick to adapt the application of theory to changes in the circumstances. Speed of thought was his characteristic in all things. In general conversation he loved to disturb complacency, and when, as so often, there were two sides to a question he would emphasize the one more disturbing to the company present.
His Treatise on Probability is a notable work of philosophy. Although using mathematical symbols freely, it does not seek to add to the mathematical theory of probability, but rather to explore the philosophical foundations on which that theory rests. Written clearly and without pedantry, it displays a vast erudition in the history of the subject which was reinforced by and reinforced his activities as a bibliophile.
Keynes had on certain occasions an appreciable influence on the course of history. His resignation from the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference and his publication a few months later of The Economic Consequences of the Peace had immediate and lasting effects on world opinion about the peace treaty. The propriety of his action became a matter of controversy. Opinions still differ on the merits of the treaty, but about the point with which he was particularly concerned, reparations, there is now general agreement with his view that the settlement – or lack of settlement – was ill-conceived and likely to do injury to the fabric of the world economy. His subsequent polemic against the gold standard did not prevent a return to it in 1925, but largely added to the ill repute of that system in wide circles since. It was mainly through his personal influence some years later that the Liberal Party adopted as their platform in the election of 1929 the proposal to conquer unemployment by a policy of public works and monetary expansion.
In two wars he had a footing in the British Treasury. The idea of deferred credits was contained in the pamphlet entitled ‘How to Pay for the War’, which he published in 1940. From 1943 he played a principal part in the discussions and negotiations with the United States to effect a transition from war to peace conditions of trade and finance which avoided the errors of the last peace, and to establish international organization which would avoid both the disastrous fluctuations and the restrictions which characterized the inter-war period. He was the leader of the British experts in the preparatory discussions of 1943 and gave his name to the first British contribution – ‘the Keynes Plan’ – to the proposals for establishing an international monetary authority. In July, 1944, he led the British delegation at the Monetary Conference of the United and Associated Nations at Bretton Woods, where an agreed plan was worked out. He was the dominant figure in the British delegation which for three months, from September to December, 1945, hammered out the terms of the American Loan Agreement, which he defended brilliantly in the House of Lords. He was appointed in February Governor of the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and in these capacities had just paid a further visit to the United States, whence he returned only two weeks ago. These continuous exertions to advance the cause of liberality and freedom in commercial and financial policies as a means to expand world trade and employment imposed an exceptionally heavy and prolonged strain which, in view of his severe illness just before the war, Lord Keynes was physically ill-fitted to bear.
His life-long activities as a book-collector were not interrupted, even by war. His great haul of unpublished Newton manuscripts on alchemy calls for mention. He identified an anonymous pamphlet entitled ‘An Abstract of a Treatise of Human Nature’, acquired by his brother, Mr Geoffrey Keynes, as being the authentic work of David Hume himself. He had it reprinted in 1938, and it will no doubt hereafter be eagerly studied by generations of philosophers. During the second war his hobby was to buy and then, unlike many bibliophiles, to read rare Elizabethan works. His interest in and encouragement of the arts meant much to him. From undergraduate days he had great friendships with writers and painters and, while his activities brought him in touch with many distinguished people of the academic world and public life, he was probably happiest with artistic people. At one period he was at the centre of the literary circle which used to be known as ‘Bloomsbury’ – Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, and their intimate friends. More than fame and worldly honours he valued the good esteem of this very cultivated and fastidious society.
And finally there was the man himself – radiant, brilliant, effervescent, gay, full of impish jokes. His entry into the room invariably raised the spirits of the company. He always seemed cheerful; his interests and projects were so many and his knowledge so deep that he gave the feeling that the world could not get seriously out of joint in the end while he was busy in it. He did not suffer fools gladly; he often put eminent persons to shame by making a devastating retort which left no loophole for face-saving. He could be rude. He did not expect others to bear malice and bore none himself in the little or great affairs of life. He had many rebuffs but did not recriminate. When his projects were rejected, often by mere obstructionists, he went straight ahead and produced some more projects. He was a shrewd judge of men and often plumbed the depths in his psychology. He was a humane man genuinely devoted to the cause of the common good.
Henry Ford
Motor manufacturer and idealist
7 April 1947
Mr Henry Ford, the motor-car manufacturer, who died suddenly at his home, Dearborn, near Detroit, on Monday night at the age of 83, was for many years one of the world’s outstanding individuals.
In his own sphere as a maker of machines Ford effected the greatest revolution of his day. It was due largely to him that the motor-car, instead of continuing for years to be a luxury for the rich, was brought speedily within the reach of comparatively humble folk. In the course of this accomplishment the process of mass production was carried to new and unheard-of lengths and a novel conception of its possibilities was created. The industrial empire which Ford’s imagination and drive established was in due course to yield him an immense fortune; but wealth was at no period his goal. He was in fact an emotional visionary, ignorant of much that quite ordinary people know, but with real good will for all and a power of handling the practical things of life which has never been surpassed. Thus for many years he was a continuing astonishment to his contemporaries, who, marvelling one day at his new designs for motor-cars or his new schemes for still vaster factories, would find him on the next with startling proposals for higher wages, shorter hours, or better methods of salesmanship, or, just as likely, attacking the bankers or preaching pacifism, bickering with his own Government, or at issue with organized labour. In all that he did or said moreover, he remained his independent and opinionative self, satisfied, as was indeed quite often true, that he was serving his age as successfully as he was supplying it with tractors, motor-cars, and aeroplanes.
Henry Ford was born on July 30, 1863, on a farm at Dearborn, Michigan, the son of William Ford, a prosperous farmer, who was of Irish stock. His mother was of mixed Dutch and Scandinavian origin and had been adopted by one Patrick O’Hearn. He went to the local school, where he seemed a normal boy, good but not exceptionally brilliant at his studies. At an early age, however, he disclosed a remarkable mechanical bent and an eager curiosity in regard to the working of machines. At 17 he became an apprentice in a machine shop in Detroit, but after nine months he felt he had learned all he could there and went on to another firm. After a time his employment failed to satisfy him and he returned to Dearborn, reconciled to it by the fact that Clara Bryant, whom he married in 1888, was a neighbour. Years of happiness followed: but he nevertheless continued to be haunted by an early ideal of a machine which would do the heavy work of a farm. In the country he kept a machine shop of his own and worked in summer for a harvester company by repairing their portable farm engines. However, the promptings of his genius became too strong for him and eventually he decided to go back to Detroit where in 1890 he secured a post with the Detroit Edison Electric Company.
Ford had realized in his earlier Detroit days that the public were more interested in road vehicles than in tractors; but scheme as he would the weight of a steam engine had thwarted him. Then in an English paper, the World of Science, he had read of a ‘silent gas engine’ which used gas for fuel. A little later he had been asked to repair one of these Otto engines. Convinced by his study of it that its principles were sound, he had in 1887 built his first gas engine, and had kept on building more. After he returned to Detroit, however, he worked in his spare time on his first ‘gasoline buggy’, and in 1893 it was ready for public trial, at which it attained a speed of 25 miles an hour. In 1896 he began work on a second car. In 1899 he resigned his position and organized a local company in which, holding one sixth of the stock, he became chief engineer. The company made cars on the model of his first one. Ford, whose governing idea was to provide automobiles for the masses, was soon in disagreement with his associates, who thought chiefly of profits, and in 1902 he resigned, ‘determined never again to put myself under orders’. At that time the public interest was centred on racing cars and Ford determined to enter the racing field. He proved astonishingly successful with some racing machines of his design and thus drew attention to his own car. In 1903, therefore, he was able to found the Ford Motor Company with 12 shareholders and a capital of $100,000, of which $20,000 was put into the company, the only cash investment in its long career which did not come from earnings. In 1908 Ford himself became the controlling owner and president, and in 1924 he and his son, Edsel, were to acquire all the stock. Ford had long had his own ideas about quantity production, and with control in his own hands was able to put them into effect. Sales began to rise and his products to enter foreign markets. His success in the Scottish Reliability Trials of 1905 had already helped him considerably in establishing himself in Great Britain. He also developed a new agency policy which included an agreement to maintain service stations. The car itself had, moreover, been steadily improving, and in 1908 and 1909 his famous model ‘T’ was put on sale. Standardization became thenceforward his settled policy, and the ‘assembly line’ was devised; but in this, as in all else, his ruling notion was service to the ordinary man.
In 1915 Ford was able to turn his attention to his first love, the farm tractor. The European war seemed to him to impose a delay in placing it on the market: but victory depended upon British agriculture making good the food shortage which the German submarines were causing, and Ford sent his Fordson tractor to the rescue. He also rendered notable service by fulfilling his undertaking to build Eagle submarine chasers by the same methods he employed in regard to his cars. From war, however, he refused to profit. At this period indeed the magician in production stood in strange contrast to the unrealistic pacifist who as leader of a group of cranks went in the Peace Ship to Scandinavia in order to have the ‘boys out of the trenches by Christmas, never to return’. It was the foolishness of a child, but the intention was entirely sincere. Ford had his difficulties and in the slump of 1920 faced a serious financial situation: but he found his own way out and his vast undertaking went on from strength to strength. In 1924 its annual production reached the towering peak of 2,000,000 cars, trucks, and tractors. His achievements were, moreover, by no means in the material sphere alone. Of humble origin himself he had a deep feeling for his employees, and worked out rough and ready principles in regard to labour which he consistently applied. One was to pay the highest possible wages, and in this he was a true reformer; another to accept applicants for work without questions or references. Ex-prisoners were welcomed: but once a would-be employee was accepted he came under a rigid discipline which followed him even into his home. For years Ford would have nothing to do with unions. His passion for the perfect organization of production led him indeed into an effort to mechanize the human material he employed. It was, however, a deterrent to many independent-minded Americans and numbers of his workers were drawn from recent emigrants to the United States.
In 1918 Ford, who was a supporter of President Wilson, had run unsuccessfully for the Senate and in 1923 there was some talk – it caused alarm among the professional politicians – that he would run for the Presidency, and a movement to support him was started; but before long he himself announced his refusal to stand against Mr Coolidge. In the next year his acquisition of the Dagenham site in addition to his Trafford Park and Cork works was announced. It was part of a post-war policy of expansion, and between 1931 and 1946 over 1,000,000 vehicles were manufactured at the Dagenham factory alone. He then went into civil aviation, opened his company’s private air service, and soon afterwards his all-metal monoplanes were on sale. It was the beginning of great developments. At this period the Press published many stories of his fabulous wealth, and his spectacular successes and good treatment of his workers were widely discussed, and Ford himself wrote three books concerning his own life’s work and ideals – My Life and Work, Today and Tomorrow, and Moving Forward. In 1927 ‘Model T’ was superseded and over 350,000 advance orders were received for his new car. In April, 1931, his 20,000,000th car came off the assembly line, but in that year also the company, suffering like all others from the depression, lost £10,000,000.
The years immediately before the 1939–45 war saw a revival in the Ford fortunes and fresh expansions of plant, and as the war developed his company did excellent work; but the production of his great plant at Willow Run scarcely lived up to his earlier estimates of his own capacity as a producer. In 1943 Ford lost his only child and close associate, Edsel Bryant Ford, who for many years had played a leading part in all his undertakings, and, although nearly 80, himself resumed the presidency of his company. He resigned, for the second time, in 1945, and on his nomination his grandson, Henry Ford ii, was elected in his place. Henry Ford ii, who was born in September, 1917, had been released from the United States Navy in 1943 to direct war production at the Ford Motor Company, of which he was appointed executive vice-president in 1944.
Mahatma Gandhi
Apostle of independence
30 January 1948
Mr Gandhi, who was assassinated in Delhi yesterday afternoon, was the most influential figure India has produced for generations. He set out to promote national consciousness, and to defend the ancient Indian ideals of poverty and simplicity against the inroads of modern industrialism, though this part of his teaching was seldom heard in his later years. He judged all activities, whether of the State or of the individual, by their conformity to the doctrine of non-violence, which he held to be the panacea of all human ills, political, social, and economic. His day of triumph when British authority was voluntarily withdrawn was turned to profound sorrow, for communal strife and bloodshed, instead of ending as he had confidently hoped, were greatly intensified, and the two new Dominions of India and Pakistan were brought to the verge of war. To efforts to replace this fratricidal strife by Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh harmony and good will he devoted the last months of his long life.
In all parts of the world many regarded the ‘Mahatma’ (‘great soul’) as both a great moral teacher and a great Indian patriot. Others held him to be the victim of a naive self-delusion which blinded him to the race-hatred, disorder, and bloodshed which his ‘non-violent’ campaigns against British authority invariably provoked. But few critics have questioned the sincerity of his repudiation of force. A whole-hearted pacifist, he believed he had a mission not to India only but to all the world. To his own co-religionists he was certainly a ‘saint’. His increasing asceticism, finally marked by a complete indifference to the comforts of life (though these were showered upon him by wealthy supporters), won him a reverence that bordered upon adoration; the popular mind long credited him with powers little short of miraculous; his gospel of the liberation of India from British rule early won the enthusiastic support of most of the younger school of Hindu politicians, and did much to wean them from the cult of anarchy; his defence of Hindu faith and culture against western ‘materialism’ gave him the adhesion of multitudes of the orthodox.
A convinced Hindu, but widely read in other faiths and a great admirer of the Christian ideal, he was a powerful advocate of social reform. The poverty of the masses and his desire for India to return to the simplicities of the past led him to proclaim the need for the people, rich and poor alike, to spin by hand their own cotton thread and to weave and wear their own hand-made cotton cloth. Wherever he went his charka (spinning wheel) went with him, and as he talked to those who sought him daily he spun his cloth.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869, at Porbandar, the capital of a small State in Kathiawar, Western India, where his father, though belonging only to the socially obscure Bania (moneylending) section of Hindus, was the Dewan. He was married when only 13 to a child of the same age, but from 1906 was a Brahmacharya – that is, a celibate within the marriage state for the purpose of realizing God. In early life he admired Western ways, and in this period he read law at the Inner Temple and was called to the Bar. He was meticulous in wearing the top hat and frock coat of the ‘town kit’ of the period. Some years later on, after conviction in India, he was disbarred. All his life he remained a strict vegetarian and total abstainer. In 1893 he went from Bombay to South Africa in connection with an Indian legal case of some complexity, and remained to oppose discriminatory legislation against Indians, and his stay lasted for 21 years. Gandhi was admitted an advocate of the Supreme Court. When the South African war broke out he organized an Indian Ambulance Corps, 1,000 strong, which often worked under heavy fire. Again, in 1906, on the outbreak of the Zulu rebellion, he formed a stretcher-bearer corps.
After the passage of an Act in 1913 restricting Indian migration between the different Provinces of the Union, some 3,000 Indians with Gandhi at their head, crossed the border from Natal into the Transvaal in order to court arrest. Many, including the leader, his wife, and one of his sons, were imprisoned. In 1914 Gandhi returned to India by way of London, and he landed here a few days before the outbreak of the 1914–18 War. He was instrumental in organizing from among the Indian students a volunteer ambulance corps, which rendered good service. In Western India he rapidly became the champion of all whom he regarded as weak and oppressed, and was associated with the whirlwind movement for Home Rule resulting from the activities of Annie Besant, but at the War Conference convened by the Viceroy at Delhi in the spring of 1918 he supported ‘with all his heart’ a resolution of support of the war effort.
In 1919, in pursuance of what he called satyagraha, or ‘truth-seeking’, he issued a pledge of refusal to obey the Rowlatt Acts, ‘and such other laws as the committee to be hereafter appointed may think fit’. There followed the serious disturbances of April, 1919, both at Ahmedabad, Gandhi’s home, and in the Punjab, notably at Amritsar. The loss of life thus caused led Gandhi to admit that he had made a blunder of ‘Himalayan’ dimensions. But from this time began his unquestioned mastery over the Congress Party organization. To him that party was India; and as its spokesman he was India’s chosen mouthpiece.
In the spring of 1920 Gandhi considered that India was spiritually prepared to undertake a further campaign of passive resistance without risk of lapse into violence. He started a movement of ‘non-violent non-cooperation’, declaring it would be maintained until the claims of the Khilafat movement – started by Indian Muslims to obtain alleviation of the harsh peace terms imposed on Turkey after the 1914–18 war – were conceded, and until public servants alleged to be guilty of ‘martial law excesses’ in the Punjab were adequately punished. He promised swaraj, meaning complete self-government without the aid of the British, within a year. On paper at least he collected within a few months a crore of rupees (£750,000) for swaraj. Gandhi’s open letter to the Viceroy (the first Lord Reading) dated February 9, 1922, giving him seven days in which to announce a change of policy, had scarcely been dispatched when at Chauri-Chaura, in the Gorakhpur district, United Provinces, a number of constables were attacked in their thana and burnt to death. He called a halt to the civil disobedience movement and imposed upon himself a five days’ fast. On March 10, 1922, he was arrested, and was later tried for conspiracy. Gandhi pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six years’ simple imprisonment, but was released in January, 1924, after an operation in gaol for appendicitis.
Early in 1929 Gandhi shared responsibility for a resolution of conditional acceptance of the proposed Round Table Conference passed at a meeting of political leaders. But on March 12, 1930, Gandhi, with 80 volunteers, began a march of 200 miles on foot from his ashram, near Ahmedabad, to Dandi, a village on the sea coast in the Surat district, for the purpose of collecting salt, and thereby defying the law. On May 5 he was arrested and interned at Yeravda Gaol, near Poona, under a Bombay Regulation of 1827. The economic effects of the second era of civil disobedience were much more serious than those of the first, owing in large measure to the intensity of the boycott.
The Round Table Conference met in London in the autumn of 1930. Lord Irwin (now Lord Halifax) released the Congress leaders to facilitate discussions and had a number of interviews with Gandhi. These led in March, 1931, to the signature of the famous Irwin-Gandhi Pact.
Gandhi came to London in the late summer as the sole delegate of the Congress at the Round Table Conference. The expectation formed in many quarters here of seeing a man of commanding gifts was not fulfilled. He had no mastery of detail: constitutional problems did not interest him. He was no orator; his speeches were made seated and delivered slowly in low, level tones, which did not vary whatever his theme might be. His interventions in discussion were mainly propagandist, and often had little real connection with the matter in hand. He made no real constructive contribution to the work of the Conference. Meantime the pact was breaking down, and on Gandhi’s return to Bombay a renewed campaign of civil disobedience was initiated by the Congress under his chairmanship. Once more he was arrested, on January 4, 1932, and detained in Yeravda Gaol.
When the British Government’s communal award was published he intimated to the Prime Minister (Mr Ramsay MacDonald) that he would starve himself to death unless the part of the award giving separate seats to the depressed classes (which in his view cut them off from the Hindu community) were withdrawn or suspended. The fast began on September 20, 1932, but some political leaders of the two communities negotiated a compromise, approved by the Mahatma and accepted by Government. Gandhi accordingly broke his fast on the seventh day. There was great diversity of opinion, in Hindu ranks particularly, on Gandhi’s advocacy of legislation to secure admission of the depressed classes to the temples of higher caste folk. At the end of April, 1933, he announced his intention in this connection to fast for 21 days, and when the ordeal began on May 8 he was unconditionally released. Soon after Gandhi arranged to lead another civil disobedience ‘march’. On the eve of the march, July 31, he was arrested, and a few days later was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment.
Dissatisfied with the facilities given to him in prison to work for the Harijans (his name for the depressed classes), he decided once more to fast, and after a week of abstinence from food he was released purely for medical reasons on August 23. The civil disobedience movement was waning, and in April, 1934, Congress adopted his advice to suspend it. But his personal contact, and that of Congress leaders generally, with the Viceroy and the Governors was not resumed until, in the summer of 1937, the Viceroy (Lord Linlithgow) took the initiative in bringing the long estrangement to an end by inviting Gandhi to meet him at Delhi.
In the first general election for the Provincial Parliaments under the Act of 1935 the widespread Congress organization scored striking successes, and its candidates obtained majorities in six of the 11 Provinces of British India. When provincial autonomy was introduced in April, 1937, and the question of acceptance or non-acceptance of office by the Congress Party was under constant discussion, Gandhi casually admitted to a distinguished and sympathetic British public man that he had not read the India Act of 1935, for his entourage and advisers had assured him that it gave nothing of real worth to India. Persuaded by his visitor to repair the omission, he admitted when they next met that he had been mistaken and that the Act marked a very substantial advance. Thereupon he threw his immense weight against Pandit Nehru’s policy of abstention and of course carried the day. Congress Ministries were formed, after a few months of the familiar attempts at bargaining with Government in which the Mahatma was such an adept. Gandhi then retired with his considerable entourage to a remote village near Wardha, in the Central Provinces, and it became known as Sevagram (the village of service). Gandhi showed an unexpected gift for realism by encouraging Ministers in paths of administrative orthodoxy, while pressing forward his ideals, such as a policy of prohibition by instalments, and what is known as the Wardha plan of primary education.
Though he had upheld for years a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ that the Congress would not come between the Princes and their subjects, he did intervene early in March, 1939, in Rajkote, a small Kathiawar State, on the ground that the Thakore Saheb had gone back on his word as to constitutional advances. He issued a 24 hours’ ultimatum, and as it was not accepted he began a ‘fast unto death’, but the Viceroy (Lord Linlithgow) suggested a solution of the immediate question, and Gandhi abandoned his fast at the beginning of the fifth day. The Mahatma’s hold on Nationalist reverence was increased, rather than diminished, by his public apology and expression of contrition for having resorted to a coercive method not consistent with his non-violent principles. Yet he was to resort to it on future occasions. He was not free from ‘the last infirmity of noble minds’, and was skilful in exhibitionism.
When war broke out in September, 1939, it seemed for a short time that Gandhi would invite the Congress Party to give moral support to the nations seeking to prevent, though by armed force, the enslavement of the world by brutal aggressors. But he became convinced that only a ‘free India’ could give effective moral support to Britain; and his demand for ‘complete independence’ became more and more urgent. When Japan struck down Malaya and invaded Burma Gandhi became seriously perturbed at the defence measures which the Government of India initiated. In the spring of 1942, when the discussions between Sir Stafford Cripps (then Lord Privy Seal in Mr Churchill’s Government) and the party leaders had reached a hopeful stage, Gandhi advised against settlement and the negotiations with the Congress leaders broke down. The war situation was then unfavourable, and Gandhi was commonly alleged to have talked contemptuously of the draft Declaration whereby India was to secure complete self-government after the war as a ‘post-dated cheque on a crashing bank’. He demanded that the British should ‘quit India’ (a slogan which had wide currency), that the Indian Army should be disbanded, and that Japan should be free to come to the country and arrange terms with a non-resisting people.
In August, 1942, he concurred in the decision to strike the blow of mass obstruction against the war effort – ‘open rebellion’, as he calmly called it. This led to his arrest and that of other Congress leaders and to widespread disorder and bloodshed. Gandhi was interned in the Aga Khan’s palace at Poona and was barred from political contacts, though he was allowed the companionship of Mrs Gandhi, who died in February, 1944. Gandhi continued in detention until May 6, 1944, when he was released unconditionally on medical grounds. Later all the leaders were released to share in the prolonged discussions arising from attempts to bring an end to the increasing strife between Hindus and Muslims over the Pakistan issue.
A long prepared and carefully staged series of discussions between the Mahatma and Mr Jinnah, at the house of the latter in Bombay, yielded no tangible result, for Mr Gandhi stated that he spoke only for himself and had no commission from the working committee of the Congress. Indeed, for many years he had withdrawn from actual membership of the party, only to dominate it from without. The explosive possibilities of the situation developed with the end of the war. The historic Cabinet Mission, headed by Lord Pethick-Lawrence, went out in the spring of 1946 and spent three anxious months of incessant conference and negotiation in the heat at Delhi. The Mahatma took a large share in the negotiations chiefly behind the scenes, and in his inscrutable way was at times helpful and at times the reverse. When at long last and amid most serious outbreaks of communal violence the short-term and long-term plans of the Cabinet Mission led to the formation at Delhi of an interim National Government, with Mr Nehru as Vice-President of the Council, Gandhi remained outside the Cabinet, much to the relief of its members. But no major decision could be taken either at the Centre or in the Provincial Congress Governments without full consideration of the views and wishes of the Mahatma, the idol of the Hindu masses.
The announcement made by Mr Attlee in February, 1947, that complete British withdrawal would not be later than June, 1948, had the effect of accentuating the conflict between the two main parties, and the subsequent antedating of the time limit and decision to set up two Dominions, India and Pakistan, quickened savage outbreaks in the Punjab between Hindu and Sikh on the one side and Muslims on the other. Moreover, when Independence Day came the sanguinary unrest in Calcutta led to fears that the division of Bengal would have untoward consequences. ‘Bapu’, who had been travelling from place to place in Eastern Bengal and in Bihar preaching brotherhood, went to Calcutta, and at the beginning of September undertook another fast not to be ended until normal conditions were restored. The party leaders exerted themselves in exhortations to the people, and on the fourth day the Mahatma was able to end his ordeal. Thus he succeeded where armed force had failed. The miracle encouraged him to stage in Delhi early this month his fifteenth fast in the effort to bring harmony between India and Pakistan. He had shown himself acutely conscious that in the lust for communal reprisals his word did not carry the weight of former years. The fast began as the Security Council at Lake Success was considering the controversy on Kashmir and related problems between the two Dominions. One effect of the fast and leading to its cessation on the fifth day was the decision pressed on the Cabinet at New Delhi by the Mahatma no longer to withhold from the Karachi Government payment of the whole of the £41m, due from the undivided cash balances at the time of the British withdrawal.
George Orwell
Criticism and allegory
21 January 1950
Mr George Orwell, a writer of acute and penetrating temper and of conspicuous honesty of mind, died on Friday in hospital in London at the age of 46. He had been a sick man for a considerable time.
Though he made his widest appeal in the form of fiction, Orwell had a critical rather than imaginative endowment of mind and he has left a large number of finely executed essays. In a less troubled, less revolutionary period of history he might perhaps have discovered within himself a richer and more creative power of imagination, a deeper philosophy of acceptance. As it was he was essentially the analyst, by turns indignant, satirical, and prophetic, of an order of life and society in rapid dissolution. The analysis is presented, to a large extent, in autobiographical terms; Orwell, it might fairly be said, lived his convictions. Much of his early work is a direct transcription of personal experience, while the later volumes record, in expository or allegorical form, the progressive phases of his disenchantment with current social and political ideals. The death of so searching and sincere a writer is a very real loss.
George Orwell, which was the name adopted by Eric Arthur Blair, was born in India in 1903 of a Scottish family, the son of Mr R. W. Blair, who served in the opium department of the Government of Bengal. He was a King’s Scholar at Eton, which he left in 1921, and then, at the persuasion of his father, entered the Imperial Police in Burma, where he remained for five years. After that he was, by turns, dish-washer, schoolmaster, and book-seller’s assistant. The name he adopted comes from the river Orwell – his parents were settled at Southwold, in Suffolk, at the time he decided upon it. Orwell preferred to suppress his earlier novels. Down and Out in Paris and London, his first book, published in 1933, is a plain, observant and, for the most part, dispassionate piece of reporting, which achieves without faltering precisely what it sets out to do. Orwell had strived in a Paris slum and in England had tramped from one casual ward to another, and the lessons of this first-hand acquaintance with poverty and destitution were never afterwards lost on him. Although in time he grew fearful of a theoretical egalitarianism, he made no bones about the primary need of securing social justice. In The Road to Wigan Pier, which appeared in 1937, he described the lives of those on unemployment pay or public assistance and made his own contribution to Socialist propaganda.
Next year he brought out his Homage to Catalonia, an outspoken and at times impassioned account of his experience and observation as a volunteer on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war. He had joined not the International Brigade but the militia organized by the small Catalan party predominantly syndicalist or anarcho-syndicalist in temper – known as poum. He was wounded during the fighting round Huesca. With deepening anxiety and embitterment he had noted the fanaticism and ruthlessness of Communist attempts to secure at all costs – even at the cost of probable defeat – political ascendancy over the Republican forces. It was from this point that his left-wing convictions underwent the transformation that was eventually to be projected in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
First, however, a few months before the outbreak of war in 1939, he published Coming up for Air, the book which is his nearest approach to a novel proper. It was not his first published essay in fiction. In Burmese Days, published five years earlier, he had written with notable insight and justice of the administrative problems of the British in Burma and of the conflict of the white and native peoples, though the personal story tacked onto this treatment of his subject was weak and rather lifeless. The book suggested clearly enough, indeed, that Orwell was something other than a novelist. Yet in Coming up for Air, for all that it sought to present, in a picture of the world before 1914, a warning of the totalitarian shape of things to come, he recaptures the atmosphere of childhood with a degree of truth and tenderness that is deeply affecting. Here was the creative touch one sought in vain in the later books.
Rejected for the Army on medical grounds, Orwell in 1940 became a sergeant in the Home Guard. He wrote spasmodically rather than steadily during the war years. His picture of Britain at war, published in 1941 under the title The Lion and the Unicorn, was a brave attempt to determine the relationship between Socialism and the English genius. A volume consisting of three long essays, Inside the Whale, one of which was the entertaining, if occasionally somewhat wrongheaded, study of boys’ popular weeklies, preceded the appearance in 1945 of Animal Farm. In the guise of a fairy-tale Orwell here produced a blistering and most amusing satire on the totalitarian tyranny, as he saw it, that in Soviet Russia masqueraded as the classless society. The book won wide and deservedly admiring notice. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, published early last year, the premonition of the totalitarian wrath to come had developed into a sense of fatalistic horror. In Orwell’s vision of a not too remote future in Airstrip One, the new name for Britain in a wholly totalitarian world, men had been conditioned to deny the possibility of human freedom and to will their subservience to an omnipotent ruling hierarchy. The book was a brave enough performance, though it fell a good way short of the highest achievement in its kind.
Orwell married in 1933 Miss Eileen O’Shaughnessy. She died in 1945 after an operation, and last year he married Miss Sonia Brownell, assistant editor of Horizon.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophy of language
29 April 1951
Dr Ludwig Wittgenstein, who died in his sixty-second year on Sunday at Cambridge, was a philosopher with a reputation as an intellectual innovator on the highest level. His earlier and later work formed the points of origin of two schools of philosophy, both of which he himself disowned.
He came from a well-known Austrian family (his ancestors included the Prince Wittgenstein who fought against Napoleon), and he was brought up in Vienna. After studying engineering at Manchester he went to Cambridge in 1912 as an ‘advanced student’ to study under Bertrand (now Lord) Russell. At the outbreak of war in 1914 he returned to Austria to serve with the Austrian Army until he was taken prisoner in 1918 in the Italian campaign. While thus serving he completed a manuscript, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus which, appearing in 1921 in German in the last number of Ostwald’s Annalen der Naturphilosophie and in English in book form in 1922, at once made for its author an international reputation.
Throughout his life Wittgenstein showed the characteristics of a religious contemplative of the hermit type. Thus he alternated between periods of great prominence in academic life and periods of extreme abnegation and retirement, and in 1922 he renounced his fortune and took a post as a schoolmaster in a mountain village near Wiener Neustadt. Here he stayed until 1928. He maintained, however, contacts with Vienna, where he went in the school holidays and where, through his acquaintance with the Professor of Philosophy, Moritz Schlick, he originated a school of philosophy – the famous Vienna Circle, later known as the logical positivists.
Quite apart from the intrinsic merit of his ideas, Wittgenstein’s historical importance in this period consists in the fact that through him the work of a long series of formal logicians, culminating in Russell, became known to the inheritors of an equally long tradition of philosophy of science, culminating in Mach (Schlick’s predecessor in his chair). The intellectual results of this fusion were such that, a decade later, they spread all over the philosophic world. By this time, however, Wittgenstein was reinstalled in Cambridge, having arrived there for a short visit in 1929. Trinity College elected him to a five-year research fellowship in 1930, and he also started lecturing. Apart from one paper in 1929, he published nothing in this period; but two sets of notes, dictated to groups of pupils and known respectively as The Blue Book and The Brown Book, were widely circulated, contrary to Wittgenstein’s wishes. Again, it is not too much to say that he inaugurated a new ‘school’, or perhaps rather a new method in philosophy - namely, that of which John Wisdom and Gilbert Ryle are the best known exponents, and which is often referred to as ‘the philosophy of ordinary language’. The point of view put forward in these notes diverges widely from that of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, though it is not difficult to see how the second grew out of the first. The way had been prepared for this new philosophical departure by the emphasis placed by G. E. Moore, who was at Cambridge, on ‘the language of common sense’.
In 1936 Wittgenstein left Cambridge and went to Norway, where it is said that he lived in a mountain hut, and from which he returned in 1938, after the fall of Vienna. In 1939 he succeeded G. E. Moore in the Cambridge Chair of Philosophy, and was also naturalized as a British citizen. He continued lecturing for a time, but in 1943 he went to work, first as a porter in a London hospital and afterwards as a research assistant. In 1945 he returned, but found that his teaching duties prevented him from doing creative writing, and in 1947 he resigned from his chair. The second book, however, which he had sacrificed so much to complete and publish (in order, as he said, to show how very wrong the Tractatus was), was not destined to appear. In 1949 he became seriously ill, of a disease from which he knew there could be no great hope of recovery, and retired from active life. He formed round him a small group of philosophers who were also his friends, with whom he worked and discussed to the last.
We are still too close to Wittgenstein to form a just estimate of his work. His Tractatus is a logical poem, consisting as it does of the development of a gigantic metaphor, constructed round two senses of ‘language’. It is thus an exceptionally difficult book to interpret with any reliability. His sets of notes, and his incomplete manuscript, also show, in the opinion of all who have read them, signs of indubitable genius; but Wittgenstein himself took all the steps in his power to prevent their being circulated on the ground that, if they were, they would be bound to be misunderstood. What is beyond doubt is that, like Descartes in one way, like Locke in another, he started a worldwide philosophical trend. In so far as this can be described in one sentence, it consists in following up the idea that thinking consists in using a language. Thus thought, which it had been easy to conceive of as a private, indefinable, amorphous entity, becomes the manipulation of some symbolism; something public, something which can be ‘nailed down’ and to which the techniques of formal logic can be applied.
Arnold Schoenberg
Beyond chromaticism
13 July 1951
Professor Arnold Schoenberg, who died on Friday at his home at Los Angeles at the age of 76, was probably the most discussed musician of the twentieth century.
His system of atonality, or, as he preferred to call it, twelve-tone music, though reached by process of evolution from chromaticism, was the most revolutionary movement in musical history since Monteverde in the seventeenth century. It is so subversive of established ways of thought that its general adoption is improbable in the extreme, but it has provided a ferment of far-reaching influence on modern music. In this respect, as in some others, Schoenberg is like Stravinsky; between 1910 and 1930 these two men were the outstanding figures in the history of modern music. Curiously enough, both suffered the same fate. At the height of his fame each was forced to leave his country and to adjust himself to new conditions.
Schoenberg was born in Vienna on September 13, 1874. At the age of eight he learnt to play the violin and composed short violin duets for his lessons. Later on he taught himself the cello and composed a string quartet. For several years he worked without any outside help or supervision. Alexander von Zemlinsky (whose daughter he married in 1901), a composer of whom Brahms had a very high opinion, recognized his outstanding talent, gave him his first instruction in composition and brought him into the musical circles of Vienna. Schoenberg’s earliest works were written in the style of Brahms, whose technique he admired, and later set as a model to his pupils when he was teaching composition himself.
The first work which Schoenberg made known to the musical world was a string sextet, Verklärte Nacht. It was an attempt to apply the symphonic form of a tone poem to chamber music. To the same period belong the Gurrelieder, a cantata for solo voices, chorus and orchestra written in 1900, a tone poem, Pelleas and Melisande, and a string quartet in D minor. A new development began with the Chamber-Symphony in E, opus 9, in 1906. Schoenberg’s style became concise, his harmonies more daring. It was these works which first roused the opposition of conservative musicians and the admiration of a younger generation who were trying to find new ways of expression. This aim was achieved in the three piano pieces, opus 11, 1909, written in the so-called ‘atonal style’ which aroused much discussion among musicians all over the world. At this time Schoenberg left Vienna and settled in Berlin. Here he wrote Pierrot Lunaire, a cycle of poems recited in a kind of song-speech accompanied by instruments. This work established Schoenberg’s fame as one of the leading modern composers. In 1913 he returned to Vienna to teach composition, and, after the end of the 1914–18 war, he founded a society for the performance of modern music. He embodied his technical principles in the Treatise on Harmony, begun in the early years of the century and since revised, but it is only recently in a volume of essays, Style and Idea, that he has discussed their aesthetic basis.
The years between 1920 and 1925 were the most prosperous in Schoenberg’s life. His works were performed regularly at the festivals of the International Music Society; his principal choral work, the Gurrelieder, aroused general admiration at a performance in his honour at the Vienna State Opera, and most conductors included his works in their programmes. He had now gained an international reputation. When Busoni died in 1924 in Berlin, Schoenberg succeeded him as a member of the Academy of the Arts, a position which should have given him financial independence for the rest of his life. After Hitler came to power, however, in 1933, he lost his position and accepted an offer from the Malkin Conservatory, Boston. He felt the change as a great shock. His health suffered from the eastern winter and he soon moved to Los Angeles, where he was appointed professor of music in the University of Southern California. Here he wrote a suite for string orchestra (1934), the fourth string quartet (1938), a violin concerto, a piano concerto, and the Ode to Napoleon. Schoenberg retired from his university post in 1944 at the age of 70, to spend the rest of his life in composing and teaching. He completed the opera Moses and Aaron, on which he had been working for many years, not long before he died. He had the satisfaction of seeing a revival of his works after the defeat of the Nazi regime and the re-establishment of his fame as one of the most inspiring innovators of contemporary music. His wife died in 1923 and he is survived by a son and a daughter.
Joseph Stalin
Dictator of Russia for 29 years
5 March 1953
The death of Stalin, like the death of Lenin 29 years ago, marks an epoch in Russian history. Rarely have two successive rulers of a great country responded so absolutely to its changing needs and piloted it so successfully through periods of crisis. Lenin was at the helm through five years of revolution, civil war, and precarious recovery. Stalin, coming to power in the aftermath of revolution, took up the task of organizing and disciplining the revolutionary state, and putting into execution the revolutionary programmes of planned industry and collectivized agriculture. He thus equipped the country to meet the gravest external peril which had threatened it since Napoleon, and brought it triumphantly through a four years’ ordeal of invasion and devastation. The characters of the two men present a contrast which corresponds to the different tasks confronting them. Lenin was an original thinker, an idealist, a superb revolutionary agitator. Stalin neither possessed, nor required, these qualities. He was essentially an administrator, an organizer and a politician. Both were ruthless in the pursuit of policies which they regarded as vital to the cause they had at heart. But Stalin appeared to lack a certain element of humanity which Lenin generally maintained in personal relations, though allied statesmen who dealt with him during the war were unanimous in finding him approachable, sympathetic, and readily disposed to moderate the intransigence of his subordinates. As the war drew to its close Stalin, whether for reasons of health or for reasons of policy, became less and less accessible to representatives of the western Powers and so the rift began which was to widen in the counsels of the United Nations and in the policies towards the west of Russia’s satellites, until the open warfare broke out in Korea which still festers and poisons the whole international scene.
A Man of Authority
Public Enthusiasm
In Russia and the adjacent Communist States Marshal Stalin at the time of his death occupied a position of personal eminence almost without parallel in the history of the world. His rare public appearances provoked scenes of tremendous enthusiasm; his speeches and writings on any subject – linguistics, the art of war, biology and history, as well as on the theory of Communism – were treated as virtually inspired texts and analysed in meticulous detail by hundreds of commentators. A quotation from the works of Stalin was the irrefutable end to any argument. The mere mention of his name at a political conference in any of the satellite States was sufficient to bring all present to their feet by a prolonged ovation. The Stalin legend became an integral part of the chain which united orthodox Communists all over the world. In appearance Stalin was grey; his hair grey and stiff as a badger’s; his nostrils and lower cheeks greyish white; his moustache, too, though in youth it had been richly brown and still showed some traces of that colour, was grey. He spoke softly, moved slowly, but his expression was quizzical, like a man enjoying a hidden joke, at times softening into abroad smile. Often as he spoke his look was oddly remote and withdrawn, the look of a man thinking through two or three processes at once. His expression was above all confident, without a trace of nerves; strong, calm or suddenly watchful in an amused kind of way. Tough, yet unathletic, dignified yet self-conscious, he dominated any group of which he formed a part for all his small stature.
Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, known to the world as Stalin, one of his many revolutionary noms de guerre, was born at Gori, in Georgia, on December 21, 1879. His father, a cobbler of peasant origin, died when he was 11. Joseph was sent to the church school in his native town, where he remained until 1893. It was here that he learned to use Russian as an instrument of expression, since all ecclesiastical schools in Georgia at that time were the implements of the Tsarist policy of Russification. He emerged from the school at Gori sharply conscious of the suppression of Georgian nationalism and not unaware of the social inequalities and injustices prevailing in his native Georgia. Such feelings were never revealed however to the school staff, and in view of the fact that he was invariably the best pupil in his form, the head master and the local priest had no hesitation in recommending him for a scholarship at the seminary in Tiflis following upon his matriculation there in the autumn of 1894.
‘A Model Pupil’; Clandestine Socialist
In his early period at the seminary Dzhugashvili was a model pupil, able and diligent at his work, but towards the end of his first year, unbeknown to his tutors, he was already in contact with opposition groups in Tiflis and published some patriotic radical verses in the Liberal newspaper Iberya. His contact with radical groups in Tiflis, headed by former seminarists, continued to develop until finally in August, 1898, he joined the clandestine Socialist organization known as Mesamé-Dasi. Thenceforward he began to lead a kind of dual existence. His few leisure hours were spent in lecturing on Socialism to small groups of working men in Tiflis; discussion in a secret debating society, formed by himself inside the seminary, and the reading of radical books. This state of affairs eventually came to the notice of the seminary authorities and in May, 1899, the 20-year-old Dzhugashvili was expelled. He then embarked on a revolutionary career, but was faced with the immediate problem of employment. For a few months he made a little money giving lessons to the children of middle-class families and at the end of 1899 found a job as a clerk in the observatory at Tiflis – an occupation which seems to have afforded him much free time for political activity. He remained in this employment until March, 1901, when his political activities forced him to go underground completely.
In November, 1901, he was elected to membership of the Social Democratic committee of Tiflis and a few weeks later was sent to Batum, where he proceeded with the establishment of a vigorous clandestine organization and an illegal printing press. The influence of this organization, under his leadership, on the oil workers of Batum was so remarkable in its manifestations that ‘Koba’ (as Dzhugashvili was then known) was arrested, and imprisoned in the spring of 1902 as a dangerous agitator. From his exile in Siberia he escaped a few weeks later and reappeared in Tiflis to find that the great schism which divided the Social Democratic Party in 1903 had left the Mensheviks in virtual control of the Caucasian party. A few months after his return, with some hesitation, Koba took the side of Lenin and the Bolsheviks and proceeded to agitate energetically against the Mensheviks and other political groupings.
First Meeting with Lenin
Koba’s role during the ‘general rehearsal’ of 1905 was a local rather than a national one. Apart from organizing the ‘fighting squads’ (later to be a subject of considerable controversy within the party) and the editing of the newspaper Kavkaski Rabochi Listok (Caucasian Workers’ News-sheet), which enjoyed temporary legality, he continued to conduct a vigorous onslaught against the Mensheviks. When he attended the party conference in Tammerfors in December, 1905, as a delegate of the Caucasian Bolsheviks (a group of uncertain credentials, since most of the local leaders were Mensheviks), Koba emerged for the first time from the provincial arena of Caucasian politics into the atmosphere of a truly national gathering. Here, too, he first met Lenin. In the following year he attended the Stockholm Congress and in 1907 the London Party Congress as a Caucasian delegate, where he encountered Trotsky.
Soon after his return from the London Congress he was elected to membership of the Baku Committee, and it was in the oil wells of Baku that Stalin, on his testimony, first learned to lead great masses of workers. He was arrested in November, 1908, and deported to Vologda province. A few months later, however, he escaped and appeared again in the south, under the name of Melikyants. His period of freedom was brief, for he was re-arrested in March, 1910, and sent back to Vologda to complete his sentence of 1908. Released in June, 1911, he settled in Petersburg at the home of his future father-in-law, Alliluyev, although he had been forbidden to live in most large towns. In consequence, he was again arrested. Reaction was now at its height and the party fortunes at their lowest ebb. A small conference of Bolshevik stalwarts in Prague in January, 1912, coopted Stalin as a member of the central executive committee of the party; and on his escape a few weeks later he helped to found the new party journal Pravda in Petersburg.
A Turning-point
Lenin’s ‘Wonderful Georgian’
It was in the winter of 1912-13 that Stalin made his only extended visit abroad, spending some months with Lenin in Cracow and some time in Vienna. This was a turning-point in his career. Ten years earlier Lenin, in his famous pamphlet ‘What is to be Done?’ had first stated the case, on which he never ceased to insist, for a centrally directed party of professional revolutionaries, organized and disciplined in thought and deed, as the essential instrument of social revolution. Stalin had all the marks of Lenin’s ideal professional revolutionary: he was intrepid, orderly and orthodox. It was a further asset that though born a Georgian and a member of one of the ‘subject races’ Stalin had had no truck with separatist or ‘federalist’ ideas within the party and was an out-and-out ‘centralist’. Not for nothing therefore did Lenin at this time refer to Stalin in a letter to Maxim Gorky as ‘a wonderful Georgian’ who was writing an essay on the national question. The essay, eventually published under the title ‘Marxism and the National Question’ in a party journal, was an attack on the ‘national’ heresies of the Austrian Marxists Bauer and Renner and a statement of accepted Bolshevik doctrine, steering a cautious middle course between those who regarded any kind of nationalism as incompatible with international socialism and those who regarded nationalism as an essential element in it. It was the first of his writings to be signed by the name under which he was to become famous.
Back in Russia, Stalin underwent in February, 1913, his sixth and last imprisonment and exile. The revolution of February, 1917, released him, and he was probably the first member of the central committee of the party to reach Petersburg. In this capacity he temporarily took over the editorship of Pravda. This was the occasion of a short-lived deviation to which Stalin afterwards frankly confessed. In common with the other leading Bolsheviks then in the capital – excluding Molotov and Shlyapnikov – Stalin believed that the right tactics for the Bolsheviks were to support the provisional Government and rally to the defence of the fatherland; and this line, which would have assimilated the policy of the Bolsheviks to that of the Social-Democratic parties of the Second International, was taken editorially in Pravda. Lenin, chafing inactively in Switzerland, denounced in his ‘Letters from Afar’ the weak-kneed Bolsheviks of the capital. When later he reached Petrograd in the sealed train and propounded his famous ‘April theses’ of no cooperation with the provisional Government or with any policy that would keep Russia in the war, he quickly rallied his faltering party, and geared it for the second revolution. Thereafter Stalin remained a faithful and undeviating disciple.
1917 Revolution
Enhanced Status in the Party
The difficulty for the biographer of this as of the earlier period of Stalin’s life is to disentangle the authentic contemporary evidence from the mass of more recent and largely apocryphal accretions. It seems that he first became a figure familiar to party cadres at the time of his election to a new central committee of nine members in April, 1917, and after the difficult July days, when Lenin and Zinoviev were compelled to retreat to Finland and Kamenev, Trotsky and others were arrested, Stalin emerged to lead the party. On their return to the political scene, he retired again into the shadows. While there is but little information relating to any participation by him in the work of the Revolutionary Military Committee during the actual rising, he nevertheless undoubtedly performed an important function in the editorial office of Pravda. He supported Lenin against Zinoviev and Kamenev in the controversy over the preparation and timing of the October revolution and against Trotsky over Brest-Litovsk; and though his interventions recorded in the minutes of the central committee were on both occasions brief and inconspicuous, his fidelity to Lenin in these troubled times must have won the gratitude of the leader and greatly enhanced his status in the party. He was appointed People’s Commissar for Nationalities in October, 1917, and in this capacity one of his first measures was to proclaim Finland’s independence from Russia, at a conference in Helsinki. In spite of the opposition of elements within the party, who regarded this as an unwarranted concession to bourgeois nationalism, the decree was officially signed by Lenin and Stalin in December. He also played an active part in the drafting of the 1918 constitution of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic and he was still more closely concerned four years later in framing the federal constitution of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics.
Breach with Trotsky
The civil war provided fresh scope for Stalin’s unflagging energy and undoubted administrative talents. That the civil war provided the occasion of Stalin’s first open breach with Trotsky; that Stalin and Voroshilov intrigued busily against Trotsky, criticizing both his disposition of his armies and his use of former Tsarist officers; that recriminations flared up to a dangerous point over the defence of Tsaritsin (renamed Stalingrad some years later) against Denikin; that Lenin tried to smooth over these animosities and to retain the services of two invaluable though quarrelsome lieutenants – so much is clear. But the historian of the future may well find it a superhuman task to extract the grain of truth from the chaff of subsequent controversy and the haystack of misrepresentation beneath which Trotsky’s achievements have been hidden. For the rest Stalin’s name figures little in the literature of the period. At any time up to 1922 the general impression which he made on his colleagues was apparently one of undistinguished competence; though admitted to the first rank of Bolshevik leaders he seemed the least remarkable of them, the most lacking in personality. But his capacity for hard and regular work more than balanced the more spectacular talents of his rivals, and indeed it could not have escaped the notice of a few that Stalin’s influence in the state and his hold on the party machine had grown enormously. At the end of the civil war he filled three significant posts: membership of the Politburo, Commissar of Nationalities, and Commissar for Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection (Rabkrin).
In March, 1922, he was appointed Secretary-General of the party – a newly created post obviously suited to his rather pedestrian gifts. Though not regarded by anyone as a potential stepping-stone to supreme power, nevertheless this post, considered in conjunction with his other spheres of influence, rendered his personal position most formidable. Although Lenin still held the reins, Stalin’s influence was becoming comparable to that of Lenin. In May of the same year Lenin had a first stroke from which he recovered, temporarily and incompletely, to be finally stricken by a second in March, 1923. From this moment, though Lenin lingered on, totally incapacitated, till January, 1924, the succession was open. Had anyone seriously canvassed Stalin’s chances, a letter from Lenin to the central committee of the party – commonly, though unwarrantably, known as Lenin’s testament – might have seemed a decisive obstacle. Writing at the end of December, 1922, with a postscript of January 4, 1923, Lenin who evidently knew that his days were numbered, passed in review the principal party leaders. He noted that Stalin since he had become Secretary-General had ‘concentrated in his hands an immense power’, and expressed the fear that he might not always use it prudently. He described Stalin as ‘too rough,’ and proposed that he should be replaced by someone ‘more patient, more loyal, more polite, more attentive to the comrades, less capricious, &c.’ Fortunately for Stalin, the letter also treated Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin with scant respect, so that there was a powerful interest in limiting its circulation – though it was familiar to all members of the central committee, and its authenticity has never been contested. But Stalin must be credited with extraordinary skill in surmounting so formidable an obstacle. When the twelfth party congress met in April, 1923, Lenin was known, though not yet publicly admitted, to be past recovery. The talk was of a group of three (‘troika’) to take over his authority; and the names of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin were freely mentioned. Stalin, with consummate tact, defended Zinoviev and Kamenev rather than himself from attacks made jointly on all three of them. Trotsky was gradually edged on one side. Attacks on him for undermining the unity of the party began in the autumn of that year.
The year 1924 was decisive for Stalin’s ascent to power. During this year he for the first time exhibited to the full that amazing political dexterity which made all his rivals look like bunglers and amateurs. In the first place he brought about what may not unfairly be called the ‘canonization’ of Lenin. From the moment of Lenin’s death, and almost entirely as the result of Stalin’s initiative, every word that Lenin had uttered or written came to be treated as sacrosanct – as Lenin himself had treated the works of Marx and Engels; and everyone who had differed from him was now suspect not merely as a heretic in the past, but as a potential heretic in the future. This weapon was aimed primarily at Trotsky, whose impetuous character and long record of past bickerings with Lenin made him highly vulnerable. But it could also serve against Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had more than once been severely castigated by Lenin for their backslidings. Stalin had been too prudent or not conspicuous enough to come under the lash – except in the unofficial ‘testament’ now being gradually consigned to oblivion. This was a negative asset. But immense pains were taken, both at this time and afterwards, to build up a positive picture of Stalin as Lenin’s ablest coadjutor, most faithful disciple, and chosen political executor.
Control of Party Machine Power Strengthened
Secondly, Stalin, well aware of the prestige attaching in the party to the master of Marxist theory, set out to establish his credentials in that field. In the spring of 1924 he delivered at the Sverdlov University in Moscow a course of lectures on ‘The Foundations of Leninism’ – a competent exposition of the development and application by Lenin of Marxist doctrine. He went on to take the offensive against Trotsky. In the lectures themselves he had followed the usual view that the ultimate success of the Russian revolution depended on the spread of revolution elsewhere in Europe. But the revolutionary failures of 1923 in Germany suggested that this consummation was remote; and the new international status of the Soviet Union, which had been recognized in 1924 by all the principal Powers except the United States, made the encouragement of world revolution an increasingly inconvenient policy. At the end of 1924 Stalin issued a revised edition of his lectures in which he proclaimed the doctrine of ‘Socialism in one country’. Trotsky could thus be branded as an internationalist, a champion of the outmoded slogan of ‘permanent revolution’.
Thirdly, Stalin strengthened his control of the party machine and discovered how to use it for the discomfiture of his enemies. As Secretary-General he was already master of all promotions and appointments to key positions in the party. Lenin’s memory was now honoured by the admission of a large number of new members; and this admission, managed by Stalin and his supporters, brought a mass of recruits to the new orthodoxy. Whatever opinions were held among the leaders the weight of numbers must begin to tell. Before long Trotsky was being shouted down at party meetings by enthusiastic young Stalinists.
Trotsky’s Expulsion
By January, 1925, the campaign against Trotsky had gathered sufficient momentum to permit of his deposition from his office as People’s Commissar for War. Before the end of the year Zinoviev and Kamenev, taking fright at Stalin’s growing power, were seeking a rapprochement with Trotsky. But the move came too late to save them. In 1926 Stalin secured a condemnation of Trotskyites and Zinovievites alike both by a party conference and by the Comintern; and in November, 1927, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev were formally expelled from the party. Two months later Trotsky was forcibly removed from Moscow and sent to Alma-Ata in central Asia. He was finally expelled from Russia in January, 1929.
In the struggle thus concluded personal rivalries had been intertwined not only with the issue of foreign policy already referred to but with internal political controversies. Trotsky had always been an advocate of industrialization and planning. Stalin opened the campaign against him with the nep slogans of conciliating the peasant and with the charge, repeated and illustrated ad nauseam, that Trotsky was guilty of ‘underestimating the peasant’. But Stalin soon saw the dangers of going too far, and from the end of 1925 onwards cleverly steered a middle course between the ‘left’ opposition of Trotsky and Zinoviev, who were accused of ignoring the peasant, and the ‘right’ opposition of Rykov and Bukharin, who exaggerated the policy of appeasing the peasant.
After the rout of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, Stalin’s position was not yet supreme in the Politburo. He still had to deal with the ‘right’ opposition of Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky. Contrary to the prophecies of the recently defeated opposition, the influence of the Bukharin group did not overshadow that of Stalin. The fifteenth Congress elected a new Politburo of nine and in the new line-up Stalin had a majority of votes, among them Kaganovich and Mikoyan. The flaring up of conflicting forces inside the Politburo did not come until 1928, when in view of the grain famine ‘emergency measures’ were instituted by the Politburo, resulting in Stalin’s call for ‘the elimination of the kulaks as a class’. Although in the councils of the Politburo these measures were opposed by Bukharin and his group, it was not until April, 1929, that Stalin openly denounced Bukharin as the leader of the ‘right’ opposition to his policy in the countryside. Soon after, Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky were excluded from the Politburo and other significant posts. Stalin’s ascendancy in the Politburo was now complete, and from this moment he was recognized as the virtual ruler of the Soviet Union – a position consecrated by the unusual demonstrations with which his fiftieth birthday was celebrated in December, 1929. At the very moment of Trotsky’s expulsion Stalin was preparing a powerful swing-over towards industrialization. The first Five-year Plan was launched by him in 1928. Its inevitable concomitant, the collectivization of agriculture, though not seriously taken in hand till 1931, had been on the party agenda since the end of 1927. Throughout this period, though mistakes were made (notably in the estimate of the pace at which collectivization could be carried out), Stalin’s sense of timing was on the whole superb. Few, if any, of the policies which he applied were original to himself; but he was unique in his sense of when to act and when to wait.
In the middle thirties, with industrialization well on the way and collectivization a fait accompli, the Soviet Union may well have seemed to be sailing out into smoother waters. The second Five-year Plan promised an increased output of consumer goods. Stalin’s public pronouncements assumed a more optimistic tone, and he may well have originally conceived the ‘Stalin constitution’, promulgated in 1936, as the crown of his work. Socialism had been achieved; the road to Communism, however distant the goal, lay open; increased material prosperity and broader constitutional liberties were a vision of the immediate future. These expectations, if they were entertained, were not fulfilled. In the middle thirties the Soviet Union entered a new period of storm and stress. The murder of Kirov at the end of 1934 was the symptom or starting-point of a grave internal crisis; and in international affairs Germany regained her power in a form particularly menacing to the Soviet Union. The internal crisis was obscure, the evidence relating to it contentious, and it was dealt with by methods which left a lasting cloud on Stalin’s name. The growing-pains of collective farming, the liquidation of the kulaks, the need – in face of the Nazi menace – to increase the pace of industrialization had all imposed severe strains on the population and bred discontent, sometimes in high places. Stalin decided to strike hard. In the panic which followed old scores were paid off and new grudges indulged, and things probably went a good deal farther than Stalin or anyone else intended at the start.
Treason Trials
In 1935 and 1936 successive trials were held in which all those prominent Bolsheviks who had at one time or another been implicated in ‘Trotskyism’ or other forms of opposition to the regime – Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin among them – were condemned and shot for self-confessed treason. In 1937 a number of the leading generals were shot on similar charges without public trial. Of the leading Bolsheviks of the first generation hardly any survived except Stalin, Molotov, and Voroshilov. In 1938 the purge was at last stayed. Yagoda, long the head of the gpu and its successor the nkvd, who had been removed from office at the end of 1936, was now himself executed; and Yezhov, his successor, formerly an influential party leader, disappeared from the scene about the same time. Judgment on the purge will depend partly on the amount of credence given to reports and confessions of active treason on the part of the accused; and it has to be admitted that the Soviet polity afterwards survived the almost intolerable strains of war with fewer breaks and fissures than most observers had been prepared to predict. Nevertheless it is certain that the damage done by the purges to Soviet prestige in the west was a fatal handicap to the foreign policy of a common defensive front with the western Powers to which Soviet diplomacy was at that time committed. This was probably the gravest and most disastrous miscalculation of that period.
Munich and After
Treaty with the Nazis
Soviet foreign policy in the thirties, as much as Soviet domestic policy, was clearly Stalin’s creation. He had long been by inclination a Soviet nationalist rather than an internationalist; and now that he was firmly established in the seat of power he was unlikely to shrink from any of the implications of ‘Socialism in one country’. Faced by the German menace, he executed without embarrassment the ideological change of front necessary to bring the Soviet Union into the League of Nations and to conclude treaties of alliance with France and Czechoslovakia. In the end it was not lack of Soviet good will that defeated this project, but the weakness of France and what appeared to Soviet eyes as a dual policy on the part of Great Britain. So long as Great Britain could be suspected of hesitating between a deal with Germany and a common front against her, Stalin on his side would equally keep both doors open. Munich, though a severe shock to prospects of cooperation, was partly offset by British rearmament, and the riddle of British policy was unsolved throughout the winter. On March 10, 1939, at the eighteenth party congress Stalin gave what was doubtless intended as a note of warning that Soviet policy was ‘not to allow our country to be drawn into conflicts by war-mongers’. But his speech was overtaken by the march of events.
It was Hitler’s seizure of Prague in the middle of March which fired the train. Great Britain now prepared feverishly for war and sought for allies in the east. Two alternatives were still open to her. She could have an alliance with the Soviet Union at the price of accepting Soviet policy in Eastern Europe – in Poland, in Rumania, in the Baltic States; or she could have alliances with the anti-Soviet Governments of these countries at the price of driving the Soviet Union into the hostile camp. British diplomacy was too simple-minded, and too ignorant of eastern Europe, to understand the hard choice before it. It plunged impetuously into the pacts of guarantee with Poland and Rumania; and within a few days, on May 3, 1939, the resignation of Litvinov and his replacement by Molotov signalled a vital change in Soviet foreign policy. The British mission which had been sent to Moscow found itself unable to make any progress. Negotiations continued; but unless Great Britain was prepared to abandon the Polish alliance, or put severe pressure on her new ally, their eventual break-down was certain. When Hitler decided to wait no longer, Stalin for his part did not hesitate. Ribbentrop came to Moscow and the German-Soviet treaty was signed. It is fair to infer that Stalin regarded it as a pis aller. He would have preferred alliance with the western Powers, but could not have it on any terms which he would have found tolerable.
Uneasy Neutrality
Twenty-two months of most uneasy neutrality followed. The German advance in Poland was answered by a corresponding Soviet move to reoccupy the White Russian territories ceded to Poland by the treaty of Riga in 1921. Thus, by the autumn of 1939, Soviet and German power already confronted each other in Poland, on the Danube, and on the Baltic. The war against Finland in the winter of 1939-40 was designed to strengthen the defences of Leningrad by pushing forward the frontier in a westerly direction. It eventually achieved this object, but at the cost of much discredit to Soviet prestige and the formal expulsion of the Soviet Union from the League of Nations.
After the fall of France, Soviet fears of German victory and German predominance grew apace; and military and industrial preparations were pressed forward. Stalin now probably foresaw the inevitability of conflict, but was determined not to provoke or hasten it. In November, 1940, he sent Molotov on a visit to Berlin without being able to mitigate the palpable clash of interests. On the other hand, Japanese neutrality was assured when Matsuoka was effusively received in Moscow in April, 1941. In the following month Stalin, hitherto only Secretary-General of the party and without official rank, became President of the Council of People’s Commissars – the Soviet Prime Minister. The appointment sounded a note of alarm at home and of warning abroad.
Russia at War
Heavy Burden of Responsibility
The German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, and the almost immediate threat to the capital placed on Stalin’s shoulders an enormous weight of anxiety and responsibility. From the outset, the supreme direction of the war effort and defence organization became vested in the State Defence Committee consisting of five members – Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Beria, and Malenkov, with Stalin as chairman, though it was not till March, 1943, that he assumed the rank of marshal, and later of generalissimo. During the war his customary public speeches on May 1 and on the eve of November 7 took the form of large-scale reviews of military operations and war policy. He was also active in a diplomatic role. Before the war Stalin had been almost entirely inaccessible to foreigners. Now, apart from regular conversations with the allied Ambassadors, he received a constant flow of distinguished visitors. Lord Beaverbrook and Mr Harriman were in Moscow in August, 1941, to organize supplies from the west; Mr Churchill came in August, 1942, and again, with Mr Eden, in October, 1944. In December, 1943, Stalin met President Roosevelt and Mr Churchill at Teheran, and in February, 1945, at Yalta. The last meeting of the Big Three, with Mr Truman succeeding Roosevelt and Mr Attlee replacing Mr Churchill in the middle of the proceedings, took place at Potsdam in July, 1945.
Among his diplomatic activities Stalin was particularly concerned with the perennial problem of Soviet-Polish relations. By dint of much patience he eventually secured the recognition of the new Polish Government by his allies, and the acceptance by them as the frontier, between the Soviet Union and Poland, of the so-called ‘Curzon line’ originally drawn by the Allied and Associated Powers at the Paris peace conference of 1919. He worked untiringly to secure for his country that place of undisputed equality with the other Great Powers to which its achievements and sacrifices in the war entitled it.
Domestic Policy
Comintern and Church
Two striking decisions of domestic policy during the war – the disbandment of Comintern and the renewed recognition of the Orthodox Church – were undoubtedly taken by Stalin out of deference for allied opinion; but they were in line with this long-standing inclination, accentuated by the war, to give precedence to national over ideological considerations. The reforms of 1944 which accorded separate armies and separate rights of diplomatic representation abroad to the major constituent republics of the Soviet Union were perhaps partly designed to secure to the Ukraine and White Russia independent membership and voting power in the United Nations. When the war ended Stalin was in his sixty-sixth year. A holiday of two-and-a-half months in the autumn of 1945 at Sochi on the Black Sea produced the usual crop of rumours, but was no more than a merited and necessary respite from the burden of public affairs. In December he was back in Moscow for the visit of Mr Bevin and Mr Byrnes. Thenceforward there were few personal contacts between Stalin and representatives of the western Powers. In February, 1946, he took part in the elections to the Supreme Soviet, making the principal campaign speech, in which he forecast an early end of bread rationing – a hope which was defeated by the bad harvest. He also declared that it was the intention of the Soviet Communist Party to organize a new effort in the economic field, the aim of which would be to treble pre-war production figures. Although advanced in years, Stalin still continued to hold the reins of power and in March, 1946, he was again confirmed as Secretary of the central committee of the party. In the same year the State Publishing House began publication of a collected edition of his works.
Growing Mistrust
The unparalleled popularity in the non-Communist world with which the Russian people in general, and Marshal Stalin in particular, had emerged from the war thus early gave place to mistrust. It had been hoped that the pre-war doctrine which was associated with Stalin’s name, of ‘socialism in one country’, would provide the basis for peaceful coexistence in the post-war period. Stalin’s own comments on international affairs sometimes tended to confirm, and sometimes to deny, this prospect. Thus in answer to questions put to him by the Moscow correspondent of the Sunday Times in September, 1946, Stalin declared that, in spite of ideological differences, he believed in the possibility of lasting cooperation between the Soviet Union and the western democracies, and that Communism in one country was perfectly possible. This provoked worldwide interest and was regarded as a welcome statement, contributing much to the easing of growing international tension. A month later, however, in reply to questions sent to him by the United Press of America, he asserted that in his opinion ‘the incendiaries of a new war’, naming several prominent British and American statesmen, constituted the most serious threat to world peace, and thus destroyed the earlier good impression.
Russia’s post-war policy towards her neighbours did nothing to confirm Stalin’s peaceful protestations. The independent Baltic States, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, had already been incorporated in Russia in 1940. Finland and Bulgaria were compelled to surrender territory to Russia as the price of defeat, and Poland suffered even greater amputations as the reward of victory. In the Far East Russia claimed North Sakhalin and the Kurilles Islands as her price for taking part in the war against Japan. In all the countries which had been overrun by the Red Army it was only a question of time before a Communist regime had been set up and its opponents liquidated. By the middle of 1948 the borders of Communism stretched from the Elbe to the Adriatic. A year later Communism had triumphed in China. Stalin controlled the destinies of an empire far larger than any Tsar had ever dreamed of.
It was the coup d’état in Prague in February, 1948, which finally forced western Europe and North America into action for their common defence. The North-Atlantic Treaty was signed in April, 1949. But even before then the west had successfully met another outward thrust by Russia. It was in June, 1948, that the air-lift began which nullified the effects of the blockade of Berlin. Stalin remained, as always, in the background during this period of dynamic Russian expansion. It was only rarely that he received a foreign diplomat, though leaders of the satellite States naturally had readier access to him. From time to time the suggestion was made for a new conference between Stalin, the American President and the British Prime Minister, but none of them came to anything. It was in 1946 that President Truman disclosed that he had invited Stalin to Washington for a social visit, but that Stalin had found it necessary to decline for reasons of health. In the last interview which he gave to a foreign correspondent (to the representative of the New York Times in December last year) he indicated that he held a favourable view of proposals for talks between himself and the head of the new American Administration, President Eisenhower, and that he was interested in any new diplomatic move to end hostilities in Korea. President Eisenhower declared his willingness last month to hold a meeting with Stalin in certain circumstances, and Mr Churchill subsequently told the House of Commons that he did not rule out the possibility of three-cornered discussions.
Stalin’s New Role: Economic Theorist
It was in the last year of his life that Stalin appeared in a role which would have surprised former colleagues, such as Lenin and Trotsky, but which therefore may well have given him most pride – as an economic theorist in the tradition of (and not less important than) Marx, Engels and Lenin. Shortly before the nineteenth congress of the Russian Communist Party, which was held in Moscow in October, 1952 – the first congress since 1939 – Stalin published his Economic Problems of Socialism in the ussr, which has since become the definitive text-book for Communists in all countries. In this work he warned his readers that, for all Russia’s successes in building a new society, it was wrong to think that the natural economic laws did not apply as much in Russia as elsewhere. He also forecast a deepening crisis of capitalism, that west European countries would dissociate themselves from the United States, and that war between these capitalist countries was inevitable. He also outlined a programme of basic preliminary conditions necessary for the transition to Communism in the Soviet Union. At the Congress there was a reorganization of party organs – the Politburo and the Orgburo being brought together in a single body, the Praesidium of the Central Committee, of which Stalin became chairman.
On the occasion of his seventieth birthday in December, 1949, there were widespread celebrations throughout the Soviet Union and busts of Stalin were erected on 38 of the highest peaks in the Soviet Union. It marked, too, the inauguration of international Stalin peace prizes, to be awarded each year on his birthday. On March 3, 1953, it was announced by Moscow radio that Stalin was gravely ill as the result of a haemorrhage, that he had lost consciousness and speech, and that he would take no part in leading activity for a prolonged period.
Only a few details are known of Stalin’s personal life. In 1903 he married Yekaterina Svanidze, a profoundly religious woman and the sister of a Georgian comrade, who left him a son, Yasha, when she died in 1907 of pneumonia. His second wife, whom he married in 1918 – Nadezhda Alliluyeva – was 20 years younger than himself and was the daughter of a Bolshevik worker, with whom Stalin had contacts in both the Caucasus and St Petersburg. She was formerly one of Lenin’s secretaries and later studied at a technical college in Moscow. This marriage, too, ended with the death of his wife, in November, 1932. She left him two children – a daughter, Svetlana, and a son, Vassili, now a high ranking officer in the Soviet Air Force. Late in life he married Rosa Kaganovich, the sister of Lazar Kaganovich, a member of the Politburo.
Alan Turing
7 June 1954
Dr Alan Mathison Turing, obe, frs, whose death at the age of 41 has already been reported, was born on June 23, 1912, the son of Julius Mathison Turing. He was educated at Sherborne School and at King’s College, Cambridge, of which he was elected a Fellow in 1935. He was appointed obe in 1941 for wartime services in the Foreign Office and was elected frs in 1951. Until 1939 he was a pure mathematician and logician, but after the war most of his work was connected with the design and use of automatic computing machines, first at the National Physical Laboratory and then since 1948 at Manchester University, where he was a Reader at the time of his death.
The discovery which will give Turing a permanent place in mathematical logic was made not long after he had graduated. This was his proof that (contrary to the then prevailing view of Hilbert and his school at Göttingen) there are classes of mathematical problem which cannot be solved by any fixed and definite process. The crucial step in his proof was to clarify the notion of a ‘definite process’, which he interpreted as ‘something that could be done by an automatic machine’. Although other proofs of insolubility were published at about the same time by other authors, the ‘Turing machine’ has remained the most vivid, and in many ways the most convincing, interpretation of these essentially equivalent theories. The description that he then gave of a ‘universal’ computing machine was entirely theoretical in purpose, but Turing’s strong interest in all kinds of practical experiment made him even then interested in the possibility of actually constructing a machine on these lines.
It was natural at the end of the war for him to accept an invitation to work at the National Physical Laboratory on the development of the ace, the first large computer to be begun in this country. He threw himself into the work with enthusiasm, thoroughly enjoying the rapid alternation of abstract questions of design with problems of practical engineering. Later at Manchester he devoted himself more particularly to problems arising out of the use of the machine. It was at this time that he became involved in discussions on the contrasts and similarities between machines and brains. Turing’s view, expressed with great force and wit, was that it was for those who saw an unbridgeable gap between the two to say just where the difference lay.
The war interrupted Turing’s mathematical career for the six critical years between the age of 27 and 33. A mathematical theory of the chemical basis of organic growth which he had lately started to develop has been tragically interrupted, and must remain a fragment. Important though his contributions to logic have been, few who have known him personally can doubt that, with his deep insight into the principles of mathematics and of natural science, and his brilliant originality, he would, but for these accidents, have made much greater discoveries.
Henri Matisse
A master of modern French painting
3 November 1954
M. Henri Matisse, one of the most outstanding representatives of the modern French school of painting, died on Wednesday at his home at Nice. He was 84, and had been in poor health for several years.
Partly, if not chiefly, because they were both subject to the same indiscriminate abuse from artistic ‘diehards’ in England, M. Henri Matisse and Señor Pablo Picasso were closely connected in the public mind. In reality they had not very much in common, though they were associated in their first departure from academic art. To some extent they were complementary, and Matisse was weak where Picasso is strong, and the other way about. Of the two Matisse was the less intellectual, and he had not the range and depth or the inventiveness and versatility of the Spaniard but it is questionable if he had not more of the special sensibility of the painter as distinct from other kinds of creative artist. His colour was enchanting and his handling of paint was masterly.
Henri Matisse, who is said to have had some Jewish blood, was a Norman, the son of a grain merchant in a small way, and was born at Le Cateau Nord, on December 31, 1869. His father wanted him to become a lawyer and put him into the office of a legal friend to pick up what knowledge he could before entering a law school. But after about a year the boy got appendicitis, and during his long convalescence at home he took up painting at the suggestion of a neighbour who had seen him sketching. The result was that when he was 20 Matisse went to Paris, where he entered the Ecole des Beaux Arts and studied under Bouguereau. When he was 24 he married Mlle Amelie Noellie Parayre, and before long he had a young family of a daughter and two sons. Times were hard, but besides being an excellent housewife Mme Matisse opened a small millinery shop to help out the family income.
Then Gustave Moreau, the ‘mystical’ painter, who may be said to have started the cult of ‘Salome’, saw Matisse working in the Louvre, making copies of pictures there, and invited him to study in his own studio at the Ecole des Beaux Arts which was destined to become a nursery of young rebels, the fellow pupils of Matisse including Rouault and Dufy. In 1897 Matisse met the veteran Camille Pissarro and for a time worked as successfully as an Impressionist as he had as a copyist of old masters in the Louvre. On the advice of Pissarro in 1898 Matisse visited London to study Turner. Matisse was not greatly impressed by Turner, which was not surprising, because the acute interest in Paris had shifted from Impressionism, but he heard about Whistler and his Japanese prints. On his return to Paris he began to study oriental art systematically, and after a visit to Corsica, where he stayed a year, he went to Munich to see an exhibition of Moslem art, which confirmed his impression of the decorative values of the East.
‘Les Fauves’
Up to now, though he was experimenting, Matisse had not kicked over the traces. He was exhibiting regularly at the official Salon, and in 1904 the dealer Vollard, from whom he had bought Cézanne’s ‘Bathers’ to hang in his studio, gave him a one-man show of nearly 50 pictures. The explosion came at the Autumn Salon of 1905. For this exhibition Matisse organized a collection of works by the more advanced painters, including himself, Derain, Braque, Rouault, and Vlaminck, and these were hung in a room by themselves. An indignant critic, Louis Vauxcelles, writing in Gil Blas, called the room a ‘cage aux Fauves’ or ‘cage of wild beasts’, and the name stuck. Beyond distortion or deformation of natural appearance in the interests of design and vehemence in statement, the Fauves had no common doctrine. Fauvism, in fact, might be described as a violent wrenching away of the picture from literal representation.
A picture that came in for special abuse was Matisse’s ‘Woman with a Hat’. This, for which Mme Matisse was the model, was bought by the American writer Miss Gertrude Stein, who was doing useful propaganda for the rebels. In 1906 she introduced Matisse to Picasso, who was then painting her portrait. Matisse was now celebrated. The Galerie Druet gave him a big one-man show, and in 1908 he was introduced to the American public by Alfred Steiglitz.
Fauvism in Paris was followed by Cubism, which was originated by Picasso and Braque. Matisse is credited with the invention of the name, but he does not appear to have more than flirted with Cubism, though it was he who introduced Negro sculpture to Picasso. The truth seems to be that Matisse was too much of a painter in the special sense of the word to be greatly interested in geometrical abstraction. After 1908, when, refusing to take any fees, he taught for a short time at a school in Paris opened by his friends and supporters, Matisse did not greatly change his style. He spent two years in Morocco, stayed various times at Saint Tropez, Cassis and Collioure, and travelled in America, Tahiti, Italy, and Russia. In 1917 he took a villa at Nice, where he remained more or less for the rest of his life.
Visit to America
On his first visit to America Matisse was violently attacked and accused of obscenity in his work, so that he begged an interviewer, ‘Oh please do tell the American people that I am a normal man; that I am a devoted husband and father; that I have three fine children; that I go to the theatre, ride horse-back, have a comfortable home, a fine garden that I love, flowers, &c., just like any man’, and this self-description tallies with the impressions of an English observer who described Matisse as a quiet, sensible, bourgeois gentleman, without pose or affectation. America, too, revised its opinion, for in 1927 Matisse received a first prize at the Carnegie International, and a year or two later the Carnegie Institute invited him to be a judge in its competition.
Besides being a painter Matisse was an etcher, lithographer, and wood-engraver, and he produced a good many works of sculpture. He illustrated the poems of Mallarmé and an edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, published by the Limited Edition Club, New York, in 1935. His work is known all over the world, the largest collections being in the Moscow Museum of Western Art and the Barnes Foundation, Pennsylvania. Matisse, who is represented at the Tate Gallery by ‘Le Forêt’ and ‘Nude’, both bequeathed by Mr C. Frank Stoop in 1933, was included in both the Post-Impressionist exhibitions at the Grafton Galleries in 1910 and 1911, and in 1937 there was a very extensive exhibition of his work at the Rosenberg and Helft Gallery in London.
Though he was already well known in artistic circles in London, it was not until 1945 that Matisse really got ‘into the news’. In the December of that year an exhibition of works by Picasso and Matisse, arranged by La Direction Générale des Relations Culturelles and the British Council, was opened by the French Ambassador at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Criticism began mildly enough with a letter to The Times, signed by Professor Thomas Bodkin and Dr D. S. MacColl, to the effect that the war-diminished space in our galleries and museums should be devoted to the exhibition of their own historical treasures rather than to the works of two contemporary foreign painters of highly disputable merit. There followed in The Times a spate of correspondence for and against, many of the blows aimed at Picasso falling upon Matisse. Red herrings were strewn, but the discussion as a whole ranged round the perennial question of the distortion of natural appearance under emotion and in the interests of pictorial design.
In 1947 Matisse offered to design and build a chapel for the Dominicans of Vence, and this was consecrated in 1951. An architect built it on a plan suggested by the artist and inside Matisse painted three large compositions in black on white ceramic tiles. Last year there was an exhibition of his sculptures at the Tate Gallery, and he was honoured by the National Arts Foundation in New York as an ‘outstanding artist of 1953’. Matisse was a member of the French Communist Party, but his standing with the Communists in recent years was unclear. Criticism came from Russia of his chapel at Vence, and in 1952 the French Communist Party was reported to be considering his expulsion for not falling into line with Moscow’s instructions that art must be ‘realistic and depict Communist ideals’.
There can be no doubt about Matisse’s technical competence as a painter, but graceful as they are, his innumerable ‘Odalisques’ in Mediterranean interiors may to some minds end by becoming rather boring. Matisse himself said: ‘While working, I never try to think, only to feel.’ That is enough to explain his distortions, perhaps also his defects. As a colourist he was something more than decorative, because he had in high degree the rare capacity to establish the position of objects in the depth of the picture by the relations between colours, without the aid of linear or atmospheric perspective.
Sir Alexander Fleming
Discoverer of penicillin
11 March 1955
Sir Alexander Fleming, d.sc, mb, frcp, frcs, frs, the discoverer of penicillin, died suddenly yesterday at his home in London of a heart attack at the age of 73.
Alexander Fleming, the son of a farmer, was born at Lochfield, near Darvel, in Ayrshire, on August 6, 1881. He received his early education at the village school and at Kilmarnock Academy. At 13 years of age he was sent to live with his brother in London, where, for the next two or three years, he continued his education by attending the Polytechnic Institute in Regent Street. At that time he displayed no particular scientific ability nor felt any urge to be a doctor. For some years he worked in a shipping office in Leadenhall Street, but he found office routine deadly dull and after four years in the City a small legacy enabled him to escape. The brother with whom he was living had already taken his medical degree and he encouraged his younger brother to take up medicine. Thus at the age of 20 he became a student at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School, winning the senior entrance scholarship in natural science. He showed that he had found his true bent by winning almost every class prize and scholarship during his student career. He qualified in 1906 and at the mb, bs examination of London University in 1908 he obtained honours and was awarded a gold medal.
In 1909 he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1906 he had begun to assist Sir Almroth Wright in the inoculation department at St Mary’s Hospital, and this association led to his taking up the study of bacteriology. Under the stimulating influence of Wright, who was at that time engaged in his researches on the opsonic theory, he acquired great experience and skill in bacteriological technique and in clinical pathology. For recreation he attended the drills and parades of the London Scottish, which he had joined as a private in the year before he resigned from his post with the shipping company. For some years he went to the annual camp and, being a fair shot, to the meetings at Bisley. On the outbreak of war in 1914 he resigned from the London Scottish so that he could go to France as a captain in the ramc. He worked in Sir Almroth Wright’s laboratory in the Casino at Boulogne and received a mention in dispatches. At the end of the war he returned to St Mary’s as assistant to Sir Almroth Wright and was also appointed lecturer in bacteriology in the medical school. He subsequently became director of the department of systematic bacteriology and assistant director of the inoculation department. For some years he acted as pathologist to the venereal disease department at St Mary’s and was also pathologist to the London Lock Hospital. In 1928 he was appointed Professor of Bacteriology in the University of London, the post being tenable at St Mary’s. He retired with the title emeritus in 1948, but continued at St Mary’s as head of the Wright-Fleming Institute of Micro-Biology. Though last year he formally handed over the reins to Professor R. Cruikshank, he continued his own research work there and only the day before yesterday was at the institute discussing plans for the lecture tour in the Middle East he had been asked to undertake by the British Council.
Fleming’s first notable discovery, that of lysozyme, was made in 1922. He had for some time been interested in antiseptics and in naturally occurring antibacterial substances. In culturing nasal secretion from a patient with an acute cold he found a remarkable element that had the power of dissolving bacteria. This bacteriolyte element, which he also found in tears and other body fluids, he isolated and named lysozyme.
A Lucky Accident
Penicillin was discovered in 1928 when Fleming was engaged in bacteriological researches on staphylococci. For examination purposes he had to remove the covers of his culture plates and a mould spore drifted on to a plate. After a time it revealed itself by developing into a colony about half an inch across. It was no new thing for a bacteriologist to find that a mould had grown on a culture plate which had lain on the bench for a week, but the strange thing in this particular case was that the bacterial colonies in the neighbourhood of the mould appeared to be fading away. What had a week before been vigorous staphylococcus colonies were now faint shadows of their former selves. Fleming might have merely discarded the contaminated culture plate but fortunately his previous research work on antiseptics and on naturally occurring antibacterial substances caused him to take special note of the apparent anti-bacterial action of the mould.
He made sub-cultures of the mould and investigated the properties of the antibacterial substance. He found that while the crude culture fluid in which the mould had grown was strongly antibacterial it was non-toxic to animals and human beings. The crude penicillin was, however, very unstable and was too weak and too crude for injection. Early attempts at concentration were not very successful, and after a few tentative trials its clinical use was not pursued, although it continued to be used in Fleming’s laboratory for differential culture. The position in 1929 was that Fleming had discovered and named penicillin, had investigated its antibacterial power, and had suggested that it might be useful as an antiseptic applied to infected lesions. Attempts to produce a concentrated extract capable of clinical application were not successful and had been abandoned. In the light of later knowledge Fleming’s original paper of 1929 was remarkable. It covered nearly the whole field, realized most of the problems and made considerable progress in solving them. The resuscitation of penicillin as a chemotherapeutic agent was due to the brilliant work of Sir Howard Florey and his colleagues at Oxford, notably Dr E. B. Chain.
Overwhelmed with Honours
After the establishment of penicillin as a life-saving drug Fleming was overwhelmed with honours. He was knighted in 1944 and in the following year he shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine with Sir Howard Florey and Dr E. B. Chain. He was William Julius Mickle Fellow of London University in 1942, and received an award of merit from the American Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association in 1943. He was elected frs in 1943 and frcp in 1944, under the special by-law. His other honours included the Moxon medal of the Royal College of Physicians (1945), the Charles Mickle Fellowship of Toronto University (1944), the John Scott medal of the City Guild of Philadelphia (1944), the Cameron prize of Edinburgh University (1945), the Albert Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Arts (1946), the honorary Gold Medal of the Royal College of Surgeons (1946), the Actonian Prize of the Royal Institution, and the honorary Freedom of the Boroughs of Paddington, Darvel, and Chelsea. He had innumerable honorary degrees from British and foreign universities, and in 1951 was elected Rector of Edinburgh University. Only last weekend thieves stole property from his flat in Chelsea worth about £1,000 and later an appeal was made to them to return a gold seal of great sentimental value.
Fleming was president of the London Ayrshire Society and of the Pathological and Comparative Medicine Sections of the Royal Society of Medicine. Apart from the papers describing his great discoveries, he contributed to the Medical Research Council System of Bacteriology, to the official Medical History of the 1914–18 War, and to many other publications. He was a keen amateur painter, and he had many friends among artists. He was also very fond of motoring and of gardening. He remained quite unspoiled by the publicity and acclaim that came to him and no one was more aware than he of the indispensable part played by other investigators in the development of penicillin. Animated by the spirit of the true scientist, he looked ever forward.
He was twice married, first to Sarah Marion, daughter of Mr John McElroy. She died in 1949, leaving a son. In 1953 he married Dr Amalia Coutsouris, of Athens, who had been a member of his staff at the Wright-Fleming Institute.
Albert Einstein
Father of nuclear physics
18 April 1955
Professor Albert Einstein, the greatest scientist of modern times, died in hospital at Princeton, New Jersey, on April 18 at the age of 76. He had lived a secluded life for some years, though he had been a member of the staff of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton University.
Albert Einstein was born at Ulm, in Württemberg, on March 14, 1879. A year later his family moved to Munich, where they remained until he was 15. His parentage was Jewish, but few Jewish usages were observed in his home. He was slow in learning to talk and at the Catholic elementary school which he first attended was known as Biedermeier (‘Honest John’) from his ponderously accurate way of speaking. Both here and at the Luitpold Gymnasium, where the educational system was rigid, he saw little difference between school and barrack. His father, Hermann, had a small electro-chemical factory, but he had a greater genius for living than he had for success. Failing in Munich he moved to Milan and later to Pavia. The son, left unhappily at the gymnasium, was well on the way to manoeuvring his departure from it when he was unexpectedly asked to leave as being ‘disruptive’ of his class. Italy gave him as great an interest in art and music as he already had in Schiller, and the affairs of his father enforced him to seek a career. He had speculated at the age of five on the movement of a compass needle, and he knew that his mathematics, if not his other subjects, were well beyond the usual examination requirements. Combining interest and ability, he arrived at theoretical physics as the field that would most attract him but partly because of his father’s work and partly from his own lack of formal attainment, he thought that technological training would be his best approach. He therefore proposed to study at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zürich, but was at first rejected. He had to qualify for the diploma in modern languages and biology at a cantonal school at Aarau. There he lost his dislike of schooling, and from the age of 17 until the age of 21 he conscientiously followed the course prescribed at Zürich for a teacher of physics and mathematics. In 1901 he became a Swiss citizen – a reflection of his dislike of authority.
Annus Mirabilis, 1905
Partly on account of his ancestry, he had difficulty in finding a teaching post, but by the influence of a fellow student he was appointed as a technical assistant in the Swiss Patent Office at Berne in 1902. This was the ‘cobbler’s job’, which he maintained later was the way that scientists should earn their living. In the next year he married Mileva Maritsch, a fellow student at the Polytechnic. Two sons were born in quick succession, but there were differences of temperament and interest, and the marriage was dissolved after some years.
Einstein’s first contribution to theoretical physics was made in the same year that he obtained his Patent Office job. Three years later was his annus mirabilis, 1905. Then he burst without warning into an extraordinary range of discovery and new ideas, of which the ‘Special Theory of Relativity’ was one part, not at the time the most comprehensible by his colleagues. In his earliest work he had simplified Boltzmann’s theory of the random motions of the molecules of a gas, and in 1905 he applied this method to the ‘Brownian movement’ – the impetuous, irregular motion of microscopic particles, suspended in a fluid, that is produced by molecular bombardment. Einstein showed how the number of molecules per unit of volume could be inferred from measurements made of the distances travelled by the visible particles which they hit. Such measurements, made later by Perrin, verified Einstein’s theory so well that the Brownian movement has ever since been regarded as one of the most direct – and impressive – pieces of evidence for the reality of molecules.
In the same year Einstein advanced a revolutionary theory of the photo-electric effect, which has exercised a decisive influence on the modern quantum theory of light. The essence of this effect is that the speed with which electrons are liberated from a metal surface illuminated by ultraviolet light depends only on the colour of the light and not on its brightness. Einstein suggested that the light (from which the escaping electrons must derive their energy) is not continuously distributed in space, but is like a gas with a discrete molecular structure – the ‘molecules’ being photons or units of radiant energy of amounts proportional to the frequency of the light. This assumption gave a concrete physical mechanism for the quantum theory of white light advanced by Planck in 1900, and it provided satisfactory estimates of the speed of photo-electrons. But the importance of Einstein’s theory of photons far transcended the occasion of its suggestion. Its real significance is that it accustomed physicists to accept the dual character of light, which sometimes behaves like a continuous train of waves, and sometimes a hail of bullets, and that in 1924 it suggested to de Broglie that matter itself had a similar ‘dual personality’ and could behave either as a wave or a corpuscle. These conceptions have dominated all subsequent speculations about the ultimate elements of matter and light.
Special Theory of Relativity
Although Einstein’s researches in the quantum theory were of vital significance and, in one direction, seemed to show a clearer grasp of its implications than was possessed by its originator, it is with the theories of relativity that his name will always be associated. The ‘Special Theory of Relativity’ was published in the same extraordinary year. It expressed in a simple and systematic form the effects produced on the basic instruments of physics – the ‘rigid’ scale and the perfect clock – by relative motion, and thus codified the earlier mathematical investigations of Voigt, the physical speculations of Larmor and the pioneer work of Lorentz. For the first time the optics of moving media received a satisfactory formulation, and Newtonian dynamics itself was generalized so as to express the effect of motion on apparent mass. In particular, Einstein’s deduction that mass and energy are proportional became the basic law of atomic transformation. Apart from its spectacular demonstration in atomic energy, it is supported also by a host of experiments in nuclear physics, in which it is used daily as a tool with which nuclear physicists work. Equally, the design of large engineering machines, such as ‘synchrotrons’, in which nuclear particles are accelerated to high energies, depends directly on its use.
In this group of varied and important publications he showed at once qualities of imagination and insight which were even more vital to his work than mathematical ability, which indeed was a necessary qualification but was not (by the highest standards) exceptional. It was also well for his immediate career that he had more than one contribution to offer.
As soon as the remarkable researches published by Einstein in 1905 became known many attempts were made to secure for him a professorial post. As a result of these efforts he became a Privatdozent at Berne in 1908 and Professor extraordinarius at Zürich in 1909. In 1911 he became Professor of Theoretical Physics at Prague, but returned to Zürich to the corresponding post in 1912. During 1913 Planck and Nernst persuaded Einstein to go to Berlin as director of the projected research institute for physics, as a member of the Royal Prussian Academy of Science and as a professor in the University of Berlin – with no duties or obligations. He occupied this post until 1933.
General Theory of Relativity
The ‘General Theory of Relativity’, published in 1916, was the fruit of many years of speculation by Einstein on the questions: ‘Can we distinguish the effects of gravitation and of acceleration?’ and ‘Are light rays bent by gravity?’ To answer these questions he was led to build a great and complex theory, which needs for its systematic expression a new mathematical discipline invented by Ricci and Levi-Civita. The divergences between the predictions of the planetary theory based on Einstein’s theory and those based on the classical theory of Newton are all extremely small, but in one case (the slow changes in the orbit of Mercury) Einstein’s theory provides an explanation which had never been found on Newtonian principles. Moreover, it successfully predicted the deflection of light from distant stars as it grazed the sun’s disc – an effect subsequently verified by British astronomical expeditions in 1919 – and also the reddening of light from very massive stars – which was much later confirmed by observations on the dark companion of Sirius. The success with which ‘general relativity’ gave quantitative predictions of the new phenomena has created a presumption in its favour which has substantially survived.
The application of general relativity to cosmology was implicit in Einstein’s original theory, but became explicit through a modification which he introduced into it in 1917. His contribution in this field was an attempt to provide an answer to an old and ‘insoluble’ problem: ‘How can the universe of stars be uniform in density, fill all space and yet be of finite total mass?’ The subsequent relation of observational evidence of ‘the expanding universe’ to the possible forms of theory that might be developed was done mainly by others, including Lemaître, de Sitter, and Eddington, to whom Einstein served as a stimulus.
During the 1914–18 war two other notable events occurred in his life – he refused to sign the ‘Manifesto of Ninety-two German Intellectuals’ which identified German culture and German militarism, and he contracted a second marriage, with his cousin Elsa. In 1921 he appeared publicly as a supporter of Zionism and he actively collaborated with Weizmann in the establishment of the University of Jerusalem. During the post-war years he travelled and lectured in Holland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, the United States (where he not only lectured on relativity but took part in Weizmann’s campaign for the Jewish National Fund), and England (where he lectured at King’s College, London, and calmed the fears of the Archbishop of Canterbury that relativity was a threat to theology). In 1922 he lectured in Paris, Shanghai, and Kobe, returning home via Palestine and Spain.
The Nobel Prize
In the same year he was awarded a Nobel prize, strangely enough, for his work in quantum theory, as the committee were not sure whether his theory of relativity was technically a ‘discovery’! He was awarded a Copley Medal by the Royal Society in 1925. He visited South America in 1925 and lectured at Pasadena (California) during the winters of 1930–31, 1931–32, and 1932–33. In the summer of 1932 he lectured at Oxford, and was made an honorary Doctor of Science. The great purge of Jewish scientists began under Hitler in 1933 and Einstein decided not to return to Germany, where scientific freedom had ceased to exist. He lived for some months at La Cocque in Belgium and resigned from the Prussian Academy. In the winter of 1933, at the invitation of Flexner, he emigrated to America and became a Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, a post which he held until 1945. His second wife, Elsa, had died in 1936.
Indeterminacy Opposed
In his later years he was venerated – and loved – but became somewhat isolated in his work from the main stream of modern physics. Remembering his early contribution to the quantum theory, it might have been supposed that he would have accepted readily the principle of indeterminacy, which came to play so large a part in it, and that, in his quest for a further unification of the laws of Nature, he would have tried to weld together the discontinuous and indeterminate picture given by the quantum theory with the continuous and determinate picture of relativity. But for Einstein physics was firmly rooted in causality; God did not play at dice, and he would not admit the ultimate validity of any theory based on chance or indeterminacy. The quantum theory remained, therefore, for him as a passing phase, however important to working physicists. Instead, he attempted further generalizations of relativity, which should incorporate both gravitation and electromagnetism, together with the nuclear fields of force. This work, however, has received no better reception than have all other ‘unified field theories’.
When we consider the basic character of the problems he attacked, the vast cosmical scale on which he worked, and his immense influence on physical cosmology as well as physics, we can only compare Einstein with Newton. If Newton’s central achievement was to establish the reign of gravitation in its full simplicity and universality, the essence of Einstein’s work was to reveal gravitation as a phenomenon expressible in terms of world geometry.
Humphrey Bogart
An actor of authority
14 January 1957
Mr Humphrey Bogart, the American actor, died yesterday in Hollywood. He was 57. For over 20 years – since his playing of the Dillinger-like part of Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest, which won him much praise – his seamed, sardonic cast of countenance and mordant tongue had been familiar to cinema audiences all over the world.
Bogart was born in New York on June 23, 1899, the son of Dr Belmont Bogart, a physician, and his wife, who as Maud Humphrey had made a name for herself as a watercolour artist and commercial illustrator. He was educated at Trinity School, New York, and at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, whence he was destined to go to Yale, but this intention was not fulfilled. The United States had entered the First World War and Bogart joined the Navy. He had always been attracted to the theatre and as soon as the war ended he joined the staff of a promoter of theatrical ventures as manager of a travelling company. But he was determined to act and made his way to New York, where he made his first appearance in 1922 in Drifting.
Thereafter he appeared regularly in plays and it was not until 1930 that he went to Hollywood. Of his first efforts he himself later said they were ‘a flop’. He returned to the stage and it was only after the success of the play The Petrified Forest that he again turned to the screen, to make an immediate impact with the film of the play with Leslie Howard and Miss Bette Davis.
There followed many other films, and notable among his earlier successes was Dead End, in which Bogart played the part of a gangster; and a gangster on the screen he often was, but a gangster with a difference. If Mr Clark Gable may be said to stand in the parts he plays for the uninhibited American male, the happy extrovert whom every college boy would wish to be, the lad for the girls and the lad for the liquor, Bogart represented a contrasting, yet allied, type of American hero.
He dwelt in the shadows and was on the other side, so far as the police and the law were concerned, but that was because the police and the law were themselves often shown as corrupt. He was the masculine counterpart of the girl of easy virtue who has a heart of gold. Typical was the role he played in The Big Shot. Here he was, of course, the ‘big shot’, the head of a gang which took beatings-up and murder in its stride, and yet at the end he gave himself up rather than see an innocent man, a man he did not even know, electrocuted. It is, of course, wildly improbable that the ‘big shot’ would do any such thing and, to make the climax convincing, some powerful acting would seem necessary. But that was not Bogart’s way. ‘He has charm and he doesn’t waste energy pretending to act,’ wrote James Agate. ‘He has a sinister-rueful countenance which acts for him. He has an exciting personality and lets it do the work.’
Certainly Bogart seemed to do little more than project his film personality on to the screen and leave it at that, but it was astonishing how much he could convey with a suggestion of pathos in that husky voice of his, with a shadow of a smile wryly turned against himself, and in films which gave him a chance, a film, for instance, such as John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, he showed that his acting could be positive even though it never moved far away from the essential Bogart.
Bogart appeared in a great number of films, among them High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon, Across the Pacific, The African Queen, To Have and Have Not, Casablanca, and The Caine Mutiny, and, while other reputations waxed and waned, he went on unchanged and unchangeable in calm, complete command of himself, the situation and the screen. He had what Kent found in Lear – authority.
Arturo Toscanini
A legendary musical figure
16 January 1957
Signor Arturo Toscanini, who died in New York yesterday at the age of 89, was the most renowned of living conductors, since his reputation was internationally supreme. His pre-eminence was recognized in Italy, where he was born, in America, where he worked for the greater part of his career, and in German countries, where between the wars he conducted at the Bayreuth and Salzburg Festivals.
His quality as an interpreter was mainly known in this country from gramophone records, but his visits to London in the 1930s and in 1952 confirmed and amplified the judgment that for clarity of presentation and fidelity to the composer he had no peer. His tastes were catholic but his interpretations were always those of an Italian. Yet Siegfried Wagner made him the mainstay of the Bayreuth Festival in 1930 and 1931, and the connection was broken only by Toscanini’s refusal to appear in Germany when Jewish musicians were maltreated by the Nazi Government. That he should thus be accepted by the leading institution which stands above all others for German music is certainly a remarkable testimony to the universality of his art. It was also a characteristic fulfilment of Toscanini’s career. For he had been the first to introduce Wagner’s Götterdämmerung to Italians; he had supervised the international repertory at the Metropolitan Opera in New York from 1898 to 1915; and it is on his performances of Beethoven’s symphonies that his popular fame is founded.
In this country our opportunities of hearing him in the flesh were limited to a short series of concerts in each of the years 1930, 1935, 1937–39, and a last visit in 1952, and, though we heard no opera under his direction, his performances of choral works, including Beethoven’s Mass in D and Choral Symphony, Brahms’s Requiem, and Verdi’s Requiem were memorable. It was widely claimed for him that his readings of these and other classics revealed them in their true character as their creators conceived them, if not for the first time, certainly in a definitive manner. The listener hearing some hitherto over-looked detail in a familiar symphony, noting some subtlety of tonal gradation or shaping of a phrase, was surprised to find that it was all marked in the score, which in point of fact the conductor never used either at rehearsal or at performances by virtue of his prodigious and, as it seems, photographic memory. Yet his interpretations were no more final than those of any other executant musician, and critics whose admiration was less idolatrous found the defects of his qualities in his reading of German music.
Beethoven’s Symphonies
The Latin mind, like the Mediterranean sunshine which conditions it, views things with hard edges, clear outlines, and thorough-going logic. Toscanini’s meticulous attention to detail in Beethoven’s symphonies made them classical and brilliant but ultimately a little inhuman. The opening chords of the Eroica sounded, at any rate with the virtuoso orchestras of America, more like pistol shots than an announcement of the key of E flat, and his bourgeois German Mastersingers became a procession of Florentine nobles. This is only to say that he was true to himself, and no conductor of more single-minded integrity ever lived. This sterling honesty brought him into conflict with the Fascist Government, whose song ‘Giovinezza’ he refused to play, as it also caused him later to break with Nazi-dominated Germany. To show with an unmistakable gesture what he thought of their intolerance he went to Palestine and conducted the newly formed Jewish orchestra in its national home.
Born at Parma on March 25, 1867, he began his musical studies at the local conservatoire, where his principal subject was the cello. Attention was first called to his exceptional abilities by his remarkable memory, which enabled him after a few rehearsals to play his part in the orchestra without opening the copy on his desk. His opportunity came when, at Rio de Janeiro in 1886, he was called by a sudden emergency to leave his place among the cellos and conduct Aida, which he did by heart. From that beginning he went on to the Metropolitan in New York, where he was chief conductor from 1898 to 1915. In 1922 he returned to La Scala at Milan, where he had previously worked between 1898 and 1908, and when the theatre was reopened after alterations in 1922 he was appointed director and ruled it like the autocrat he was.
Encores Abolished
Of new works, such as the eagerly expected performance of Boito’s Nerone and the premiere of Puccini’s last opera, Turandot, he refused to announce even the dates until he was satisfied that the productions were ready, in complete disregard of the convenience of those who were prepared to come long distances to attend them. Nor would he compromise on matters of artistic detail, still less on principle. Thus he abolished encores at La Scala in the face of long-standing Italian practice, and he demanded obedience from the singers and players whom he directed. Yehudi Menuhin, the violinist, who worked in happy association with him at concerts in New York, bears astonished testimony to his impulsiveness and to the general acceptance by others that his will was law. To stop a telephone bell ringing during a private rehearsal with Menuhin Toscanini pulled the instrument from the wall, plaster and all, and returned without a word to the piano. No one expressed any surprise, though Menuhin confesses that he had never before seen such an uninhibited obedience to impulse. There were therefore some qualms at the bbc when that body invited him to come and direct its orchestra, but he won the players’ confidence, enthusiasm, and loyalty without any of the explosions with which he has been credited elsewhere. Indeed, Mr Bernard Shore, the violist who played under him, says in his book The Orchestra Speaks that playing under Toscanini becomes a different art. ‘He stimulates his men, refreshes their minds; and music that has become stale is revived in all its pristine beauty.’
But his autocracy at Milan was bound to bring friction with those whose artistic concentration was less than his own, and after having taken the Scala Company abroad to Germany and Vienna and given performances, more particularly of Verdi’s Falstaff, which entranced German-speaking audiences, he announced his intention of leaving Milan, and in the winter of 1929 accepted the post of conductor to the Philharmonic Society of New York. It was with the New York Orchestra that he first came to England and toured Europe. He remained with them until 1936.
Later Tours
He then formed his own orchestra, the National Broadcasting Company Orchestra, with which he gave concerts all through the Second World War, touring Latin America and making the gramophone records which preserve his interpretations for the rest of the world. In 1946 he returned for a while to Milan for a few months in order to contribute the proceeds of some concerts towards the rebuilding of La Scala in addition to a financial gift of a million lire. When the Festival Hall was being built in 1950 it was announced that he was willing to come to London and direct some of its inaugural concerts. This plan, however, had to be abandoned. Notwithstanding, he did conduct in the Festival Hall, when in September, 1952, he came to London to give two concerts devoted mainly to the four symphonies of Brahms. In this connection it is worthy of remark that though he denounced other musicians for tampering with scores, he did himself play some tricks with the timpani of Brahms’s C minor symphony.
This symphony also showed him sacrificing the brooding tragedy of the opening in favour of creating immediately a feeling of tremendous tension, a treatment which leaves him with a problem of what to do with the development section. In the milder Brahms of the St Anthony Variations and the D major symphony he showed a more ingratiating temper and in his interpretation of Debussy’s La Mer sensuous tonal shading was not neglected. But in general it was the intensity, the urgency, the magnification of the life of a score, upon which he seized, and it was this remarkable dynamic drive which he preserved into extreme old age.
His last concert was given at Carnegie Hall in New York no longer ago than in April 1954, when he bade farewell to his orchestra and his public in a Wagner programme, at the end of which he dropped his baton and went out, not to return to face the plaudits of his audience, a symbolic gesture of retirement after 68 years of active music-making.
Signor Toscanini’s wife predeceased him in 1951. There were a son and two daughters of the marriage, of whom one is married to Mr Vladimir Horowitz, the pianist.
Christian Dior
A master of couture design
24 October 1957
M. Christian Dior, the famous French couture designer, died suddenly yesterday at Montecatini, Italy, at the age of 52, as announced in our late editions. Never strong, Dior had been in ill-health for some time and his death, although so sudden, was not entirely unexpected.
A master of his craft, a rare genius, Dior’s name will stand high in the records of fine achievement in the field of couture design. Even more than this he will be honoured for the help that he, with the Marcel Boussac organisation, was able to give France just after the war when it was so greatly needed. Then, the great textile industry, the third most important in France, was nearly at a standstill, but following the tremendous success of his first collection in January, 1947, with its full-skirted styles each requiring many yards of fabric, orders began to flow into the French mills.
Today thousands of workers throughout the world owe their living directly to his inspiration, not only as a result of his couture showings, but also through the success of the wholesale houses and accessory businesses built up under the umbrella of the central organization in Paris, with offices in London, New York, and Caracas.
Born on January 21, 1905, at Granville, in Normandy, he was the only son of Maurice Dior, a wealthy chemical manufacturer. As a youth he enjoyed designing clothes for his sisters, and a costume representing Neptune, which he designed and wore at a fancy dress ball, won him the first prize. The Diplomatic Corps, however, not dress designing, was originally planned as a career for the intelligent, rather delicate, youth. He studied political science at the Sorbonne, but the French financial crisis of 1930–31, which crippled the family business, enabled him to escape from the prospect of a career which had never greatly attracted him. Always interested in art, with the collaboration of friends, he set up a small salon in the Rue la Boétie, in the centre of Paris, and helped to launch Christian Bérard among other young painters. Later Bérard was always to be seen sitting on the floor of the large salon at the première of Dior’s collections, until the former’s death in 1949.
Forced to give up his art gallery for reasons of ill-health Dior was sent to the mountains to recover. Returning eventually he took up couture designing in earnest, first of all with Agnes, for whom he designed hats, and later with Robert Piguet.
Shortly after the outbreak of war Dior retired to the country where he remained for some time with a sister who had a market garden business. On his return to Paris he became one of Lelong’s designers, and remained with Lelong until the fortuitous meeting with a friend of his youth, Marcel Boussac. At this time Boussac was, in fact, looking for a designer in order to set up a couture house, and a partnership was arranged culminating in the widely publicized first collection in the spring of 1947.
Christian Dior’s very real affection for England and things English stemmed from his first visit at the age of 19 when, to assist his recovery from a serious illness, his father gave him a sum of money and suggested it should be spent exploring Britain. He had, indeed, many English friends and always made a practice of having at least one English mannequin in the house on the Avenue Montaigne. And he always gave sympathetic attention to the products of British fabric manufacturers.
His feeling for line was allied to a wonderful appreciation of colour and texture, and whatever the ‘line’ the result was always feminine clothes designed to flatter the wearer. His early death at this moment is not only a tragedy for the house of Dior, but could have serious consequences for the French industry as a whole, following as it does the death or retirement of a number of other important French designers in the past few years.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Christian apologist and novelist
17 December 1957
Miss Dorothy L. Sayers died at her home at Witham, Essex, on Tuesday night at the age of 64.
Sudden death would have had no terrors for her. She combined an adventurous curiosity about life with a religious faith based on natural piety, common sense, and hard reading. She made a name in several diverse fields of creative work. But the diversity of her success was founded on an inner unity of character. When she came down from Somerville with a First in Modern Languages she tried her hand at advertising. The directness and the grasp of facts that are needed by a copywriter stood her in good stead as a newcomer to the crowded ranks of authors of detective fiction. During the 1920s and 1930s, she established herself as one of the few who could give a new look to that hard-ridden kind of novel.
Her recipe was deftly to mix a plot that kept readers guessing with inside information, told without tears, about some fascinating subject – campanology, the backrooms of an advertising agency, life behind the discreet windows of a West End club. Lord Peter Wimsey came alive as a good companion to the few detectives into whom an engaging individuality has been breathed.
This was not done by chance; she had made a close, critical study of the craft. Lecturing, once, on Aristotle’s Poetics she remarked that he was obviously hankering after a good detective novel because he had laid it down that the writer’s business was to lead the reader up the garden, to make the murderer’s villainy implicit in his character from the start, and to remember that the dénouement is the most difficult part of the story.
But it is some 20 years since Miss Sayers wrote a detective story, and, shortly before her death, she said: ‘There will be no more Peter Wimseys.’ The detective writer had been ousted by the Christian apologist. Miss Sayers approached her task of making religion real for the widest public with a zeal that sometimes shocked the conventionally orthodox (with whose protests she was well able to deal) and always held the ears of listeners and the eyes of the reading public. ‘The Man Born to be King’ became a bbc bestseller, attracting large audiences Christmas after Christmas.
Dante Translations
She carried what she regarded as the central purpose of her life on to the stage and into books. Dogma had no terrors for her. She did not believe in putting water into the pure spirit of her Church. Dante, with his colloquial idiom and unselfconscious piety, naturally attracted her. The translations she published of his Inferno and Purgatorio caught the directness of the original but failed, as Binyon did not, to catch the poetry. But her prose comments have done more than those of any other recent English author to quicken interest in Dante.
Dorothy Leigh Sayers was born in 1893, the daughter of the Rev. Henry Sayers and Helen Mary Leigh. She was in print before she was 21 with Op I, a book of verse, and followed it in 1919 by another, Catholic Tales. It was a medium in which she could be skilful, flexible, and effective, and readers of The Times Literary Supplement will, no doubt, remember her strong poem, ‘The English War’, which appeared in its issue of September 7, 1940. Lord Peter made his first appearance in 1923 in Whose Body? There followed Clouds of Witness (1926), Unnatural Death (1927), The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928) and The Documents in the Case (1930).
In 1930 Miss Sayers in addition to producing her Strong Poison, yet another detective book, made an interesting departure. Out of the fragments of its Anglo-Norman version she had constructed her Tristan in Brittany, in the form of a modern English story and produced it, partly in verse and partly in prose.
Have His Carcase (1932) introduced a companion for Lord Peter in the shape of Harriet Vane, a writer of detective stories. In Hangman’s Holiday (1933), a book of short stories, she created another amateur detective, Mr Montague Egg, who was a simpler reasoner than Lord Peter, but almost as acute. In The Nine Tailors, though of the same genre, her theme was built round a noble church in Fenland, and possessed a majesty which disclosed powers the authoress had scarcely exerted until then. Gaudy Night (1935) took Lord Peter and Harriet Vane into the serene and serious life of a women’s college at Oxford, and psychological problems deeper than those which belong to the detective convention arose.
Lord Peter on Stage
In 1936 her Busman’s Holiday, a play which presented Lord Peter married – Miss Sayers called it ‘a love story with detective interruptions’ – was staged at the Comedy Theatre. She had a collaborator in M. St Clair Byrne, and between them they provided Lord Peter’s public with an excellent entertainment. The Zeal of Thy House (1937), which was written for the Canterbury Festival and played there and in London, was set in the twelfth century and was a sincere and illuminating study of the purification of an artist, a kind of architectural Gerontius purged by heavenly fire of his last earthly infirmity. The Devil to Pay (1939) was also written for the Canterbury Festival. It set the legend of Dr Faustus, one of the great stories of the world, at the kind of angle most likely to commend it to the modern stage. Later it was played at His Majesty’s Theatre. By sheer alertness of invention and the power to fit her ideas into a dramatic narrative she accomplished an extremely difficult task with credit. Love All (1940) was an agreeable and amusing comedy.
In 1940 Miss Sayers published a calmly philosophic essay on the war, which she named ‘Begin Here’. Then, in 1941, she followed it with her ‘The Mind of the Maker’, in which she analysed the metaphor of God as Creator and tested it in the light of creative activity as she knew it. Unpopular Opinions, a miscellaneous collection of essays, came out in 1946, Creed or Chaos, another series of essays, pungent and well reasoned, in 1947, and The Lost Tools of Learning in the following year. She began her translations of Dante for the Penguin Series with the Inferno which came out in November, 1949; Purgatorio followed in May, 1955. She found the third volume Paradiso the hardest and in August, 1956, her translation had reached Canto VII. Her commentary was one of the most valuable parts of her books. After she had finished her second volume, she slipped in, as a kind of relaxation, a translation of Chanson de Roland, published this year.
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Anna Temkin
The Times obituaries have given readers throughout the world an instant picture of a life for over 150 years. The Times Great Lives is a selection of 124 of these pieces, each obituary has been updated and reproduced in their entirety, by Anna Temkin, The Times assistant obituaries editor.The Times register provides a rich store of information and opinion on the most influential characters of the twentieth and early twenty-first century – be they politicians, sportspeople, musicians, writers, artists, pop stars or military personnel.Major figures of influence from our times and from recent history such as Sigmund Freud, Pablo Picasso and Diana, Princess of Wales are included. This updated second edition includes some of the greatest figures of the modern era such as Nelson Mandela, Steve Jobs, Neil Armstrong and Margaret Thatcher.Authoritative, fascinating, insightful and endlessly engaging, The Times Great Lives is a must for anyone with an interest in the history and people of the twentieth century.
GREAT LIVES
GREAT LIVES
a century in obituaries
Edited by Anna Temkin
Times Books
Published by Times Books
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
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Ebook first edition 2015
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Cover Image © Louise Gubb
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Lord Kitchener (#uf28759ee-71f7-5f2b-b52f-67cd341b5134)
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Benjamin Britten (#litres_trial_promo)
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Maria Callas (#litres_trial_promo)
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Sir Alfred Hitchcock (#litres_trial_promo)
Mae West (#litres_trial_promo)
John Lennon (#litres_trial_promo)
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Henry Moore (#litres_trial_promo)
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Laurence Olivier (#litres_trial_promo)
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Francis Bacon (#litres_trial_promo)
Elizabeth David (#litres_trial_promo)
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Rudolf Nureyev (#litres_trial_promo)
Richard Nixon (#litres_trial_promo)
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Fred Perry (#litres_trial_promo)
Harold Wilson (#litres_trial_promo)
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Diana, Princess of Wales (#litres_trial_promo)
Mother Teresa (#litres_trial_promo)
Frank Sinatra (#litres_trial_promo)
Iris Murdoch (#litres_trial_promo)
Stanley Kubrick (#litres_trial_promo)
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Sir Alf Ramsey (#litres_trial_promo)
Raisa Gorbachev (#litres_trial_promo)
Sir Stanley Matthews (#litres_trial_promo)
Dame Barbara Cartland (#litres_trial_promo)
Sir John Gielgud (#litres_trial_promo)
Sir Alec Guinness (#litres_trial_promo)
Don Bradman (#litres_trial_promo)
Christiaan Barnard (#litres_trial_promo)
Spike Milligan (#litres_trial_promo)
Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother (#litres_trial_promo)
Ronald Reagan (#litres_trial_promo)
Francis Crick (#litres_trial_promo)
Pope John Paul II (#litres_trial_promo)
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Luciano Pavarotti (#litres_trial_promo)
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Michael Jackson (#litres_trial_promo)
Elizabeth Taylor (#litres_trial_promo)
Steve Jobs (#litres_trial_promo)
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Neil Armstrong (#litres_trial_promo)
Baroness Thatcher (#litres_trial_promo)
Seamus Heaney (#litres_trial_promo)
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Nelson Mandela (#litres_trial_promo)
Lady Soames (#litres_trial_promo)
Lord Attenborough (#litres_trial_promo)
Sir Terry Pratchett (#litres_trial_promo)
Lee Kuan Yew (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Introduction
Anna Temkin
Assistant Obituaries Editor, The Times
Perhaps the most effective way to study history is to read the obituaries of those who have shaped it. Many would agree there is no better place to do so than in the pages of The Times. Its notices have long been a prime source for scholars; to this day, contributors to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography are invariably advised to start their research by consulting the relevant Times obituary.
The pieces chronologically assembled here, from Lord Kitchener to Lee Kuan Yew, form an enthralling snapshot of the past 100 years. Over that period The Times house style has of course changed – to include details of survivors, for example, and a final paragraph recording the date of birth and date of death. The comprehensive first edition of Great Lives, edited by Ian Brunskill, was published in 2005 and closed with the obituary of Pope John Paul II. In the ten years since, great lives have continued to be recorded in The Times. Many of these would be worthy of appearing in this second edition and the selection process has necessarily involved making invidious choices. Who to include and who to exclude, while still giving due coverage to the worlds of entertainment, sport et al? Apart from the two most high profile deaths in recent years – those of Baroness Thatcher and Nelson Mandela – the new contenders were generally open to debate. Choosing which to add and which, very reluctantly, to remove meant avoiding a number of risks: too many politicians (farewell Earl Attlee), too few writers (stay put Enid Blyton), too much music (so long Glenn Gould), not enough science (welcome Sir Bernard Lovell). All these were important considerations when updating this edition.
Rosa Parks, who died in 2007, was at the forefront of the civil rights movement and, appropriately, is now among the vanguard of the new obituaries in this compendium. Between the Iron Lady and South Africa’s much-loved ‘Madiba’, the world also lost Seamus Heaney, whose poetry caused nothing short of a literary sensation, and the doyen of television interrogators Sir David Frost, who famously teased a confession out of President Nixon over Watergate. Sir Edmund Hillary modestly described his life as merely a ‘constant battle against boredom’ but Britain held its breath as he became the first climber to reach the summit of Everest. Again, how could anyone forget the visionary Steve Jobs whose name will forever be synonymous with the ubiquitous Apple?
The perennial power of the obituary is that it brings the dead to life. At its most compelling, it combines biography and historical context with anecdotes and telling quotations; such is the art of the skilled obituarist. The majority of Times notices are written in house, but when necessary the paper avails itself of specialist knowledge from outsiders. All, however, are unsigned. This policy of anonymity ultimately allows for a fairer, fuller account of the subject’s life and the obituarist need not fear any backlash following publication. After Nubar Gulbenkian, the Armenian business magnate, was embroiled in a bitter feud with his father, a famous oil millionaire, he was concerned which side of the dispute his obituary in The Times would take. He therefore invited members of the paper’s staff for lunch at the Ritz, offering them £1000 for a view of his draft obituary. He never saw it and when the notice actually appeared in 1972, it gave a balanced portrayal of the family feud. That kind of proportional representation, as it were, is exemplified in many of the pieces reproduced here. Michael Jackson’s obituary, for instance, acknowledges his reputation as the king of pop while also addressing the sensational allegations of impropriety levelled at him.
These pages contain some of the most extraordinary lives that have defined the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries; within them are stories of genius, innovation, adversity and, at times, sheer eccentricity. Thomas Carlyle declared, ‘History is the essence of innumerable biographies’. His ‘Great Man’ theory that the past can be explained by the influence of leaders and heroes may not be infallible (after all, some of the most significant could not be regarded as either noble or heroic). Yet there is no doubt that all the men and women of this collection left an indelible mark on both the world they knew and the one that we now inhabit. Their obituaries have stood the test of time and are, in that sense, a fitting reflection of The Times itself.
Abridged Introduction
to the First Edition
Ian Brunskill
Former Obituaries Editor, The Times
From its beginnings in 1785 The Times has recorded significant deaths. Often in the early days this amounted to little more than a list of names of people who had died, and on more than one occasion The Times simply plagiarized a notice from another paper if it had none of its own. It was under John Thadeus Delane, Editor of The Times from 1841 to 1877, that this began to change. Delane clearly recognized that the death of a leading figure on the national stage was an event that would seize the public imagination as almost nothing else could, and that it demanded more than just a brief notice recording the demise. ‘Wellington’s death,’ Delane told a colleague, ‘will be the only topic’.
Delane instituted the practice of preparing detailed, authoritative – and often very long – obituaries of the more important and influential personalities of the day while they were still alive. The resulting increase in the quality and scope of the major notices ensured that, even if the paper’s day-to-day obituary coverage remained erratic, The Times in the second half of the 19th century rose to the big occasion far better than its rivals could. The investment of effort and resources was not hard to justify. The Times obituaries not only found a ready following among readers of the paper but were soon being collected and republished in book form too. Six volumes of ‘Biographies of Eminent Persons’ covered the period 1870-1894.
It was not until 1920, however, that The Times appointed its first obituary editor, and it was some years later still before the paper began to run a daily obituary page. As late as 1956, the publisher Rupert Hart-Davis could complain in a letter to the retired Eton schoolmaster George Lyttelton: ‘The obituary arrangements at The Times are haphazard and unsatisfactory. The smallest civil servant – Sewage Disposal Officer in Uppingham – automatically has at least half a column about him in standing type at the office, but writers and artists are not provided for until they are eighty.’
That was a little unfair, even at the time, but if matters have improved since then, it is in large part due to the efforts of the late Colin Watson, who took over as obituaries editor in the year Hart-Davis expressed that disparaging view and who remained in the post for 25 years. He built up and maintained the stock of advance notices so that there were usually about 5,000 on file at any one time, a figure that has remained more or less constant ever since.
Watson, in an article written on his retirement, gave a revealing and only half-frivolous account of what the whole business involves. It was – is – a relentless, if rewarding, task: ‘You may read and read and read,’ he wrote, ‘particularly history; turn on the radio; listen for rumours of ill-health (never laugh at so much as a chesty cold); and you may write endless letters – but never dare say you are on top.’
If Watson may in many respects be said to have brought the obituary department into the modern world, it fell to his successors, particularly John Higgins and Anthony Howard, to show how effectively the paper could respond when other newspapers, from the mid-1980s, began to expand their obituary coverage to match that of The Times. There were some elsewhere who claimed, in the course of this expansion, to have invented or reinvented the newspaper obituary in its modern form – chiefly, it often seemed, by treating all their subjects like amusing minor characters in the novels of Anthony Powell. In fact, as I hope this collection shows, the obituary form as practised for more than a century in The Times had at its best always been both broader in range and livelier in approach than may generally have been assumed.
Lord Kitchener
5 June 1916
Horatio Herbert Kitchener was born at Gunsborough House, near Listowel, in County Kerry, on June 24, 1850. He was the second son of Lieutenant-Colonel H. H. Kitchener, of Cossington, Leicestershire, by his marriage with Frances, daughter of the Rev. John Chevallier, dd, of Aspall Hall, Suffolk, and was therefore of English descent though born in Ireland.
He was educated privately by tutors until the age of 13, when he was sent with his three brothers to Villeneuve, on the Lake of Geneva, where he was in the charge of the Rev. J. Bennett. From Villeneuve, after some further travels abroad, he returned to London, and was prepared for the Army by the Rev. George Frost of Kensington Square. He entered the Royal Military Academy at Woolwich in 1868 and obtained a commission in the Royal Engineers in January, 1871. During the short interval between passing out of Woolwich and joining the Engineers he was on a visit to his father at Dinan, and volunteered for service with the French Army. He served under Chanzy for a short time, but was struck down by pneumonia and invalided home. He now applied himself vigorously to the technical work of his branch, and laboured incessantly at Chatham and Aldershot to succeed in his profession.
Palestine and Cyprus
His first chance of adventure arose owing to a vacancy on the staff of the Palestine Exploration Society. Kitchener was offered the post in 1874 and at once accepted it. He remained in the Holy Land until the year 1878, engaged first as assistant to Lieutenant Conder, re, in mapping 1,600 square miles of Judah and Philistia, and then in sole charge during the year 1877 surveying that part of Western Palestine which still remained unmapped. The work was done with the thoroughness which distinguished Kitchener’s methods in his subsequent career. He rejoined Conder in London in January, 1878, and by the following September the scheme of the Society was carried through, and a map of Western Palestine on a scale of one inch to a mile was satisfactorily completed. The work entailed considerable hardship, and even danger. Kitchener suffered from sun-stroke and fever. He and his surveying parties were frequently attacked by bands of marauders, and on one of these occasions both Conder and he barely escaped with their lives. On another occasion Kitchener pluckily rescued his comrade from drowning. His survey work in Palestine led directly to his nomination for similar work in Cyprus, where he began the map of the island which was eventually published in 1885.
Egypt and the Red Sea
Realising that trouble was brewing in Egypt, Kitchener managed to be at Alexandria on leave at the time of Arabi’s revolt. He served through the campaign of 1882, and, thanks largely to his knowledge of Arabic, became second in command of the Egyptian Cavalry when Sir Evelyn Wood was made Sirdar of the Egyptian Army. He left Suez in November, 1883, to take part in the survey of the Sinai Peninsula, but almost immediately returned for service in the Intelligence branch. He was sent southward after the defeat of Hicks Pasha in order to win over the tribes and prevent the further spread of disaffection. His personality and influence did much. The Mudir of Dongola in response to Kitchener’s appeal, fell upon the dervishes at Korti and defeated them. But the tide of Mahdi-ism was still flowing strongly. By July, 1884, Khartum was invested, and upon Kitchener fell the duty of keeping touch between Gordon and the expedition all too tardily dispatched for his relief.
Kitchener was now a major and daa and qmc on the Intelligence Staff. In December, 1884, Wolseley and his troops reached Korti. Kitchener accompanied Sir Herbert Stewart’s column on its march to Metemmeh, but only as far as Gakdul Wells, and consequently he was not at Abu Klea. When the expedition recoiled, it became Kitchener’s painful duty to piece together an account of the storming of Khartum and the death of Gordon. For Kitchener’s services in this arduous and disappointing campaign there came a mention in dispatches, a medal and clasp, and the Khedive’s star. In June, 1885, he was promoted lieutenant-colonel. In the summer the Mahdi died and the Khalifa Abdullahi succeeded him. Kitchener had resigned his commission in the Egyptian Army and had returned to England, but he was almost at once sent off to Zanzibar on a boundary commission and was subsequently appointed Governor-General of the Red Sea littoral and Commandant at Suakin in August, 1886. Here he soon found himself at grips with the famous Emir Osman Digna.
After some desultory fighting round Suakin Kitchener marched out one morning, surprised Osman’s camp at Handont, and carried it with the Sudanese. But in the course of the action he was severely wounded by a bullet in the neck, and was subsequently invalided home. The bullet caused him serious inconvenience until it was at last extracted. In June, 1888, he became colonel and adc to her Majesty Queen Victoria, who had formed a high and just estimate of Kitchener’s talents and ever displayed towards him a gracious regard. He rejoined the Egyptian Army as Adjutant-General, and was in command of a brigade of Sudanese when Sir Francis Grenfell stormed Osman Digna’s line at Gemaizeh. Toski, in the following summer, was another success, and Kitchener’s share in it at the head of 1,500 mounted troops won for him a cb.
Three less eventful years now went by while the Egyptian Army, encouraged by its successes in the Geld, grew in strength and efficiency. In 1892 Kitchener succeeded Grenfell as Sirdar, and in 1894 was made a kcmg.
The Reconquest of the Sudan
Lord Salisbury’s Government decided on March 12, 1896, that the time had come for a forward movement on the Nile. Their immediate object was to make a diversion in favour of Italy, whose troops had just been totally defeated by the Abyssinians at Adowa, but the natural impetus of the advance carried the Sirdar and his army eventually to Khartum. Kitchener was ready when the order to advance was given. He had 10,000 men on the frontier, rails ready to follow them to Kerma, and all preparations made for supply. At Firket he surprised the dervishes at dawn, and at a cost of only 100 casualties caused the enemy a loss of 800 dead and 1,000 prisoners. A period of unavoidable inactivity ensued to admit of the construction of the railway, the accumulation of supplies, and the preparation of a fleet of steamers to accompany the advance. Cholera ravaged the camp and sandstorms of a furious character impeded operations, but the advance was at last resumed, and after sharp fights at Hafir and Dongola, the latter town was occupied on September 23, and the first stage of the reconquest of the Sudan was at an end. Kitchener was promoted major-general, with a very good, but not yet assured, prospect of completing the work which he had begun so well.
From the various lines of further advance open to him Kitchener chose the direct line from Wady Halfa to Abu Hamed, and formed the audacious project of spanning this arid and apparently waterless desert, 230 miles broad, with a railway, as he advanced. The first rails of this line were laid in January, 1897, and 130 miles were completed by July. Abu Hamed was captured on August 7 by Hunter with a flying column from Merowi, and Berber on August 31. The remaining 100 miles of the desert railway were then completed. Fortune favoured Kitchener at this period. Water was found by boring in the desert, but the construction of the line was still a triumph of imagination and resource. There were risks in the general situation at this moment, for the position of the army was temporarily far from favourable. There was a specially difficult period towards the close of 1897, when large dervish forces were massed at Metemmeh and a dash to the north seemed on the cards. But the Khalifa delayed his stroke, and when in February, 1898, the Khalifa’s lieutenant Mahmud began to march to the north Kitchener was ready for him.
The Atbara
Mahmud and Osman Digna, with some 12,000 good fighting men and several notable Emirs, had concentrated on the eastern bank of the Nile round Shendy, and marching across the desert had struck the Atbara at Nakheila, about 35 miles from its confluence with the Nile. Kitchener, while holding the junction point of the rivers at Atbara Fort, massed the remainder of his force at Res el Hudi on the Atbara, prepared either to attack the dervishes in flank if they moved north or to fall on them in their camp if they remained inert. The reconnaissances showed that the dervishes had fortified their camp in the thick scrub, and that the dem could best be attacked from the desert side. An attack seemed likely to be costly, and Kitchener hoped that the dervishes, who were short of food, would either attack the Anglo-Egyptian zariba or offer a fight in the open field. The dervishes did not move, and not even a successful raid on Shendy by the gunboats carrying troops affected their decision. After some telegraphic communications with Lord Cromer, Kitchener drew nearer to his enemy, advancing first to Abadar and then to Umdabia. Here he was within striking distance, and in the evening of April 7 the whole force marched silently out into the desert, and after a well-executed night march came within sight of Mahmud’s lines at 3 a.m. on the morning of Good Friday, April 8. A halt was made about 600 yards from the trenches and the artillery opened fire, while the infantry was reformed for the assault, Hunter’s Sudanese on the right and the British on the left. At 7.40 a.m. Kitchener ordered the advance. A sustained fire of musketry broke out from the dervish entrenchments and was returned with interest by the British and Sudanese, who advanced firing without halting and as steadily as on parade. The din was terrific and the attack irresistible. In less than a quarter of an hour the dervish zariba was torn aside and Kitchener’s troops inundated the defences. The dervishes stood well and even attempted counter-attacks, but they were swept out of the dem into the river and the bush, leaving 1,700 dead in the trenches, including many Emirs. The wily Osman escaped, but Mahmud was made prisoner, while comparatively few of the dervishes who escaped regained Khartum. In this brief but fierce and decisive action the Anglo-Egyptian force suffered 551 casualties.
As Kitchener rode up to greet and to thank the regiments while they were reforming the men received him with resounding cheers. He may not have won their love, for no man, not even Wellington, ever less sought by arts and graces to cultivate popularity among his men, but he had given them a fight after their own hearts, and their confidence in him was unbounded and complete.
Omdurman
By June, 1898, the rails reached the Atbara, and preparations were continued for the final advance at the next high Nile. The army was gradually concentrated by road and river at Wad Hamed, on the west bank of the Nile, 60 miles from Khartum. From this point, 22,000 strong, it set out in gallant array, on a broad front, covered and flanked by the gunboats and the mounted troops. The sun was scorching and the marching hard, but the men were in fine condition and their spirit was superb. By September 1 the plain of Kerreri was reached – the plain which, according to prophecy, was to be whitened by skulls – and the cavalry now reported that the enemy was advancing. Kitchener drew up his troops in crescent formation, their flanks resting on the river, the British brigades on the left. A night attack by the dervishes was expected and might have proved dangerous, but fortunately it was not attempted, and when dawn came on September 2 the fate of the Khalifa’s host was sealed. Kitchener had ridden forward at dawn to Jebel Surgam, a high hill which concealed the two armies from each other, and returned in serious mood, for he had seen some 52,000 dervishes advancing in ordered masses to the attack, and their aspect was formidable. Well marshalled and well led, they swept away the Egyptian cavalry and camel corps, hurling them down the hill, and then turned towards the river and came down upon Kitchener with flags waving, shouting their war cries, and led right gallantly by their Emirs. It was very brave but very hopeless.Kitchener gave the order to open fire when the dervish masses were within 1,700 yards. There was a clear field of fire with scarcely cover for a mouse. The hail of bullets from guns, rifles, and maxims smote the great host of barbarism and shattered it from end to end. The dervish fire was comparatively ineffective, and though individual fanatics struggled up to within short range no formed body came near enough to charge. Completely repulsed with frightful losses the masses melted away, the survivors reeled back, and the fire temporarily ceased.
Kitchener now ordered an advance upon Omdurman in échelon of brigades from the left, and this brought on the second phase of the battle. In the échelon formation Macdonald’s Egyptian brigade on the right was farthest out in the desert, and, as the advance began, the dervish reserves and other masses which had been recalled from the pursuit of the cavalry closed upon Macdonald and delivered a furious attack. The coolness of the commander and the steadiness of his troops saved the situation. Wauchope hurried to his support, while the other brigades wheeled to their right and drove the remnants of the Khalifa’s army away into the desert. A gallant attack by the 21st Lancers under Colonel Martin upon a large body of dervishes in a khor was a stirring incident of the fight on the left, but placed the Lancers out of court for pursuit. The army resumed its march, halted at the Khor Sambat to reform, and then entered Omdurman without allowing time for the enemy to recover and line the walls. Kitchener and his staff, after wandering about the town in some danger from fire, which continued intermittently throughout the night, sought shelter with Lyttelton’s brigade, which bivouacked in quarter-column protected by pickets on the desert side of the town, and from this bivouack ‘à la belle étoile’ the commander wrote the dispatch announcing the victory.
In this great spectacular, but all too one-sided battle there fell 10,700 gallant dervishes, while twice as many more left the field with wounds. The Anglo-Egyptian losses were 386 all told. The Khalifa’s great black flag, now at Windsor Castle, was captured, and if the Khalifa himself escaped for the time being it was not long before he and his remaining Emirs fell victims to Wingate’s troops. Mahdi-ism was smashed to pieces, Gordon was avenged, and the intolerable miseries of a rule which had reduced the population by some seven million souls were brought at last to an end. Two days after the victory a memorial service was held amidst the ruins of Gordon’s old Palace at Khartum. The British and Egyptian flags were hoisted on the walls close to the spot where Gordon fell. As Kitchener stood under the shade of the great tree on the river front to receive the congratulations of his officers, all the sternness had died out of him, for the aim of 14 long years of effort had been attained. He returned home to receive the honours and rewards which England does not stint to those who serve her well in war. He was raised to the peerage under the title of Baron Kitchener of Khartum, received the gcb, and was granted £30,000 and the thanks of both Houses of Parliament. The total cost of the campaigns of 1896–98 was only £2,354,000, of which £1,355,000 was spent on railways and gunboats. Of the total sum, rather less than £800,000 was paid by the British Government.
South Africa
Kitchener was not long left to enjoy his well-merited honours in peace. The Black Week of December, 1899, in South Africa caused Lord Roberts to be appointed Commander-in-Chief in the field, and with him there went out Lord Kitchener as Chief of Staff. During the time that Lord Roberts remained in South Africa Kitchener as much as possible effaced himself, and though always ready with counsel and assistance never gave a thought to his own aggrandizement. He was a model lieutenant and gave throughout a fine example of loyalty to his chief. He took part in all the marches and operations which carried the British flag from the Orange River by Paardeberg to Bloemfontein and Pretoria, and displayed energy in performing every duty that Lord Roberts saw fit to confide in him.
Paardeberg
When Cronje left his lines at Magersfontein and retreated eastward up the Modder, Lord Roberts was temporarily indisposed and Kitchener was virtually in command. When the morning of February 18, 1900, found Cronje still in laager at Wolvekraal, in a hollow encircled by commanding heights, upon Kitchener, in co-operation with French, devolved the duty of tackling him. Kitchener decided to strike while the enemy was within reach and issued orders for an advance upon the laager from east and west and by both banks of the river. The Boer position was bad. But the river bed afforded excellent cover and there was a good field of fire on both banks. Moreover, large bodies of Boers came up from the south and east throughout the day in order to extricate Cronje, and interfered materially with the orderly conduct of the fight. A long, wearing, and somewhat disconnected fight raged throughout the day, at the close of which the British troops had suffered 1,262 casualties without having penetrated the enemy’s lines. Kitchener rode rapidly during the day from one point of the battlefield to another endeavouring to electrify all with his own devouring activity. If the conduct of the fight was open to criticism it had this supreme merit – namely, that it was furiously energetic, and if it did not succeed in its immediate object it glued Cronje to his laager and drove away the Boers who were attempting to succour a comrade in distress. There are incidents in this fight which are still remembered with regret so far as Kitchener’s leading is concerned, but it is fair to say that in looking only to the main object set before him – namely, the destruction of Cronje’s force before it could escape or be reinforced – Kitchener was guided by correct principles, and that the subsequent surrender of the Boer force was largely due to the energetic manner in which Kitchener had smitten and hustled the enemy from the first.
The Guerilla War
When Lord Roberts handed over the command to Kitchener in November, 1900, it was generally supposed that the war was at an end. All the organized forces of the Boers had been dispersed, and nearly all the chief towns were in British occupation. But under the guidance of enterprising leaders the spirit of resistance rose superior to misfortune. On all sides guerilla bands sprang up and began a war of raids, ambuscades, and surprises with which a regular army is rarely fitted to cope on equal terms. There were still about 60,000 Boers, foreigners, and rebels in the field, and although they were not all, nor always, engaged in fighting, a fairly accountable force could usually be collected for any specific enterprise by a local leader of note. Their resolution, their field-craft, and the help of every kind which they drew from the countryside made them most formidable enemies. Their subjugation, in view of the wide area over which they operated, was one of the most arduous tasks that has ever been entrusted to a British commander. Of the 210,000 men under Kitchener more than half were disseminated along the railways and in isolated garrisons. The new commander did not possess that numerous force of efficient mounted troops which was indispensable to bring the war to a conclusion.
Into the active conduct of the war, and into the reorganization of his army, Kitchener threw the whole weight of his immense personal influence. He instilled a new spirit into the war when he dashed off to Bloemfontein to hurry along columns for the pursuit of De Wet, and he left no stone unturned to improve the quality of his army. He raided clubs, hotels, and rest camps to beat up loiterers, appealed to all parts of the Empire for mounted men, stimulated the purchase of remounts, raised mounted men from his infantry and artillery, created a new defence force in Cape Colony, and in every possible way prepared to meet like with like and to impart a new spirit of energy and enterprise into the conduct of the war.
The first months of 1901 were marked by the invasion of Cape Colony by De Wet and other leaders, and by a great driving operation in the Eastern Transvaal under French. Both movements failed to entrap the main Boer forces engaged, but the active conduct of the operations, and the losses suffered by the Boers, began that process of moral and material attrition by which the war was ultimately brought to an end.
The winter campaign from May to September, 1901, eliminated about 9,000 Boer fighters, leaving 35,000 still in the field, but this number was much under-estimated at the time. With the spring rains there was a general renewal of the war on the part of the burghers, their leading idea consisting of diversions in Cape Colony and Natal. Severe fighting followed in many places. As the months wore on both the offensive and the defensive virtues of Kitchener’s system became more striking. The blockhouse lines became more solid and began to extend over fixed areas of the country. Strengthened by infantry, they flanked the great drives, and became the nets into which the Boer commandos were driven. There came at last a dawning of perception in the Boer mind that further resistance, however honourable, was hopeless.
The Peace
An offer of mediation made by the Netherlands Government on January 25, 1902, gave an excuse to both sides for ending the war. Though this offer was not accepted, a copy of the correspondence which followed it was transmitted to the Transvaal Government on March 7, without any covering letter, explanation, or suggestion. It produced an immediate effect. President Schalk Burger asked for a safe-conduct for himself and others to enable them to meet the Free State Government to discuss terms, and a meeting took place in Kitchener’s house on April 12. A Convention at Vereeniging was arranged. Sixty Boer delegates there assembled on May 15. Terms were at last agreed to by the delegates in concert with Lord Kitchener and Lord Milner, and, after revision by the British Government, were finally accepted by 54 votes to 6 on May 31, only half an hour before the expiry of the time of grace.
Returning once more to England Kitchener was made a Viscount, and received the Order of Merit, the thanks of both Houses of Parliament, and a substantial grant of public money. Once again he was not allowed to enjoy for long his new honours in peace, and was appointed Commander-in-Chief in India in the same year that he had returned home.
Work in India
At the time when Kitchener reached India, the army in India, though possessing many war-like qualities, was suffering from serious organic and administrative defects. It did not present the offensive value which might have been expected from its numbers and its cost. It did not exploit all the martial races available for its service. The distribution of the troops had not been altered to correspond with new railway facilities and a changed strategical situation. It was not self-supporting in material of war, and the armament of the troops was behind the times. There was scarcely a single military requisite that had been completely supplied to the four poorly-organized divisions which formed the inadequate field army, and scarcely any provision had been made for maintaining the army in the field. The content of the Indian Army had not been inspired by adequate provision for its material well-being. Lastly, the higher administration of the Army was under a system of dual control, which produced conflicts between the responsibility pertaining to the Commander-in-Chief and the power which rested in the Military Department.
The history of Kitchener’s seven years in India is a history of sustained and in the end almost completely successful efforts to overcome these serious defects. He did not act in a hurry. He began by making extended tours over India, including a journey of 1,500 miles on horseback and on foot round the North-West frontier, and he consulted every officer of eminence and experience in India. Lord Curzon, who had urged Kitchener’s appointment, was heartily with him in his plans for Army reform up to the unfortunate moment when a difference of opinion arose between Viceroy and Commander-in-Chief on the question of the Military Department and the higher administration of the Army. The difference gave rise at last to a serious crisis. Kitchener fought his own battle alone and unsupported in the Governor-General’s Council, and the decision of Mr Balfour’s Government and the settlement finally made by Lord Morley were in his favour. Mr Brodrick’s dispatch of May 31, 1905, placed the Commander-in-Chief in India in charge of a newly-named Army Department, which became in the end invested with most of the rights and duties of the old Military Department, but large powers were reserved for the Secretary to the Army Department. Lord Curzon resigned in 1905.
Kitchener’s projects for the reform of the Army had begun to take shape in 1904. On October 28 of that year an Army Order divided the country into nine territorial divisional areas, and arranged the forces contained in them into nine divisions and three independent brigades, exclusive of Burma and Aden. The plan was to redistribute the troops according to the requirements of the defence of India, to train all arms together at suitable centres, and to promote decentralization of work and devolution of authority. Kitchener proposed to secure thorough training for war in recognized war formations, to enable the whole of the nine divisions to take the field in a high state of efficiency, to expand the reserve which would maintain them in the field, and to have behind them sufficient troops to support the civil power with garrisons and mobile columns. In May, 1907, another Army Order created a Northern and a Southern Army. The commanders of these Armies became inspectors whose duty was to ensure uniformity of training and discipline. The administrative work was delegated to officers commanding divisions.
Kitchener’s plan for the redistribution of the Army was much attacked because it was misrepresented and misunderstood. The cantonments given up were those which no longer required troops. The troops were not massed by divisions but by divisional areas, and in drawing up his plans for obligatory garrisons and the support of the civil power Kitchener worked closely with the civil authorities and left unguarded no likely centre of disaffection. The new distribution corresponded with strategical exigencies, and the various divisions were échelonned behind each other in a manner to utilize to the full the carrying capacity of the railways. There was no concentration on the frontier as was popularly supposed. The point of both Armies was directed to the North-West frontier, but there was nothing to prevent a concentration in any other direction.
Kitchener’s scheme was not one for increasing the Army, but for utilizing better existing material. He improved and widened the recruiting grounds of the Army. He did much for the pay, pensions, and allowances of the Indian Army, established grass and dairy farms all over India, and was very successful through his medical service in combating disease. It was his object, as it was that of Lord Lawrence, not only to make the Army formidable, but to make it safe. The principle of keeping the artillery mainly in the hands of Europeans was maintained. By creating the Quetta Staff College Kitchener enabled India to train her own Staff Officers, and by building factories he rendered the Army self-supporting in material of war. The total cost of these reforms was £8,216,000.
Australasian Defence
Kitchener, who was made Field Marshal on September 10, 1909, returned home by way of Australasia, having been invited to examine the land forces and the new Military laws of Australia and New Zealand and to suggest improvements in them. He did his work as thoroughly as usual. He left behind him a memorandum of a very impressive character, and had the satisfaction to learn that his recommendations were approved. On his return home he was made a kp, and was appointed High Commissioner and Commander-in-Chief in the Mediterranean in succession to the Duke of Connaught, who had resigned. Kitchener only accepted this post at the desire of King Edward, and when the King released him from the obligation, he resigned the appointment. In 1911 he purchased Broome Park, with 550 acres, near Canterbury, and occupied his unaccustomed leisure in beautifying and rearranging the house and grounds. The failure of the Government to employ Kitchener aroused unfavourable public comment, but in 1911 the death of Sir Eldon Gorst created a vacancy in Egypt, and Kitchener was offered, and accepted, the post of British Agent and Consul-General.
Egypt and the Sudan
Kitchener landed at Alexandria on September 27, 1911. He arrived in a cruiser, and this fact did not fail to make an impression (upon which he had doubtless calculated) on the natives, who had already been somewhat chastened by the news of his appointment as British Agent.
When Kitchener assumed office at Kasr-el-Doubara, he found a fierce religious controversy still raging between the Copts and the Moslems, and political unrest and seditious journalism still sufficiently active to cause some anxiety. Scarcely had he had time to take stock of his surroundings than there broke out the Italo-Turkish War, which, since its seat was at Egypt’s door, threatened to create in this country a situation which might at any moment have become very serious owing to the large Italian colony and the community of religion, and in many cases of interest, that binds the Egyptians to Turkey.
There seems little doubt that Kitchener’s presence and his prestige were solely responsible for the safe passage of Egypt through the critical periods of the Tripoli and the two Balkan Wars. But for him, the Egyptian Government would not have been able to prevent collisions between the Greek and Italian colonies and the natives, and certainly it would not have succeeded in forcing the Egyptian Moslems to maintain the neutrality which was obviously so essential to the country’s welfare. From the very outset he dealt most firmly with the malcontents and the seditious Press. The tone and the higher standard of the vernacular Press today are an all-sufficient justification of his ruthless enforcement of the Press Law.
Whilst the adoption of a strong policy had a great deal to do with the pacification of the country, there was undoubtedly one other important determining factor. Kitchener came to the conclusion that the best means of counteracting the exciting influence of the Turkish wars and of cutting the ground from under the feet of the sedition-mongers was to keep the country occupied with the contemplation of matters of a more personal and local nature. He therefore initiated a policy of economic reform which, owing to its far-reaching character, should make its beneficial effects felt generations hence.
A beginning was made with the savings bank system, which was extended to the villages, where the local tax collector was authorized to receive deposits, the idea being to encourage the fellaheen to pay in part of the proceeds of their crops against the day when the taxes fall due, and so prevent their squandering the money and having to borrow to pay the imposts. A Usuary Law was introduced forbidding the lending of money at more than three per cent and empowering the courts to inflict fines and imprisonment on infringers of the law. Kitchener also caused Government cotton halekas (markets) to be opened all over the country, which remedied the exploiting of the fellah by the local dealers in the matter of short weight and market prices of cotton. Next he introduced the Five Feddan or Homestead Law, which briefly laid down that distraint could not be levied on the agricultural property of a cultivator, consisting of five feddans or less, and which thus tended to create a system of homesteads. As a companion to his schemes for improving the material lot of the fellah Kitchener caused to be created a new form of jurisdiction, called the Cantonal Courts, which dispense to the fellaheen justice according to local custom. Local notables sit on the bench and this system of village justice for the people by the people has proved a great success.
With a view to protecting the country from the evil results of the fellah’s ignorance, Kitchener gave much attention to the consideration of the agricultural question. He supported through thick and thin the then newly formed Department of Agriculture, and in due course had it transformed into a Ministry. Since Egypt depends entirely on the cotton crop, every aspect of the question was studied. Cotton seed was distributed on a large scale by the Government in order to stop adulteration. Laws were introduced for combating the various pests that attack the crop; demonstration farms were created at strategic points to show the fellah the best means of cultivating the land, and a hundred and one measures have been, and are being, taken to safeguard and effect a permanent improvement in the agricultural position of the country. The remainder of Kitchener’s economic policy is represented by the gigantic drainage and land reclamation work that is being carried out in the Delta. For years a scheme had been talked of, but it remained for Kitchener to put it into execution. The cost will be about £2,500,000, but most of this will be reimbursed from the sale of land and the increase in the rate of taxation.
On the political side Kitchener was no less successful. He attempted what every one admitted to be an urgent necessity, but what all his predecessors had feared to undertake – viz., the reform of the management of the Wakfs – Moslem endowments – and he transferred the control from the hands of a Director-General nominated by the Khedive to those of a Minister directly responsible to the Council of Ministers and controlled by a superior board nominated by the Government. The reform was hailed with unbounded delight by the entire population. His other great achievement was the reform of the system of representative government.
Meanwhile, Kitchener did not neglect the military situation. He pushed to the utmost the construction of roads throughout the Delta, thus increasing the mobility of the troops; he stopped the Khedive from selling the Mariut Railway to a Triple Alliance syndicate, and by enabling the Egyptian Government to purchase it placed at its disposal (and at that of Great Britain) a line of communication of great potential strategic value in the future. The army of occupation was increased by the bringing of every battalion up to full strength. Points of vantage for strategic purposes were secured in Cairo under the guise of town-planning reforms.
Secretary of State for War
On August 5, 1914, Kitchener, who happened to be in England at the moment, was appointed Secretary of State for War. The post, as will be remembered, had been held since the end of the previous March by Mr Asquith, who now, ‘in consequence of the pressure of other duties’, handed it over to a man in whom the country at large placed perfect confidence. The fact that, for the first time, a soldier with no Cabinet experience was to become War Minister was seen to be an advantage rather than otherwise. What was needed was not a politician but an organizer – and organization was believed to be Kitchener’s especial gift. He was, too, exceptional in not under-rating his enemy. His first act as Minister was to demand a vote of credit for £100,000,000, and an increase of the Army of half a million men. In an interview with an American journalist, published in December, he was reported to have expressed his opinion that the war would last at least three years. In an official denial next day, ‘the remarks attributed to the Secretary of State’ were declared to be ‘imaginary’. In any case, it is certain that in the appeal which he issued, within two days of his appointment, for 100,000 men, the terms of service were given, as ‘for a period of three years or until the war is concluded’. In an article published in The Times of August 15, the reason why his plans had been based upon a long war were explained, and the wisdom of this recognition, at a moment when the world in general, including the Germans, cherished the belief that the war would be soon over, should always be remembered in forming any estimate of Kitchener’s work as Minister of War.
The curious inability of the authorities to come straight to the point, which was to dog the steps of the voluntary system as long as it lasted, at first concealed the fact that these 100,000 men were to be not an expansion, it was supposed, of the Territorial Force, nor even an addition to the Regular Army, but the beginning of an entirely new Army, to which common parlance quickly gave the name of ‘Kitchener’s’. Considerable difference of opinion existed in military circles as to the wisdom of Kitchener’s method of creating it. Many eminent officers, including Lord Roberts, considered that he would have been better advised if he had merely expanded the Territorial Force, the cadres of which would have provided a ready-made organization. But Kitchener preferred to do things in his own way.
In spite of the difficulties inevitable in the absence of machinery capable of coping with a rush some 50 times greater than any contemplated in normal circumstances, he was able by August 25, on his first appearance as a Minister of the Crown, to inform the House of Lords that his 100,000 recruits had been ‘already practically secured’. He added:
‘I cannot at this stage say what will be the limits of the forces required, or what measures may eventually become necessary to supply and maintain them. The scale of the Field Army which we are now calling into being is large and may rise in the course of the next six or seven months to a total of 30 divisions continually maintained in the field.’
It would be an ungrateful task to recall the series of appeals, misunderstandings, and recriminations which attended the course of the recruiting campaign. Its varying fortunes seem trivial enough today, when the task is complete. Kitchener was a sincere believer in the voluntary service which had given him the Armies with which he had won his fame. And amid the chaos of political controversies which surrounded him in the Cabinet he applied himself unsparingly to the task of raising men.
At the beginning of the war he lived at Lady Wantage’s house in Carlton House Terrace, but early in 1915 he went into residence at York House, St James’s Palace, which was placed at his disposal by the King. He worked all day and every day, only spending a few hours occasionally at Broome Park. Of relaxation he took practically none, unless the inspecting of troops maybe described by that name.
As time went on it became evident that Kitchener was attempting more than lay in the power of any one man. In May of last year the disclosures of the Military Correspondent of The Times as to the shortage of shells at the front came as a sudden shock to the country, although they were merely the culmination of a series of previous warnings. It is proof of the immense belief which Kitchener inspired in the country that The Times was falsely accused of ‘attacking’ him in calling attention to an admitted deficiency. But the prompt institution of the Ministry of Munitions relieved him of that part at least of his heavy burden, and enabled him to devote himself more strenuously than ever to the attempt to maintain under the voluntary system the enormous Army gradually assembling in the field. With the reconstitution at the beginning of October, 1915, of the General Staff Kitchener was relieved of yet another part of his overgrown duties, and the War Office gradually assumed shape and organization.
Kitchener naturally paid several visits to France on tours of inspection. He was also present at the Allied Conferences at Calais and Paris, where his knowledge of French, superior to that of most of his colleagues, gave him a certain advantage in the discussions.
In November last the announcement that, ‘at the request of his colleagues’, Kitchener had left England for a short visit to the Eastern theatre of war brought home to the general public the seriousness of the situation in Gallipoli. The part played by him in the military aspects of the decisions arrived at before and during the Dardanelles Expedition can only be conjectured. After a short stay in Paris, he visited the Dardanelles, and later had an audience of King Constantine in Athens, returning home by way of Rome, the Italian front, and Paris. The result of Kitchener’s investigations, confirming as they did the recommendations of General Monro, was the evacuation of Gallipoli.
The remarkable and unprecedented occasion on which, five days ago, he received a considerable proportion of the members of the House of Commons, making a statement to them and replying to recent criticisms of Army administration, is fresh in the public memory.
Kitchener was made a kg in 1915. During the war he also received the Grand Cordon of the Legion of Honour and of the Order of Leopold. He was never married. The earldom which was conferred on him in July, 1914, passes by special remainder to his elder brother, Colonel Henry Elliott Chevallier Kitchener, who was born in 1846. The new peer served in Burma and with the Manipur Expedition in 1891, being mentioned in dispatches. At the outbreak of the present war he offered his services to the Government, took part in the campaign in South-West Africa, and is now on his way home. He is a widower, and has one son, Commander H. F. C. Kitchener, rn; and a daughter.
V. I. Lenin
Dictator of Soviet Russia.
World revolution as goal.
21 January 1924
Nikolai Lenin, whose death is announced on another page, was the pseudonym of Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov, the dictator of Soviet Russia. His real name has almost passed into oblivion. It was under his nom de guerre that he became famous. It is as Lenin that he will pass into history.
This extraordinary figure was first and foremost a professional revolutionary and conspirator. He had no other occupation; in and by revolution he lived. Authorship and the social and economic studies to which he devoted his time were to him but the means for collecting fuel for a world conflagration. The hope of that calamity haunted this cold dreamer from his schooldays. His is a striking instance of a purpose that from early youth marched unflinchingly towards a chosen goal, undisturbed by weariness or intellectual doubt, never halting at crime, knowing no compunction. The goal was the universal social revolution.
Lenin was born on April 10, 1870, at Simbirsk, a little town set on a hill that overlooks the middle Volga and the eastward rolling steppes. His father, born of a humble family in Astrakhan, had risen to the position of district director of schools under the Ministry of Education. The atmosphere of the home was that of the middle-class urban intelligentsia, which ardently cultivated book-learning, was keenly interested in abstract ideas, but had little care for the arts and was at best indifferent to the Russian national tradition.
Of Lenin’s early life little is known. He attended the local high school, the headmaster of which was Feodor Kerensky, father of Alexander Kerensky, whom Lenin was one day to overthrow from political power. The boy appears to have been diligent in his studies, but retiring and morose. In 1887 his elder brother was executed for taking part in an attempt on the life of Alexander iii. This event may possibly have intensified Lenin’s revolutionary sentiments, though emotion never played a great part in his personal life. He was guided by cold logic though he well knew how to work on the feelings of others and to transform them into the motive power he required for his own purposes.
From the high school he passed on into the University of Kazan where he became a student in the faculty of law. Here he came under the suspicion of the authorities, and was expelled from the university on account of his ‘unsound political views’. He continued his studies privately, and finally took his degree at the University of St Petersburg.
Marxism in Action
In the early ’nineties the radical intellectual circles in St Petersburg were stirred by a new development of the Socialist movement. From the ’forties onward Socialism had been the accepted creed of a large proportion of Russian intellectuals, but it was a romantic Socialism, mainly of an agrarian character, and based on an extraordinary sympathy for an idealized peasantry. At the beginning of the ’nineties a small group of young men became enthusiastic advocates of what was known as the scientific Socialism of Karl Marx, and, in articles in reviews and in the theoretical public debates on economic subjects that the autocracy permitted at that time they raised a revolt against the ‘Populist’ Socialism that had become traditional in the intelligentsia. Peter Struve, who later became a Liberal, and even developed Conservative leanings, and Michael Tugan-Baranovsky, who in the end became a popular and highly respected Professor of Political Economy, were the leaders of the Marxian group. Lenin joined them and was greatly assisted by them in his early, literary, efforts, which consisted of polemical articles on the aspects of Socialism that were then in debate. At that time he wrote under the pseudonym of Ilyin.
Lenin never wrote a first-class scientific work. He was not primarily a theorist or a writer but a propagandist. For him articles and books were but means to an end. It was when the Marxists turned from theoretical discussion to the organization of party effort that Lenin found his true vocation. In 1898 the Russian Social Democratic Party came into being. It was of course a conspirative organization. Political activities were under the ban. No political parties, whether Liberal, Conservative, or Socialist, were permitted publicly to exist. The secret parties, or rather clubs, organized by the revolutionaries, recruited their adherents among the intelligentsia, and only to a very small extent among the workmen and peasants. The Marxists organized among the workmen of St Petersburg and other towns clandestine classes for instruction in Socialist doctrine.
It was dangerous work, but Russian revolutionaries were never deterred by the fear of imprisonment or exile. Lenin began his career as an active revolutionary in this comparatively innocuous form of effort. He was caught by the police, as many others were, imprisoned, and sent to Siberia. As compared with many others, his experience of police persecution was brief indeed, but it is significant that during his banishment in Siberia his character as a deliberate fomenter of discord among the revolutionary parties was already, sharply, revealed. The older exiles, who held fast to the ‘Populist’ tradition, were for the most part gentle, humane, and easy going. They formed a class apart with a strong esprit de corps, with fixed habits of comradely intercourse. When Lenin and the other Marxists came, the peace was broken, a new aggressive tone was introduced, and perpetual intrigue led to perpetual dissension and suspicion.
How Bolshevism Began
Lenin escaped from Siberia to Western Europe in 1900, and took up his abode in Switzerland. Here he became one of the leaders in the revolutionary activities of the band of refugees organized under the name of the Russian Social Democratic Party, and in 1901 he joined the editorial staff of their review, Iskra (the Spark). The party retained until the Bolshevist Revolution the title of ‘The One (or United) Russian Social Democratic Party’. As a matter of fact it was not long before Lenin himself split the party into two warring sections. At the second congress of the party, held in London in 1903, a fierce discussion arose over questions of tactics, and ended in a vote which yielded a majority (bolshinstvo) for the view advocated by Lenin. The supporters of the majority view came to be known as Bolsheviki, while the adherents of the minority (menshinstvo) were called Mensheviki. Lenin stood at this conference for an extreme centralization of the party organization and for the adoption of direct revolutionary methods, as opposed to the educational and evolutionary tactics advocated by the other side. He displayed then the temperament that moulded his career. A man of iron will and inflexible ambition, he had no scruple about means and treated human beings as mere material for his purpose. Trotsky, then Lenin’s opponent on the question of tactics, and later his chief colleague in the Council of People’s Commissaries, has given a vivid description of Lenin’s conduct on this occasion.
At the second congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party (he wrote) this man with his habitual talent and energy played the part of disorganizer of the party… Comrade Lenin made a mental review of the membership of the party, and came to the conclusion that the iron hand needed for organization belonged to him. He was right. The leadership of Social Democracy in the struggle for liberty meant in reality the leadership of Lenin over Social Democracy.
Dictatorship as a Principle
It is unnecessary to dwell at length on the theoretical side of the controversy between Lenin and the Menshevists. Both sides published in support of their views a large number of fiercely polemical articles and pamphlets, which for the uninitiated make extremely dull reading, though for the patient historian they may provide a vivid illustration of revolutionary mentality. Lenin’s idea was that the Central Committee should absolutely dominate every individual, and every local group in the party. He was opposed to any sort of democratic equality or local autonomy in the party organization. Dictatorship by a compact central group was the principle on which he worked. ‘Give us an organization consisting of true revolutionaries,’ he wrote, ‘and we will turn Russia upside down.’ He regarded his opponents in the party as opportunists and no true revolutionaries. He was for direct action, for cutting loose from all entangling compromise with Liberals and more cautious Socialists.
The Social Democrats argued vehemently and incessantly, but this did not prevent them from agitating, organizing, and conspiring in Russia. While the rival party, the Socialist Revolutionaries, agitated among the peasantry and planned and carried out a series of terrorist acts, of which several Ministers, Governors, and the Grand Duke Serge were the victims, the Social Democrats developed their propaganda among the factory workmen, with but slight success until 1906, when the discontent caused by the Japanese War and the shooting of workmen in St Petersburg on Red Sunday, January 22, provoked an openly revolutionary movement throughout Russia. The movement culminated in the granting of a Constitution on October 30, 1905. During the months immediately preceding and following this event the Socialist agitation was at its height. Then, for the first time, the masses of the Russian people became acquainted with Socialist principles, and the agitators gained experience in dealing with the masses.
Propaganda at Work
Lenin’s name was not prominent during the first Revolution. He was very active behind the scenes, organizing, directing, pushing things in his own direction, noting the readiness of the masses to respond to extreme and demoralizing watchwords, sneering at all hints of compromise, at every stage forcing a disruption between the Social Democrats and the bourgeois parties. It is curious that he refused to become a member of the first short-lived St Petersburg Council of Workmen’s Deputies, formed after the promulgation of the Constitution. Trotsky played a prominent part in this Soviet. It is characteristic of Lenin that he only adopted the Soviet idea at the moment – 12 years later – when it suited his own purposes.
From 1905 to 1907 Lenin lived in Russia under an assumed name, endeavouring to keep alive and to organize the revolutionary movement, which, in the end, the Stolypin Government ruthlessly suppressed. His name is connected with several cases of ‘expropriation’. Apparently he did not personally organize these armed raids on banks and post-offices, but considerable sums seized in such robberies were handed over to the Bolshevists and used by Lenin to develop his propaganda at home and abroad. He left Russia when the collapse of the 1905 Revolution became apparent and resumed his activities in Geneva. On the whole his position among the revolutionaries had been greatly strengthened and among the mixed crowd of new exiles who had been thrown out of Russia by the failure of the first revolutionary offensive he found many instruments suitable for his unscrupulous purpose.
In 1912 he moved to Cracow so as to be in closer touch with his agents in Russia. A singular episode, characteristic of his contempt for bourgeois morality, was his intrigue, in collusion with the Secret Police, to split the small Social Democratic Party in the Duma through a certain Malinovsky, who visited him in Cracow with the knowledge of the Head of the Department of Police.
In 1914, at the outbreak of war, Lenin was in Galicia. As a Russian subject he was arrested by the Austrian authorities, but he was released when it was discovered that he would be a useful agent in the task of weakening Russia. He returned to Switzerland, where he carried on defeatist propaganda with the object of transforming the war between the nations into a revolutionary civil war within each nation. He was joined by defeatist Socialists from various countries. The funds for these operations were perhaps provided by Germany, since the sums Lenin had received from expropriations during the first revolution were exhausted. The activities of this little group of Socialists were hardly noticed amid the great events of the war. The conferences of Zimmerwald and Kienthal in 1915 had the appearance of insignificant gatherings of crazy fanatics. Yet they drafted the defeatist revolutionary programme and framed the watchwords which later acquired enormous power in Russia and influenced the working classes throughout Europe. Lenin regarded the vicissitudes of the war purely from the standpoint of revolutionary tactics. He noted the lessons of war, industry, and State-control, and the effects of war on mass-psychology.
The Revolution of 1917
The revolution that suddenly broke out in Russia in March, 1917, gave Lenin his long-sought-for opportunity. The Provisional Government formed after the abdication of the Emperor Nicholas proclaimed unrestricted liberty and encouraged the return of the political exiles, who came flocking back in thousands. There was some difference of opinion in the Government about permitting the return of such a notorious defeatist as Lenin. He came nevertheless, transported through Germany with the help of the German General Staff. Ludendorff considered that he was likely to be a most effective agent in disorganizing the Russian Army, and wrecking the Russian front. In this he was not mistaken; what he did not foresee was that Lenin would provoke a violent revolutionary movement that was later to react on Germany herself.
Lenin was received in Petrograd with all revolutionary honours. Searchlights from armoured cars lighted up the Finland railway station, which was thronged with people. Socialists of all parties made speeches, but Lenin was not to be led away by any external success. He wanted real power. On April 14, the day after his arrival, he laid his programme before the Social Democratic Conference, a programme which six months afterwards he carried out to the letter in his decrees. At the time his speech was ridiculed by the moderate Socialists. Only a small group of Bolshevists applauded their leader when he declared that peace with the Germans must be concluded, at once, a Soviet Republic founded, the banks closed, that all power must be given to the workers, and that the Social-Democrats must henceforth call themselves Communists. His motion was rejected by 115 to 20.
Lenin had at his back a compact organization well equipped with money. The Bolshevists displayed extraordinary activity in demoralizing the Army and the workmen and in provoking riots among the peasantry. There was no power to restrain them. In Petrograd, Lenin took up his quarters in the house of the dancer Kaszesinska, and from the balcony addressed large crowds day after day. In July he attempted a coup d’état, but failed. He went into hiding, but continued to direct subversive movement. The Provisional Government under Kerensky shrank from coercive measures. The Socialist Revolutionaries and Social-Democrats who controlled the Petrograd Soviet partly sympathized with the Bolshevists, partly feared them, but in their appeals to the masses they were always outbid by Lenin’s followers, and speedily they lost ground.
After the failure of Korniloff’s attempt in August to re-establish law and order the general demoralization increased. The Army went to pieces and, taking advantage of this disorganized host of armed men, to whom he promised immediate peace, Lenin effected a coup d’état on November 7, 1917, this time without any difficulty. Lenin appeared with his followers in a Congress of Soviets, and was acclaimed as Dictator. The members of the Provisional Government were imprisoned, all but Kerensky, who escaped. There was a sharp struggle in Moscow, where for several days boys from officers’ training schools defended the Kremlin, but they finally succumbed.
Master of the Terror
Lenin took up his residence in the Kremlin, and from that ancient citadel of autocracy and orthodoxy launched his propaganda, of world-revolution. Outwardly he lived as modestly as when he had been an obscure political refugee. Both he and his wife – he had married late in the ’nineties Nadiezhda Krupskaya – had the scorn of sectarians for bourgeois inventions and comforts. Short and sturdy, with a bald head, small beard, and keen, bright, deep-set eyes, Lenin looked like a small tradesman. When he spoke at meetings his ill-fitting suit, his crooked tie, his generally nondescript appearance, disposed the crowd in his favour. ‘He is not one of the gentle-folk,’ they would say, ‘he is one of us.’
This is not the place to describe in detail the terrible achievements of Bolshevism – the shameful peace with Germany, the plundering of the educated and propertied classes, the long-continued terror with its thousands of innocent victims, the Communist experiment carried to the point of suppressing private trade, and making practically all the adult population of the towns servants and slaves of the Soviet Government; the civil war, the creation and strengthening of the Red Army, the fights with the border peoples, the Ukraine, with Koltchak and Denikin and with Poland, culminating in 1920 in the defeat of the White Armies and the conclusion of peace with Poland. Never in modern times has any great country passed through such a convulsion as that brought about by Lenin’s implacable effort to establish Communism in Russia, and thence to spread it throughout the world.
In the light of these world-shaking events Lenin’s personality acquired an immense significance. He retained control. He was the directive force. He was in effect Bolshevism. His associates were pygmies compared with him. Even Trotsky, who displayed great energy and ability in organizing the Red Army, deferred to Lenin. Both the Communist Party and the Council of People’s Commissaries were completely under Lenin’s control. It happened sometimes that after listening to a discussion of two conflicting motions in some meeting under his chairmanship Lenin would dictate to the secretary, without troubling to argue his point some third resolution entirely his own. He had an uncanny skill in detecting the weaknesses of his adversaries, and his associates regarded him with awe as a supreme tactician. His judgment was final.
He was ultimately responsible for the terror as for all the other main lines of Bolshevist policy. He presided over the meeting of the Council of People’s Commissaries which, in July, 1918, approved the foul murder of Nicholas ii and his family by the Ekaterinburg Soviet.
The Communist experiment brought Russia to economic ruin, famine, and barbarism. Under Soviet rule the Russian people suffered unheard of calamity. To Lenin, this mattered little. When the famine came in 1921 he remarked, with a scornful smile, ‘It’s a trifle if twenty millions or so die.’
He did realize, however, that the effort to maintain undiluted Communism was endangering the existence of his Government. In March, 1921, he called a halt. Against the wishes of the majority of his followers he proclaimed a new economic policy, consisting of a temporary compromise between Socialism and Capitalism, with the Communist movement in complete control. His hope was that this policy would secure a breathing space during which the Communists might rally for a new attack on world capitalism.
The famine raged. Russia sank deeper and deeper into the mire. The resources of the Soviet Government, the gold reserve of the Imperial Government which they had squandered in their wild propaganda and in their feeble pretence of foreign trade, were almost exhausted. Their one hope lay in bluffing Europe, and to this task they set themselves with great zest and incomparable skill.
Last Illness
In the midst of the rapid crumbling of all his plans, Lenin fell ill towards the end of 1921, and for many weeks was unable to take any public part in affairs. The nature of his complaint was obscure. Experts were summoned from Germany, and a bullet was extracted that had been fired on Lenin when an attempt was made on his life by the Jewish socialist revolutionary, Dora Kaplan, in 1918. There was a brief interval, during which Lenin’s health was apparently restored, and he made speeches declaring that the new economic policy would go no farther, and that concessions to capitalists were at an end. He was unable to attend the Genoa Conference, and shortly after the conclusion of the Conference the reports as to his health became more alarming. German specialists were again summoned, and his condition became so grave that steps were taken by his associates to establish a directorate, to carry on his functions.
One paralytic stroke followed another, and it became clear that Lenin would never return to affairs, that his days were numbered. He was removed to a country house near Moscow, where, under the care of nurses, he lingered on till his name grew shadowy and his party was divided by an open dispute for the succession.
Giacomo Puccini
A famous opera composer
29 November 1924
Giacomo Puccini, whose death is announced on another page, had held first place among the composers of opera in his generation so decisively that to the majority of opera-goers he seemed to stand alone. Musicians may find among his contemporaries a dozen or more names whose works for the stage they will prefer before his. Humperdinck, Strauss, Charpentier, Bruneau, and Debussy have all displayed qualities which in their different ways are beyond the range of Puccini’s art, yet no one of them competes for his position of favour in the eyes of the general public. A conservative operatic management such as we have known in London may try experiments in one or other; ever since the success of La Bohème there have been no experiments in Puccini. The only question was how quickly each new work could be hurried on to the stage. In fact, an opera of his entitled Turandot was announced for production next spring; and he had almost finished it.
Once he was regarded as a member of a group of brilliant and sensational representatives of Young Italy. The comparatively early death of Leoncavallo, the failure of Mascagni to follow up the meteoric success of Cavalleria, and the lack of any decisive characteristics in Giordano enabled Puccini to outdistance his companions in that group, and Italian opera still has the advantage in the world over that of any other country in that it rallies to its standard the great voices, whether those voices are the product of Italy or of Australia, or Ireland or America.
Puccini was born at Lucca in the same year as Leoncavallo (1858) and was, like Bach and Mozart, the inheritor of a family tradition of musicianship. He represented the fifth generation of musical Puccinis, the earliest of whom, his great-great-grandfather, bore the same Christian name, Giacomo, and, was a friend of Martini, the master of Mozart. Puccini’s father dying when the boy was six years old, it was through the determination and sacrifice of his mother, who was left poor, that he was given the opportunity of study at the Milan Conservatory. There he worked at composition with Bazzini and with Ponchielli, the composer of La Gioconda. The production of a student work, a Capriccio for orchestra, called forth praise of his possibilities as a symphonic writer, but Puccini never mistook that as an indication that he should write symphonies. He subsequently put his powers in this direction to good use in devising those running orchestral commentaries which, supporting the dialogues of his characters on the stage, form the links between the great lyrical outbursts.
For some time Puccini lived in Milan with his brother and a fellow-student, enjoying the delights and sorrows of a Bohemian existence, enduring a sufficient amount of hardship to give him a place in the long roll of struggling geniuses, and incidentally storing up memories which were to give him the right local colour for his first accepted masterpiece.
His first opera, Le Villi, a modest work suggested to him by Ponchielli, was given at the Teatro dal Verme in Milan in 1884. Its production was an important moment in his career and the success was considerable, even if one discounts something from the tone of the telegram which he sent off to his mother after the first performance: ‘Theatre packed, immense success; anticipations exceeded; 18 calls; finale of first act thrice encored.’ The substantial part of it was that Le Villi was bought for a small sum by Messrs. Ricordi, who published it eventually, but not until Puccini’s fame had been established by his subsequent works.
Le Villi in an enlarged form brought Puccini on to the stage of La Scala in the following year, but it was not until 1889 that his second opera, Edgar, arrived and was actually produced there. Edgar was a failure, the one decisive and permanent failure which Puccini ever encountered. Possibly it helped him, as many such failures have helped, to realize the necessity of making ‘every stroke tell’, as Weber said in another connection. At any rate, Puccini must have seen in it the error of accepting too readily a weak libretto, for he became exceedingly fastidious, and each one of the works by which he is known is the result of a personal choice of subject framed to his wishes by his librettists, of whom L. Illica and G. Giacosa have been the chief.
The first was Manon Lescaut, which was produced at Turin in 1893, the drama of which, like its successor, La Bohème, is treated rather as a series of episodes than as a whole. Considering how well known the Abbé Prevost’s novel was, the operatic version might have carried this treatment further. Indeed, the attempt to remodel the story so as to make the deportation of Manon in the third act consequent upon the events of the second produces considerable incongruity. As the opera stands there is either too much or too little connection between its parts to be dramatically satisfactory. Outside Italy it had at first to contend with the popularity of Massenet’s opera, but in this country at any rate it has steadily increased in popularity, and its success rests largely on the skilful musical handling of details, such as the scene of Manon’s levée, and on the passionate love music of the last act, which Caruso first realized to the full.
From the time of the production of Manon onwards Puccini’s most famous operas follow in a series with three to four years between each. La Bohème, also at Turin, came in 1896, La Tosca at Rome in 1900, Madama Butterfly at Milan in 1904. The Carl Rosa Opera Company first brought La Bohème to England and performed it in English a couple of years before it was produced at Covent Garden at the instigation of Mme Melba. Puccini came to England for the first performance of The Bohemians at the Theatre Royal in Manchester, on which occasion, it may be remarked, he was much amused by the makeshift fashion in which the brass and drums of the orchestra had to be accommodated in boxes. La Bohème having won its way both in London and the provinces, La Tosca was quickly secured and was given at Covent Garden in 1900 with Mme Ternina in the principal part. The extraordinary ill treatment which Madama Butterfly received from the Milanese public on its production at La Scala in 1904 really had very little effect on Puccini’s position with the wider public. The performance under Signor Campanini had scarcely begun when it was interrupted by hisses and cries of disapproval; it was carried through in spite of continued disturbance, and at the end Puccini took the score away with him, refusing to risk a second performance there. Yet so firmly fixed was he in the estimation of the English public that the Covent Garden authorities did not hesitate to stage it in the following year with the distinguished cast (Mme Destinn and Signori Caruso and Scotti) who were its most famous interpreters.
It is on these three works that Puccini’s fame most principally rests, and, while each of them possesses to the full his salient characteristics of glowing melody and strong characterization, the variety of their subject matter brings wide differences of musical treatment. There is a freshness and simplicity about La Bohème which does not fade with frequent repetition. La Tosca, at first rather looked askance at by serious musicians for the crudity of its melodrama, yet contains some of the most forcible musical moments in the whole of Puccini’s work. The broad tune with which the orchestra pictures Tosca’s sense of horror after the murder of Scarpia is in itself enough to proclaim Puccini’s genius for emotional melody. The whole of the music of the later scenes of Madama Butterfly, depicting the phases of hope, fear, disillusionment, heroism, shows an insight for which neither of the previous operas prepares us.
After this there was an interval of seven years before Puccini wrote another opera. He was said to have considered a number of subjects, including the story of Marie Antoinette. When one thinks of the increasing power with which he had delineated the characters of women, it seems a pity that he turned aside from his subject. When the opportunity came of a production in America he was seized by a play of David Belasco’s, which had been successful in New York, one of those hectic romances of California, in which rascality and sentiment alternate with bewildering rapidity. La Fanciulla del West was announced in the autumn of 1910 for simultaneous production in New York, Boston, and Chicago, and the composer went to New York to superintend the performance there, for which Mme Destinn and Caruso were engaged. In the circumstances it is hardly necessary to say that the arts of advertisement were used to the full and that the work was clamoured for in the principal opera houses of Europe. It is refreshing to find that the benefits of advertisement are, after all, comparatively short lived, for the boom given to The Girl of the Golden West, to quote the original title, did not blind anyone to the fact that, in spite of moments of beauty and a wealth of striking detail, it was not to be placed in the same class with its predecessors.
A still longer interval divided it from the set of three one-act operas which was completed in 1919 and which was given at Covent Garden in 1920 after performance in Italy and America. In planning his triptych, Puccini sought an opportunity to display again his power of dealing with widely different situations, involving strongly contrasted types of emotion. Il Tabarro is one of those pieces of sordid violence which have attracted all Italian composers since Mascagni’s Cavalleria Rusticana. Suor Angelica aims at an atmosphere of religious mysticism, and Gianni Schicchi is caustic comedy. In the first he was doing again what he and others had already done with success. In the second he failed by mistaking a self-conscious sentiment for a real emotion. In the third he succeeded in what for him was an entirely new genre and produced a masterpiece of opera buffa which captivated every one; that this was the general opinion in England was shown by what happened at Covent Garden. For the first few performances the three were given in sequence, and it was pointed out that Puccini wished them to be given together; then Suor Angelica was dropped, and finally Gianni Schicchi alone remained, the places of the others being filled by performances of the Russian Ballet.
In one respect Puccini set a practical example by which other composers might profit. He always gave his personal supervision to the first productions of his works, and he never conducted them. In this way he was able to assure himself that the regular conductors had a sympathetic understanding of his musical intentions and could secure what he wanted in his absence. He was ready to acknowledge the great debt which he owed to his interpreters, both conductors and singers, and his appreciation of their efforts went hand in hand with an unerring instinct for gauging their capabilities. By writing music which it was a joy to sing he could be certain that the singer would convey his own pleasure in it to the hearers. Puccini could use his orchestra for any thing that he wanted to say, either to describe the draught by which Mimi’s candle was extinguished or to enhance the first ardours of Rodolfo’s love. Even in the most lurid moments of La Tosca and Il Tabarro he handled the orchestra without a sense of effort. He knew all the tricks of modern orchestration, yet rarely, save in some passages of La Fanciulla del West, seemed to set much store by them. His unerring sense of what would be effective in the theatre was a power shared by most composers of his country, but he employed it to finer purpose than the majority in his generation. If Puccini’s was not the greatest music, at least there could never be any doubt that it was music.
Claude Monet
The great painter of light
5 December 1926
Judged by the nature and extent of his influence, Claude Oscar Monet, whose death is announced on another page, was the most important artist within living memory. Others, such as Manet and Renoir, may have excelled him in personal achievement and even in the number of their evident followers, but for what may be called infective and pervasive effects upon the body of painting there is nobody to compare with him except Cézanne, whom he long outlived, and Cézanne was not his equal in accomplishment. Monet did not invent a new thing; he would hardly have had such a widespreading influence if he did; but, happening to be born at the right moment with an instinctive bent for that expression of light which both Turner and Constable had attempted, he carried it on to fulfilment and dominated the field of painting until Cézanne, inheriting his gains, recalled the attention of artists to the claims of solid earth. He may be said to have irradiated landscape painting, and the gleams penetrated into quarters where any conscious acceptance of his influence would have been hotly disclaimed.
Though he came to be associated with the North of France, Normandy in particular, Monet was actually born in Paris, in the Rue Laffitte, on November 14, 1840 – the same day as his future friend, Auguste Rodin – his mother being a member of a Lyons family. His childhood was spent at Havre, where caricatures drawn by him and exhibited in a shop window attracted the attention of Eugène Boudin, who initiated him into painting in the open air. As early as 1856 the two were exhibiting together at Rouen, and Monet always spoke of Boudin with gratitude, saying that he had ‘dashed the scales from his eyes and shown him the beauties of land and sea painting’. The following year Monet went to Paris, but without immediate results, and in 1860 he left for Algeria to complete his military service in the Chasseurs d’Afrique. He returned invalided, with his instinct for light further confirmed. Back at Havre he fell in with Jongkind, the Dutch artist, who, like Boudin, may be said to have prepared the way for Impressionism, and the three of them worked together.
In 1863 Monet went again to Paris with the intention of entering the studio of Gleyre, and here he made the acquaintance of Renoir, Sisley, and other painters, who, with differences, were carrying on the tradition of the Barbizon group, Corot in particular. Monet quickly decided to work out his own salvation. He made his first appearance in the Salon of 1865 with two marine subjects – ‘Pointe de la Hève’ and ‘Embouchure de la Seine à Honfleur’. His work at this period showed affinities with both Boudin and Jongkind, and also with Manet – a broadening of the facts under the influence of light into atmospheric values, but without any decided attempt to realize light itself on the canvas. Its characters may be seen in ‘Plage de Trouville’, in the Courtauld collection at the Tate Gallery, though that picture was not painted until 1870.
Monet’s first attempt to paint a large landscape with figures in the open air bore the same title as a famous picture by Manet, ‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe’. It introduced him to Courbet and the two men became fast friends. An amusing story is told of a visit paid by them to Alexandre Dumas the Elder, who was stopping in Havre. This was in 1866, when Monet’s ‘Camille’, afterwards known as ‘Dame en Vert’, was attracting attention in the Salon. Neither of the artists had met Dumas, but Courbet insisted that they should call. At first they were told that Dumas was not at home, but Courbet said: ‘Tell him that it is Courbet who asks for him; he will be in.’ Dumas came out in shirt and trousers; he and Courbet embraced with tears; and the two painters were invited to lunch, cooked by Dumas himself, who afterwards paraded them through the streets of Havre in his carriage.
The following year Monet’s ‘Women in a Garden’ was rejected by the Salon, and its exhibition in a shop window brought him the acquaintance of Manet and introduced him to the group of writers, including Zola, who were then championing Manet and his friends. It was between this date and the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War that the informal association of artists began which, consolidated by the attitude of the Salon, led to the Impressionist school. They included Monet, Camille Pissarro, Manet, Degas, Renoir, Sisley, Cézanne, Berthe Morisot, who was Manet’s sister-in-law, and Mary Cassatt among others. Not all these artists were Impressionists, as the word came to be understood, but they had common sympathies in refusing to be bound by authority.
Visit to England
During the siege of Paris, in 1870–71, Monet and Pissarro paid a visit to England, and there can be little doubt that the acquaintance with Turner and Constable which they made then had considerable influence in confirming their aims – just as the exhibition of Constable’s ‘Hay Wain’ in Paris had profoundly affected an earlier generation of French painters. It was in 1874 that the word ‘Impressionism’ was first coined, and by accident. Under the title of ‘Société anonyme des artistes peintres, sculpteurs et graveurs du 15 avril au 15 mai 1874’, the artists already named, with others, arranged a collective exhibition at Nadar’s, in the Boulevard des Capucines. Among the works by Monet there was one entitled ‘Sunrise, an Impression’, merely by way of description. The word ‘Impressionists’ was seized upon as a term of ridicule for the whole group, and though many of them had nothing in common with Monet they cheerfully accepted it as a battle-cry. Financially the exhibition was a disaster, the works being sold by auction the following year at prices averaging about 100 francs. It was at this time that Manet, who was well off, suggested to Duvet a way of helping Monet, then very poor, by buying ten of his pictures between them for 1,000 francs without disclosing the purchasers.
The Impressionists, as they were now called, continued to hold exhibitions, being supported by Durand-Ruel and other dealers with the courage of their convictions, and little by little, with the aid of intelligent criticism, hostility was overcome and the aims of Monet and his associates began to be understood. It was not, however, until 1889, when he shared an exhibition with Rodin at the Georges Petit Gallery, that Monet had a substantial success, his first one-man show in 1880 having been a failure.
With his studies of the Gare Saint Lazare in the third group exhibition of 1877, Monet had already begun the series of the same or similar subjects – railway stations, cathedrals, hay-ricks, river banks, poplars, water-lilies – under different conditions of light which were to establish his fame, and from 1889 onward his artistic reputation steadily increased. In 1883 he had settled at Giverny, in the department of the Eure, Normandy, and he remained there for the rest of his life, with occasional visits abroad, quietly and happily producing his pictures. Monet never received any honour from the State, though a tardy offer was made to him of a seat on the Académie des Beaux Arts, which he declined, and such pictures of his as are to be found in French national collections, at the Luxembourg Museum and elsewhere, are gifts or bequests. He himself presented to the French nation a series of 19 ‘Water-Lily’ paintings, and in 1923, at the age of 83, in the company of his old friend, M. Clemenceau, who was a supporter of the Impressionists in the stormy days of the ’seventies, Monet visited the Tuileries Gardens to inspect the building which was being specially constituted to contain them.
London Views
His work has been frequently shown in London, at the Goupil Gallery, the Leicester Galleries, the Lefèvre Galleries, the French Gallery, the Independent Gallery, and elsewhere, and some years ago an association of English and foreign artists was formed in London called the ‘Monarro Group’, combining the names of Monet and Pissarro as heads of the movement with which they found themselves in sympathy. In connection with Monet’s visits to England his views of the Thames, including ‘Waterloo Bridge’ and ‘The Houses of Parliament’, must not be forgotten. He is represented in the Modern Foreign Section of the Tate Gallery by two pictures only: ‘Plage de Trouville’, painted in 1870, purchased in 1924 by the Trustees of the Courtauld Fund; and ‘Vetheuil: Sunshine and Snow’, painted in 1881, included in the Lane Bequest of 1917.
Monet’s artistic progress may be described as the more and more purely æsthetic organization of his technical conquest of light and atmosphere. He did not follow the so-called neo-Impressionists into the formal dotting which was the logical outcome, or scientific application, of his own system of laying strokes or touches of pure colour side by side, eliminating all browns from the palette, but contented himself with a method which produced the effects he desired; and it was the æsthetic value, the poetry, rather than the mere realization of light that inspired him. Nor, though he was a pioneer in the discovery of ‘colour in shadow’, was he a decorative colourist by intention; he painted colour for the sake of light rather than light for the sake of colour. His work has been called lacking in design, but the charge cannot be supported. It stands to reason that if an artist is designing in atmospheric values, in veils of light, the design will not be so emphatic, so easily grasped, as if he were designing in solid forms, but nobody can look with attention at a picture by Monet and regard it as a mere representation of the facts and conditions. In this respect his work might well be compared to the music of his countryman Claude Debussy, in which, under an atmospheric shimmer, the melodies are not so immediately recognizable as they are in the works of Bach or Beethoven, but are nevertheless present to the attentive ear.
At the same time it must be allowed that the aim and methods of Monet were better adapted to some subjects than others, and with due appreciation of his cathedrals, railway stations, and Venetian scenes, we find his happiest expression in those river subjects in which a leafy garland of poplars reflects the influence of sky and water, such as the beautiful ‘Poplars on the Epte’, in the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh, or in the arabesques of water lilies. A fair description of the emotional effect of a typical work of Monet at his best would be that of a ‘sunny smile’. It was inevitable that after so much trafficking in airy regions painting should come to earth again, and the concern for plastic volumes and a more emphatic design instituted by Cézanne and other leaders of the movement conveniently known as Post-Impressionism was as natural a sequence to the Impressionism of Monet, as is the desire for physical exercise after loitering in a garden. But, so far as it is humanly possible to judge, Monet left a gleam upon the surface of painting which will never entirely disappear. Monet has been the subject of many writings, including an exhaustive study by M. Camille Mauclair.
Emmeline Pankhurst
A pioneer of woman suffrage
14 June 1928
Mrs Emmeline Pankhurst, whose death is announced on another page, was born in Manchester on July 14, 1858. In her early childhood she was brought into close touch with those who had inherited the spirit of the Manchester reformers. Her father, Mr Robert Goulden, a calico-printer, was keenly interested in the reform question and the dawn of the movement for woman’s suffrage; her grandfather nearly lost his life in the Peterloo franchise riots in 1819. At the age of 13, soon after she had been taken to her first woman suffrage meeting by her mother, she went to school in Paris, where she found a girl-friend of her own way of thinking in the daughter of Henri Rochefort. In 1879 she married Dr R. M. Pankhurst, a man many years older than herself. An intimate friend of John Stuart Mill and an able lawyer, he shared and helped to mould his wife’s political views. She served with him on the committee which promoted the Married Women’s Property Act, and was at the same time a member of the Manchester Women’s Suffrage Committee. In 1889 she helped in forming the Women’s Franchise League, which, however, was discontinued after a few years. She remained a Liberal until 1892, when she joined the Independent Labour Party. After being defeated for the Manchester School Board, she was elected at the head of the poll for the board of guardians and served for five years. When her husband died, in 1898, she was left not well off, and with three girls and a boy to bring up. Accordingly she found work as registrar of births and deaths at Chorlton-on-Medlock, but her propaganda activities were considered inconsistent with her official position and she resigned.
In 1903 her interest in the cause of woman suffrage was reawakened by the enthusiasm of her daughter Christabel and she formed the Women’s Social and Political Union, the first meeting of which was held in her house in Manchester in October of that year. Two years later the militant movement was started as the immediate result of the treatment received by Miss Christabel Pankhurst and Miss Annie Kenney, two members of the union who endeavoured to question Sir Edward Grey on the prospects of woman suffrage, at a political meeting held in Manchester. In 1906 Mrs Pankhurst and her union began a series of pilgrimages to the House of Commons, which resulted in conflicts with the police and the imprisonment of large numbers of the members. In October, 1906, she was present at the first of these demonstrations, when 11 women were arrested. In January, 1908, she was pelted with eggs and rolled in the mud during the Mid-Devon election at Newton Abbot, and a month later she was arrested when carrying a petition to the Prime Minister at the House of Commons, but was released after undergoing five of the six weeks’ imprisonment to which she was sentenced. Some months later, in October, a warrant was issued for her arrest, together with Miss Pankhurst and Mrs Drummond, for inciting the public to ‘rush’ the House of Commons. During her three months’ imprisonment in Holloway Gaol she led a revolt of her followers against the rules of prison discipline, demanding that they should be treated as political prisoners. In 1909, the year in which the ‘hunger strike’ and ‘forcible feeding’ were first practised in connection with these cases, she was once more arrested at the door of the House of Commons, and after her trial, and pending an appeal founded on the Bill of Rights and a statute of Charles, dealing with petitions to the Crown, she went to America and Canada on a lecturing tour; two days before her return her fine was paid by some unknown person, so that she did not go to prison.
As soon, however, as she was back in England, she again devoted her energies to the encouragement of the campaign of pin-pricks and violence to which she was committed and by which she hoped to further the cause which she had at heart. In 1912, for her own share in those lawless acts, she was twice imprisoned, but in each case served only five weeks of the periods of two months and nine months – for conspiracy to break windows – to which she was sentenced. A year later she was arrested on the more serious charge of inciting to commit a felony, in connection with the blowing-up of Mr Lloyd George’s country house at Walton. In spite of the ability with which she conducted her own defence the jury found her guilty – though with a strong recommendation to mercy – and she was sentenced by Mr Justice Lush to three years’ penal servitude. On the tenth day of the hunger strike which she at once began (to be followed later on by a thirst strike) she was temporarily released, under the terms of the measure introduced by Mr McKenna commonly known as the Cat and Mouse Act, because of the condition of extreme weakness to which she was reduced. At the end of five months, during which she was several times released and rearrested, she went to Paris, and then to America (after a detention of 2½ days on Ellis Island), having served not quite three weeks of her three years’ sentence. On her return to England the same cat-and-mouse policy was resumed by the authorities – and accompanied by more and more violent outbreaks on the part of Mrs Pankhurst’s militant followers – until at last, in the summer of 1914, after she had been arrested and released nine or ten times on the one charge, it was finally abandoned, and the remainder of her term of three years’ penal servitude allowed to lapse.
Whether, but for the outbreak of the Great War, the militant movement would have resulted in the establishment of woman suffrage is a point on which opinions will probably always differ. But there is no question that the coming of the vote, which Mrs Pankhurst claimed as the right of her sex, was sensibly hastened by the general feeling that after the extraordinary courage and devotion shown by women of all classes in the nation’s emergency there must be no risk of a renewal of the feminist strife of the days of militancy. When the War was over it was remembered that on its outbreak Mrs Pankhurst, with her daughter Christabel and the rest of the militant leaders, declared an immediate suffrage truce and gave herself up to the claims of national service and devoted her talents as a speaker to the encouragement of recruiting, first in this country and then in the United States. A visit to Russia in 1917, where she formed strong opinions on the evils of Bolshevism, was followed by a residence of some years in Canada and afterwards in Bermuda for the benefit of her health. Since she came home, at the end of 1925, she had taken a deep interest in public life and politics, and had some thoughts of standing for Parliament, though she declined Lady Astor’s offer to give up to her her seat in Plymouth.
Whatever views may be held as to the righteousness of the cause to which she gave her life and the methods by which she tried to bring about its achievement, there can be no doubt about the singleness of her aim and the remarkable strength and nobility of her character. She was inclined to be autocratic and liked to go her own way. But that was because she was honestly convinced that her own way was the only way. The end that she had in view was the emancipation of women from what she believed, with passionate sincerity, to be a condition of harmful subjection. She was convinced that she was working for the salvation of the world, as well as of her sex. She was a public speaker of very remarkable force and ability, with a power of stimulating and swaying her audience possessed by no other woman of her generation, and was regarded with devoted admiration by many people outside the members of her union. With all her autocracy and her grievous mistakes, she was a humble-minded, large-hearted, unselfish woman, of the stuff of which martyrs are made. Quite deliberately, and having counted the cost, she undertook a warfare against the forces of law and order the strain of which her slight and fragile body was unable to bear. It will be remembered of her that whatever peril and suffering she called on followers to endure, up to the extreme indignity of forcible feeding, she herself was ready to face, and did face, with unfailing courage and endurance of body and mind.
D. H. Lawrence
A writer of genius
2 March 1930
David Herbert Lawrence, whose death is announced on another page, was born at Eastwood, near Nottingham, on September 11, 1885. His novel Sons and Lovers and his play The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd are at least so far biographical as to tell the world that his father was a coalminer and his mother a woman of finer grain. At the age of 12 the boy won a county council scholarship; but the sum was scarcely enough to pay the fees at the Nottingham High School and the fares to and fro. At 16 he began to earn his living as a clerk. When his ill-health put an end to that, he taught in a school for miners’ boys.
At 19 he won another scholarship, of which he could not avail himself, as he had no money, to pay the necessary entrance fee; but at 21 he went to Nottingham University College, and after two years there he came to London and took up teaching again. It was in these years that he wrote, under the name of Lawrence H. Davidson, some books on history. He had begun also the writing of fiction, and his first novel, The White Peacock, was published about a month after his mother’s death had robbed him of his best and dearest friend.
Sons and Lovers, published when he was 28, brought him fame. Many years of poverty were to pass before his work began to make him financially comfortable; and even then the collapse of a publishing firm in America deprived him of some of the fruits of his labours. But this revolt against society which fills his books had its counterpart in his life, in his travels, and especially in his attempt to found, in 1923, an intellectual and community settlement in New Mexico.
Undoubtedly he had genius. He could create characters which are even obtrusively real. His ruthless interpretation of certain sides of the nature of women was recognized by some women to be just. Every one of his novels, as well as his books of travel, contains passages of description so fine that they command the admiration of people whom much of his work disgusts. His powers range from a rich simplicity, a delicacy almost like that of Mr W. H. Davies, to turbulent clangour, and from tenderness to savage irony and gross brutality. There was that in his intellect which might have made him one of England’s greatest writers, and did indeed make him the writer of some things worthy of the best of English literature. But as time went on and his disease took firmer hold, his rage and his fear grew upon him. He confused decency with hypocrisy, and honesty with the free and public use of vulgar words. At once fascinated and horrified by physical passion, he paraded his disgust and fear in the trappings of a showy masculinity. And, not content with words, he turned to painting in order to exhibit more clearly still his contempt for all reticence.
It was inevitable (though it was regrettable) that such a man should come into conflict with the law over his novel The Rainbow, over some manuscripts sent through the post to his agent in London and over an exhibition of his paintings. But a graver cause for regret is that the author of Sons and Lovers, of Amores, and the other books of poems, of Aaron’s Rod, the short stories published as The Prussian Officer, Ladybird, and Kangaroo should have missed the place among the very best which his genius might have won.
In 1914 Lawrence married Frieda von Richthofen, who survives him. He left no children.
Dame Nellie Melba
A great prima donna
23 February 1931
Melba, to use the name by which she was universally known until the prefix of Dame Nellie was attached to it, whose death we regret to announce this morning, was born near Melbourne in 1859, and began her career as Helen Porter Mitchell. Her Scottish parents, who had settled in Australia, had themselves some musical proclivities. But it was not until after her early marriage to Mr Charles Armstrong that it became clear that her gifts must be taken seriously.
It was largely by her own efforts that she came to England in 1885 with the intention of cultivating her voice. When she arrived the experts to whom she appealed in London did not realize her possibilities. It is amusing to record that she was refused work in the Savoy Opera Company by Sullivan, though probably he did her and the world at large the greatest service by his refusal. She went to Paris, and to Mme Mathilde Marchesi belongs the credit of having instantly recognized that, to quote her own phrase, she ‘had found a star’.
A year of study and of close companionship with this great teacher was all that was needed to give Nellie Armstrong a brilliant début at ‘La Monnaie’ in Brussels as Mme Melba. She made her first appearance there on October 13, 1887, in the part of Gilda in Rigoletto. Her second part was Violetta in La Traviata, so that from the first she was identified with the earlier phases of Verdi, in which she has been pre-eminent ever since. Although, contrary to the traditions of the Brussels theatre, she sang in Italian, she aroused such enthusiasm that when a little later she was to sing Lakmé, and the question arose as to whether her French accent was sufficiently secure, the composer Délibes, is said to have exclaimed, ‘Qu’elle chante Lakmé en français, en italien, en allemand, en anglais, ou en chinois, cela m’est égal, mais qu’elle la chante.’
Her first appearance at Covent Garden on May 24, 1888, in Lucia di Lammermoor, was a more qualified success. Curiously enough, she was more commended at first for some supposed dramatic power than for the only two things which have ever really mattered in her case – the exquisite voice and the perfect use of it. From London she returned to the more congenial atmosphere of Brussels, and in the following year, 1889, proceeded to the conquest of Paris, where she triumphed as Ophélie in Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet. In Paris Mme Melba had the advantage of studying the parts of Marguerite in Faust and of Juliette with Gounod, and she took part in the first performance of Roméo et Juliette in French at Covent Garden in 1889.
From this time onward Mme Melba had only to visit one country after another to be acclaimed. From St Petersburg, where she sang before the Tsar in 1891, to Chicago, where in 1893 her singing with the de Reszkes was one of the features of the ‘World’s Fair’, the tale of her triumphs was virtually the same. But from the musical point of view a more important episode was her prolonged visit to Italy between these two events. Here she met the veteran Verdi and the young Puccini. Verdi helped her in the study of Aïda and of Desdemona (Otello). She made the acquaintance of Puccini’s Manon, but La Bohème, the only one of his operas with which she was to be identified, was not yet written. Another young composer who begged leave to be presented was Leoncavallo. She sang Nedda in the first London performance of I Pagliacci a little later.
Mme Melba’s early American appearances recall her few experiments with Wagner. She sang Elisabeth in Tannhäuser at the Metropolitan Opera House, New York, during her first season there, and it was later in America that she made her single appearance as Brünnhilde. She had previously sung Elsa (Lohengrin) at Covent Garden, but she quite rightly realized that Wagner’s music was not for her. The only pity, when one recalls her repertory, is that either lack of opportunity or of inclination prevented her from turning to Mozart instead.
Her actual repertory amounted to 25 operas, of which, however, only some 10 parts are those which will be remembered as her own. La Bohème was the last of these to be added, and she first sang in it at Philadelphia in 1898, having studied it with the composer in Italy earlier in the year. She was so much in love with the music that she would not rest until she had brought it to London, and it was largely by her personal influence that it was accepted at Covent Garden. Indeed, she persuaded the management to stage La Bohème with the promise to sing some favourite scena from her repertory in addition on each night that she appeared in it until the success of the opera was assured. She kept the promise, though the rapid success of the opera soon justified her faith. To most of the present generation of opera-goers ‘Melba nights’ meant La Bohéme nights, and, for several seasons before the War and when Covent Garden reopened after it, there could not be too many of them for the public. She bade farewell to Covent Garden on June 8, 1926, when, in the presence of the King and Queen, she sang in acts from Roméo et Juliette, Otello, and La Bohème. Actually her last appearance in London was at a charity concert in 1929.
It is difficult now to realize that 30 years or so ago La Bohème seemed to offer few opportunities for the special characteristics of Mme Melba’s art, intimately associated as it then was with Donizetti, the earlier Verdi, and Gounod. But those characteristics in reality had full play in all music based on the expression of a pure vocal cantilena, and could appear in the simply held note at the end of the first act of La Bohème as completely as in the fioritura of ‘Caro nome’ or ‘The Jewel Song’. The essence of her power was due to such an ease in the production of pure tone in all parts of the voice and in all circumstances that there was no barrier between the music and the listener.
It is unnecessary to enlarge on the personal popularity of Melba here, or the almost passionate devotion which she inspired among her own countrymen on the various occasions when she revisited Australia. Her book of reminiscences, Melodies and Memories (1925), was disappointing, for it contained too little about her methods and experiences. She was generous in giving her services for good causes, and her work for War charities is remembered in the title conferred in 1918. She was then created dbe, and gbe in 1927.
Sir Edward Elgar
The laureate of English music
23 February 1934
The number of musicians of whom it can safely be said that the general public needs no explanation of their importance and asks for no justification of the place which their fellows accord them is small. Among composers this country has possessed two in the last century – Sullivan and Elgar. Of these the case of Elgar, who died yesterday at his home at Worcester at the age of 76, is the more remarkable because his genius was devoted to the larger forms of the musical art with which the ordinary man is supposed to sympathize least readily – the symphony, the concerto, and the oratorio. He never associated himself with the theatre in any close way; he never held any dominating official position in the musical life of the country, he rather stood aloof from institutions of any sort. Through nearly half his working life he was entirely unknown; during the remainder he was unhesitatingly accepted as our musical laureate.
In these days when the term ‘British composer’ is on everyone’s lips it is worth while remarking that Elgar by descent, upbringing, and education was entirely English. His father, a native of Dover, had settled in Worcester, where he kept a music shop and was organist to the Roman Catholic church of St George. His mother, Ann Greening, came from Herefordshire.
Edward William Elgar (he entirely dropped the second name in later years) was born at Broadheath, a village about four miles from Worcester, on June 2, 1857, and spent his youth in the typically English environment of the cathedral town and its surrounding country. Much has been said of Elgar’s upbringing as a member of the Roman Catholic Church and of the inspiration which it brought to his greatest choral work, The Dream of Gerontius, all of which is natural and true. But Elgar used to resent the idea that these influences in any way cut him off from others. As a boy he was constantly in and out of the cathedral listening to the music of its daily services and drawing many of his earliest and most treasured experiences from them. The Three Choirs Festivals at Worcester were sources of the most vivid delight to him. Indeed, it was characteristic of him at all times, that he loved to show himself knowledgeable on whatever others were inclined to think might lie a little outside his sphere of interest.
Early Compositions
Young Elgar had no systematic musical education, but he entered into all the musical activities of his father, which were many. He played the organ at St George’s, and, indeed, succeeded his father as regular organist there; he played the bassoon in a wind quintet (which perhaps accounts for the bassoon solo in the ‘Enigma’ Variations No. 111), but more particularly the violin, his thorough knowledge of which certainly had something to do with the brilliant passage-work of the famous concerto. He took an active part in all local music, particularly the concerts of the Worcester Glee Club, whose members gave him a bow for his violin in recognition of his services. Above all, he composed constantly, and some of the music now known in the orchestral suites, The Wand of Youth, dates from his boyhood. Pieces for violin and piano, part-songs, a motet, slight essays for the orchestra, are chief among such early works as survive. The interesting thing about them is that among much that is obvious and some that is trite one comes across turns of melody and harmony which are unmistakably the voice of Elgar. Even the first phrase of ‘Salut d’Amour’ must be allowed to be one of them.
Elgar was 32 years of age when he married, in 1889, Caroline Alice, only daughter of General Sir Henry Gee Roberts. This is hardly the place to write particularly of his wife’s influence on his career, but beyond question her unfaltering faith in him both as man and as artist sustained him through all the disappointments of his isolated position and enabled him to hold the difficult course towards success to which his helm was set.
In one respect his marriage rather emphasized the difficulties, for it caused him to live in London for the first time, and to discover how unready were musicians, publishers, and concert givers to take any interest in his music. The neglect of genius is always a fruitful theme for commentators who are wise after the event. Elgar was a genius, he lived two years in London unrecognized; these commentators cry ‘shame!’ but it is difficult to see what there was to recognize between 1889 and 1891. He had written none of the great works which have made him famous since. It may be remarked that Mr Bernard Shaw’s recently published Music in London, 1890–1894 does not contain the name of Elgar. True his overture ‘Froissart’ was produced at the Worcester Festival in 1890, and some people realized that here was something fresh and original.
Festival Works
In 1891 Elgar returned to the West Country and settled at Malvern, where he began his serious work in the composition of a number of pieces for choir and orchestra which were produced at various festivals in the succeeding years. The Black Knight, characteristically described as ‘a symphony for chorus and orchestra’, came out in 1893. Scenes from the Saga of King Olaf, Scenes from the Bavarian Highlands and an oratorio, The Light of Life, all appeared in 1896, the first at the North Staffordshire Musical Festival, the other two at Worcester. Here indeed was proof positive of the new voice in music, more than a hint of that mystical imagination, that sensitiveness to tone-colour, and that elusive yet individual gift of melody which were to seize his hearers so powerfully a little later. A patriotic cantata, The Banner of St George, for the Diamond Jubilee year, and Caractacus, written for the Leeds Festival of 1898, emphasized another side of Elgar’s musical character, an alert and nervous energy, the love of pageantry, the discovery of the poetry underlying external splendour. One finds here the Elgar of the ‘Pomp and Circumstance’ marches, the Coronation march, and the Scherzo of the Second Symphony.
The invitation to write for the Leeds Festival (this was the last festival conducted by Sullivan) was in Elgar’s case, as in that of several other English composers, the sign that he had ‘arrived’. A still more decisive landmark in his career was the production by Richter of the ‘Enigma’ Variations for orchestra in London in the following year, and it is indeed difficult to understand how, amid these signal proofs of his qualities, The Dream of Gerontius could have missed fire as it did at Birmingham in 1900. No doubt its very originality stood in its way. Choral singers accustomed to solid oratorio choruses could not understand these paeans of angels and frenzied outcries of demons. It was held to be extremely difficult. Common opinion declared that while it had beautiful moments it was a failure as a whole. That opinion has now been reversed. Every one realizes that The Dream of Gerontius has some perilously weak moments, but that as a whole it is one of the great imaginative creations of musical art.
The failure at Birmingham, however, was a step towards Elgar’s recognition outside his own country. A. J. Jaeger, an early enthusiast for Elgar’s music, and at that time reader to Messrs. Novello and Co., was instrumental in getting Gerontius accepted for performance at the Lower Rhine Festival at Düsseldorf, where it was most enthusiastically acclaimed. The approval of a keenly critical German public led to its revival at Worcester in 1902, with the result that everyone knows. Birmingham made amends by producing the two companion oratorios, The Apostles and The Kingdom, at its two subsequent festivals (1903 and 1906); the London Choral Society was formed to give the first public performance of The Dream of Gerontius in London (1903), and a special festival consisting entirely of Elgar’s music was arranged at Covent Garden in 1904. In the following year he paid his first visit to the United States, where his works were received with enthusiasm.
The Symphonies: Public Acclaim
With these triumphs the first period of Elgar’s success as a composer of choral and orchestral works on the largest scale was completed. A second and equally brilliant instrumental period was to begin with the production of the first symphony in 1908. The Variations and several concert overtures, notably the popular ‘Cockaigne’ and ‘In the South’, together with the beautiful ‘Introduction and Allegro’ for strings, had contributed to the assurance that Elgar would reach his most individual expression in some work of the symphonic type; but he was even slower than Brahms in committing himself to a symphony. When the first symphony in A flat was announced for a concert of the Hallé Orchestra under Richter at Manchester excitement ran high. The broad melody with which it opens, the restless surge of its first allegro, the delicate merging of the scherzo into the slow movement and the triumphant progress of the finale to an apotheosis of the opening theme, would have carried away an audience less thrilled with expectancy than was that which crowded the Free Trade Hall on December 3, 1908.
Never has a symphony become so instantly ‘the rage’ with the ordinary British public as did this. For some time the regular orchestras of London could not play it often enough, special concerts were arranged for it, enterprising commercialists even engaged orchestras to play it in their lounges and palm courts as an attraction to their winter sales of underwear. The ‘boom’ was as absurd as such things usually are, and as short-lived, but it was based on something real. Here at last the public had found a composer whom experts acknowledged to be a master and whom they could understand. Elgar had caught the ear of the public for big music, apart from words or voice or drama.
That the violin concerto produced by Kreisler in 1910 should have been received in the same spirit is less remarkable, for the solo work has all the advantage of personal virtuosity which the symphony lacks. Both it and the second symphony in E flat, dedicated to the memory of King Edward vii, were felt by musicians to be of a finer fibre than the first, but the quiet, reflective ending of the second symphony was in itself sufficient to prevent the work being sought for as the first had been. The majestic funeral march of this symphony and the lofty but restrained dignity of the finale make it rank very high, however, in the estimation of musicians.
The War and After
It is not surprising that a period of comparative unproductiveness should have followed on these years. The Music Makers, a short choral work of a sentimental cast, in which themes from all Elgar’s chief works were freely quoted, rather emphasized his decline in energy. One further orchestral work, the symphonic poem ‘Falstaff’, however, showed that his invention was by no means exhausted. The War came, and various pièces d’occasion, sincerely felt and fervently expressed, occupied him. Such were the music to Cammaerts’s poem ‘Carillon’ and three commemorative odes (Laurence Binyon), of which ‘For the Fallen’ was the most impressive. He turned also to the composition of chamber music, and brought out together several works of that class, a violin sonata of rather unequal texture, a delicate string quartet, and a fine quintet for piano and strings. With these came in 1919 the concerto for violoncello, which though scored for a normally full orchestra has more in common with the intimate mood of the chamber works than with that of his big orchestral period.
In the spring of 1920 the death of Lady Elgar broke the composer’s life. For some time he lived very much in retirement; but among the few occasions on which he was willing to make a public appearance were always the Three Choirs Festivals of his native West Country. But for him those festivals might not have been restored after the War, and certainly could never have enjoyed the prosperity of the last decade without the attraction of Elgar’s music given under his own direction. In 1924 the King appointed him to the traditional office, without specific duties, of Master of the King’s Musick.
There was presently some talk of his finishing the trilogy of oratorios begun with The Apostles, possibly for a Gloucester festival, but that scheme did not mature. A few minor compositions, however, were thrown off, and in the summer of 1932 Elgar mentioned casually in conversation the existence in his desk of a Third Symphony. He was persuaded to promise it to the bbc Orchestra, and it was announced for production this year. The Third Symphony, however, was not in his desk, but in his head, when he spoke of it, and, like many a great composer before him, he spoke of it as ‘practically written’ when he had made only a few sketches. Though Elgar made considerable progress with it after the offer of the bbc was accepted, ill-health last year prevented him from bringing it into a condition from which it could be finished by anyone else. During his last illness he spoke of his anxiety lest an attempt should be made by another hand to finish his work. His wishes in regard to the fragments must be respected. There is not a single movement which is near completion, though some passages have been fully scored.
Elgar was a man of many interests outside music, and as years increased they tended to absorb more of his time and attention. He loved travel, experimental chemistry, heraldry, literature, and the racecourse. Sometimes he seemed to take a whimsical pleasure in persuading himself (though he could never persuade others) that these were the serious preoccupations of his life and that the writing of symphonies was only a frivolous hobby. He was fond of saying that he knew very little about music, was not particularly interested in the performances of his works, and never read what the papers said of them. This sometimes seemed an affectation, but was really an armour of defence. He suffered much from the adulation of indiscriminate admirers and often yearned to get out of the limelight at the very moment when he deliberately walked into it. He was like his music, essentially simple and spontaneous, though the simplicity might be occasionally clouded, by decorative details. Indeed it was his power of expressing himself in his music which made so extraordinarily direct an appeal. Through all the diversity of the subjects he treated the same mind speaks. A tune of two bars or a progression of two chords is enough to reveal him. It is impossible to imagine him writing like anyone else or even purposely maintaining a disguise through a page of score.
Many Honours
Elgar received many honours both at home and abroad. He was knighted in 1904 by King Edward, and on the occasion of King George’s coronation the Order of Merit was conferred on him, a distinction never previously bestowed on a musician. In 1928 he was made kcvo, in 1931 he was created a baronet, and he was promoted to gcvo last year. The University of Cambridge led the way in the many offers of academic distinctions, honoris causa. It was at the instance of Stanford that Elgar became a Doctor of Music of Cambridge on November 22, 1900. Academic institutions of France, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Sweden, and the United States of America have paid him their several tributes. But the greatest tribute is the extent to which his music has travelled to foreign countries and has been performed by artists of the first rank. While there have been plenty of critics able to discover that his music is not a thousand things which the ideal symphony or the ideal oratorio ought to be, Elgar has been everywhere appreciated as one of the most individual composers of modern times, and distinguished from many of his contemporaries in the fact that music for him was always first and foremost beautiful sound.
Sir Edward Elgar leaves an only daughter, Carice Irene, who was married to Mr S. H. Blake in 1922.
Marie Curie
The discoverer of radium
4 July 1934
Mme Curie, whose death we announce with regret on another page, had a worldwide reputation as the most distinguished woman investigator of our times. Her claim to fame rests primarily on her researches in connection with the radioactive bodies and particularly for her discovery and separation of the new element rad-ium, which showed radiating properties to a marked degree. This was a discovery of the first importance, for it provided scientific men with a powerful source of radiation which has been instrumental in extending widely our knowledge not only of radioactivity but of the structure of atoms in general. Radium has also found an extensive application in hospitals for therapeutic purposes, and particularly for the treatment of cancerous growths by the action of the penetrating radiation emitted spontaneously from this element.
Marie Sklodowska, as she was before her marriage, was born on November 7, 1867, at Warsaw, and received her education there. She early showed a deep interest in science, and went to Paris to attend lectures in the Sorbonne. She had small financial resources, and had to teach in schools to earn sufficient money to pay her expenses. In 1895 she married Pierre Curie, a young scientist of great promise, who had already made several notable discoveries in magnetism and in the physics of crystals. Mme Curie continued her scientific work in collaboration with her husband, but the direction of their work was changed as the result of the famous discovery of Henri Becquerel in 1896, who found that the element uranium showed the surprising property of emitting penetrating types of radiation, which blackened a photographic plate and discharged an electrified body.
Examination of Pitchblende
Mme Curie made further investigations of this remarkable property using the electric method as a method of analysis. She showed that the radioactivity of uranium was an atomic property, as it depended only on the amount of uranium present and was unaffected by the combination of uranium with other elements. She also observed the striking fact that the uranium minerals from which uranium was separated showed an activity four to five times the amount to be expected from the uranium present. She correctly concluded that there must be present in uranium minerals another substance or substances far more active than uranium. With great boldness she undertook the laborious work of the chemical examination of the radioactive mineral pitchblende, and discovered a new strongly active substance which she named polonium, after the country of her birth. Later she discovered another new element, allied in chemical properties to barium, which she happily named radium. This element is present in minerals only in about one part in 3,000,000 compared with uranium, and shows radioactive properties more than a million times that of an equal weight of uranium. The Austrian Government presented Mme Curie with the radioactive residues necessary for the separation of radium in quantity, and she was in this way able to obtain sufficient material to determine the atomic weight and physical and chemical properties of the new element.
The importance of this discovery was at once recognized by the scientific world. In 1903 the Davy Medal of the Royal Society was awarded jointly to Professor and Mme Curie, while in 1904 they shared a Nobel Prize with Henri Becquerel. After the death of Pierre Curie in a street accident in Paris in 1906 Mme Curie was awarded in 1911 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for the discovery and isolation of the element radium. In 1906 she was appointed to a special Chair in the Sorbonne and was the first woman to obtain this distinction. Later a special Radium Institute, called the Pierre Curie Institute, was founded for investigations in radioactivity, and Mme Curie became the first director. She held this post at the time of her death.
Classes at the Sorbonne
In the course of the last 20 years this institute has been an important centre of research, where students of many nationalities have carried out investigations under her supervision. Mme Curie was a clear and inspiring lecturer, and her classes at the Sorbonne were widely attended. Her scientific work was all of a high order. She was a careful and accurate experimenter, and showed marked power of critical judgment in interpreting scientific facts. She retained an enthusiastic interest in her science throughout her life, and was a regular attendant at international conferences, taking an active and valuable part in scientific discussions.
She had a deep interest in the application of radium for therapeutic work both in France and abroad, and during the War actively helped in this work. She was twice invited to visit the United States and was received with acclamation, while the women of that country presented her with a gram of radium, to allow her to extend her researches. In 1922 she was appointed a member of the International Committee for Intellectual Cooperation of the League of Nations and took an active part in their deliberations.
Mme Curie left two children. The elder, Irene, early showed marked scientific ability and married a co-worker in the Radium Institute, M. Joliot. It was a source of great satisfaction and pride to Mme Curie in her later years to follow the splendid researches made by her daughter and her husband, for they have made notable contributions to our knowledge of neutrons and transformations. During the present year, they observed that a number of elements became radioactive by bombardment with the particles from radium, and have thus opened up a new method for study of the transformation of the atoms of matter.
The many friends of Mme Curie of all nations, and the scientific world as a whole, will greatly lament the removal of one who was held in such great honour for her splendid discoveries in science, and one who by strength of character and personality left a deep impression on all those who met her.
Sigmund Freud
Psycho-analysis
23 September 1939
Professor Sigmund Freud, md, originator of the science of psycho-analysis, died at his son’s London home at Hampstead on Saturday night at the age of 83. From 1902 until recently he was Professor of Neurology in the University of Vienna. When the Germans violated Austria last year he was compelled to fly to England, where he had lived ever since.
Freud was one of the most challenging figures in modern medicine. Indeed, though his work was primarily medical, there is something incongruous in speaking of him as a doctor. Rather he was a philosopher, using the methods of science to achieve therapeutic ends. Philosophy, science, and medicine all paid him the tributes of excessive admiration and excessive hostility.
The truth would seem to be that even at this late date the time has not yet arrived when a just estimate of psycho-analysis and its founder is possible. The atmosphere is too highly charged with controversy. Supporters and opponents are still in too bitter a mood. One can neither affirm that Freud’s teaching will stand the test of time, nor deny that it may change permanently the whole conception of the operations of the human mind. Psycho-analysis, whatever it may have become in alien hands, possesses at least the merit of having been given to the world as a treatment of disease and not as a moral law. Freud, indeed, though he took great liberties with philosophy, though he was himself a philosopher malgré lui, always wrote and spoke as a man of science. He did not pretend to have invented his remarkable view of mental processes: he asserted that he had discovered it.
But Freud, the man, was clearly bigger than his detractors are usually ready to admit. His influence has pervaded the world within the space of but a few years. It can be discerned today in almost every branch of human thought, and notably in education, and some of his terms have become part of everyday language, ‘the inferiority complex’ for example.
Misunderstanding dogged Freud’s steps from the beginning. He spoke of sex in that large sense which includes the love of parents for their children, the love of children for their parents, the labours of a man to provide for his family, the tenderness of a grown man towards his mother, and so on: and immediately his intention was narrowed by his critics to their own partial view. They accused him of attempting to undermine the moral law. Again, he indicated his belief that natural impulses which have been suppressed have not, by that act, been annihilated. They remain in what he called the ‘unconscious mind’ to vex and trouble their possessors. At once the cry was raised that this man preached a doctrine of unbridled libertinism. Those raising it overlooked the fact that Freud had placed side by side with his doctrine of repression his doctrine of ‘sublimation’. We must not, he taught, regard a natural impulse as, of itself, wrong or unworthy. To do so is to abhor the law of Nature and so the order of the universe. Rather we must take that impulse and apply it to the noblest purposes of which we are capable.
This, it may be admitted, was a little like saying that a negative produces a positive, and that man owes his spiritual development to racial and social taboos. It was a doctrine which appealed strongly to Puritanical minds, with the result that Freud’s supporters, like his opponents, included persons of the most diverse views. Psycho-analysis thus became not one but a dozen battle-grounds on which the combatants fought with the fierceness of zealots. There is indeed, in all Freud’s writing, a haunting echo of theological controversy. His conception included, under other names, many ancient doctrines and dogmas. Thus there is but little real distinction between ‘original sin’ and the ‘natural impulse’ of the Viennese professor. Freud, too, adjured his patients to recognize their human nature as the necessary first step to cure; not merely the knowledge but the conviction of sin was essential to a change of heart. Again, he bade his followers know themselves by every means and devised astonishing new methods of self-knowledge or ‘self-analysis’. Thus was the evil spirit of a suppressed emotion or desire unmasked and released to be transmuted into the good spirit serving as a mainspring of action.
The famous theory of dreams and the various ‘complexes’ resolve themselves, when viewed as Freud meant them to be viewed, into observations of the activities of the ‘natural man’ imprisoned and ignored yet always alive within us. This original sin, if denied, possesses, he believed, the power to ‘attach’ itself to or ‘associate’ itself with other, apparently good and innocent thoughts, lending them, thereby, its own passionate energy. Hence the innumerable ‘anxieties’ and fears (‘phobias’) of the mentally sick: hence their strange apings of physical disease, their perverted ideas, their unreasoning prejudices. To resurrect this natural man and yoke his powers to fresh and useful enterprises was the life-aim of the physician.
There are those, today, who deny the very existence of the ‘unconscious mind’ – though their numbers are diminishing. There are others who see in nervous ailments only the failure of will power, whereby they think we hold our instincts in wholesome restraint. Finally, there are many who believe that an actual physical lesion, a disease of the body, underlies every abnormality of the mind. Freud’s doctrine is anathema to all such. His doctrine, moreover, has been modified and changed, notably by Jung, who laid far less stress than Freud on the sexual character of emotional impulse. The controversy is apt to become a barren one.
Freud was born at Freiberg, in Moravia, on May 6, 1856, and studied in Vienna and at the Salpêtrière in Paris, graduating md in 1881. Most of his numerous works have been translated into English and other languages, and he was editor of Internationale zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse and of Imago, and director of the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis. Last year he was elected a Foreign Member of the Royal Society, and many years ago he received the honorary degree of ll.d from Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts. Professor Freud married in 1886, and had three sons and three daughters.
Amy Johnson
A great airwoman
6 January 1941
Miss Amy Johnson, cbe, whose death is now confirmed, will always be remembered as the first woman to fly alone from England to Australia. That flight took place in 1930 and her name at once became world-famous.
In the early days of the war she was employed in ‘ferrying’ material to France for the raf. Her cool courage, flying unarmed through the danger zone, was much admired by the raf pilots. Since that time she had flown a variety of aircraft many thousands of miles and she met her death while serving her country.
Amy Johnson was of Danish origin. Her grandfather, Anders Jörgensen, shipped to Hull when he was 16, settled there, changed his name to Johnson, and married a Yorkshire woman named Mary Holmes. One of their sons, the father of Amy, became a successful owner of Hull trawlers. Amy graduated ba at Sheffield University, and then went to London to learn to fly at the London Flying Club at Stag Lane, Edgware. After taking her ‘A’ licence she passed the Air Ministry examination to qualify as a ground engineer. Before starting on her flight to Australia her only considerable experience of cross-country flying was one flight from London to Hull.
Having acquired a secondhand Moth with Gipsy engine, she started from Croydon on May 5, 1930, on an attempt to beat the light aeroplane record of 15½ days from England to Australia. Considering her lack of experience at that time as a navigator, it was a marvel that she found her way so well. She arrived safely at Darwin on May 24. Thence she flew to Brisbane, where, probably through her exhausted condition, she overshot the aerodrome and crashed her Moth rather badly. Australian National Airways Limited arranged for her to fly as a passenger in one of their machines to Sydney, and in the pilot of that machine she met her future husband, Mr J. A. Mollison. She was accorded a great reception in Australia, and was received at Government House. King George V conferred on her the cbe and the Daily Mail made her a present of £10,000. On her return to England she was met at Croydon by the Secretary of State for Air, the late Lord Thomson, in person.
In 1931 she made a fine flight to Tokyo across Siberia, and then back to England, and in 1932 she started off in another Puss Moth, Desert Cloud, to beat her husband’s record to the Cape, which she did by nearly 10½ hours. The skill with which she crossed Africa proved that she had become a first-class pilot. In 1933 she and her husband acquired a D. H. Dragon aeroplane and set out to fly to New York. They successfully crossed the Atlantic, Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, Maine, and Massachusetts, but when they were approaching New York their petrol ran short and they therefore landed at Bridgeport, 60 miles short of New York, in the dark. The Dragon ran into a swamp, and overturned. It was extensively damaged, and both of them were bruised and scratched. Her flight to the Cape and back in May, 1936, will rank as one of her greatest achievements. She beat the outward and the homeward records, the record for the double journey, and the capital to capital record. The Royal Aero Club conferred its gold medal upon her in October, 1936, in recognition of her Empire flights. Her book Sky Roads of the World was published in September, 1939.
Her marriage took place in 1932, but in 1936 she resumed her maiden name for the purposes of her career, and in 1938 the marriage was dissolved.
Virginia Woolf
Novelist, essayist, and critic
28 March 1941
The death of Mrs Virginia Woolf, which must now be presumed, and is announced on another page, is a serious loss to English letters. As a novelist she showed a highly original form of sensitivity to mental impressions, the flux of which, in an intelligent mind, she managed to convey with remarkable force and beauty. Adeline Virginia Stephen was born at Hyde Park Gate, London, in 1882, the daughter of Sir Leslie Stephen (then editor of the Cornhill and later of the DNB) by his second wife, Julia Prinsep Duckworth (a widow, born Jackson). She was related to the Darwins, the Maitlands, the Symondses, and the Stracheys; her godfather was James Russell Lowell; and the whole force of heredity and environment was deeply literary. Virginia was a delicate child, never able to stand the rough-and-tumble of a normal schooling. She was reared partly in London and partly in Cornwall, where she imbibed that love of the sea which so often appears in her titles and her novels. Her chief companion was her sister Vanessa (later to become Mrs Clive Bell, and a distinguished painter). Her home studies included the unrestricted use of Sir Leslie’s splendid library, and as she grew up she was able to enjoy the conversation of distinguished visitors like Hardy, Ruskin, Morley, and Gosse. She devoured Hakluyt’s Voyages at a very juvenile age, and early acquired a love of the whole Elizabethan period that never left her. Her mother died when she was 13 and her father in 1904, when she was 22. After Sir Leslie Stephen’s death Virginia, Vanessa, and two brothers set up house together at Gordon Square, Bloomsbury, and as time went on the sisters, with Mr Clive Bell, the late Lytton Strachey, Mr T. S. Eliot, and some others, formed a group with which the name of that London district was associated, sometimes with ill-natured implications. But, so far as Virginia Woolf was concerned, she would have done honour to any district. She very soon displayed a keen and catholic critical sense which found expression in those brilliant and human articles written for The Times Literary Supplement, many of which are contained in her book, The Common Reader. In 1912 she married Mr Leonard Woolf, the critic and political writer, and went to live at Richmond, Surrey.
The marriage led to much joint work, literary and in publishing; but Mrs Woolf’s private interests remained primarily artistic rather than political. Despite friendships with Mrs Fawcett, the Pankhursts, and Lady Constance Lytton, she took no active part in the movement for woman suffrage, though as she showed in A Room of One’s Own, she passionately sympathized with the movement to secure for women a proper place in the community’s life. It was not until she was 33 (in 1915) that she published her first novel, The Voyage Out, which was a recension of a manuscript dating back some nine years. It was an immature work, but very interesting prophetically, as can be seen by comparing it with To the Lighthouse. By this time Mr and Mrs Woolf had set up as publishers at Hogarth House, Richmond, calling their firm the Hogarth Press. The high level of the works published by this press is universally recognized. Among them are some of the best early works of Katherine Mansfield, Middleton Murry, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster, besides the works of Mrs Woolf herself. Later transferred to Bloomsbury, the Press acquired an additional reputation for the issue of books having a political trend to the Left.
In 1919 Mrs Woolf brought out a second novel, Night and Day, which was still by way of being ’prentice work, but with Jacob’s Room (1922) she became widely recognized as a novelist of subtle apprehensions and delicate reactions to life, with a method of her own and a finely wrought and musical style. Her subsequent novels, Mrs Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, Orlando, and The Waves, rightly earned her an international reputation. These books broke away from the orderly narrative style of the traditional English novel, and are sometimes baffling to minds less agile than hers: but their subtle poetry and their power of inspiring intense mental excitement in imaginative minds are qualities which far outweigh occasional obscurity. The flux of perceptions and the inexorable movement of time were two of her chief themes; and if there is some truth in the criticism that her characters are little more than states of mind, it is also true that they are very highly individualized by the author’s remarkable power of observation. Above all, she had a perfect sense of form and of the unity – even if its expression were unattainable – underlying the whole strange process which we call human life. Mrs Woolf’s last book, published in 1940, was a profoundly interesting biography of Roger Fry.
David Lloyd George
National leadership in war and peace. A pioneer of social reform.
26 March 1945
The death of Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor, which is announced on another page, marks the loss of one of the most controversial and commanding figures in British political life. Though for many years he had been out of office, he left an indelible mark on his country’s history both as a protagonist of social reform and as an indomitable leader during the war of 1914–18.
The Right Hon. David Lloyd George, pc, om, first Earl Lloyd George of Dwyfor, and Viscount Gwynedd, of Dwyfor in the county of Caernarvon, in the Peerage of the United Kingdom, was born in Hulme, Manchester, on January 17, 1863. His father, William, came of a stock of substantial farmers in South Wales, but, preferring books to the plough, left the farm and became a wandering missionary of education, teaching in many places, of which Manchester was the last. His mother was a Lloyd, daughter of a Baptist minister who lived at Llanystumdwy, near Criccieth, in Caernarvonshire. The father died when he was 42, leaving the mother to bring up David, then a baby of 18 months, a daughter, who was older, and another son, who was born posthumously. Hearing of her plight her brother, Richard Lloyd, at once left his workshop – he was a master bootmaker – and took his sister and her children back to live with him at Llanystumdwy. He treated his sister’s children as his own, and sent them to the village school. David at school is said to have been quick rather than industrious, and his best subjects were geography and mathematics.
Start as a Lawyer
The Georges had known Mr Goffey, a Liverpool solicitor, and in the family councils about the boy’s future it was finally decided, thanks mainly to his mother’s insistence, to make him a lawyer. At 16 he was articled to a firm of solicitors in Portmadoc. Five years later he had started as a solicitor on his own account at Criccieth, to which the family had by then removed, and his uncle’s back parlour was his first chambers. He began to get work, and in 1885 he and his younger brother William had offices in the main street of Portmadoc. Three years later – just after his twenty-fifth birthday – the young solicitor was doing well enough to marry Margaret Owen, who belonged to a prosperous yeoman family just outside Criccieth. The marriage was happy and helpful.
Lloyd George’s boyhood was cast in the great days of the Welsh national revival, which for tactical reasons looked to the Liberal rather than to the Conservative Party. Always a Nationalist and a Democrat, in this respect a typical Welshman, he had no part in the traditions of either party, and his politics were rooted in incidents and accidents of the early struggles of Welsh Nationalism. He said later in life that the chapel was his secondary school and university, and with the sap of the new national life rising in its services and in its institutions it was one not to be despised. ‘How the past holds you here!’ he exclaimed when he visited Oxford after the South African War, ‘I am glad I never came here.’
At an early age, when most boys are content to reflect the commonplaces of their school-books, he was the Hampden of the village politics. At 18 he was writing over the name ‘Brutus’ in a local newspaper articles showing a curious detachment of political judgment, but inclining strongly to the Radical wing of the Liberals. Early in 1886 he was on the first Irish Home Rule platform at Festiniog, and greatly impressed Michael Davitt by his speech. Two years later he was adopted as the Liberal candidate for Caernarvon Boroughs, and in 1890 was elected at a by-election by a narrow majority.
He did not speak frequently, and at first men noted chiefly the pleasant softness of his voice and his turn for personal quips. It was a platform speech on Welsh Disestablishment at the Metropolitan Tabernacle that first made him famous outside Wales, but he wisely stuck to his Parliamentary work, and presently became the most active among the Welsh Parliamentary rebels. He made an unsuccessful effort to create an independent Welsh Nationalist Party, with an organization of its own, and he used every device of the mutinous Parliamentarian to force the Rosebery Government to bring in a Welsh Disestablishment Bill and pass it through the Commons.
South African War
After the cordite vote of 1895, when the Liberal Government was defeated by a chance vote on the insufficiency of small-arm ammunition, the Liberals were in opposition for 10 years. Up to then a Welsh Nationalist, hardly interested in party controversy except in so far as it served Wales, Lloyd George in the 1896 Parliament became the leader of the Left Wing Liberals. Foiled in his ambition to be the Parnell of all Wales, he now threw himself with ardour into English politics. He opposed the Agricultural Rates Bill with such vigour that he got himself suspended. This was the opposition of the peasant, ‘cottage-bred’ man to the landlord who, he alleged, was subsidized by this measure.
Local feeling had run very high in his election in 1892 and 1895, but his resistance to the South African War made him the most unpopular man in the country. He conducted a campaign for the conclusion of peace, and it was almost the rule for him to have his meetings broken up. But the worst riot, and one which brought him within peril of his life, was that in Birmingham in the week before Christmas, 1901, from which he only escaped under escort by dressing in the uniform of a policeman. Yet it may be doubted whether he was ever so thoroughly happy as he was at this period of his life. He took the risks quite deliberately, believing that he was right; and he had his reward in the reputation for courage and constancy acquired at this time.
The end of the South African War marked also the end of the long period during which he had bothered or opposed his own party almost as much as their rivals. The Conservative Education Bill of 1902 gave him his first real chance to emerge as a leader of the whole Liberal Party. The Bill, which proposed to give public assistance to all voluntary schools, whether sectarian or not, offended the cardinal principle of the Nonconformists that denominational teaching should not be fostered by the State, and rallied practically all Liberals against the principle of granting public funds without imposing public control. He had full scope for his gifts of industry and oratory during every stage of the Bill, and he used them to such purpose that he won a tribute during the closing stages from Balfour himself. His efforts during 1902 procured for him a position and reputation which made his inclusion in the next Liberal Government certain.
From 1906, when the Liberals came into power, he held office continuously for more than 15 eventful years. His conduct of the Board of Trade, to which office he was appointed in 1906, was a complete surprise to all his old enemies who knew him only by his agitation in the South African War and expected to find him an intransigent, unpractical extremist. On the contrary, he was accessible to argument, ingenious in compromise, and much more independent of his officials than most Ministers. Not only was he ready to hear what the interests affected had to say on a measure that he was preparing, but he made it a practice – and here his procedure was quite original – himself to seek them out, call them in conference, and embody their criticisms, if he thought them valid, while the measure was still in the drafting stage. In this way he not only secured the more rapid passage of Bills through Parliament, but when they became law he had the cooperation of the interests affected in making them a success.
The Merchant Shipping Act, the Port of London Act, and the Patents Act (which, by the way, offended the strait-laced free-traders) were all remarkable products of this new method of legislation, which completely broke with bureaucratic tradition. Broadly, it would probably be true to say that he always had an imperfect sympathy with the orthodox Civil Service habit of mind, and, while he relied on it to administer existing law, he despaired of its giving him new ideas and looked elsewhere for them. Here was the germ of what was later known as the new bureaucracy. While he was at the Board of Trade, too, he showed his ingenuity as a mediator by settling the railway strike of 1907. His industrial settlements, however, had a way of being opportunist rather than permanent. The loss of his eldest daughter a few weeks after the strike ended was a sore grief to him.
Chancellor of the Exchequer
The 1909 Budget
In 1908 Campbell-Bannerman died. Asquith succeeded him as Prime Minister and was succeeded as Chancellor of the Exchequer by Lloyd George. At this time, and for some years later, Lloyd George was in very close association with Mr Winston Churchill. Mr Churchill, who succeeded Lloyd George at the Board of Trade, contributed a minimum wage in sweated industries, a weekly half-holiday for shop workers, and the Labour Exchanges. Lloyd George, on going to the Treasury, found an Old Age Pensions Bill already drafted by his predecessor, and after he had carried this through he turned his thought towards schemes of national insurance against sickness and unemployment, and visited Germany in the autumn of 1908 to study the German insurance system. The combination in one pair of hands of responsibility for national finance and of directing a vigorous policy of social reform was unique.
His first Budget, brought in on April 29, 1909, was described by its author as a ‘war budget’, the war being against poverty and squalor, and it dominated politics for the next two years. The speech in which it was introduced was the longest and one of the least successful that he ever made, and with its central idea of taxing the increment on land values, or at any rate with the machinery for doing this, his advisers at the Treasury are believed to have been in very imperfect sympathy, and the Bill was very badly pulled about during the eight months of unclosured debate that it consumed in passing through the Commons. Fierce as was the controversy in the Commons, it was still fiercer in the country, and rarely in our modern politics have such hard words been used on both sides. A speech at Limehouse, made by Lloyd George in July which added a new verb to the English language, is probably the best statement of his case; another at Newcastle in November described the proposals as fraught with ‘rare and refreshing fruit for the parched lips of the multitude’.
In invective and abuse Lloyd George was surpassed by his critics, and future generations re-reading the speeches of 1909 will marvel that so much sound and fury should have been generated over taxes whose yield never approached the cost of collection and which disappeared almost unregretted 10 years later. Lloyd George undoubtedly thought that the country was with him, and when the Lords threw out the Finance Bill he is alleged to have exclaimed: ‘I have them now.’ But the comparatively small majority of 124 at the first election of 1910 was almost equivalent to a defeat, for the Liberals had lost 115 seats, or 230 votes.
Leaders’ Conference
This election had a profound effect on his future. Perhaps it was now that he was converted to coalition. At any rate, it was he who, after the death of King Edward vii, made the first suggestion of the conference of party leaders that followed. It is known that Lloyd George and Balfour were in agreement at the conference, and, had their views been accepted, something like the party truce that was concluded in 1914 would have been concluded at the end of 1910. Among the terms of the concordat it is believed that Lloyd George was willing to withdraw his opposition to McKenna’s shipbuilding programme, and even to consent to some form of compulsory service. During the General Election at the end of 1910 (the second of the year) Lloyd George had the throat trouble which impaired the early beauty and flexibility of his voice.
In the next year he introduced and carried his Insurance Bill. There could be no doubt of the genuineness of his sympathy with the trials of poverty; and he was astonished at the strength of the opposition aroused. It remains, however, the most important of his legislative achievements. He proposed in the next years to attack the problem of the reform of land tenure, but his studies were interrupted by the shadows of the coming war with Germany and of the Marconi scandal. This last was the worst trouble of his political life, but no one imputed worse to him than carelessness and an imperfect sense of what was expected from one holding his high office.
Foreign Policy
It remains to gather up the threads of Lloyd George’s views on foreign policy before war came. He entered the Liberal Government in 1906 with a violent prejudice against the Liberal League and all its works, and with some good personal reason, for it had been founded as a check on the Liberal Left, of which he was the leader. He belonged to the Campbell-Bannerman wing of the party and adopted without questioning the old Liberal objections to expenditure on armaments, and pleaded for its diversion to social reform.
On this as on other matters the conference of 1910 seems to have induced a certain change of opinion. At any rate, in 1911, after the dispatch of the Panther to Agadir, he made at the Guildhall banquet a remarkable speech, in the course of which he declared that if Germany were to treat this country as of no account in the comity of nations then peace at such a price would be an intolerable humiliation for our great country. But he remained fundamentally unconvinced of the German menace. As late as January 1, 1914, in a newspaper interview, the authenticity of which was never denied, he said that he felt convinced that if Germany ever had any idea of challenging our supremacy at sea, the exigencies of the military situation must necessarily put it out of her head. He said that our relations with her were more friendly than they had been for years, and he looked forward to the spread of a revolt against militarism all over western Europe.
When the crisis began in July Lloyd George was the leader of the peace party, which was in an actual majority as late as July 31. By August 2, after (and doubtless in consequence of) the letter from the Conservative Party leaders, the Cabinet had agreed to a limited intervention in case the German fleet came into the Channel to conduct operations against the French coasts. It was to weaken this resolve that von Kühlmann issued his statement to the Press that if Great Britain remained neutral Germany would not conduct naval operations against the French coast, and this promise made some impression on Lloyd George. He told an interviewer that after such a guarantee ‘I would not have been a party to a declaration of war had Belgium not been invaded, and I think I can say the same thing for most, if not all, of my colleagues.’ In his opinion, a poll of the electors on Saturday (August 1) would have shown 95 per cent against embroiling this country in hostilities, whereas by the Tuesday after a poll would have resulted in a vote of 99 per cent in favour of war. Equally logical and equally consistent with his reluctance to enter the war was his determination that once in the war we could not afford to come out of it except as unequivocal victors.
He soon emerged as the most ardent war spirit in the Government. His early war speeches lacked Asquith’s fine mastery of phrase, but were more stirring, and two speeches, one at the Queen’s Hall in September and another at the City Temple in November, are fit to be included in any anthology of militant British oratory. Lloyd George was a member of a committee formed in October to advise the War Office on the best means of providing the guns and ammunition that were required. All countries, including Germany, had under-estimated the expenditure of shells, and, though progress was made in increasing the supplies, it fell far short of our requirements, particularly after trench war had begun. Lloyd George was at first disposed to put the blame on the ‘lure of drink’. We were fighting, he said on March 17, Germany, Austria, and drink, and the greatest enemy was drink. The final result of the offensive against this antagonist was the appointment of the Liquor Control Board.
Munitions for the Troops; Policy for Ministry
But it was evident that, however hard men worked, the output of guns and shells could only be assured by relaxation of union restrictions. ‘This is an engineers’ war,’ said Lloyd George on February 28, and on March 17 he urged a conference of trade union leaders to accept certain proposals for the dilution of labour, including the admission of women to workshops. Thus early was outlined the policy which three months later led to the formation of the Ministry of Munitions and the Munitions Act.
His energy was so much valued by the Army that when French decided in May to appeal to Caesar for a better supply of munitions, and in particular of high explosives, he sent copies of his correspondence with the Government through Captain Guest, one of his adcs and formerly a Junior Whip in the Government, to Lloyd George, and also to Bonar Law and Balfour. Colonel Repington, then Military Correspondent of The Times, was the vehicle of the appeal to the nation as a whole. It is almost forgotten that Lloyd George in a speech to the House of Commons on April 21 said much the same about our manufacture of war munitions as Asquith in his much-criticized speech at Newcastle the day before, but French’s reason for choosing Lloyd George was a just one. He had, as he said, shown by his special interest in this subject that he grasped the military nature of our necessities. There may have been other reasons, too, for the choice, for Lloyd George, a coalitionist at heart since 1910, very early in the war began to doubt whether a party Government could do everything that was required for victory.
Coalition Formed
Lloyd George, who from the South African War days took a very keen interest in military campaigns, was one of the first to shed the facile optimism which was fashionable in the first year of the war, and the likelihood that conscription and grinding taxation would be necessary soon began to oppress him. How could a party Government propose such measures? Was it not necessary to form a coalition of parties if the Government was to have the requisite moral authority? This new crisis matured about the same time as the failure, attributed to lack of munitions, of the attack on the Aubers Ridge. On May 12, 1915, Mr Handel Booth – whose relations with Lloyd George had been fairly close – suggested that the time had come when leaders of the other two parties should be admitted to the Government; three days later Lord Fisher resigned, and on May 17 Asquith, in a letter to Bonar Law, consented to the formation of a Coalition Government. There can be little doubt that Lloyd George inspired this change, which was both necessary for the successful prosecution of the war and accorded with Lloyd George’s political views, and it was certainly he who quelled the Liberal opposition. In the new Ministry, completed by the end of the first week in June, Lloyd George was Minister of Munitions, and a year later we had definitely established an ascendancy over Germany in the manufacture of munitions.
The formation of the Ministry of Munitions and the substitution of a Coalition for a Liberal Government did not exhaust Lloyd George’s energies in this wonderful first year of the war. He also had views on strategy. He saw the incipient weakness of Russia, and was one of the few who appreciated the magnitude of Hindenburg’s victories over Russia at Tannenberg and in the spring of 1915 at its true value. Mackensen’s victory over Russia at Gorlice sharpened his opinion that the chief danger was in the East, and that our sound strategy was to concentrate our offensive efforts against the weaker member of the Central Alliance. He and Mr Churchill thought alike, but whereas Mr Churchill worked for the Dardanelles enterprise, Lloyd George, as early as January, 1915, advocated the dispatch of an expedition to the Balkans to cooperate with Serbia. Briand was of the same general opinion. But the project of a French Army of the East, which it was at first intended should cooperate on the Asiatic shores of the Dardanelles, was opposed by Joffre, and by the time Briand had succeeded the military situation in Serbia was so bad, owing to the entry of Bulgaria, that our General Staff advised that there was no possibility of saving Serbia. It also advised that the employment of troops at Salonika was a dissipation of our strength. In this, however, the Cabinet was over-persuaded by Lloyd George and by the urgent appeals of the French, and the decision to land at Salonika was taken.
Prime Minister
The Change of Office
On the death of Lord Kitchener in June 1916, Lloyd George became War Minister, though it was understood that Asquith made the appointment not without reluctance. There was already widespread dissatisfaction with Asquith’s Government. It is unnecessary to consider whether or not Lloyd George now deliberately planned to supplant Asquith as Prime Minister. He did not believe that Asquith possessed the vigour and vision necessary to win the war, whereas he was confident that he himself did; and he sincerely believed, not without justification, that he was the one man best able to push the war through to victory.
The breach between the two men arose out of negotiations for the formation of a War Committee of the Cabinet, the control of which Lloyd George already wished to keep out of Asquith’s hands. On December 4, 1916, The Times published an accurate account of these negotiations in a leading article. Asquith seems to have believed that the article was inspired by Lloyd George, though in fact its contents were quite familiar in the inner circle of politics. In any case he at once wrote a letter insisting that the Prime Minister, while not a member of the Committee, must have ‘supreme and effective control of war policy’, by supervising the agenda of the Committee and having all its conclusions subject to his approval or veto. Lloyd George repudiated this interpretation of what was afoot, and accepted Asquith’s construction of the arrangement, ‘subject to personnel’, a proviso inserted partly in the interests of Carson, who shared Lloyd George’s views on Balkan strategy. In spite of this letter, Asquith, having consulted his Liberal colleagues, wrote that evening insisting that the Prime Minister must be chairman. Lloyd George then resigned. Asquith followed suit, and with the active support of Bonar Law a new Government was constituted under Lloyd George as Prime Minister, and from then on his will was practically supreme in the conduct of the war. His energy, his own buoyant confidence and courage, and his ability to impart confidence and courage to others were of immense importance.
The end of the war left Lloyd George in a position of commanding, almost dictatorial power; and that position he proceeded at once to consolidate by getting a new mandate from the constituencies for the continuance of the Coalition. The same Government which had won the war, the people were told, was necessary to reconstruct the country and make sure that the new England was to be a fit land for heroes to live in.
Whatever may have been his intention, he allowed the General Election of 1918 to degenerate into an outburst of hysteria. He returned to power with the two potential embarrassments of extravagant promises and an immense majority. They caused him moments of annoyance from the very beginning, but it was fully three years before they seriously impaired a position of personal supremacy such as no British Prime Minister had ever before enjoyed. He dominated the Government of England at a moment when, probably, England’s power in the world was greater than it had ever been.
The Versailles Treaty
Meanwhile the Peace Conference assembled in Paris. This is not the place to examine the faults or the merits of the provisions of the Versailles Treaty, but it must be noted that the longer the conference continued the more did the world lose faith in Lloyd George. All observers paid tribute to his courage in debate, his versatility, his power to win over the other negotiators and to smooth out differences between them, his extraordinary nimbleness and dialectical skill; and all alike grew to disbelieve in the fixity of his convictions or the permanence of any position which he might take up. This impression, which incidents of the next few years did little to dispel, was no less unfortunate for the reputation of Great Britain and of British diplomacy than it was for Lloyd George himself.
At home, Lloyd George attacked the problems of peace in precisely the same spirit as he had attacked those of the war. In his letter to Bonar Law of November 2, 1918, inviting the cooperation of the Unionist Party in the continuation of the Coalition, he said that the problems of peace would be ‘hardly less pressing and will require hardly less drastic action’ than those of the war itself; and for that action the unity of the Coalition was as necessary as ever.
His speeches at this time reflected a mind filled with generous visions of the new and splendid world which was to be built up on the ruins of the war. But like most men of imagination he was inclined to be contemptuous of awkward facts.
Deepening Depression
Only slowly did it become evident how completely the fabric of all societies had been shattered. Lloyd George and his colleagues were not alone in dreaming of a world turning eagerly to the pursuits of peace, and (what was of the first importance for Great Britain’s prosperity) crying hungrily for all those manufactured goods which during the war they had been compelled to deny themselves. But as month after month and year after year the financial conditions of the world grew more chaotic, and the purchasing power of the peoples of the world smaller, commercial depression in England deepened until by 1922 there were normally from 1,250,000 persons unemployed, and the burden of unemployment insurance became heavy alike upon industry and upon the taxpayer.
The Government attempted to struggle on with its schemes of national regeneration and at the same time to parry the onset of economic depression. It showed the utmost fertility in devising palliatives, and there was no branch of public effort directed towards the encouragement of trade or the relief of unemployment during the years between the two wars which did not owe its inception to the Coalition Government. But some portions of the Government’s policy, such as the Agriculture Act and the Addison Housing Scheme, had to be abandoned. Others were allowed to wither, and the general impression was created that the Government was being forced into economy, which was indeed no solution whatsoever, rather than leading the nation towards it.
Dissatisfaction with the foreign policies of the Coalition was even deeper than with its conduct of affairs at home. The costly adventure into Mesopotamia was extremely unpopular. The early encouragement of the Greeks in their operations against Turkey and the half-hearted policy – neither entire abandonment nor a continuance of active help – after King Constantine’s return showed irresolution and lack of any guiding principle. Above all, our relations with France grew less and less friendly. Neither Lloyd George nor the Coalition was to blame for the withdrawal of the United States from the pact to guarantee the security of France or for the German recalcitrancy in the matter of reparation payments, any more than they were to blame for the worldwide unrest and disorganization which followed the war.
No Prime Minister and no Government could, probably, have kept the confidence of the country through these troubled years of disillusionment and distress. All Governments must bear the blame for many things which are beyond their control, and never were Lloyd George’s better qualities more conspicuously displayed. His courage, his versatility, his buoyancy of spirit, and, almost more than all, his amazing physical energy were the wonder of his enemies and the delight of his friends. He had largely superseded the established methods of diplomatic negotiation through the recognized channels by round-table discussions by the heads or plenipotentiary representatives of the various Governments. Over each of the conferences summoned in pursuance of this plan he established an extraordinary personal ascendancy which was something more than the respect necessarily paid to the man who stood for the might of Great Britain. The conferences never attained anything like the objects for which they had been called, but, making the most of what little achievement there was, Lloyd George succeeded in representing each as better than a failure and in keeping hope alive to the next; and at critical moments his speeches in the House of Commons were triumphs. Read in print, the speeches lose much of their magic. In his treatment of France, of Germany, of Russia, of Greece, of the League of Nations, of the Treaty of Versailles itself, Lloyd George was always ready to put everything aside in favour of his own inspiration of the moment.
The Irish Troubles; Discontent with Government
Among the various causes which contributed to the growing discontent with the Coalition Government were the troubles in Ireland. For some reason the Irish question seems never to have especially interested Lloyd George. Soon after the Armistice he spoke vaguely of the Government’s intention to ‘satisfy Irish aspirations’, without injury to the rights and claims of Ulster: but he seems to have been far from comprehending how far Irish sentiment had travelled since the days of 1914. Prudence demanded that the Irish question should be taken up at once and in the most liberal spirit. The Times strongly advocated a measure of self-government for Ireland, without compulsion upon Ulster, and was the first to urge this measure on a reluctant Government. But the Cabinet (certainly its hands were full) dallied and postponed action while every month made the situation more difficult. It was the old fable of the Sibylline books. The price at which Irish peace might have been bought immediately after the war was contemptuously rejected at the beginning of 1920. Then followed one of the most terrible chapters of Ireland’s terrible history, a chapter of civil war, of murder, of repression and reprisals and when the final ‘settlement’ was made it was on terms and in a spirit which would have been incredible three years earlier.
The importance of the influence of the Irish settlement on the fate of the Lloyd George Government was not so much that it aroused any especial popular disapproval as that it definitely alienated an influential section of the Unionist Party. Lloyd George, when he superseded Asquith, had split the Liberal Party in two and he had no more embittered enemies than that half of the party which still followed Asquith. In spite of the concessions which he had made to the wage-earners during and immediately after the war, he had now lost the confidence of Labour as a whole, by a policy which, as in other spheres, lacked consistent principle. The predominant partner in the Coalition was the Unionist Party. On his ability to hold Conservative support the fate of his Government rested. The antagonism aroused among Conservatives by his Irish policy, therefore, was of serious importance. Its extent, however, should not be exaggerated. The policy which culminated in the Treaty of 1922 was loyally supported and indeed largely created by Conservative Ministers; and although a certain section of Conservatives doubtless found in it justification for a revival of their traditional mistrust of Lloyd George, the malcontents would not have been strong enough to overthrow him without allies from quite a different part of the Conservative camp.
Fall of the Coalition
What precipitated Lloyd George’s fall was the crisis in the Near East, with the Kemalist victory over the Greeks, the capture of Smyrna, and the Turkish threat to Constantinople and the little British force, now deserted by its allies, on the Dardanelles. The first intimation that the general public had of the seriousness of the situation was from a clumsily worded communication from the Government to the self-governing Dominions asking them whether Great Britain could count on their military support in case of war. The country was alarmed, and inevitably turned its wrath against the Government, which, outside of Parliament, had by now few friends.
In spite of the endeavours of Austen Chamberlain to keep the party in line, a conference of the Unionist members of the House of Commons held at the Carlton Club in November, 1922, decided by a vote of 186 to 87 in favour of party independence, and Bonar Law, recently recovered from serious illness, consented to act as the party leader. The decisive nature of this vote was due to the growing belief among a number of the younger Conservatives that the choice before them was neither more nor less than whether or not Lloyd George should become the leader of the Conservative Party. They were not in close personal touch with him and not under the spell of his personality. They were repelled rather than attracted by his dramatic and dictatorial methods of doing business. Bonar Law’s emergence gave them an alternative leader and their mistrust of Lloyd George became revolt. At the General Election, which followed immediately, the Coalition Liberals (now calling themselves National Liberals) returned less than 60 members against 344 Unionists. When the new Parliament assembled Lloyd George found himself in the corner seat behind the gangway, at the head of the smallest of the four parties. The official representation of the Opposition passed to the Labour Party.
Re-entry into Party
The result of the election undoubtedly surprised and wounded Lloyd George, who appears to have expected that he would be able to assert over a vast electorate that personal supremacy which he had consistently exercised for so long over smaller bodies. He lost little time, however, in repining, and was soon buoyantly at work trying to effect his re-entry into the Liberal Party. Although he had antagonized many to whom the Coalition was anathema, he was still in a strong position. He had his own powerful organization, equipped with the Coalition Liberal share of the party funds which had been collected to finance a national campaign, and his hold on the Welsh electorate gave him a strong territorial basis for claiming the leadership of a revived Liberal Party.
His efforts to reidentify himself with Liberalism continued to the end of his career with a success which was more apparent than real. He was readmitted to the fold, and, after the transference of Asquith to the House of Lords, consistently elected leader of the Liberal Parliamentary Party. But his leadership was always subject to fragmentary challenges and widespread distrust. The fund which came to be associated with his name was hated by a large section of Liberals even though it was being employed for the use of the Liberal Party. His failure to establish himself as a sectional leader was perhaps due to the same faults of character as had led to his downfall as a national leader, but it is at least doubtful whether the task would not have been beyond any man’s powers. He had to make an effective political force out of a party subject to suction both from the Right and from the Left, every item of whose policy might be claimed as its own by the one or the other of two parties, both of which had clearly a much better chance of carrying it out. The task before him was not merely to overcome prejudice against him within the Liberal Party; it was to transform a centre party into a focus of recruitment for itself rather than a source of recruitment for its rivals.
In this task he never succeeded. His committees of political research produced an agricultural and an urban policy in 1923. He himself produced an unemployment policy in 1929. In all these social and economic schemes he was undoubtedly the anticipator of the agreed and accepted policies of today, as he was the successor of the Liberal policies of the years before the war of 1914-18: but the only real electoral success – that of 1923 – was due not to new plans but to the old associations of Liberals with free trade. Between 1931 and the outbreak of the present war, he gradually retired into the position of an elder statesman, whose occasional irruptions into active politics continued to command more interest than agreement. Perhaps some of this shadow was due to the fact that his voice did not come well over the wireless. But in conversation his personality and his tongue remained as vivid as ever. For example, when asked what he thought of Mr Chamberlain’s visit to Munich, he grimly remarked: ‘In my day they came to see me.’ But it would not be unfair to say that he viewed all Governments with almost equal disfavour, and that he never felt that he himself could usefully fit into any possible team. At least he played no great part in public life either in the years immediately preceding the present war or in the war itself. He was greatly affected by the death of his first wife, Dame Margaret Lloyd George, in 1941. One source of great pleasure to him, however, was the success of his two children, Major Gwilym Lloyd George and Miss Megan Lloyd George, in their political careers. Between them and him there existed the very closest bonds of affection and devotion.
Looking back over Lloyd George’s remarkable career, it appears to fall quite clearly into three parts. In the first he appears as the crusading Radical, finding his inspiration in an ever-widening circle of problems and opportunities. In the second he is still a crusader, but a crusader on behalf of the whole nation. In the third he is trying to persuade himself that he is still a crusader, when he has become in fact a tactician. In every one of these phases his gifts of charm, of wit, of courage moved and attracted audiences, but in the last the prophetic power and hold had vanished. None the less, one of his political opponents once said of him that throughout the bitterest times of their controversy he had always felt that Lloyd George was on the side of the underdog, and this remained true to the end.
His countrymen at least will remember that he wrought greatly and daringly for them in dark times, in peace and in war, and will admit without distinction of class or party that a great man has passed away.
In 1919 he received the om, in 1920 the Grand Cordon of the Legion of Honour, and he was an honorary dcl of Oxford and an honorary ll.d of Edinburgh. He married, in 1888, Margaret, daughter of Richard Owen, of Mynyddednyfed, Criccieth. She was created a gbe, and died in 1941, leaving two sons and two daughters. Secondly he married, in 1943, Miss Frances Louise Stevenson, cbe, who had been his private secretary from 1913.
Earl Lloyd George’s elder son, Viscount Gwynedd, known until recently as Major Richard Lloyd George, now succeeds as second earl. In 1917 he married Roberta Ida Freeman (fifth daughter of Sir Robert McAlpine, first baronet), who divorced him in 1933, having had a son and a daughter. He married a second time, and his present wife is a line controller of the London Transport Welfare Department. The first earl’s second son is Major the Right Hon. Gwilym Lloyd George, Minister of Fuel and Power; his elder daughter is Lady Olwen Carey-Evans, wife of Major Sir Thomas Carey-Evans, mc, frcs; and his younger daughter is Lady Megan Lloyd George, mp for Anglesey.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt
Four times chief executive of United States.
Service in freedom’s cause.
12 April 1945
The death of President Roosevelt from cerebral haemorrhage on Thursday afternoon at Warm Springs, Georgia, as announced in the later editions of The Times yesterday, robs the United States of its Chief Executive within less than six months of his election to serve a fourth term of office at the White House – a term without precedent in American history. Throughout yesterday the people of the United States, of the United Nations, and of all peace-loving States mourned the passing of a leader whose influence for good had extended far beyond his national boundaries.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the thirty-first President of the United States, was, as his whole life attested, a man of destiny. From one fate to another he was called. Through two great and prolonged crises in his country’s history he set its course and steered it through. Each of them provided a searching test of character and statecraft, and each made its own demands upon the Chief Executive. In both of them, however, he retained the confidence and was upheld by the support of an immense majority of his fellow-countrymen. The place in history which he will fill in relation to the greatest of his predecessors has yet to be decided but one of the determining factors in regard to it will be that he alone of them was invested by his fellow-countrymen with a fourth term of office and at his elections secured more decisive votes than any Presidential candidate before him. It will be remembered also that his pre-eminence was by no means due to lack of opposition, for many of his policies were carried in the teeth of a resistance by powerful and vocal sections of the American public. He was in fact during his first three terms master of Congress for only one comparatively brief period, and after that was opposed as strongly by some important groups in his party as by the Republicans. He had often, therefore, to use outside opinion to force his own supporters to follow him. His ability to do so was one of the truest measures of his stature. His like can, indeed, only be sought among those whose idealism made a comparable appeal to his people, and whose actions were equally justified in the event.
Rights of Democracy
The world was first to hear of Franklin Roosevelt, the second of his blood and familiar name to occupy the White House, as a champion of the rights of democracy. In this he was a true heir to the traditions of his country. Sensitive as he always was to the feelings of those near him he seemed able to enlarge the range of his sympathy and understanding until it embraced a huge and diversified nation. To him, a man of generous though sometimes hasty instincts, distress, suffering, and insecurity were standing challenges. He had an aristocrat’s magnanimity and angry inability to see unnecessary pain inflicted, and the ‘New Deal’ was a supreme assertion of the claim of all mankind to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. ‘Every man has the right to live; and this means that he has the right to a comfortable living’ was both the expression of a genuine belief and a continuing directive of policy. To many millions of Americans it became a sufficing and unquestioned gospel. Even if the Fates had had no more to ask of him than the mighty struggle against the depression of the early 1930s which it inspired, his place in the first rank of Presidents would be secure. At the end of four years of it faith in his leadership had actually increased, and even after four more survived in a remarkable degree.
Roosevelt was required, however, not only to protect the fruits of his advanced Liberalism from internal enemies, but also against a far more formidable menace from without. His aims demanded that he should be a man of peace. Peace, however, was not to continue in his time. He did within the limitations of his position all he could to avert the calamity of war, and both before and after its outbreak displayed, in addition to an astonishing gift of judging his own people, almost as remarkable a one for seeing deep into the Axis leaders. Totalitarianism was the antithesis of all he stood for. He never concealed his personal hatred of it; but he determined with cautious statesmanship to move only as fast as his own countrymen could be led to travel with him. There were in the early stages of the war cross currents in American opinion, and it was not until Pearl Harbour that he had a united people behind him. In foresight he was from the first far ahead of most of them: but he understood the American temper much too well to force the pace, and in this way he succeeded in maintaining the position of a trusted interpreter of world events. When, therefore, Japan struck and he was free from the restrictions which had fettered him, he moved instantaneously into that not merely of a commander-in-chief in war, but of a national war-leader as well. He had, moreover, by this time not only armed his country, but had insured the capacity of Great Britain to hold Germany. It was, in fact, in the years immediately before Japan’s attack no less than in the years after it that his life’s battle for democracy was won.
Atlantic Crossings
It is true that, when pressed by his own party in 1940 to seek a third term and opposed by Mr Wendell Willkie, he failed to register as tremendous a victory as in 1936; but it is true also that it was a contest chiefly upon domestic issues, for Mr Willkie was broadly in agreement with him on the wider and more pressing ones of war. Thus during the years of America’s belligerency he was in fact the supreme head of an embattled people, and in authority the equal in vital matters of the great national figures with whom he cooperated. When, therefore, in the course of the long conflict he crossed the Atlantic to join in allied councils of war he went with all the prestige of his standing in the nation he represented as well as that of his own transcendent personality.
Roosevelt was a statesman in virtually every direction open to a truly democratic leader. As President he had immense powers and exercised them freely. Thus at times he would initiate and act with daring, and at others hold and caution. Occasionally he would move ahead of his people: but, if he found he had gone too far he would fall quietly into step with them again. He thus displayed the resiliency of his fibrous strength. Sprung of long lines of American ancestors, he was so deep rooted in the American soil and so steeped in American sentiment that he had no sense of inferiority to any man or people upon earth and could therefore be completely spontaneous. So American was he, indeed, that he seemed instinctively to realize the ideals which, however inarticulately, were stirring in his fellow-countrymen, and, since they were usually his own as well, it became his delight to translate them into concrete political forms. He became, moreover, in virtue chiefly of the accuracy of his intuitions, the shrewdest and most adroit of politicians. He had also the rare power of making government appear interesting and exciting, especially to the younger generation. He had, of course, his weaknesses and incapacities, though they were perhaps the inevitable concomitants of his virtues. He was assailed, for example, as a reckless spender, a plotter against the Constitution, a dictator, and an enemy of sound finance; but when due allowance is made for political animus, the substance of such charges seems small indeed beside his achievements. Added, moreover, to his many other qualifications for his exalted office he had an abounding vitality and exuberance of spirit, and, by no means least of his powers, he was a sound judge and a natural attractor of men. No doubt he was a favoured child of fortune; and yet the man who had fought and conquered a fell disease had, it seemed, wrung from that grim struggle the secret of all human victories.
Early Life
Wish to Be a Sailor
Franklin Delano Roosevelt was born at Hyde Park, in Dutchess County, New York, on January 30, 1882. He was the only son of an affluent and long-established family well and widely related. President Theodore Roosevelt was his distant cousin. In him Dutch, French, Scottish, and Irish strains were mingled, but all of them had been seasoned for generations in the United States. His father, James Roosevelt, was both a man of business and a country gentleman. His mother, a remarkable woman who was to exert a great influence upon his life, was Sara Delano, a member of a French family which had left Leyden in the early seventeenth century. Although delicate he had a happy childhood, during which he was taken a number of times to Europe. Then rather late he was sent to school at Groton. As a boy he had wanted to enter the Navy – his love of ships remained with him always – but instead he went to Harvard. There, although he moved in a largely Republican set, he was known as a strong Democrat, the political faith of his immediate family; he also gained distinction by being managing editor of The Crimson, an undergraduate newspaper. After taking a full share in the university life and sports he graduated in 1904.
On St Patrick’s Day, 1905, when he was studying law at Columbia University he married Eleanor Roosevelt, the niece of the famous Republican President. She was only a girl: but he seemed to have divined the quality of one who, herself a woman of remarkable ability, was to become a potent factor in his career and the most prominent and active mistress the White House has ever known. The young couple settled in New York, and in 1907 he was admitted to the Bar and joined the important legal firm of Carter, Ledyard and Milburn, of that city. Then in 1910 he yielded to the suggestion that he should stand for the State Senate as candidate for the Dutchess County District which for years had been a Republican stronghold. At the election his immense vitality, charm, and good humour won the day and his brilliant political career began. At its outset he made his name, for he became the central figure in a courageous and successful revolt against Tammany Hall over the election of a Senator to Washington.
Navy Assistant Secretary
When in 1912 Woodrow Wilson became President, Roosevelt was offered a choice of two places in the administration; but neither appealed to him. Then, however, Josephus Daniels, the new Secretary of the Navy, asked him if he would take the congenial post of Navy Assistant Secretary and he readily consented. Daniels was a pacifist of puritanical mind, but the two men got on well together, and Roosevelt, who was much the more popular with the service, was, in his capable and vigorous way, able to do a great deal to increase the efficiency of the fleet. He found, however, that the President was less helpful than he might have been. Wilson liked and admired Roosevelt, who continued to hold him in deep regard, but he hesitated to give signs of preparation for war. It was indeed only in 1916 that he consented to an increased navy, and thus gave the Assistant Secretary his chance. In June, 1918, Roosevelt was offered a nomination for the governorship of New York but refused it. Then in the next month he went in pursuit of his duties to England and afterwards to France. He was eager at the time to play a combatant’s part, but this was not to be. In London he created an admirable impression and made many friends. After the Armistice he went to Europe again.
At the Democratic Convention of 1920, which was held at San Francisco, Governor Cox, of Ohio, was nominated to succeed Wilson, and, much to his surprise and pleasure, the convention agreed that Roosevelt should go forward for the Vice-Presidency. It was a strenuous campaign; but the fate of the Democrats was sealed, and he retired into private life with good humour and, in spite of the defeat of his party, a high reputation. He thereupon resumed his legal practice, and as an occupation for his spare time undertook to reorganize the Boy Scout movement in New York. He had, however, been subjected to a long and unbroken strain, and in the next year was smitten with poliomyelitis, a form of infantile paralysis. It might well have ended his career, but, bearing its pain and deprivation with superb courage, he triumphed first over the disease itself and then by degrees over the physical incapacity it left. ‘I’ll beat this thing,’ he said. He was never in fact to regain the full use of his legs, and to him, who had the physique and habit of an athlete, swimming was to remain his only locomotive exercise. Owing, however, to his iron will and magnificent resistance he was able to do some work in 1922, and in 1924 played a prominent part in the Democratic Convention of that year. All who knew him seemed to have agreed that his ordeal had deepened as well as strengthened a character already strong.
Governor of New York
By 1928 much benefited by prolonged treatment at Warm Springs, in Western Georgia, where he later established a foundation for the treatment of infantile paralysis, he was able to stand without crutches, and once again to bear the strain of active politics. It was he, therefore, who nominated his old friend ‘Al’ Smith as Democratic candidate to the Presidency, and himself on Smith’s strong persuasion stood for the governorship of the State of New York. His election to it was in the circumstances of the time a triumph, for even Smith himself failed for the first time to carry his Empire State. This important office, which raised him to Presidential status, he was to hold for two terms of two years each. His was in many ways a notable administration, for he found himself in a laboratory in which he could test the reforms he was afterwards to apply to the country as a whole. He also developed his own political technique, and it was at this period that he was among the first to exploit the political uses of the broadcast, a medium of which he became perhaps the most skilled and effective exponent of his time. Perhaps the greatest of his many problems was the administration of New York City, and when in view of certain scandals he instituted an extensive investigation into its municipal affairs, events were to show that his action had been justified. By the end of the second period of office he had greatly increased his reputation in the country at large by the just and fearless performance of his official duties.
Elected President
New Deal Promised
Meanwhile the economic condition of the nation, gripped in the ever-deepening depression of those years, was going from bad to worse. The unemployment figures, in so far as they could be estimated, ran to many millions. Values were sinking to fantastic levels, factories were without orders, and a dreadful paralysis was encroaching on every normal national activity. It was against this background of gloom and widespread sense of hopelessness that the Presidential election of 1932 was held. At it the Republicans, who felt bound to vindicate their President by their votes, decided to put Herbert Hoover forward for a second time. At the Democratic Convention at Chicago there was a good deal of initial manoeuvring, but eventually Roosevelt was nominated, and once his campaign had started there was little question of the result. In it he was helped immensely by the work of the group of chosen experts known as the ‘Brain Trust’, whom he had employed to advise him, and to ensure that the votes his policy might gain would not be obtained by false pretences. Apart from the fact that the Hoover regime had failed to master the depression, there were many circumstances in his favour. The Democratic platform was, in defiance of all precedent, brief and definite; conditions generally could scarcely have been more desperate; and the refusal of prohibition was a popular Democratic plank. Moreover, as the campaign progressed Roosevelt’s inspired nomination pledge of ‘a new deal for the American people’ began to catch the public imagination: Hoover, indeed, was beaten from the first; but the result when it came was unparalleled in American history – a majority of 4,000,000 votes and 480 out of 531 in the electoral college. On this there followed the four months of impotence which the constitution imposed when there was nothing for him to do except to watch the increasing difficulties of the country and to mature the Brain Trust’s plans. In February, when he was in Florida, a crazy Italian made an attempt upon his life, and his companion, Anton Cermak, the Mayor of Chicago, was killed.
On the eve of his inauguration the nation long lost to hope was on the point of panic. Banks had been closing all over the country and it was rumoured that those of New York and Chicago would shut the next day. It was a moment of culmination at which Roosevelt alone seemed to stand between the people and complete despair. At such a time he was at his greatest, and as he drove with his tired predecessor through the streets of the capital to the inauguration ceremonies, he appeared to radiate courage and assurance. His speech was brief and foreshadowed immediate and strenuous action. Before evening every member of his Cabinet was sworn in, and almost at once came his proclamation of a four-day banking holiday. He called Congress together at the earliest possible moment and with his overwhelming support there was able to pass through a vast programme of reform. His plans for national recovery covered the whole range of industry. Huge schemes of public relief works were launched and the Budget rose to a total unprecedented even in the years of war. Since taxation could not cover it, he had to borrow. In finance his plan was to move towards a managed currency, and his aim a dollar which would not change in its purchasing or debt-paying power during the succeeding generation. There was to be constant talk of a balanced Budget in some year not too far ahead, but the figures and estimates were scarcely to point in that direction. With the huge defence programme which developed later all hope of it expired.
Fireside Chats
There were three aspects of the President’s ‘New Deal’. The first was to avert abuses by imposing drastic limitations on all big industrial organizations; the second to develop national resources by such means as huge dams and hydro-electric plants; the third to establish social security in one grand sweep. Nothing in regard to it was particularly new except the immensity of its scale and speed with which it was attempted to put it through. At every stage, moreover, he sought to carry the country with him, and to this end kept it informed of both his aims and achievements by his ‘Fireside Chats’, a system of direct personal contact which developed into an unprecedented intimacy between President and people.
There were, of course, loud complaints from business and other interests, and those who felt themselves to be prejudiced or endangered by the new legislation. But apart from some checks and some dissension the President’s proposals were carried through on a broad tide of popular support. Even after what has been called the first ‘honeymoon’ year everything continued to go smoothly enough. Then, however, the ‘codes’ which Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 had imposed upon employers were condemned by the Supreme Court and rendered invalid. His Agricultural Adjustment Act was also to suffer the same fate. It was the beginning of a sharp constitutional conflict. In spite, however, of a tendency in some quarters to make it a political issue, the President, to whom opposition was always a stimulant, faced the difficulty calmly, and, in trying to save what he could, succeeded beyond expectation. In spite, therefore, of the loss of legislation which incidentally had served a great deal of its purpose, the ‘New Deal’ went on.
The new President had also been faced with serious problems of foreign policy. War debts provided one of them and disarmament another. In April, 1933, Mr Ramsay MacDonald went to see him at Washington to discuss the whole world situation, and in May he issued an important message to the heads of the 54 States concerned in the disarmament and economic conferences of that year. In it he appealed for a common understanding and suggested a definite non-aggression pact. It appeared indeed at the time that he contemplated a closer participation of representatives of the United States in international conferences, and as a step in that direction made Mr Norman Davis his Ambassador at large to various countries of Europe. Unfortunately, however, owing to American failure to see eye to eye with some of the European countries in regard to the stability of international exchange, the high hopes which had been formed were to remain unrealized, for the economic conference proved abortive. Thereafter for some years the United States was to lapse into an increasing detachment.
Plea for Broader Outlook
By 1935 the President was able to claim that his basic programme was substantially complete. Apart from its material effects it had undoubtedly exerted a remarkable educative influence on the people, and in the same year he stated that the objective of the nation had greatly changed, and that clearer thinking and understanding were leading to a broader and therefore a less selfish outlook. By that year also the economic skies had begun to lighten. It was, therefore, with the confidence of great achievements and substantial hopes that he entered his campaign of 1936. The Republicans had chosen Mr Alfred Landon, the Governor of Kansas, to oppose him – by no means a formidable champion. It was, none the less, a bitter combat, in which, except for his party organization, the President seemed to stand alone. Against him were arrayed all the massed strength and resources of financial and industrial leadership, some of the clergy, more than three-quarters of the nation’s newspapers, and the film industry. Relying, however, upon the record of his administration he toured the country. The result was remarkable indeed. All that his opponents could do and say counted, as The Times said, for no more than Mrs Partington’s mop. It was observed at the time that everybody was against him except the electorate; but it returned him with a majority of 8,593,130 popular votes and with only Maine and Vermont against him in the Electoral College. It was a victory beyond all precedent and a supreme vindication of American democracy.
Second Term
A Remarkable Prophecy
Entering upon his second term in January, Roosevelt put forward proposals for a radical reorganization of the Executive Branch directed towards increasing the effectiveness of the office of President. He also turned to the Supreme Court, which had proved so great an obstacle to his plans, and proposed to elect an additional judge above the nine who were then sitting for every one of them who had passed the age of 72. He was at once accused of tampering with the constitution, and the storm which followed was by no means confined to the Opposition. He had, therefore, to forgo his scheme. Fate was, however, to come to his assistance, for several judges were soon to die, and in a few more years the Bench was to be composed of men with greater sympathy for his social legislation.
The second term, however, was to be full of other than domestic preoccupations. In his Inaugural Address he did not mention foreign affairs; but in the next October he sounded a warning note and said that the epidemic of world lawlessness was spreading. ‘Let no one imagine,’ he added, ‘that America will escape, that America may expect mercy; that this Western Hemisphere will not be attacked; and that it will continue tranquilly and peacefully to carry on the ethics and the arts of civilisation.’ It was remarkable prophecy; but perhaps even more remarkable, the prophet himself proceeded to act upon it.
Dictators Denounced
With, therefore, all the prestige of his election behind him, he proceeded to take what steps he could to reinforce the cause of peace. One of them was to continue patiently to foster his ‘good neighbour’ policy in regard to the South American countries. When in 1941 Japan struck her blow he was to reap the advantage of the wise course Washington in his days had pursued towards the Latin American nations and of the established machinery of Pan-American cooperation. Nine Caribbean republics joined in at once in North America’s war of defence, and what had formerly been an almost hostile attitude on the part of South America towards its northern neighbour was as time passed to be one of increasing friendliness. As a result, America as a whole was to become the most disappointing of all continents to the Axis, and what might have been a fruitful field for the tares of Nazi diplomacy was very largely denied to it. Neither, however, the ‘good neighbour’ policy nor his desire to prevent war was to keep him from forceful comment on the increasingly aggressive and tyrannical acts of the German and Italian dictators, and he denounced Germany’s disregard of treaties soundly. When, moreover, he went to Canada in 1938 to open the new international bridge over the St Lawrence he made the historic pledge: ‘I give you the assurance that the people of the United States will not stand idly by if Canadian soil is threatened by any other Empire.’
In 1938 also Roosevelt began more fully to employ his influence in the affairs of Europe. Consequently when the crisis in regard to Czechoslovakia was at its height he addressed messages to both sides begging them to reach a peaceful solution by negotiation: and not to break off their deliberations. He sent, too, a second appeal to Hitler urging the maintenance of peace and then, when all negotiations seemed to have broken down at Godesberg, he established touch with Mussolini and had a hand in bringing about the Munich Conference, thus delaying war for a season. Throughout, however, the several critical years before it came he had no illusions in regard to the sinister nature of the dictators’ policies. ‘It is no accident,’ he had said, when he visited Buenos Aires for the Pan-American Conference, ‘that the nations which have carried the process of erecting trade barriers the farthest are those which proclaim most loudly that they require war as an instrument of policy.’ Incidentally, he concluded on that occasion with the remarkable words, ‘We took from our ancestors a great dream. We offer it back as a great unified reality. We offer hope for peace and more abundant life to the peoples of the world.’
Opposition to Hitler
Roosevelt saw far too deeply into the European situation to be set at rest by the achievement of Munich. At the beginning of 1939 he told Congress that he would go to any length short of war to stop the aggressor, and added that there were effective means of doing so. His speeches during the months which followed contained strong declarations for peace, but still more powerful vindications of democracy. His policy, he declared, was the defence of civilization against militarism. Thus he opposed to the morbid race theory and overweening demands of Hitler the broad and humane sanity of his democratic faith. At the same time he proceeded to strengthen the material defences of the United States and, as a precaution, ordered a comprehensive survey of American industry.
When in March Hitler seized what remained of Bohemia he sent messages to him and Mussolini as a ‘friendly intermediary’ asking them to give a guarantee not to attack for 10 years a specified list of nations. If they agreed he said he would be prepared to ask for reciprocal guarantees and call an international conference to which the United States would give every support in order to try to reach a settlement of all international difficulties. It was, in fact his last great bid; but Hitler would have none of it.
During the summer of 1939 the King and Queen toured Canada and took the opportunity of visiting the United States. The President and Mrs Roosevelt received them at Washington and were their hosts at the White House and then for a weekend at Hyde Park. It was a happy interlude in grave and anxious days. Then, as towards the end of August war drew nearer, Roosevelt appealed twice to Hitler to preserve peace and to the President of Poland to continue negotiations. He also sent a personal message to the King of Italy asking him to use his influence in promoting negotiations. Next, on September 1 when war seemed inevitable, he begged the Powers concerned to declare publicly that they would not bomb civilian populations or unfortified cities. The German answer was the devastation of open Polish towns and villages. After this there was nothing for him to do except to fulfil his obligation to proclaim neutrality, and, under the laws which had been adopted in recent years with the purpose of keeping America out of war, he had to forbid American ships to enter the zone of combat, to warn Americans not to travel there, and to preclude the supply of ammunition or armaments to the belligerents and the raising of loans by those who still owed war debts in America. In the autumn, however, on his urgent insistence, the ban on armaments was relaxed so as to permit the sale of aeroplanes, munitions, and weapons to France and Great Britain under the ‘cash and carry’ plan. In this country it was a very welcome amendment, and was the beginning of the pro-allied legislation which he was determined to enact. He had indeed many weapons in his armoury and was prepared to use them all. He could warn and thunder and impose embargoes and trade sanctions but he lacked the only one to which Hitler might have paid attention, for he could not offer the threat of war. A biographer has written of him that at this time he was ‘a crusader wielding a sheathed sword’.
National Defence
With the overrunning of Europe and the fall of France the attitude of the people of the United States began to change. Demands for a vast programme of national defence arose, and Roosevelt, responsive as ever to national feeling, announced that there could only be peace ‘if we are prepared to meet force with force if the challenge is ever made’. The last despairing appeal of France moved him deeply; but he was compelled to point out that assistance by armed forces was not for him but for Congress to give. By June, 1940, American opinion had moved so far that he was able to say of Italy that ‘the hand that held the dagger had struck it into the back of its neighbour’ and to add that America sent forward her prayers and hopes ‘to those beyond the seas who are maintaining with magnificent valour the battle for freedom’. In July, 1940, at a Press conference he defined the ‘five freedoms’, the aims to be realized if peace were to return to the earth.
In the election of 1940 Mr Wendell Willkie was the Republican candidate. There was an honoured and unbroken tradition which forbade a third term to any President, and for a long time Roosevelt refused to say whether he would be prepared to stand. At last, however, having made it clear that he had no desire to do so, he yielded to a unanimous request from the convention at Chicago. Willkie was a strong opponent of the New Deal and of most of Roosevelt’s internal legislation. He was, however, in general agreement with him on a more vigorous defence policy and fuller aid for Britain. It was therefore to those matters that the President confined his attention, inaugurating meanwhile a huge programme for the production of munitions with the aid of leading businessmen whom he called in to assist and advise. He also took two leading Republicans, Colonels Knox and Stimson, into the Cabinet, transferred 50 destroyers to Great Britain in return for naval bases, and worked out a defence policy with Canada. He thus fulfilled his slogan ‘Full speed ahead’ in war production. In the campaign itself, however, he took little part and made only a few speeches towards its close, when he said he had been misrepresented.
Third Time President
Once again, although Mr Willkie did better against him than either Mr Hoover or Mr Landon, he won handsomely – he was elected by a majority of some 5,000,000 on the popular vote – and thus opened up new fields of leadership. Almost immediately he brought forward his lend-lease proposals, which were embodied in a measure entitled ‘An Act to promote the defense of the United States’. These proposals were to enable him to provide war supplies for Great Britain and in fact for ‘the government of any country whose defense the President deems vital to the defense of the United States’. Thereafter he kept on enlarging his production plans and stated that America would be ‘the arsenal of democracy’. He also pushed her naval patrols farther into the ocean than they had gone in defence of neutrality, and, after the Italians had been driven from Eritrea, sent American supply ships to the Red Sea. Calling for ‘unqualified immediate all-out aid for Britain, increased and again increased until total victory has been won’, he urged that there should be no idle machine and that they should operate 24 hours a day and seven days a week. Speaking in May at the birthplace of Woodrow Wilson, he said: ‘He taught us that democracy could not survive in isolation. We applaud his judgment. We applaud his faith.’ Thus, by arming his country for its own defence and in the meantime sustaining the resistance of Great Britain, he served what was in fact the single purpose of saving democracy.
On May 27, 1941, Roosevelt delivered one of the most momentous broadcasts of his career. He reasserted the American doctrine of the freedom of the seas and announced that he had issued a Proclamation to the effect that an unlimited national emergency existed which required strengthening of the defences of the United States to the extreme limit of national power and authority. He pointed to the sinkings of merchant shipping, and said that all measures necessary to the delivery to Great Britain of the supplies she needed would be taken. ‘This can be done. It must be done. It will be done.’ In June, Lord Halifax, as Chancellor of Oxford University, conferred the degree of dcl upon him, the first time that a Chancellor had officiated at a Convocation outside the walls of Oxford.
Pearl Harbour; Entry into the War
As the year progressed the President became even more assertive in word and action. American troops were sent to Iceland, and in August he met Mr Churchill at sea. The Atlantic Charter recorded their agreement. There were attacks upon the American Navy, and he replied to them with a warning that Axis warships would enter American defensive waters at their peril. A little later he went to Congress to seek a revision of the Neutrality Act. Meanwhile German hatred of him found expression in a crescendo of abuse. Ever since the attack upon Russia he had shown his determination to uphold her resistance, and in November a credit of $100,000,000 was extended to her. Thus as the situation in both the Western and Eastern Hemispheres grew tenser he appeared to be gathering his strength against an inevitable collision. It came on December 7. He had just sent a message to the Emperor of Japan couched in persuasive terms, but protesting against the flooding of Japanese forces into Indo-China. One hour before the reply was delivered by the Japanese Ambassador Pearl Harbour was in smoke and ruin. The next day he gave in person a message to Congress and called for a declaration of war. Except for one member of the House of Representatives the answer was unanimous. ‘With confidence, ’ he said, ‘in our armed forces, with the unbounded determination of our people, we will gain the inevitable triumph, so help us God.’ And so when a few days later Congress no less readily accepted the challenge of Germany and Italy, Roosevelt entered upon the war leadership supported by the national confidence to which his wise and patient handling of a long-drawn crisis had so richly entitled him.
Hotfoot upon the belligerency of the United States Mr Churchill went to Washington to plan for unity of action, and stayed at the White House. It was the beginning of a wartime association founded upon a well-established mutual regard and doubly proofed against external efforts to break it. Never before in history had the leaders of two great democracies worked together on the fraternal terms which came to exist between the President and the Prime Minister. Each stood high in the opinions of the other’s people, and as a result each strengthened the other’s hand. Roosevelt and Churchill together were a combination of scarcely precedented power.
Faith and Courage; All Resources Mobilized
The President’s message to Congress at the beginning of 1942 showed that the attack by Japan had not only failed to stun him but that he had reacted in much the same way as to the economic perils of 1932. In both cases his response was a programme of immediate action on a nationwide scale. All the vast resources of the United States were mobilized for war. A people which justly prided itself upon the largeness of its conceptions was given an almost unlimited scope for effort. The estimated cost was staggering, but the nation accepted it. He was close on 60 and his birthday at the end of the month brought many messages which indicated the regard of the allied peoples for him. He was already in the ninth year of the immense labours in which his own faith and courage had been his chief sustenance.
As Commander-in-Chief of the United States it was Roosevelt’s task to make a peaceful and largely self-centred people strategically minded, and to interpret the war to them as a world conflict rather than an opportunity for the counter-strike they longed to deal Japan. Isolationism was his greatest obstacle, and he said of those who still proclaimed its merits that they wanted the American Eagle to imitate the ostrich. Thus in firm but good-humoured fashion he led his people on, and the fact that the great majority were brought to take the broad, patient, and unselfish view which the character of the war demanded was due primarily to him. Despite, however, the huge measure of support he commanded, he continued to be exposed to a running fire of criticism from sections of the public and the Press.
In April he proposed a seven-point programme to combat the rise which had taken place in the cost of living and included a large increase in taxation. The fear of inflation had begun and was to continue to haunt him, but he was to find Congress somewhat reluctant to incur electoral unpopularity by supporting him in drastic measures. Another danger which he sought to avert was a light-hearted but, as he knew, unfounded optimism on the part of the people. By the summer, however, he was in a position to say that America’s reservoir of resources was reaching a flood stage, and vast amounts of material were being sent over-sea to the assistance of the allies. It was a vindication of his own far-sightedness. His lend-lease agreements were already taking shape as key instruments of national policy and he was beginning to realize his world statesman’s aim of distributing the financial burdens of the war. In June he welcomed Mr Churchill once again and found that they were still at one upon the major problems of the war. In September he made a quick tour of 11 States in order to test the spirit of the nation and reported it ‘unbeatable’. In November came the landing in North Africa – Mr Churchill attributed the authorship of it to him – and what he regarded as the turning point of the war.
Casablanca
The President’s New Year address in 1943 to a new Congress will probably rank among the greatest of many great utterances, for in it he was the inspired realist. He looked backward with a well justified satisfaction and forward with a lively hope. He said it was necessary to keep in mind not only the evil things against which America was fighting but the good things she was fighting for. Never indeed did he stand forth so clearly as the leader of his people’s thought as well as the ruler of their actions or as the possessor of a grasp wide enough to encompass the whole of the struggle for civilization. Then hard up on this call to thought and action came the bill for it – a Budget of $100,000,000,000. These preliminaries to the year performed, he was before the month had ended at Casablanca, when he conferred with Mr Churchill and the Fighting French at what, remembering General Grant, he called the ‘Unconditional Surrender Meeting’. The momentous conversations lasted for some 10 days and every aspect of the war was reviewed at them. Nothing like this had ever happened before, for he was the first President who had ever left his country in wartime. On the way home he stopped at Brazil for a discussion with the President. By thus breaking with tradition and adopting Mr Churchill’s practice of going himself to a vital centre of action Roosevelt achieved a master-stroke of leadership, for not only did he enhance his own authority as war leader but drew the beam of national interest after him. Paramount, however, though his authority was he continued to be engaged by efforts to keep prices down in spite of the hesitancy of Congress and the recalcitrance of active labour interests. In April he went to Mexico to discuss post-war cooperation. It was the first time the chief executives of the two countries had met. At the same time he visited the American forces in the Southern States.
In May Mr Churchill, at the President’s invitation, paid his fourth wartime visit to the United States, and it was widely noted that such occasions were the presage of great events. In this case the communiqué announced a full agreement on all points ‘from Great Britain to New Britain and beyond’. At the same time Roosevelt found himself in one of his recurrent troubles with labour – in this case, the miners – and handled it with characteristic firmness. He was not, however, to receive the support he desired from Congress, for late in June an Anti-Strike Bill which he vetoed was passed in spite of him. It was one of a series of setbacks in domestic policy. They were offset by occasional victories; but his supreme task of directing American strategy continued to be complicated by distractions due to the attitude of an increasingly difficult Legislature.
With the collapse of Italy the war entered on a new, and hopeful phase; but he refused to limit his aims even to a total victory over the Axis, and looked beyond it to another over all the forces of oppression, intolerance, insecurity, and injustice which had impeded the forward march of civilization. In August he went to Quebec for yet another meeting with Mr Churchill in which his old friend Mr Mackenzie King sat with them. Then, he travelled westwards to Ottawa, where he addressed the two Houses of the Canadian Parliament. It was the first time an American President had been there, and in his speech he stated that during the Quebec Conference things had been talked over and ways and means discussed ‘in the manner of members of the same family’, a phrase in true accord with both the theory and practice of the ‘good neighbour’ policy.
In November, 1943, Roosevelt left the United States for the series of historic conferences by which the leaders of the Allied Nations sought to consolidate their aims and efforts. At the first meetings in Cairo he and Mr Churchill met Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek and discussed future military operations against Japan. They declared that she should be stripped of all her island gains in the Pacific as well as the territories she had stolen from China and other spoils of her aggression. To this end it was agreed to continue to persevere in the serious and prolonged efforts necessary to secure her unconditional surrender. The President with the Prime Minister moved next to Teheran, where for four intensive days they were in council with Marshal Stalin, whom Roosevelt then met for the first time. There in most amicable discussion the three leaders shaped and confirmed their international policy and announced jointly that they recognized their responsibility for a peace that would command the good will of the overwhelming masses of the peoples of the world. Thereupon the President with Mr Churchill went back to Cairo for discussions with M. Ismet Inönü, the President of the Turkish Republic. On the return journey Roosevelt visited both Malta and Sicily, arriving eventually at the White House bronzed and cheerful. One of his last actions of the year was to order the Secretary of State for War to take over the railways where trouble had been threatening.
In early January, 1944, Mr and Mrs Roosevelt presented their homestead at Hyde Park to the United States Government as a historical national site with a proviso that the immediate family might use it. It followed upon an earlier gift of the Roosevelt Library there. Then a few days later the President’s message to Congress embodied his programme for still further mobilization of the resources of the nation. In it he referred scathingly to the ‘pressure groups’ and others who, while he had been abroad, had been busy in the pursuit of interests which he regarded as only secondary to the supreme task of winning the war. This corrective he accompanied by yet another Budget for $100,000,000,000.
In the New Year there were to be still further difficulties with Congress. In late February he vetoed the Tax Bill, and thereby lost one of his staunchest supporters, Senator Barkley, of Kentucky, the Democratic Leader in the Senate, only to be overridden by large majorities in both Houses. It was a protest against what were regarded as the encroachments of the Administration. The obedient Legislature of his earlier years had long since been replaced by one largely hostile to his social policy. The result was the cat and dog relationship between President and Congress which the American Constitution permits, and his caustic description of the Bill as relief ‘not for the needy but for the greedy’ was an appeal over the head of the legislators to the people.
Senator Truman
As the spring lengthened the probability of his running for a fourth term seemed steadily to grow greater. In April, 1944, he had to take a rest, but in May be was back at the White House, himself again, clear of eye and voice. Simultaneously with his return to it the chairman of the Democratic National Committee asserted that he would accept the party’s nomination; but he himself refused to be drawn. At the end of the month, when reminded on one occasion of his support of President Wilson, he stated that he contemplated a new and better League of Nations in the post-war world and a little later outlined the American plan for a world security organization. On July 11 he broke his silence and announced that if elected he would serve a fourth term as President. The news was received calmly because it was widely expected. On July 20 the Democratic Convention at Chicago nominated him with loud applause and the waving of many banners ensigned with his name. Senator Truman was, however, chosen instead of his associate, Mr Wallace, to run for the Vice-Presidency.
In July the President was in Honolulu for a three days’ conference. On his way back he visited the Aleutians and Alaska, and dramatically broadcast from a warship on the Pacific coast. Then in September he went to Quebec to meet Mr Churchill. The discussions, which ranged over a wide field, were conducted, as Mr Churchill said, ‘in a blaze of friendship’. It was only after his return from Quebec that he made the first political speech of his campaign; but his wartime activities as Commander-in-Chief pleaded as strongly for him with the electorate as any words he could have uttered. Things were, indeed, beginning to go well for him, and on October 16 the New York Times came down in his favour. On October 22 he made a 51-mile tour of the City of New York in cold and rain. Meanwhile, his opponent, Mr Dewey, sought to mobilize every hostile and dissentient element against him. The President, however, standing foursquare upon his record, but dealing chiefly with foreign affairs, hit back upon occasion as hard as he had ever done.
Fourth Term
A Landslide Victory
The result of the election was once again a victory for Roosevelt so decisive as to be in fact a landslide. Such strength as Mr Dewey showed was in the rural districts; the workers in the great towns and cities were overwhelmingly for the President. In both the Senate and the House of Representatives he had comfortable majorities. Thus, not only unique in American history but triumphantly so, he prepared himself to enter on his fourth term.
No sooner was Roosevelt back at the White House than suggestions that he would shortly confer with Mr Churchill and Marshal Stalin filled the American Press, but arrangements had still to be made. In the meantime, therefore, he attended to the preparations for his fourth term, and spent a holiday at Warm Springs, in Georgia. On his return he took occasion to allay some disquietude in regard to the validity of the Atlantic Charter by declaring that its objectives were sound and as valid as when they were framed.
Early in 1945 his message on the state of the Union was read to a joint session of Congress. It was of exceptional length and great significance, and, after a masterly and comprehensive review of the military situation, in which he paid a vigorous personal tribute to General Eisenhower, went on to state that his country could not and would not shrink from the responsibilities which follow in the wake of battle. He followed it on January 20 by his fourth inaugural address, delivered from the south portico of the White House. On this occasion he spoke for only 14 minutes, though it was historical indeed as the first wartime Presidential inauguration since that of Abraham Lincoln. Then the next important news of him came from the Black Sea, when on February 8 the Press announced that he, Mr Churchill, and Marshal Stalin had reached complete agreement for joint military operations in the final phase of the war against Germany. In a few days the famous Yalta declaration, which disclosed the full extent of the agreement reached among the three national leaders, was given to the world. For him personally, no less than for the other two, it was a crowning triumph of wisdom and political capacity.
Crimea Conference
On March 1 Roosevelt made what he called his ‘personal report’ of the Crimea conference to the Senate and the House of Representatives and, by broadcast, to the American people. He had, so far as any United States President could, accepted joint responsibility with Great Britain and Russia for the solution of the political problems in Europe – a responsibility, he said, the shirking of which would be ‘our own tragic loss’ – and he asked for approval of the decisions made by political leaders and public opinion. He looked forward with hope to the San Francisco conference. He believed that the three great centres of military power would be able to achieve their aims for security; and in this mood of confidence he approached the full and intricate problems involved in America’s collaboration with the rest of the world. Thus he worked to the end.
Roosevelt was a tall and handsome man with a fine head. In compensation for his weakened lower limbs he had developed a great torso and immense strength in his arms. A direct speaker of remarkable precision and clarity, he had a clear voice with a ring of music in it, which helped him particularly in broadcasting. Instinctively friendly and sympathetic, he was the most approachable of men and had an engaging smile for all. At his Press conferences, which he managed in a fashion of his own, he was the familiar of all who attended them; but nowhere were his immense skill and clever touch in human relationships more apparent. At them he was open to direct viva voce examination and permitted himself a frankness which only the observance by the American Press of the strict code of honour embodied in the words ‘Off the record’ could have rendered possible. He had many interests. In his latter days he was particularly fond of deep sea fishing, and often went for long fishing trips; but his chief hobbies were ships – he had a remarkable collection of prints of them – and philately.
He leaves four sons, James, Elliot, Franklin, and John, all of whom have served in the armed forces, and a daughter who is married to Mr John Boetiger, a journalist, who is now on war service.
Adolf Hitler
Dictator of Germany. Twelve years of force and tyranny.
30 April 1945
Few men in the whole of history and none in modern times have been the cause of human suffering on so large a scale as Hitler, who died in Berlin yesterday. If history judges to be greatest those who fill most of her pages, Hitler was a very great man; and the house-painter who became for a while master of Europe cannot be denied the most remarkable talents. He found Germans depressed, bewildered, aimless. After five years in office he had united the German race in a single Reich, abolished regional diversities of administration, and got rid of unemployment. But these achievements were merely instruments of an overwhelming lust for power. Nazi domination over Germany was a stepping stone towards the domination of Nazi Germany over the world. The process was continuous, and the methods were the same. Hitler effected the triumph of the Nazi Party in Germany by a mixture of deceit and violence; he then employed the same devices to destroy other nations. From the time he became master of Germany he made lies, cruelty, and terror his principal means to achieve his ends; and he became in the eyes of virtually the whole world an incarnation of absolute evil.
Hitler was unimpressive to meet on informal occasions, but became transformed when he was face to face with a crowd, especially if it was an audience of his followers. He would speak to them like a man possessed and give the appearance of utter exhaustion when his speech was over. His speeches betrayed few if any original ideas, and even his belief in the suggestive power of reiteration scarcely justified the repetitions of past history with which most of his public orations were overladen. He was, however, a propagandist of the first order, and his uncannily subtle and acute understanding of the mind of his own people was the ultimate source of his power for evil.
Early Years
Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889, at Braunau-am-Inn, on the frontier, as he said himself, of the two German States, the reunion of which he regarded as a work worthy to be accomplished by any and every means. His parents were of Bavarian, and perhaps Bohemian, peasant descent, and his father – who until his fortieth year was known as Schicklgruber – was a Customs officer in the Austrian service and married three times – Adolf being the only son of his young third wife. Adolf was sent to the best school available, being intended for the Government service, though he himself had artistic inclinations. In 1902 his father died suddenly, leaving no resources available for the continued education of his son.
From 1904 to 1909 the young Hitler lived a life of hardship. He moved after the loss of his mother to Vienna where he had dreams of becoming an architect, but could earn only a hazardous livelihood as assistant to a house-painter and by selling sketches. For three years he lived the life of the poorest man in Vienna, sleeping in a men’s hostel, eating the bread of charity at a monastery, occasionally reduced to begging. The food for thought also presented gratuitously by life in a great city, to such as care to receive it, was not left untasted by him. Hazy legends like the Nordic saga jostled in his mind with illusions regarding the ennobling effect of war and with more rational dreams of German national unity. He saw and hated the growing Slav ascendancy and the enfeeblement of the German elements in the racially mixed Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. He drank in the pan-Germanism of Luege, in which all the original elements of ‘Hitlerism’ are to be found. He read assiduously the works of Marx and his disciples, and thoroughly disagreed with their conclusions. He discovered the Jews and acquired a fanatical aversion to them. By 1910 he had so far improved his professional position as to be able to set up as an independent draughtsman; and, still hoping to become an architect, removed to Munich thinking to find wider scope in the Bavarian capital.
A year or two later the 1914–18 war broke out, and Hitler, preferring to enrol himself in the German national army rather than in the polyglot forces of the Hapsburgs, although he was an Austrian subject, joined the 16th Bavarian Reserve Regiment as a volunteer. His war service was meritorious, but not distinguished. He won the Iron Cross, and rose to the rank of corporal. He was wounded in the battle of the Somme in 1916, and badly gassed in the later stages of the war. It was while lying in a Berlin hospital, temporarily blinded, that he learned of the events known as the November Revolution of 1918.
Political Career Begun
On leaving hospital he returned to Munich. That pleasant city soon became the prey of his enemies the Marxists. The reaction against their regime made a breeding-ground for Fascism. It was at that moment that Hitler began his political career. Thousands of bewildered and workless young Germans were meeting and talking and propounding every sort of theory and scheme. Hitler possessed what most of these fumblers lacked, a few definite ideas and a knowledge of the value and of the art of propaganda. One night he attended in Munich a meeting of a newly formed German Workers’ Party, and decided to join it. He was its seventh member, and was not long in making himself its leader and his nationalist and anti-Marxist creed its programme. The movement soon took hold in Bavaria.
Hitler discovered his remarkable oratorical powers and proved himself an adept in the management of large meetings. He realized to the full the value of repetition and of reiterating a single theme over and over again in a slightly different form. ‘All propaganda,’ he said, ‘should adapt its intellectual level to the receptive ability of the least intellectual of those whom it is desired to address.’ A pillar of strength in these days was Captain Röhm, a staff officer at Munich and a valued organizer in the councils of his military superiors. He won for Hitler the tacit approval of the local high command and certain financial resources without which two-fold help little progress could have been achieved.
Thus supported and encouraged, Hitler, in conjunction with Röhm, Göring, General Ludendorff, and others, made his first attempt to seize power in the notorious Munich Putsch of November 10, 1923. They were met outside the Feldherrnhalle by police, who fired upon them, killing Hitler’s nearest companion and 15 others. Hitler lay flat on his face. Only Ludendorff marched straight on. As soon as the firing slackened Hitler, with a dislocated shoulder, fled in a motor-car, but was arrested two days later and imprisoned in the fortress of Landsberg. During the nine months he spent there he wrote the greater part of Mein Kampf, that turgid, rambling, remarkable book of nearly 1,000 pages, which became the Bible of the Nazi movement.
Hitler’s authority declined after the fiasco of Munich, and for a while Gregor Strasser, the creator of the Nazi Party in North Germany, counted for more than he in the party ranks, whose strength in the Berlin Reichstag was no more than 12. Hitler gradually reasserted himself, however, and in the elections of 1930, when Dr Brüning was Chancellor, and when the economic crisis was already creating widespread unemployment and distress, the number of National-Socialist Deputies jumped to 107.
The political situation rapidly deteriorated. Faced by the growth of the extremist vote and the chaotic state of the party system, the Chancellor was forced increasingly to govern by decree, and though his intentions were most genuinely liberal, he led Germany far along the road to dictatorship. On May 30, 1932, he fell after dealing Hitler two shrewd blows – the dissolution of the Brown Army and the re-election of Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg as Reichspräsident in face of the fully mobilized Nazi vote in support of Hitler’s own candidature. Hitler regarded himself as heir to the Chancellorship. But he had still 10 months to wait, 10 months of crisis during which he was thwarted, not by the now impotent Liberal and Socialist vote, not even by the vociferous Communists, who by their threats to the bourgeoisie were indirectly a help, but by the veiled resistance of the Right Wing of the old regime, with its backing of Junkers, trade magnates, Monarchists, and the entourage of the now senile Reichspräsident.
The appointment of the shifty von Papen as Chancellor to succeed Brüning was followed by the rescinding of the latter’s ban on the Brown Army as a bait to catch the Nazi support, and by a general election. At the polls Hitler more than doubled his vote, being returned with 230 followers, the largest party in the Reichstag. He demanded the Chancellorship, but Papen manoeuvred him into an interview with the Field Marshal, where Hitler, who was nervous and showed to little advantage, received a pre-arranged rebuff. His prestige suffered considerably thereby, but worse was to follow. After three months of hopeless struggle in a hostile Reichstag Papen held another election. The Nazis lost 2,000,000 votes. A feeling of defeat spread throughout the party. Some of the leaders were in despair. In Germany and abroad it was thought that Hitler had passed his zenith.
In the meantime the affairs of Germany prospered little better than those of the Bavarian ex-corporal. Papen had to resign in November, 1932, and was followed by General Kurt von Schleicher, the last Chancellor of the old regime, a clever man, who came near to destroying Hitler and paid the forfeit on June 30, 1934. Schleicher had the confidence of the Army, and, as far as anyone could, that of President von Hindenburg, but he had no Parliamentary support, and was threatened by Papen, who regarded him as the cause of his own fall from power. Schleicher in December made a bid for independence. He thought to propitiate the Nazi strength by attracting to himself in a semi-Socialist administration Gregor Strasser.
Chancellor at Last
Reichstag Fire
It was a critical moment. Hitler, who had borne the recent setbacks with surprising calm, now lost heart. ‘If the party breaks up,’ he confided to Goebbels, ‘I’ll end matters with my pistol in three minutes.’ Schism indeed seemed imminent. But Strasser himself spoilt the scheme. He dallied and hesitated. The discussions were deferred, and before they could be resumed Schleicher had fallen. The tables had been suddenly turned by von Papen, who in January made an alliance with Hitler in order to overthrow Schleicher. The Nazi leader, whom he regarded as humbled by recent ill-fortune, was to be Chancellor and he himself Vice-Chancellor, with a majority of non-Nazi colleagues, the good will of the President, and, he confidently hoped, the real power. The plan took shape, and on January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was formally invested with the seals of office as Reichskanzler.
The new Government was a minority one, and decided to dissolve the Reichstag and hold another election, the third in nine months. In an unparalleled propaganda campaign, in which the opposition parties had to remain passive observers, voters were belaboured with the Communist menace. Yet the voting gave an absolute majority only to the combined Nazi and Nationalist Parties, and the uneasy alliance between Hitler and Hugenberg, the Nationalist leader, would perhaps have continued but for an event of the first importance, the Reichstag fire. Whoever lit the match, it was the Nazis who arranged and profited by this act of incendiarism. Interpreted by them as a Communist act of terrorism, it was made the pretext for the suspension of all constitutional liberties and the setting up of the Nazi dictatorship under Hitler.
The seizure of power by the Nazis in March, 1933, brought to an end the hollow alliance with the Nationalists under Hugenberg, who was forced to resign shortly afterwards. At the same time the German Press was muzzled and put under the control of Goebbels. Unhampered by Parliamentary restrictions or Press criticism, Hitler and his lieutenants pushed on with the Nazi revolution. Force and unity were the guiding ideals, and every element within or outside Germany which withstood the overriding claims of German nationalism was marked down for destruction.
The long struggle for power was now ended. The National-Socialist Party was faced with the task of consolidation, and this was set about with more zeal than unity of conception or purpose. The position of Röhm’s Brown Army in the State and its relation to the Reichswehr and the position of the Stahlhelm, the armed organization of the Nationalists, were among the most thorny problems and involved much bitterness and heart-burning.
The ‘Blood Bath’; Shooting of Röhm
On July 1, 1934, the civilized world learnt with horror of the killings that had taken place the day before and have since been known as the purge or the ‘blood bath’. How many people lost their lives will never be known. The outstanding victims were Röhm, Schleicher, and Strasser. On the night of June 29 Hitler flew from the Rhineland to Munich and on to the place where Röhm was staying. Röhm was taken from his bed to Munich and shot. All over Germany similar scenes were being enacted. Leading officials of the party and comparative nonentities alike lost their lives. Many an act of private revenge was carried out that night. Hitler, in his statement to the Reichstag, said he had saved Germany from a plot of reactionaries, dissolute members of the Brown Army and the agents of a foreign Power. The reason for the massacre of June 30 may never be exactly known, but apart from private rancours and rivalries it is generally believed that Röhm aimed at having the Reichswehr embodied in his sa organization – which Hitler had the sense to refuse.
The ‘blood bath’ was officially approved by Field Marshal von Hindenburg, who probably understood nothing of it. A month later, on August 2, the old man died, and within an hour Adolf Hitler was declared his successor. He abjured the title of Reichspräsident and elected to be known as Führer and Kanzler. The poor man of Vienna was now the master of Germany, absolute lord of 60,000,000 Europeans.
Armaments
Hitler’s advent heralded a series of increasingly grave breaches of treaty obligations and challenges to European opinion. Dr Brüning had already claimed equality in armaments. This claim was vigorously repeated by Hitler, and it was on the pretext that it had been too tardily admitted by the Powers that he abruptly left the League of Nations in October, 1933. Franco-British discussions in London in February, 1935, for a general settlement were brusquely forestalled by Hitler’s announcement of conscription for an army of half a million and the creation of an Air Force. The British Government joined the French and Italian Governments in condemning the unilateral repudiation of treaty obligations, but a few weeks later, in June, 1935, it concluded a naval agreement with Hitler granting him 35 per cent of the naval strength of Great Britain and equality in submarines. To ‘his people’, as he now called the Germans, it looked as though their Führer’s tactics paid, while Europe could no longer ignore the fact that Germany was again a great Power.
In March, 1936, Adolf Hitler, taking advantage of the embroilment of Great Britain and France with Italy over Abyssinia, suddenly occupied the demilitarized zone of the Rhineland, at the same time denouncing the Treaty of Locarno, which he claimed had already been abrogated by the formation of the Franco-Russian Alliance. The military occupation of the Rhineland was the most serious as well as the most spectacular breach made so far in the facade of the Versailles Treaty. In conjunction with the introduction of conscription it transformed the military situation. It deprived the Western Powers in one moment of the strongest weapon in their armoury, one that had been used in early post-war years, the freedom of entry into German territory. Henceforward Hitler could hope to hold off an attack on his western front with one hand, while the other was free elsewhere.
The occupation of the Rhineland was accompanied by a series of proposals addressed by Hitler to the world at large, and for the special attention of the French and British peoples. He offered a 25-year non-aggression pact, an aid pact for Western Europe, non-aggression pacts with his eastern neighbours, and he even announced his readiness to return to the League of Nations under certain conditions. None of these proposals was taken seriously enough by the outside world for any concrete result to follow.
Suspicion of Hitler was now growing, though the world did not yet grasp the full baseness of Nazi technique, with its deliberate use of the lie as an instrument of policy whereby to lull future victims into a sense of security while some nefarious scheme was being developed elsewhere. Yet the Führer and Chancellor himself had asserted that the bigger the lie the better the chance of its being believed.
The Rhineland coup was followed by two years of digestion and consolidation, during which time German military preparations were pushed forward with increasing activity, and an economic reorganization aiming at self-sufficiency was undertaken. Events outside Germany in 1936 and 1937 increased the nervous tension in Europe and did much to strengthen Hitler’s position. The policy of sanctions against Italy incompletely carried out through the machinery of the League of Nations made the worst of both worlds. It fell short of what was needed to save Ethiopia, but served to turn Mussolini from friendship and collaboration with the Western Powers to an increasingly close connection with Hitler, the foremost critic in Europe of the League of Nations. This understanding was given substantive form by the support accorded by the two totalitarian States to General Franco’s cause in Spain, and was finally registered by the official establishment in September, 1937, of the Rome–Berlin Axis. By this diplomatic revolution Hitler won an important European ally at the expense of the Powers of the Versailles ‘Diktat’, whose prestige, both moral and material, had as a result of these various events suffered a considerable diminution.
Seizure of Austria
Entry into Vienna
In the early weeks of 1938 the storm centre of Europe shifted back to Berlin. Hitler engineered an abrupt crisis in Austro-German relations, which ended on March 11 by the violation of the frontier by the German Army and the forcible incorporation of Austria in the Reich. Mussolini, who in 1934, on the murder of Herr Dollfuss, had massed troops on the Brenner frontier, made no move, and received the effusive thanks of the Führer: ‘Mussolini: Ich soll es Ilnen nie vergessen.’ Hitler’s dramatic entry into Vienna a few days later, after nearly a quarter of a century’s absence, during which he had experienced every vicissitude of hope, despair, and triumph, was watched with curiosity and even sympathy by millions of people outside the Reich, whose Governments had in the past resoundingly refused to the constitutional requests of both Berlin and Vienna the union which the German Dictator had now achieved by force.
The union of the Reich and the Ostmark, as Austria was now called, immediately raised the problem of Czechoslovakia, which contained a minority of some 3,500,000 Germans and was now surrounded by German territory on three sides. The question asked all over Europe was how soon would Bohemia share the fate of Austria. Hitler’s assurance to the Czech Government that it had nothing to fear did not allay suspicion. A series of communal elections throughout Czechoslovakia in May raised to fever-pitch the excitement created in the German minority by the inclusion in the Reich of their Austrian co-racialists. At the annual meeting in September of the National-Socialist Party at Nuremberg Hitler stood as the avowed champion of the Sudeten Germans, and their demands immediately precipitated an acute European crisis involving the imminent risk of general war. Hitler, with the German Army mobilized, his western front approaching a state of impregnability, faced by potential opponents who were mentally bewildered and militarily unprepared, and divided both geographically and ideologically, was in a position to dictate his terms. In conferences at Berchtesgaden and Godesberg with Mr Neville Chamberlain, and then at Munich, where M. Daladier and Mussolini, as well as Mr Chamberlain, were present, he put forward demands that France and Britain were not in a position to refuse. To save the peace of the world and to avoid their own destruction the Czechs were told that they must submit to the arrangements made by the four Great Powers at Munich, whereby all the German districts of Bohemia, together with the immense fortifications of the Erzgebirge, were handed over absolutely to Germany. In eight months Hitler had added 10,000,000 of Germans to the Third Reich, had broken the only formidable bastion to German expansion south-eastwards, and had made himself the most powerful individual in Europe since Napoleon i.
Czechoslovakia a ‘protectorate’
In the course of his conversations with Mr Chamberlain Hitler had assured him that he had no more territorial claims to make in Europe – a phrase he had also used after the seizure of Austria. On March 15, 1939, the world was, however, startled to hear that the German Army was invading and overwhelming Bohemia, Moravia, and Slovakia, all that remained of the independent Republic. President Hacha, who under German pressure had succeeded Dr Benesh in the autumn, was summoned to Berlin and forced to accept terms which made his country a ‘Protectorate’ of the Reich. Hitler went to Prague to proclaim there another bloodless victory and then while the going was good travelled to Memel, which had been ceded under the Versailles Treaty to Lithuania, and announced its annexation on March 23.
Poland had profited from the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia by being allowed to annex the disputed region of Teschen. But she was marked down as the next victim. While German troops were still moving into Slovakia Hitler proposed to the Polish Government that Danzig should be returned to Germany and that Germany should build and own a road connecting East Prussia with the rest of the Reich, in return for which Germany would guarantee the Polish frontiers for 25 years – though a 10-year treaty of non-aggression already existed between the two countries, of which five years had still to run. Poland rejected the proposals and appealed to Great Britain and France for support. These countries at once gave Poland pledges to defend her independence, if necessary by war. The action of the Western Powers came as a shock to Hitler, who was further alarmed by negotiations shortly afterwards set on foot in Moscow by the French and British with the Soviet Government. The spectre of war on two fronts again arose to damp the German ardour for acquisition. Hitler, faced with the prospect of a check and a rebuff, fatal contingencies for an aspiring dictator, made his decision. Rather than give up his cherished, and indeed loudly proclaimed design of seizing Danzig and the Polish Corridor, he was prepared to eat every word he had uttered in condemnation, derision, and defiance of the Bolshevist regime, and to invite the Russians to agree to a non-aggression pact. Stalin on his side, finding the danger of a German attack suddenly exorcized, and distrusting the constancy of the Western Powers, was not unwilling to accept Hitler’s overtures, and the Pact was signed on August 23.
Hitler Starts War
With the disappearance of any likelihood of Russian assistance being given to the western allies Hitler saw no further obstacle in the way of an immediate attack on Poland, and on August 31, 1939, he ordered the German Armies to cross the frontier. The Second World War had begun. With typical falsity Hitler and Ribbentrop – now his intimate and most pernicious adviser – had offered the Polish Ambassador terms of settlement, and broadcast them to the world, a few hours before the soldiers began the invasion, without, however, allowing the Ambassador time or means to convey them to his Government.
The attack on Poland gave the world its first taste of the horrors of a German Blitzkrieg. Hitler went East to superintend the slaughter in person. It was a swift and terrible war which he waged in bitter hatred and, when the issue was clear, with crude boastings and gross lies at the expense of a broken nation. In a speech at Danzig on September 19 he had the effrontery to declare that: ‘Poland has worked for this war’ and ‘peace was prevented by a handful of (British) warmongers’. On the same occasion he took up what he called the British ‘challenge’ to a three years’ conflict and announced that Germany possessed a new weapon. The grim business was over in a few weeks. Warsaw surrendered on September 24 and on October 5 Hitler visited it and swaggered among the ruins which were garlanded for the occasion.
The next day, speaking in the Reichstag, he made what he called his last offer to the allies. It was a remarkable rhetorical performance, though, obviously nervous, he hurried through the phrases in which he described his new friendship with the Russians. As a plea for peace it could, if only one of its premises had been sound and one of its promises could have been believed, scarcely have been bettered; but he had by that time to pay the price of his habitual contempt for truth. In early November he made a speech at Munich, on the anniversary of the Putsch of 1923, in which he said that he had given Göring orders to prepare for a five years’ war. He ended earlier than had been expected and left the Burgerbräu beer cellar in which he made it for Berlin. Shortly afterwards there was an explosion in which six people were killed and over 60 injured. The official German News Agency claimed that the attempt had been inspired by foreign agents and offered a reward of half a million marks for the discovery of the instigators. One George Elsen was arrested. Official Germans were infuriated with The Times for suggesting that the explosion was no surprise to the Führer and that he had left early to avoid it.
France Crushed
On New Year’s Day, 1940, Hitler declared that he was fighting for ‘a new Europe’. On March 18 he met Mussolini on the Brenner, a presage, as it was later recognized to be, of great events. In April came the invasions of Norway and Denmark, and in early May he was congratulating his troops on their success and authorizing decorations for them. On May 10 his armies invaded Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg, and on the same day he went to the Western Front. On the morrow he proclaimed that the hour for the decisive battle for the future of the German nation had come. In less than a month the bells were rung in Germany to celebrate the victorious conclusion of what he called ‘the greatest battle of all time’. A few days later he congratulated Mussolini on the entry of Italy into the war. On June 22 the Armistice with France was signed. At that moment Hitler stood at the zenith of his success and power. Western Europe was his and there remained no one there to crush except Great Britain, weakened by her losses on the Continent and without an effective ally. As usual Goebbels was turned on to prepare the way.
Battle of Britain
Victory Promised for 1941
On July 19, speaking in the Reichstag, Hitler ‘as a victor’ made his final appeal to ‘common sense’ before proceeding with his campaign against her. He spoke with an unusual sobriety, but there was no mistaking his threats. He had his answer from a united and determined Empire. On September 4 he reiterated his menaces. Then he unleashed the Luftwaffe and the Battle of Britain began in earnest. On October 4 after a month of it he was back at the Brenner to talk things over with Mussolini. In a few days his troops entered Rumania. A little later he went to the Spanish frontier for a discussion with General Franco with a view, it was thought, to tightening the blockade of Great Britain. Before the end of the month he was back with Mussolini in Florence. He seemed about this time to understand that Great Britain could not be conquered from the air and to think increasingly in terms of U-boats. He described himself as the ‘hardest man the German people have had for decades and, perhaps, for centuries’.
In his New Year’s proclamation to the army Hitler promised victory over Great Britain in 1941 and added that every Power which ate of democracy should die of it. He continued, for he always seemed uneasy on this score, to place the blame for unrestricted air warfare on Mr Churchill, and he kept on expressing his confidence in the U-boat. All that spring, indeed, he seemed particularly eager to encourage his followers. In April he invaded Yugoslavia and Greece and went to join his advancing armies. And all the time he kept hammering at Great Britain from the air and striking under water at her supply lines.
On June 3, 1941, there was another meeting of the dictators on the Brenner Pass, and it was suggested that there would be an immediate start in the organization of a Continental peace; but on June 22 he cast aside his mask and struck at Russia. Once again the Soviet Government became the ‘Jewish-Bolshevist clique’, and once again he was free to indulge his inherent hatred of the Slav. There were the usual lengthy and disingenuous explanations; but they were not calculated to deceive close readers of Mein Kampf. For at least five years, indeed, he had contemplated this particular volte face, for in 1934 he had taken Dr Rauschning into his confidence in regard to his intention if necessary to employ a Russian alliance as a trump card. In August he and Mussolini visited the Eastern Front. As a gage of affection he presented his brother-in-arms with a great astronomical observatory. After a long silence he spoke on October 4 at the opening meeting of the Winter Help Campaign and announced a ‘gigantic operation’ which would help to defeat Russia. A few days later he was boasting that he had smashed her.
The Supreme Command
Brauchitsch Dismissed
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour of December 7 most of the world was in the conflict. In announcing his declaration of war on the United States to the Reichstag Hitler abused President Roosevelt and said that America had planned to attack Germany in 1943. Just before Christmas he dismissed Field Marshal von Brauchitsch, his Commander-in-Chief, and took supreme command himself. A promise which he had made two months before to capture Moscow had not been fulfilled, and his own troops were retiring before the Red Army. He felt, perhaps, that he had to find a culprit for the failure and also to put heart into his own troops. He spent Christmas at his headquarters in Eastern Europe, not as previously, among his front line troops.
Hitler’s New Year message for 1942 was far less confident than that of 1941. ‘Let us all,’ he said, ‘pray to God that the year 1942 will bring a decision.’ There were rumours of disagreement with his generals and of pressure from the radicals within the Nazi ranks. In March he appointed Bormann to keep the party and the State authorities in close cooperation. He was making strenuous efforts to build up the home front, to increase the number of foreign workers in Germany, and to procure the forces for a spring offensive.
In April he received from the obedient Reichstag the title of ‘Supreme War Lord’ and measured the duration of the Reich by the mystical number of a thousand years. The tremendous eastward thrust of the summer of 1942 was delivered, reached the Volga, and went deep into the Caucasus. In September he claimed that Germany had vastly extended the living space of the people of Europe and called on his own to do their duty in the fourth winter of the war. On October 1, at the Sportspalast, he taunted, boasted, and promised the capture of Stalingrad. His effort to make good his word in the end cost Germany a tremendous loss of lives and material. He seemed, however, at this period to be more inclined to talk about the inability of the allies to defeat him than to prophesy a German victory. In November, after the allied landings in North Africa, his troops overran unoccupied France and seized Toulon.
A Chastened Man
In the New Year order of the day for 1943 he prophesied that the year would perhaps be difficult but not harder than the one before. He was certainly a much chastened Führer. The industrial effort of Germany was being seriously disrupted by air attack, and Russia was pressing perilously hard. On the tenth anniversary of his accession to power he did not speak, but entrusted Goebbels with a proclamation to read for him. His silence gave rise to rumours, some to the effect that he was giving up his command of the army, others that he was dead. On February 25, instead of speaking, he issued another proclamation to celebrate the birthday of the party. It added fresh fuel to the rumours.
On March 21 Hitler at last broke silence. The manner of his speech was lifeless and almost perfunctory. The matter, even for one as prone as he to endless reiteration, was all too familiar. His only news was that he had started to rearm not in 1936 but in 1933.
Mussolini’s Fall
The Italian Capitulation
Hitler, in his appeal on the anniversary of the Winter Help scheme on May 20, told the German people that the army had faced a crisis during the winter in Russia – a crisis, he said, which would have broken any other army in the world. Soon another crisis faced the Germans. On July 25 Mussolini fell from power, four days after it had been announced that Hitler and Mussolini had met in northern Italy where it was believed Mussolini had demanded more help from Germany in the defence of Italy. But Italy was not to be kept at Germany’s side, and on September 8 Marshal Badoglio, who had succeeded Mussolini, announced in a broadcast that his Government had requested an armistice from the allies. Hitler reacted in characteristic manner. He told the Germans that the collapse of Italy had been foreseen for a long time, not because Italy had not the necessary means of defending herself effectively, or because the necessary German support was not forthcoming but rather as a result of the failure or the absence of will of those elements in Italy who, to crown their systematic sabotage, had now brought about the capitulation. Though Hitler was able to claim this foreknowledge of events in Italy, it was clear from his speech, which was direct and effective, that he did not underestimate the seriousness of his new problem.
Hitler seemed still to have the collapse of Italy in mind when he emerged from his headquarters on November 8 to spend a few hours with the ‘Old Comrades’ of the National-Socialist Party at Munich. He spoke deliberately and forcefully. He was loudly cheered when he declared that the hour of retaliation would come. He said that everything was possible in the war but that he should lose his nerve, and he assured his audience that however long the war lasted Germany would never capitulate. She would not give in at the eleventh hour; she would go on fighting past 12 o’clock. At the beginning of his twelfth year in power – on January 20 – Hitler spoke of the danger from Russia. ‘There will be only one victor in this war, and that will be either Germany or Soviet Russia.’
In the late afternoon of July 20 it was announced that an attempt had been made on Hitler’s life. The attempt was a deep and well-laid plan by a group of generals and officers to end Hitler’s regime and the military command. General Beck, who was Chief of the General Staff until November, 1938, when he was dismissed, was declared to have been the chief conspirator. It was added that he was ‘no longer among the living’. On August 5 a purge of the Army was announced from Hitler’s headquarters. ‘At the request of the Army,’ the announcement said, Hitler had set up a court of honour to inquire into the antecedents of field marshals and generals and to find out who took part in the attempt on his life. It was disclosed that several officers had already been executed. Further executions were announced on August 8.
In a proclamation issued on November 12 as part of the annual commemoration of the Nazis who fell in the Putsch of 1923, Hitler declared that Germany was fighting for her life. Throughout the proclamation there were references to his own life and to its unimportance compared with the achievement of German aims. ‘If, in these days,’ Hitler said, ‘I have but few and rare words for you, the German people, that is only because I am working unremittingly towards the fulfilment of the tasks imposed upon me, tasks which must be fulfilled if we are to overcome fate.’ In the spring the gravity of Germany’s crisis became clear. The Russians reached the Oder; the British and Americans crossed the Rhine. On April 23 Marshal Stalin confirmed that the Russians had broken through the defences covering Berlin from the east. The battle for Berlin had begun, and Hitler, the man who brought ruin to so many of Europe’s cities, was, according to Hamburg radio, facing the enemy in his own capital, and there he came to his end.
General G. S. Patton
Brilliant American war leader
21 December 1945
General George S. Patton Junior, commander of the United States Fifteenth Army, whose death is announced on another page, was one of the most brilliant and successful leaders whom the war produced. It was he who led the American attack on Casablanca, forged his way through to effect a juncture with the Eighth Army near Gafsa, commanded the Seventh Army in Sicily, and then swept at the head of the Third from Brittany to Metz and onwards.
George Smith Patton, a cavalryman by training and instinct, became a tank expert. Brave, thrustful, and determined in action, he was a remarkable personality, who taught his men both to fear and to admire him. At the same time he was a serious and thoughtful soldier. He was an early advocate of the employment of armour in swiftly moving masses to exploit the break-through, and was finally able, with the help of American methods of mass-production, to realize his theories in practice. A great athlete in his earlier days, he had also a taste for philosophy, literature, and poetry. He was the son of a California pioneer, and was born at San Gabriel, in that State, on November 11, 1885. Soldiering was in his blood for he was the great-grandson of General Hugh Mercer, who served under Washington, and his grandfather died in the Civil War. It was natural, therefore, that he should find his way to the United States Military Academy at West Point, where he graduated in 1909. After great achievements on the track at West Point he was to be placed fifth in the cross-country run of the Modern Pentathlon (in the main a military event) at the Olympic Games of 1912. He was also to be known as a fine horseman and show rider and a crack pistol shot. He developed a flamboyant and emotional character for which his men found expression in the sobriquet ‘Old Blood-and-Guts’, but he was a born military leader.
Commissioned in the cavalry, Patton served first at Fort Sheridan, Illinois. A little later he went to France to study the sabre there and after his return served as Master of the Sword at the Mounted Service School at Fort Riley, Kansas. In 1916 he was aide-de-camp to General Pershing on the punitive expedition into Mexico. Then, when America entered the 1914–18 war he, by that time a captain, went on Pershing’s staff to France, where, in November, 1917, he was detailed to the Tank Corps and attended a course at the French Tank School and he was present when the British tanks were launched at Cambrai. After this he organized the American Tank Centre at Langres and later the 304th Brigade of the Tank Corps, which he commanded with much distinction in the St Mihiel offensive of September, 1918. Having been transferred with his brigade to the Meuse-Argonne sector he was wounded on the first day of the offensive; for his services he was awarded the dsc and dsm and at the time of the Armistice was a temporary colonel.
Returning to the United States in early 1919, Patton in 1920 was given command as a permanent captain of a squadron of the 3rd Cavalry at Fort Myer. Then he was detailed to the general staff corps and served for four years at the headquarters of the First Corps area at Boston and in the Hawaiian Islands. After four more years at Washington he was ordered to Fort Myer, where, as a permanent lieutenant-colonel, he remained on duty with the 3rd Cavalry until 1935.
Patton received command of the 2nd Armoured Division in October, 1940, with the temporary rank of brigadier-general, becoming in the next year commanding general of the First Armoured Corps. While he was thus employed Patton learned that they might be required in North Africa. He therefore set up a large training centre in California, where he built up a coordinated striking force. At last his opportunity came and as commander of the Western Task Force he and his men succeeded in their swift descent in occupying Casablanca. He himself had a narrow escape, for the landing craft which was to take him ashore was shattered. Later, when the American Second Corps were in difficulties at Kasserine Pass, Patton was sent to retrieve the situation and, with timely British aid, not only did so but carried it on to Gafsa, near which it made contact with the Eighth Army. Thus it was that he was chosen to command the Seventh Army in the invasion of Sicily. It was while he was visiting a field hospital in that island that, suspecting a soldier of being a malingerer, he struck him. The incident was reported and General Eisenhower made it clear that such conduct could not be tolerated; but Patton, who made generous apology, was far too valuable a man to lose when hard fighting lay ahead, and a little later he was nominated to the permanent rank of major-general.
In April, 1944, he arrived in the European theatre of operations, and he took command of the Third Army, which went into action in France on August 1. With it he cut off the Brittany peninsula, played his part in the trapping of the Germans and drove on to Paris. In October he had another of his narrow escapes when a heavy shell landed near him but failed to explode. Driving on relentlessly towards the German frontier, it fell to Patton to reconquer Metz, and in recognition of this victory he received the Bronze Star. His next outstanding performance was in late December when the Third Army drove in to relieve the First and helped to hold Bastogne. He was famous for the speed of his operations, but surpassing himself on this occasion, he surprised the Germans, and slowed down and eventually checked the advance of Rundstedt’s southern column. One of his most striking feats was when in the advance to the Rhine, he moved towards that river with his right flank on the Moselle. The Germans were apparently expecting him to force a crossing of the Rhine, but instead he suddenly crossed the Moselle near the confluence, taking the enemy ‘on the wrong foot’ and completely smashing up his array. In Germany his armoured divisions made the deepest advances of all, penetrating in the end into Czechoslovakia. A German staff officer, captured in the final stages, reported that his general had asked him each morning as a first question what was the latest news about Patton.
In April this year President Truman nominated Patton to be a full general. The Third Army occupied Bavaria last July, and in September Patton was ordered to appear before General Eisenhower to report on his stewardship of Bavaria. The summons was a result of Patton’s statements to a Press conference that Nazi politics are just like a Republican and Democratic election in the United States, and that he saw no need for the de-Nazification programme in the occupation of Germany. In October General Eisenhower announced that General Patton had been removed from the command of the Third Army and had been transferred to the command of the Fifteenth Army, a skeleton force.
Patton, in spite of many idiosyncrasies, which included the free use of a cavalryman’s tongue – ‘You have never lived until you have been bawled out by General Patton’ his men used to say – was a fundamentally serious soldier, offensively minded and bent on the single object of defeating his enemy. He affected a smart and sometimes striking turnout, and was insistent that those under him should also maintain a smart and soldierly appearance.
John Maynard Keynes
A great economist
21 April 1946
Lord Keynes, the great economist, died at Tilton, Firle, Sussex, yesterday from a heart attack.
By his death the country has lost a very great Englishman. He was a man of genius, who as a political economist had a worldwide influence on the thinking both of specialists and of the general public, and he was also master of a variety of other subjects which he pursued through life. He was a man of action, as well as of thought, who intervened on occasion with critical effect in the great affairs of state, and carried on efficiently a number of practical business activities which would have filled the life of an ordinary man. And he was not merely a prodigy of intellect; he had civic virtues – courage, steadfastness, and a humane outlook; he had private virtues –he was a good son, a devoted member of his college, a loyal and affectionate friend, and a lavish and unwearying helper of young men of promise.
The Right Hon. John Maynard Keynes, cb, Baron Keynes, of Tilton, Sussex, in the Peerage of the United Kingdom, was born on June 5, 1883, son of Dr John Neville Keynes, for many years Registrary of Cambridge University. His mother was Mayor of Cambridge as lately as 1932. He was brought up in the most intellectual society of Cambridge. He was in college at Eton, which he dearly loved, and he was proud of being nominated by the masters to be their representative governor later in life. He won a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, in mathematics and classics, writing his essay on Héloïse and Abelard. He was President of the Cambridge Union, won the Members’ English Essay Prize for an essay on the political opinions of Burke, and was twelfth wrangler in the mathematical tripos. Although he did not take another tripos, he studied deeply in philosophy and economics and was influenced by such men as Sidgwick, Whitehead, W. E. Johnson, G. E. Moore, and, of course, Alfred Marshall.
In 1906 he passed second into the Civil Service, getting his worst mark in economics – ‘the examiners presumably knew less than I did’ – and chose the India Office, partly out of regard for John Morley and partly because in those days of a smooth working gold standard, the Indian currency was the livest monetary issue and had been the subject of Royal Commissions and classic controversies. During his two years there he was working on his fellowship dissertation on ‘Probability’ which gained him a prize fellowship at King’s. This did not oblige him to resign from the Civil Service, but Marshall was anxious to get him to Cambridge, and, as token, paid him £100 a year out of his private pocket to supplement the exiguous fellowship dividend – those were before the days of his bursarship of the college. Anyhow, his real heart lay in Cambridge. He lectured on money. He was a member of the Royal Commission on Indian Currency and Finance (1913–14). He served in the Treasury (1915–19), went with the first Lord Reading’s mission to the United States, and was principal representative of the Treasury at the Paris Peace Conference and deputy for the Chancellor of the Exchequer on the Supreme Economic Council. After his resignation he returned to teaching and to his bursar’s duties at King’s, but he always spent part of his time in London. He was a member of the Macmillan Committee on Finance and Industry, and parts of its classic report bear the stamp of his mind.
In 1940 he was made a member of the Chancellor of the Exchequer’s Consultative Council and played an important part in Treasury business. He was appointed a director of the Bank of England. In 1942 he was created Lord Keynes, of Tilton, and made some valuable contributions to debate in the Upper House. He became High Steward of Cambridge (Borough) in 1943. His continued interest in the arts was marked by his trusteeship of the National Gallery and chairmanship of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (cema). In 1925 he married Lydia Lopokova, renowned star of the Russian Imperial Ballet – ‘the best thing Maynard ever did’, according to the aged Mrs Alfred Marshall. She made a delightful home for him, and in the years after his serious heart attack in 1937 was a tireless nurse and vigilant guardian against the pressures of the outside world.
Lord Keynes’s genius was expressed in his important contributions to the fundamentals of economic science; in his power of winning public interest in the practical application of economics on critical occasions; in his English prose style – his description of the protagonists at the Versailles Conference, first fully published in his Essays in Biography (1933), is likely long to remain a classic – and, perhaps it should be added, in the brilliant wit, the wisdom, and the range of his private conversation, which would have made him a valued member of any intellectual salon or coterie in the great ages of polished discussion.
In practical affairs his activities in addition to his important public services were legion. As bursar of King’s he administered the college finances with unflagging attention to detail. By segregating a fund which could be invested outside trustee securities he greatly enlarged the resources of the college, and, unlike most college bursars, he was continually urging the college to spend more money on current needs. From 1912 he was editor of the Economic Journal, which grew and flourished under his guidance, and from 1921 to 1938 he was chairman of the National Mutual Life Assurance Society. He ran an investment company. He organised the Camargo Ballet. He built and opened the Arts Theatre at Cambridge and, having himself supervised and financed it during its period of teething troubles, he handed it over, when it was established as a paying concern, as a gift to ex-officio trustees drawn from the university and city. He became chairman of cema in 1942 and of the Arts Council in 1945. He was chairman of the Nation, and later, when the merger took place, of the New Statesman; but he had too scrupulous a regard for editorial freedom for that paper to be in any sense a reflection of his own opinions. He also did duty as a teacher of undergraduates at King’s College and played an important and inspiring part in the development of the Economics faculty at Cambridge. The better students saw him at his most brilliant in his Political Economy Club. He was interested in university business and his evidence before the Royal Commission (1919–22) was an important influence in causing it to recommend that the financial powers of the university should give it greater influence over the colleges.
To find an economist of comparable influence one would have to go back to Adam Smith. His early interest was primarily in money and foreign exchange, and there is an austere school of thought which regards his Indian Currency and Finance (1912) as his best book. After the 1914–18 war his interest in the relation between monetary deflation and trade depression led him on to reconsider the traditional theory about the broad economic forces which govern the total level of employment and activity in a society. He concluded that, to make a free system work at optimum capacity – and so provide ‘full employment’ – it would be necessary to have deliberate central control of the rate of interest and also, in certain cases, to stimulate capital development. These conclusions rest on a very subtle and intricate analysis of the working of the whole system, which is still being debated wherever economics is seriously studied.
Popularly he was supposed to have the vice of inconsistency. Serious students of his work are not inclined to endorse this estimate. His views changed in the sense that they developed. He would perceive that some particular theory had a wider application. He was always feeling his way to the larger synthesis. The new generalization grew out of the old. But he regarded words as private property which he would define and redefine. Unlike most professional theorists, he was very quick to adapt the application of theory to changes in the circumstances. Speed of thought was his characteristic in all things. In general conversation he loved to disturb complacency, and when, as so often, there were two sides to a question he would emphasize the one more disturbing to the company present.
His Treatise on Probability is a notable work of philosophy. Although using mathematical symbols freely, it does not seek to add to the mathematical theory of probability, but rather to explore the philosophical foundations on which that theory rests. Written clearly and without pedantry, it displays a vast erudition in the history of the subject which was reinforced by and reinforced his activities as a bibliophile.
Keynes had on certain occasions an appreciable influence on the course of history. His resignation from the British delegation to the Paris Peace Conference and his publication a few months later of The Economic Consequences of the Peace had immediate and lasting effects on world opinion about the peace treaty. The propriety of his action became a matter of controversy. Opinions still differ on the merits of the treaty, but about the point with which he was particularly concerned, reparations, there is now general agreement with his view that the settlement – or lack of settlement – was ill-conceived and likely to do injury to the fabric of the world economy. His subsequent polemic against the gold standard did not prevent a return to it in 1925, but largely added to the ill repute of that system in wide circles since. It was mainly through his personal influence some years later that the Liberal Party adopted as their platform in the election of 1929 the proposal to conquer unemployment by a policy of public works and monetary expansion.
In two wars he had a footing in the British Treasury. The idea of deferred credits was contained in the pamphlet entitled ‘How to Pay for the War’, which he published in 1940. From 1943 he played a principal part in the discussions and negotiations with the United States to effect a transition from war to peace conditions of trade and finance which avoided the errors of the last peace, and to establish international organization which would avoid both the disastrous fluctuations and the restrictions which characterized the inter-war period. He was the leader of the British experts in the preparatory discussions of 1943 and gave his name to the first British contribution – ‘the Keynes Plan’ – to the proposals for establishing an international monetary authority. In July, 1944, he led the British delegation at the Monetary Conference of the United and Associated Nations at Bretton Woods, where an agreed plan was worked out. He was the dominant figure in the British delegation which for three months, from September to December, 1945, hammered out the terms of the American Loan Agreement, which he defended brilliantly in the House of Lords. He was appointed in February Governor of the International Monetary Fund and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development, and in these capacities had just paid a further visit to the United States, whence he returned only two weeks ago. These continuous exertions to advance the cause of liberality and freedom in commercial and financial policies as a means to expand world trade and employment imposed an exceptionally heavy and prolonged strain which, in view of his severe illness just before the war, Lord Keynes was physically ill-fitted to bear.
His life-long activities as a book-collector were not interrupted, even by war. His great haul of unpublished Newton manuscripts on alchemy calls for mention. He identified an anonymous pamphlet entitled ‘An Abstract of a Treatise of Human Nature’, acquired by his brother, Mr Geoffrey Keynes, as being the authentic work of David Hume himself. He had it reprinted in 1938, and it will no doubt hereafter be eagerly studied by generations of philosophers. During the second war his hobby was to buy and then, unlike many bibliophiles, to read rare Elizabethan works. His interest in and encouragement of the arts meant much to him. From undergraduate days he had great friendships with writers and painters and, while his activities brought him in touch with many distinguished people of the academic world and public life, he was probably happiest with artistic people. At one period he was at the centre of the literary circle which used to be known as ‘Bloomsbury’ – Lytton Strachey, Virginia Woolf, and their intimate friends. More than fame and worldly honours he valued the good esteem of this very cultivated and fastidious society.
And finally there was the man himself – radiant, brilliant, effervescent, gay, full of impish jokes. His entry into the room invariably raised the spirits of the company. He always seemed cheerful; his interests and projects were so many and his knowledge so deep that he gave the feeling that the world could not get seriously out of joint in the end while he was busy in it. He did not suffer fools gladly; he often put eminent persons to shame by making a devastating retort which left no loophole for face-saving. He could be rude. He did not expect others to bear malice and bore none himself in the little or great affairs of life. He had many rebuffs but did not recriminate. When his projects were rejected, often by mere obstructionists, he went straight ahead and produced some more projects. He was a shrewd judge of men and often plumbed the depths in his psychology. He was a humane man genuinely devoted to the cause of the common good.
Henry Ford
Motor manufacturer and idealist
7 April 1947
Mr Henry Ford, the motor-car manufacturer, who died suddenly at his home, Dearborn, near Detroit, on Monday night at the age of 83, was for many years one of the world’s outstanding individuals.
In his own sphere as a maker of machines Ford effected the greatest revolution of his day. It was due largely to him that the motor-car, instead of continuing for years to be a luxury for the rich, was brought speedily within the reach of comparatively humble folk. In the course of this accomplishment the process of mass production was carried to new and unheard-of lengths and a novel conception of its possibilities was created. The industrial empire which Ford’s imagination and drive established was in due course to yield him an immense fortune; but wealth was at no period his goal. He was in fact an emotional visionary, ignorant of much that quite ordinary people know, but with real good will for all and a power of handling the practical things of life which has never been surpassed. Thus for many years he was a continuing astonishment to his contemporaries, who, marvelling one day at his new designs for motor-cars or his new schemes for still vaster factories, would find him on the next with startling proposals for higher wages, shorter hours, or better methods of salesmanship, or, just as likely, attacking the bankers or preaching pacifism, bickering with his own Government, or at issue with organized labour. In all that he did or said moreover, he remained his independent and opinionative self, satisfied, as was indeed quite often true, that he was serving his age as successfully as he was supplying it with tractors, motor-cars, and aeroplanes.
Henry Ford was born on July 30, 1863, on a farm at Dearborn, Michigan, the son of William Ford, a prosperous farmer, who was of Irish stock. His mother was of mixed Dutch and Scandinavian origin and had been adopted by one Patrick O’Hearn. He went to the local school, where he seemed a normal boy, good but not exceptionally brilliant at his studies. At an early age, however, he disclosed a remarkable mechanical bent and an eager curiosity in regard to the working of machines. At 17 he became an apprentice in a machine shop in Detroit, but after nine months he felt he had learned all he could there and went on to another firm. After a time his employment failed to satisfy him and he returned to Dearborn, reconciled to it by the fact that Clara Bryant, whom he married in 1888, was a neighbour. Years of happiness followed: but he nevertheless continued to be haunted by an early ideal of a machine which would do the heavy work of a farm. In the country he kept a machine shop of his own and worked in summer for a harvester company by repairing their portable farm engines. However, the promptings of his genius became too strong for him and eventually he decided to go back to Detroit where in 1890 he secured a post with the Detroit Edison Electric Company.
Ford had realized in his earlier Detroit days that the public were more interested in road vehicles than in tractors; but scheme as he would the weight of a steam engine had thwarted him. Then in an English paper, the World of Science, he had read of a ‘silent gas engine’ which used gas for fuel. A little later he had been asked to repair one of these Otto engines. Convinced by his study of it that its principles were sound, he had in 1887 built his first gas engine, and had kept on building more. After he returned to Detroit, however, he worked in his spare time on his first ‘gasoline buggy’, and in 1893 it was ready for public trial, at which it attained a speed of 25 miles an hour. In 1896 he began work on a second car. In 1899 he resigned his position and organized a local company in which, holding one sixth of the stock, he became chief engineer. The company made cars on the model of his first one. Ford, whose governing idea was to provide automobiles for the masses, was soon in disagreement with his associates, who thought chiefly of profits, and in 1902 he resigned, ‘determined never again to put myself under orders’. At that time the public interest was centred on racing cars and Ford determined to enter the racing field. He proved astonishingly successful with some racing machines of his design and thus drew attention to his own car. In 1903, therefore, he was able to found the Ford Motor Company with 12 shareholders and a capital of $100,000, of which $20,000 was put into the company, the only cash investment in its long career which did not come from earnings. In 1908 Ford himself became the controlling owner and president, and in 1924 he and his son, Edsel, were to acquire all the stock. Ford had long had his own ideas about quantity production, and with control in his own hands was able to put them into effect. Sales began to rise and his products to enter foreign markets. His success in the Scottish Reliability Trials of 1905 had already helped him considerably in establishing himself in Great Britain. He also developed a new agency policy which included an agreement to maintain service stations. The car itself had, moreover, been steadily improving, and in 1908 and 1909 his famous model ‘T’ was put on sale. Standardization became thenceforward his settled policy, and the ‘assembly line’ was devised; but in this, as in all else, his ruling notion was service to the ordinary man.
In 1915 Ford was able to turn his attention to his first love, the farm tractor. The European war seemed to him to impose a delay in placing it on the market: but victory depended upon British agriculture making good the food shortage which the German submarines were causing, and Ford sent his Fordson tractor to the rescue. He also rendered notable service by fulfilling his undertaking to build Eagle submarine chasers by the same methods he employed in regard to his cars. From war, however, he refused to profit. At this period indeed the magician in production stood in strange contrast to the unrealistic pacifist who as leader of a group of cranks went in the Peace Ship to Scandinavia in order to have the ‘boys out of the trenches by Christmas, never to return’. It was the foolishness of a child, but the intention was entirely sincere. Ford had his difficulties and in the slump of 1920 faced a serious financial situation: but he found his own way out and his vast undertaking went on from strength to strength. In 1924 its annual production reached the towering peak of 2,000,000 cars, trucks, and tractors. His achievements were, moreover, by no means in the material sphere alone. Of humble origin himself he had a deep feeling for his employees, and worked out rough and ready principles in regard to labour which he consistently applied. One was to pay the highest possible wages, and in this he was a true reformer; another to accept applicants for work without questions or references. Ex-prisoners were welcomed: but once a would-be employee was accepted he came under a rigid discipline which followed him even into his home. For years Ford would have nothing to do with unions. His passion for the perfect organization of production led him indeed into an effort to mechanize the human material he employed. It was, however, a deterrent to many independent-minded Americans and numbers of his workers were drawn from recent emigrants to the United States.
In 1918 Ford, who was a supporter of President Wilson, had run unsuccessfully for the Senate and in 1923 there was some talk – it caused alarm among the professional politicians – that he would run for the Presidency, and a movement to support him was started; but before long he himself announced his refusal to stand against Mr Coolidge. In the next year his acquisition of the Dagenham site in addition to his Trafford Park and Cork works was announced. It was part of a post-war policy of expansion, and between 1931 and 1946 over 1,000,000 vehicles were manufactured at the Dagenham factory alone. He then went into civil aviation, opened his company’s private air service, and soon afterwards his all-metal monoplanes were on sale. It was the beginning of great developments. At this period the Press published many stories of his fabulous wealth, and his spectacular successes and good treatment of his workers were widely discussed, and Ford himself wrote three books concerning his own life’s work and ideals – My Life and Work, Today and Tomorrow, and Moving Forward. In 1927 ‘Model T’ was superseded and over 350,000 advance orders were received for his new car. In April, 1931, his 20,000,000th car came off the assembly line, but in that year also the company, suffering like all others from the depression, lost £10,000,000.
The years immediately before the 1939–45 war saw a revival in the Ford fortunes and fresh expansions of plant, and as the war developed his company did excellent work; but the production of his great plant at Willow Run scarcely lived up to his earlier estimates of his own capacity as a producer. In 1943 Ford lost his only child and close associate, Edsel Bryant Ford, who for many years had played a leading part in all his undertakings, and, although nearly 80, himself resumed the presidency of his company. He resigned, for the second time, in 1945, and on his nomination his grandson, Henry Ford ii, was elected in his place. Henry Ford ii, who was born in September, 1917, had been released from the United States Navy in 1943 to direct war production at the Ford Motor Company, of which he was appointed executive vice-president in 1944.
Mahatma Gandhi
Apostle of independence
30 January 1948
Mr Gandhi, who was assassinated in Delhi yesterday afternoon, was the most influential figure India has produced for generations. He set out to promote national consciousness, and to defend the ancient Indian ideals of poverty and simplicity against the inroads of modern industrialism, though this part of his teaching was seldom heard in his later years. He judged all activities, whether of the State or of the individual, by their conformity to the doctrine of non-violence, which he held to be the panacea of all human ills, political, social, and economic. His day of triumph when British authority was voluntarily withdrawn was turned to profound sorrow, for communal strife and bloodshed, instead of ending as he had confidently hoped, were greatly intensified, and the two new Dominions of India and Pakistan were brought to the verge of war. To efforts to replace this fratricidal strife by Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh harmony and good will he devoted the last months of his long life.
In all parts of the world many regarded the ‘Mahatma’ (‘great soul’) as both a great moral teacher and a great Indian patriot. Others held him to be the victim of a naive self-delusion which blinded him to the race-hatred, disorder, and bloodshed which his ‘non-violent’ campaigns against British authority invariably provoked. But few critics have questioned the sincerity of his repudiation of force. A whole-hearted pacifist, he believed he had a mission not to India only but to all the world. To his own co-religionists he was certainly a ‘saint’. His increasing asceticism, finally marked by a complete indifference to the comforts of life (though these were showered upon him by wealthy supporters), won him a reverence that bordered upon adoration; the popular mind long credited him with powers little short of miraculous; his gospel of the liberation of India from British rule early won the enthusiastic support of most of the younger school of Hindu politicians, and did much to wean them from the cult of anarchy; his defence of Hindu faith and culture against western ‘materialism’ gave him the adhesion of multitudes of the orthodox.
A convinced Hindu, but widely read in other faiths and a great admirer of the Christian ideal, he was a powerful advocate of social reform. The poverty of the masses and his desire for India to return to the simplicities of the past led him to proclaim the need for the people, rich and poor alike, to spin by hand their own cotton thread and to weave and wear their own hand-made cotton cloth. Wherever he went his charka (spinning wheel) went with him, and as he talked to those who sought him daily he spun his cloth.
Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was born on October 2, 1869, at Porbandar, the capital of a small State in Kathiawar, Western India, where his father, though belonging only to the socially obscure Bania (moneylending) section of Hindus, was the Dewan. He was married when only 13 to a child of the same age, but from 1906 was a Brahmacharya – that is, a celibate within the marriage state for the purpose of realizing God. In early life he admired Western ways, and in this period he read law at the Inner Temple and was called to the Bar. He was meticulous in wearing the top hat and frock coat of the ‘town kit’ of the period. Some years later on, after conviction in India, he was disbarred. All his life he remained a strict vegetarian and total abstainer. In 1893 he went from Bombay to South Africa in connection with an Indian legal case of some complexity, and remained to oppose discriminatory legislation against Indians, and his stay lasted for 21 years. Gandhi was admitted an advocate of the Supreme Court. When the South African war broke out he organized an Indian Ambulance Corps, 1,000 strong, which often worked under heavy fire. Again, in 1906, on the outbreak of the Zulu rebellion, he formed a stretcher-bearer corps.
After the passage of an Act in 1913 restricting Indian migration between the different Provinces of the Union, some 3,000 Indians with Gandhi at their head, crossed the border from Natal into the Transvaal in order to court arrest. Many, including the leader, his wife, and one of his sons, were imprisoned. In 1914 Gandhi returned to India by way of London, and he landed here a few days before the outbreak of the 1914–18 War. He was instrumental in organizing from among the Indian students a volunteer ambulance corps, which rendered good service. In Western India he rapidly became the champion of all whom he regarded as weak and oppressed, and was associated with the whirlwind movement for Home Rule resulting from the activities of Annie Besant, but at the War Conference convened by the Viceroy at Delhi in the spring of 1918 he supported ‘with all his heart’ a resolution of support of the war effort.
In 1919, in pursuance of what he called satyagraha, or ‘truth-seeking’, he issued a pledge of refusal to obey the Rowlatt Acts, ‘and such other laws as the committee to be hereafter appointed may think fit’. There followed the serious disturbances of April, 1919, both at Ahmedabad, Gandhi’s home, and in the Punjab, notably at Amritsar. The loss of life thus caused led Gandhi to admit that he had made a blunder of ‘Himalayan’ dimensions. But from this time began his unquestioned mastery over the Congress Party organization. To him that party was India; and as its spokesman he was India’s chosen mouthpiece.
In the spring of 1920 Gandhi considered that India was spiritually prepared to undertake a further campaign of passive resistance without risk of lapse into violence. He started a movement of ‘non-violent non-cooperation’, declaring it would be maintained until the claims of the Khilafat movement – started by Indian Muslims to obtain alleviation of the harsh peace terms imposed on Turkey after the 1914–18 war – were conceded, and until public servants alleged to be guilty of ‘martial law excesses’ in the Punjab were adequately punished. He promised swaraj, meaning complete self-government without the aid of the British, within a year. On paper at least he collected within a few months a crore of rupees (£750,000) for swaraj. Gandhi’s open letter to the Viceroy (the first Lord Reading) dated February 9, 1922, giving him seven days in which to announce a change of policy, had scarcely been dispatched when at Chauri-Chaura, in the Gorakhpur district, United Provinces, a number of constables were attacked in their thana and burnt to death. He called a halt to the civil disobedience movement and imposed upon himself a five days’ fast. On March 10, 1922, he was arrested, and was later tried for conspiracy. Gandhi pleaded guilty and was sentenced to six years’ simple imprisonment, but was released in January, 1924, after an operation in gaol for appendicitis.
Early in 1929 Gandhi shared responsibility for a resolution of conditional acceptance of the proposed Round Table Conference passed at a meeting of political leaders. But on March 12, 1930, Gandhi, with 80 volunteers, began a march of 200 miles on foot from his ashram, near Ahmedabad, to Dandi, a village on the sea coast in the Surat district, for the purpose of collecting salt, and thereby defying the law. On May 5 he was arrested and interned at Yeravda Gaol, near Poona, under a Bombay Regulation of 1827. The economic effects of the second era of civil disobedience were much more serious than those of the first, owing in large measure to the intensity of the boycott.
The Round Table Conference met in London in the autumn of 1930. Lord Irwin (now Lord Halifax) released the Congress leaders to facilitate discussions and had a number of interviews with Gandhi. These led in March, 1931, to the signature of the famous Irwin-Gandhi Pact.
Gandhi came to London in the late summer as the sole delegate of the Congress at the Round Table Conference. The expectation formed in many quarters here of seeing a man of commanding gifts was not fulfilled. He had no mastery of detail: constitutional problems did not interest him. He was no orator; his speeches were made seated and delivered slowly in low, level tones, which did not vary whatever his theme might be. His interventions in discussion were mainly propagandist, and often had little real connection with the matter in hand. He made no real constructive contribution to the work of the Conference. Meantime the pact was breaking down, and on Gandhi’s return to Bombay a renewed campaign of civil disobedience was initiated by the Congress under his chairmanship. Once more he was arrested, on January 4, 1932, and detained in Yeravda Gaol.
When the British Government’s communal award was published he intimated to the Prime Minister (Mr Ramsay MacDonald) that he would starve himself to death unless the part of the award giving separate seats to the depressed classes (which in his view cut them off from the Hindu community) were withdrawn or suspended. The fast began on September 20, 1932, but some political leaders of the two communities negotiated a compromise, approved by the Mahatma and accepted by Government. Gandhi accordingly broke his fast on the seventh day. There was great diversity of opinion, in Hindu ranks particularly, on Gandhi’s advocacy of legislation to secure admission of the depressed classes to the temples of higher caste folk. At the end of April, 1933, he announced his intention in this connection to fast for 21 days, and when the ordeal began on May 8 he was unconditionally released. Soon after Gandhi arranged to lead another civil disobedience ‘march’. On the eve of the march, July 31, he was arrested, and a few days later was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment.
Dissatisfied with the facilities given to him in prison to work for the Harijans (his name for the depressed classes), he decided once more to fast, and after a week of abstinence from food he was released purely for medical reasons on August 23. The civil disobedience movement was waning, and in April, 1934, Congress adopted his advice to suspend it. But his personal contact, and that of Congress leaders generally, with the Viceroy and the Governors was not resumed until, in the summer of 1937, the Viceroy (Lord Linlithgow) took the initiative in bringing the long estrangement to an end by inviting Gandhi to meet him at Delhi.
In the first general election for the Provincial Parliaments under the Act of 1935 the widespread Congress organization scored striking successes, and its candidates obtained majorities in six of the 11 Provinces of British India. When provincial autonomy was introduced in April, 1937, and the question of acceptance or non-acceptance of office by the Congress Party was under constant discussion, Gandhi casually admitted to a distinguished and sympathetic British public man that he had not read the India Act of 1935, for his entourage and advisers had assured him that it gave nothing of real worth to India. Persuaded by his visitor to repair the omission, he admitted when they next met that he had been mistaken and that the Act marked a very substantial advance. Thereupon he threw his immense weight against Pandit Nehru’s policy of abstention and of course carried the day. Congress Ministries were formed, after a few months of the familiar attempts at bargaining with Government in which the Mahatma was such an adept. Gandhi then retired with his considerable entourage to a remote village near Wardha, in the Central Provinces, and it became known as Sevagram (the village of service). Gandhi showed an unexpected gift for realism by encouraging Ministers in paths of administrative orthodoxy, while pressing forward his ideals, such as a policy of prohibition by instalments, and what is known as the Wardha plan of primary education.
Though he had upheld for years a ‘gentleman’s agreement’ that the Congress would not come between the Princes and their subjects, he did intervene early in March, 1939, in Rajkote, a small Kathiawar State, on the ground that the Thakore Saheb had gone back on his word as to constitutional advances. He issued a 24 hours’ ultimatum, and as it was not accepted he began a ‘fast unto death’, but the Viceroy (Lord Linlithgow) suggested a solution of the immediate question, and Gandhi abandoned his fast at the beginning of the fifth day. The Mahatma’s hold on Nationalist reverence was increased, rather than diminished, by his public apology and expression of contrition for having resorted to a coercive method not consistent with his non-violent principles. Yet he was to resort to it on future occasions. He was not free from ‘the last infirmity of noble minds’, and was skilful in exhibitionism.
When war broke out in September, 1939, it seemed for a short time that Gandhi would invite the Congress Party to give moral support to the nations seeking to prevent, though by armed force, the enslavement of the world by brutal aggressors. But he became convinced that only a ‘free India’ could give effective moral support to Britain; and his demand for ‘complete independence’ became more and more urgent. When Japan struck down Malaya and invaded Burma Gandhi became seriously perturbed at the defence measures which the Government of India initiated. In the spring of 1942, when the discussions between Sir Stafford Cripps (then Lord Privy Seal in Mr Churchill’s Government) and the party leaders had reached a hopeful stage, Gandhi advised against settlement and the negotiations with the Congress leaders broke down. The war situation was then unfavourable, and Gandhi was commonly alleged to have talked contemptuously of the draft Declaration whereby India was to secure complete self-government after the war as a ‘post-dated cheque on a crashing bank’. He demanded that the British should ‘quit India’ (a slogan which had wide currency), that the Indian Army should be disbanded, and that Japan should be free to come to the country and arrange terms with a non-resisting people.
In August, 1942, he concurred in the decision to strike the blow of mass obstruction against the war effort – ‘open rebellion’, as he calmly called it. This led to his arrest and that of other Congress leaders and to widespread disorder and bloodshed. Gandhi was interned in the Aga Khan’s palace at Poona and was barred from political contacts, though he was allowed the companionship of Mrs Gandhi, who died in February, 1944. Gandhi continued in detention until May 6, 1944, when he was released unconditionally on medical grounds. Later all the leaders were released to share in the prolonged discussions arising from attempts to bring an end to the increasing strife between Hindus and Muslims over the Pakistan issue.
A long prepared and carefully staged series of discussions between the Mahatma and Mr Jinnah, at the house of the latter in Bombay, yielded no tangible result, for Mr Gandhi stated that he spoke only for himself and had no commission from the working committee of the Congress. Indeed, for many years he had withdrawn from actual membership of the party, only to dominate it from without. The explosive possibilities of the situation developed with the end of the war. The historic Cabinet Mission, headed by Lord Pethick-Lawrence, went out in the spring of 1946 and spent three anxious months of incessant conference and negotiation in the heat at Delhi. The Mahatma took a large share in the negotiations chiefly behind the scenes, and in his inscrutable way was at times helpful and at times the reverse. When at long last and amid most serious outbreaks of communal violence the short-term and long-term plans of the Cabinet Mission led to the formation at Delhi of an interim National Government, with Mr Nehru as Vice-President of the Council, Gandhi remained outside the Cabinet, much to the relief of its members. But no major decision could be taken either at the Centre or in the Provincial Congress Governments without full consideration of the views and wishes of the Mahatma, the idol of the Hindu masses.
The announcement made by Mr Attlee in February, 1947, that complete British withdrawal would not be later than June, 1948, had the effect of accentuating the conflict between the two main parties, and the subsequent antedating of the time limit and decision to set up two Dominions, India and Pakistan, quickened savage outbreaks in the Punjab between Hindu and Sikh on the one side and Muslims on the other. Moreover, when Independence Day came the sanguinary unrest in Calcutta led to fears that the division of Bengal would have untoward consequences. ‘Bapu’, who had been travelling from place to place in Eastern Bengal and in Bihar preaching brotherhood, went to Calcutta, and at the beginning of September undertook another fast not to be ended until normal conditions were restored. The party leaders exerted themselves in exhortations to the people, and on the fourth day the Mahatma was able to end his ordeal. Thus he succeeded where armed force had failed. The miracle encouraged him to stage in Delhi early this month his fifteenth fast in the effort to bring harmony between India and Pakistan. He had shown himself acutely conscious that in the lust for communal reprisals his word did not carry the weight of former years. The fast began as the Security Council at Lake Success was considering the controversy on Kashmir and related problems between the two Dominions. One effect of the fast and leading to its cessation on the fifth day was the decision pressed on the Cabinet at New Delhi by the Mahatma no longer to withhold from the Karachi Government payment of the whole of the £41m, due from the undivided cash balances at the time of the British withdrawal.
George Orwell
Criticism and allegory
21 January 1950
Mr George Orwell, a writer of acute and penetrating temper and of conspicuous honesty of mind, died on Friday in hospital in London at the age of 46. He had been a sick man for a considerable time.
Though he made his widest appeal in the form of fiction, Orwell had a critical rather than imaginative endowment of mind and he has left a large number of finely executed essays. In a less troubled, less revolutionary period of history he might perhaps have discovered within himself a richer and more creative power of imagination, a deeper philosophy of acceptance. As it was he was essentially the analyst, by turns indignant, satirical, and prophetic, of an order of life and society in rapid dissolution. The analysis is presented, to a large extent, in autobiographical terms; Orwell, it might fairly be said, lived his convictions. Much of his early work is a direct transcription of personal experience, while the later volumes record, in expository or allegorical form, the progressive phases of his disenchantment with current social and political ideals. The death of so searching and sincere a writer is a very real loss.
George Orwell, which was the name adopted by Eric Arthur Blair, was born in India in 1903 of a Scottish family, the son of Mr R. W. Blair, who served in the opium department of the Government of Bengal. He was a King’s Scholar at Eton, which he left in 1921, and then, at the persuasion of his father, entered the Imperial Police in Burma, where he remained for five years. After that he was, by turns, dish-washer, schoolmaster, and book-seller’s assistant. The name he adopted comes from the river Orwell – his parents were settled at Southwold, in Suffolk, at the time he decided upon it. Orwell preferred to suppress his earlier novels. Down and Out in Paris and London, his first book, published in 1933, is a plain, observant and, for the most part, dispassionate piece of reporting, which achieves without faltering precisely what it sets out to do. Orwell had strived in a Paris slum and in England had tramped from one casual ward to another, and the lessons of this first-hand acquaintance with poverty and destitution were never afterwards lost on him. Although in time he grew fearful of a theoretical egalitarianism, he made no bones about the primary need of securing social justice. In The Road to Wigan Pier, which appeared in 1937, he described the lives of those on unemployment pay or public assistance and made his own contribution to Socialist propaganda.
Next year he brought out his Homage to Catalonia, an outspoken and at times impassioned account of his experience and observation as a volunteer on the Republican side in the Spanish civil war. He had joined not the International Brigade but the militia organized by the small Catalan party predominantly syndicalist or anarcho-syndicalist in temper – known as poum. He was wounded during the fighting round Huesca. With deepening anxiety and embitterment he had noted the fanaticism and ruthlessness of Communist attempts to secure at all costs – even at the cost of probable defeat – political ascendancy over the Republican forces. It was from this point that his left-wing convictions underwent the transformation that was eventually to be projected in Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
First, however, a few months before the outbreak of war in 1939, he published Coming up for Air, the book which is his nearest approach to a novel proper. It was not his first published essay in fiction. In Burmese Days, published five years earlier, he had written with notable insight and justice of the administrative problems of the British in Burma and of the conflict of the white and native peoples, though the personal story tacked onto this treatment of his subject was weak and rather lifeless. The book suggested clearly enough, indeed, that Orwell was something other than a novelist. Yet in Coming up for Air, for all that it sought to present, in a picture of the world before 1914, a warning of the totalitarian shape of things to come, he recaptures the atmosphere of childhood with a degree of truth and tenderness that is deeply affecting. Here was the creative touch one sought in vain in the later books.
Rejected for the Army on medical grounds, Orwell in 1940 became a sergeant in the Home Guard. He wrote spasmodically rather than steadily during the war years. His picture of Britain at war, published in 1941 under the title The Lion and the Unicorn, was a brave attempt to determine the relationship between Socialism and the English genius. A volume consisting of three long essays, Inside the Whale, one of which was the entertaining, if occasionally somewhat wrongheaded, study of boys’ popular weeklies, preceded the appearance in 1945 of Animal Farm. In the guise of a fairy-tale Orwell here produced a blistering and most amusing satire on the totalitarian tyranny, as he saw it, that in Soviet Russia masqueraded as the classless society. The book won wide and deservedly admiring notice. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, published early last year, the premonition of the totalitarian wrath to come had developed into a sense of fatalistic horror. In Orwell’s vision of a not too remote future in Airstrip One, the new name for Britain in a wholly totalitarian world, men had been conditioned to deny the possibility of human freedom and to will their subservience to an omnipotent ruling hierarchy. The book was a brave enough performance, though it fell a good way short of the highest achievement in its kind.
Orwell married in 1933 Miss Eileen O’Shaughnessy. She died in 1945 after an operation, and last year he married Miss Sonia Brownell, assistant editor of Horizon.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophy of language
29 April 1951
Dr Ludwig Wittgenstein, who died in his sixty-second year on Sunday at Cambridge, was a philosopher with a reputation as an intellectual innovator on the highest level. His earlier and later work formed the points of origin of two schools of philosophy, both of which he himself disowned.
He came from a well-known Austrian family (his ancestors included the Prince Wittgenstein who fought against Napoleon), and he was brought up in Vienna. After studying engineering at Manchester he went to Cambridge in 1912 as an ‘advanced student’ to study under Bertrand (now Lord) Russell. At the outbreak of war in 1914 he returned to Austria to serve with the Austrian Army until he was taken prisoner in 1918 in the Italian campaign. While thus serving he completed a manuscript, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus which, appearing in 1921 in German in the last number of Ostwald’s Annalen der Naturphilosophie and in English in book form in 1922, at once made for its author an international reputation.
Throughout his life Wittgenstein showed the characteristics of a religious contemplative of the hermit type. Thus he alternated between periods of great prominence in academic life and periods of extreme abnegation and retirement, and in 1922 he renounced his fortune and took a post as a schoolmaster in a mountain village near Wiener Neustadt. Here he stayed until 1928. He maintained, however, contacts with Vienna, where he went in the school holidays and where, through his acquaintance with the Professor of Philosophy, Moritz Schlick, he originated a school of philosophy – the famous Vienna Circle, later known as the logical positivists.
Quite apart from the intrinsic merit of his ideas, Wittgenstein’s historical importance in this period consists in the fact that through him the work of a long series of formal logicians, culminating in Russell, became known to the inheritors of an equally long tradition of philosophy of science, culminating in Mach (Schlick’s predecessor in his chair). The intellectual results of this fusion were such that, a decade later, they spread all over the philosophic world. By this time, however, Wittgenstein was reinstalled in Cambridge, having arrived there for a short visit in 1929. Trinity College elected him to a five-year research fellowship in 1930, and he also started lecturing. Apart from one paper in 1929, he published nothing in this period; but two sets of notes, dictated to groups of pupils and known respectively as The Blue Book and The Brown Book, were widely circulated, contrary to Wittgenstein’s wishes. Again, it is not too much to say that he inaugurated a new ‘school’, or perhaps rather a new method in philosophy - namely, that of which John Wisdom and Gilbert Ryle are the best known exponents, and which is often referred to as ‘the philosophy of ordinary language’. The point of view put forward in these notes diverges widely from that of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, though it is not difficult to see how the second grew out of the first. The way had been prepared for this new philosophical departure by the emphasis placed by G. E. Moore, who was at Cambridge, on ‘the language of common sense’.
In 1936 Wittgenstein left Cambridge and went to Norway, where it is said that he lived in a mountain hut, and from which he returned in 1938, after the fall of Vienna. In 1939 he succeeded G. E. Moore in the Cambridge Chair of Philosophy, and was also naturalized as a British citizen. He continued lecturing for a time, but in 1943 he went to work, first as a porter in a London hospital and afterwards as a research assistant. In 1945 he returned, but found that his teaching duties prevented him from doing creative writing, and in 1947 he resigned from his chair. The second book, however, which he had sacrificed so much to complete and publish (in order, as he said, to show how very wrong the Tractatus was), was not destined to appear. In 1949 he became seriously ill, of a disease from which he knew there could be no great hope of recovery, and retired from active life. He formed round him a small group of philosophers who were also his friends, with whom he worked and discussed to the last.
We are still too close to Wittgenstein to form a just estimate of his work. His Tractatus is a logical poem, consisting as it does of the development of a gigantic metaphor, constructed round two senses of ‘language’. It is thus an exceptionally difficult book to interpret with any reliability. His sets of notes, and his incomplete manuscript, also show, in the opinion of all who have read them, signs of indubitable genius; but Wittgenstein himself took all the steps in his power to prevent their being circulated on the ground that, if they were, they would be bound to be misunderstood. What is beyond doubt is that, like Descartes in one way, like Locke in another, he started a worldwide philosophical trend. In so far as this can be described in one sentence, it consists in following up the idea that thinking consists in using a language. Thus thought, which it had been easy to conceive of as a private, indefinable, amorphous entity, becomes the manipulation of some symbolism; something public, something which can be ‘nailed down’ and to which the techniques of formal logic can be applied.
Arnold Schoenberg
Beyond chromaticism
13 July 1951
Professor Arnold Schoenberg, who died on Friday at his home at Los Angeles at the age of 76, was probably the most discussed musician of the twentieth century.
His system of atonality, or, as he preferred to call it, twelve-tone music, though reached by process of evolution from chromaticism, was the most revolutionary movement in musical history since Monteverde in the seventeenth century. It is so subversive of established ways of thought that its general adoption is improbable in the extreme, but it has provided a ferment of far-reaching influence on modern music. In this respect, as in some others, Schoenberg is like Stravinsky; between 1910 and 1930 these two men were the outstanding figures in the history of modern music. Curiously enough, both suffered the same fate. At the height of his fame each was forced to leave his country and to adjust himself to new conditions.
Schoenberg was born in Vienna on September 13, 1874. At the age of eight he learnt to play the violin and composed short violin duets for his lessons. Later on he taught himself the cello and composed a string quartet. For several years he worked without any outside help or supervision. Alexander von Zemlinsky (whose daughter he married in 1901), a composer of whom Brahms had a very high opinion, recognized his outstanding talent, gave him his first instruction in composition and brought him into the musical circles of Vienna. Schoenberg’s earliest works were written in the style of Brahms, whose technique he admired, and later set as a model to his pupils when he was teaching composition himself.
The first work which Schoenberg made known to the musical world was a string sextet, Verklärte Nacht. It was an attempt to apply the symphonic form of a tone poem to chamber music. To the same period belong the Gurrelieder, a cantata for solo voices, chorus and orchestra written in 1900, a tone poem, Pelleas and Melisande, and a string quartet in D minor. A new development began with the Chamber-Symphony in E, opus 9, in 1906. Schoenberg’s style became concise, his harmonies more daring. It was these works which first roused the opposition of conservative musicians and the admiration of a younger generation who were trying to find new ways of expression. This aim was achieved in the three piano pieces, opus 11, 1909, written in the so-called ‘atonal style’ which aroused much discussion among musicians all over the world. At this time Schoenberg left Vienna and settled in Berlin. Here he wrote Pierrot Lunaire, a cycle of poems recited in a kind of song-speech accompanied by instruments. This work established Schoenberg’s fame as one of the leading modern composers. In 1913 he returned to Vienna to teach composition, and, after the end of the 1914–18 war, he founded a society for the performance of modern music. He embodied his technical principles in the Treatise on Harmony, begun in the early years of the century and since revised, but it is only recently in a volume of essays, Style and Idea, that he has discussed their aesthetic basis.
The years between 1920 and 1925 were the most prosperous in Schoenberg’s life. His works were performed regularly at the festivals of the International Music Society; his principal choral work, the Gurrelieder, aroused general admiration at a performance in his honour at the Vienna State Opera, and most conductors included his works in their programmes. He had now gained an international reputation. When Busoni died in 1924 in Berlin, Schoenberg succeeded him as a member of the Academy of the Arts, a position which should have given him financial independence for the rest of his life. After Hitler came to power, however, in 1933, he lost his position and accepted an offer from the Malkin Conservatory, Boston. He felt the change as a great shock. His health suffered from the eastern winter and he soon moved to Los Angeles, where he was appointed professor of music in the University of Southern California. Here he wrote a suite for string orchestra (1934), the fourth string quartet (1938), a violin concerto, a piano concerto, and the Ode to Napoleon. Schoenberg retired from his university post in 1944 at the age of 70, to spend the rest of his life in composing and teaching. He completed the opera Moses and Aaron, on which he had been working for many years, not long before he died. He had the satisfaction of seeing a revival of his works after the defeat of the Nazi regime and the re-establishment of his fame as one of the most inspiring innovators of contemporary music. His wife died in 1923 and he is survived by a son and a daughter.
Joseph Stalin
Dictator of Russia for 29 years
5 March 1953
The death of Stalin, like the death of Lenin 29 years ago, marks an epoch in Russian history. Rarely have two successive rulers of a great country responded so absolutely to its changing needs and piloted it so successfully through periods of crisis. Lenin was at the helm through five years of revolution, civil war, and precarious recovery. Stalin, coming to power in the aftermath of revolution, took up the task of organizing and disciplining the revolutionary state, and putting into execution the revolutionary programmes of planned industry and collectivized agriculture. He thus equipped the country to meet the gravest external peril which had threatened it since Napoleon, and brought it triumphantly through a four years’ ordeal of invasion and devastation. The characters of the two men present a contrast which corresponds to the different tasks confronting them. Lenin was an original thinker, an idealist, a superb revolutionary agitator. Stalin neither possessed, nor required, these qualities. He was essentially an administrator, an organizer and a politician. Both were ruthless in the pursuit of policies which they regarded as vital to the cause they had at heart. But Stalin appeared to lack a certain element of humanity which Lenin generally maintained in personal relations, though allied statesmen who dealt with him during the war were unanimous in finding him approachable, sympathetic, and readily disposed to moderate the intransigence of his subordinates. As the war drew to its close Stalin, whether for reasons of health or for reasons of policy, became less and less accessible to representatives of the western Powers and so the rift began which was to widen in the counsels of the United Nations and in the policies towards the west of Russia’s satellites, until the open warfare broke out in Korea which still festers and poisons the whole international scene.
A Man of Authority
Public Enthusiasm
In Russia and the adjacent Communist States Marshal Stalin at the time of his death occupied a position of personal eminence almost without parallel in the history of the world. His rare public appearances provoked scenes of tremendous enthusiasm; his speeches and writings on any subject – linguistics, the art of war, biology and history, as well as on the theory of Communism – were treated as virtually inspired texts and analysed in meticulous detail by hundreds of commentators. A quotation from the works of Stalin was the irrefutable end to any argument. The mere mention of his name at a political conference in any of the satellite States was sufficient to bring all present to their feet by a prolonged ovation. The Stalin legend became an integral part of the chain which united orthodox Communists all over the world. In appearance Stalin was grey; his hair grey and stiff as a badger’s; his nostrils and lower cheeks greyish white; his moustache, too, though in youth it had been richly brown and still showed some traces of that colour, was grey. He spoke softly, moved slowly, but his expression was quizzical, like a man enjoying a hidden joke, at times softening into abroad smile. Often as he spoke his look was oddly remote and withdrawn, the look of a man thinking through two or three processes at once. His expression was above all confident, without a trace of nerves; strong, calm or suddenly watchful in an amused kind of way. Tough, yet unathletic, dignified yet self-conscious, he dominated any group of which he formed a part for all his small stature.
Joseph Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili, known to the world as Stalin, one of his many revolutionary noms de guerre, was born at Gori, in Georgia, on December 21, 1879. His father, a cobbler of peasant origin, died when he was 11. Joseph was sent to the church school in his native town, where he remained until 1893. It was here that he learned to use Russian as an instrument of expression, since all ecclesiastical schools in Georgia at that time were the implements of the Tsarist policy of Russification. He emerged from the school at Gori sharply conscious of the suppression of Georgian nationalism and not unaware of the social inequalities and injustices prevailing in his native Georgia. Such feelings were never revealed however to the school staff, and in view of the fact that he was invariably the best pupil in his form, the head master and the local priest had no hesitation in recommending him for a scholarship at the seminary in Tiflis following upon his matriculation there in the autumn of 1894.
‘A Model Pupil’; Clandestine Socialist
In his early period at the seminary Dzhugashvili was a model pupil, able and diligent at his work, but towards the end of his first year, unbeknown to his tutors, he was already in contact with opposition groups in Tiflis and published some patriotic radical verses in the Liberal newspaper Iberya. His contact with radical groups in Tiflis, headed by former seminarists, continued to develop until finally in August, 1898, he joined the clandestine Socialist organization known as Mesamé-Dasi. Thenceforward he began to lead a kind of dual existence. His few leisure hours were spent in lecturing on Socialism to small groups of working men in Tiflis; discussion in a secret debating society, formed by himself inside the seminary, and the reading of radical books. This state of affairs eventually came to the notice of the seminary authorities and in May, 1899, the 20-year-old Dzhugashvili was expelled. He then embarked on a revolutionary career, but was faced with the immediate problem of employment. For a few months he made a little money giving lessons to the children of middle-class families and at the end of 1899 found a job as a clerk in the observatory at Tiflis – an occupation which seems to have afforded him much free time for political activity. He remained in this employment until March, 1901, when his political activities forced him to go underground completely.
In November, 1901, he was elected to membership of the Social Democratic committee of Tiflis and a few weeks later was sent to Batum, where he proceeded with the establishment of a vigorous clandestine organization and an illegal printing press. The influence of this organization, under his leadership, on the oil workers of Batum was so remarkable in its manifestations that ‘Koba’ (as Dzhugashvili was then known) was arrested, and imprisoned in the spring of 1902 as a dangerous agitator. From his exile in Siberia he escaped a few weeks later and reappeared in Tiflis to find that the great schism which divided the Social Democratic Party in 1903 had left the Mensheviks in virtual control of the Caucasian party. A few months after his return, with some hesitation, Koba took the side of Lenin and the Bolsheviks and proceeded to agitate energetically against the Mensheviks and other political groupings.
First Meeting with Lenin
Koba’s role during the ‘general rehearsal’ of 1905 was a local rather than a national one. Apart from organizing the ‘fighting squads’ (later to be a subject of considerable controversy within the party) and the editing of the newspaper Kavkaski Rabochi Listok (Caucasian Workers’ News-sheet), which enjoyed temporary legality, he continued to conduct a vigorous onslaught against the Mensheviks. When he attended the party conference in Tammerfors in December, 1905, as a delegate of the Caucasian Bolsheviks (a group of uncertain credentials, since most of the local leaders were Mensheviks), Koba emerged for the first time from the provincial arena of Caucasian politics into the atmosphere of a truly national gathering. Here, too, he first met Lenin. In the following year he attended the Stockholm Congress and in 1907 the London Party Congress as a Caucasian delegate, where he encountered Trotsky.
Soon after his return from the London Congress he was elected to membership of the Baku Committee, and it was in the oil wells of Baku that Stalin, on his testimony, first learned to lead great masses of workers. He was arrested in November, 1908, and deported to Vologda province. A few months later, however, he escaped and appeared again in the south, under the name of Melikyants. His period of freedom was brief, for he was re-arrested in March, 1910, and sent back to Vologda to complete his sentence of 1908. Released in June, 1911, he settled in Petersburg at the home of his future father-in-law, Alliluyev, although he had been forbidden to live in most large towns. In consequence, he was again arrested. Reaction was now at its height and the party fortunes at their lowest ebb. A small conference of Bolshevik stalwarts in Prague in January, 1912, coopted Stalin as a member of the central executive committee of the party; and on his escape a few weeks later he helped to found the new party journal Pravda in Petersburg.
A Turning-point
Lenin’s ‘Wonderful Georgian’
It was in the winter of 1912-13 that Stalin made his only extended visit abroad, spending some months with Lenin in Cracow and some time in Vienna. This was a turning-point in his career. Ten years earlier Lenin, in his famous pamphlet ‘What is to be Done?’ had first stated the case, on which he never ceased to insist, for a centrally directed party of professional revolutionaries, organized and disciplined in thought and deed, as the essential instrument of social revolution. Stalin had all the marks of Lenin’s ideal professional revolutionary: he was intrepid, orderly and orthodox. It was a further asset that though born a Georgian and a member of one of the ‘subject races’ Stalin had had no truck with separatist or ‘federalist’ ideas within the party and was an out-and-out ‘centralist’. Not for nothing therefore did Lenin at this time refer to Stalin in a letter to Maxim Gorky as ‘a wonderful Georgian’ who was writing an essay on the national question. The essay, eventually published under the title ‘Marxism and the National Question’ in a party journal, was an attack on the ‘national’ heresies of the Austrian Marxists Bauer and Renner and a statement of accepted Bolshevik doctrine, steering a cautious middle course between those who regarded any kind of nationalism as incompatible with international socialism and those who regarded nationalism as an essential element in it. It was the first of his writings to be signed by the name under which he was to become famous.
Back in Russia, Stalin underwent in February, 1913, his sixth and last imprisonment and exile. The revolution of February, 1917, released him, and he was probably the first member of the central committee of the party to reach Petersburg. In this capacity he temporarily took over the editorship of Pravda. This was the occasion of a short-lived deviation to which Stalin afterwards frankly confessed. In common with the other leading Bolsheviks then in the capital – excluding Molotov and Shlyapnikov – Stalin believed that the right tactics for the Bolsheviks were to support the provisional Government and rally to the defence of the fatherland; and this line, which would have assimilated the policy of the Bolsheviks to that of the Social-Democratic parties of the Second International, was taken editorially in Pravda. Lenin, chafing inactively in Switzerland, denounced in his ‘Letters from Afar’ the weak-kneed Bolsheviks of the capital. When later he reached Petrograd in the sealed train and propounded his famous ‘April theses’ of no cooperation with the provisional Government or with any policy that would keep Russia in the war, he quickly rallied his faltering party, and geared it for the second revolution. Thereafter Stalin remained a faithful and undeviating disciple.
1917 Revolution
Enhanced Status in the Party
The difficulty for the biographer of this as of the earlier period of Stalin’s life is to disentangle the authentic contemporary evidence from the mass of more recent and largely apocryphal accretions. It seems that he first became a figure familiar to party cadres at the time of his election to a new central committee of nine members in April, 1917, and after the difficult July days, when Lenin and Zinoviev were compelled to retreat to Finland and Kamenev, Trotsky and others were arrested, Stalin emerged to lead the party. On their return to the political scene, he retired again into the shadows. While there is but little information relating to any participation by him in the work of the Revolutionary Military Committee during the actual rising, he nevertheless undoubtedly performed an important function in the editorial office of Pravda. He supported Lenin against Zinoviev and Kamenev in the controversy over the preparation and timing of the October revolution and against Trotsky over Brest-Litovsk; and though his interventions recorded in the minutes of the central committee were on both occasions brief and inconspicuous, his fidelity to Lenin in these troubled times must have won the gratitude of the leader and greatly enhanced his status in the party. He was appointed People’s Commissar for Nationalities in October, 1917, and in this capacity one of his first measures was to proclaim Finland’s independence from Russia, at a conference in Helsinki. In spite of the opposition of elements within the party, who regarded this as an unwarranted concession to bourgeois nationalism, the decree was officially signed by Lenin and Stalin in December. He also played an active part in the drafting of the 1918 constitution of the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic and he was still more closely concerned four years later in framing the federal constitution of the Union of Socialist Soviet Republics.
Breach with Trotsky
The civil war provided fresh scope for Stalin’s unflagging energy and undoubted administrative talents. That the civil war provided the occasion of Stalin’s first open breach with Trotsky; that Stalin and Voroshilov intrigued busily against Trotsky, criticizing both his disposition of his armies and his use of former Tsarist officers; that recriminations flared up to a dangerous point over the defence of Tsaritsin (renamed Stalingrad some years later) against Denikin; that Lenin tried to smooth over these animosities and to retain the services of two invaluable though quarrelsome lieutenants – so much is clear. But the historian of the future may well find it a superhuman task to extract the grain of truth from the chaff of subsequent controversy and the haystack of misrepresentation beneath which Trotsky’s achievements have been hidden. For the rest Stalin’s name figures little in the literature of the period. At any time up to 1922 the general impression which he made on his colleagues was apparently one of undistinguished competence; though admitted to the first rank of Bolshevik leaders he seemed the least remarkable of them, the most lacking in personality. But his capacity for hard and regular work more than balanced the more spectacular talents of his rivals, and indeed it could not have escaped the notice of a few that Stalin’s influence in the state and his hold on the party machine had grown enormously. At the end of the civil war he filled three significant posts: membership of the Politburo, Commissar of Nationalities, and Commissar for Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspection (Rabkrin).
In March, 1922, he was appointed Secretary-General of the party – a newly created post obviously suited to his rather pedestrian gifts. Though not regarded by anyone as a potential stepping-stone to supreme power, nevertheless this post, considered in conjunction with his other spheres of influence, rendered his personal position most formidable. Although Lenin still held the reins, Stalin’s influence was becoming comparable to that of Lenin. In May of the same year Lenin had a first stroke from which he recovered, temporarily and incompletely, to be finally stricken by a second in March, 1923. From this moment, though Lenin lingered on, totally incapacitated, till January, 1924, the succession was open. Had anyone seriously canvassed Stalin’s chances, a letter from Lenin to the central committee of the party – commonly, though unwarrantably, known as Lenin’s testament – might have seemed a decisive obstacle. Writing at the end of December, 1922, with a postscript of January 4, 1923, Lenin who evidently knew that his days were numbered, passed in review the principal party leaders. He noted that Stalin since he had become Secretary-General had ‘concentrated in his hands an immense power’, and expressed the fear that he might not always use it prudently. He described Stalin as ‘too rough,’ and proposed that he should be replaced by someone ‘more patient, more loyal, more polite, more attentive to the comrades, less capricious, &c.’ Fortunately for Stalin, the letter also treated Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin with scant respect, so that there was a powerful interest in limiting its circulation – though it was familiar to all members of the central committee, and its authenticity has never been contested. But Stalin must be credited with extraordinary skill in surmounting so formidable an obstacle. When the twelfth party congress met in April, 1923, Lenin was known, though not yet publicly admitted, to be past recovery. The talk was of a group of three (‘troika’) to take over his authority; and the names of Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin were freely mentioned. Stalin, with consummate tact, defended Zinoviev and Kamenev rather than himself from attacks made jointly on all three of them. Trotsky was gradually edged on one side. Attacks on him for undermining the unity of the party began in the autumn of that year.
The year 1924 was decisive for Stalin’s ascent to power. During this year he for the first time exhibited to the full that amazing political dexterity which made all his rivals look like bunglers and amateurs. In the first place he brought about what may not unfairly be called the ‘canonization’ of Lenin. From the moment of Lenin’s death, and almost entirely as the result of Stalin’s initiative, every word that Lenin had uttered or written came to be treated as sacrosanct – as Lenin himself had treated the works of Marx and Engels; and everyone who had differed from him was now suspect not merely as a heretic in the past, but as a potential heretic in the future. This weapon was aimed primarily at Trotsky, whose impetuous character and long record of past bickerings with Lenin made him highly vulnerable. But it could also serve against Zinoviev and Kamenev, who had more than once been severely castigated by Lenin for their backslidings. Stalin had been too prudent or not conspicuous enough to come under the lash – except in the unofficial ‘testament’ now being gradually consigned to oblivion. This was a negative asset. But immense pains were taken, both at this time and afterwards, to build up a positive picture of Stalin as Lenin’s ablest coadjutor, most faithful disciple, and chosen political executor.
Control of Party Machine Power Strengthened
Secondly, Stalin, well aware of the prestige attaching in the party to the master of Marxist theory, set out to establish his credentials in that field. In the spring of 1924 he delivered at the Sverdlov University in Moscow a course of lectures on ‘The Foundations of Leninism’ – a competent exposition of the development and application by Lenin of Marxist doctrine. He went on to take the offensive against Trotsky. In the lectures themselves he had followed the usual view that the ultimate success of the Russian revolution depended on the spread of revolution elsewhere in Europe. But the revolutionary failures of 1923 in Germany suggested that this consummation was remote; and the new international status of the Soviet Union, which had been recognized in 1924 by all the principal Powers except the United States, made the encouragement of world revolution an increasingly inconvenient policy. At the end of 1924 Stalin issued a revised edition of his lectures in which he proclaimed the doctrine of ‘Socialism in one country’. Trotsky could thus be branded as an internationalist, a champion of the outmoded slogan of ‘permanent revolution’.
Thirdly, Stalin strengthened his control of the party machine and discovered how to use it for the discomfiture of his enemies. As Secretary-General he was already master of all promotions and appointments to key positions in the party. Lenin’s memory was now honoured by the admission of a large number of new members; and this admission, managed by Stalin and his supporters, brought a mass of recruits to the new orthodoxy. Whatever opinions were held among the leaders the weight of numbers must begin to tell. Before long Trotsky was being shouted down at party meetings by enthusiastic young Stalinists.
Trotsky’s Expulsion
By January, 1925, the campaign against Trotsky had gathered sufficient momentum to permit of his deposition from his office as People’s Commissar for War. Before the end of the year Zinoviev and Kamenev, taking fright at Stalin’s growing power, were seeking a rapprochement with Trotsky. But the move came too late to save them. In 1926 Stalin secured a condemnation of Trotskyites and Zinovievites alike both by a party conference and by the Comintern; and in November, 1927, Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev were formally expelled from the party. Two months later Trotsky was forcibly removed from Moscow and sent to Alma-Ata in central Asia. He was finally expelled from Russia in January, 1929.
In the struggle thus concluded personal rivalries had been intertwined not only with the issue of foreign policy already referred to but with internal political controversies. Trotsky had always been an advocate of industrialization and planning. Stalin opened the campaign against him with the nep slogans of conciliating the peasant and with the charge, repeated and illustrated ad nauseam, that Trotsky was guilty of ‘underestimating the peasant’. But Stalin soon saw the dangers of going too far, and from the end of 1925 onwards cleverly steered a middle course between the ‘left’ opposition of Trotsky and Zinoviev, who were accused of ignoring the peasant, and the ‘right’ opposition of Rykov and Bukharin, who exaggerated the policy of appeasing the peasant.
After the rout of Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, Stalin’s position was not yet supreme in the Politburo. He still had to deal with the ‘right’ opposition of Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky. Contrary to the prophecies of the recently defeated opposition, the influence of the Bukharin group did not overshadow that of Stalin. The fifteenth Congress elected a new Politburo of nine and in the new line-up Stalin had a majority of votes, among them Kaganovich and Mikoyan. The flaring up of conflicting forces inside the Politburo did not come until 1928, when in view of the grain famine ‘emergency measures’ were instituted by the Politburo, resulting in Stalin’s call for ‘the elimination of the kulaks as a class’. Although in the councils of the Politburo these measures were opposed by Bukharin and his group, it was not until April, 1929, that Stalin openly denounced Bukharin as the leader of the ‘right’ opposition to his policy in the countryside. Soon after, Bukharin, Rykov, and Tomsky were excluded from the Politburo and other significant posts. Stalin’s ascendancy in the Politburo was now complete, and from this moment he was recognized as the virtual ruler of the Soviet Union – a position consecrated by the unusual demonstrations with which his fiftieth birthday was celebrated in December, 1929. At the very moment of Trotsky’s expulsion Stalin was preparing a powerful swing-over towards industrialization. The first Five-year Plan was launched by him in 1928. Its inevitable concomitant, the collectivization of agriculture, though not seriously taken in hand till 1931, had been on the party agenda since the end of 1927. Throughout this period, though mistakes were made (notably in the estimate of the pace at which collectivization could be carried out), Stalin’s sense of timing was on the whole superb. Few, if any, of the policies which he applied were original to himself; but he was unique in his sense of when to act and when to wait.
In the middle thirties, with industrialization well on the way and collectivization a fait accompli, the Soviet Union may well have seemed to be sailing out into smoother waters. The second Five-year Plan promised an increased output of consumer goods. Stalin’s public pronouncements assumed a more optimistic tone, and he may well have originally conceived the ‘Stalin constitution’, promulgated in 1936, as the crown of his work. Socialism had been achieved; the road to Communism, however distant the goal, lay open; increased material prosperity and broader constitutional liberties were a vision of the immediate future. These expectations, if they were entertained, were not fulfilled. In the middle thirties the Soviet Union entered a new period of storm and stress. The murder of Kirov at the end of 1934 was the symptom or starting-point of a grave internal crisis; and in international affairs Germany regained her power in a form particularly menacing to the Soviet Union. The internal crisis was obscure, the evidence relating to it contentious, and it was dealt with by methods which left a lasting cloud on Stalin’s name. The growing-pains of collective farming, the liquidation of the kulaks, the need – in face of the Nazi menace – to increase the pace of industrialization had all imposed severe strains on the population and bred discontent, sometimes in high places. Stalin decided to strike hard. In the panic which followed old scores were paid off and new grudges indulged, and things probably went a good deal farther than Stalin or anyone else intended at the start.
Treason Trials
In 1935 and 1936 successive trials were held in which all those prominent Bolsheviks who had at one time or another been implicated in ‘Trotskyism’ or other forms of opposition to the regime – Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Bukharin among them – were condemned and shot for self-confessed treason. In 1937 a number of the leading generals were shot on similar charges without public trial. Of the leading Bolsheviks of the first generation hardly any survived except Stalin, Molotov, and Voroshilov. In 1938 the purge was at last stayed. Yagoda, long the head of the gpu and its successor the nkvd, who had been removed from office at the end of 1936, was now himself executed; and Yezhov, his successor, formerly an influential party leader, disappeared from the scene about the same time. Judgment on the purge will depend partly on the amount of credence given to reports and confessions of active treason on the part of the accused; and it has to be admitted that the Soviet polity afterwards survived the almost intolerable strains of war with fewer breaks and fissures than most observers had been prepared to predict. Nevertheless it is certain that the damage done by the purges to Soviet prestige in the west was a fatal handicap to the foreign policy of a common defensive front with the western Powers to which Soviet diplomacy was at that time committed. This was probably the gravest and most disastrous miscalculation of that period.
Munich and After
Treaty with the Nazis
Soviet foreign policy in the thirties, as much as Soviet domestic policy, was clearly Stalin’s creation. He had long been by inclination a Soviet nationalist rather than an internationalist; and now that he was firmly established in the seat of power he was unlikely to shrink from any of the implications of ‘Socialism in one country’. Faced by the German menace, he executed without embarrassment the ideological change of front necessary to bring the Soviet Union into the League of Nations and to conclude treaties of alliance with France and Czechoslovakia. In the end it was not lack of Soviet good will that defeated this project, but the weakness of France and what appeared to Soviet eyes as a dual policy on the part of Great Britain. So long as Great Britain could be suspected of hesitating between a deal with Germany and a common front against her, Stalin on his side would equally keep both doors open. Munich, though a severe shock to prospects of cooperation, was partly offset by British rearmament, and the riddle of British policy was unsolved throughout the winter. On March 10, 1939, at the eighteenth party congress Stalin gave what was doubtless intended as a note of warning that Soviet policy was ‘not to allow our country to be drawn into conflicts by war-mongers’. But his speech was overtaken by the march of events.
It was Hitler’s seizure of Prague in the middle of March which fired the train. Great Britain now prepared feverishly for war and sought for allies in the east. Two alternatives were still open to her. She could have an alliance with the Soviet Union at the price of accepting Soviet policy in Eastern Europe – in Poland, in Rumania, in the Baltic States; or she could have alliances with the anti-Soviet Governments of these countries at the price of driving the Soviet Union into the hostile camp. British diplomacy was too simple-minded, and too ignorant of eastern Europe, to understand the hard choice before it. It plunged impetuously into the pacts of guarantee with Poland and Rumania; and within a few days, on May 3, 1939, the resignation of Litvinov and his replacement by Molotov signalled a vital change in Soviet foreign policy. The British mission which had been sent to Moscow found itself unable to make any progress. Negotiations continued; but unless Great Britain was prepared to abandon the Polish alliance, or put severe pressure on her new ally, their eventual break-down was certain. When Hitler decided to wait no longer, Stalin for his part did not hesitate. Ribbentrop came to Moscow and the German-Soviet treaty was signed. It is fair to infer that Stalin regarded it as a pis aller. He would have preferred alliance with the western Powers, but could not have it on any terms which he would have found tolerable.
Uneasy Neutrality
Twenty-two months of most uneasy neutrality followed. The German advance in Poland was answered by a corresponding Soviet move to reoccupy the White Russian territories ceded to Poland by the treaty of Riga in 1921. Thus, by the autumn of 1939, Soviet and German power already confronted each other in Poland, on the Danube, and on the Baltic. The war against Finland in the winter of 1939-40 was designed to strengthen the defences of Leningrad by pushing forward the frontier in a westerly direction. It eventually achieved this object, but at the cost of much discredit to Soviet prestige and the formal expulsion of the Soviet Union from the League of Nations.
After the fall of France, Soviet fears of German victory and German predominance grew apace; and military and industrial preparations were pressed forward. Stalin now probably foresaw the inevitability of conflict, but was determined not to provoke or hasten it. In November, 1940, he sent Molotov on a visit to Berlin without being able to mitigate the palpable clash of interests. On the other hand, Japanese neutrality was assured when Matsuoka was effusively received in Moscow in April, 1941. In the following month Stalin, hitherto only Secretary-General of the party and without official rank, became President of the Council of People’s Commissars – the Soviet Prime Minister. The appointment sounded a note of alarm at home and of warning abroad.
Russia at War
Heavy Burden of Responsibility
The German invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, and the almost immediate threat to the capital placed on Stalin’s shoulders an enormous weight of anxiety and responsibility. From the outset, the supreme direction of the war effort and defence organization became vested in the State Defence Committee consisting of five members – Stalin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Beria, and Malenkov, with Stalin as chairman, though it was not till March, 1943, that he assumed the rank of marshal, and later of generalissimo. During the war his customary public speeches on May 1 and on the eve of November 7 took the form of large-scale reviews of military operations and war policy. He was also active in a diplomatic role. Before the war Stalin had been almost entirely inaccessible to foreigners. Now, apart from regular conversations with the allied Ambassadors, he received a constant flow of distinguished visitors. Lord Beaverbrook and Mr Harriman were in Moscow in August, 1941, to organize supplies from the west; Mr Churchill came in August, 1942, and again, with Mr Eden, in October, 1944. In December, 1943, Stalin met President Roosevelt and Mr Churchill at Teheran, and in February, 1945, at Yalta. The last meeting of the Big Three, with Mr Truman succeeding Roosevelt and Mr Attlee replacing Mr Churchill in the middle of the proceedings, took place at Potsdam in July, 1945.
Among his diplomatic activities Stalin was particularly concerned with the perennial problem of Soviet-Polish relations. By dint of much patience he eventually secured the recognition of the new Polish Government by his allies, and the acceptance by them as the frontier, between the Soviet Union and Poland, of the so-called ‘Curzon line’ originally drawn by the Allied and Associated Powers at the Paris peace conference of 1919. He worked untiringly to secure for his country that place of undisputed equality with the other Great Powers to which its achievements and sacrifices in the war entitled it.
Domestic Policy
Comintern and Church
Two striking decisions of domestic policy during the war – the disbandment of Comintern and the renewed recognition of the Orthodox Church – were undoubtedly taken by Stalin out of deference for allied opinion; but they were in line with this long-standing inclination, accentuated by the war, to give precedence to national over ideological considerations. The reforms of 1944 which accorded separate armies and separate rights of diplomatic representation abroad to the major constituent republics of the Soviet Union were perhaps partly designed to secure to the Ukraine and White Russia independent membership and voting power in the United Nations. When the war ended Stalin was in his sixty-sixth year. A holiday of two-and-a-half months in the autumn of 1945 at Sochi on the Black Sea produced the usual crop of rumours, but was no more than a merited and necessary respite from the burden of public affairs. In December he was back in Moscow for the visit of Mr Bevin and Mr Byrnes. Thenceforward there were few personal contacts between Stalin and representatives of the western Powers. In February, 1946, he took part in the elections to the Supreme Soviet, making the principal campaign speech, in which he forecast an early end of bread rationing – a hope which was defeated by the bad harvest. He also declared that it was the intention of the Soviet Communist Party to organize a new effort in the economic field, the aim of which would be to treble pre-war production figures. Although advanced in years, Stalin still continued to hold the reins of power and in March, 1946, he was again confirmed as Secretary of the central committee of the party. In the same year the State Publishing House began publication of a collected edition of his works.
Growing Mistrust
The unparalleled popularity in the non-Communist world with which the Russian people in general, and Marshal Stalin in particular, had emerged from the war thus early gave place to mistrust. It had been hoped that the pre-war doctrine which was associated with Stalin’s name, of ‘socialism in one country’, would provide the basis for peaceful coexistence in the post-war period. Stalin’s own comments on international affairs sometimes tended to confirm, and sometimes to deny, this prospect. Thus in answer to questions put to him by the Moscow correspondent of the Sunday Times in September, 1946, Stalin declared that, in spite of ideological differences, he believed in the possibility of lasting cooperation between the Soviet Union and the western democracies, and that Communism in one country was perfectly possible. This provoked worldwide interest and was regarded as a welcome statement, contributing much to the easing of growing international tension. A month later, however, in reply to questions sent to him by the United Press of America, he asserted that in his opinion ‘the incendiaries of a new war’, naming several prominent British and American statesmen, constituted the most serious threat to world peace, and thus destroyed the earlier good impression.
Russia’s post-war policy towards her neighbours did nothing to confirm Stalin’s peaceful protestations. The independent Baltic States, Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, had already been incorporated in Russia in 1940. Finland and Bulgaria were compelled to surrender territory to Russia as the price of defeat, and Poland suffered even greater amputations as the reward of victory. In the Far East Russia claimed North Sakhalin and the Kurilles Islands as her price for taking part in the war against Japan. In all the countries which had been overrun by the Red Army it was only a question of time before a Communist regime had been set up and its opponents liquidated. By the middle of 1948 the borders of Communism stretched from the Elbe to the Adriatic. A year later Communism had triumphed in China. Stalin controlled the destinies of an empire far larger than any Tsar had ever dreamed of.
It was the coup d’état in Prague in February, 1948, which finally forced western Europe and North America into action for their common defence. The North-Atlantic Treaty was signed in April, 1949. But even before then the west had successfully met another outward thrust by Russia. It was in June, 1948, that the air-lift began which nullified the effects of the blockade of Berlin. Stalin remained, as always, in the background during this period of dynamic Russian expansion. It was only rarely that he received a foreign diplomat, though leaders of the satellite States naturally had readier access to him. From time to time the suggestion was made for a new conference between Stalin, the American President and the British Prime Minister, but none of them came to anything. It was in 1946 that President Truman disclosed that he had invited Stalin to Washington for a social visit, but that Stalin had found it necessary to decline for reasons of health. In the last interview which he gave to a foreign correspondent (to the representative of the New York Times in December last year) he indicated that he held a favourable view of proposals for talks between himself and the head of the new American Administration, President Eisenhower, and that he was interested in any new diplomatic move to end hostilities in Korea. President Eisenhower declared his willingness last month to hold a meeting with Stalin in certain circumstances, and Mr Churchill subsequently told the House of Commons that he did not rule out the possibility of three-cornered discussions.
Stalin’s New Role: Economic Theorist
It was in the last year of his life that Stalin appeared in a role which would have surprised former colleagues, such as Lenin and Trotsky, but which therefore may well have given him most pride – as an economic theorist in the tradition of (and not less important than) Marx, Engels and Lenin. Shortly before the nineteenth congress of the Russian Communist Party, which was held in Moscow in October, 1952 – the first congress since 1939 – Stalin published his Economic Problems of Socialism in the ussr, which has since become the definitive text-book for Communists in all countries. In this work he warned his readers that, for all Russia’s successes in building a new society, it was wrong to think that the natural economic laws did not apply as much in Russia as elsewhere. He also forecast a deepening crisis of capitalism, that west European countries would dissociate themselves from the United States, and that war between these capitalist countries was inevitable. He also outlined a programme of basic preliminary conditions necessary for the transition to Communism in the Soviet Union. At the Congress there was a reorganization of party organs – the Politburo and the Orgburo being brought together in a single body, the Praesidium of the Central Committee, of which Stalin became chairman.
On the occasion of his seventieth birthday in December, 1949, there were widespread celebrations throughout the Soviet Union and busts of Stalin were erected on 38 of the highest peaks in the Soviet Union. It marked, too, the inauguration of international Stalin peace prizes, to be awarded each year on his birthday. On March 3, 1953, it was announced by Moscow radio that Stalin was gravely ill as the result of a haemorrhage, that he had lost consciousness and speech, and that he would take no part in leading activity for a prolonged period.
Only a few details are known of Stalin’s personal life. In 1903 he married Yekaterina Svanidze, a profoundly religious woman and the sister of a Georgian comrade, who left him a son, Yasha, when she died in 1907 of pneumonia. His second wife, whom he married in 1918 – Nadezhda Alliluyeva – was 20 years younger than himself and was the daughter of a Bolshevik worker, with whom Stalin had contacts in both the Caucasus and St Petersburg. She was formerly one of Lenin’s secretaries and later studied at a technical college in Moscow. This marriage, too, ended with the death of his wife, in November, 1932. She left him two children – a daughter, Svetlana, and a son, Vassili, now a high ranking officer in the Soviet Air Force. Late in life he married Rosa Kaganovich, the sister of Lazar Kaganovich, a member of the Politburo.
Alan Turing
7 June 1954
Dr Alan Mathison Turing, obe, frs, whose death at the age of 41 has already been reported, was born on June 23, 1912, the son of Julius Mathison Turing. He was educated at Sherborne School and at King’s College, Cambridge, of which he was elected a Fellow in 1935. He was appointed obe in 1941 for wartime services in the Foreign Office and was elected frs in 1951. Until 1939 he was a pure mathematician and logician, but after the war most of his work was connected with the design and use of automatic computing machines, first at the National Physical Laboratory and then since 1948 at Manchester University, where he was a Reader at the time of his death.
The discovery which will give Turing a permanent place in mathematical logic was made not long after he had graduated. This was his proof that (contrary to the then prevailing view of Hilbert and his school at Göttingen) there are classes of mathematical problem which cannot be solved by any fixed and definite process. The crucial step in his proof was to clarify the notion of a ‘definite process’, which he interpreted as ‘something that could be done by an automatic machine’. Although other proofs of insolubility were published at about the same time by other authors, the ‘Turing machine’ has remained the most vivid, and in many ways the most convincing, interpretation of these essentially equivalent theories. The description that he then gave of a ‘universal’ computing machine was entirely theoretical in purpose, but Turing’s strong interest in all kinds of practical experiment made him even then interested in the possibility of actually constructing a machine on these lines.
It was natural at the end of the war for him to accept an invitation to work at the National Physical Laboratory on the development of the ace, the first large computer to be begun in this country. He threw himself into the work with enthusiasm, thoroughly enjoying the rapid alternation of abstract questions of design with problems of practical engineering. Later at Manchester he devoted himself more particularly to problems arising out of the use of the machine. It was at this time that he became involved in discussions on the contrasts and similarities between machines and brains. Turing’s view, expressed with great force and wit, was that it was for those who saw an unbridgeable gap between the two to say just where the difference lay.
The war interrupted Turing’s mathematical career for the six critical years between the age of 27 and 33. A mathematical theory of the chemical basis of organic growth which he had lately started to develop has been tragically interrupted, and must remain a fragment. Important though his contributions to logic have been, few who have known him personally can doubt that, with his deep insight into the principles of mathematics and of natural science, and his brilliant originality, he would, but for these accidents, have made much greater discoveries.
Henri Matisse
A master of modern French painting
3 November 1954
M. Henri Matisse, one of the most outstanding representatives of the modern French school of painting, died on Wednesday at his home at Nice. He was 84, and had been in poor health for several years.
Partly, if not chiefly, because they were both subject to the same indiscriminate abuse from artistic ‘diehards’ in England, M. Henri Matisse and Señor Pablo Picasso were closely connected in the public mind. In reality they had not very much in common, though they were associated in their first departure from academic art. To some extent they were complementary, and Matisse was weak where Picasso is strong, and the other way about. Of the two Matisse was the less intellectual, and he had not the range and depth or the inventiveness and versatility of the Spaniard but it is questionable if he had not more of the special sensibility of the painter as distinct from other kinds of creative artist. His colour was enchanting and his handling of paint was masterly.
Henri Matisse, who is said to have had some Jewish blood, was a Norman, the son of a grain merchant in a small way, and was born at Le Cateau Nord, on December 31, 1869. His father wanted him to become a lawyer and put him into the office of a legal friend to pick up what knowledge he could before entering a law school. But after about a year the boy got appendicitis, and during his long convalescence at home he took up painting at the suggestion of a neighbour who had seen him sketching. The result was that when he was 20 Matisse went to Paris, where he entered the Ecole des Beaux Arts and studied under Bouguereau. When he was 24 he married Mlle Amelie Noellie Parayre, and before long he had a young family of a daughter and two sons. Times were hard, but besides being an excellent housewife Mme Matisse opened a small millinery shop to help out the family income.
Then Gustave Moreau, the ‘mystical’ painter, who may be said to have started the cult of ‘Salome’, saw Matisse working in the Louvre, making copies of pictures there, and invited him to study in his own studio at the Ecole des Beaux Arts which was destined to become a nursery of young rebels, the fellow pupils of Matisse including Rouault and Dufy. In 1897 Matisse met the veteran Camille Pissarro and for a time worked as successfully as an Impressionist as he had as a copyist of old masters in the Louvre. On the advice of Pissarro in 1898 Matisse visited London to study Turner. Matisse was not greatly impressed by Turner, which was not surprising, because the acute interest in Paris had shifted from Impressionism, but he heard about Whistler and his Japanese prints. On his return to Paris he began to study oriental art systematically, and after a visit to Corsica, where he stayed a year, he went to Munich to see an exhibition of Moslem art, which confirmed his impression of the decorative values of the East.
‘Les Fauves’
Up to now, though he was experimenting, Matisse had not kicked over the traces. He was exhibiting regularly at the official Salon, and in 1904 the dealer Vollard, from whom he had bought Cézanne’s ‘Bathers’ to hang in his studio, gave him a one-man show of nearly 50 pictures. The explosion came at the Autumn Salon of 1905. For this exhibition Matisse organized a collection of works by the more advanced painters, including himself, Derain, Braque, Rouault, and Vlaminck, and these were hung in a room by themselves. An indignant critic, Louis Vauxcelles, writing in Gil Blas, called the room a ‘cage aux Fauves’ or ‘cage of wild beasts’, and the name stuck. Beyond distortion or deformation of natural appearance in the interests of design and vehemence in statement, the Fauves had no common doctrine. Fauvism, in fact, might be described as a violent wrenching away of the picture from literal representation.
A picture that came in for special abuse was Matisse’s ‘Woman with a Hat’. This, for which Mme Matisse was the model, was bought by the American writer Miss Gertrude Stein, who was doing useful propaganda for the rebels. In 1906 she introduced Matisse to Picasso, who was then painting her portrait. Matisse was now celebrated. The Galerie Druet gave him a big one-man show, and in 1908 he was introduced to the American public by Alfred Steiglitz.
Fauvism in Paris was followed by Cubism, which was originated by Picasso and Braque. Matisse is credited with the invention of the name, but he does not appear to have more than flirted with Cubism, though it was he who introduced Negro sculpture to Picasso. The truth seems to be that Matisse was too much of a painter in the special sense of the word to be greatly interested in geometrical abstraction. After 1908, when, refusing to take any fees, he taught for a short time at a school in Paris opened by his friends and supporters, Matisse did not greatly change his style. He spent two years in Morocco, stayed various times at Saint Tropez, Cassis and Collioure, and travelled in America, Tahiti, Italy, and Russia. In 1917 he took a villa at Nice, where he remained more or less for the rest of his life.
Visit to America
On his first visit to America Matisse was violently attacked and accused of obscenity in his work, so that he begged an interviewer, ‘Oh please do tell the American people that I am a normal man; that I am a devoted husband and father; that I have three fine children; that I go to the theatre, ride horse-back, have a comfortable home, a fine garden that I love, flowers, &c., just like any man’, and this self-description tallies with the impressions of an English observer who described Matisse as a quiet, sensible, bourgeois gentleman, without pose or affectation. America, too, revised its opinion, for in 1927 Matisse received a first prize at the Carnegie International, and a year or two later the Carnegie Institute invited him to be a judge in its competition.
Besides being a painter Matisse was an etcher, lithographer, and wood-engraver, and he produced a good many works of sculpture. He illustrated the poems of Mallarmé and an edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses, published by the Limited Edition Club, New York, in 1935. His work is known all over the world, the largest collections being in the Moscow Museum of Western Art and the Barnes Foundation, Pennsylvania. Matisse, who is represented at the Tate Gallery by ‘Le Forêt’ and ‘Nude’, both bequeathed by Mr C. Frank Stoop in 1933, was included in both the Post-Impressionist exhibitions at the Grafton Galleries in 1910 and 1911, and in 1937 there was a very extensive exhibition of his work at the Rosenberg and Helft Gallery in London.
Though he was already well known in artistic circles in London, it was not until 1945 that Matisse really got ‘into the news’. In the December of that year an exhibition of works by Picasso and Matisse, arranged by La Direction Générale des Relations Culturelles and the British Council, was opened by the French Ambassador at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Criticism began mildly enough with a letter to The Times, signed by Professor Thomas Bodkin and Dr D. S. MacColl, to the effect that the war-diminished space in our galleries and museums should be devoted to the exhibition of their own historical treasures rather than to the works of two contemporary foreign painters of highly disputable merit. There followed in The Times a spate of correspondence for and against, many of the blows aimed at Picasso falling upon Matisse. Red herrings were strewn, but the discussion as a whole ranged round the perennial question of the distortion of natural appearance under emotion and in the interests of pictorial design.
In 1947 Matisse offered to design and build a chapel for the Dominicans of Vence, and this was consecrated in 1951. An architect built it on a plan suggested by the artist and inside Matisse painted three large compositions in black on white ceramic tiles. Last year there was an exhibition of his sculptures at the Tate Gallery, and he was honoured by the National Arts Foundation in New York as an ‘outstanding artist of 1953’. Matisse was a member of the French Communist Party, but his standing with the Communists in recent years was unclear. Criticism came from Russia of his chapel at Vence, and in 1952 the French Communist Party was reported to be considering his expulsion for not falling into line with Moscow’s instructions that art must be ‘realistic and depict Communist ideals’.
There can be no doubt about Matisse’s technical competence as a painter, but graceful as they are, his innumerable ‘Odalisques’ in Mediterranean interiors may to some minds end by becoming rather boring. Matisse himself said: ‘While working, I never try to think, only to feel.’ That is enough to explain his distortions, perhaps also his defects. As a colourist he was something more than decorative, because he had in high degree the rare capacity to establish the position of objects in the depth of the picture by the relations between colours, without the aid of linear or atmospheric perspective.
Sir Alexander Fleming
Discoverer of penicillin
11 March 1955
Sir Alexander Fleming, d.sc, mb, frcp, frcs, frs, the discoverer of penicillin, died suddenly yesterday at his home in London of a heart attack at the age of 73.
Alexander Fleming, the son of a farmer, was born at Lochfield, near Darvel, in Ayrshire, on August 6, 1881. He received his early education at the village school and at Kilmarnock Academy. At 13 years of age he was sent to live with his brother in London, where, for the next two or three years, he continued his education by attending the Polytechnic Institute in Regent Street. At that time he displayed no particular scientific ability nor felt any urge to be a doctor. For some years he worked in a shipping office in Leadenhall Street, but he found office routine deadly dull and after four years in the City a small legacy enabled him to escape. The brother with whom he was living had already taken his medical degree and he encouraged his younger brother to take up medicine. Thus at the age of 20 he became a student at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School, winning the senior entrance scholarship in natural science. He showed that he had found his true bent by winning almost every class prize and scholarship during his student career. He qualified in 1906 and at the mb, bs examination of London University in 1908 he obtained honours and was awarded a gold medal.
In 1909 he became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons. In 1906 he had begun to assist Sir Almroth Wright in the inoculation department at St Mary’s Hospital, and this association led to his taking up the study of bacteriology. Under the stimulating influence of Wright, who was at that time engaged in his researches on the opsonic theory, he acquired great experience and skill in bacteriological technique and in clinical pathology. For recreation he attended the drills and parades of the London Scottish, which he had joined as a private in the year before he resigned from his post with the shipping company. For some years he went to the annual camp and, being a fair shot, to the meetings at Bisley. On the outbreak of war in 1914 he resigned from the London Scottish so that he could go to France as a captain in the ramc. He worked in Sir Almroth Wright’s laboratory in the Casino at Boulogne and received a mention in dispatches. At the end of the war he returned to St Mary’s as assistant to Sir Almroth Wright and was also appointed lecturer in bacteriology in the medical school. He subsequently became director of the department of systematic bacteriology and assistant director of the inoculation department. For some years he acted as pathologist to the venereal disease department at St Mary’s and was also pathologist to the London Lock Hospital. In 1928 he was appointed Professor of Bacteriology in the University of London, the post being tenable at St Mary’s. He retired with the title emeritus in 1948, but continued at St Mary’s as head of the Wright-Fleming Institute of Micro-Biology. Though last year he formally handed over the reins to Professor R. Cruikshank, he continued his own research work there and only the day before yesterday was at the institute discussing plans for the lecture tour in the Middle East he had been asked to undertake by the British Council.
Fleming’s first notable discovery, that of lysozyme, was made in 1922. He had for some time been interested in antiseptics and in naturally occurring antibacterial substances. In culturing nasal secretion from a patient with an acute cold he found a remarkable element that had the power of dissolving bacteria. This bacteriolyte element, which he also found in tears and other body fluids, he isolated and named lysozyme.
A Lucky Accident
Penicillin was discovered in 1928 when Fleming was engaged in bacteriological researches on staphylococci. For examination purposes he had to remove the covers of his culture plates and a mould spore drifted on to a plate. After a time it revealed itself by developing into a colony about half an inch across. It was no new thing for a bacteriologist to find that a mould had grown on a culture plate which had lain on the bench for a week, but the strange thing in this particular case was that the bacterial colonies in the neighbourhood of the mould appeared to be fading away. What had a week before been vigorous staphylococcus colonies were now faint shadows of their former selves. Fleming might have merely discarded the contaminated culture plate but fortunately his previous research work on antiseptics and on naturally occurring antibacterial substances caused him to take special note of the apparent anti-bacterial action of the mould.
He made sub-cultures of the mould and investigated the properties of the antibacterial substance. He found that while the crude culture fluid in which the mould had grown was strongly antibacterial it was non-toxic to animals and human beings. The crude penicillin was, however, very unstable and was too weak and too crude for injection. Early attempts at concentration were not very successful, and after a few tentative trials its clinical use was not pursued, although it continued to be used in Fleming’s laboratory for differential culture. The position in 1929 was that Fleming had discovered and named penicillin, had investigated its antibacterial power, and had suggested that it might be useful as an antiseptic applied to infected lesions. Attempts to produce a concentrated extract capable of clinical application were not successful and had been abandoned. In the light of later knowledge Fleming’s original paper of 1929 was remarkable. It covered nearly the whole field, realized most of the problems and made considerable progress in solving them. The resuscitation of penicillin as a chemotherapeutic agent was due to the brilliant work of Sir Howard Florey and his colleagues at Oxford, notably Dr E. B. Chain.
Overwhelmed with Honours
After the establishment of penicillin as a life-saving drug Fleming was overwhelmed with honours. He was knighted in 1944 and in the following year he shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine with Sir Howard Florey and Dr E. B. Chain. He was William Julius Mickle Fellow of London University in 1942, and received an award of merit from the American Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association in 1943. He was elected frs in 1943 and frcp in 1944, under the special by-law. His other honours included the Moxon medal of the Royal College of Physicians (1945), the Charles Mickle Fellowship of Toronto University (1944), the John Scott medal of the City Guild of Philadelphia (1944), the Cameron prize of Edinburgh University (1945), the Albert Gold Medal of the Royal Society of Arts (1946), the honorary Gold Medal of the Royal College of Surgeons (1946), the Actonian Prize of the Royal Institution, and the honorary Freedom of the Boroughs of Paddington, Darvel, and Chelsea. He had innumerable honorary degrees from British and foreign universities, and in 1951 was elected Rector of Edinburgh University. Only last weekend thieves stole property from his flat in Chelsea worth about £1,000 and later an appeal was made to them to return a gold seal of great sentimental value.
Fleming was president of the London Ayrshire Society and of the Pathological and Comparative Medicine Sections of the Royal Society of Medicine. Apart from the papers describing his great discoveries, he contributed to the Medical Research Council System of Bacteriology, to the official Medical History of the 1914–18 War, and to many other publications. He was a keen amateur painter, and he had many friends among artists. He was also very fond of motoring and of gardening. He remained quite unspoiled by the publicity and acclaim that came to him and no one was more aware than he of the indispensable part played by other investigators in the development of penicillin. Animated by the spirit of the true scientist, he looked ever forward.
He was twice married, first to Sarah Marion, daughter of Mr John McElroy. She died in 1949, leaving a son. In 1953 he married Dr Amalia Coutsouris, of Athens, who had been a member of his staff at the Wright-Fleming Institute.
Albert Einstein
Father of nuclear physics
18 April 1955
Professor Albert Einstein, the greatest scientist of modern times, died in hospital at Princeton, New Jersey, on April 18 at the age of 76. He had lived a secluded life for some years, though he had been a member of the staff of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton University.
Albert Einstein was born at Ulm, in Württemberg, on March 14, 1879. A year later his family moved to Munich, where they remained until he was 15. His parentage was Jewish, but few Jewish usages were observed in his home. He was slow in learning to talk and at the Catholic elementary school which he first attended was known as Biedermeier (‘Honest John’) from his ponderously accurate way of speaking. Both here and at the Luitpold Gymnasium, where the educational system was rigid, he saw little difference between school and barrack. His father, Hermann, had a small electro-chemical factory, but he had a greater genius for living than he had for success. Failing in Munich he moved to Milan and later to Pavia. The son, left unhappily at the gymnasium, was well on the way to manoeuvring his departure from it when he was unexpectedly asked to leave as being ‘disruptive’ of his class. Italy gave him as great an interest in art and music as he already had in Schiller, and the affairs of his father enforced him to seek a career. He had speculated at the age of five on the movement of a compass needle, and he knew that his mathematics, if not his other subjects, were well beyond the usual examination requirements. Combining interest and ability, he arrived at theoretical physics as the field that would most attract him but partly because of his father’s work and partly from his own lack of formal attainment, he thought that technological training would be his best approach. He therefore proposed to study at the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zürich, but was at first rejected. He had to qualify for the diploma in modern languages and biology at a cantonal school at Aarau. There he lost his dislike of schooling, and from the age of 17 until the age of 21 he conscientiously followed the course prescribed at Zürich for a teacher of physics and mathematics. In 1901 he became a Swiss citizen – a reflection of his dislike of authority.
Annus Mirabilis, 1905
Partly on account of his ancestry, he had difficulty in finding a teaching post, but by the influence of a fellow student he was appointed as a technical assistant in the Swiss Patent Office at Berne in 1902. This was the ‘cobbler’s job’, which he maintained later was the way that scientists should earn their living. In the next year he married Mileva Maritsch, a fellow student at the Polytechnic. Two sons were born in quick succession, but there were differences of temperament and interest, and the marriage was dissolved after some years.
Einstein’s first contribution to theoretical physics was made in the same year that he obtained his Patent Office job. Three years later was his annus mirabilis, 1905. Then he burst without warning into an extraordinary range of discovery and new ideas, of which the ‘Special Theory of Relativity’ was one part, not at the time the most comprehensible by his colleagues. In his earliest work he had simplified Boltzmann’s theory of the random motions of the molecules of a gas, and in 1905 he applied this method to the ‘Brownian movement’ – the impetuous, irregular motion of microscopic particles, suspended in a fluid, that is produced by molecular bombardment. Einstein showed how the number of molecules per unit of volume could be inferred from measurements made of the distances travelled by the visible particles which they hit. Such measurements, made later by Perrin, verified Einstein’s theory so well that the Brownian movement has ever since been regarded as one of the most direct – and impressive – pieces of evidence for the reality of molecules.
In the same year Einstein advanced a revolutionary theory of the photo-electric effect, which has exercised a decisive influence on the modern quantum theory of light. The essence of this effect is that the speed with which electrons are liberated from a metal surface illuminated by ultraviolet light depends only on the colour of the light and not on its brightness. Einstein suggested that the light (from which the escaping electrons must derive their energy) is not continuously distributed in space, but is like a gas with a discrete molecular structure – the ‘molecules’ being photons or units of radiant energy of amounts proportional to the frequency of the light. This assumption gave a concrete physical mechanism for the quantum theory of white light advanced by Planck in 1900, and it provided satisfactory estimates of the speed of photo-electrons. But the importance of Einstein’s theory of photons far transcended the occasion of its suggestion. Its real significance is that it accustomed physicists to accept the dual character of light, which sometimes behaves like a continuous train of waves, and sometimes a hail of bullets, and that in 1924 it suggested to de Broglie that matter itself had a similar ‘dual personality’ and could behave either as a wave or a corpuscle. These conceptions have dominated all subsequent speculations about the ultimate elements of matter and light.
Special Theory of Relativity
Although Einstein’s researches in the quantum theory were of vital significance and, in one direction, seemed to show a clearer grasp of its implications than was possessed by its originator, it is with the theories of relativity that his name will always be associated. The ‘Special Theory of Relativity’ was published in the same extraordinary year. It expressed in a simple and systematic form the effects produced on the basic instruments of physics – the ‘rigid’ scale and the perfect clock – by relative motion, and thus codified the earlier mathematical investigations of Voigt, the physical speculations of Larmor and the pioneer work of Lorentz. For the first time the optics of moving media received a satisfactory formulation, and Newtonian dynamics itself was generalized so as to express the effect of motion on apparent mass. In particular, Einstein’s deduction that mass and energy are proportional became the basic law of atomic transformation. Apart from its spectacular demonstration in atomic energy, it is supported also by a host of experiments in nuclear physics, in which it is used daily as a tool with which nuclear physicists work. Equally, the design of large engineering machines, such as ‘synchrotrons’, in which nuclear particles are accelerated to high energies, depends directly on its use.
In this group of varied and important publications he showed at once qualities of imagination and insight which were even more vital to his work than mathematical ability, which indeed was a necessary qualification but was not (by the highest standards) exceptional. It was also well for his immediate career that he had more than one contribution to offer.
As soon as the remarkable researches published by Einstein in 1905 became known many attempts were made to secure for him a professorial post. As a result of these efforts he became a Privatdozent at Berne in 1908 and Professor extraordinarius at Zürich in 1909. In 1911 he became Professor of Theoretical Physics at Prague, but returned to Zürich to the corresponding post in 1912. During 1913 Planck and Nernst persuaded Einstein to go to Berlin as director of the projected research institute for physics, as a member of the Royal Prussian Academy of Science and as a professor in the University of Berlin – with no duties or obligations. He occupied this post until 1933.
General Theory of Relativity
The ‘General Theory of Relativity’, published in 1916, was the fruit of many years of speculation by Einstein on the questions: ‘Can we distinguish the effects of gravitation and of acceleration?’ and ‘Are light rays bent by gravity?’ To answer these questions he was led to build a great and complex theory, which needs for its systematic expression a new mathematical discipline invented by Ricci and Levi-Civita. The divergences between the predictions of the planetary theory based on Einstein’s theory and those based on the classical theory of Newton are all extremely small, but in one case (the slow changes in the orbit of Mercury) Einstein’s theory provides an explanation which had never been found on Newtonian principles. Moreover, it successfully predicted the deflection of light from distant stars as it grazed the sun’s disc – an effect subsequently verified by British astronomical expeditions in 1919 – and also the reddening of light from very massive stars – which was much later confirmed by observations on the dark companion of Sirius. The success with which ‘general relativity’ gave quantitative predictions of the new phenomena has created a presumption in its favour which has substantially survived.
The application of general relativity to cosmology was implicit in Einstein’s original theory, but became explicit through a modification which he introduced into it in 1917. His contribution in this field was an attempt to provide an answer to an old and ‘insoluble’ problem: ‘How can the universe of stars be uniform in density, fill all space and yet be of finite total mass?’ The subsequent relation of observational evidence of ‘the expanding universe’ to the possible forms of theory that might be developed was done mainly by others, including Lemaître, de Sitter, and Eddington, to whom Einstein served as a stimulus.
During the 1914–18 war two other notable events occurred in his life – he refused to sign the ‘Manifesto of Ninety-two German Intellectuals’ which identified German culture and German militarism, and he contracted a second marriage, with his cousin Elsa. In 1921 he appeared publicly as a supporter of Zionism and he actively collaborated with Weizmann in the establishment of the University of Jerusalem. During the post-war years he travelled and lectured in Holland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, the United States (where he not only lectured on relativity but took part in Weizmann’s campaign for the Jewish National Fund), and England (where he lectured at King’s College, London, and calmed the fears of the Archbishop of Canterbury that relativity was a threat to theology). In 1922 he lectured in Paris, Shanghai, and Kobe, returning home via Palestine and Spain.
The Nobel Prize
In the same year he was awarded a Nobel prize, strangely enough, for his work in quantum theory, as the committee were not sure whether his theory of relativity was technically a ‘discovery’! He was awarded a Copley Medal by the Royal Society in 1925. He visited South America in 1925 and lectured at Pasadena (California) during the winters of 1930–31, 1931–32, and 1932–33. In the summer of 1932 he lectured at Oxford, and was made an honorary Doctor of Science. The great purge of Jewish scientists began under Hitler in 1933 and Einstein decided not to return to Germany, where scientific freedom had ceased to exist. He lived for some months at La Cocque in Belgium and resigned from the Prussian Academy. In the winter of 1933, at the invitation of Flexner, he emigrated to America and became a Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, a post which he held until 1945. His second wife, Elsa, had died in 1936.
Indeterminacy Opposed
In his later years he was venerated – and loved – but became somewhat isolated in his work from the main stream of modern physics. Remembering his early contribution to the quantum theory, it might have been supposed that he would have accepted readily the principle of indeterminacy, which came to play so large a part in it, and that, in his quest for a further unification of the laws of Nature, he would have tried to weld together the discontinuous and indeterminate picture given by the quantum theory with the continuous and determinate picture of relativity. But for Einstein physics was firmly rooted in causality; God did not play at dice, and he would not admit the ultimate validity of any theory based on chance or indeterminacy. The quantum theory remained, therefore, for him as a passing phase, however important to working physicists. Instead, he attempted further generalizations of relativity, which should incorporate both gravitation and electromagnetism, together with the nuclear fields of force. This work, however, has received no better reception than have all other ‘unified field theories’.
When we consider the basic character of the problems he attacked, the vast cosmical scale on which he worked, and his immense influence on physical cosmology as well as physics, we can only compare Einstein with Newton. If Newton’s central achievement was to establish the reign of gravitation in its full simplicity and universality, the essence of Einstein’s work was to reveal gravitation as a phenomenon expressible in terms of world geometry.
Humphrey Bogart
An actor of authority
14 January 1957
Mr Humphrey Bogart, the American actor, died yesterday in Hollywood. He was 57. For over 20 years – since his playing of the Dillinger-like part of Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest, which won him much praise – his seamed, sardonic cast of countenance and mordant tongue had been familiar to cinema audiences all over the world.
Bogart was born in New York on June 23, 1899, the son of Dr Belmont Bogart, a physician, and his wife, who as Maud Humphrey had made a name for herself as a watercolour artist and commercial illustrator. He was educated at Trinity School, New York, and at Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, whence he was destined to go to Yale, but this intention was not fulfilled. The United States had entered the First World War and Bogart joined the Navy. He had always been attracted to the theatre and as soon as the war ended he joined the staff of a promoter of theatrical ventures as manager of a travelling company. But he was determined to act and made his way to New York, where he made his first appearance in 1922 in Drifting.
Thereafter he appeared regularly in plays and it was not until 1930 that he went to Hollywood. Of his first efforts he himself later said they were ‘a flop’. He returned to the stage and it was only after the success of the play The Petrified Forest that he again turned to the screen, to make an immediate impact with the film of the play with Leslie Howard and Miss Bette Davis.
There followed many other films, and notable among his earlier successes was Dead End, in which Bogart played the part of a gangster; and a gangster on the screen he often was, but a gangster with a difference. If Mr Clark Gable may be said to stand in the parts he plays for the uninhibited American male, the happy extrovert whom every college boy would wish to be, the lad for the girls and the lad for the liquor, Bogart represented a contrasting, yet allied, type of American hero.
He dwelt in the shadows and was on the other side, so far as the police and the law were concerned, but that was because the police and the law were themselves often shown as corrupt. He was the masculine counterpart of the girl of easy virtue who has a heart of gold. Typical was the role he played in The Big Shot. Here he was, of course, the ‘big shot’, the head of a gang which took beatings-up and murder in its stride, and yet at the end he gave himself up rather than see an innocent man, a man he did not even know, electrocuted. It is, of course, wildly improbable that the ‘big shot’ would do any such thing and, to make the climax convincing, some powerful acting would seem necessary. But that was not Bogart’s way. ‘He has charm and he doesn’t waste energy pretending to act,’ wrote James Agate. ‘He has a sinister-rueful countenance which acts for him. He has an exciting personality and lets it do the work.’
Certainly Bogart seemed to do little more than project his film personality on to the screen and leave it at that, but it was astonishing how much he could convey with a suggestion of pathos in that husky voice of his, with a shadow of a smile wryly turned against himself, and in films which gave him a chance, a film, for instance, such as John Huston’s The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, he showed that his acting could be positive even though it never moved far away from the essential Bogart.
Bogart appeared in a great number of films, among them High Sierra, The Maltese Falcon, Across the Pacific, The African Queen, To Have and Have Not, Casablanca, and The Caine Mutiny, and, while other reputations waxed and waned, he went on unchanged and unchangeable in calm, complete command of himself, the situation and the screen. He had what Kent found in Lear – authority.
Arturo Toscanini
A legendary musical figure
16 January 1957
Signor Arturo Toscanini, who died in New York yesterday at the age of 89, was the most renowned of living conductors, since his reputation was internationally supreme. His pre-eminence was recognized in Italy, where he was born, in America, where he worked for the greater part of his career, and in German countries, where between the wars he conducted at the Bayreuth and Salzburg Festivals.
His quality as an interpreter was mainly known in this country from gramophone records, but his visits to London in the 1930s and in 1952 confirmed and amplified the judgment that for clarity of presentation and fidelity to the composer he had no peer. His tastes were catholic but his interpretations were always those of an Italian. Yet Siegfried Wagner made him the mainstay of the Bayreuth Festival in 1930 and 1931, and the connection was broken only by Toscanini’s refusal to appear in Germany when Jewish musicians were maltreated by the Nazi Government. That he should thus be accepted by the leading institution which stands above all others for German music is certainly a remarkable testimony to the universality of his art. It was also a characteristic fulfilment of Toscanini’s career. For he had been the first to introduce Wagner’s Götterdämmerung to Italians; he had supervised the international repertory at the Metropolitan Opera in New York from 1898 to 1915; and it is on his performances of Beethoven’s symphonies that his popular fame is founded.
In this country our opportunities of hearing him in the flesh were limited to a short series of concerts in each of the years 1930, 1935, 1937–39, and a last visit in 1952, and, though we heard no opera under his direction, his performances of choral works, including Beethoven’s Mass in D and Choral Symphony, Brahms’s Requiem, and Verdi’s Requiem were memorable. It was widely claimed for him that his readings of these and other classics revealed them in their true character as their creators conceived them, if not for the first time, certainly in a definitive manner. The listener hearing some hitherto over-looked detail in a familiar symphony, noting some subtlety of tonal gradation or shaping of a phrase, was surprised to find that it was all marked in the score, which in point of fact the conductor never used either at rehearsal or at performances by virtue of his prodigious and, as it seems, photographic memory. Yet his interpretations were no more final than those of any other executant musician, and critics whose admiration was less idolatrous found the defects of his qualities in his reading of German music.
Beethoven’s Symphonies
The Latin mind, like the Mediterranean sunshine which conditions it, views things with hard edges, clear outlines, and thorough-going logic. Toscanini’s meticulous attention to detail in Beethoven’s symphonies made them classical and brilliant but ultimately a little inhuman. The opening chords of the Eroica sounded, at any rate with the virtuoso orchestras of America, more like pistol shots than an announcement of the key of E flat, and his bourgeois German Mastersingers became a procession of Florentine nobles. This is only to say that he was true to himself, and no conductor of more single-minded integrity ever lived. This sterling honesty brought him into conflict with the Fascist Government, whose song ‘Giovinezza’ he refused to play, as it also caused him later to break with Nazi-dominated Germany. To show with an unmistakable gesture what he thought of their intolerance he went to Palestine and conducted the newly formed Jewish orchestra in its national home.
Born at Parma on March 25, 1867, he began his musical studies at the local conservatoire, where his principal subject was the cello. Attention was first called to his exceptional abilities by his remarkable memory, which enabled him after a few rehearsals to play his part in the orchestra without opening the copy on his desk. His opportunity came when, at Rio de Janeiro in 1886, he was called by a sudden emergency to leave his place among the cellos and conduct Aida, which he did by heart. From that beginning he went on to the Metropolitan in New York, where he was chief conductor from 1898 to 1915. In 1922 he returned to La Scala at Milan, where he had previously worked between 1898 and 1908, and when the theatre was reopened after alterations in 1922 he was appointed director and ruled it like the autocrat he was.
Encores Abolished
Of new works, such as the eagerly expected performance of Boito’s Nerone and the premiere of Puccini’s last opera, Turandot, he refused to announce even the dates until he was satisfied that the productions were ready, in complete disregard of the convenience of those who were prepared to come long distances to attend them. Nor would he compromise on matters of artistic detail, still less on principle. Thus he abolished encores at La Scala in the face of long-standing Italian practice, and he demanded obedience from the singers and players whom he directed. Yehudi Menuhin, the violinist, who worked in happy association with him at concerts in New York, bears astonished testimony to his impulsiveness and to the general acceptance by others that his will was law. To stop a telephone bell ringing during a private rehearsal with Menuhin Toscanini pulled the instrument from the wall, plaster and all, and returned without a word to the piano. No one expressed any surprise, though Menuhin confesses that he had never before seen such an uninhibited obedience to impulse. There were therefore some qualms at the bbc when that body invited him to come and direct its orchestra, but he won the players’ confidence, enthusiasm, and loyalty without any of the explosions with which he has been credited elsewhere. Indeed, Mr Bernard Shore, the violist who played under him, says in his book The Orchestra Speaks that playing under Toscanini becomes a different art. ‘He stimulates his men, refreshes their minds; and music that has become stale is revived in all its pristine beauty.’
But his autocracy at Milan was bound to bring friction with those whose artistic concentration was less than his own, and after having taken the Scala Company abroad to Germany and Vienna and given performances, more particularly of Verdi’s Falstaff, which entranced German-speaking audiences, he announced his intention of leaving Milan, and in the winter of 1929 accepted the post of conductor to the Philharmonic Society of New York. It was with the New York Orchestra that he first came to England and toured Europe. He remained with them until 1936.
Later Tours
He then formed his own orchestra, the National Broadcasting Company Orchestra, with which he gave concerts all through the Second World War, touring Latin America and making the gramophone records which preserve his interpretations for the rest of the world. In 1946 he returned for a while to Milan for a few months in order to contribute the proceeds of some concerts towards the rebuilding of La Scala in addition to a financial gift of a million lire. When the Festival Hall was being built in 1950 it was announced that he was willing to come to London and direct some of its inaugural concerts. This plan, however, had to be abandoned. Notwithstanding, he did conduct in the Festival Hall, when in September, 1952, he came to London to give two concerts devoted mainly to the four symphonies of Brahms. In this connection it is worthy of remark that though he denounced other musicians for tampering with scores, he did himself play some tricks with the timpani of Brahms’s C minor symphony.
This symphony also showed him sacrificing the brooding tragedy of the opening in favour of creating immediately a feeling of tremendous tension, a treatment which leaves him with a problem of what to do with the development section. In the milder Brahms of the St Anthony Variations and the D major symphony he showed a more ingratiating temper and in his interpretation of Debussy’s La Mer sensuous tonal shading was not neglected. But in general it was the intensity, the urgency, the magnification of the life of a score, upon which he seized, and it was this remarkable dynamic drive which he preserved into extreme old age.
His last concert was given at Carnegie Hall in New York no longer ago than in April 1954, when he bade farewell to his orchestra and his public in a Wagner programme, at the end of which he dropped his baton and went out, not to return to face the plaudits of his audience, a symbolic gesture of retirement after 68 years of active music-making.
Signor Toscanini’s wife predeceased him in 1951. There were a son and two daughters of the marriage, of whom one is married to Mr Vladimir Horowitz, the pianist.
Christian Dior
A master of couture design
24 October 1957
M. Christian Dior, the famous French couture designer, died suddenly yesterday at Montecatini, Italy, at the age of 52, as announced in our late editions. Never strong, Dior had been in ill-health for some time and his death, although so sudden, was not entirely unexpected.
A master of his craft, a rare genius, Dior’s name will stand high in the records of fine achievement in the field of couture design. Even more than this he will be honoured for the help that he, with the Marcel Boussac organisation, was able to give France just after the war when it was so greatly needed. Then, the great textile industry, the third most important in France, was nearly at a standstill, but following the tremendous success of his first collection in January, 1947, with its full-skirted styles each requiring many yards of fabric, orders began to flow into the French mills.
Today thousands of workers throughout the world owe their living directly to his inspiration, not only as a result of his couture showings, but also through the success of the wholesale houses and accessory businesses built up under the umbrella of the central organization in Paris, with offices in London, New York, and Caracas.
Born on January 21, 1905, at Granville, in Normandy, he was the only son of Maurice Dior, a wealthy chemical manufacturer. As a youth he enjoyed designing clothes for his sisters, and a costume representing Neptune, which he designed and wore at a fancy dress ball, won him the first prize. The Diplomatic Corps, however, not dress designing, was originally planned as a career for the intelligent, rather delicate, youth. He studied political science at the Sorbonne, but the French financial crisis of 1930–31, which crippled the family business, enabled him to escape from the prospect of a career which had never greatly attracted him. Always interested in art, with the collaboration of friends, he set up a small salon in the Rue la Boétie, in the centre of Paris, and helped to launch Christian Bérard among other young painters. Later Bérard was always to be seen sitting on the floor of the large salon at the première of Dior’s collections, until the former’s death in 1949.
Forced to give up his art gallery for reasons of ill-health Dior was sent to the mountains to recover. Returning eventually he took up couture designing in earnest, first of all with Agnes, for whom he designed hats, and later with Robert Piguet.
Shortly after the outbreak of war Dior retired to the country where he remained for some time with a sister who had a market garden business. On his return to Paris he became one of Lelong’s designers, and remained with Lelong until the fortuitous meeting with a friend of his youth, Marcel Boussac. At this time Boussac was, in fact, looking for a designer in order to set up a couture house, and a partnership was arranged culminating in the widely publicized first collection in the spring of 1947.
Christian Dior’s very real affection for England and things English stemmed from his first visit at the age of 19 when, to assist his recovery from a serious illness, his father gave him a sum of money and suggested it should be spent exploring Britain. He had, indeed, many English friends and always made a practice of having at least one English mannequin in the house on the Avenue Montaigne. And he always gave sympathetic attention to the products of British fabric manufacturers.
His feeling for line was allied to a wonderful appreciation of colour and texture, and whatever the ‘line’ the result was always feminine clothes designed to flatter the wearer. His early death at this moment is not only a tragedy for the house of Dior, but could have serious consequences for the French industry as a whole, following as it does the death or retirement of a number of other important French designers in the past few years.
Dorothy L. Sayers
Christian apologist and novelist
17 December 1957
Miss Dorothy L. Sayers died at her home at Witham, Essex, on Tuesday night at the age of 64.
Sudden death would have had no terrors for her. She combined an adventurous curiosity about life with a religious faith based on natural piety, common sense, and hard reading. She made a name in several diverse fields of creative work. But the diversity of her success was founded on an inner unity of character. When she came down from Somerville with a First in Modern Languages she tried her hand at advertising. The directness and the grasp of facts that are needed by a copywriter stood her in good stead as a newcomer to the crowded ranks of authors of detective fiction. During the 1920s and 1930s, she established herself as one of the few who could give a new look to that hard-ridden kind of novel.
Her recipe was deftly to mix a plot that kept readers guessing with inside information, told without tears, about some fascinating subject – campanology, the backrooms of an advertising agency, life behind the discreet windows of a West End club. Lord Peter Wimsey came alive as a good companion to the few detectives into whom an engaging individuality has been breathed.
This was not done by chance; she had made a close, critical study of the craft. Lecturing, once, on Aristotle’s Poetics she remarked that he was obviously hankering after a good detective novel because he had laid it down that the writer’s business was to lead the reader up the garden, to make the murderer’s villainy implicit in his character from the start, and to remember that the dénouement is the most difficult part of the story.
But it is some 20 years since Miss Sayers wrote a detective story, and, shortly before her death, she said: ‘There will be no more Peter Wimseys.’ The detective writer had been ousted by the Christian apologist. Miss Sayers approached her task of making religion real for the widest public with a zeal that sometimes shocked the conventionally orthodox (with whose protests she was well able to deal) and always held the ears of listeners and the eyes of the reading public. ‘The Man Born to be King’ became a bbc bestseller, attracting large audiences Christmas after Christmas.
Dante Translations
She carried what she regarded as the central purpose of her life on to the stage and into books. Dogma had no terrors for her. She did not believe in putting water into the pure spirit of her Church. Dante, with his colloquial idiom and unselfconscious piety, naturally attracted her. The translations she published of his Inferno and Purgatorio caught the directness of the original but failed, as Binyon did not, to catch the poetry. But her prose comments have done more than those of any other recent English author to quicken interest in Dante.
Dorothy Leigh Sayers was born in 1893, the daughter of the Rev. Henry Sayers and Helen Mary Leigh. She was in print before she was 21 with Op I, a book of verse, and followed it in 1919 by another, Catholic Tales. It was a medium in which she could be skilful, flexible, and effective, and readers of The Times Literary Supplement will, no doubt, remember her strong poem, ‘The English War’, which appeared in its issue of September 7, 1940. Lord Peter made his first appearance in 1923 in Whose Body? There followed Clouds of Witness (1926), Unnatural Death (1927), The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928) and The Documents in the Case (1930).
In 1930 Miss Sayers in addition to producing her Strong Poison, yet another detective book, made an interesting departure. Out of the fragments of its Anglo-Norman version she had constructed her Tristan in Brittany, in the form of a modern English story and produced it, partly in verse and partly in prose.
Have His Carcase (1932) introduced a companion for Lord Peter in the shape of Harriet Vane, a writer of detective stories. In Hangman’s Holiday (1933), a book of short stories, she created another amateur detective, Mr Montague Egg, who was a simpler reasoner than Lord Peter, but almost as acute. In The Nine Tailors, though of the same genre, her theme was built round a noble church in Fenland, and possessed a majesty which disclosed powers the authoress had scarcely exerted until then. Gaudy Night (1935) took Lord Peter and Harriet Vane into the serene and serious life of a women’s college at Oxford, and psychological problems deeper than those which belong to the detective convention arose.
Lord Peter on Stage
In 1936 her Busman’s Holiday, a play which presented Lord Peter married – Miss Sayers called it ‘a love story with detective interruptions’ – was staged at the Comedy Theatre. She had a collaborator in M. St Clair Byrne, and between them they provided Lord Peter’s public with an excellent entertainment. The Zeal of Thy House (1937), which was written for the Canterbury Festival and played there and in London, was set in the twelfth century and was a sincere and illuminating study of the purification of an artist, a kind of architectural Gerontius purged by heavenly fire of his last earthly infirmity. The Devil to Pay (1939) was also written for the Canterbury Festival. It set the legend of Dr Faustus, one of the great stories of the world, at the kind of angle most likely to commend it to the modern stage. Later it was played at His Majesty’s Theatre. By sheer alertness of invention and the power to fit her ideas into a dramatic narrative she accomplished an extremely difficult task with credit. Love All (1940) was an agreeable and amusing comedy.
In 1940 Miss Sayers published a calmly philosophic essay on the war, which she named ‘Begin Here’. Then, in 1941, she followed it with her ‘The Mind of the Maker’, in which she analysed the metaphor of God as Creator and tested it in the light of creative activity as she knew it. Unpopular Opinions, a miscellaneous collection of essays, came out in 1946, Creed or Chaos, another series of essays, pungent and well reasoned, in 1947, and The Lost Tools of Learning in the following year. She began her translations of Dante for the Penguin Series with the Inferno which came out in November, 1949; Purgatorio followed in May, 1955. She found the third volume Paradiso the hardest and in August, 1956, her translation had reached Canto VII. Her commentary was one of the most valuable parts of her books. After she had finished her second volume, she slipped in, as a kind of relaxation, a translation of Chanson de Roland, published this year.
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Anna Temkin
Тип: электронная книга
Жанр: Энциклопедические словари
Язык: на английском языке
Издательство: HarperCollins
Дата публикации: 16.04.2024
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О книге: The Times obituaries have given readers throughout the world an instant picture of a life for over 150 years. The Times Great Lives is a selection of 124 of these pieces, each obituary has been updated and reproduced in their entirety, by Anna Temkin, The Times assistant obituaries editor.The Times register provides a rich store of information and opinion on the most influential characters of the twentieth and early twenty-first century – be they politicians, sportspeople, musicians, writers, artists, pop stars or military personnel.Major figures of influence from our times and from recent history such as Sigmund Freud, Pablo Picasso and Diana, Princess of Wales are included. This updated second edition includes some of the greatest figures of the modern era such as Nelson Mandela, Steve Jobs, Neil Armstrong and Margaret Thatcher.Authoritative, fascinating, insightful and endlessly engaging, The Times Great Lives is a must for anyone with an interest in the history and people of the twentieth century.