Songs of Innocence (16 page)

Not that the main complainants were parents, though. During the 1930s, MI5 would respond to a wide range of complaints about the schools and about the radicalization of children more generally
– mostly, if the file is anything to go by, from a small group of conservatives who were concerned about moral standards. And while the security service would not find evidence of any major
threat, it did feel the need to ask questions about what was going on. For instance, the Secretary of the International Law Society, Wyndham Bewes, wrote in great alarm to the Home Office about
promiscuity at Neill’s school at Leiston, and about another run by Countess Dora Russell in Sussex. He attached an article from a Norwegian magazine which gushed about Neill’s liberal
attitudes: ‘Very often he was obliged to hide from parents what he knew about their children. As to young people of eighteen years of age, it had happened that he had been obliged to tell
them that he could not allow them to sleep with each other because he knew that they could not afford preventatives . . . In other cases he could well imagine that some of the young people slept
together but he did not interfere because he knew that they had enough money.’ Could anything be done, Mr Bewes wanted to know? The MI5 officer who responded thought not. If Neill had allowed
a girl under the age of sixteen to have sex, there might be grounds for a prosecution: ‘But there is no allegation of this. Quite
frankly I feel unable to take the
statements in this article at all seriously. It is typical left-wing eyewash. My personal feeling is that the article is quite unreliable and there is no evidence in it whatever that any sexual
irregularity does in fact take place . . . it would be difficult to justify any action on the strength of a tendentious foreign article.’

Why the Security Service would have been given the task of investigating illicit teenage sex is something of a mystery. However, its officers were tasked at the time with assessing all threats
to the security of the UK, and some of the complaints about the progressive schools involved the political activities of their teachers – so the letters tended to find their way to the desks
of MI5 officers, maybe for want of any other obvious recipient. Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, the responses of MI5 to these complaints became increasingly weary as the years went by. Yet as the
international tension mounted, they continued to come in thick and fast – and during the 1930s this deep-rooted fear that young people were somehow being subverted grew ever stronger.

According to the right-wing press, children across the country were becoming increasingly radicalized, and the issue was fast becoming a head-on clash between the forces of conservatism and the
those of the left. On 2 November 1932, the Winscombe Women’s Conservative and Unionist Association sent an appeal to the government, asking it to take immediate steps to close down the
Communist Sunday Schools which appeared, its members felt, to be springing up all around them. An enclosed resolution, proposed by Mrs Percival Wiseman, noted that these Sunday Schools were
‘teaching children that there is no God, are deliberately making heathens in a professedly Christian country’. The resolution, the letter confirmed, had been passed unanimously. In
evidence, the association sent a cutting from the previous day’s
Daily Mail
about a new society called the League of Militant Godless, which had been founded by a
Communist named T. A. Jackson. ‘The Reds of Moscow have thrown down their greatest challenge to the world. They have launched a campaign to dishonour God, defame the Bible, and
eliminate religion from the life of mankind,’ the paper had thundered. MI5’s response was more measured: ‘We have no information to indicate that there are in Cornwall churches in
sympathy with the idea of substituting the cult of Lenin for that of divine worship. It seems hardly necessary to make further inquiries,’ the agency’s official noted dryly.

Despite this scepticism in official circles, there does seem to have been something of a proliferation of organizations for young radicals at the time: the Young Communist League was thought to
have about 400 members, while the Young Pioneers of Great Britain, which had recently replaced the Young Comrades League, had claimed to be selling around 3,500 newspapers each month. This was
sufficient to alarm the
Daily Telegraph
into running a series of articles on the menace in April 1933, including this parody of the Lord’s Prayer, from the children’s corner of
the
Daily Worker
:

And it was sufficient to inspire an admiral, Mark Kerr, to set up an Order of the Child, to campaign against such ‘child corruption’. He
wrote to the Home Office in March 1933 of ‘sinister developments’. ‘The communists are now attempting to get at the children by penetration into the ordinary state schools, and it
is most significant that at the Special Conference of the Teachers Labour League in October 1930 it was decided by an overwhelming majority that this league should become affiliated to the National
Minority Movement – the communist organisation active in this country and closely bound up with the Russian Soviet,’ he wrote.

All of this passed the pupils of Dartington Hall by. But in the East End of London, a young boy from a very different background was soaking up the political atmosphere. Bernard Kops, the son of
desperately poor Jewish migrants from Holland and later a playwright, was growing up in Stepney Green – a stone’s throw, quite literally, from where Oswald Mosley’s British Union
of Fascists would hold its meetings.

‘I joined the blue and white shirts,’ he said. ‘It was all shirts in those days. There were green shirts, red shirts. Our leader, Mr Pritchard, was killed in the Spanish Civil
War. So we were quite organized.’
³²

Kops was born in Stepney Green Buildings, which overlooked a long strip of land where the Fascists would set up their soapboxes: ‘The British Union of Fascists had this idea, they were
going to take over the East End. So we children had a job to do – we had to stand on our balcony and throw stones over at the Fascist speakers,’ he explained. When the BUF decided to
send thousands of marchers into the East End on Sunday, 4 October 1936, Kops was among the ranks of children who were sent out to oppose the march.

‘We didn’t trust the police. We knew they had allowed the march to go ahead. I think the police didn’t like any of the immigrant communities, anyone who wasn’t
English,’ he said. ‘We had to stand
on the sidelines with our marbles, and throw them under the hooves of the police horses.’ Kops, who was ten at the
time, saw a police horse go down in the crowd: ‘Though I don’t think it was because of any of my marbles.’ Afterwards, he said, his cousins tracked the policeman down and
‘did him straight up – left him with two broken legs. He had been laying about him with his truncheon.’
³³

The Battle of Cable Street, as it became known, involved no fewer than 10,000 police and a massive 300,000 anti-fascist protesters. There were 150 arrests, 100 people were injured and several
policemen were kidnapped. Afterwards, a law was passed requiring marchers to obtain a police permit before staging a demonstration, and the Fascists began to retreat from the East End.

Elsewhere, the news grew increasingly grim. In the Kops’ crowded flat, the talk was of the Spanish Civil War, of Hitler, of whether the family should return to Holland. Fortunately for
them, they could not scrape the money together to go: ‘If it hadn’t been for that, we would all have been killed.’

At Dartington, too, the mood was darkening. Bill Curry was often absent, up in London pushing the already lost cause of pacifism. Peter Thomas remembers unrest in the school as a result:
‘There was quite a hoo-ha with the pupils – there was a sign, I think in the dining room: ‘We want our headmaster back,’ he recalled. The pupils became very involved with
the Spanish Civil War, as teachers went away to fight. One of the Spanish teachers at the school was a refugee, and at one point the children knitted blankets for a group of Spanish children who
were housed somewhere in the Hall.

During Curry’s increasingly rare visits to the school, he would invite pupils up to his house for debates about pacifism. Yet despite all his efforts, by 1939 the children of Dartington,
like so many others across the country, were preparing for war.

5
 War Babies

‘At 10.30 we heard from a radio news bulletin that hostilities had broken out between Poland and Germany. It seemed that war was inevitable. We listened to every news
that we were able for the rest of the day. Mother and I went to the cinema in the evening, and we received a shock when we came out to find the town in a state of darkness.’
¹

To a fifteen-year-old boy, living in Hampshire and recording the outbreak of war for the Mass Observation organization, Hitler’s invasion of Poland was an exciting development; one that
would be bound to make life more interesting. Through a child’s eyes, with so much in the world still unexplored, the events tended to be viewed with a sense of mounting excitement rather
than with the knowing dread the adult world was feeling. The details this particular boy felt significant enough to record reveal a sort of banality about the preparations. Somehow, seen through
this boy’s eyes, the implementation of the civil defence plans which had been made over the preceding months and years come across as rather sedate, rather English and rather
middle-class.

‘I noticed while doing some shopping for my mother a large van outside an empty shop off one of the main streets. Gas masks, gum boots and steel helmets were being unloaded from it and
taken into
the shop. A few days later I learned that it was to be the ARP central store. Later in the morning I sat in the Princess Gardens and watched some raw recruits of
a Scotch regiment being drilled. After dinner I went and sat in the municipal gardens with a book to read. I have got all this spare time owing to the fact that the school is closed for a holiday.
As I got there a man and woman pushing a pram went by. “Well we shan’t be gassed this time,” said the man. “No,” replied the woman, “I’m going to bed with
my gas mask on tonight.”’

Yet the war was to have profound effects on the children of Britain, some of which would only truly be recognized once the hostilities had ceased and the smoke had begun to clear. If the
inter-war years had been years in which the Western world learned the importance of stability and parent–child relations in the life of a growing youngster, the war would throw all that
knowledge in the air. The years of World War Two were, for many thousands of families, years in which parents and children experienced separation from one another. They experienced separation
through evacuation and through displacement because of bombing and other disruption. But they also experienced separation because suddenly the workforce of Britain was largely female. In a way
which was far better organized than it had been in World War One, day care was made available so that women could perform necessary war work. For many children, that meant daily contact with the
state at a much earlier age than had previously been common.

In the past, a few children had been moved from one part of the country to another, some children had been separated from their parents, and some children had even had the opportunity to meet
people of a different social status from themselves – but the numbers who had done so were tiny in comparison to what was about to happen. The war was to shake up the whole class system
– not in a way which would cause it to be destroyed, but in a way which would allow the poor to see how the wealthy lived, and vice versa. After
the war, no one would
again be able to turn a blind eye – as the East End slum-owning Lord Alington, forced by Sonia Keppel’s mother to confront the truth about his wealth, had done – to the reality of
how the poor were living in Britain’s inner cities. The net effect, then, would be a national eye-opening about the state of the population. The war would lay bare the nation’s
undergarments, and childhood would never really be the same again.

But all that was in the future as dawn broke on 1 September 1939. At 11.07 a.m. on the previous day an order had been issued from Whitehall: ‘Evacuate forthwith.’ And education
authorities around the country, which had been making detailed preparations for such an event for some time, swung into action. The scale of the evacuation was breathtaking. In total, around three
million people, most of them schoolchildren, would be parcelled up, labelled – quite literally, with brown tags and string – and shipped out from the cities to the ‘reception
areas’ in the countryside. In practical terms, the organization of this unprecedented mass relocation of the population was astonishingly well executed: ‘Party after party was marched
to its proper train, safely bestowed in the carriages and dispatched without confusion and fuss,’ noted the
Manchester Guardian’s
correspondent, who watched the scene at the
city’s Victoria Station as no fewer than 50,000 children were moved by train and bus. ‘The early parties looked rather tired, as if they had been wakened too early. One marching column
made the subway ring with the strains of the “Lambeth Walk”. A coin-in-the-slot chocolate machine caused a little dislocation of one party, but discipline was easily
restored.’

The scheme had been under development for years by this time. Discussions had been taking place since the early 1930s about the principle of removing vulnerable populations from areas where
aerial bombing was likely to be intense, and in the summer of 1938 the Anderson Committee – which also introduced the Anderson shelter – set out the details. Evacuation would not be
compulsory,
though billeting would be, and schoolchildren would be moved with their schools. In London
²
and elsewhere, the
need to prioritize the evacuation of children and pregnant women was quickly established. The phrase ‘women and children first’ had sprung from the sinking of HMS
Birkenhead
off
South Africa in 1852 – as a result of an order from the captain, all the women and children on board were saved, while most of the men perished. And the notion that women and children were
somehow uniquely delicate and precious went back much further. But in relation to children in particular this notion had gained a new poignancy, a new urgency, in the first few decades of the
twentieth century, as the debate about the future of the nation – its health, its empire – had become more intense.