Books: Changed Men

THE MEN AROUND CHURCHILL—Rene Kraus—Lippincott ($3).

Between two devastating defeats, Norway and France, Britons quietly won the one victory without which they could not hope to survive in World War II—they liquidated the class war in England for the duration. Entirely within the framework of their democracy, Britons freed themselves of those fatal tensions and cleavages that plague other democracies, paralyzed France. The miracle of Britain’s outnumbered defense was made possible by the miracle of British class collaboration.

This week Biographer Rene Kraus (Winston Churchill; TIME, Nov. 4) described this crucial compromise in terms of the men who made it and who now rule wartime England. Some of them have been written up before. “Cato” mauled the Tories in his Guilty Men (TIME, Sept. 30). Patricia Strauss cleverly clawed the Laborites in Bevin and Co. (TIME, July 7). Rene Kraus’s book mauls nobody, is the first book to line up for biographical inspection all of the 14 men who Kraus believes are “the men around Churchill.”

They are: 1) Conservative Lord Halifax; 2) Conservative Anthony Eden; 3) Liberal Sir Archibald Sinclair; 4) Conservative Sir Kingsley Wood; 5) Laborite Ernest Bevin; 6) Laborite Herbert Morrison; 7) Laborite Clement Attlee; 8) Laborite Albert Victor Alexander; 9) Conservative Lord Beaverbrook; 10) Laborite Sir Stafford Cripps; 11) Laborite Arthur Greenwood; 12) General Sir John Dill; 13) General Archibald Wavell; 14) King George VI.

Most remarkable fact about Britain’s sea change, says Author Kraus, is not that Chamberlain gave way to Churchill. “More remarkable . . . seems the fact that the team that pulls Great Britain through the war has remained, on the whole, unchanged. The fighters of today are the petty politicians of yesterday. Eccentrics have become constructive. Revolutionaries are now pillars of state and society. Tories forget to wear the old school tie.”

Between World Wars I & II, Britain was not a functioning democracy. Democracy is the most delicate balance of classes and their conflicting interests; appeasement was the symptom that this balance had become unbalanced. Among British Tories, appeasement took the form of pro-Nazi laissez faire. Among Laborites appeasement took the form of do-nothing pacifism. “The House of Lords,” says Kraus, “. . . was . . . the stronghold of pro-Nazi sympathies—with the Labor Lords, in their pacifism, closely allied with Fascist-minded peers.” Britons were afraid even to diagnose the disease of which the great General-Strike of 1926 and Munich were cognate symptoms. Hitler made the diagnosis, calculated his tactics with clinical precision. But Hitler made one mistake—the sick man was not incurable.

The cure was revolutionary enough to change even the mental habits of the men around Churchill. Says Kraus: “I venture to show this transformation in a few test cases . . . The men I describe are not necessarily great men, but they seem to be great examples.”

Four of them:

George VI. The man who embodies England’s compromise of classes is the King. They have turned the rose beds at Windsor Castle into vegetable gardens. Queen Elizabeth practices sharpshooting. George VI, King of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions Beyond the Seas, Defender of the Faith, Emperor of India, dodges bombs, eats by ration card, works some 20 hours a day. He is Defender of the Faith in a deeper sense, says Author Kraus, “than his ancestors and predecessors in a thousand years of British Monarchy.” For “the war has transformed King and nation alike. . . . He is not only the noblest of reformed Englishmen, but . . . himself a great reformer . . . everything revolutionary in England, from mechanized warfare to the abolition of the class system is intimately connected with his personal endeavors.”

Perhaps his post as second in command of a gun turret at the Battle of Jutland gave George VI that sense of reality that modern monarchs seldom get. Perhaps it was his training as a pilot in the early R.A.F. But “the merit of having mobilized the Duke of York’s social conscience goes to . . . the Reverend Robert Hyde,” long a social worker among England’s poor. Hyde once proposed a great welfare project to King George V. The King called in the Duke of York, asked him to sponsor the project. “I will do it,” said the future George VI, “but I don’t want any of that damned red carpet (official receptions).” Sometimes he ran into another kind of red. On an inspection of the Welsh coal mines, the Duke was met by the secretary of the miners’ federation, wearing a red tie and a red carnation. Housewives, “to demonstrate their political convictions,” hung red petticoats on their clotheslines. The Duke smiled, talked, offered agricultural advice to kitchen gardeners. The petticoats disappeared. The secretary threw away his carnation. He could not get rid of his tie. “Blimey,” he said, “I can’t run around in front of a duke without a tie.” Later the Duke organized his youth camps, a kind of British NYA, widely copied in the Dominions.

Today when George VI visits bombed sections of London and other cities, Herbert Morrison is usually at his side. Morrison, “once a rabid socialist” is now Home Secretary and Minister of Home Security. “The King,” says Author Kraus, “likes Mr. Morrison’s sharp wit and his tight-lipped but so much the more fanatic devotion to England.” Morrison likes the King, regrets that he already holds so exalted a job. Morrison, who also runs the London County Council, once enviously sighed: “What an excellent Alderman of London the King would make!”

The “Cockney Sparrow.” “Imagine Henry Ford abolishing capitalism or Jim Farley entirely abandoning the Democratic Party.” Thus Author Kraus conveys an idea of what has happened to Churchill’s Cockney Chancellor of the Exchequer, Sir Kingsley Wood. A self-made millionaire, “for 58 years Sir Kingsley has lived the life and preached the creed of capitalism. In his 59th year he has, to use his own phrase, ‘liquidated the millionaire.’ ” In Parliament, Wood had been a kind of right-wing British Ickes, baiting the Laborite members with the ferocity and felicity of a man who had known the left from birth. But “in his 5th year he delivered a speech in the House that brought the Labor members to their feet to give him a solemn ovation.” He had just put through “a budget . . . that takes almost the last penny out of the rich man’s pocket and makes England a poor man’s country.” “If a Laborite had done it,” says Kraus, “the City would have suffered a serious attack of jitters. However, since it was Sir Kingsley, everyone understands that war transforms people and problems.” And, Kraus adds, “to the lasting honor of Conservative landowners, shipping magnates, business executives . . . they don’t care whether they are broke or not as long as they are helping to break Hitler. . . . They have changed as miraculously as has their Chancellor.”

Ambassador Most Extraordinary. The transformations on the left are just as surprising. A wag once called Sir Stafford Cripps Sir Stafford Crapps, “a parody of his own way of speaking when he tightens his lips and hisses damnation to the capitaLIstic system with a poisonously sharp ‘li.’ ” For years Sir Stafford, though the owner of one of Britain’s largest stone quarries and one of its highest-priced lawyers, was a spiritual resident of Moscow. To show his contempt for “imperialist” World War II, Sir Stafford hopped off soon after it started to study war conditions in China.

Then Churchill, who once growled at Cripps’s “loathsome speaking,” sent him to Moscow in the flesh. Russian officials who met him in morning coats and top hats were appalled when the British ambassador appeared in a flannel suit; he looked like a Bolshevik intellectual. But with all the skill and keenness that made him a great lawyer, Sir Stafford went into action for England, with Hitler’s help got an alliance for the British sector of the “capitaLIstic system.”

Boss. Ernest Bevin is Britain’s most powerful labor leader, Minister of Labor. Some 20 years ago, he won his elaborate argument for 100,000 striking dockers before the Ministry of Labor’s special commission. Friends urged him to go into the law, “You would certainly become a K.C. (King’s Counsel, Britain’s highest legal rank).” “P.C. if you please,” growled Bevin, “P.C.—counsel for the proletariat.”

Bevin does not use the word proletariat now. “He detests it. He remains true to his cause,” says Kraus, “but his terminology, indeed his whole aspect, has considerably matured.” As Britain’s Minister of Labor, Bevin “has the right to transfer every man and woman in England to whatever job and whatever place he chooses.”This power he exercises “with meticulous care.” “Since his every word can now decide human destiny,” the man who used to be called the Mussolini of British labor “has become argumentative and persuasive.” Says Author Kraus: “It is an old English miracle. Ernest Bevin, the product of poverty, is as British as the King.”

“Bevin is perhaps the only one among England’s responsible statesmen who rarely misses an opportunity to state his war aims. . . . Hitler’s defeat is not to him, as to most of his harassed compatriots, an aim in itself. It is simply the inevitable condition for building the kind of world that the man who has built the house of labor wants to live in.” And “why shouldn’t Ernest Bevin have the opportunity of moving into No. 10 Downing Street?” asks Author Kraus, “England will need a reformer to bring construction out of chaos.”

The Author. Just before Hitler called him to Berchtesgaden, Kurt von Schuschnigg called Rene Kraus from New York to Vienna to join the Government’s press section. Kraus is believed to have been the only member of the Schuschnigg Government to escape when the Nazis seized Austria. He admits his escape was “dramatic,” declines to give the dramatic details, prefers to “forget about my Austrian and European past, as it is water under the bridge, and think and work only for a British victory over Naziism.” Kraus gained his intimate knowledge of British leaders by spending considerable time in England. He regards Britain as “my spiritual home,” plans to return there from Canada (via U.S. and India) next spring, stay until the end of the war. He hopes that “Germany will get a crushing defeat and a new world order will be established under Anglo-American leadership.”