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CONTENTS
- a natural rebel
- opposing war
- opposing conscription
- first imprisonments
- hard labour
- breaking the rules
- opposing the prison system
- ‘No More War’
- onset of war
- anti-war, anti-Nazi
- war work
- aftermath
- the Cold War
- working to the end
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‘No More War’
Convalescing at Scarborough after his release, Fenner Brockway watched his daughters playing on the beach and vowed to do what he could to save them from war. Although he became deeply involved in the campaign for prison reform, he made sure there was time for leading roles in the British ‘No More War’ movement and the newly founded War Resisters International.
He also resumed his work for the anti-war and strongly socialist Independent Labour Party, editing its journal (now called the ‘New Leader’) from 1926 to 1929, when he became a Labour MP for two years. In Parliament he spoke frequently on the issues of disarmament and peace. In 1932 he and the rest of the ILP cut their links with the Labour party, having found that parliamentary procedure provided no way to achieve the social changes, and the restraining of capitalism, that the ILP believed were necessary.
Fenner Brockway knew and admired Gandhi, and helped him with research into a publication about nonviolence. ’There is no doubt that nonviolent non-co-operation is the ideal method. Hitler would never have been able to occupy Europe if the peoples had refused in an organised way. The pacifists have the solution...but the peoples are not yet ready to adopt it.’
He travelled in Europe, and in Germany saw for himself the effects of Nazism. This was a decade of deeply complicated and passionate political feeling. Fenner Brockway was not immune. Behind his thinking about war at this time lay his detestation of all kinds of fascism, and his belief that human salvation could only be found in a world of social equality and the end of empires.
Such views influenced his response to the Spanish Civil War. Some ILP members went to Spain to fight alongside socialists there: Fenner Brockway helped them to get to Spain, and, in 1939 after the war, helped them to get home again. ‘We saw the war in Spain as a national manifestation of a disaster threatening the whole world.’
The war in Spain, as he put it, ‘undermined’ his pacifism - but that didn’t mean that he ever approved of war. He belonged to a world-wide working-class movement which struggled for social change under the slogan ‘Against War and Fascism.’
Onset of war
And as Europe drew closer to another World War, resisting war was Fenner Brockway’s mission. But he also felt that fascism in Germany had to be overcome. In 1938 the ILP’s International Centre (which was also helping refugees from Germany, Austria and Czechoslovakia) launched an International Workers’ Front Against War, with the aim of encouraging workers’ organisations to resist war - and to continue the struggle against capitalism. ‘We recognised that as long as capitalism continued the alternatives were either a patched-up imperialist peace or an imperialist war.’ As we know, the first was attempted and the second was carried out.
In June 1938 Fenner Brockway took part in a public debate about conscription. One of the other speakers was Winston Churchill’s son Randolph, who ‘passionately called for the mobilisation of all the nation’s forces for war. As I listened to the speeches that followed I began to think I was back in 1914. There was even the old man who wished himself forty years younger so that he might fight, and who would proudly give up his sons. I lived in another world of thought. My loyalties were not to a country, but to the dispossessed of all countries who were denied real life in peace and summoned to die in war for the very system of which they were the victims. When I rose to speak I tried to say this. I tried to depict the possibilities of a new socialist world to make both poverty and war unnecessary. At the end an eminent lawyer told us that he was shocked to his inner being by what I had said’, and had expected the very portraits on the debating-room walls to step down in protest.
Anti-war, anti-Nazi
But as far as the Second World War was concerned, Fenner Brockway found himself in a painful dilemma. Though ‘instinctively a pacifist’ - ‘I could never see myself killing anyone and had never held a weapon in my hands’ - he could not now be wholly anti-war. ‘The thought of mass killing was unbearable. But I also thought of the Nazi brutality I had seen. And I thought of brave German comrades who would now face concentration camps and the firing squad. I thought of what a Hitler victory could mean for Europe.’ But he went on speaking out for the ILP’s anti-war views, urging that the war be should ended by a people’s revolution across Europe’s frontiers, not by military victory. He also took part in the ILP’s vigorous protest against British carpet-bombing of civilian areas in Germany.
The ‘brave German comrades’ Fenner Brockway kept in mind were those who sent this message to the ILP office just four days before war was declared:
‘In the moment before the cannons speak, before the world faces horror and manslaughter, we send our message to you. The German workers do not want this war. The German peasants do not want war. This war is not our war, this fight is not our fight. We ask you, in the midst of death and destruction: do not forget the ideas for which we died under torture, do not forget the ideals for which we have suffered in the concentration camps.....Comrades, our common fatherland is our humanity.’
War work
Fenner Brockway was in London through the war, and it was at his suggestion that the government set up a national Fire Service to watch through the bombing raids to spot fires and put them out before they spread. He organised a nightly fire watch for the buildings where the ILP office was, and took his turn regularly.
He also became chairman of the Central Board for Conscientious Objectors. Not surprisingly, ‘I had no hesitation in supporting the rights of young men who felt they could not answer the compulsory call-up. What liberty is more sacred than liberty of conscience?’ From time to time he took part in tribunals hearing CO cases, and sometimes intervened when there was extreme hardship. ‘I heard of a Jehovah’s Witness who was coming before a court martial for the fifth time. I volunteered to defend him, and got him off.’
Aftermath
After the war Fenner Brockway rejoined the Labour party and began working to become an MP again. In 1947 he got a surprising invitation: Hamburg Trades Union Council would like him to speak at their first May Day demonstration for 14 years. The foreign secretary said that he could go - but must report to the army’s Whitehall office first. ‘I was told I could only go to Germany if I joined the army temporarily. I was given the rank of captain and handed a uniform. I laughed at the irony of it. In the First World War I was court-martialled for refusing to put on army uniform, and here I was accepting it to go on a socialist mission!’
In Germany he was shocked by what he saw of the results of war, especially the hunger. ‘I used to save a roll of bread from every meal. At first I offered it shyly to a boy or girl in the street, but soon I realised that no-one was ashamed to accept food.’ In a mental hospital he found patients still on the starvation diet Hitler’s regime had ordered so that they would slowly die, and he was quick to tell the Allied administration to put this right.
This visit was the first of many travels abroad in the interests of human rights, socialist principles and peace. Fenner Brockway became involved in benign diplomacy in many commonwealth countries, speaking for them in Parliament after he became an MP again in 1950. He was MP for Eton and Slough until 1964 - and, because he spoke also against re-armament, was called by one Tory ‘the Member for Moscow and Eton’.
The Cold War
Why ‘Moscow’? This was the period of the Cold War and the nuclear arms race. Fenner Brockway was a founder member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament - and had been the first to gather MPs together in 1954 to start the movement which led to CND. Later (1979) he was co-founder of the World Disarmament Campaign.
‘I met Philip Noel-Baker in a corridor in the House of Lords. He remarked that the peace movement was missing a great opportunity: it should be campaigning for the disarmament agreement signed by 149 governments in 1978. “Let’s start a campaign,” I said. Philip’s eyes lit up, and he shook my hand. Thus it began. We were both nearly 90, but the response we got showed that the moment was ripe.’
The World Disarmament Campaign called for destruction of nuclear weapons, the phased abolition of conventional weapons, general and complete disarmament, and the transfer of military budgets to development programmes with the aim of ending world poverty. Seven years later Fenner Brockway was still at work for the Campaign, worriedly reminding the House of Lords that the number of strategic nuclear weapons had risen from 6,000 in 1970 to 20,000 in 1985, and demanding support for the Non-Proliferation Treaty: ‘the world’s only multilateral treaty aimed at halting both the spread and build-up of nuclear weapons’.
Working to the end
Perhaps it’s surprising that Fenner Brockway, with his socialist principles, accepted a life peerage in 1964; and he wrote later that he remained doubtful as to whether he had done the right thing. Certainly his second wife, Edith, would have none of it, and consistently refused to answer to the title ‘Lady Brockway’ - something that had to be learned (and accepted) by everyone she dealt with. But the peerage meant that Fenner Brockway was still in Parliament, where, until he became too deaf to do so, asked more parliamentary questions, introduced more parliamentary bills, and started more parliamentary debates than anyone else.
And his work abroad continued too. In 1965 he started the British Committee for Peace in Vietnam. In 1967 he set up a committee for peace in Nigeria, and helped bring about a truce ending the Biafran war there. In 1975 he was negotiating for peace in Cyprus. In 1982 he was in Moscow with his own draft for a Peace Programme. In 1983 he was in Prague for the World Conference for Peace and Life, and between 1983 and 1985 appeared at peace conferences in Geneva, Athens, Berlin, Perugia, Stockholm, Helsinki....
By the end of his life he had also written over 20 books. The last (‘98 Not Out’) was published two years before his death in 1988.
In a memoir published back in 1963, when he was 75, Fenner Brockway had written: ‘I am satisfied to call myself a Universalist. That is my philosophy. Its application? All that makes for human happiness and friendship, human dignity, human equality, human co-operation across the boundaries of race, colour, language and religion, human conquest of science not for war but to end poverty and disease, human fulfilment, physically, mentally, spiritually, on earth and among the stars.’
And his message for people who, like pacifists, want a more just and peaceful world? The answer is social change. But this needs determination from individual people who aim at being just and peaceful themselves. ‘I used to think that better social systems were the condition for better lives, and I still do. But better lives are also the condition for better social systems.’ That was what Fenner Brockway learned from his vast experience, from despair in a prison cell to hope inspired when people acknowledge their shared humanity and work for peace.
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