Finest Years (38 page)

Clement Attlee, leader of the Labour Party and deputy prime minister, wielded no authority over the military machine, but exercised wide influence on domestic policy. A mild-mannered man whom some made the mistake of underrating, Attlee conducted himself with unfailing dignity, discretion and good sense. There were many moments when he would have been justified in losing his temper with Churchill, but he remained unruffled. The prime minister was seldom less than courteous to Labour members of his government, but they were rarely invited to join his table or to weekend at Chequers. To share private moments, he almost invariably chose Conservative ministers. Even in a coalition administration, this was probably inevitable, and Attlee displayed no sign of resentment, or indeed of any wish to join Churchill's circle.

During the prime minister's increasingly frequent absences abroad his deputy presided over the cabinet and war cabinet, taking the decisions that had to be made, but never overreaching his authority. There were often complaints by critics that the cabinet allowed itself to be a mere rubber-stamp, that Attlee and his colleagues failed to restrain Churchill's excesses. But it is only necessary to consider the
damage that would have been done had the Labour leader used his position to lead an opposition to the prime minister and fracture the government's unity, to applaud his statesmanship. He believed that Churchill, for all his imperfections, was the only possible man to lead Britain through the war. He served the prime minister loyally, and chaired a host of important committees.

Ernest Bevin towered over his socialist colleagues in the esteem not only of the public, but of Churchill. Hugh Dalton, a renegade Etonian socialist, called the Minister of Labour ‘
by far the best
of all my colleagues, in spite of his mountainous defects of egoism, garrulity and peasant-minded suspicion'. Bevin, sixty-two, the son of a Somerset farm labourer, left school at eleven. Though almost uneducated, he displayed the highest intelligence and force of personality. Until co-opted into government in 1940 he had been secretary of Britain's largest union, the Transport & General Workers. He disliked communists as much as the prime minister, and wielded his immense popular authority to curb trade union excesses as much as any man could. He deserves much of the credit for the fact that Britain mobilised its population, and especially its women, more effectively than any other belligerent nation, save possibly Russia. He was never less than blunt: Churchill was probably undismayed when Bevin once told Stafford Cripps in cabinet that ‘
he didn't know why
he didn't mind his own bloody business'.

Sir John Anderson, as Lord President of the Council, presided over a domestic counterpart of the war cabinet. A ponderous, humourless former civil servant who had served as governor of Bengal, Anderson commanded little affection but much respect. His memory, and grasp of facts and figures, were so prodigious that a colleague once enquired whether he boasted an elephant on his coat of arms. Though he sat in the Commons as MP for the Scottish Universities, his biographer observed: ‘
He never really understood
the House. He naturally regarded all men, and, in particular, men in public pos-itions…as being rational in their words and actions…When this did not seem to him to be so, it distressed him and even offended his sense of propriety. “I am shocked at their irresponsibility,” he once remarked of MPs.'

Churchill never warmed to Anderson—no one could—but he valued his abilities: ‘
There is no better warhorse
in the government,' he said. Anderson acted as economic coordinator, with responsibility for wages and manpower, then became in1943—less successfully—chancellor of the Exchequer. In his invariable wing collar and formal Whitehall attire, he was nicknamed ‘Jehovah', which caused Attlee to open a committee meeting one morning with the jocular greeting: ‘Here we all are, Jehovah's witnesses.' Churchill nominated Anderson as successor to the premiership in the event that both he and Eden were killed on one of their wartime journeys.

Anderson undertook only one uncharacteristic action in his life. As a lonely widower of fifty-nine, he married a raffish young widow, Ava Wigram, whose late husband Ralph had passed secret intelligence to Churchill in the 1930s. The Andersons bought a millhouse together in Sussex, where one day he fell off a small bridge into the river. The Lord President swam round in circles in his pork pie hat, which reduced Ava to hysterical laughter. Anderson demanded angrily: ‘Would you have your husband drown?' She was eventually persuaded to assist him. In the country, he was once observed churning butter with one hand, while doing his ministerial boxes with the other. This austere, unimaginative man, who bore responsibility with the ease of long experience, managed a host of matters that were vital, but which bored the prime minister.

Anderson's most notable colleague was the food minister, Lord Woolton, another outstanding figure of Britain's war. Woolton—Frederick Marquis before his elevation—was a former boss of the department store chain John Lewis. He was not only an inspired administrator, directing the operations of 40,000 people handling the national rationing and distribution system, but also a natural communicator. Save for the prime minister, no member of the government proved more accomplished in explaining himself to the nation through the BBC's microphones. ‘Woolton pie', made with cheap, nutritious and—above all—available ingredients, became a lasting memory of the war for millions of people. Woolton once displayed dismay at criticism in the Lords of a ‘government in
slumberland'. Hugh Dalton observed patronisingly, from the viewpoint of a career politician: ‘
He has had no political training
to harden his skin and his sensibilities.'

Dalton himself, a socialist intellectual but a considerable social climber who loved to lunch with such hostesses as Lady Colefax, was moved from the Ministry of Economic Warfare to the Board of Trade in the February 1942 reshuffle, having allegedly fumbled the management of Special Operations Executive, SOE. Dalton was grieved to lose control of the sabotage organisation, which excited him, but thereafter did useful work grappling with the intractable coal industry. He was one of the best Whitehall diarists of the war, an ardent intriguer, bitchy and self-obsessed. After one of his own platform performances, he wrote: ‘
I am in exceptionally good form
and make a very good speech, full of impromptu jokes.' His admiration for Churchill was not reciprocated. He was never on the guest list for Chequers, and like most of his colleagues seldom saw the prime minister privately.

Herbert Morrison was a controversial Home Secretary, not much esteemed by his colleagues, least of all Bevin, with whom he feuded. Morrison, a World War I conscientious objector, had made his reputation in London local government. In Whitehall, his conceit was deemed to exceed his abilities. Lord Leathers as Minister of War Transport, by contrast, a peacetime shipping magnate, was highly regarded by almost everyone except Alan Brooke. A group of notably talented civil servants and academics supported the cabinet team, the economist Maynard Keynes prominent among them. Beaverbrook complained that the government was run by ‘
the three profs
—Cherwell, Keynes and [the economist Lionel] Robbins'.

Churchill was often criticised for taking insufficient interest in domestic affairs. Yet he seems to deserve full credit for ensuring that those to whom he entrusted them were, almost without exception, men of notable ability. The British people were exasperated by petty restriction. Some factories suffered from poor management, outdated production methods, lack of quality control and a recalcitrant workforce—shortcomings which had hampered the nation's economic
progress through the previous half-century. But many industries achieved remarkable results, and reaped the harvest of Britain's astonishing wartime record of scientific innovation. The overall achievement was impressive.

Wartime unity was a considerable reality. The majority of the British people remained staunch. Yet class tensions ran deep. Significant groups, above all shop-floor workers, displayed disaffection. Sections of Britain's industrial workforce perceived no contradiction between supporting Churchill and the crusade against Nazism, while sustaining the class struggle which had raged since the beginning of the century. Strikes were officially outlawed for the duration by the government's March 1941 Essential Work Order, but legislation failed to prevent wildcat stoppages, above all in coal pits, shipyards and aircraft plants, often in support of absurd or avaricious demands. At the depth of the Depression, in 1932, just 48,000 working days were lost to strikes in the metal, engineering and shipbuilding industries. In 1939, by contrast, 332,000 days were lost; in 1940, 163,000; 1941, 556,000; 1942, 526,000; 1943, 635,000; 1944, 1,048,000; 1945, 528,000. This was a better record than that achieved in 1917, when stoppages in the same industries cost three million days of production. Nonetheless, it suggests a less than wholehearted commitment to the war effort in some factories, also manifested by dockyard workers who, to the disgust of ships' crews, were guilty of systematic pilferage, including on occasion lifeboat rations.

Few workers broke ranks during the Dunkirk period, but as the war news improved they perceived less urgency about the struggle for national survival. ‘I gather that production is not nearly good enough,' wrote Tory MP Cuthbert Headlam in December 1940, ‘
that the work people
in airplane and other gov[ernment] factories are beginning to go ca'canny; that the dockers at the ports are giving trouble…communists active—I only hope that much of this gossip is exaggerated, but it is alarming nonetheless.' In September 1941, when Churchill visited the Armstrong-Siddeley factory at Coventry, where Whitley bombers were being manufactured, he was warned that the plant was ‘a hotbed of communism'. Jock Colville wrote:

‘
I was disgusted to hear
that their production tempo had not really grown until Russia came into the war.' Nine thousand men at Vickers-Armstrong in Barrow went on unofficial strike in a dispute over piecework rates. When a tribunal found against them, the strike committee held a mass meeting at a local football ground, and put forward a motion suggesting that the men should resume work ‘under protest'. This was overwhelmingly defeated, and the dispute dragged on for weeks.

Of eight serious strikes
in the aircraft industry between February and May 1943, six concerned pay, one was sparked by objections to an efficiency check on machine use, and one by refusal to allow two fitters to be transferred to different sections of the same shop. There were twenty-eight lesser stoppages prompted by disputes about canteen facilities, alleged victimisation of a shop steward, the use of women riveters, and refusal by management to allow collections for the Red Army during working hours. A report on De Havillands at Castle Bromwich noted ‘
a marked absence of discipline
…slackness…difficulty in controlling shop stewards'. Ernest Bevin reported that the aircraft industry ‘
had failed to improve
its productivity in proportion to the amount of labour supplies'. A total of 1.8 million working days were lost during 1,785 disputes in 1943, a figure which rose to 3.7 million in 2,194 disputes in 1944.

‘
Strikes continue to cause
much discussion,' declared a 1943 Home Intelligence report. ‘The majority feeling is that strike action in wartime is unjustified…Fatigue and war-weariness, combined with the belief that we are “out of the wood” and victory now certain, are thought by many to account for the situation.' American seamen arriving in Britain were shocked by the attitudes they encountered among dockers. Walter Byrd, chief officer of the US merchantman SS
J. Marshall
, ‘made very strong criticism of the attitude of stevedores and other dockworkers in the port of Glasgow. He accused them of complete indifference to the exigencies of any situation, however urgent.'
Byrd complained to
harbour security officers that many trucks and tanks were being damaged by reckless handling during offloading. It was decided to dispatch some shipworkers to
work in US yards on British vessels. At a time when passenger space was at a premium, service chiefs were enraged when these men refused to sail without their wives—and their demand was met: ‘
I do not see why
the country sh[oul]d not be mobilised and equality of sacrifice demanded,' a senior army officer commented indignantly.

Of all wartime industrial disputes
, 60 per cent concerned wages, 19 per cent demarcation, 11.2 per cent working arrangements. A strong communist element on Clydeside was held responsible by managements for many local difficulties. Some trades unionists adopted a shameless view that there was no better time to secure higher pay than during a national emergency, when the need for continuous production was so compelling. Those who served Britain in uniform were poorly rewarded—the average private soldier received less than a pound a week—but industrial workers did well out of the war.
The Cost of Living Index
rose from eighty-eight in 1939 to 112.5 in 1945, while average wages rose from 106 to 164. The highestpaid men, handling sheet metal on fuselage assembly in aircraft factories, received £20-£25 a week, though £12 was nearer the average for a sixty-hour week. Average civilian weekly earnings in July 1944 were just over £6.

In the coal industry, wage increases were much steeper, from an indexed 109 to 222. But these did nothing to stem a relentless decline in production—by 12 per cent between 1938 and 1944—which alarmed the government and bewildered the public. The mines employed 766,000 workers in 1939, 709,000 in 1945. Loss of skilled labour from the pits to the services provided an inadequate explanation for the fall in per capita output, since the German coal industry achieved dramatic increases under the same handicap.

Absenteeism was rife among the British mine workforce, rising from 6.4 per cent in 1938 to 8.3 per cent in 1940; 12.1 per cent in 1943; 16.3 per cent in 1945. Almost half of those missing were reckoned to have downed tools by choice. In addition, miners' strikes accounted for half of all working days lost to industrial disputes in 1943, two-thirds in 1944. Almost everything was wrong with the coal industry: poor management, a high accident and disease rate, rail
transport problems and stubborn miners' resistance to mechanisation. Early in 1941, according to the official wartime history of British coal, ‘
it became necessary to
bring home to the industry the urgency of production'. The Essential Work (Coalmining) Order was introduced, providing a guaranteed wage, but banning absenteeism. In July 1942 a despairing government took operational control of the industry. Yet still production languished, and stoppages persisted.