The National Council for Civil Liberties and the Policing of Interwar Politics : At Liberty to Protest [1 ed.] 9781526129581, 9780719085178

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t h e n a t io n a l c ou n c i l f o r c i v i l l i b e r t i e s a n d t h e p ol i c i n g of i n t e r wa r p ol i t i c s

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The National Council for Civil Liberties and the policing of interwar politics At liberty to protest

Janet Clark

Manchester University Press Manchester

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Copyright © Janet Clark 2012 The right of Janet Clark to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA, UK www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data applied for ISBN  978 0 7190 85178 hardback First published 2012 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Typeset by Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster

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Contents

Acknowledgements

page vii

List of images

ix

Abbreviations xi Foreword

Clive Emsley

Chapter 1

Introduction and background debates

Chapter 2

Our precious liberties: disparate interests and common cause

xiii 1 12

Chapter 3

Political expression: people, parties and pressure groups 31

Chapter 4

Policemen, protesters and libertarians

Chapter 5

The NCCL in action: networks, methods and strategies 80

Chapter 6

Beyond the legitimate province of a policeman: fascists, anti-fascism and new police powers

104

Police powers and politics: police and Home Office responses

130

Chapter 8

The NCCL: recognition and regime change

160

Chapter 9

Conclusion

179

Appendix A: Biographical information

186

Appendix B: Extracts from the Public Order Act 1936

196

Bibliography

200

Index

213

Chapter 7

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Acknowledgements

I am indebted to all those family, friends and colleagues whose advice, encouragement and understanding have made this work possible. In particular I thank Clive Emsley for his careful and generous advice, which has been invaluable, and Paul Lawrence for his unwavering support and erudite comment that have been my inspiration. My thanks too to all my colleagues at the Open University for their help and cheerful encouragement. I am grateful for the assistance and advice of many librarians and archivists, especially those at the University of Hull, The National Archives, the British Library, the RAF Museum at Hendon and the Board of Deputies of British Jews. My thanks also to the Hull History Centre, the Metropolitan Police Archive and the National Portrait Gallery for their material that appears in this book. Finally, I am indebted to my family for indulging me in the pursuit of my goal and to whom this book is dedicated.

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List of images

Front cover: Mounted police at Cable Street, October 1936 (© Metropolitan Police Authority 2010) 2.1: Ronald Kidd in 1940 age 51 (U DSF/2/11 University Archives, Hull History Centre)

page 17

2.2: 1st Viscount Hugh Trenchard, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, 1931 to 1935 (© National Portrait Gallery)

18

4.1: Home Secretary Sir John Gilmour (centre) and Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord Trenchard (standing behind Gilmour) at the opening of the Metropolitan Police laboratory in 1935 (© Getty Images) 71 4.2: Mounted police at a 1930s demonstration in London (© Metropolitan Police Authority 2010)

72

6.1: Sir Philip Game, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, 1935 to 1945 (© National Portrait Gallery)

119

6.2: Fascist march, Cable Street, 4 October 1936 (© Metropolitan Police Authority 2010)

120

8.1: Ronald Kidd as a young man (U DSF/2/11 University Archives, Hull History Centre)

173

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Abbreviations

BUF CID CPGB NCCL NFWI NUJ NUWM ILD ILP JPC LCC LHASC LNU LSE PPU TNA TUC UDC

British Union of Fascists Criminal Investigation Department Communist Party of Great Britain National Council for Civil Liberties National Federation of Women’s Institutes National Union of Journalists National Unemployed Workers’ Movement International Labour Defence Independent Labour Party Jewish People’s Council London County Council Labour History Archive and Study Centre League of Nations Union London School of Economics Peace Pledge Union The National Archive Trade Union Congress Union of Democratic Control

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Foreword

The surveillance of protest groups and the policing of crowds protesting against injustice or demanding various rights or reforms have always been controversial. In this book Janet Clark focuses on the 1930s when the police closely observed those advocating so-called alien ideologies that were believed to threaten the British state, and when they stood between rival political activists in the streets. These policing tasks, criticised by many contemporaries as high-handed, biased and rough, in turn prompted the creation of the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL) – a body dedicated to preserving liberties from encroachments by state officials and to ensuring that such officials, not least the police, observed both the letter and the spirit of the law. At the beginning of the 1930s the Metropolitan Police had only recently celebrated its centenary. But in spite of the celebrations and the way in which the British police were commonly lauded as ‘the best in the world’ there had been a succession of scandals during the 1920s. These had led to the appointment of a Royal Commission charged with investigating police powers and procedure. The Commission had given the police a clean bill of health. Any large organisation, it had concluded, was bound to have a few bad apples but, generally speaking, the police were considered to be doing a commendable job in a commendable fashion. This view probably was not shared in many poor working-class districts where tough policemen often got their retaliation in first and were as hard as the local hard men, but this was not something that the Royal Commission chose, or was asked, to investigate. Moreover, the broadly conservative authorities in Britain liked to perceive of their society as one based on consensus; perhaps it is no coincidence that Charles Reith’s classic, popular Whig histories of British police

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xiv

FOR EWOR D

development began to appear during the 1930s. Economic unrest sparked by poverty and the Depression, and the street politics in which British fascists squared up to British communists challenged the notions of consensus and required policing that was very different from the usual patrolling of the beat Bobby. Given the regular occurrence of unrest and street politics during the 1930s, this style of policing was rarely out of the gaze of the media and the public. Police officers generally reflect the society from which they are drawn and which they serve. During the 1930s some of them clearly showed a lack of sympathy for Jewish victims of the fascists, but then the police came from a society that had viewed with alarm the influx of central and eastern European Jews on the eve of the First World War. When the NCCL began to question incidents of police behaviour, perhaps understandably, the police began to suspect the organisation of left-wing political sympathies and to investigate it as a creature of the Communist Party. What is striking in Janet Clark’s account is how so many in the government and among parliamentarians of different political hues acknowledged the rhetoric of British liberty and were prepared to challenge and question police behaviour. Equally significant is the way in which a cross-section of politicians was prepared to lobby and ask questions on the promptings of the NCCL. Whether it was a communist front or not – and as Clark points out, the case is not proven – its emphasis on British liberty appealed to a wide constituency. The police supervision of supposedly dissident groups and the police control of crowds are issues that vex British society at the beginning of the twenty-first century as much as they did 80 years ago. Moreover, Liberty continues to raise questions about rights and liberties, and to challenge what it considers to be high-handed behaviour by police officers in much the same way as did its predecessor, the NCCL; and Liberty is often equally denigrated. Janet Clark has written a book that should feed significantly into contemporary debates. It is not that it will teach police officers, politicians, Liberty and the general public how various kinds of activist might best be investigated and kept under surveillance, nor will it show how to resolve confrontations on the streets and the tensions and criticisms that emerge afterwards – we might learn some things from history, or at least think that we can learn from history, but it is quite possible to learn things that are wrong and

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xv

to be too dogmatic in our conclusions. What Janet Clark does here is to provide a rich awareness of past problems; this awareness should improve our understanding of the history of the 1930s as well as contribute to the search for more sensible policies, improved behaviour and, it is to be hoped, greater tolerance in the present. Clive Emsley

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1

Introduction and background debates

In 1933 a little known bookseller, Ronald Kidd, took on the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, Lord Trenchard, in the pages of the popular press. Kidd challenged Trenchard to account for the hostile police tactics employed against hunger march protesters in the parks and streets of London.1 The resultant publicity gained Kidd the support of influential individuals of varied interests, all of whom shared concerns about police practices such as the interference in personal morals by police ‘spies’, heavyhanded police questioning methods and political bias in the policing of labour and public protest. The chain of events begun by Kidd’s press intervention led to the formation in 1934 of the National Council for Civil Liberties (NCCL), a pressure group centred on civil liberties and the powers of the police, with Kidd as its General Secretary.2 This book will consider the key part played by the NCCL in shaping a distinct and organised critique of police behaviour in interwar Britain. Its innovative and direct methods involved placing observers at public demonstrations and meetings to monitor police behaviour, providing legal defence in police prosecutions, collecting witness statements and presenting evidence of police partiality or violence and lobbying MPs with complaints against the police. It established important associations through which it was able to influence Parliament and public opinion and impact upon relations between the police and public protest. Of course, that is not to say that police powers had not been a concern prior to the 1930s. The upper- and middle-class suspicions of the new and organised force that had surrounded the formation of the Metropolitan Police in 1829 had for the most part become a shared mutual respect with ‘their bobby’, 3 but this

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equilibrium had not been achieved without occasional hiccups. Police methods were not always effective and there were occasions when the police lost control of public demonstrations. One police officer died during a Chartist riot at Cold Bath Fields in London in 1833 and in 1848 a Chartist weaver died from blows inflicted by police.4 Police handling of demonstrators and disorder, and allegations of brutality and corruption had been the subject of a number of select committee inquiries and Royal Commissions on police powers and practices throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The outcome of these investigations generally praised police behaviour and problems were put down to a few ‘bad apples’. Indeed, the interwar period has often been championed as a ‘golden age’ where police in Britain could be regarded as the ‘best police in the world’. However, for much of the working classes, labour activists and the emergent political left the view was very different. Throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century this sector of society widely regarded the police as interfering, partisan and brutal.5 The use of plain clothes police officers was a particularly sensitive matter and the introduction of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) and subsequently Special Branch towards the end of the nineteenth century was controversial. The use of police ‘spies’ across mainland Europe (particularly in France and Austria) was widely reported in the British press as deeply objectionable and, throughout the nineteenth and into the twentieth century, incidents of similar ‘un-English’ practices in use in Britain attracted press and public condemnation.6 Nevertheless, the police and government ministers recognised the value of such methods and quietly sanctioned surveillance practices and the gathering of intelligence from the very early days of the Metropolitan Police. In 1833 Metropolitan Police Sgt. William Popay was dismissed for exceeding his duties when his surveillance of the activities of the National Political Union transgressed into the actions of agent provocateur. Later on in the nineteenth century socialists and reform groups echoed the sentiments expressed over Popay’s activities. Complaints about covert police practices from the Reform League, the Social Democratic Federation and bodies representing the unemployed were among those that excited press interest.7 Home Secretaries and select committees were at pains to reassure public opinion that such practices were not the norm. Nonetheless, they were not prepared to condemn their use or to give assurances

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about the regulation of undercover police methods. The Popay case, for example, elicited only a warning from the select committee about the discreet and cautious future use of such practices.8 The formation of an official detective branch, the Criminal Investigation Department, in the early 1840s was the subject of much public debate, and was only made palatable by a number of earlier uniformed police failures.9 Even so, the Home Secretary was faced in Parliament with cries of ‘espionage’ following a police ‘sting’ operation in 1880. He would give no undertaking about the recurrence of such operations.10 The Special Branch, initially an offshoot of the CID, was set up in 1883 in response to a spate of Feinan atrocities. It established an official focus on political as opposed to purely criminal activity and was met with the considerable hostility of the political left. A letter to the Pall Mall Gazette in 1888 claimed that ‘a most bitter system of Continental police supervision’ existed that was ‘calculated to ruin every Socialist individually’.11 By the early twentieth century the extent of Special Branch interest in industrial unrest and labour activism prompted commentators to view the state response to strikers and labour activists as in line with that accorded to enemy invaders.12 A fixation on association with communism and the influence of Moscow on labour following the formation of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) in 1920 led to a view of the police, and particularly of Special Branch, as a menace to individual liberties and freedoms.13 The ‘ideal’ of British policing was as entrenched in police ideology as in public perception but it was facing challenges on a number of fronts during the interwar years. A Royal Commission on Police Powers and Procedure in 1929 investigated allegations of scandal and corruption in the force. The Royal Commission’s investigation into the questioning of Irene Savidge in connection with the arrest of Sir Leo Choizza Money on a charge of indecency, and the case of Mrs Pace accused of murdering her husband, captured the sympathetic attention of the press. There were questions in Parliament about the behaviour of the police towards women and children in custody and about the use of ‘the third degree’ in police questioning methods.14 The National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship, of which Eleanor Rathbone was president, raised concerns about the treatment of women by police and demanded the appointment of women to the Royal Commission.15 The liberal and left-wing press, the New Statesman, the Manchester Guardian and the Herald

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were among those that were highly critical of police actions and of the limitations of the Royal Commission’s investigations and its recommendations.16 At the same time, much of the political left was alarmed at the growing militarisation of the police, and the controversial appointment of Viscount Byng formerly governor-general of Canada, as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in 1929, was vociferously opposed by many Labour politicians.17 For a significant minority, the concerns about encroaching police powers that underpinned the civil liberties campaign in the 1930s were deep rooted and longstanding, and were an important aspect of the support for the civil liberties movement. But it would be wrong to conclude that policing of demonstrations had progressively become more violent or partisan and culminated in 1934 in the formation of the NCCL. Equally important was the wide backing for the NCCL that came from its array of influential supporters and which owed much to the contemporaneous events and to the political ideology of the 1920s and 1930s. The immediate events from which the NCCL emerged were most obviously the hunger marches of the early 1930s. Organised by the National Unemployed Workers’ Movement (NUWM), they were marked by ferocious policing and alarmist government propaganda that many observers found disturbing and the cause of unwarranted public fear and animosity. Notable too was the Police Bill before Parliament during the summer of 1933. The Bill proposed controversial reforms to police recruitment, training and practices and appeared to signal further militarisation. This deeply alarmed opposition politicians who had opposed the appointment of Trenchard as they had his predecessor Lord Byng because of their military backgrounds. Over the same period, the rapid consolidation of the Nazi regime in Germany following an arson attack on the Reichstag at the beginning of 1933 introduced a broader European context in which the issues of civil liberties, police powers and the fairness of the legal system were given added urgency in Britain. Conspiracy allegations and an inquiry into the Reichstag fire affair, held in London, generated sympathy for the political left. What is more, the changing forms of political expression, the divisive party politics, non-party pressure groups and the marginalisation of the mainstream left characterised the political landscape of the interwar period and shaped the personal and political agendas of the NCCL’s supporters.

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Kidd’s letter to the editor of the Weekend Review in August 1933 raised serious allegations about police practices that involved the use of agents provocateur in the policing of demonstrators in London during the hunger march at the end of the previous year. Such allegations usually met a dismissive response from Scotland Yard but the sequence of events that followed took Kidd’s complaint directly to Trenchard. The Commissioner’s unconvincing assurances that the allegations were unfounded prompted the idea of a pressure group and the NCCL was launched a few months later with the backing of the paper’s editor Gerald Barry and a number of well-connected individuals from politics, journalism and the law. The adoption by the NCCL of a non-party identity was key. It associated the organisation with a broad culture of political pressure outside party politics that had been part of political expression in Britain since the emergence of Liberal Internationalism and single-issue pressure groups at the beginning of the twentieth century.18 It was an ethos embraced by organisations like the League of Nations Union (LNU), the National Peace Council and later women’s organisations such as the Women’s Institute movement and the Townswomen’s Guilds. These organisations saw their role as educational or having a welfare or social function and they avoided political direction. Nevertheless, the campaigns they pursued related to progressive and reformist issues and members were encouraged to adopt active citizenship and to take part in local politics.19 The National Federation of Women’s Institutes (NFWI), the British Legion and the Rotary International, for example, cultivated mass memberships and engaged in public activities and political campaigns ranging from birth control and slum clearance to war pensions and the Poppy Day appeal. At the same time they embraced an aggressive non-party identity and located themselves firmly outside the arena of partisan controversy.20 Many of the politicians, professionals and intellectuals associated with the NCCL were also involved with other non-party and cross-party groups and they understood the NCCL to represent a challenge to the National Government’s policing policy that was not allied to party politics. In the wider political context, after the split with Labour leader Ramsay MacDonald following the formation of the first Labour National Government in 1931, the progressively more left-focused Labour Party was essentially marginalised by successive, predominantly Conservative, National Governments.21 The Labour Party

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was not necessarily the party of choice as far as the working class was concerned and much of the working class remained committed to the Tory Party through most of the interwar period. 22 At the same time, Conservative policies appealed to a huge and growing middle class. Furthermore, Conservative campaigns had wide appeal to women and the party attracted disproportionate numbers of the female electorate.23 The Labour Party had seen exceptional growth in its local party organisation through the interwar years. Nevertheless, the minor role it played in events through the latter part of the 1930s was symptomatic of the political strait-jacket imposed by its own internal conflicts and influences from the far left that inhibited flexibility and new approaches.24 Non-party organisations represented compromise and, importantly, an alternative means of participation in the political process outside party politics that appealed to disenchanted Labour politicians and activists. Home Office papers held at the National Archives reveal the intense interest the authorities took in the NCCL and its leadership and the dilemma that arose for successive Home Secretaries over its influential support.25 The police were not willing to treat the NCCL’s activities as anything other than an escalation of left-wing activism. They did not trust its non-party associations and police sources denounced the organisation as the inspiration of the Communist Party. The plethora of Special Branch reports that are to be found among the papers of the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office portray an image of the NCCL as a communist front organisation, Ronald Kidd as a puppet of Communist Party machinations and its prominent supporters as misled. Throughout the 1930s both Trenchard and his successor, Sir Philip Game used information gathered by Special Branch to discredit the NCCL and to appeal to the Home Secretary to ignore its representations so as not to encourage its ‘troublesome’ activities. The extent to which the authoritarian outlook of the police made hostility towards the left, and thus towards the NCCL, inevitable is an interesting point. The responsibilities of Special Branch in the interwar period, and indeed well beyond, related almost exclusively to the exposure of subversive political activity and the surveillance of suspected communists. Its viewpoint was naturally in conflict with left-wing interests to the extent that the objectivity of Special Branch information was questionable. Indeed, even Special Branch was eventually to concede that for most of the 1930s, while under

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Kidd’s stewardship, the NCCL was unlikely to have satisfied Communist Party ambitions and increased communist influence within the organisation was noted following Kidd’s death. Even so, the Special Branch view of the personal connections and political affiliations of the members and supporters of the NCCL cannot be simply dismissed. The Metropolitan Commissioners of the 1930s rarely questioned Special Branch information, and both Trenchard and Game relied extensively upon it in the making of operational public order policing policy. Publicly the Home Secretary’s support for the Commissioner did not waiver. Nevertheless, throughout the latter part of the 1930s the policing of public order in the capital was the subject of intense internal scrutiny. The presentation by the NCCL of evidence of police violence, partiality or, indeed, inaction contributed significantly to ministerial concerns. Commissioner Philip Game barely concealed his frustration when in he wrote: ‘until I have had another talk with the S. of S. I am doing nothing beyond striving with varying success, to preserve the peace!’26 He was referring to his public order policing operation which, in the summer of 1938, he regarded as unreasonably constrained by political debate. Legislation introduced at the beginning of 1937 had provided the police with extensive powers to control political meetings and processions. It was intended to ensure there would be no repeat of the violent scenes witnessed at fascist events at Olympia in 1934 and at Cable Street in East London in 1936.27 Nevertheless, more than a year after the ‘battle of Cable Street’, public order policing in the Metropolitan district remained marred by political confrontation and at the centre of the NCCL’s campaign. The Commissioner found ministers unwilling to sanction interference with political activism beyond the most troubled areas of the East End. Commentators have, it seems, often assumed that Special Branch intelligence would have discredited Kidd and the NCCL to the extent that both would have been disregarded by the authorities and would, therefore, have been ineffective;28 or have accepted that communist influence within the NCCL was such that the objectives of the organisation were effectively those of the Communist Party.29 As a consequence the conditions that inspired the formation of the pressure group; the motivation and personal agendas of the prominent politicians, journalists and lawyers that supported the organisation; and its impact on the policing of disorder in the

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capital have been overshadowed by the discourse on Scotland Yard and Home Office views of its political orientation. Nonetheless, as this book will show, the NCCL played an important role in the relationship between the state and public protest in interwar Britain. It specifically targeted police behaviour around labour and anti-fascist activism. It built up an enviable network of influential journalistic and legal support and employed a professional and legalistic approach to the collation and presentation of evidence. It fed this into independent inquiries and lobbied and coached MPs to raise in Parliament grievances of violent and also ineffective policing. Its campaigns brought vital new tactics to the protest against legislation and police powers that were seen increasingly to encroach upon individual freedoms and liberty. The following chapters examine the conception and formation of the NCCL, its political orientation and the political and personal agendas of its supporters alongside a discussion of the state and police responses to organised criticism of police methods and to the emergence of a civil rights movement. Chapter two explores the vital role played by the press and the prominent, well-connected backing for the organisation and introduces a detailed discussion on the formation of the NCCL. Chapter three examines the nature of the support for a civil liberties pressure group, the political orientation of the organisation, its place in non-party ideology and its role in a political culture that included Liberal Internationalism, pacifist groups and women’s organisations. A discussion around the personal agendas of a number of the NCCL’s leading supporters will show that changing forms of political expression, divisive party politics and the marginalisation of Labour politicians played a noteworthy role in the momentum for a civil liberties pressure group. The NCCL’s networks, methods and associations through which it was able to bring complaints about legislation and police behaviour to public attention and into the parliamentary arena will be examined in chapters four, five and six, via a discussion of a number of its campaigns and its association with anti-fascism. Public, press, police and ministerial responses to the NCCL’s activities is a theme that runs through all chapters. However, chapter seven focuses on the police and Home Office responses to the NCCL. It will discuss police attempts to discredit the organisation and the involvement of Special Branch intelligence in perpetuating a view of

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the ­organisation as simply a front for Communist Party activities. A discussion here of the workings of the Public Order Act 1936 will highlight the nature of the NCCL’s influence and the developing relationships between the state and public pressure group protest. Chapter eight briefly reviews the ongoing role and changing political relationships of the NCCL following Ronald Kidd’s death in 1942, alongside the response of the police and Home Office to the emerging new regime. Finally, it will be concluded that police powers and civil liberties were as much in contention and as difficult to balance in the 1930s as today. Public interest is no less exercised in the twenty-first century by the subject of liberties and powers of the police than it was in 1934, or indeed 1830, but the formation of the National Council for Civil Liberties in 1934 organised the protest about police powers and civil liberties and laid the foundations for the greater accountability and awareness existing today. Notes 1 With the help of writer and politician A. P. Herbert and Weekend Review editor Gerald Barry, Kidd took a complaint to the Commissioner about police behaviour at a hunger march demonstration in London in 1932. 2 The National Council for Civil Liberties is the former name of the civil rights organisation Liberty. 3 Storch, Robert D., ‘A Plague of Blue Locusts’, International Review of Social History, Vol. XX, Part 1, 1976, pp. 61–90. 4 Emsley, Clive, The English Police: A Political and Social History (London: Longman, 1996), p. 61. 5 Emsley, Clive, ‘“The Thump of Wood on Swede Turnip”: Police Violence in Nineteenth-Century England’, Criminal Justice History, 6, 1985, pp. 125–49. 6 See Interalia The Times, 2 and 4 December 1845; ‘Police Persecution of Socialists’, Pall Mall Gazette, 4 August 1888; ‘The Police Inquiry’, Daily Herald, 9 October 1928. 7 Letter to the editor, Pall Mall Gazette, 25 July 1866; Pall Mall Gazette, 13 February 1886; Pall Mall Gazette, 22 October 1892. 8 House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, 1833 (675), Select Committee on State of Metropolitan Police, Report, 16 August 1833; and 1833 (627), Select Committee on Petition of F. Young and Others, Report, 6 August, 1833. 9 Morris, Robert, ‘Crime Does Not Pay: Thinking Again about

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Detectives in the First Century of the Metropolitan Police’, in Emsley and Shpayer-Makov (eds), Police Detectives in History 1750–1950 (Aldeshot, Ashgate, 2006). 10 Parl. Debs, 11 January 1881, col. 442–4. 11 ‘Police Persecution of Socialists’, Pall Mall Gazette, 4 August 1888. 12 See Weinberger, Barbara, ‘Keeping the Peace? Policing Strikes 1906–26’, History Today, Vol.  38, December 1987, pp.  29–35; Weinberger, Barbara, The Best Police in the World: An Oral History of English Policing (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995); Morgan, Jane, Conflict and Order: The Police and Labour Disputes in England and Wales, 1900–1939 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987). 13 See inter alia ‘Secret Police and Working-Class Woman’, Sunday Worker, 14 October 1928, p. 7; ‘The Police Inquiry’, Daily Herald, 9 October 1928, p. 4. 14 See The National Archive (TNA) MEPO 3/554 and LO 2/24. Sir Leo Choizza Money had been arrested for committing an indecent act with a Miss Savidge in Hyde Park. The case was dismissed and the two Police Constables who gave evidence were accused of committing perjury. Miss Savidge claimed she had been bullied by the police. See also Wood, John Carter, ‘“The Third Degree”: Press Reporting, Crime Fiction and Police Powers in 1920s Britain’, Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 21, No. 4 (2010), pp. 464–85. 15 London Metropolitan University, the Women’s Library, The Papers of Eleanor Rathbone, 7ELR. The organisation was formerly known as the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies. 16 New Statesman, 18 August and 30 March 1929; ‘The Liberty of the Subject’, Manchester Guardian, 21 July 1928; ‘The Police Inquiry’, Daily Herald, 9 October 1928. 17 The appointment of Lord Byng was debated in the House of Commons in July 1928. The objections were defeated and the appointment was confirmed. The Times, 3 July 1928, p. 16. 18 Dackombe, B. P., ‘Single-Issue Extra-parliamentary Groups and Liberal Internationalism, 1899–1920’ (Open University PhD Thesis, 2008). 19 Beaumont, Caitriona, ‘Citizens not Feminists: The Boundary Negotiated between Citizenship and Feminism by Mainstream Women’s Organisations in England, 1928–9’, Women’s History Review, Vol. 9, No. 2, 2000, pp. 411–29. 20 McCarthy, Helen, ‘Parties, Voluntary Associations and Democratic Politics in Interwar Britain’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 50, No. 4, 2007, pp. 891–912. 21 The collapse of the second Labour Government and Ramsay MacDonald’s decision to accept the invitation to form a National

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Government led to most of his party breaking away to form an oppositional Labour Party. 22 McKibbin, Ross, The Ideologies of Class: Social Relations in Britain, 1850–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 95. 23 McKibbin, Ross, Classes and Cultures: England 1918–1951 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); for discussion on Conservative appeal to women see David Jarvis, ‘Mrs Maggs and Betty: The Conservative Appeal to Women Voters in the 1920s’, Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1994, pp. 129–52; and David Jarvis, ‘British Conservatism and Class Politics in the 1920s’, The English Historical Review, Vol. 111, No. 440, February 1996, pp. 59–84. 24 Pimlott, Ben, Labour and the Left in the 1930s (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 25 TNA HO 45/25462, HO 45/25463, HO 45/25464 and HO 45/25465 contain detailed police and Special Branch reports and Home Office correspondence on the activities of the NCCL from its inception in 1934 through to the 1950s. 26 MEPO 3/2490, Letter to Norman Brook from Philip Game, 27 June 1938. 27 Violent fascist stewarding at a British Union of Fascists meeting at Olympia in June 1934 attracted condemnation in the press and in Parliament. There was extensive criticism of the policing operation that appeared to ignore serious assaults on anti-fascist protesters. At Cable Street in the East End of London in October 1936 police officers fought a pitched battle with the mainly Jewish residents protesting at Mosley’s plans to conduct an anniversary march through the East End. 28 See inter alia Copsey, Nigel, Anti-Fascism in Britain (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 44–5 and p. 77; Thurlow, Richard, The Secret State: British Internal Security in the Twentieth Century (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994).  29 Samuel, Raphael, ‘Staying Power: The Lost World of British Communism (Part II)’, New Left Review, 1/156 March-April 1986, pp. 63–113. Samuel’s acknowledged source is Joe Jacobs, Out of the Ghetto: My Youth in the East End: Communism and Fascism, 1913–1939 (London: Janet Simon, 1978), although Samuel accepts that Jacobs’ views are on occasions inconsistent with other sources.

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Our precious liberties: disparate interests and common cause

The discourse on policing in Britain in the interwar period has often been presented in terms of a ‘golden age’ and of the police in Britain attracting admiration around the world. Clive Emsley has commented that there was something of a ‘consensus on the excellence of the English Police’ in parliament during the interwar years. The Royal Commission on Police Powers and Procedure set up to investigate corruption and scandals in 1929 formed a ‘favourable opinion of the conduct, tone and efficiency of the police service as a whole’. But, alongside this ‘indulgent tradition’, much of the working class, labour activists and some sections of the political left held a very different view.1 Thus the emergence of a pressure group aimed at police powers and civil rights was not an inconceivable event in the mid 1930s. Nonetheless, the conception of the NCCL and the means of its formation were improbable, and arose from an unlikely opportunity presented by the press to directly challenge the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police on methods used to police hunger marchers. It was an article by barrister and author, A. P. Herbert, published in the Weekend Review in August 1933 under the title ‘Bandits and Bottles’ that led to an encounter between Ronald Kidd, bookseller and one-time freelance journalist, and Lord Trenchard, the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. This in turn set in motion the idea that was to become the NCCL. Herbert’s article exposed the probability that the Metropolitan Police used police officers as agents provocateurs in connection with afterhours drinking in London’s night clubs.2 Kidd believed he had witnessed similar police practices in connection with the hunger march demonstrations in London during the previous autumn. In Kidd’s view, such police actions towards peaceful protesters was a wholly more serious

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matter than the drinking hours of London’s toffs and club-goers that concerned Herbert. In a vociferous response to the editor of the Weekend Review Kidd accused Herbert of snobbery and hypocrisy and of trivialising civil liberties. He issued a sardonic invitation to Herbert ‘as one so solicitous for liberty’ to say whether he had been present in Hyde Park and Trafalgar Square to see ‘perfectly orderly Hunger Marchers batoned by police agents provocateurs who wore cloth caps and red handkerchiefs’.3 In a lively exchange that ensued in the paper over the following weeks Herbert challenged Kidd to give him the evidence. He invited Kidd to make an affidavit supporting his story and offered to ‘bring Mr Kidd and his affidavit to Lord Trenchard’s notice’.4 Previous experience of lodging complaints about police behaviour led Kidd to expect a whitewashing response, at best, from the Commissioner. Nevertheless, he made the affidavit and he also secured a second from Douglas Jefferies, a journalist friend.5 Kidd’s statement described ‘fairly orderly’ crowds in Whitehall on 1 November 1932 that were being subjected to numerous baton charges by mounted and foot police with ‘much severe clubbing of apparently orderly persons of both sexes’. He gave a description of two men ‘wearing cloth caps and neckerchiefs’ who appeared to be excited and imminently liable to incite others to disorder. Kidd alleged that he had believed the men to be genuine demonstrators until both drew truncheons from their clothing and laid about the marchers indiscriminately, subsequently arresting two men who attempted to defend themselves from the batons.6 Jefferies described a similar scene. He alleged that he had seen several men in the crowd boisterously shoving those around them and shouting violently, and who he judged from their build, carriage and drilled movements ‘looked suspiciously like plainclothes policemen’. Jefferies had recognised Arthur Cane of the Special Branch who, he said, was well known to him. He described how Cane and a number of other men, who had been previously ‘standing about’, ran into the thick crowd shouting and causing a disturbance. He alleged that Cane took missiles from his coat pocket and threw them over the heads of the crowd in the direction of mounted police patrolling at the end of the street. This incited a police baton charge and street fighting broke out among the previously orderly crowd.7 Kidd would not have been surprised by the Commissioner’s

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initial response to Herbert’s complaint and the affidavits, had he been aware of it. Trenchard wanted to know if there was anyone in Special Branch called Cane because the matter would be easier to deal with if there were not. He considered an appropriate reply to Herbert might be to the effect that he was satisfied that none of the charges took place and any further complaints should be directed to the Home Office.8 However, the police reports and statements provided far from conclusive vindication of police actions. Cane, who had since been promoted to sergeant, had indeed been one of the Special Branch officers on duty in Whitehall that evening. Moreover, Special Branch Superintendent Foster, the officer in charge on 1 November, confirmed that many Special Branch and other police officers were dressed in ‘rough manner’, so as to ‘mingle with the mob and collect essential information’.9 Sergeant Cane admitted that he and Jefferies were well acquainted. They had met at a literary debating society and Cane had subsequently had dinner at Jefferies’ flat. Cane denied the allegations made by Jefferies.10 The arrests of two men by plain clothes officers documented at Cannon Row Police Station on 1 November support Kidd’s allegations. However, on the strength of a 35 minute time difference in the recorded times of the arrests, police reports concluded that the men could not have been arrested during the same incident, as Kidd had alleged, and therefore his statement was false.11 This conclusion took no account of the general confusion caused by the crowds of some 11,000 people in the area and the considerable disorder that led to 36 people being arrested. Nor did it consider the disruption at Cannon Row Police Station, where all of those arrested were taken, and where two of the arresting officers described the station at the time these men were taken into custody as ‘full of police and prisoners’.12 Foster did suggest that Kidd ‘may have been genuinely mistaken’. However, he maintained that Jefferies’ ‘story’, that Cane or any plain clothes officer would ‘throw bricks about’, was ‘utterly incredible’.13 Significantly, Foster’s reports maintained that Jefferies was known to Special Branch as the editor of a communist journal called Storm and was believed to supervise the affairs of the NUWM on behalf of the Communist Party. Kidd was believed to be a member of the West Central London branch of the Friends of the Soviet Union.14 Foster’s statements implied that the affidavits were unreliable and

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that ‘both these men are to some extent tainted’ and had been ‘driven to making the affidavits by the persistence of Mr. Herbert’.15 In the light of this ‘evidence’ Trenchard reconsidered his initial proposal to dismiss Herbert’s complaint. After consulting with the Home Office he decided to see Herbert ‘confidentially’ to advise him that Kidd and Jefferies were ‘communists’, that their allegations were not correct and that there was, therefore, ‘no case for an enquiry’.16 Gerald Barry, editor of the Weekend Review, accompanied Herbert to what turned out to be ‘a very long interview’ where Trenchard tried, and failed, to convince the two men that the allegations were ‘inherently improbable’.17 Herbert’s summing up of the case made the front page of the Weekend Review. As a barrister he was well aware that the time discrepancy in the charge sheet at Cannon Row Police Station could have been accounted for in a number of ways. He reported the discrepancy as ‘not quite so shattering as Lord Trenchard seems to think’.18 Kidd and Jefferies had impressed him as ‘sincere and reasonable men’, and not likely to allow their political opinions to lead them into wild accusations. He thought that Kidd had ‘done a service in raising the matter’.19 The ‘front page splash’ and Herbert’s triumph in reaching Trenchard with the affidavits impressed Kidd immensely. Contemporary commentators have suggested it gave him the idea for an organisation made up of well-known professional and literary figures who were prepared to act as observers at public meetings and demonstrations, and who would bring complaints about police actions to parliament and to the press. 20 However, the favourable impression that Kidd had made on Herbert and Barry was clearly also significant in the realisation of his vision. The formation of a pressure group The National Council for Civil Liberties was launched on 22 February 1934, four months after the Weekend Review had brought Kidd’s complaint to the attention of the public.21 The inaugural meeting was attended by some 30 well-known public figures. The prestigious list of vice-presidents and supporters included Labour MPs Clement Attlee, George Lansbury, Aneurin Bevan, Dingle Foot, Liberal MPs Edward Mallalieu and Sir Percy Harris, and Conservative MP Vyvyan Adams. New Statesman editor Kingsley Martin and political commentator Harold Laski were among the

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18 individuals elected to the executive committee. Author and critic E. M. Forster was elected president. Forster’s liberal views and detachment from party politics was testimony to the ‘comprehensive character’ of the Council and its ‘non-party and undenominational’ constitution.22 It aimed to represent disparate concerns for civil liberties by bringing people together whose names carried weight in literature, science, art and the law. A strong bias among its membership towards the legal profession and literary figures was considered to be important because of the ‘technical legal character’ of many of the problems the Council would be called upon to address, and to ensure the all-important effective press propaganda. The stated aim of the organisation was to help protect freedoms of speech, press and assembly from infringement by executive or judicial authority or by government and other agencies to ‘use their powers at the expense of precious liberties’. Its objective to co-ordinate the activities of political parties and other bodies, and to concentrate into a single channel the diffuse efforts of numerous societies which, in their specialised way, are concerned with ­preservation of our civil rights23

made a decisive statement. It underlined the inclusive nature of the organisation and its aim to bring together the broad critique of police powers and behaviour in this period to form an organised and coherent pressure group protest. It was not inevitable that Kidd would turn the press publicity into tangible support for such an organisation. He had not approached the Weekend Review seeking backing for a campaign or for the formation of a pressure group. Quite the contrary. He had dubbed Herbert ‘a snob and jester’ and accused him of being concerned with the trivial affairs of his own social class and of undermining vital wider issues relating to police powers and interference with freedoms and liberties.24 But, significantly, Kidd’s crusade captured the attention of Weekend Review editor Gerald Barry. Barry played an important part in the momentum and backing for the organisation. He had accompanied Herbert to the meeting with Trenchard and he was at the inaugural meeting of the NCCL. Both he and Herbert were among its first vice-presidents. Barry was a very well respected political commentator and involved with cross-party interests.25 He had useful contacts in press and political circles. Kingsley Martin was particularly important. Martin was editor of

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2.1  Ronald Kidd in 1940 age 51

the New Statesman and Nation and a close associate of Barry. The two papers were merged in 1934 under Martin’s editorship with Barry being appointed director. Kidd and the Weekend Review affair was a timely public reminder of the manner of policing the activities of hunger marchers. The 1932 NUWM-organised march had been associated with exceptional violence and another march was planned for 1934. The attitude of the authorities towards these events was a compelling incentive, but it was not the only issue to make 1933 ‘a good year’ to rally support for a pressure group aimed at civil liberties and police powers. Throughout 1933 the New Statesman and Nation had been involved in its own campaign against the rise of fascism and the curtailment of civil liberties in Germany. Circulation of the paper was banned in Germany for several months because of its critical editorial.26 Press and public interest in Britain in an arson attack on the Reichstag in February 1933 and the rapid progress of the Nazi regime was one of the two events in particular during that year that stand out as significant in raising awareness in Britain of the

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2.2 1st Viscount Hugh Trenchard, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, 1931 to 1935

fragility of civil liberties. The second was the Metropolitan Police Bill that was debated in Parliament throughout the summer. The Reichstag fire affair The arson attack on the Reichstag on 27 February 1933, by Dutch ex-communist Marius Van der Lubbe, was swiftly taken up by the Nazi Party as the start of a communist terror campaign across Germany. The true influences behind the attack were far from clear, but the affair led to the rapid consolidation of the Nazi regime. 27 A Commission of Inquiry into the arrest and trial of the accused, and a suspected Nazi conspiracy, was held in London through the autumn of 1933. Opposition Chief Whip Lord Marley was behind the organisation of the London Inquiry. He also chaired the ‘World Relief Committee for the Victims of German Fascism’, a new organisation set up in May 1933 and supported by a number of Labour Party members frustrated by their Party’s weak official response. Among them was Dorothy Woodman, Kingsley Martin’s partner.28 The London Inquiry opened on 14 September.

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Its findings, which exonerated Van der Lubbe and other accused communists tried in Germany, were announced on 20 September. This coincided precisely with Kidd’s altercation with Herbert in the Weekend Review.29 The trial in Germany concluded that the arson attack had been communist inspired, although only Van der Lubbe was found guilty and executed in January 1934. In England meetings and demonstrations to protest against the events in Germany were organised by the International Labour Defence (ILD). Originally known as the International Class War Prisoners’ Aid, the ILD was ostensibly a communist-backed relief organisation providing aid for political prisoners.30 Despite its communist connections, through the 1920s the organisation in Britain had been made up largely of Labour politicians and trade union officials and its campaign against the curtailment of civil liberties in Germany had mainstream support. The ILD’s members and its activities attracted the intense scrutiny of Scotland Yard. Secretary Alun Thomas had been warned that ‘the Commissioner has decided that deputations, processions and persons with petitions will not be allowed to proceed to the German Embassy’ and that demonstrations would not be allowed to take place there.31 This was considered to be a very high-handed action and ‘unwarranted interference’ with a recognised public right. The ILD’s leaders were deeply opposed to the involvement of the police and security services in the legitimate affairs of the organisation. Alun Thomas assured Scotland Yard that the ‘legal public activities’ of the organisation would continue,32 and a meeting at Conway Hall in London on 22 September 1933 was convened to determine its response. ILD meetings were subject to Special Branch surveillance. It is clear from the surveillance reports of the Conway Hall meeting that Kidd was there, and he subsequently joined a demonstration at the German Embassy,33 but that he was not known, at that time, as previously having been associated with the organisation. Speakers at Conway Hall included Kingsley Martin and Dorothy Woodman, Professor Harold Laski, Frederick Pethick-Lawrence, who was former Financial Secretary under Philip Snowden in the second Labour Government, and barrister Neil Lawson, secretary to the London Commission of Inquiry.34 All were to become vice-presidents or associated with the NCCL from the outset. The ILD’s secretary, Alun Thomas, was elected to the executive committee of the NCCL at the inaugural meeting.35 Lord Marley

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was one of its first vice-presidents. Martin’s connections had provided Kidd with this recruiting opportunity. He took a personal interest in Kidd’s progress, and was to note a few months after the NCCL was set up that ‘Kidd has done better than I could have thought possible’.36 This was a very significant body of support for Kidd but it brought with it the certainty of Special Branch attention. The defence of those accused of causing the Reichstag fire and the case for a Nazi conspiracy were led by the ‘Red Millionaire’, German communist Willi Munzenberg, who was well known to the security services in England and thought to be the Soviet Union’s director of propaganda operations in the West.37 Munzenberg had been the subject of MI5 interest since 1917 and had been denied entry to Britain on several occasions throughout the interwar years.38 He was refused permission to attend the legal commission in London in 1933 and the regular visits of his close associate Otto Katz during the Inquiry were under round-the-clock surveillance.39 Thus association with the Reichstag fire affair was interpreted by the authorities in Britain as evidence of communist association. The Police Bill While the interest in the events in Germany and in the London Inquiry helped Kidd make connections on the left, at the same time the parliamentary debate on the Metropolitan Police Bill throughout the summer of 1933 turned the opposition benches of the House of Commons into a valuable recruiting ground for the NCCL from the political mainstream. The Bill was Trenchard’s plans to reform the force. Often referred to as the ‘father of the air force’, Trenchard’s military skills and achievements were in little doubt but his appointment as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police was, to many on the political left, indicative of the National Government’s commitment to right-wing policies. Trenchard had taken up the post in October 1931 in the midst of economic crisis and in the wake of pay cuts for civil servants including the police. Following the Invergordon incident, an Admiralty blunder over reductions in pay that led to naval ratings refusing to obey orders and sensational press reports of mutiny and imminent revolution, there was deep apprehension at the possibility of a police strike, particularly in London. It was felt

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that a resolute Commissioner was needed, who would be prepared to effect wholesale reforms if necessary, to curb the influence of the Federation and ‘recall the police to a sense of their responsibilities’. Reluctant at first, Trenchard eventually accepted the post on the assurance from Prime Minister Ramsey MacDonald of a free hand and full support for his proposals, ‘even if it means turning the force upside down’.40 Little more than a year into the role of Commissioner, Trenchard regarded reform as vital and urgent. He wrote to the Home Secretary on 12 January 1933: ‘the difficulty of carrying on here under present conditions is so great that I feel it is essential to sketch out a definite programme of action as regards the reforms without any further delay’.41 He was well aware that his proposals would be difficult for many to accept and acknowledged that ‘75% of the decent people believe that everything in the Metropolitan Police Force is perfect and will not altogether believe that these drastic remedies are necessary’.42 He, however, felt the Force was in an appalling state. The Police Federation he considered to be virtually a police trade union, ‘no more than a tool of agitators’.43 He was in no doubt that the real cause of the ‘inefficiency and discontent’ that had long been prevalent in the force, was the lack of an ‘educated officer class’.44 He was, he said, ‘perfectly certain that if any serious trouble arises in the next two or three years, there is real danger of the Force breaking in our hands’. Trenchard urged that there should be no delay in implementing the reforms, and with a hint of concern that he might not pull it off he warned, ‘the only thing that would stop this programme would be the beginning of a big strike’.45 Hence the Bill proposed reforms that were designed to curb the activities of the Police Federation, cut service to a maximum of 10 years and to establish a Police College to recruit and train an ‘officer class’ of senior police officers. Unsurprisingly, this met fierce opposition in the House of Commons. The White Paper had followed rapidly on the heels of Trenchard’s first Annual Report as Commissioner that had only hinted at the problems in the Force. Labour MPs had long complained about the steady militarisation of the police force over many years and the deterioration in the relationship between the Commissioner and the Police Federation. They were suspicious of what appeared to be panic legislation and reforms being rushed through ‘to some sinister ulterior end’.46 Throughout May and June 1933 the opposition repeatedly challenged the Home

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Secretary on the Bill as fascist and undemocratic. George Lansbury, leader of the opposition, demanded to know how it was that Lord Trenchard, ‘this wonderful genius of the air’, had discovered that the police force wanted ‘revolutionary treatment’ when previously it had been described as the ‘most perfect police force’, and the admiration of the world where ‘foreigners come here and almost kneel down to worship the man on point duty’.47 Clement Attlee accused the government of turning its back on democracy, and Trenchard of the utter disregard of the men serving under him.48 Aneurin Bevan argued that the Force was being organised on the basis that there would be disorder rather than with the aim of avoiding it and he went so far as to suggest, ‘It is an entirely Fascist development, intended to ‘make the Police Force more amenable to the orders of the Carlton Club and Downing Street, if there is a disturbance’ and designed to ‘separate the officer class from other members of the police force’.49 After a number of amendments the Bill was passed at the end of June with 210 votes in favour and 52 against. Among those voting against, Clement Attlee, Aneurin Bevan, Dingle Foot, Eleanor Rathbone and George Lansbury were all to become vice-presidents of the NCCL from the outset.50 George Buchanan, Sir Stafford Cripps, Sir Percy Harris, Edward Mallalieu and James Maxton were among those who were to be associated with the organisation over the coming years. The parliamentary debate surrounding the Bill was near perfect timing for Kidd, coming as it did in the weeks leading up to his press exposure afforded by correspondence with Herbert and the Weekend Review. Most of these MPs were associated with the wider critique of police behaviour and for them the press and parliamentary focus on the Metropolitan Police was a powerful stimulus to support the formation of the NCCL. According to Andrew Boyle, Trenchard’s biographer, the debate in the House of Commons alarmed uncommitted onlookers and many intellectuals and writers of the day as well as opposition MPs. Boyle suggests that the influence of this body of opposition was seriously under-estimated, even despised, and he views the formation of the National Council for Civil Liberties as a ‘logical enough sequel’.51

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A practical role and early success An urgent task faced the founding members of the NCCL as the organisation was launched on 22 February 1934. It was the imminent arrival in London of another NUWM hunger march. Harold Laski, H. G. Wells, Julian Huxley and Claud Cockburn were chosen, among others, to observe police behaviour at a rally in Hyde Park planned for three days later.52 The appointment of a vigilance committee to monitor police activities established a tangible and practical role for the organisation. Without this, as Claud Cockburn was in later years to note, ‘that sort of body at that time could very easily have started with a general proclamation of liberal principles and really never got much further’.53 The following day a letter in The Times and the Manchester Guardian announced that the Council for Civil Liberties would ‘maintain a vigilant observation of proceedings’ while the marchers were in London. It deplored the ‘dangerous and unjustified atmosphere of misgiving’ that the authorities had created around the hunger march and pointed out the ‘excellent discipline’ of the marchers.54 Kingsley Martin was a signatory along with Clement Attlee, A. P. Herbert, Harold Laski, D. N. Pritt and H. G. Wells. Martin later recalled that Lord Trenchard’s personal investigation of events during the 1932 march had ‘left a nasty taste’ and the ‘well known names’ of the NCCL executive decided to take action.55 The policing of the NUWM hunger march in the autumn of 1932, that had prompted Kidd’s outburst about agents provocateur, had been a brutal affair, particularly so in London. Jane Morgan has commented that ‘many complaints were voiced about the police’, especially those in the metropolis. Opposition MPs complained that ‘another kind of police was emerging’ where peaceful demonstrations that had been allowed in the past were being broken up by the police.56 Eye-witness accounts of the events around Hyde Park on 27 October 1932 described how, without the slightest provocation, mounted police raced up and down the roads flourishing staves and ‘smashing their way in and out amongst the traffic’.57 NUWM leader Wal Hannington recalled that from the speakers’ platforms in Hyde Park, ‘the roar of the crowd’ could be heard from outside the park gates as they ‘battled with the police’ and there were ‘many casualties on both sides’.58 Inexperienced and ‘panicky’ Special Constables were blamed for much of the serious disorder

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when regular police were forced to draw their truncheons to protect the Specials and quell the ‘incensed’ demonstrators.59 The police claimed that responsibility lay with communists and a ‘hooligan element’ among the marchers, who were ‘noticeably antagonistic to the Special Constables’. However, the observation that ‘the special constabulary turned up in excess of numbers asked for, and showed enthusiasm for their duties’ might suggest excessive zeal.60 The elaborate police operation in 1932 included drafting police reinforcements into central London from other districts and from areas outside London. All leave was cancelled, rapid means of transport was provided by 15 motor tenders, and 5 wireless tenders were available in case of emergency. The full resources of the mounted branch were employed and additional horses borrowed from the military authorities and riding schools.61 The arrest of ringleaders was considered the most effective means of containing the disorder.62 Four NUWM leaders were arrested and an ‘urgent and confidential’ memo from the Commissioner’s office was circulated to officers in charge of Districts. It required a report of all ‘local or other leaders of the Communists or Unemployed against whom you possess evidence of incitement to create disturbance, or of participation in disturbances that have occurred’.63 According to Hannington, a police raid on the NUWM headquarters and his arrest on a charge of attempting to cause disaffection among members of the Metropolitan Police, brought ‘tens of thousands’ of unemployed workers onto the streets of London, requiring ‘enormous forces of police’ to be mobilised.64 Propaganda was an important part of the policing operation in 1932 and the press had generally collaborated with the authorities in creating an atmosphere of fear. Typical of the sensational headlines and alarmist editorial that sought to keep people away from the marchers, the Daily Telegraph warned of ‘loot and pillage’ and the certainty of ‘bloodshed’ under the headline ‘Truth about Marchers, Communist-Led Body under Orders of Moscow’.65 Trenchard’s plans for the 1934 march suggested that he anticipated a policing operation much the same as on the previous occasion. He had at his disposal more than 13,000 uniformed constables. He did advocate the more cautious use of ‘Specials’ under the charge of regular police and he was also anxious to avoid plain clothes men ‘taking people off to Scotland Yard or to the Police Stations’. Referring to ‘the A. P. Herbert case’, the Commissioner warned that plain clothes

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men doing this work ‘gives rise to a wrong impression’. Trenchard expected his propaganda machine to ‘get large numbers of the press’ to warn the public against sight-seeing.66 Film companies too were to be asked not to film the hunger marchers. He hoped to convince them that it would not be in the public interest to show such pictures either in this country or abroad.67 As in 1932 NUWM leader Hannington and Tom Mann, a leader of the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), were arrested.68 The Commissioner paid scant attention to the changed mood since the previous NUWM march. There is nothing in his preparations to suggest that he had taken into account the possibility that some form of vigilance group was about to be set up to monitor police behaviour. The Home Secretary, however, was much more cautious. Publicly, John Gilmour had warned MPs that those who were associated with the march ‘incurred a grave responsibility’.69 At the same time, however, he warned the Commissioner that the position had changed from the previous year when no Members of Parliament had been associated with the march. In 1934 he was mindful that James Maxton, George Buchanan, John McGovern and Aneurin Bevan were all supporting the march. A repeat of the policing operation of the previous occasion was not acceptable.70 In the event, not only was there greater support for the marchers than previously, but the attitude of NUWM leaders was also noticeably more amenable. In October 1932 Hannington had caused indignation among the socialist left wing of the House by rejecting Independent Labour Party MP John McGovern’s offer to present a petition to Parliament on behalf of the NUWM.71 In February 1934 there was, perhaps, a certain esprit de corps between the organisers of the hunger march and some MPs. According to Hannington the scene in the House of Commons was one of ‘extreme bitterness’ and ‘raw tempers’ as Liberal as well as Labour MPs supported the marchers.72 In 1932 the emphasis of the authorities had been on preventing the presentation of a petition to the Prime Minister. The Home Secretary’s concerns in 1934 were more focused on how deputations to the House of Commons could be facilitated, and the possibility that it might be a Member of Parliament presenting the petition.73 Deputations to the House of Commons were a matter of ‘great difficulty’ for the police. It was their duty to prevent large crowds in the vicinity of Parliament.74 Trenchard considered the Home Secretary to be dithering, reluctant to enforce the law fully

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and yet fearful of encouraging the hunger marchers.75 The Commissioner took it upon himself to warn the King and Queen that it would be best during the week of the hunger marchers’ stay to have ‘no public or semi-public engagements in London’.76 The violent scenes of October 1932 were not repeated in February 1934. The NUWM rally in Hyde Park on 25 February went off peacefully and there was remarkably little disturbance during the hunger marchers’ stay in London. Harold Laski, observing for the NCCL in Hyde Park, reported that ‘the police conduct was admirable and there was nothing to which one could take the slightest exception’.77 While there is no evidence that the Commissioner considered the presence of NCCL observers as anything other than a new aspect of communist activities, the formation of the organisation and its well-known observers and supporters almost certainly featured in the Home Secretary’s decision to tone down the policing operation. The resulting, less obtrusive, policing no doubt played a part in minimising the disorder. Trenchard had reluctantly observed Gilmour’s instructions to tone down his elaborate plans for policing the marchers at the end of February. Just two weeks later, on 13 March, he wrote to the Prime Minister asking to be relieved of his duties, and saying that he had ‘achieved or set in motion all that he had set out to do’.78 It is more than coincidence that this came so soon after the Home Secretary had challenged his public order policy. Boyle suggests that the Cabinet were not at all anxious to release Trenchard at that time and may have prompted the King to dissuade him. Trenchard, according to Boyle, ‘by both nature and training predisposed to accept the least inclination of the royal will as a categorical command’, agreed to stay for another year following an audience at Buckingham Palace.79 There was now, however, another dimension to the policing of public order in the shape of the NCCL, a pressure group actively campaigning for the protection of civil liberties in relation to police powers. It could be argued that this was due, in no small part, to Trenchard’s policies. The Commissioner’s reform of the Metropolitan Police Force had weakened the Federation and favoured militarism in the training and development of police officers. This, alongside the perceptions of right-wing bias engendered by policing methods, was a significant factor in motivating influential individuals who were already disenchanted by violence and force in the policing of political activism, and who welcomed the advent of a civil liberties

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movement. While political influences within the NCCL were treated with suspicion at Scotland Yard and its activities regarded as troublesome, prominent support for the organisation’s aims ensured that the authorities would be forced to account for police behaviour and deployment in a more detailed and careful way. Notes 1 Emsley, Clive, ‘The English Bobby’, in Roy Porter (ed.), Myths of the English (Cambridge: Polity, 1992), pp. 126–7. See also inter alia Emsley, The English Police; Storch, ‘A Plague of Blue Locusts’. 2 Weekend Review, 5 August 1933. 3 Weekend Review, 19 August 1933, p. 182. 4 Weekend Review, 26 August 1933, p. 205, 9 September 1933, p. 245 and 16 September 1933, p. 270. 5 Scaffardi, Sylvia, Fire Under The Carpet (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1986), pp. 41–2. 6 MEPO 3/553, Sworn affidavit of Ronald Kidd, 27 September 1933. 7 MEPO 3/553, Sworn affidavit of Douglas Jefferies, 28 September 1933. 8 MEPO 3/553, Commissioner’s minute, 2 October 1933. 9 MEPO 3/553, Superintendent Foster, Special Branch memo, 5 October 1933. 10 MEPO 3/553, Statement of Sgt Cane, Special Branch, undated. 11 MEPO 3/553, Minute note, Superintendent Foster, 6 October 1933. 12 MEPO 3/553, Report of A/Superintendent Foster, 5 and 6 October 1933 and Statement of PC McKetterick, 5 October 1933. 13 MEPO 3/553, Minute note 11.9.10.33. 14 MEPO 3/553, Report of A/Superintendent Foster, 5 October 1933. 15 MEPO 3/553, Minute note, Superintendent Foster, 9 October 1933. 16 MEPO 3/553, Memo, Commissioner to Sir Russell Scott, 10 October 1933. 17 MEPO 3/553, Memo, Commissioner to Sir Russell Scott, 17 October 1933 and Commissioner’s draft letter to Herbert, October 1933. London School of Economics (LSE), British Library of Political and Economic Science, BARRY, biographical history. Barry was a political journalist and editor. He had cross-party affiliation and chaired various Government committees including the reform of obscene libel laws on radio and television. He was a co-founder of Political and Economic Planning. 18 Scaffardi, Fire Under The Carpet, p. 42. 19 Weekend Review, 28 October 1933. 20 University of Hull, Scaffardi Papers, DSF/4/2, Barry Cox interview

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with Sylvia Scaffardi, c.1969. See also Scaffardi, Fire Under The Carpet, p. 42. 21 Originally launched as the Council for Civil Liberties, the organisation adopted its national identity a few months later and opened branches initially in Croydon, Portsmouth, Southampton, Birmingham, Liverpool and Manchester. 22 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 4/2, Barry Cox interview with Kingsley Martin, c.1969, and DSF 1/1, The National Council for Civil Liberties Annual Report for 1934, April 1935, p. 6. The non-party concept will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 3. 23 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 1/1, The National Council for Civil Liberties Annual Report for 1934, April 1935, p. 5. 24 Weekend Review, 19 August 1933, p. 182. 25 Barry was editor of the Saturday Review from 1924 until he founded the Weekend Review in 1930 following a disagreement with the Board of Directors that earned him the regard of his peers for having ‘refused outside dictatorship’. See LSE, BARRY 46, extract from New Statesman, 22 February 1936; Marwick, Arthur, ‘Middle Opinion in the Thirties: Planning Progress and Political Agreement’, The English Historical Review, Vol. 79, No. 311, April 1964, p. 288. 26 The Times, 17 March and 24 April 1933. 27 McMeekin, Sean, The Red Millionaire: A Political Biography of Willi Munzenberg, Moscow’s Secret Propaganda Tsar in the West (Newhaven and London: Yale University Press, 2003), pp. 257–8. 28 Copsey, Anti-fascism in Britain, pp. 19–20. 29 The Times, 15 September 1933, p. 6 and 21 September 1933, p. 12. Herbert’s initial comment appeared in the Weekend Review on 5 August 1933 and his front page summing up on 29 October 1933. 30 Labour History Archive and Study Centre (LHASC), LP/ID/C1/4/1, The International Class War Prisoners’ Aid by Dr. Friedrich Adler and LP/ID/C1/10/1, The International Class War Prisoners’ Aid, List of Officers and Committee Members. 31 MEPO 2/3057, Letter, Deputy Commissioner to The Secretary, International Labour Defence, 19 September 1933. 32 MEPO 2/3057, Letter, Alun Thomas, Secretary to International Labour Defence to Deputy Commissioner, 21 September 1933, and Summary of meetings held at Kingsway and Conway Halls on 22 September 1933, A/Superintendent Foster. 33 MEPO 3/553, Statement of Ronald Kidd, 17 December 1933. 34 MEPO 3/553, Summary of meetings held at Kingsway and Conway Halls on 22 September 1933, A/Superintendent Foster. 35 Scaffardi Papers, DSF1/1, The National Council for Civil Liberties, Annual Report for 1934, pp. 5–6.

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36 University of Sussex, Kingsley Martin Papers, KM7/25, Diary and Notebook for 1934–1937, 17 July 1934. 37 Koch, Stephen, ‘Lying for the Truth: Munzenberg and the Comintern’ (the New Criterion online: www.newcriterion.com/archive/12/nov93. Koch.htm). Munzenberg controlled a media empire that included publishers, newspapers, film studios, cinemas and theatres and made up a formidable communist propaganda machine. See McMeekin, The Red Millionaire. 38 See TNA KV 2/772, KV 2/773 and KV 2/774, Wilhelm Munzenberg: A Leading German Communist and Comintern Official. 39 TNA KV 2/1382, Otto Katz: Czechoslovak, Significant Agent of the Comintern based in Paris. 40 Boyle, Andrew, Trenchard: Man of Vision (London: Collins, 1962), pp. 591ff. 41 Royal Air Force Museum, Trenchard Papers 111/9, Letter from Trenchard to the Home Secretary, 12 January 1933. 42 Ibid. 43 Trenchard Papers 111/13, Memorandum by the Commissioner attached to Letter from Trenchard to the Home Office, 23 December 1932. 44 Trenchard Papers 111/13, Letter from Trenchard to the Home Office, 23 December 1932. 45 Trenchard Papers 111/9, Letter from Trenchard to the Home Secretary, 12 January, 1933. 46 Boyle, Trenchard, pp. 630 ff. 47 Parl. Debs, Commons, 23 May 1933, vol. 278, col. 956–8, col. 965–7. 48 Parl. Debs, Commons, 23 May 1933, vol. 278, col. 1052–7. 49 Parl. Debs, Commons, 26 June 1933, vol. 279, col. 1216–18. 50 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 1/1, Annual Report of the National Council for Civil Liberties for 1934. 51 Boyle, Trenchard, pp. 634–5. 52 Martin, Kingsley, Editor: A Second Volume of Autobiography, 1931–45 (London: Penguin, 1969), p. 166. 53 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 4/2, Barry Cox interview with Claud Cockburn, c.1969. 54 Scaffardi, Fire Under The Carpet, pp. 44–5. 55 Martin, Editor, p. 153. 56 Morgan, Conflict and Order, pp. 253–4. 57 Grant, J. L., ‘The Hunger Marchers and the Police’, Socialist Review, Winter 1932, pp. 243–4. 58 Hannington, Walter, Never on our Knees (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1967), pp. 263–4. 59 Hannington, Never on our Knees, p. 263.

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60 MEPO 3/3065, Report of ‘D’ Division, Marylebone Lane Station, 27 October 1932. 61 MEPO 2/3071, Summary of the National Hunger March on London, October and November 1932. 62 MEPO 2/3071, Memo from Chief Constable’s Office, No. 1 District to D. A. C. A., 6 October 1932. 63 MEPO 2/3071, Memo from Commissioner’s Office to Officers in Charge of Districts, 24 October 1932. 64 Hannington, Never on our Knees, pp. 270–1. 65 Daily Telegraph, 29 October 1932. 66 MEPO 2/3071, Notes of preliminary meeting on the hunger marchers held in the Commissioner’s room on 25 January 1934. 67 MEPO 2/3071, Draft letter to film companies, 2 February 1934. 68 MEPO 2/3071, Metropolitan Police telegram, 24 February 1934. 69 MEPO 2/3071, Report of a meeting of the Fulham and Chelsea United Front Committee in support of the hunger march, 9 February 1934, p. 5. 70 MEPO 2/3071, Note of a conference held in the Home Secretary’s room on Tuesday, 6 February 1934. 71 Daily Telegraph, 31 October 1932. 72 Hannington, Never on our Knees, pp. 298–9. 73 MEPO 2/3071, Note of a conference held in the Home Secretary’s room on Tuesday, 6 February 1934. 74 MEPO 2/3071, Memo, Commissioner to the Home Office, 6 February 1934. 75 MEPO 2/3071, Notes of preliminary meeting on the hunger marchers held in the Commissioner’s room on 25 January 1934. 76 Trenchard Papers 111/2, Letter, Trenchard to Wigram, 12 February 1934. 77 Daily Herald, 26 February 1934. 78 Trenchard Papers 111/23, Letter, Trenchard to the Prime Minister, 13 March 1934. 79 Boyle, Trenchard, p. 651.

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3

Political expression: people, parties and pressure groups

The people who gave their backing to the formation of the National Council for Civil Liberties came together in a shared distaste for government policies and police actions that whipped up public opinion to fear hunger marchers as the perpetrators of loot and pillage. While public concern over police powers had, as noted, been around since the early nineteenth century, this marked the beginning of an organised civil rights movement. Yet the organisation, the conditions that inspired it and the personal aims of its supporters, remarkably, have featured little in the discourse on the police in Britain. It seems that historians may themselves have been persuaded by the police propaganda of the time that aimed to show that the NCCL was unimportant and disregarded by the authorities. However, there is an extensive collection of papers, reports, press cuttings and excerpts from parliamentary debates in the Metropolitan Police and Home Office archives from which it is clear that the organisation was not ignored. It was consistently in evidence from the mid 1930s and, on occasions, the interests of its leaders and the appeal of its campaigns were central to considerations about the policing of disorder in the capital. Moreover, it took up a great deal of police and Home Office time to deal with the complaints about police behaviour raised by its activities. The archive material shows too that there was a very firm resolve on the part of the police to maintain the status quo regardless of this pressure group-led criticism. Scotland Yard responded to the emergence of the NCCL with a determination to show the organisation as itself guilty of political bias; to discredit its evidence and witnesses; to show its mainstream support as misguided; and to attack its non-party identity as a disguise adopted to hide its true communist direction. In this regard the discussion would not be

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complete without taking account of the role of Special Branch that, according to Porter, only truly became a ‘political police’ during the post First World War era.1 Pressure group culture and identity Ideological non-party political expression allowed individuals of diverse political opinion to share a platform. This had important resonance with the ‘great and the good’ of the 1930s and was a characteristic of the NCCL that was key in securing and maintaining its membership and support. Nothing that is known of Kidd suggests that he had any involvement with non-party pressure groups before the formation of the NCCL, but most of those who initially backed its formation, Barry and Martin especially, functioned politically within these concepts and understood the role of a civil liberties pressure group within this context. The concept had its roots in the peace movement and in Liberal Internationalism. Liberal Internationalist groups aspired to both influence ministers and party leaders and to mobilise citizens on progressive economic and social issues. Barry Dackombe has commented that such groups were fostered in a bourgeoisie public arena between the elitist politics of the nineteenth century and the mass democratic politics that emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century.2 The LNU was the most successful, in terms of membership numbers, of the Liberal Internationalist groups. It boasted 987 politically diverse founding members in 1918 and by the end of 1919 its membership numbered 14,665.3 Groups such as the LNU, the National Peace Council, the Next Five Years Group and the Popular Front were examples of consensus of agreement across party boundaries that provided incentive for collective extra-party activities on issues such as disarmament and world peace, and political and economic planning. Barry was a founding member of Political and Economic Planning group and used the columns of the Weekend Review to publish ‘A National Plan for Great Britain’ in February 1931.4 Arthur Marwick has commented that an important aspect of all these groups was that they brought together members of all parties ‘in general, if not particular agreement’. The National Peace Council and the LNU successfully brought about a union of ‘centre-progressive forces’ in the mid 1930s that saw individuals as politically diverse as Sir Stafford Cripps, leader

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of the Socialist League, and young Conservative MP Vyvyan Adams working together. Supporters of the Next Five Years Group included Lansbury, Julian Huxley and Eleanor Rathbone as well as Conservative Harold Macmillan and Liberal Herbert Samuel.5 This broad consensus of agreement across political and public opinion characterises the ideals to which the NCCL’s objectives belonged. And it was this political diversity that many of these same individuals embraced in working with the NCCL in support of individually held beliefs and aims. Eleanor Rathbone, an early addition to the NCCL’s network of MPs who were prepared to put down questions in Parliament, was a prolific supporter of non-party pressure group politics. Rathbone’s biographer, Susan Pedersen, has observed that Rathbone had many disguises and was ‘as likely to pop up on deputations for the National Council for Civil Liberties  ..., the League of Nations, the Abyssinia Association or any one of three or four committees on Spain’. Women’s organisations made an important contribution to non-party political pressure through the 1920s and 1930s because of the drive to attract the female vote. Rathbone was associated with the reformist campaigns of a number of women’s organisations, including the NFWI, the Mothers’ Union and the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship that set up the ‘Townswomen’s Guilds’, all of which were aggressively non-party organisations.6 Via such organisations the campaign for social and economic rights for women progressed alongside pressure for improvements in maternity services and the provision of birth control information and family allowance, but there was also an underlying educational purpose in their activities and an aim to instil the importance of the ‘intelligent use of the vote’.7 In the masculine sphere organisations such as the British Legion and the Rotary International performed a similar role. Helen McCarthy has commented that the British Legion lobbied the Government on unemployment and war pensions and the Rotary International sought to create a cross-section of influential local businessmen and professionals to promote ethical high standards and build friendships locally, nationally and internationally. All these organisations remained very firmly outside party identity.8 The NCCL identified with these broad non-party objectives to educate, inspire political awareness and arouse public opinion beyond the confines of its membership. Its campaigns specifically targeted police powers and civil liberties on issues such as public

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order legislation, police impartiality and fascist anti-semitism via which it sought to affect legislation and police policy and behaviour. It did not seek to emulate the mass membership of organisations like the LNU or the NFWI. Instead, it fostered networks of influence in Parliament and the press. It organised observers at major events, to investigate complaints, and presented evidence in a professional and legalistic way to Members of Parliament. It promoted the findings of its unofficial inquiries into specific events in the press. Via its branches around the country it set up local networks of influential professional people prepared to act as observers of police behaviour. It held delegate conferences and, on occasions, events for honoured guests. A conference held to frame a response to fascist anti-semitism towards the end of 1936 was attended by more than 300 invited delegates from widely varied national and local organisations, including Labour Party branches, the Fabian Society, the London Liberal Federation, the National Peace Council, the NUWM, the Teachers’ Anti-War Movement and Communist Party headquarters.9 It promoted its work and its campaigns through newsletters, pamphlets and its journal, Civil Liberty. The membership of the NCCL was diverse and reflected the characteristics of the wider criticism of police methods and concerns for liberties and freedoms in the period. Mostly, vice-presidents and committee members were Labour and Liberal politicians, intellectuals and liberal thinkers of the day. Some were, or had in the past been, associated with labour activism, with the suffrage and pacifist movements or with anti-fascism. Some had been concerned with complaints about police methods, such as plain clothes police ‘spies’ recording perfectly legal activities at political meetings and in public places; the use of ‘the third degree’ questioning procedures; and the growing militarisation of the police. Many had links with the Fabian Society. The NCCL was not a Fabian Society initiative but the aims and objectives on which it was founded were closely allied to Fabian principles. Moreover, the Society was important within the aims of the NCCL because it was a large network of like-minded people with which both Barry and Martin were associated. Laski too had longstanding Fabian connections and joined the Society’s executive committee in 1921. Professor R. H. Tawney, H. G. Wells, Bertrand Russell, Julian Huxley and G. D. H. Cole were some of the fellow Fabians among the NCCL’s vice-presidents.10 Martin and NCCL lawyer and executive committee member Dudley Collard

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served on Fabian Society committees during the 1930s and many of the NCCL’s vice-presidents and supporters appear on the lists of speakers at Fabian Society lectures.11 The New Statesman was founded on Fabian socialism. The paper played an important part in the support and motivation for the formation of the NCCL because of its notable role in the criticism of police methods in the lead-up to the Royal Commission on Police Powers in 1929. It led the demands for a wide and searching inquiry in the Savidge case, where police were accused of insensitivity and bullying during the questioning of Miss Savidge following the arrest of Sir Leo Choizza Money for allegedly committing an indecent act with her in Hyde Park.12 Following the summing up of the case in the Commons it called for the Royal Commission to investigate the whole matter of plain clothes policemen ‘sneaking about’ behind park benches and bushes to watch couples sitting in the dark. It condemned the practice as an attempt by the police to enforce moral standards.13 Its editorial on 13 October 1928 called for an end to the ‘Horwood–Childs–Bodkin-methods’, that is, the Commissioner, Assistant Commissioner (Head of Special Branch) and Director of Public Prosecutions trio, and led to the paper being served with writs for libel.14 It supported the opposition in Parliament to the appointment of Lord Byng of Vimy as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in 1928, arguing that, as a military general, Byng may have been just the man to take Vimy ridge but the difference between a great general and a policeman needed some careful consideration concerning discipline and command.15 Under Martin’s editorship the merged New Statesman and Nation continued its critique of police practices. It was critical of the failure to fully implement the recommendations of the Royal Commission and in 1936 published a pamphlet on the topic, ‘Police Methods’, in conjunction with the NCCL.16 The press played an important role in the critique of police methods during the 1920s. Lansbury was an early associate of Fabianism, a committed pacifist and supporter of the pacifist movement, and a founder member of the NCCL. He was associated with the origins of the Daily Herald from 1912. His socialist editorial policy backed suffragette agitation and welcomed revolution in Russia, and was thus not necessarily in line with Labour Party views. Nonetheless, he was instrumental in the sale of the financially ailing Herald to the Labour movement. His involvement with the paper came to

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an end in 1925 but the Herald continued its editorial position.17 On the policing of industrial unrest in 1926, it accused the Home Secretary of investing in Chief Constables similar powers to those which Mussolini had delegated to his agents in Italy to suppress his critics.18 Soon afterwards the paper joined the demands for the Royal Commission of Inquiry into police practices to look at the gathering of intelligence by undercover police at political meetings and called for the ‘whole conduct of Special Branch’ to be brought under review. It maintained that the mania at Scotland Yard to obtain information about many people in the Labour movement led to Special Branch activities being directed almost entirely towards spying on and harassing working-class political organisations.19 Equally the more traditionalist Manchester Guardian had pursued complaints about police methods over a number of years and its readers were familiar with the issues at the centre of the NCCL’s campaigns. There were strong links with pacifism and the peace movement in the NCCL’s membership. Lansbury was a life-long advocate of pacifism. Bevan had been involved with anti-war campaigns across South Wales during the First World War. 20 The Peace Pledge Union (PPU) was set up by NCCL vice-president Cannon H. R. L (Dick) Sheppard a few months after the launch of the organisation. Sheppard’s PPU had a number of members and supporters in common with the NCCL. Of the 20 known sponsors of the PPU in 1937 at least half were at the same time vice-presidents of the NCCL.21 Thus many of the founders and supporters of the NCCL had an ideological relationship with non-party political pressure – and might even be regarded as the ‘usual suspects’. Nevertheless, they gave their, often well known, names and their patronage to the NCCL because they were prepared to be, or in many cases already were in some way, associated with the protest about encroaching police powers and growing state interference with legitimate political activities and with people’s liberty and freedoms. This was especially so as the growing and progressively more ordered use of undercover police methods in everyday lives, from the matter of afterhours drinking and clandestine meetings in the park to the affairs of labour organisations, brought critics of the police increasingly within the range of Special Branch intelligence.

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Special Branch intelligence Intelligence played a part in the policing of political activism in the metropolis from the beginning. This was clear from the case of Sergeant Popay, whose overzealous surveillance tactics at political meetings led to his dismissal in 1833.22 Police surveillance strategies were placed on a more firm foundation towards the end of the nineteenth century with the introduction of Special Branch to keep under observation the activities of Fenians, anarchists and Indian nationalists and, through the early twentieth century, ‘revolutionary’ organisations. In the 1930s intelligence was a crucial element of operational policing strategies and Special Branch was more formally under the supervision of the Commissioner. This, however, implies a greater clarity to the boundaries of Special Branch duties across Scotland Yard and the security services than actually existed even at the end of the 1930s. Through the interwar years Special Branch survived a number of attempts to reorganise its duties and reporting responsibilities. The first major development was in May 1919. Special Branch was made independent of the CID and given a co-ordinating role over intelligence collection under the direction of Basil Thomson, who was appointed Head of the new Directorate of Intelligence. Absorbing some of the responsibilities and personnel from MI5, Thomson’s mission was to deal with political and industrial unrest said to be ‘very rampant during the transitory period from war to peace’. 23 According to Christopher Andrew’s work, the post put Thomson personally in control of Special Branch and formally confirmed him as chief watchdog of subversion. He reported weekly to the Cabinet, often in rather lurid and exaggerated terms, on the activities of ‘revolutionary’ organisations. 24 His somewhat colourful autobiographical recollections suggest that unrest in Britain touched a high water mark at the beginning of 1919 when the word ‘revolution’ was ‘on every lip’. The police strike he believed filled extremists with renewed hope while for the Londoner ‘the bottom seemed to have fallen out of the world’.25 Thomson’s regime set the stage for Special Branch as a secretive organisation entirely focused on political subversion that was to endure throughout the interwar years.26 Thomson’s ignominious departure from the Head of Special Branch position at the end of 1921 also brought to an end the Directorate of Intelligence. Thomson resigned rather than

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be sacked. The official reason suggests that the newly appointed Commissioner, Sir William Horwood, disapproved of Thomson’s independence and demanded to be told what he was up to. The relationship deteriorated to the extent that the two men hardly conversed other than via an intermediary and the Home Secretary had no alternative but to intervene.27 Thomson’s version of events linked his demise to an incident at Chequers, the Prime Minister’s country residence, when four Irishmen entered the grounds and chalked the words ‘Up Sinn Fein’ in the summerhouse. Thomson considered the incident was ‘in the nature of a skylark’ and let the men go. Prime Minister Lloyd George, who Thomson considered to have ‘an exaggerated solicitude for the safety of his own skin’, was livid and demanded Thomson’s resignation.28 Whatever the reality, Thomson resigned and Major-General Sir Wyndham Childs joined Scotland Yard as Assistant Commissioner (Head of Special Branch) on 5 December.29 It was soon discovered that it was not only the Commissioner that Thomson had kept in the dark. Following Thomson’s departure Childs described the Special Branch staff under him as having ‘no knowledge of the activities of their Chief’. Thomson’s regime was, he wrote, ‘a one man show and that one man never took his staff into his confidence’. Childs maintained, ‘I did not take over from Sir Basil Thomson as I have never seen him … or had any communication from him in any shape or form.’ Thomson handed nothing over to Childs other than ‘an empty safe, a desk full of empty drawers and a sheet of clean blotting paper.’ 30 With Childs in the post Horwood set out his proposals to restructure the command of Special Branch. He proposed the ‘reversion to a pre-war organisation’ merging the duties of Special Branch and the CID under one Assistant Commissioner and the transfer of responsibility for foreign affairs to the Foreign Office. The ‘large volume of work’ to remain under Special Branch control related to ‘Bolshevist, Communist and Revolutionary matters generally’. The reorganisation would reduce the number of senior police officers needed in Special Branch, effect an annual saving of between £20,000 and £30,000 and ‘tend to greater efficiency’.31 Despite the reorganisation the control and responsibilities of Special Branch clearly continued to be something of a mystery. In 1925 Sir Russell Scott, then Controller of Establishments at the Treasury, was asked by the Prime Minister to examine Special Branch and report on its background, activities and funding.32 Scott

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listed among its duties: ‘responsibility for dealing with all phases of the Irish revolutionary movement’; ‘Intelligence department for various police forces’ to obtain advance information of ‘strikes, demonstrations (especially of the unemployed), and meetings’; the protection of Royalty and Cabinet ministers; obtaining information of various ‘revolutionary movements’ including communists and the unemployed from an ‘inside source’ or from paid ‘informants’; naturalisation inquiries; translations; and liaison with immigration officers to identify criminals and revolutionaries. Scott concluded that Special Branch work was necessarily of a ‘specially [sic] secret nature’ but he considered that the internal organisation ‘left something to be desired’. He found that Special Branch carried out ‘a certain amount of intelligence work on its own responsibility’ and that control and direction were ‘inadequately provided’. There was no one whose responsibility it was to ensure the department worked in ‘complete harmony’; that intelligence was effectively translated into police action; and that actions taken were in ‘strict accordance with general or particular policy’.33 Childs appears unperturbed by the debate. He understood the most important part of his role as Head of Special Branch to be the ‘problem of communism’. According to his autobiography, he had embraced the task ‘full of confidence’ that he would be able to ‘smash the organisation’. Years later, he could not understand why the successive governments he had served refused to ‘strike one overwhelming and final blow against the communist organisation’.34 Childs continued to provide weekly reports of revolutionary organisations as Thomson had done, and from the early 1920s intercepting mail and using plain clothes men to infiltrate the unions and labour organisations became routine Special Branch work.35 Nevertheless, Childs must surely have questioned just how seriously his reports would be taken by the new Labour Government when in January 1924 Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald goaded him by suggesting that ‘little of the news contained [in the reports] is likely to be unfamiliar to members of the Government or indeed anyone who reads the Worker’s Weekly and similar papers’.36 MacDonald suggested the reports might be made ‘at once attractive and indeed entertaining’ if Childs were to include ‘not only communistic activities but also other political activities of an extreme kind’. He recommended ‘a little knowledge in regard to the Fascist movement’ and ‘a few tit bits’ on the influences behind the Patriot or perhaps

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‘the secret history of the Crusader movement’.37 He urged enlarging the scope to give an ‘exhilarating flavour to the document and  … convert it into a complete and finished work of art’.38 Childs’ brusque response pointed out that the weekly reports were confined to ‘organisations of a revolutionary or communistic nature’, whereas he considered fascists to be more inclined towards ’breaches of the law’.39 Childs’ reports continued in the same vein. Despite reporting the Communist Party’s ‘poor performance in almost every area’ and communist meetings beset by quarrels and infighting among delegates, the weekly summary was generally couched in terms that suggested there was a serious threat to the Government from the CPGB.40 Horwood was as convinced of the threat from communist plots and revolution as Childs. He pressed for legislation to treat the CPGB as a ‘seditious and treasonable organisation’.41 The Home Office was unmoved by Horwood’s ‘gloomy prognostications’. There were recollections that Basil Thomson had similarly warned of ‘armed insurrections which may amount to civil war’ in 1921 and that the ‘trouble prophesied’ did not materialise. It was thought that the legislation Horwood wanted would be ‘bitterly opposed’ and hard to imagine as a serious suggestion to the House of Commons ‘that a constable should be given power to arrest without warrant any person suspected of an offence’.42 Porter has commented that Special Branch under Childs had a closer relationship with Scotland Yard than with the other intelligence services and was more accountable to Government and Parliament through the Commissioner and the Home Secretary.43 A further attempt to reorganise Special Branch duties and bring it more firmly within the Commissioner’s responsibilities coincided with Trenchard’s appointment as Commissioner in October 1931, although the evidence suggests he was not involved in the decision. Returning some of the duties lost to Thomson, the ‘collection of information of revolutionary and seditious activities and propaganda’ was transferred from Special Branch to MI5. This was intended to ‘centralise the information available’ and to ‘avoid duplication of research’.44 It is questionable whether that was achieved. Little over a year later MI5 were only aware in a ‘vague way’ that they had taken over certain duties from the Metropolitan Police and there was not a ‘single scrap of paper’ that supported the subsequent increase in MI5 staff.45

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By the 1930s Special Branch intelligence was a crucial aspect of policing under the direction of the Commissioner. Nevertheless, it still maintained its role within the wider security services which meant that Special Branch officers might at the same time receive instructions from MI5 and from the Commissioner. Special Branch duties ranged from naturalisation inquiries for the Home Office, through monitoring the movements of aliens and extremists at ports and airfields and intercepting mail and infiltrating the activities of suspected communists for MI5, to reporting at political meetings and investigating police brutality at unemployed or anti-fascist demonstrations for the Commissioner.46 The convergence of these roles perpetuated a cumulative understanding of left-wing activism as communist and thus subversive, which raised issues for police partiality and civil liberties. Shaping a communist pedigree Special Branch intelligence was central to Scotland Yard’s view of Kidd and the NCCL. Special Branch traced the origins of the NCCL to a legal panel set up at the beginning of 1933 comprising a dozen or so legal advisers, barristers and solicitors, sympathetic to the Communist Party, of which D. N. Pritt KC, barrister Neil Lawson and solicitor W. H. Thompson were the ‘nucleus’. This view was not entirely without foundation, but the subtleties of the relationship were lost to Special Branch. The legal panel was most likely a reference to the Haldane Club. In 1933 the Club, or Society as it later became, was a recently formed group of socialist lawyers who pledged to work for labour and radical left interests. It advised the New Fabian Research Bureau on legislation and legal matters and had Labour Party connections. Several of the NCCL’s original backers, including Pritt and Lawson, and its succeeding legal team belonged to the group. A history of the Club published in 1980 regards Pritt as the most celebrated of its founder members.47 Preliminary discussions ahead of the formation of the NCCL did include Pritt. He considered that he was involved with the organisation ‘before it existed’. He was later to recall that there was ‘a group of people and I was asked to come and join in’.48 Thompson was also involved at the outset and was elected to the executive committee.49 However, if the organisation had been the brainchild of the Haldane Club or any associated panel of lawyers, Kidd

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would be an unlikely choice of leader. Kidd was not professionally accomplished or well connected and his administrative capabilities were questionable. He was from a middle-class background – his father and grand-father had been doctors – but poor health had prevented him from completing his education and from engaging in active service during the First World War. He claimed to have ‘considerable experience as a writer for the press’ and to have contributed to publications such as the Westminster Review and the Local Government Review.50 In 1933, Kidd identified himself as a bookseller. His shop, the Punch and Judy bookshop, was a one-room kiosk in the entrance hall of a block of flats where, according to Scotland Yard, he sold books ‘of an advanced nature’.51 There is no evidence he was approached by such a group or known to them before August 1933 when he wrote his letter to the Weekend Review and unwittingly attracted the attention of Barry, Herbert and Martin with his allegations about police agents provocateur and the policing of hunger marchers. However, throughout 1933 Haldane Club lawyers had produced a number of papers for the Fabian Research Bureau on matters of law and civil liberties. This legal analysis arose from aspects of the arrest of NUWM leaders in connection with the hunger march the previous year, and the police search of NUWM premises and seizure of documents. The aims and objectives of the NCCL were very closely related to issues for civil liberties and the freedom of meeting, speech and assembly that were raised within these documents. It is more plausible, therefore, that Haldane Club lawyers and Kidd and the NCCL’s founders shared an understanding of the mutual benefits of legal expertise prepared to defend the concepts of civil liberties and an emerging pressure group whose membership was beginning to ‘read just like who’s who’.52 There was an extent of ‘shared history’ between many of the leading figures of the NCCL and Scotland Yard via Special Branch. The close links with labour and pacifist organisations and associations of some with the suffrage movement ensured that this would be the case. Basil Thomson’s appointment as the Head of Special Branch in 1913 had set the scene for Special Branch duties throughout the interwar period that almost exclusively involved the surveillance of ‘revolutionary’ organisations in Britain which, from 1920, meant the CPGB, its front organisations and anyone suspected of Party connections. Moreover, an aim to deal with

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‘rampant’ political and industrial unrest in the transition period from war to peace had put Special Branch at the centre of the bitter relations between the police and strikers.53 According to Porter, Special Branch became a ‘proper political police’ in this period and this set up future implications for civil liberties.54 Thomson’s zealous approach to pacifist activities is a good example. Pacifist organisations were required to present their accounts and list of subscribers to the authorities, but Thomson favoured (more effective) police raids. This allowed correspondence and information to be seized and it ‘considerably upset the organisation and interfered with their activity’.55 The premises of the National Council Against Conscription, with which NCCL vice-presidents Frederick Pethick-Lawrence and Henry Nevinson were associated, were raided in November 1917. Bank and cash books, ledgers, pamphlets and correspondence were seized. Books containing names of the secretaries of trade unions found among the papers were of such apparent interest that they were retained by Special Branch.56 Suffragettes were considered to be ‘especially dangerous’ militants and policing suffrage activities had involved a great deal of Special Branch resource.57 Lansbury, Pethick-Lawrence, Nevinson and the NCCL’s treasurer Hugh Franklin were prominent figures in the women’s suffrage movement. Pethick-Lawrence and his wife Emmeline served a nine month prison sentence for their involvement with the suffragette’s window-smashing campaign.58 Hugh Franklin was arrested during the events of Black Friday.59 He held Home Secretary Winston Churchill responsible for the ill-treatment of women protesters and attacked him with a whip, for which he was imprisoned for six weeks.60 He served further terms of imprisonment for his suffrage activities, notably nine months for setting fire to a railway carriage. Franklin was the first prisoner to be released from jail under the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’.61 The ‘weary looking gentleman who usually supports the wall outside your front door’ observed by a neighbour, was almost certainly a Special Branch officer on surveillance duties.62 Lansbury was arrested and found guilty in 1913 of disturbing the peace and being ‘likely to incite others to commit divers crimes and misdemeanours’, after a speech at the Albert Hall where he appeared to sanction the suffragettes’ arson campaign. He was committed to Pentonville prison but released when he embarked on a hunger strike.63 Long afterwards

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his activities were kept under surveillance and his speeches were recorded and reported to the Home Secretary.64 A small number of the vice-presidents and executive committee members received the full weight of security service attention. Claud Cockburn, editor of The Week, was thought to be in touch with foreign embassies and with ‘far from desirable elements in the lower walks of journalistic life’. From 1934 MI5 and Special Branch were routinely intercepting Cockburn’s mail and listening to his telephone calls.65 Denis Pritt came to the attention of the security services in 1932 and his involvement with the Reichstag fire inquiry in London was of particular interest. He was regarded as ‘one of those Labour Party members who mask their real communist beliefs for the sake of more effective action in the Party’. His mail and telephone calls were intercepted. Special Branch thought his attendance at the 1936 annual general meeting of the NCCL worthy of a report to MI5 when he expressed his admiration for the people’s soviets in Russia that had given 170 million people the ‘beginnings of freedom’.66 Martin was of concern to the security services because of his ‘wide connections with the left of British politics’ through his partner Dorothy Woodman. Woodman’s interests spanned the suffrage, socialist and labour movements. She was Secretary of the Union of Democratic Control (UDC). The security services noted ‘there has scarcely been a left wing political group within the last 10 years, with which Miss Dorothy Woodman … has not been in some way connected’. Throughout the 1930s her activities were watched by Special Branch. Her departure and return to British ports or airports were notified to MI5.67 Woodman herself wrestled with contradictory views; described by a colleague in the 1930s as ‘halfway to communisme’, she found Russia to be ‘a perfect nightmare’.68 Martin too once described himself as ‘philosophically’ a communist but one who knew ‘too much about the realities of government to think revolution is a good thing’.69 Pritt however, considered Martin was ‘ready to run at any moment at the first smell of a communist’.70 Some of these events took place two decades or more before the NCCL was set up but the connections were not lost to Special Branch. Its collective memory was long. Personnel remained in post for long periods or moved around within the security services. Once an individual had become the object of Special Branch attention there was little likelihood of shaking it off.71

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Scotland Yard attempted to explain away the NCCL’s well-known supporters as a ‘formidable galaxy of vice-presidents’ that had been taken in by Kidd. It maintained that Kidd made a ‘great pretence’ that the NCCL was an independent non-party body in order to inveigle well-known people into lending their names as patrons and members – unaware of its true activities on behalf of the Communist Party.72 By their nature non-party organisations had a politically diverse membership and this did present challenges for the leadership. Kidd and the more liberal leaders of the NCCL were conscious that the Council’s policy and direction must reflect the wide mutual interests with which its membership and support identified. The NCCL’s vice-presidents and supporters changed very little throughout the 1930s; it is unlikely they were unaware of the tenor of activities. It maintained a prominent public image and pursued vigorous press propaganda to promote its work. Regular newsletters and pamphlets detailed its views and interests. It provided legal representation in a number of notable court cases, and there was wide press coverage of its campaigns and unofficial inquiries into police behaviour. The evidence available from the Liberty archive suggests that Kidd was passionate about the campaigns and cases with which the NCCL was involved, and that the plethora of literature it produced accurately reflected his own views and objectives.73 Kidd was not a member of the Communist Party. According to Special Branch intelligence he applied for Party membership shortly after the formation of the organisation and had been advised by the central committee that he could ‘serve the communist cause much more effectively if he remained nominally outside the party’.74 Kidd may have been in touch with CPGB leader Harry Pollitt. He made a diary entry on 6 May 1934: ‘Daily Worker – ring up Pollitt and Isobel Brown’75 but, if Special Branch were correct and he did choose to apply for Communist Party membership only a few weeks after launching the NCCL, it would seem to have been a serious, and uncharacteristic, error of judgement. As Special Branch reports had noted, the ‘non-party’ identity of the organisation had been fundamental in securing the liberal support that was key to the successful launch of the NCCL. Its leaders clearly understood that official ties, or in some cases more tenuous connections, with the Communist Party would put its future success in jeopardy. Association with anti-fascism and with Indian nationalism was

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initially avoided for this reason: it was feared that with such connections the organisation would appear to be ‘very left’ in its direction.76 Furthermore, there may have been an element of the radical left that was wary of Kidd and the intentions of a new civil rights organisation. MI5 seized upon Kidd’s assurance to Alun Thomas, secretary of the ILD, that the NCCL would be ‘keen to keep the correct party line’, as evidence of Kidd’s communist persuasions.77 However, a full reading of Kidd’s letter to Thomas, which had presumably been intercepted by MI5, suggests that Kidd was reassuring Thomas that the NCCL would not usurp the ILD’s role and responsibilities. Kidd acknowledged that it is ‘clearly the function of the ILD’ to undertake the legal defence of workers and stressed that the main focus of the NCCL would be on the behaviour of the police and would ‘not necessarily apply to workers in particular’.78 Thomas’s place on the NCCL’s executive committee may well have been to watch over the interests of the ILD. Personal accounts of Kidd have commented on his political naivety and suggested that his obsession with civil liberties rather obscured any appreciation of party politics. Kingsley Martin thought him ‘a genuine liberal’ who ‘only worried about people’s liberties’ and knew nothing about ‘right-wing and left-wing and Fascist and Marxist’. Others recalled him as an ‘odd character’ who never voted in elections, and as ‘politically an anarchist’. Claud Cockburn considered that he himself was the only communist on the NCCL committee at the beginning and Kidd ‘certainly wasn’t’.79 Special Branch reports maintain that most of the liberal members and supporters of the NCCL were not active within the organisation. If that meant they undertook little of the day-to-day self-promotion and lobbying that maintained the NCCL’s position, then that could be said too of their radical left associates.80 In fact, Kidd received little tangible assistance from NCCL members of any political persuasion. According to Kidd’s partner, Sylvia Scaffardi, he took charge of everything from administration to policy, and ‘practically everything’ that emerged from the executive committee would be his concern. He arranged publicity, located venues and organised public meetings and conferences, arranged advertisements and leaflets, and the proofs and paste-up of the NCCL publication Civil Liberty. Throughout his term as secretary he saw it as ‘a venture for which he was largely responsible’.81

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Communist interests within the NCCL may well have tried to control the organisation and Scotland Yard interest was inevitable. However, the propensity for Special Branch to avoid any distinction across liberal left, radical left and communist interests allowed its entrenched impressions to preclude objective consideration of the aims of the more liberal members of the NCCL: individuals like Attlee, Pethick-Lawrence, Nevinson, Franklin, Lansbury and Laski, who had been committed to the socialist and labour movements from their early days and went on to hold prominent positions in mainstream politics and professions, as well as those who more simply had concerns that the police exceeded their powers or applied them selectively such as Herbert and Barry. Scaffardi’s recollections attributed the NCCL’s greatest success to its appeal to diverse interests across the political spectrum and outside of politics. It was a ‘point of contact’ for so many different people, whether in ‘Bethnal Green or Oxbridge’, and represented ‘a sort of rallying point and a focus’.82 Such a disparate mix of people ensured that meetings were lively. Pritt’s impression was that ‘meetings were always long and half stormy because we were all fairly individualistic people and it’s very difficult to define (a) what is a civil liberties issue and (b) … can we afford to turn our limited resources to it at the possible cost of neglecting other things?’.83 Political expression: politics and non-party ideology The NCCL’s position within the framework of non-party ideology underlines the complex nature of non-party political pressure in this period. McKibbin’s account of interwar social relations argues that self-consciously non-party associations had a tendency to depoliticise social relationships and served to support an anti-socialist mentality and reinforce the hegemony of the Conservative Party.84 That cannot be said of the NCCL. Neither the NCCL’s supporters nor its critics were concerned that its true orientation may have been conservative but rather that it may have been communist. McCarthy has argued that non-party pressure was part of a wider political response to the destabilising ideological and economic forces of the period and an important category of democratic participation that effectively ‘anchored British politics ideologically in the centre-ground’.85 This is an interesting point. The political landscape of the 1930s was shaped by an extraordinarily unsettled

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period in British politics. This had been ongoing from the end of the previous century and had brought about the development of Labour and the political left; the collapse of the Liberal Party; a dominant Conservative Party; a split and realignment of the Labour Party; and also the formation of the CPGB. Politically, the period was characterised by shifting alliances, and personal frustrations and successes that underpinned an ideological belief in non-party and cross-party political participation. Mainstream politics in Britain was polarised in the 1930s. The two main parties, Conservative and Labour, vied for the huge middle ground of the new working-class and female electorate. Even so, the Conservative Party remained remarkably strong throughout the interwar period and Labour and the left struggled to achieve unity and, after the split in 1931, to regain credibility. Commentators have found it hard to explain the success of the Conservative Party in this period. It has been attributed to Conservative leader Baldwin’s enduring appeal to the electorate, to his skilled use of radio and newsreel, and his conversational ‘non-party’ tone via which he was reaching an audience of more than 33 million people on the radio and cinema audiences of more than 20 million by the mid-1930s.86 Others have highlighted the importance of the gender bias to Conservative support and pointed out the massively disproportionate support for the Conservative Party among women.87 According to David Jarvis, Conservative propaganda was topical and relevant and was tailored towards the new female electorate. Conservative fears about women’s irresponsibility and susceptibility to socialism were successfully translated in propaganda literature that showed an optimistic stereotype of Conservative women as responsible and committed to Empire.88 McKibbin has commented on the Conservatives’ ‘good fortune’ to be defeated in the 1929 elections and thus to be in opposition during the 1930–31 depression that swept away all the governments of the English-speaking countries.89 Nonetheless, it cannot be insignificant that the political left in this period was characterised by splits and divisions, factionalism and unlikely alliances. Ramsey MacDonald’s readiness to lead a predominantly Conservative National Government after the collapse of the Labour Government in 1931 was regarded as traitorous by some of the leading figures in his own party. Attlee’s passion about MacDonald’s treacherous behaviour never mellowed

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through the 1930s. According to his biographer, Trevor Burridge, Attlee once called MacDonald a ‘political nudist’ having shed every rag of political conviction.90 Attlee became Party leader in 1935. The reshuffling of the political left in the intervening period saw first Arthur Henderson and then, a year later, Lansbury as leader of the Party, and the formation of the Socialist League to which Attlee, Lansbury and Stafford Cripps were attached.91 A. J. P. Taylor commented that Lansbury was the obvious leader to mould the opposition Labour Party, with the help of Attlee and Cripps, from the remnants left in 1931.92 The Socialist League, however, was short lived and was dissolved in May 1937. A united front campaign with the Communist Party and the Independent Labour Party (ILP) fell apart over divergent views and factional rivalries. Party discipline and keeping distance from any association with the Communist Party were a constant question for Attlee as he came under pressure from within the National Executive Comittee to expel rebels, including Cripps, from the Party.93 Ben Pimlott has observed that the Labour Party could have played a more important role but for these internal struggles but he views Labour ideology as no match for the highly skilled, vastly experienced Conservative bureaucracy.94 Other commentators have argued that the working-class Conservative vote cannot be simply attributed to the Labour Party’s failings. Some Labour policies did not have wide appeal. Labour promises of a radical overhaul of Britain’s infrastructure went against the grain for many looking for stability and Labour’s emphasis on intervention perhaps alienated as many people as it attracted. Matthew Worley has commented that even campaigns that highlighted the plight of the unemployed and socially disadvantaged did not necessarily resonate with the experiences of many British people. Conservatives were much better at representing themselves as the ‘defender of the national interest and purveyors of conventional wisdom’ than Labour.95 In these events, many on the left of British politics felt marginalised by the poor performance of Labour and the predominance of the Conservative Party and at the same time disadvantaged by state machinery and policing in relation to political activism that was seen as favouring the political right. Thus the prevailing political situation in Britain in the early 1930s was favourable to the formation of the NCCL. Its non-party identity allowed the organisation to be inclusive whereas party politics was more often

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divisive. What is more, MPs and party activists had their eye on the new voters. There was interest in the non-party ethos because it was a way of politicising newly enfranchised women and the working class, and politicians were keen to support it. Opposition politicians in particular were eager to promote the ideals of liberty, freedom and democracy and, as a result, many were amenable to the NCCL’s non-party challenge to police methods and policies and to oppressive legislation. Regardless of the NCCL’s ambiguous relationship with the Communist Party and the views of Scotland Yard, as a non-party pressure group there was nothing unusual in the NCCL’s membership. It included individuals from the liberal mainstream as well as the radical left and some, undoubtedly, who had communist inclinations. Its vice-presidents and supporters were involved with other organisations that had a very similar make-up in their memberships. And yet those organisations did not attract the same interest from Scotland Yard. Even communist-backed organisations like the International Labour Defence and the National Unemployed Workers ‘Movement’ or ‘front’ organisations like the Left Book Club,96 were not targeted by Scotland Yard, nor were attempts made to discredit their activities in the same way. Scotland Yard’s attack on the NCCL’s non-party identity and the objectives of its founders and members was part of the police armoury of defence against its critics. Non-party pressure group protest introduced new tactics that, for the first time, specifically attacked police behaviour, and was able to organise otherwise disjointed protests into a coherent critique of the police and bring complaints to Parliament and to the attention of the public. The NCCL’s methods and strategies through which this was achieved, and Scotland Yard and Home Office responses to the organisation and its campaigns, are explored in the following chapters. Notes 1 Porter, Bernard, The Origins of the Vigilant State: The London Metropolitan Police Special Branch before the First World War (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987), pp. 120–1. 2 Dackombe, B.  P., ‘Single-Issue Extra-parliamentary groups and Liberal Internationalism, 1899–1920’ (Open University, 2008).

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3 Ibid. 4 Marwick, ‘Middle Opinion in the Thirties’. 5 Ibid. 6 Pedersen, Susan, Eleanor Rathbone and the Politics of Conscience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 178 and pp. 196–7. 7 Beaumont, Caitriona, ‘The Women’s Movement, Politics and Citizenship’ in Ina Zweiniger-Bargielowska (ed.), Women in Twentieth-Century Britain (Harlow: Longman, 2001), p. 269. 8 McCarthy, ‘Parties, Voluntary Associations and Democratic Politics in Interwar Britain’, pp. 895–6. 9 DSF1/1, The National Council for Civil Liberties Annual Report 1938–1939, pp. 14–15, University of Hull archives, Hull History Centre, DCL 75/2 conference reports and correspondence, 1937. 10 Hyams, Edward, The New Statesman: The History of the First Fifty Years 1913–1963 (London: Longmans, 1963); and Newman, Michael, ‘Laski, Harold Joseph (1893–1950)’; Smith, Adrian, ‘Martin (Basil) Kingsley (1897–1969)’; Conekin, Becky E., ‘Barry, Sir Gerald Reid (1898–1968)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004–7). 11 LSE, Fabian Society Collection/C/18, Executive Committee Minute Book, 27 September 1933 to 25 November 1937. 12 New Statesman, 26 May 1928, p. 213. Sir Leo Choizza Money was an ‘old friend’ and regular contributor to the New Statesman; see Hyams, The New Statesman, pp. 84–5. 13 New Statesman, 18 August, 1928, p. 577. 14 New Statesman, 13 October, 1928, p. 2. 15 New Statesman, 7 July 1928, p. 416. Before his appointment as Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Lord Byng had had a long and esteemed military career, most recently as Governor-General of Canada. 16 HO 45/25462, Home Office minute, National Council for Civil Liberties, Thurloe Square disturbances, July 1936. 17 Holman, Bob, Good Old George: The Life of George Lansbury (Oxford: Lion, 1990), pp. 79–85. 18 Daily Herald, 17 November 1926; see Morgan, Conflict and Order, pp. 206–8. 19 ‘Put the Police System on Its Trial! By A Solicitor’, Daily Herald, 14 July 1928, p. 4. 20 Smith, Dai, ‘Bevan, Aneurin (1897–1960)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 21 Ceadel, Martin, Pacifism in Britain 1914–1945: The Defining of a Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), Appendix II. 22 The case of Sergeant Popay is discussed in greater detail in chapter 1.

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23 TNA, CAB 127/366, Report by Sir Russell Scott, undated. 24 Andrew, Christopher, Secret Service: The Making of the British Intelligence Community (Sevenoaks: Sceptre, 1986), pp. 336–7. 25 Thomson, Sir Basil Home, Queer People (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1922), p. 273. 26 Andrew, Secret Service, pp. 336–7. 27 Porter, Bernard, Plots and Paranoia: A History of Political Espionage in Britain, 1790–1988 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), p. 157. 28 Thomson, Sir Basil Home, The Scene Changes (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Company Inc.,1937), pp. 430–1. 29 HO 45/18728, Letter from Sir William Horwood, Commissioner to Edward Troup, Home Office, 5 December 1921. 30 TNA CAB 127/366, Report by Sir Wyndham Childs, 30 June 1925. 31 MEPO 10/3, Memorandum from Sir William Horwood, Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis to The Secretary of State, 1 March 1922. 32 CAB 127/366, Letter from Sir Wyndham Childs to Sir Robert Russell Scott, 24 June 1925. 33 CAB 127/366, Report of Sir Russell Scott, undated, c.June 1925. 34 Childs, Major-General Sir Wyndham, Episodes and Reflections (London: Cassell & Co., 1930), p. 209. 35 Morgan, Conflict and Order, p. 112. 36 TNA, PRO 30/69/221, Letter to Wyndham Childs from R. P. Gower, Prime Minister’s Private Secretary, 30 January 1924. 37 The Patriot was founded in 1922 by Alan Percy, Duke of Northumberland. It was ferociously right wing, promoting anti-socialist, anti-communist propaganda. 38 TNA, PRO 30/69/221, Letter to Wyndham Childs from R. P. Gower, Prime Minister’s Private Secretary, 30 January 1924. 39 PRO 30/69/221, Letter from Wyndham Childs to Gower, Prime Minister’s Private Secretary, 2 February 1924. 40 PRO/30/69/220, Reports on revolutionary organisations in the United Kingdom 1924–25. 41 HO 144/4684, Letter to the Secretary of State from Horwood, 9 March 1925. 42 HO 144/4684, Notes on the Commissioner’s letter of 9 March 1925. 43 Porter, Plots and Paranoia, p. 168. 44 KV 4/126, Circular letter, Carter to chief constables, 14 October 1931 and Kell, letter to all chief constables, 2 November 1931. 45 KV 4/126, Home Office minute, Holt-Wilson to Major Philips, 5 January 1933. 46 MEPO 2/5385, Superintendent A. Canning, Report on Special Branch Strength, 21 June 1935.

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47 Blake, Nick and Rajak, Harry, Wigs and Workers: A History of the Haldane Society of Socialist Lawyers 1930–1980 (London: The Society, 1980). See also LSE, CHORLEY/2/7 and FABIAN SOCIETY/J/50. 48 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 4/2, Barry Cox interview with D. N. Pritt, c.1969. 49 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 1/1, The National Council for Civil Liberties Annual Report for 1934, April 1935. 50 Scaffardi Papers, DSF/2/1, Kidd, Letter to Box J.975, The Times, 21 June 1916. 51 HO 45/25462, Special Branch report of the activities of Ronald Hubert Kidd, November 1935. 52 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 4/2, Barry Cox interview with Sylvia Scaffardi, c.1969. 53 CAB 127/366, Report by Sir Russell Scott, undated. 54 Porter, The Origins of the Vigilant State, p. 180. See also inter alia Weinberger, Barbara, ‘Police Perceptions of Labour in the Inter-war Period’, in Snyder, Francis and Hay, Douglas (eds.), Labour, Law and Crime (London: Tavistock Publications, 1987), pp. 166–7. 55 KV 2/665, Copy of minute, 13 November 1917. 56 KV 2/665, Criminal Investigation Department police report, 21 November 1917. 57 Thomson, Queer People, p. 49. 58 HO 45/24630, Petitions of Frederick William Pethick-Lawrence and Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence, 14 May 1912. 59 A women’s suffrage demonstration outside the Houses of Parliament on 18 November 1910 became known as Black Friday for the level of violence and number of arrests. The police were accused of behaving with unnecessary brutality towards the women demonstrators. 60 The Women’s Library, Papers of Hugh Franklin and Elsie Duval, 7/ HDF Box 226 Folder 2. 61 The Prisoners’ Temporary Discharge for Health Act (1913), better known as the ‘Cat and Mouse Act’, was introduced to allow the Government to avoid the embarrassing publicity around the forcefeeding of suffragettes. Imprisoned suffragettes routinely embarked on hunger strikes. Rather than being force-fed they were allowed to become too weak to cause trouble and then released ‘on licence’. Once restored to health, should they re-offend, they were immediately re-arrested and returned to prison. 62 Papers of Hugh Franklin and Elsie Duval, 7/HDF Box 226 Folder 4, Letter to Hugh Franklin from Dorothy Walker Evans, 5 May 1913. 63 HO 144/5992, Report to the Under Secretary of State from Basil Thomson, Assistant Commissioner of Police, 12 June 1914 and

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Minutes, Mr George Lansbury, 22 October 1920. See Shepherd, John, ‘George Lansbury’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press). 64 HO 144/5992, Letter and report from Wyndham Childs to Sir William Joynson Hicks, 7 July 1926. 65 KV 2/1546, Special Branch, report of Claud Cockburn, 19 March 1934 and Memo to Newsam, Francis Claud Cockburn and The Week, 19 June 1934. 66 KV 2/1062, Letters from Vernon Kell to D.  C. J. McSweeney, Colonial Office, 1 and 8 June 1933; Letter to Major V. Vivian signed D. G. W., 12 February 1937 and Special Branch report, D. N. Pritt, 26 February 1936. 67 KV 2/1607, Dorothy Woodman, Note (unsigned), 23 January 1941. See also Women’s Library, Records of the National Union of Societies for Equal Citizenship, GB/106/2/NUSEC/D1/1–20, circular letter from The Young Suffragists, 28 February 1927. There are many reports on KV 2/1607 of Woodman’s activities, for example Croydon Airport, 27 December 1933 and Port of Dover, 23 April 1936. The UDC was established at the outbreak of the First World War to work for parliamentary control of foreign policy and a just peace settlement. It became a leading anti-colonial organisation and pressed for reform of the League of Nations. 68 Kingsley Martin Papers, KM 6/11, Letter from Dr. Waldemar Hoepfner to C. M. Rolph, 23 March 1972. 69 Kingsley Martin Papers, KM 7/3, Diary and Workbook 1935. 70 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 4/2, Barry Cox interview with D. N. Pritt Q.C. c.1969. 71 For example, Special Branch files MEPO 38/53 on Jewish People’s Council leader Julius Jacobs and MEPO 38/45 on NUWM leader Wal Hannington remained active until their deaths in the 1960s. 72 HO 45/25462, Special Branch report of the activities of Ronald Kidd, 12 November 1935. 73 See NCCL DCL 48/1, NCCL Newsletters nos 1–5, 1935–37 and DCL 75/2, NCCL circulars 1937–38; reports of campaigns in DCL 40/1, DCL 9/4, DCL 27/2, DCL 27/3 and Scaffardi Papers, DSF 1/21; Kidd, Ronald, British Liberty in Danger: An Introduction ot the Study of Civil Rights (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1940). 74 HO 45/25462, Special Branch report of the activities of Ronald Kidd, 12 November 1935. 75 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 2/9, Ronald Kidd pocket diary for 1934. 76 NCCL, DCL 74/2, Letter from Forster to Kidd, 21 January 1935. 77 HO45/25462, Letter, Vernon Kell to Sir Russell Scott, 22 February 1934.

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78 HO45/25462, Letter, Ronald Kidd to The Secretary, International Labour Defence, 19 February 1934. There is no way of knowing whether the letter came into the possession of the security services from the surveillance of Alun Thomas and the ILD, or of Kidd. However, a handwritten note at the foot of the letter reminds Sir Russell Scott at the Home Office: ‘You will remember he [Kidd] was the protagonist in the “New Statesman” controversy.’ The Weekend Review had merged with the New Statesman. 79 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 4/2 and DSF 4/3, Transcript of Barry Cox interviews with Claud Cockburn, Kingsley Martin, F. W. Adams, and Neil Lawson, c.1969. 80 HO 45/25462, Special Branch report on Ronald Kidd, 19 November 1935. 81 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 4/2, Barry Cox interview with Sylvia Scaffardi, c.1969. 82 Ibid. 83 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 4/2, Barry Cox interview with D. N. Pritt, c.1969. 84 McKibbin, Classes and Cultures, cited in McCarthy, p. 893. 85 McCarthy, ‘Parties, Voluntary Associations and Democratic Politics’, p. 893. 86 Williamson, Philip, Stanley Baldwin: Conservative Leadership and National Values (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 78–83. 87 McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, p. 285. 88 Jarvis, ‘Mrs Maggs and Betty’, pp. 129–52, pp. 131–2. See also Jarvis, ‘British Conservatism and Class Politics in the 1920s’, pp. 59–84. 89 McKibbin, Ideologies of Class, p. 262–4. 90 Burridge, Trevor, Clement Attlee: A Political Biography (London: Jonathan Cape, 1985), pp. 77–9. 91 Burridge, Clement Attlee, pp. 103–13. 92 Cited in Holman, Good Old George, pp. 135–6. 93 Burridge, Clement Attlee, p. 124. 94 Pimlott, Labour and the Left, pp. 198–203. 95 Worley, Matthew, Labour Inside the Gate: A History of the British Labour Party between the Wars (London: I. B. Tauris, 2005), pp. 174–7. 96 The Left Book Club was launched in May 1936 by publisher Victor Gollancz in association with John Strachey and Harold Laski. It set up discussion groups and sold left-wing books cheaply. It was an important vehicle for promoting anti-fascist and radical left ideas. At its height it had an impressive 60,000 members.

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The marked lack of grounds for complaints about the behaviour of the police at the Hyde Park rally to mark the arrival of the hunger marchers in London in March 1934 was not the result the NCCL had expected. The presence of its observers was recognised as having contributed to the peaceful outcome but the absence of the violent police actions and widespread disorder seen at the previous hunger march denied the newly formed organisation the momentum of a conspicuous legal challenge and sensational headlines in the press. Without such exposure and obvious purpose the organisation might easily have faded away. That it was instead able to consolidate its support and become established in a very short time owed much to a sustained state anxiety in relation to the activities of the political left that was manifest in heightened concerns about an institutional political bias in policing. The advent of fascism in Britain and the formation of the British Union of Fascists (BUF) in 1932 were of concern to the police more for their propensity to provoke anti-fascist opposition than, in themselves, a serious political threat or source of disorder. Policing strategies remained focused on the control of the political left. This was a situation that allowed the NCCL to become a focal point for the expression of legitimate concerns for civil liberties and police practices that appeared to favour the right. At the same time, Scotland Yard viewed the emergence of a civil liberties pressure group as part of the problem of the political left. The NCCL gained recognition in its opposition to the Incitement to Disaffection Bill and police discrimination campaign, and established its tactics to observe and record police actions and lobby MPs to bring complaints about police behaviour to the Home Secretary and to Parliament. Its rapid consolidation as an adept pressure group prompted Special

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Branch to warn that the organisation had become increasingly effective. Both Trenchard and his successor as Commissioner, Philip Game, responded with a firm determination to discourage any official recognition of the NCCL and of Kidd’s representations, and a resolve to maintain the status quo. The Incitement to Disaffection Bill Within weeks of the NCCL’s formation a Bill was before Parliament that would introduce severe penalties for the possession of seditious literature and extensive additional police powers of search and seizure of property. The proposals for new legislation were introduced after judgement went against the police in the Elias v Pasmore case.1 The case had been brought in response to the police search of premises and seizure of documents in connection with the arrest of Hannington and other communist leaders in the lead-up to the hunger march in October 1932. Barbara Weinberger has commented on these events as damaging to the Government that claimed to be the guardian of civil liberties and responsible for rallying an influential section of the middle class that gave its support to the NCCL.2 The proposed legislation was widely unpopular and the introduction of the Bill gave the NCCL’s campaign a new impetus. Within hours of the publication of the Bill the NCCL launched its opposition campaign with a mass lobbying exercise. It circulated a detailed analysis of its proposals to every member of the House of Commons. This emphasised the ‘dangerous character’ of the proposed legislation and included a summary of vital amendments to the Bill. The response was widely favourable. Independent MP Eleanor Rathbone presented a national petition to Parliament. Public meetings and conferences were held in London and around the country which attracted representatives of all political parties, and academic, pacifist and industrial societies. Jointly, with the London Trades Council, a delegate conference was held that attracted some 1600 delegates said to represent ‘every phase of progressive thought’. In the House of Lords a ‘legal panel’ was on hand to advise on legal points.3 Commentators have paid tribute to the NCCL for its contribution to the notably weakened legislation that was implemented. Kingsley Martin’s autobiographical recollections suggest that the NCCL was responsible for ‘emasculating and so discrediting’ the Bill that the Act was subsequently used only in

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very few relatively unimportant cases.4 The more recent work of Ewing and Gearty argues that the coalition between left and right was important in damaging the Bill, and it was largely due to the ‘organisational skills of the nascent NCCL’ that the true nature of the legislation was so widely recognised.5 The campaign put Kidd ‘in touch’ with many MPs. It afforded him personally an exceptional opportunity to hone his lobbying skills and strategies and to establish valuable lasting contacts for the NCCL. E. M. Forster would ask Kidd to get him a ticket to the Commons debate on the Bill because, unlike Kidd, he himself knew no MPs ‘at all well’.6 Scaffardi’s account recalled that ‘very good official Labour Party support’ for the organisation was achieved in a remarkably short time, and the opposition to the Incitement to Disaffection Bill was ‘a very big achievement and a major hurdle surmounted on the road to prestige and respectability in the Labour movement’.7 The rapid progress that the NCCL achieved from the fortuitous timing of the introduction of the Bill did not escape Scotland Yard. Special Branch reported that the NCCL had ‘seized upon’ the Incitement to Disaffection Bill in an endeavour to ‘further justify its existence’. The Bill, it reported, had served to ‘rally to its banner men and women of widely different creeds and parties, who were looking for some means to express their determined opposition to the Bill but would not otherwise have supported the Council’.8 That was no doubt true. The British Union of Fascists at Olympia A similarly decisive event for the future course of the NCCL was the notorious BUF rally held at Olympia on 7 June 1934. The criticism directed at the police over the handling of disorder at the rally and the anti-fascist counter-demonstration was arguably among the most damaging to the reputation of the Metropolitan Police of all the fascist and anti-fascist confrontations in London throughout the 1930s. Furthermore, it brought renewed momentum and direction to the police powers and civil liberties debate. The rally was billed by Oswald Mosley as the greatest indoor political demonstration ever held. The audience were from the influential middle and upper classes and public figures from the literary, academic and political world, and were dressed in their

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evening finery. There were no official NCCL observers at Olympia but a number of its vice-presidents and supporters were at the rally; Professor Julian Huxley, Gerald Barry, Conservative MP Vyvyan Adams and the Revd. H. L. R. Sheppard.9 The strength of anti-fascist feeling surrounding the event was no secret. Several weeks before the meeting, the Communist Party had announced its intention to turn the meeting into a fiasco. Anti-fascist marches were organised from around London and planned to converge on Olympia for a counter-demonstration outside the hall; demonstrators had obtained tickets and were intent on disrupting the proceedings with organised heckling.10 Almost immediately Mosely began to speak orchestrated heckling began from around the hall. This was met with unprecedented violence as hecklers were assaulted and thrown into the street by Blackshirt stewards. Despite the obvious serious injuries of those ejected, uniformed police did not enter the meeting, claiming they had no legal authority to do so. This was contentious. Politicians were obligated to control their own meetings. The law supported the police entering private meetings uninvited only if a breach of the peace was actually taking place. However, the subsequent widespread condemnation of the fascist violence also put police behaviour in the spotlight. It called into question the police decision not to intervene despite the extent of injuries that might have indicated a breach of the peace, and further highlighted the thorny matter of police partiality. In the coming months the NCCL would eventually become more associated with anti-fascism but it was not part of the Communist Party-led opposition to the Olympia rally and there were no NCCL observers present. Gerald Barry and the Revd. H. L. R. Sheppard were, however, among those who condemned the Blackshirt violence in the press over the following days.11 Kidd himself placed a piece in several newspapers calling for victims and witnesses of the assaults to come forward with details of their experiences. An NCCL inquiry into the attitude of police outside Olympia was promised.12 In response to Kidd’s appeal, eye-witness accounts described wounded people leaving the hall as in a ‘deplorable condition’; a man ‘looked as if an animal had attacked him, his face was mauled’; a ‘hysterical woman came out shrieking’;13 another man had ‘his suit of clothes torn and a bruise on the forehead from a Blackshirt’s knuckleduster’.14 Dr. Peter Grover said that ‘a man’s life was in desperate danger and [the police] made no effort to intervene’. His

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offer of medical assistance to the injured was rejected by a police constable who ‘used insulting language and invited me to return to Moscow’.15 The statements of doctors and medical staff at Queen Mary’s Hospital, Stratford, where several of the injured were taken, detailed cases where knuckledusters or knives had been used and one of a girl who was bleeding from a kick in the stomach.16 It is not clear that the NCCL inquiry went ahead. Nonetheless, according to Special Branch reports, the organisation ‘took a prominent part’ in a ‘furious anti-fascist campaign’ that followed the Olympia rally and culminated in a ‘full-dress debate’ in the House of Commons. It was suggested that an anonymous booklet containing the statements of eye-witnesses, compiled under the pseudonym ‘Vindicator’ and entitled Fascists at Olympia, ‘bore the imprint of Kidd’s hand’. Moreover, Kidd was said to have ‘adroitly exploited’ the condemnation of the fascist brutality at Olympia to ‘win support for the Council’.17 The Home Secretary, John Gilmour, vigorously defended the actions of the police in the House of Commons, insisting they had ‘no legal authority to enter the premises’. He pointed out that it was not the duty of the police to steward meetings and the advice to the police at Olympia had been based on the assumption that the stewards would ‘act without undue violence and will themselves avoid illegal acts’. He maintained that should such assumptions prove unwarranted, ‘the whole policy of police action inside such public meetings will have to be reviewed’.18 As Kidd observed, the assumption that fascist stewards would not indulge in undue or illegal conduct was a ‘most unwarrantable one for any policeman or lawyer to make’ since violence by fascist stewards ‘was no very rare occurrence’.19 Similar acts of fascist violence were well known to have occurred on at least two previous occasions at BUF meetings in Oxford in November 1933 and in Bristol in March 1934.20 Comprehensive intelligence on the anti-fascist plans to disrupt the rally had been available to the Commissioner well in advance. Special Branch reported that Communist Party members had made a tour of inspection of the neighbourhood and noted old bricks and debris ‘of which use could be made’. Details of the tickets obtained and the placing of groups of demonstrators in different parts of the hall were reported, along with the pre-arranged plan for the shouting of slogans from each group in turn. According to

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Special Branch, Party members had been especially active among the ‘Jewish elements in the East End’ from where a large number of demonstrators were expected.21 Police resources were focused on the anti-fascist demonstration outside the hall where, despite the detailed information available, the 800-strong force struggled to maintain order in the immediate area around Olympia. 22 The press reported ‘wild scenes such as have not been witnessed in London since the worst days of the Suffragist agitation’, 23 and that ‘police, Blackshirts and communists were at one time locked in a wildly struggling mass for more than two hours’.24 Even though details of the planned disruption to speakers were known there were no arrangements to take account of the probability of a breach of the peace occurring inside the hall. Quite the contrary, uniformed police officers had been given unambiguous instructions that they should not interfere with the proceedings in the hall, and from the various police reports it is obvious there was more concern to justify the reason for a handful of officers having entered the hall to rescue an injured man than to explain why they had not intervened to stop the manifest violence.25 Gilmour insisted there were no police officers at the meeting. There were, however, a number of Special Branch officers among the audience. According to the Commissioner, they were there not ‘primarily’ as police officers but to gather ‘confidential information from the political side’ and their presence was ‘nothing to do with anybody’.26 Their accounts of the events are revealing, nevertheless. Special Branch officers reported ‘very violent treatment’ meted out by the Blackshirts: ‘two men reached the street minus their trousers and others were bleeding at the face’;27 ‘interruptions and removals … which lasted for about an hour’; a man ‘pounced upon by stewards’ and receiving ‘many blows with their fists’.28 Sergeant William Rogers reported leaving the hall when the ejections started, to take up observation outside one of the entrances. He witnessed at least 30 people ejected; ‘almost every person bore some mark of violence and was in a state of semi-collapse’, men and women bleeding profusely from wounds on the face.29 Sergeant Albert Hunt gave an account of 50 people ejected ‘in the most violent manner and in some cases were punched unconscious and their clothing torn’.30 The account of Inspector O’Carroll, one of the uniformed officers who went into the building, also reported violent assaults

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taking place at the hands of a group of stewards of ‘a hooligan type’, recruited for the purpose of ‘assaulting interrupters before they left the building’.31 A couple of days later, during an interview with D. A. C. Quinn, O’Carroll was ‘encouraged’ to change his statement and concede that the wording of his report was ‘perhaps inaccurate’, and had been written to justify having entered the hall against instructions and to have failed to make an arrest. Quinn concluded: ‘I am inclined to think that Inspector O’Carroll’s report gives a rather more serious impression of the assaults than was really the case.’32 O’Carroll’s original statement was consistent with those of the Special Branch officers. It is no surprise that reference to the presence of Special Branch officers in the hall was omitted entirely from any official statement and from the Home Secretary’s account in the Commons. Eighteen months later, when the Commissioner was asked to provide police evidence for the Mosley v Marchbanks case, the matter was still ‘troublesome and difficult’ and his legal advice observed, ‘we must die in the last ditch before we disclose any report made by any Special Branch officer.’33 Hampered by these conflicting reports, the Commissioner confessed: ‘frankly I cannot reconcile them’. He accepted Inspector O’Carroll’s position was ‘a difficult one’. The reason the police did not go into the meeting when they knew that people were being ‘violently assaulted’ was because they had been given orders to avoid interference with the meeting itself and not enter the hall unless requested to do so. These instructions were issued on the strength of intelligence received from ‘our man who is inside the BUF HQ’, that suggested that leading members of the BUF proposed to make a formal complaint if the police ‘exceeded their duty’ by interfering with Blackshirts who were ‘ejecting interrupters’.34 Trenchard was anxious to avoid legal confrontation with the litigious Mosley on this contentious point. He reasoned that the only way of avoiding disturbances of this kind was to prevent such meetings being held at all.35 The complaints about police actions that followed in the press and in Parliament show that this policy did not meet public expectations. The NCCL argued that the policing arrangements were inadequate in view of anti-fascist plans to cause major disruption to the meeting, which were general knowledge.36 Some police reports too betray frustration with the situation, such as that of Superintendent Varney:

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It is an axiom and a legal one that police may and indeed ought to stop a breach of the peace in any place, even a private house and may break and enter to do so, but in this case the matter was occurring within view of the public and they were clamouring for police action to prevent further violence. The Inspector [O’Carroll] therefore did the correct thing and would have failed in his duty if he had remained inactive or refused to act.37

This also implies a decision to enter the hall would have been defensible. Mosley made a point of complying with police instructions and, to the extent that brutal attacks on protesters had previously gone unchecked by the authorities, critics believed that the BUF had been encouraged to suppose its methods were acceptable. The promotion of the BUF and its objectives may not have formed any part of the Commissioner’s public order policies but, nevertheless, Olympia showed that policing fascist and anti-fascist conflict could easily appear to favour fascists and have damaging consequences for the police. Jon Lawrence has commented that long-debated questions around the extent to which politicians should tolerate disorder and organised protest as part of the ‘rough and tumble of popular politics’ assumed new urgency in the context of the ‘dramatic intervention’ of fascists into political life. He argues that Mosley failed to recognise that political sensibilities had hardened against disorder in the post First World War years and the outcry against the Blackshirt violence at Olympia changed views in both Westminster and in the press, and led both the BUF and the Communist Party to re-think their tactics.38 This view has been challenged. According to Martin Pugh the press comment in the aftermath of Olympia created a misleading impression. Pugh argues that the Conservative weekly journals particularly were very relaxed about Olympia and that a number of Conservative MPs applauded Mosley’s tough actions against the ‘Reds’. He suggests that the reality was far more complicated than has been supposed and cites the unprecedented and immediate fillip to recruitment to the BUF that followed Olympia.39 Nonetheless, there was widespread public censure of the fascist brutality at Olympia. This effectively allowed the radical left to acquire credibility and a measure of mainstream support from its affiliation with anti-fascism. Sections of the national press not normally noted for expressions of sympathy with the political left reported ‘public disgust at the brutal methods of the fascists’40 and

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the Home Secretary’s warning to the Blackshirts that ‘Olympia scenes will not be tolerated’.41 The Daily Telegraph did publish a number of letters in support of Mosley,42 but it also published those such as from the Revd. Sheppard who saw people being ejected from the hall by Blackshirts ‘in the most brutal and outrageous manner’.43 Hostility towards fascist organisations from the Manchester Guardian, the left-wing press such as the News Chronicle, and the Daily Herald pre-dated Olympia. The News Chronicle where NCCL vice-president Gerald Barry was features editor, referred to a ‘tide of protest against Blackshirt brutality’ at Olympia, and questioned the role of the police. It reported a ‘widespread feeling’ in the labour movement that ‘the police authorities in London are neglecting the powers of preserving the peace embodied in the Public Meetings Act of 1908’, that had been effectively invoked by the authorities in provincial towns and cities in similar circumstances to those at Olympia.44 Coinciding as it did with the furore over the Incitement to Disaffection Bill, the behaviour of the police and the excesses of Mosley’s Blackshirts at Olympia were an effective incentive to liberal opinion to support a civil liberties pressure group, and contributed to a view where the NCCL and its objectives chimed with a broader contemporaneous critique of the police. Policing the right: the Commissioner and the British Union of Fascists Following the trouble at Olympia it was widely expected that new legislation would be introduced in an attempt to prevent potentially disorderly meetings. However, ministers were cautious about the likely hostile reaction from opposition MPs and were reluctant to put forward proposals to further increase police powers. Trenchard wanted legislation that would curb the militaristic practices adopted by the BUF. He was particularly uneasy about the black shirt ‘uniform’ and the military drill and leadership structure of the Union. More than a year before the Olympia affair, he had warned that ‘this Fascist business will probably give rise to breaches of the peace’.45 Fascist and anti-fascist meetings purposely held in close proximity were inevitably the cause of frequent disorder. But Trenchard was aware that fascist practices especially were looked upon as provocative, not only by anti-fascists and Communist

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Party members but also by ‘more responsible members of the public’. Furthermore, he was concerned that fascist semi-militarism incentivised its opponents. He maintained that there were signs that the Communist Party was ‘endeavouring to resuscitate its “Defence Force”’, and that bodies of men were appearing at demonstrations and marches wearing red shirts.46 Trenchard’s warnings received a lukewarm response from the Home Office. Legislation to control the wearing of uniforms was thought to be difficult to draft. The word ‘uniform’ was problematic and hard to define. It was recognised that sashes and badges, as in the example of the Orangemen, could be just as provocative as full uniform. Trenchard believed that fascist activities should be watched ‘in the sort of way that Communist activities are watched’. But this suggestion met an equally cool response; budget constraints prevented MI5 from taking on the work.47 The Commissioner’s insistence that the Secretary of State and the Cabinet should be made aware of the difficulties the police were facing, and should ‘take the responsibility of deciding against new legislation’ was apparently to no avail. He was compelled to write again, urgently, to the Secretary of State a few months later demanding the Government take action against the BUF or face the very serious consequences suffered in other countries where fascist organisations had been allowed to flourish. Trenchard was confident that he could, given the means to do so, rein in the BUF while they were ‘comparatively small and easy to deal with’.48 A few days before the Olympia rally Gilmour advised a meeting of the Cabinet that, although he concurred with the Commissioner’s view that restrictions on the wearing of uniforms in public would assist the police, he had ‘not thought fit’ to put any proposals to the Cabinet as ‘it appeared doubtful whether the House of Commons in present circumstances would support the imposition of any restrictions’. Cabinet ministers agreed. The emphasis was to remain with the police and existing legislation to maintain law and order;49 there was no appetite for legislation aimed specifically at the BUF. Any new legislation could be expected to target all shades of political activism. This was a move that would be unlikely to receive a sympathetic hearing from Labour MPs. What is more, ministers were not persuaded by the events at Olympia that the legislation Trenchard proposed was the action that needed to be taken. Home Office concerns focused more on the controversial issue of police powers in relation to private

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meetings; whether police could have entered the hall; the difficulties experienced by the police in getting information about events taking place inside a private meeting; and whether some new police powers were needed in this area. Whether Special Branch officers inside the hall at Olympia could have alerted uniformed officers, or whether they should in such cases in the future, are not recorded as part of the discussion. The Commissioner was not in favour of police officers entering meetings uninvited but was prepared to compromise on the point as long as it was combined with powers to prohibit meetings of more than five people who were wearing the uniform of ‘a political body’.50 Once again, there was no appetite for Trenchard’s proposals. The civil liberties and police powers debate had become a politically sensitive matter since the beginning of the year with the formation of the NCCL and the public interest in the policing of the NUWM hunger march and the National Government’s proposals to introduce new incitement to disaffection legislation. Instead, Gilmour spoke in Parliament of the ‘limitations of the present powers of the police’ in situations such as at Olympia and gave assurances that the Government was ‘anxious to avoid any infringement of the liberty of the subject’.51 The Commissioner was not about to concede to the civil liberties argument. As far as Trenchard was concerned it was up to the organisers to steward their own meetings with questions of free speech in mind. Under existing police powers he proposed to stop future processions like the anti-fascist demonstration at Olympia, ‘whose object it was to create disorder’. Furthermore, he was not in favour of the police having additional responsibilities in relation to private meetings and would only agree to anything of the kind reluctantly and on the understanding that it was to form part of wider proposals for dealing with the problem as a whole, particularly the problem of uniforms.52 Trenchard had ready a six-page memorandum for the Secretary of State recommending that a Public Order Bill be introduced along the lines of legislation that was about to be implemented in Sweden. He considered the Swedish proposals avoided the difficulties inhibiting the introduction of similar legislation in Britain by ‘making the organisation of anything in the nature of a private army a clear offence against the law’. He proposed three vital clauses: (1) to make private political armies illegal or (if this is regarded

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as impossible) to prohibit the wearing of uniform for political purposes by Fascists or any other similar bodies (2) the police should be empowered to enter meetings when they consider it necessary and (3) that processions of persons whose declared intention is to break up a political meeting should be disbanded. 53

Furthermore, Trenchard wanted the legislation rushed through ahead of a BUF meeting planned at the White City on 5 August, barely a month later. He warned that there was growing anti-fascist activity: a ‘United Anti-Fascist League’ would organise the Communist Party and communist-oriented organisations in mass opposition to attempts to hold fascist meetings; a ‘defence force’ of bodyguards would be provided by the NUWM for interrupters at fascist meetings; and a strike was being planned among transport and catering workers to prevent food, drink and fascist personnel reaching the White City meeting.54 Trenchard’s remonstrations fell on deaf ears and with a large anti-fascist rally now on the horizon he tried a different approach. He pointed to the financial cost to the ratepayers and the Exchequer of maintaining public order at political meetings and demonstrations in the capital, as well as the impact on his ‘principal duties of preventing crime and accidents in the streets’.55 A draft Bill was finally drawn up but it fell far short of Trenchard’s demands. In spite of all his representations over the previous year the one thing that really mattered as far as the Commissioner was concerned, the question of uniforms, had not been addressed. He was, he wrote, ‘very sorry to see that there is no mention of the word uniform from beginning to end’. He added, ‘I need not remind you that the wearing of uniform does make for military appearance and is provocative.’56 The Government remained unmoved. The Home Secretary’s unequivocal public support for police actions did not waiver but equally there was no willingness to curtail the activities of the BUF or to introduce surveillance of the organisation on the scale applied to the Communist Party and left-wing groups. At the same time there was evident anxiety that the protection of civil liberties should remain within the remit of the authorities and should not be allowed to be usurped by a new pressure group – the NCCL.57 It was to be a further two years before public order legislation was introduced.

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Trenchard’s demands for new legislation were concentrated on curtailing fascist activities but his public order priorities were firmly focused on the political left. While he advocated legislation that would ‘do away with Fascists’, his objectives related entirely to the extent to which the BUF was able to provoke anti-fascist sentiment. The methods of communists were, he maintained, ‘obviously also a contributory element’. He also recognised that the large number of police needed to keep the peace at fascist demonstrations created the impression that ‘Sir Oswald Mosley’s semi-military organisation is being permitted to develop under police protection’, and that the police received unjustified criticism as a result.58 Policing the left: the Commissioner and the anti-fascist movement The announcement that a massive anti-fascist rally was to be held in Hyde Park at the beginning of September to coincide with a planned BUF rally worried Trenchard a great deal more than the fascists’ plans. As a new campaign committee was set up by anti-fascist leaders, Special Branch advised that the co-ordinated action of the ‘various anti-fascist bodies that exist in London’ was being organised and was intended to ‘give expression’ to the volume of feeling against the BUF.59 Although the NCCL was not involved in an official capacity with the anti-fascist preparations, vice-presidents’ Pritt and Nevinson attended the initial planning meeting of the co-ordinating committee. They tried to instil a note of moderation into the proceedings. They suggested the adoption of a ‘harmless’ name such as the ‘Autumn Campaign Committee’ rather than using the more inflammatory ‘anti-fascist’, and cautioned the committee to ‘make sure beforehand that police would not object to their holding a counter demonstration on the same day and at the same place as the British Union of Fascists meeting’. Both suggestions were dismissed out of hand.60 Pritt refused to sign a circular from the co-ordinating committee on the grounds that the Commissioner might legally ban the counter-demonstration. Paradoxically, Scotland Yard regarded Pritt’s concerns as justification for a Home Office conference to consider whether there were, in fact, grounds for intervention by the authorities. The conference concluded that there were none. The Home Secretary put his trust in the ‘weight of advice from the best Labour leaders’ to deter a large gathering of anti-fascists. What is more, he was prepared

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to ‘risk a clash’, hopeful that it would bring both movements into disfavour, rather than prohibit the meeting without clear evidence of serious disorder.61 He instructed that the ‘usual permission’ should be given for the meetings to take place in Hyde Park,62 but left it to the Commissioner to act in accordance with the latest intelligence, including closing the park at short notice if necessary.63 Trenchard had already made clear that his favoured approach was to prevent the meetings altogether; he was not in sympathy with the decision to risk another clash, despite Gilmour’s assurance that the decision would be re-considered should the situation change.64 Paramount in Gilmour’s decision was a reluctance to place himself in a position of having, again, to defend charges of police partiality and interference with civil liberties. Gilmour made no specific reference to the NCCL as he impressed on the Commissioner, ‘I hope that we can allow freedom of meeting as far as possible since every step we take is being watched closely.’ Nevertheless, it is reasonable to suppose that he had in mind the monitoring of police behaviour and the ­representations of the NCCL.65 In contrast to the Home Secretary’s judicious response, the Commissioner’s proposals betrayed no suggestion that his preparations were restrained by the activities of the NCCL. He considered that left-wing activism had entered a more volatile phase and saw the NCCL as contributing to the unrest. Trenchard launched his biggest ever policing operation for the Hyde Park meetings and prepared to bring in troops. Fifty thousand people were expected to attend the demonstrations. Four thousand five hundred police were on duty, more than the Metropolitan Police had ever previously been able to turn out. Frank Newsam at the Home Office confessed that he was powerless to restrain Trenchard’s enthusiasm for his elaborate preparations involving troops.66 A 45 page ‘summary of particulars’ from the files of Special Branch gives some indication of the compulsion behind the Commissioner’s preparations. The assembled intelligence focused almost entirely on anti-fascist objectives. The four pages of information on ‘the attitude of the British Union of Fascists’ highlighted the incitement to violence contained within their advertising literature and the provocative editorials of some of the fascist press. There were references to fascist plans to ‘beat up the Reds’ and to ‘defend themselves, if attacked.67 The remaining 40 pages were devoted to the activities and associates of the anti-fascist movement and its

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relationship with bodies such as the National Joint Council of the Labour Party and the Trade Union Congress (TUC). Several extracts from the Daily Worker collected over the weeks leading up to the demonstration were included, highlighting counter-claims such as ‘the working-class of London will not be intimidated’ and promising ‘the mightiest anti-fascist demonstration ever seen in Britain’. A selection of ‘general press comments’ included commentary from the Manchester Guardian that ‘Lord Trenchard and Scotland Yard are preparing for trouble in Hyde Park’ and a warning from the New Statesman and Nation that ‘There is at least a danger of large scale disorder in Hyde Park when the Fascists hold their demonstration.’68 Intelligence revealed that the NCCL proposed to adopt a very different position than it had at Olympia three months earlier. It was to have a picked corps of observers moving amongst the crowds inside and outside Hyde Park. … This corps of observers will be composed of sound and reliable persons who are not likely to be led away by panic or emotion and they will include eminent public names  … their function will be strictly limited to observing the nature of any violence that may occur and the use to which police put their powers.69

In the event the demonstrations went off peacefully. Special Branch estimated that at least 60,000 people were in Hyde Park at the height of the demonstration, but that ‘many thousands were present merely out of curiosity or in anticipation of seeing a clash between the opposing demonstrators, or with the police’.70 Nevertheless, Special Branch’s Inspector Keeble reported that it was the heavy police cordon that kept demonstrators ‘some few yards from the speakers’. Keeble maintained that the ‘distinctly hostile’ crowd might have descended into serious disorder ‘but for the measures adopted and tact shown by police’. In all, 18 people were arrested on minor charges of insulting behaviour and obstructing the police. Ronald Kidd’s presence was noted at various places ‘following his usual practice of observing the movements and actions of the police’.71 There was, however, no general disorder and, as had been the case at the NUWM hunger march earlier in the year, no complaints were made by the NCCL. Ironically, the Commissioner and the anti-fascist movement shared a view of the provocative nature of BUF activities but

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4.1  Home Secretary Sir John Gilmour (centre) and Metropolitan Police Commissioner Lord Trenchard (standing behind Gilmour) at the opening of the Metropolitan Police laboratory in 1935

that did not prevent anti-fascists from seeing Trenchard as part of the fascist menace. Communist leader Harry Pollitt referred to Trenchard as ‘a close personal associate of Mosley’ and his police reforms as necessary to ensure that police could be relied upon as a ‘political instrument’.72 The NCCL’s position was allied to the view that the police used their powers selectively in ways that protected fascists and disadvantaged the political left. At Olympia it considered that there had been ‘ample and continuous justification’ for the police to enter the hall. Clear evidence of breaches of the peace were witnessed by Special Branch officers inside and outside the hall, by uniformed officers and by ‘reliable people’ leaving the meeting, as battered and bleeding victims were thrown into the street.73 The Commissioner himself was later to acknowledge that ‘conducting processions of Communists’ right up to the doors of Olympia, knowing their objective was to break up a fascist meeting, ‘made a breach of the peace almost inevitable’.74 As Weinberger and others have commented, public order policing did not have to be consciously biased in favour of fascists for it to appear to disadvantage the left.75

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4.2  Mounted police at a 1930s demonstration in London

Trenchard’s preparations for the next large BUF meeting held at the Albert Hall in October 1934 suggest that the tepid reaction to his demands for new legislation encouraged him to test his existing powers. His arrangements included Special Branch officers inside the hall, not for ‘political’ reasons as previously, but who, in the event of a disturbance, were to ‘go out to the nearest squad of uniform men and bring them in’ and ‘occasionally leave their seats to go into the corridors and look round the precincts’.76 Uniformed men were to ‘go in immediately’ should they see anyone ejected from the hall looking as if he or she had been ‘knocked about’.77 Mosley was advised accordingly. There was to be no repeat of the damaging public criticism of police actions that followed the fascist rally at Olympia.

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The NCCL: from Olympia to anti-fascism As far as the NCCL was concerned the questions raised about police powers by the events at Olympia ensured there would, thereafter, be NCCL observers at fascist meetings. More importantly, it raised the probability that the Government would introduce further powers for the police to maintain public order that would equally affect the left and this made its eventual association with anti-fascism predictable.78 However, the newly formed Anti-Fascist Co-ordination Committee was treated with caution and the Council was careful not to be associated with disorderly protest. The BUF meeting at the Albert Hall in October coincided with an important NCCL meeting in Trafalgar Square in connection with the Incitement to Disaffection Bill. Forster, the NCCL’s president, urged Kidd to ensure that the speakers had ‘strict orders to stick to the Bill and not be drawn into any anti-fascist demonstrations’.79 Forster’s advice prevailed. Special Branch reported that around 2000 people attended the NCCL’s meeting in Trafalgar Square and that ‘there was no public appeal to the audience to create a disturbance at the Albert Hall’. Kidd, they observed, ‘was among the audience at the BUF meeting’.80 Elsewhere the day was not without incident. NCCL executive, Alun Thomas, who was leading the anti-fascist demonstration, was arrested on a charge of obstructing a police officer in the course of his duty and bound over for three years. The evidence of the arresting police officer, PC Walter Shopland, confirmed that the incident had occurred as a result of the breaking up of an ‘orderly procession’.81 The NCCL took up the case with the Secretary of State, asking whether the action had his approval.82 It took two reminders and the passage of almost a month before the Commissioner responded to Gilmour’s request for clarification. He then confirmed that he had arranged to prevent the rival bodies getting within striking distance of each other in order to prevent a repeat of Olympia. He urged that the NCCL should not be encouraged. The organisation was, he wrote, ‘of no importance and is run almost entirely by Ronald Kidd. The list of names on the Council’s notepaper is of no value whatsoever. Only a few are active and they are of very communistic tendencies.’ He argued that ‘if an answer is sent at all, it should be to the effect that the Home Secretary is not prepared to discuss these matters with irresponsible bodies’. Home Office

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officials observed that ‘the Council ask two simple questions and as the tone of their correspondence is scrupulously polite I do not think it would be wise to give too cavalier an answer.’ The delayed response from the Commissioner was considered ‘unfortunate’.83 Sir Russell Scott’s reply to the NCCL was evasive, as far as Kidd was concerned.84 He expressed regret for the delay in replying, and confirmed that the procession was dispersed on the instructions of the Commissioner in order to prevent disorder and breaches of the peace. Thus the police did not ‘exceed their duties and obligations in any way’.85 However, while the official public response of the authorities remained solidly behind Trenchard’s more vigorous use of the existing police powers, there was little sympathy at the Home Office with his truculent approach to its critics. Thurlow has observed that the NCCL’s complaints were always subordinate to their perceived status as a communist front organisation.86 While the numerous reports of Special Branch officers may well support that interpretation, the view of the Home Office is not nearly so clear cut. In fact, the Government was forced to defend its civil liberties record in debate in the House of Commons several times during the period from the beginning of 1934 to the end of 1936. As Mosley increasingly relied on anti-semitic propaganda to promote the aims of the BUF, the continued state focus on keeping in check anti-fascist protest led to growing concerns about police partiality. Clement Attlee warned of the grave responsibility on the Government, ‘to see that this country, which is the oldest child of liberty in the world, should not succumb to the forces that have prevailed among some of her younger sisters on the continent’.87 The confiscation of anti-war literature by police at air displays at Hendon and Duxford led to questions about police discrimination against pacifists.88 The inconsistent approach to policing private meetings was highlighted by complaints that uniformed police refused to leave a private meeting that was held by communists in South Wales,89 whereas at a fascist meeting in Stratford officers apparently ‘watched with cold dispassionate gaze’ as stewards threw out interrupters with ‘little evidence of the spirit of forbearance’.90 Gilmour and his successor as Home Secretary, Sir John Simon, defended police actions and pointed to the ‘difficult task’ facing the police.91 In preparation for the debate on 5 March 1936, the Home Secretary acknowledged: ‘this debate is no doubt inspired by the National Council for Civil Liberties’.92 By this time the debate

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had moved to allegations of inadequate police protection for the Jewish community, particularly in the East End, against attacks by fascists. Simon acknowledged that he had received a ‘good number of complaints’ and was aware of cases in which ‘people have been molested because they have been Jews’. He denied there was political bias of any kind in the policing of meetings and demonstrations, and concluded: ‘as I conceive the duty of the police it is in the name of observing the liberties of us all, to see to it that, while everybody has a fair opportunity of expressing his opinions, we do not get this conflict really developed and encouraged.’93 The Home Secretary was forced to defend his own role, and the role of the police, as the guardians of civil liberties against the allegations raised in the Commons. Scotland Yard, on the other hand, responded to the NCCL by questioning the political motives of its leaders and with a determination to rebut the damaging criticism of the police that it generated. Notes 1 In January 1934 in a case brought by Sid Elias of the NUWM, the court had ruled that the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police had acted illegally in the search of the NUWM headquarters and the seizure of documents in October 1932. 2 Weinberger, The Best Police in the World, p. 173. 3 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 1/1, The National Council for Civil Liberties Annual Report for 1934, p 11. 4 Martin, Editor, p. 155. 5 Ewing, K. D. and Gearty, C. A., The Struggle for Civil Liberties: Political Freedom and the Rule of Law in Britain, 1914–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 252. 6 University of Hull, NCCL, DCL 74/1, Letter from Forster to Kidd, 31 October 1934. 7 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 4/3, Barry Cox interview, Scaffardi III, R. K.’s Politics, Political Standing of the NCCL up to 1941 – Red Smear. 8 HO 45/25462, Special Branch summary, Ronald Hubert Kidd, 19 November 1935. 9 Kidd, British Liberty in Danger, p. 124. 10 HO 144/20140, Special Branch summary of a BUF meeting at Olympia, 7 June 1934. 11 Daily Telegraph, 8 June 1934, Letter from The Very Revd H. L. R. Sheppard, p. 16; Daily Telegraph, 9 June 1934; Gerald Barry’s account, p. 14.

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12 HO 45/25462, Special Branch summary, Ronald Hubert Kidd, 19 November 1935. 13 NCCL, DCL 40/1, Letter of A. H. M. Latta on the Olympia meeting, 7 June 1934. 14 NCCL, DCL 40/1, Letter from Frank Cull to Ronald Kidd, 5 July 1934. 15 NCCL, DCL 40/1, Witness statement of Dr. Peter Grover. 16 NCCL, DCL 40/1, Witness statements of medical staff at Queen Mary’s Hospital. 17 HO 45/25462, Special Branch summary, Ronald Hubert Kidd, 19 November 1935, p. 5. ‘Vindicator’, pseud. Henry Thomas Hopkinson, Fascists at Olympia: A Record of Eye-witnesses and Victims (London: Victor Gollancz, 1934). This publication included contributions from NCCL associates, Gerald Barry, Aldous Huxley and the Revd. Sheppard, as well as Conservative MPs Geoffrey Lloyd and W. J. Anstruther-Gray. If Kidd was responsible for this publication the foreword is somewhat out of character. It states: ‘Several of the documents in this book, in their original form, contain references to the attitude of the police. These have been deliberately omitted as the object of this pamphlet is to call attention to the actions of Blackshirts, and it is not desired to complicate the issue.’ 18 HO 144/20140, Draft answers to questions 40, 42 and 43, 11 June 1934. 19 Kidd, British Liberty in Danger, p. 125. 20 HO 144/ 20140, Draft letter to Sir Oswald Mosley attached to Home Office minute dated 10 April 1934 and HO 144/19070, Letter from Colonel Sir Vernon Kell to F. A. Newsam, Home Office, 20 November 1933. 21 HO 144/20140, Special Branch report of Acting-Superintendent Forster, 7 June 1934. 22 HO 144/20140, Draft answer to questions 40, 42 and 43, 11 June 1934. 23 Daily Telegraph, 8 June 1934, p. 15. 24 Daily Express, 8 June 1934, p. 1. 25 MEPO 2/4319, Minute note from D. A. C. Quinn to A. C. A., 8 June 1934; Memo, Superintendent Varney to D. A. C. No. 1, 8 June 1934; report of Inspector O’Carroll to S. D. Inspector, 8 June 1934. 26 MEPO 2/4319, Home Office minute, 10 January 1936. 27 HO 144/20140, Statement of Inspector Harold Keeble, Special Branch summary of a BUF meeting at Olympia, 7 June 1934. 28 MEPO 2/4319, Statement of P. S. Thompson, 9 June 1934. 29 MEPO 2/4319, Statement of P. S. William Rogers, 8 June 1934. 30 MEPO 2/4319, Statement of P. S. Albert Hunt, 8 June 1934.

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31 MEPO 2/4319, Report of Inspector O’Carroll’s interview with D. A. C. Quinn, 9 June 1934. 32 Ibid. 33 MEPO 2/4319, Home Office minute, 13 January 1936. The Mosley v Marchbanks case related to an allegedly slanderous speech made by John Marchbanks at a mass rally in Newcastle Upon Tyne on 15 July 1934. Marchbanks alleged fascist brutality both inside and outside Olympia and accused the BUF of being an essentially subversive movement, acting in the guise of a military machine, with the objective of overthrowing the constitutional government. Messrs. Langton and Passmore, Mosley’s legal representatives, sought evidence from the police to negate the suggestion of fascist brutality. Mosley won the case but was awarded only a farthing in damages. The judge considered Marchbanks’ remarks were close to the truth. 34 MEPO 2/4319, report on BUF meeting at Olympia on 7 June 1934, Special Branch Superintendent Foster, 8 June 1934. 35 HO 144/20140,Trenchard to Secretary of State, answers to questions for the House of Commons. 36 Kidd, British Liberty in Danger, p. 125. 37 MEPO 2/4319, Report of Superintendent Varney to D. A. C. No. 1, 8 June 1934. 38 Lawrence, Jon, ‘Fascist Violence and the Politics of Public Order in Inter-war Britain: The Olympia Debate Revisited’, Historical Review, Vol. 76, No. 192, May 2003, pp. 238–67. 39 Pugh, Martin, ‘Hurrah for the Blackshirts!’: Fascists and Fascism in Britain between the Wars (London: Pimlico, 2006), p. 161. 40 Daily Telegraph, 11 June 1934, p. 10. 41 Daily Express, 12 June 1934, p. 2. 42 Daily Telegraph, 11 June 1934, p. 10. 43 Daily Telegraph, 8 June 1934, p. 16. 44 News Chronicle, 12 June 1934, p. 13. 45 MEPO 2/10646, Minute note, Trenchard to A. C. C., 24 October 1932. 46 MEPO 2/10646, Letters from Trenchard to the Under Secretary of State, 31 October 1933 and 26 February 1934. 47 HO 45/25386, British Union of Fascists and Cognate Bodies, Note of a conference held in the Home Office on Thursday 23 November 1933. 48 MEPO 2/10646, Letter from Trenchard to the Under Secretary of State, 26 February 1934. 49 HO 46/25386, Extract from Conclusions of a Meeting of the Cabinet held at 10 Downing Street on Wednesday 30 May 1934.

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50 HO 46/25386, Note of a conference held in the Home Secretary’s room at the House of Commons on 13 June 1934. 51 HO 46/25386, Extract from conclusions of a meeting of the Cabinet held on 13 June 1934. 52 HO 46/25386, Note of a conference held in the Home Secretary’s room at the House of Commons on 13 June 1934. 53 MEPO 3/2490, Memorandum by the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis dated 2 July 1934. 54 Ibid. 55 MEPO 3/2490, Letter from Commissioner of the Metropolis to the Under Secretary of State, 28 September 1934. 56 MEPO 3/2490, Letter from Trenchard to Sir Russell Scott, dated 8 October 1934. 57 HO 45/25462, Vote on Account, Civil Liberties, March 1936. 58 MEPO 3/2490, Letter from Trenchard to Newsam at the Home Office, 28 September 1934 and Letter from the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis to the Under Secretary of State, 28 September 1934. 59 HO 45/25383, Special Branch report, 27 July 1934. 60 Ibid. 61 HO 45/25383, Home Office minute, Note of conference held at Home Office, 2 August 1934. 62 HO 45/25383, Sir Russell Scott’s note on letter from Sir John Gilmour, 25 August 1934. 63 HO 45/25383, Letter from Sir John Gilmour, 25 August 1934. 64 HO 45/25383, Letter to Trenchard from the Home Office, 25 August 1934. 65 HO 45/25383, Letter from Sir John Gilmour, 25 August 1934. 66 HO 45/25383, Home Office minute, Hyde Park Meeting on 9 September 1934, F. A. Newsam to Secretary of State, 7 September 1934. 67 MEPO 38/15, Special Branch summary of particulars, 10 September 1934, pp. 38–9. 68 MEPO 38/15, Special Branch summary of particulars, 10 September 1934, pp. 30–3. 69 MEPO 38/15, Special Branch summary of particulars, 10 September 1934, p. 34. 70 MEPO 38/15, Special Branch report, 9 September 1934, p. 12. 71 Ibid. 72 MEPO 38/15, Special Branch report dated 9 September 1934, pp. 6–7. For other examples see also MEPO 2/3071, Communist Party of Great Britain London District Committee, Appeal for International Solidarity in the Fight Against Fascism, dated 14 February 1934;

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MEPO 2/3073, Special Branch report dated 26 June 1934; HO 45/25383, Special Branch report, 15 August 1934. 73 Scaffardi, Fire Under The Carpet, p. 75. 74 HO 144/20144, Home Office minute, 29 November 1934. 75 Weinberger, The Best Police in the World, p. 180. See also Lewis, David, Illusions of Grandeur: Mosley, Fascism and British Society, 1931–1981 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987). 76 MEPO 2/3080, Notes made by the Commissioner at a meeting with A. C. A. and A. C. C. on 16 October 1934. 77 Ibid. 78 Scaffardi, Fire Under The Carpet, p. 78. 79 NCCL, DCL 74/1, Letter from E. M. Forster to Ronald Kidd, 20 October 1934. 80 HO 45/25462, Special Branch summary, Ronald Hubert Kidd, 19 November 1935. 81 HO 144/20144, Statement of Walter Frederick Shopland, 30 October 1934. 82 HO 144/20144, Letter from Ronald Kidd, The Council for Civil Liberties, to the Secretary of State, 29 November 1934. 83 HO 144/20144, Home Office minute dated 29 November 1934. Note by F. A. Newsam, 9 January 1935. 84 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 1/1, The National Council for Civil Liberties, Annual Report for 1934. 85 HO 144/20144, Letter from Sir Russell Scott to The Secretary, The Council for Civil Liberties, 14 January 1935. 86 Thurlow, The Secret State, pp. 169–70. 87 Parl. Debs, 14 June 1934, vol. 290, col. 1933–5. 88 Parl. Debs, 16 July 1935, vol. 304, col. 947–9. 89 Parl. Debs, 16 July 1935, vol. 304, col. 949. The Duxford case is discussed in greater detail in chapter 5. 90 Parl. Debs, 30 July 1935, vol. 304, col. 2475 and 2 August 1935, col. 3076–81. 91 Parl. Debs, 2 August 1935, vol. 304, col. 3082–5. 92 HO 45/25462, Vote on Account, Civil Liberties, March 1936. 93 Parl. Debs, 5 March 1936, vol. 309, col. 1610–11.

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The NCCL in action: networks, methods and strategies

At first one of the NCCL’s favoured tactics was to investigate major concerns about legislated executive powers or operational police behaviour via an unofficial commission of inquiry. A commission’s members consisted of well-known individuals from legal, political and reformist backgrounds and the proceedings closely replicated an official government inquiry, hearing evidence under oath and producing a report of its findings for publication. It was hoped that a consequent public and parliamentary debate would force the Government to conduct an official inquiry. Following on from its highly successful opposition to the incitement to disaffection legislation, the NCCL planned two unofficial Commissions of Inquiry. The first was an inquiry into the working of the Special Powers Acts in Northern Ireland and the second an inquiry into the conduct of the police. To an extent the inquiry into the working of the Special Powers Acts reflects the interests of some of the organisation’s earliest backers. It was a matter close to the hearts of the leaders of the ILD and also of one of the NCCL’s most constant lawyers, Geoffrey Bing, himself an Ulsterman. Under the provisions of the Special Powers Acts meetings and demonstrations against legislation such as the new Unemployment Insurance Act could be banned and anyone attempting to hold or to attend such meetings could be arrested.1 Central to the inquiry was the view that methods perfected in Northern Ireland would be introduced by the Imperial Government anywhere in the British Empire, including mainland Britain, should the perceived need arise. Thus the methods in operation in Ulster were referred to as ‘fascism being tried out on the dog’ and a ‘state of dictatorship’ having parallels to the Nazi regime. The investigation was conducted along the lines of the inquiry held

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in London into the Reichstag fire affair. The Commission’s panel consisted of prison reform campaigner, Margery Fry and Liberal MPs William McKeag and Edward Mallalieu; and it was chaired by Aylmer Digby KC. Barrister Neil Lawson was secretary to the Commission, as he had been to the London Inquiry. The terms of reference for the Commission were to consider the conditions under which the regulations were made and the means whereby powers may be delegated; and to examine the effects of the Acts and regulations on civil liberties and on political life in Northern Ireland. A local committee comprising people from academic, legal and trade union circles was set up in Belfast to collect and investigate the available material and to gather statements from members of the Northern Ireland public. The Commission met to hear and consider the evidence in Belfast and at the House of Commons in London. Its report was published in May 1936.2 Its findings questioned the constitutional validity of the legislation and condemned the derogation of ‘the personal liberty of the subject’ under the working of the Acts as undemocratic and un-British. Headlines such as ‘Freedom in Chains’,3 ‘Fascist Rule in Ulster Civil Liberties Violated’4 and ‘“Dictatorship” in Ulster’5 were reported in the press in Britain, Ireland and as far afield as the USA.6 The wide press coverage and questions in Parliament did not, however, lead to the hoped for official inquiry. Ministers were able to defer to the Northern Ireland administration as solely responsible for the operation of the legislation. The plans for a Commission to inquire into the conduct of the police took a different turn. The imminent appointment of a Commission was widely publicised in the press and broadcast by the BBC.7 However, the Commission was never appointed. Instead, the police discrimination campaign was launched. Rather than an inquiry that was high profile and would gain maximum publicity but, in propaganda terms, was short lived, the long-running campaign approach recognised that police discrimination was an occurrence in everyday operational policing and not only associated with a distinct event. The allegations and complaints against the police built up over the following years and were presented via questions in Parliament, through the press and through the courts. Well before the launch of the campaign the NCCL’s ‘legal panel’ was kept fully occupied with the ‘stream of applications for help’ that began to pour in as the work of the organisation became more

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widely known.8 They were mostly allegations of police partiality, or of trumped up obstruction charges, and wrongful arrests, and allegations of intimidation and assaults by police officers.9 Among the first cases undertaken were those of Kath Duncan and of Dr. William Wooster. Duncan was charged with obstruction when, in defiance of the ‘Trenchard Ban’, she attempted to hold an impromptu meeting outside the London County Council Task Centre at New Cross.10 Duncan was fined two pounds and ordered to pay five guineas costs. It is interesting that Special Branch officers attended the hearing because it was recognised that it was an important case for the NCCL.11 The NCCL lost an appeal but, nonetheless, it was able to take advantage of the opportunity to denounce the court decision in its newsletter as ridiculous in ‘allowing the police to prohibit any meeting at which some speaker might in their view say something which might lead someone else to say something which might lead to a disturbance somewhere else’.12 The debate and the press coverage were good publicity in support of its contention that there was widespread misinterpretation of the law by the police and the Home Office that allowed police to interfere with legitimate left-wing interests. In the case of Dr. Wooster, pacifist literature was seized by Cambridgeshire police at an air display at Duxford aerodrome in July 1935. Pamphlets being distributed by Dr. Wooster and other members of the Cambridge Anti-War Council were seized by Sergeant Sussum under instructions from the Chief Constable to ‘confiscate anything of a communist flavour’.13 Summonses were issued by the NCCL against the Cambridgeshire Chief Constable, William Varney Webb, and Sergeant Sussum.14 Counsel for the police argued that Sussum was justified in seizing literature to prevent a breach of the peace even though there was no attempt by anyone to cause a breach of the peace. In court the NCCL referred to similar cases at Hendon and Mildenhall and claimed to have a ‘great volume of evidence’ on the ‘provocative and illegal actions in which the police … engage against pacifists and left-wing propagandists’. The case was found in favour of Dr. Wooster. In awarding nominal damages of one pound against the police, the judge concluded: ‘In acting as he did, I consider that the sergeant went rather beyond what he was in law entitled to do.’15 The Wooster case was brought to the attention of Parliament. Liberal MPs Edward Mallalieu and Harcourt Johnson backed the NCCL’s actions and argued that

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many MPs were uneasy about ‘what appears to be a tendency or inclination to suppress pacifist demonstrations’. It was suggested that the case showed that the police themselves could be the cause of disorder, and that it would be ‘a great misfortune if … we got into the habit of thinking that the police must necessarily be right’.16 The police had been in a position of being able to brush aside, to a large extent, individual incidents that might be considered of a petty nature or could be put down to late night revelry, high spirits or even hooliganism. The individual roughly handled by the police or attacked by a steward for shouting back at the abusive or provocative remarks of a fascist speaker, or hit over the head with a police baton for simply being in the wrong place in a disorderly crowd, found it difficult to have his complaints heard. The intervention of the NCCL in this area made an important contribution to a critique of police actions towards groups or sections of society such as pacifists, the unemployed and the Jewish communities of the East End. It provided a medium where individual complaints would be brought together to show the wider extent of the problem and gain the attention of Parliament and the press. By the middle of 1935, individual allegations of police irregularities were as much, if not more, a part of the business of the NCCL than monitoring the behaviour of the police at major demonstrations. These individual cases were more difficult for the Home Office and the Commissioner to defend than the public order issues that arose out of large political rallies. Trenchard had faced repeated criticism about his failure to adequately police fascist activities in the East End of London. Weeks before his term of office as Commissioner came to an end, uncharacteristically contrite and in probably his only recorded reference to the issue, he admitted that fascist anti-semitism was ‘one of the most difficult questions’ with which he had had to deal. He claimed that his position had been made very difficult because the fascists complied with police instructions whereas ‘Communists, Jews and others’ did not.17 The momentum around police powers and civil liberties had moved away from labour and unemployed protest and polarised around anti-fascism and fascist anti-semitism. The BUF’s increasingly anti-semitic rhetoric and the Communist Party’s drive to bring more Jewish involvement into anti-fascism rendered the police more and more vulnerable to accusations of partiality. Jewish mistrust of the police was a significant factor in the ‘battle of Cable Street’ in

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October 1936, arguably the final straw that led to the introduction of new public order legislation on 1 January 1937.18 Trenchard had not identified anti-semitism as an aspect of fascist policy during most of his term as Commissioner. He had recognised fascist activities as a worrying source of provocation to left-wing opposition but policing policies were, nevertheless, inclined to associate Jewish anti-fascism with the Communist Party rather than with anti-semitic provocation by the BUF. This apparent fixation with the political left may have obscured the Commissioner’s view, but the NCCL had no such difficulties with identifying the growing menace of Mosley’s ‘Jew-baiting’ campaign. Its October 1935 newsletter maintained that Mosley made no secret of the BUF’s anti-Jewish objectives. NCCL observers attended dozens of meetings up and down the country and recorded evidence of examples of extreme provocation from fascist speakers, such as reference to ‘Jewish scum’ and ‘the sweepings of the ghetto’. The disinclination of the police to curb such insulting language by fascist speakers, in contrast to their willingness arbitrarily to close down or interfere with Labour Party and Communist meetings, was the kind of evidence of police partiality that the NCCL made its business to bring to the notice of the House of Commons.19 The NCCL did not explicitly associate with anti-fascism until the middle of 1936. However, the policing of anti-fascism as communistinspired political activism consistently evoked allegations of anti-left bias on the part of the police and this is where the NCCL focused its attention. For example, after Olympia the Commissioner’s plans for policing BUF meetings often included proposals for uniformed men to be positioned inside the venue to help stewards with ejecting people ‘resisting violently’, whereas there was no reference to police being required to intervene when fascist speakers incited opposition with anti-Jewish language.20 Moreover, police could report that fighting had broken out between hecklers and stewards when Mosley attacked Jewish influence on the City of London with statements such as, ‘The big Jew puts you in the unemployment queue by the million and the little Jew sweats you’, 21 and yet confirm that they took no action when some 15 people were ‘roughly ejected’ by Blackshirt stewards.22 Richard Thurlow has argued that the Special Branch view of the NCCL as an organisation whose policy-making machinery was firmly in the grip of the CPGB prevailed, and that, as a consequence,

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the NCCL’s protests about this kind of police practice were officially disregarded by Scotland Yard and the Home Office. 23 Nevertheless, it did not escape the notice of Special Branch that, through its contacts, the NCCL was able to ventilate complaints about police actions in the House of Commons. It was feared that ‘sooner or later a mistaken arrest by the police of a “suspected person” may provide for it a handle by which it can raise a storm of controversy’. When the NCCL’s announcement that it intended to set up an inquiry into the conduct of the police was broadcast in a national news summary by the BBC, Special Branch was prepared to credit Kidd with having built up a movement that had the sympathetic ear of a substantial section of liberal-left press and the potential to ‘prove a formidable source of anxiety to the authorities’.24 From the details of numerous complaint cases that survive among the NCCL’s papers it is clear that the organisation was behind most of the allegations of irregularities in public order policing that reached the Home Secretary in this period, either by direct representation or through lobbying of MPs.25 Publicly, the organisation was rarely referred to by the authorities but both the police and the Home Office recognised that it had become a feature of the political landscape and a catalyst for complaints about police methods that neither had any choice but to take seriously. In November 1935 Sir Philip Game succeeded Trenchard as Commissioner. Within days of his arrival at Scotland Yard Game had before him a 21 page report, produced by Special Branch, summarising all that was known of Ronald Kidd and the NCCL’s contacts and activities since its inception. If there was a specified requirement for this report from either the Commissioner or the Home Office, the details have not survived. But it is reasonable to speculate that the growing catalogue of complaints about the policing of political activism in London through the autumn of 1935 had been attributed to the NCCL and thus its activities were of particular interest to Scotland Yard.26 Special Branch rarely wavered from its aim to expose communists, even though more than a decade had passed since this objective had been conceived in revolution in Russia and the fear of Moscow’s influence on the formation of the CPGB. Thus Kidd’s perceived communist connections ensured that the NCCL’s activities were consistently reported as subversive and under the direction of the Communist Party. However, for the Home Secretary the ­organisation presented more of a dilemma. John Simon noted:

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The difficulty about the Council for Civil Liberties is that it includes two distinct kinds of people (a) Communists and agitators who want to foment trouble and (b) decent citizens of a literary or religious tone who want to be sure that the forces of law and order do not lord it over unpopular minorities (as the Mosley gang certainly would if they got their way). 27

Simon was clear that he considered class (b) were exploited by class (a), and that it rested with the police and the Home Office to see that in police practices and methods ‘civil liberty is respected as being a sensitive part of law and order’. He was sympathetic to the police position and credited them with ‘great patience’ and ‘surprisingly few’ mistakes.28 But much as he may have wished to do so the Home Secretary was unable to dismiss the representations of the NCCL from the public order debate. In contrast, there is little to suggest that the police considered the organisation beyond its perceived communist associations. Thus the Commissioner was able to feel ‘inclined to think that as class (b) gets to know more of the true colour of class (a), it will tend to withdraw its support, and the activities of this society will become less troublesome’.29 It was the large number of cases successfully contested in the courts in little over a year of its existence that prompted the NCCL to launch its police discrimination campaign.30 However, it was not motivated by recent events only. NCCL treasurer Hugh Franklin was one of the campaign’s strongest advocates. Franklin’s motivation stemmed from the experiences of his suffrage days. He did not subscribe to the view that the police were ‘getting worse, or that their abuses are any new thing’. He observed: Those of us who remember Black Friday and the unofficial Commission’s report on that and similar days also remember how then police used to attack women’s sex and twist their breasts and knocked them senseless – many of my friends having died or remained cripples in consequence … we are up against something rather bigger than just a Trenchard reaction or a fascist urge. Authority always has used the police to browbeat protagonists of constitutional change and the job of the NCCL – which to me is not just an ad hoc organisation to stem a sudden or new evil – is permanently to provide a watchdog of civil liberty against any and every abuse of any and every government.31

Franklin’s views were representative of the ‘grass roots’ members and supporters of the NCCL who thought an inquiry to be long

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overdue and wanted a broader remit than ‘merely the question of possible political discrimination’. The issues that were to be pursued included questionable methods used by the police to obtain evidence and the arrest of ‘suspected’ persons. This linked the NCCL’s inquiry with the Royal Commission on Police Powers in 1929 that had considered ‘certain disquieting tendencies’ in police ­administration in these areas.32 The campaign was not purely reactive to received complaints. Kidd also searched the newspapers for reports of court cases and incidents relating to police behaviour. He wrote directly to a number of organisations, including the Transport and General Workers’ Union, the NUWM and the Secretary of the Communist Party, appealing for material from their files of instances of police irregularities. He specified a list of situations for which he wanted brief substantiated details: (a) police bans of processions and demonstrations, interference with poster parades etc. (b) police conduct of [sic] processions – alleged perjury, bullying, exclusion of witnesses etc. (c) alleged assaults, ill-treatment and intimidation by officers.33

Kidd’s focus was notably towards the far left of the political scene, from where he could be assured that allegations of police interference and discrimination would come. Interest in the campaign was, however, much wider than the radical left. Responses came from the mainstream political parties, labour organisations, Members of Parliament and the general public. Those allegations that reached the files of the NCCL ranged from intimidation or assault by police officers, police partiality, wrongful arrests and interference with meetings, to the handling of motoring offences and insensitivity in dealing with victims of crime and misfortune. Some of these Kidd politely declined to pursue, such as Mrs. Mattershead who alleged victimisation by the police of her son and had been ‘given your address by the Sunday Chronicle’,34 and Mr. Margerison who complained of police behaviour towards a relative following a burglary and who had read in the Sunday Chronicle that ‘your society was about to have a police inquiry’.35 To one disgruntled motorist Kidd replied, ‘we are fully aware of the very unsatisfactory behaviour on the

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part of the police which is frequently met with by motorists and other people’. He went on to advise that the NCCL was ‘limited by our financial resource’ in what it could take on.36 Kidd himself was not entirely against the idea of assisting those charged with motoring offences, ‘if we have information of good cases which seem to involve questions of propriety of police action’. However, legal advice suggested there was little chance of a successful legal challenge where motoring convictions were concerned.37 Kidd’s interest in police behaviour towards motorists was not misplaced. During 1935 recorded complaints for the Metropolitan district relating to motorists and the handling of motoring offences totalled 951, which represented 57% of all complaints received within the district for the year.38 These complainants could obviously have represented a considerable potential body of support for the NCCL. A noteworthy outcome of the exercise to gather evidence of discrimination by the police was the contribution this made towards establishing the NCCL as the point of contact for complaints against the police. Kidd’s pragmatic approach brought the NCCL into contact with the various interests in police powers and civil liberties that were not necessarily confined to political interests and boundaries. Moreover, it created an environment where individuals and organisations were encouraged to advance complaints of police irregularities in the expectation that they would be taken up with the authorities. Kidd established procedures that optimised the NCCL’s opportunities to bring complaints into the parliamentary and public arena. He encouraged prompt contact with his office ‘by letter or telephone’ on any matter believed to ‘constitute an infringement of civil rights’. He produced an NCCL leaflet, Instructions to Branches, Members and Affiliated Societies, which described the ‘numerous ways in which our liberties may be infringed and the manner in which such infringements should be reported’, which was available from the Council for the price of a three-halfpenny stamp.39 It became routine practice for individuals and organisations that held, or regularly attended, meetings to telephone Kidd for advice during or immediately following an incident. For example, in the case of a Young Communist League meeting that police attempted to close to allow that of an opposition party, Kidd advised Lionel Jacobs to give him the ‘fullest report possible’ and the names and addresses of reliable witnesses.40 The Poplar branch of the CPGB sent ‘full

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particulars in connection with the arrest of Ernest Wilson’41 and the Ilford Trades Council and Labour Party particulars of four arrests for using insulting words and behaviour that had taken place the previous evening;42 in each case the first contact had been by telephone. In the case of a Communist Party meeting at Bergen Wharf near Rotherhithe tunnel, closed by police while a fascist meeting was allowed to continue at the same location, the report was ‘phoned through to the NCCL [while] the fascists were still speaking’.43 This use of the telephone provided an incentive and an immediacy to raising complaints about police behaviour that were new. There were a number of advantages in this immediate contact. First, Kidd could only maintain credibility with lawyers and Members of Parliament by having accurate and timely evidence to support allegations of police irregularities. It was vital that rapport was established and information gathered as soon as possible after an incident had occurred. But secondly and most importantly, it established the NCCL as the first point of contact for complaints of police irregularities and, as Special Branch observed, it allowed the NCCL to show demonstrators how to challenge police behaviour more successfully. The terms of the initial contact were vital but success also relied on the NCCL maintaining a momentum to this watchdog role and here it relied on the press, and its networks of lawyers and MPs. The National Council for Civil Liberties and the press Effective press propaganda was recognised by the NCCL from the outset as one of the means by which its success would be achieved.44 Its journalistic connections were important. Its first Annual Report, published in April 1935, acknowledged the ‘excellent support’ the organisation had received since its formation from the Manchester Guardian, the News Chronicle, the Star, the Daily Herald, the New Statesman and Time and Tide that had greatly helped the Council in ‘all its propaganda work’.45 It was with some concern that Special Branch reports noted the sympathetic support for the NCCL ‘not only of the Communist and Independent Labour Party press’ but also of the liberal press. The press coverage of the proposed Commission of Inquiry into the Conduct of the Police, and a Daily Express report of the interest of a group of MPs in the numbers

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of arrests of ‘suspected persons’ in London who were subsequently acquitted of any charge, were particularly highlighted by Special Branch.46 Press reports were also important for the NCCL as a vital source of information about incidents involving questionable police actions. The NCCL’s files contain an extensive collection of press cuttings, some probably collected by Kidd, but mostly supplied by Durrent’s Press Cuttings or the International Press-Cutting Bureau. They cover all aspects of civil liberties: fascist activities; the actions of the police at public order events; arrests and complaints against the police. The cuttings were taken from provincial papers across the country, such as the Yorkshire Post, the Malvern News and the Bristol Times; from local London papers such as the Hackney Gazette, the Stratford Express and the Lewisham Borough News; and from the national press and weekly publications such as Time and Tide and the New Statesman.47 Kidd followed up matters of interest with the editor or by contacting the writer. For example Kidd contacted Professor Haldane in response to a report in the press that fascist demonstrators had shouted down his speech to University College in London. He wanted to take up the matter of why so few fascists were arrested as a result of the disorder. Similarly, Kidd was in discussion with Dagenham Labour Party following press reports of fascist-inspired disorder at its meetings. His aim was to make the Dagenham officials aware of exactly what the police were entitled to do.48 Individuals who were able to provide witness statements to NCCL inquiries or evidence of police actions for presentation to MPs were sought out in the same way. Kidd approached a Norman Pennington in response to his account in the Manchester Guardian of the violent treatment that his friend had received at Olympia. Kidd wanted to make contact with Pennington’s friend as a potential eye-witness to the events.49 The National Council for Civil Liberties and legal representation The provision of free legal advice and representation was an important aspect of the NCCL’s affairs. It allowed police prosecutions to be defended that otherwise could not have been. Initially this was down to solicitor and NCCL executive committee member W. H. Thompson and two barristers, Dudley Collard and Neil Lawson, but, according to Sylvia Scaffardi, a phenomenal number

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of cases ‘day after day’ meant that additional help had to be found from sources sufficiently supportive of the NCCL’s objectives to charge no fee. Scaffardi recalled: after a while they began to rope in other barristers from the Haldane Society … and we formed a legal panel which relieved a little the pressure on them [Collard and Lawson]. All this work was, of course, for no fee. NCCL never paid anyone for legal work.50

Kidd’s enthusiasm and persistence in fighting the police through the courts won him a good deal of respect from within the legal profession. Kingsley Martin recalled that Kidd had ‘a whole number of lawyers who were prepared to fight for him’.51 Mostly they had no apparent connection with the organisation beyond an affinity with its objectives. Nevertheless, Special Branch identified this legal panel as a Communist Party fraction under the control of Dudley Collard and in close association with the Haldane Society.52 Haldane Society lawyers did make up a sizable proportion of the NCCL’s legal network but there is no evidence of any controlling function within this group, and it is clear that there were no constraints on Kidd in his choice of legal representation for particular cases. For example, Kidd secured the services of young Conservative barrister T. F. Southall to defend four youths arrested at a fascist meeting. This was an important choice because Kidd hoped it would lead to an association with Conservative MP Sir Alfred Beit. Kidd pointed out to anti-fascist leader Norman Kennedy, ‘you might like to explain to the four accused that Mr Southall … is very strongly anti-fascist and very sound on the question of the police interfering with the civil rights of the people’. Kidd was disappointed with Kennedy’s offhand manner and he warned Kennedy: ‘he is a very good man’ and ‘your friends’ should not upset him with ‘communist propaganda’.53 Many of the cases defended by lawyers on behalf of the NCCL appear relatively trivial but they served a valuable purpose. For the reason that the cases often did not relate to very serious matters, individual cases were easily overlooked. Collectively, however, they could be shown to represent a more serious reason for criticism of police methods. This was the case where law firm Alder & Perowne was unsuccessful in the case of two men arrested under suspicion. Kidd wrote: I regret that finally these cases did not prove to be more satisfactory,

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but I feel that it is a great advantage that legal defence shall be provided in some of these cases of suspected persons, as these cases are increasing so greatly in number and these charges are so often brought on totally insufficient grounds. 54

The arrest of ‘suspected persons’ was a matter about which the NCCL received a considerable postbag. NUWM leaders complained that the unemployed were under constant threat of arrest and that ‘fellows are afraid to stop in the street after leaving the Labour Exchange’.55 Complaints also came from people who were providing for the poor. Mrs. Scott Dorrien, founder of St. Peter’s Kitchens, provided the NCCL with details of arrests and was ‘only too happy for you to use my name in connection with any of the instances that I have given you’. 56 According to Kidd complaints had also come from the clergy on ‘some very flagrant cases’, reported by ‘the Vicar of a Manchester parish’, ‘the vicar of an East End Parish’ and ‘an assistant priest at a church in Central London’.57 NCCL lawyers successfully appealed against the sentences in a number of these cases.58 The issue of arrests ‘under suspicion’ was of interest to the NCCL because, as Kidd put it, many of the arrests were ‘so grossly unsatisfactory … that the whole question does involve a principle of civil rights’. Moreover, the problem was ‘perfectly clear’ in Kidd’s view. It arose where ‘young plain clothes officers … do not exercise sufficient care to prevent injustice being done … in order to show themselves zealous officers’.59 Most of these routine cases did not make the national press, but many were successful. Malcolm MacFarlane, distributing leaflets outside Camberwell labour exchange, was charged with insulting behaviour when he questioned a police officer’s demand for him to move. The case was dismissed, the magistrate was ‘satisfied that there was no danger of a breach of the peace’.60 MacFarlane’s union, the Construction Engineering Union, reported the case in its journal, ‘in order to advocate the need to support the National Council for Civil Liberties’.61 James Carter, a speaker for the NUWM, received a settlement of £10 damages and an apology for the behaviour of a police constable who ‘regretted that in the heat of the moment he acted in a somewhat hasty and offensive manner’. PC Yeatman had punched Carter in the jaw and offered to take his uniform off and ‘go round the corner’.62 Henry Atkins, charged with using insulting words and behaviour, had been chalking advertisements on the pavement for a Labour Party film show and had disputed the

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Constable’s accusation that he had pushed people off the pavement. The charge was dismissed.63 The case of Richard Spicer is an interesting one. The 15 year old was charged with using insulting behaviour after heckling at a fascist meeting in Hampstead. He had been bound over in the sum of £5 and banned from attending fascist meetings for one year. The police had applied the ruling to prevent Spicer from attending any political meetings and he had been cautioned several times even though he had not been at fascist meetings. Kidd generally considered that lodging complaints with the Commissioner or local police was a waste of time and likely only to receive a ‘brush-off’ response but in this case he seized the opportunity to provoke the Hampstead police. He asked lawyer Ambrose Appelbe, a personal friend and early associate of the NCCL, who acted for Spicer, to write to the superintendent at Hampstead police station to complain that ‘the police have exceeded their authority’. Kidd knew some of the Hampstead inspectors personally and considered that one or two of them were ‘very high-handed and dictatorial’. He correctly assumed that the letter would invoke the usual postcard response advising that ‘your letter has been forwarded to Scotland Yard for attention’, but he considered it ‘very useful that letters of this kind shall be sent to the local police as they then have the opportunity of reading all about themselves before passing the letter on to the Yard’.64 The NCCL was not in a position to help in every case. On some occasions it was simply a matter of there being no barristers available. In other cases it had no contact with influential individuals in the locality. This was the case in the request for legal representation from the Associated Society of Locomotive Engineers and Firemen for two of their members in Workington. They were advised to try a local solicitor.65 The Anti-fascist League in Norwich was advised to ‘get in touch with any progressive minded solicitors, barristers, doctors, school masters or ministers of religion in your town and find out whether they would be prepared to help you make a protest to the police’.66 Individually these cases may not have amounted to a great deal but because of the involvement of the NCCL they became the subject of regular updates by Special Branch on Kidd’s activities. Thus they were a considerable irritant to Scotland Yard, and a source of concern about their effect on the morale of police officers.

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The National Council for Civil Liberties and parliamentary representation Representation in Parliament was key to the NCCL’s aims, and it built up its network of MP contacts into what amounted to a civil liberties lobby in parliament.67 Kidd was a singular lobbyist. Correspondence among the NCCL’s papers suggests he lost no opportunity to build rapport with MPs so as to keep them aware of the NCCL’s involvement with incidents in their constituencies. MP Fred Montague accepted Kidd’s offer of supporting evidence in connection with a question that Montague had put down in the House of Commons relating to a BUF meeting in Finsbury Park.68 Labour MP Tom Groves became acquainted with Kidd when they shared an NUWM platform as speakers.69 Groves was angered by a case of alleged assault by a police officer and voiced his support for the NCCL’s proposals for an inquiry into police partiality.70 Via his contacts with the South West Bethnal Green Labour Party, Kidd worked with Labour MP Dan Chater and Liberal MP Percy Harris to raise the matter of ineffective policing of fascist interference with NUWM and Labour Party meetings in Victoria Park Square.71 Harris was an early convert to Kidd’s crusade and one of a number of East End MPs, including Labour MPs Dan Frankel and Ben Smith, who worked closely with the NCCL to bring cases of police inaction against fascist violence and provocation in their constituencies to the attention of Parliament.72 Special Branch opinion conceded that it was ‘largely owing to Kidd’s industry and guile’ that such support had been secured, and the movement that had been built up ‘bids fair to prove a formidable source of anxiety to the authorities’.73 Certainly, the complaints of police irregularities and demands for more effective policing from East End MPs that were to trouble John Simon from his early months as Home Secretary were no coincidence. Kidd’s activities had promoted an awareness across the political establishment that ensured police powers and civil liberties were on the Home Secretary’s agenda and that the NCCL was part of the debate. The steady stream of complaints that Simon had to deal with were not confined to the left. Conservative MP Austin Hudson drew Simon’s attention to the unsatisfactory circumstances of the arrest of a Jewish woman on 1 July 1935 and, a few days later, to allegations of police partiality at fascist meetings in Hackney.

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Hudson was not convinced by the Home Secretary’s suggestion that an ‘erroneous impression’ of partiality may have been created among his constituents by the police practice of preventing rival meetings in Victoria Park Square.74 When Hudson approached Simon again a few weeks later, this time with complaints about ineffective policing at a British Union of Democrats ‘Peace and Anti-fascism’ meeting at Stamford Hill, the matter had been brought to his attention by the NCCL. An attack by Blackshirts on speakers and officials had left one man in need of hospital treatment to his injuries. The British Union of Democrats complained that only a handful of police had attended the meeting of some 2000 people, in contrast to the protection of hundreds of police given to fascist speakers. From information recorded by NCCL observers Kidd was able to advise Hudson: we can state definitely that in almost every part of the Metropolitan Police area large forces of police are always on duty to protect blackshirt meetings from possible interruption or interference but that similar adequate police protection is not provided for anti-fascist meetings and for meetings of left-wing organisations.75

Hudson shared Kidd’s enthusiasm to prevent these incidents. He welcomed the NCCL’s intervention and made good use of the evidence of fascist anti-semitism and violence and the responses of the police that Kidd was able to provide.76 Hudson kept up the pressure, writing several times to the Home Secretary during September 1935 with further allegations of assaults on his Jewish constituents.77 While publicly the assurances from the Home Secretary continued, the Commissioner was clearly under pressure to account for the apparent failure of the police to deal adequately with the situation. During his last weeks as Commissioner Trenchard was forced to admit that his strategies for the policing of fascist activities were, on occasion, less than adequate to meet the situation.78 It is clear from police reports that it was a problem that had not begun to be addressed at a local level. Suggestions that the situation was out of control were dismissed as groundless. The British Union of Democrats was dismissed as ‘almost entirely composed of the Jewish element’ and, thus, statements were regarded as much exaggerated and not impartial; ‘the Jews are as much, if not more, to blame than the Fascists’. Operationally, the police considered local supervision was entirely in hand and peaceful citizens had

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nothing to fear.79 Simon found himself in an increasingly uneasy situation as complaints of this nature continued. George Jones, Unionist MP for Stoke Newington, had to be assured that the police were ‘taking active measures to carry out their responsibility for providing protection against assaults in the district’ and ensuring that meetings were ‘adequately policed’. Simon, however, conceded that it was ‘less easy to take adequate measures’ in the case of isolated incidents.80 Home Office officials admitted they faced a difficult dilemma. Feelings were running high when Game succeeded Trenchard in November 1935. The Commissioner’s response to the Home Secretary’s investigation of complaints raised by Labour MP Ernest Thurtle’s complaint about damage to Jewish premises by fascists in uniform received the common reaction in such cases from the police division concerned: ‘nothing known of this incident’, ‘the feeling existing between fascists and Jews … is well known’ and ‘both parties are equally to blame for the bad feeling’.81 Game admitted that the evidence was ‘not very conclusive’ but he viewed fascist meetings as a problem mostly because they spread anti-Jewish feeling among the ‘hooligan element’ of the district.82 Thurtle’s subsequent petition that was signed by local residents and set out specific cases of persecution of Jews by fascists finally persuaded the Home Secretary that the Commissioner’s response would not do. He wrote: ‘I am really very seriously perturbed by the situation which is growing in Hackney’ and pointed out that in almost every case assaults were the aftermath of fascist meetings at which ‘bitter feelings were aroused by the most filthy insinuation as to Jewish religion and habits’. At the same time, there were calls for fascist meetings to be prohibited in predominantly Jewish areas and demands from MPs to be allowed to discuss the matter with the police and Home Office.83 Instead, the Commissioner was required to give a detailed account to the Home Office of all the specific cases raised. Simon deduced that ‘the only reason there isn’t a row is because Jews are submissive under insult. But they ought to be protected.’84 At Scotland Yard the investigation was clearly not pursued as vigorously as it might have been. Special Branch’s Colonel Carter observed that ‘the Home Office are inclined to be panicky’ and suggested the Commissioner should not rush into a reply.85 There was a good deal of prompting from Frank Newsam at the Home

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Office before the ‘joint operational police and Special Branch’ report reached the Home Secretary. Simon found its reading ‘disquieting’. One hundred and forty-eight BUF meetings were reported in Shoreditch, Bethnal Green and Hackney over the previous four months. There were nine reports of window breaking at premises occupied by Jews, ten incidents of insulting behaviour and thirteen incidents leading to assaults on Jews over the same period. A number of arrests had been made, most notably that of Richard Houston who, as chief propaganda officer of the Shoreditch branch of the BUF, was considered by the police to be principally responsible for insults and attacks on Jews. Special Branch superintendent Canning predicted that with Houston’s conviction ‘an abatement of the abuse towards Jews in the East End [could] be confidently expected’. Simon did not share Canning’s confidence and was not convinced that the police were treating the matter with the seriousness it deserved. He saw that it was ‘clearly necessary to take special steps to stop this Jew-baiting’. He wanted to know why Dixie Dean, described in the report as a ‘hooligan type of ex-pugilist’, who punched a Jewish shopkeeper in the face, was not prosecuted and he remarked, ‘I don’t appreciate the relevance of “no allegations of fascism”’, a term used by Special Branch in relation to some cases of anti-Jewish behaviour. Neither was he impressed by the reported ‘absence of dissent’ when Jews were abused at Bethnal Green meetings. This was, he observed, ‘so much the worse. If the I.F.L. [Imperial Fascist League] are known to distribute labels like “Jews: public enemy No. 1”. Is not this an offence?’86 Game’s response fell short of the assurances that the Home Secretary wanted to see and he minuted his concerns: I have never answered Capt. Hudson, I think. Nor, I think, Mr Laski, KC – and I really don’t know what to say to them. It is scandalous that Jewish children should be assaulted like this. And I get the impression that some of the police don’t appreciate the seriousness of it all. Was not I furnished with a draft answer the other day that the police knew nothing about Jewish shopkeepers’ windows being broken? This does not seem to square with the report … from Shoreditch.87

Acting as mediator, Newsam brokered a suggestion that additional police should be drafted into the troublesome districts specifically to keep an eye on fascist behaviour, and that consideration should be given to prosecuting the ringleaders for sedition in encouraging

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ill-will between social classes. Two days later, when MP Dan Chater again raised a question in the Commons about the policing of the East End, Simon maintained that the public could confidently count on the Commissioner’s policies. He replied: This matter is engaging my close attention in consultation with the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis. While this class of offence may be difficult to detect and to bring home to offenders, it is intolerable that any section of the population should be subject to these methods and the Hon. Member may be assured that the police will take every possible step to put a stop to them in this country.88

Commons debate inspired by the National Council for Civil Liberties The NCCL and Kidd especially were very active among these MPs, bringing incidents to their attention and providing supporting evidence and witness statements. Consequently, Simon recognised that notice of questions on civil liberties in the House of Commons meant there would be ‘some talk about fascism and jew-baiting’, and the general conclusion at the Home Office was that the debate had been ‘inspired by the National Council for Civil Liberties’.89 But despite the continual flow of complaints it was clear there was not the will to do anything very much at all, either from the Commissioner or the Home Office. Game suggested that both fascists and communists were inclined to ‘trail their coats’, but communists were more likely to react and, therefore, more likely to be arrested; hence there was ‘a superficial appearance of partiality’. He viewed fascists as ‘tiresome and difficult’ but the situation as not ‘desperate’. He thought increased fascist activities amounted to no more than shouting at Jews and he saw nothing much to choose between fascists or communist remarks. He agreed that his rule had generally been to ‘allow both sides a reasonably free hand as to what they should say’. While Simon and his Home Office colleagues pointed out that fascists talked not so much about communism as about ‘dirty Jews’, and were not satisfied with the Commissioner’s suggestion that the policing of meetings could be considered effective where provocative speeches simply did not produce violence, it was generally agreed that any statement made by the Home Secretary ‘should not enter into too much detail’. The Home Office had no plans to instigate the police, either in London or outside, to take any particular action.90

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Simon responded to his critics in the House of Commons with assurances that plans were already in place for additional police to be detailed into districts where the troubles had occurred, to keep a lookout for fascist provocation. Simon maintained that he shared with the Commissioner the view that the police were not concerned with the political views of any body or organisation or that they used their powers in any ‘partisan spirit’. He concluded: ‘I believe the debate today will greatly strengthen their hands and provide them with the public opinion behind them which is what they always need to bring about a more tolerable state of things.91 Simon did not refer to the NCCL but Kidd and the aims and activities of the organisation were the subject of lengthy discussion at the Home Office. The observation that debate ‘cannot but serve a useful purpose in reminding the public – if any reminder is needed – that parliament is still the watchdog of our liberties and will not lightly tolerate any invasion of them’, is an indication that the Home Secretary was, by the spring of 1936, neither complacent nor dismissive of the NCCL and the questions its activities raised for the policing of political activism.92 Nevertheless, the events of 1936 were to bring the NCCL, the Metropolitan Police and the dynamics of disorder in London more sharply into focus. Notes 1 Scaffardi Papers, DSF1/1, NCCL Annual Report for 1934. 2 Scaffardi Papers, DSF1/21, Report of the Commission of Inquiry into the Special Powers Acts of Northern Ireland, 1936. See also NCCL DCL48/1, NCCL Newsletters, especially No. 1, August 1935. 3 Yorkshire Observer, 23 May 1936. 4 News Chronicle, 22 May 1936. 5 Manchester Guardian, 29 May 1936. 6 See inter alia Irish Press (Dublin), ‘Government by Dictatorship’, 23 May 1936; New York Times, ‘Regime at Belfast Held Dictatorship’, 24 May 1936. 7 HO 45/25462, Special Branch Summary, Ronald Hubert Kidd, 19 November 1935, p. 15. 8 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 1/1, The National Council for Civil Liberties, Annual Report for 1934. 9 NCCL, DCL 9/2, Overview of allegations against the police for NCCL Commission of Inquiry into the Conduct of the Police, August 1935.

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10 HO 144/19284, Law Reports, 1936 Vol. 1, KB & P, Part III – March 4 Duncan v Jones, p. 219. A series of meetings and demonstrations, organised by the NUWM, held outside labour exchanges to protest about cuts in dole payments led to the Commissioner, Lord Trenchard, banning meetings in the vicinity of public buildings. This became known as the ‘Trenchard Ban’. 11 HO 144/19284, Special Branch report, 7 August 1934. 12 NCCL, DCL 48/1, NCCL News Sheet No. 2, October 1935. 13 Cambridge Daily News, Friday 13 December 1935. 14 Cambridge University, Needham Papers K.35, Letter from Kidd to Maurice Dobb, 10 July 1935. 15 NCCL, DCL 48/1, NCCL News Sheet No. 3, January 1936. 16 Parl. Debs, 16 July 1935, vol. 304, col. 947. 17 HO 144/21377, Letter from Trenchard, Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis, to The Under Secretary of State, 4 October 1935. 18 Thurlow, Richard, ‘The Straw that Broke the Camel’s Back’, in Kushner, Tony and Valman, Nadia (eds), Remembering Cable Street: Fascism and Anti-Fascism in British Society (London: Valentine Mitchell, 2000), pp. 74–94. 19 NCCL, DCL 48/1, NCCL News Sheet No. 2, October 1935. 20 MEPO 2/3080, Extract from minutes from the Commissioner to A. C. A., 19 October 1934. 21 MEPO 2/3080, Statement of PS Albert Hunt, 24 July 1935. 22 MEPO 2/3080, Statement of Chief Inspector G. Slatter, 24 July 1935. 23 Thurlow, The Secret State, pp. 169–72. 24 HO 45/25462, Special Branch report on Ronald Kidd, 19 November 1935. 25 See NCCL, DCL 8/2, 8/3 and 8/4 for examples of complaints supported by the NCCL. See also MEPO 3/548, letter from The National Council for Civil Liberties to Capt. A. U. M. Hudson, MP, September 1935, relating to an attack by Blackshirts on a British Union of Democrats meeting and the inadequacy of police protection, in contrast to that provided at fascist meetings. 26 HO 45/25462, Letter from Assistant Commissioner to The Under Secretary of State, 19 November 1935 and Special Branch Summary, Ronald Hubert Kidd, 19 November 1935. 27 HO 45/25462, Home Office minute dated 19 November 1935, Sir John Simon’s note, 28 November 1935. 28 Ibid. 29 HO 45/25462, Home Office minute dated 19 November 1935, Sir Philip Game’s note, 22 December 1935. 30 NCCL, DCL 9/2, The National Council for Civil Liberties newsletter, Commission of Inquiry into the Conduct of the Police, 1935.

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31 NCCL, DCL 9/2, Letter from Hugh Franklin to Kidd, 12 August 1935. 32 NCCL, DCL 9/2, The National Council for Civil Liberties newsletter, Commission of Inquiry into the Conduct of the Police, 1935. 33 NCCL, DCL 9/2, Circular letter from Kidd to the Communist Party, the NUWM, the Transport and General Workers’ Union etc., 11 October 1935. 34 NCCL, DCL 9/2, Mrs. E. Mattershead to Kidd, 25 August 1935. 35 NCCL, DCL 9/2, B. Margerison to Kidd, 16 August 1935. 36 NCCL, DCL 9/2, Letter from Kidd to Fairchild, 5 November 1935. 37 NCCL, DCL 9/2, Letter from Kidd to Norman Wiggins, 25 October 1935. 38 MEPO 2/7237, Annual summary of complaints against the police recorded during the period 1 January to 31 December 1935. 39 NCCL, DCL 48/1, National Council for Civil Liberties Newsletter, October 1935. 40 NCCL, DCL 8/3, Letter from Kidd to Lionel Jacobs, 1 September 1936. 41 NCCL, DCL 8/3, Letter from T. E. Roycroft to the secretary of the NCCL, 28 September 1936. 42 NCCL, DCL 8/3, Letter from Ernest Kimpton, Ilford Trades Council and Labour Party to the secretary of the NCCL, 11 October 1936. 43 NCCL, DCL 8/4, Report of police interference with meeting, 3 March 1937. 44 See chapter 2 for more detailed discussion of the NCCL’s aims. 45 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 1/1, NCCL Annual Report for 1934, April 1935. 46 HO 45/25462, Special Branch Summary, Ronald Hubert Kidd, 19 November 1935 and 20 January 1936. 47 For examples see NCCL DCL 39/1. 48 NCCL DCL 39/1, Correspondence between Kidd and Prof. Haldane, 8 and 9 March 1939; and Letter from Brockelbank, Dagenham Labour Party, to Kidd, 27 July 1936. 49 NCCL DCL 40/1, Letter from Norman Pennington to Kidd, 29 June 1934. 50 NCCL DCL 40/1, DSF 4/2, Barry Cox interview with Sylvia Scaffardi, c.1969. 51 NCCL DCL 40/1, Barry Cox interview with Kingsley Martin, c.1969. 52 The Special Branch intelligence relating to communist interest in the NCCL and the Haldane Society through a ‘legal panel’ will be discussed in greater detail in chapter 8. 53 NCCL, DCL 8/2, Letter from Kidd to Norman Kennedy, 5 July 1935.

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Kennedy was described in police files as one of the principal speakers and organisers of local communist and anti-fascist meetings; see MEPO 2/3079. 54 NCCL, DCL 9/3, Letter from Kidd to Alder & Perowne, 13 October 1936. 55 NCCL, DCL 9/3, Letter from the Secretary, Stepney NUWM to Kidd, 14 September 1936. 56 NCCL, DCL 9/3, Letter from Mrs. A. Scott Dorrien to Kidd, 21 September 1936. 57 NCCL, DCL 9/3, Letter from Kidd to Mrs. Scott Dorrien, 18 September 1936. 58 DCL 48/1, NCCL News Sheet No. 4, August 1936. 59 NCCL, DCL 9/3, Letter from Kidd to Frank Whitworth, 11 September 1936. 60 NCCL, DCL 9/3, Letter from Kidd to Malcolm MacFarlane, 1 October 1936. 61 NCCL, DCL 9/3, Letter from G. House to M. MacFarlane, 28 September 1936. 62 NCCL, DCL 9/3, Letter from Davenport Lyons Barker to The Secretary of the NCCL, 10 May 1939. 63 NCCL, DCL 9/3, Solicitor’s report on case, Police v Atkins, 21 March 1939. 64 NCCL, DCL 8/4, Letters from Kidd to Ambrose Appelbe, 18 December and 22 December 1936. 65 NCCL, DCL 8/2, Correspondence between Kidd and Percy Collick, September 1935. 66 NCCL, DCL 8/2, Letter from Kidd to A. Dickerson, 1 October 1935. 67 The NCCL numbered several MPs among its vice-presidents, including George Lansbury, Dingle Foot, Vyvyan Adams, Clement Attlee, D. N. Pritt, Frederick Pethick-Lawrence and A. P. Herbert. They, together with East End MPs Percy Harris, Herbert Morrison, Fred Watkins and Fred Montague, whose constituents predominated in the NCCL’s dossier of complaints against the police, made up the major contributors to the parliamentary debate on police powers and civil liberties. 68 NCCL, DCL 8/2, Letter from Kidd to Fred Montague MP, 22 July 1936. 69 NCCL, DCL 9/2, Police Partiality, list of cases, undated. 70 NCCL, DCL 8/2, Cases Reported, statement made by Albert Burford, 24 July 1935. 71 NCCL, DCL 8/2, Correspondence between Ronald Kidd and Mark Bass, June 1935. 72 This will be discussed in detail in chapters 6 and 7.

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73 HO 45/25462, Special Branch report on Ronald Kidd, 19 November 1935. 74 HO144/21377, Letter from John Simon to Capt. A. U. M. Hudson, 12 August 1935. 75 MEPO 3/548, Letter from Kidd to Capt. A. U. M. Hudson MP, September 1935. 76 NCCL, DCL 8/2, Letter from A.  U.  M.  Hudson to Kidd, 13 September 1935. 77 HO 144/21377, Letter from A. U. M. Hudson to Sir John Simon, 13 and 20 September 1935. 78 HO 144/21377, Letter from Trenchard to Under Secretary of State, 4 October 1935. 79 MEPO 3/548, Home Office minute, October 1935. See discussion between Frank Newsam and Sir Robert Russell Scott, Permanent Under Secretary of State. Newsam was responsible for police matters at the Home Office and for the preparation of the Public Order Bill. 80 MEPO 3/548, Letter from Euan Wallace, Home Office, to Sir George Jones, 29 October 1935. 81 HO 144/21377, Police report J Division, Fascists – Alleged Persecution of Jews, 25 November 1935. 82 HO 144/21377, Home Office minutes, February 1936. 83 MEPO 2/3087, Letter from Capt. Hudson to The Home Secretary, 13 February 1936. 84 HO 144/21377, Home Office minutes, February 1936. 85 MEPO 2/3027, Special Branch minute, 21 February 1936. 86 HO 144/21377, Home Office minutes, 25 February 1936 and Special Branch report, 24 February 1936. 87 HO 144/21377, Home Office minutes, 25 February 1936. Evidently the Home Secretary was also in touch with the Board of Deputies of British Jews on the matter; Neville Laski was president of the organisation. 88 Parl. Debs, 27 February 1936, vol. 309, col. 634. 89 HO 45/25462, Vote on Account, Civil Liberties, 5 March 1936. 90 HO 144/ 21378, Conference with the Commissioner of Police, 4 March 1936. 91 Parl. Debs, 5 March 1936, vol. 309, col. 1603–11. 92 HO 45/25462, Vote on Account, Civil Liberties, 5 March 1936.

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6

Beyond the legitimate province of a policeman: fascists, anti-fascism and new police powers On 9 October 1936, with a recent violent attack on police at Cable Street uppermost in his mind,1 and with his public order policy under scrutiny following months of sustained criticism of policing in the capital as ineffective, partisan and contemptuous of civil liberties, Philip Game wrote to the Home Secretary in terms that he admitted were ‘far beyond my legitimate province as a policeman’. He wrote, he said, not as Commissioner to the Home Secretary but as ‘Philip Game to John Simon’, and set out his recommendation that fascist organisations should be declared illegal. Game’s radical proposal did not arise from any concern that fascist organisations in England represented a threat to the established political order but rather to their propensity to provoke anti-fascist and communist opposition. He was confident he could enforce a ban on fascist meetings and marches because fascist leaders were in control and preached discipline and obedience to authority. The ferocious attack on the police at Cable Street a few days earlier had convinced him that the real clash would come with communism rather than fascism and that conditions would be very different should he be forced to ban communist activities. He predicted that drastic police action would be needed. Policemen, he pointed out, ‘are human and have no great love for the hooligans of the East End’ and he foresaw the possibility of serious injuries on both sides.2 With new legislation proposed to give the police greater public order powers, Trenchard’s recommendations from July 1934 were back on the table. His successor was not in favour of what he regarded as ‘half measures’. Game considered that banning individual meetings, prohibiting uniforms and the like would barely touch the trouble in the East End and would lead to ‘fresh and more serious trouble’.3 He maintained there was a new development of

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‘primary importance’ since his predecessor had made his recommendations – ‘Jew baiting’. Fascist speakers, he argued, would expound their anti-semitic message irrespective of their dress, and fascist anti-Jewish propaganda appealed to ‘a latent hostility to the Jewish race which most of us have, even if only sub-consciously’.4 There was, however, a development that Philip Game had not been prepared to acknowledge, either officially or in his personal correspondence with John Simon – the burgeoning civil liberties movement and the seminal part the NCCL had played in the articulation of anti-fascist objectives and as a conduit for bringing allegations of police ­irregularities to the attention of Parliament over the same period. Both as an organisation and as individuals the members and supporters of the NCCL had played a key role in the public discourse on police powers and methods throughout the year leading up to the historic events at Cable Street. From relatively minor incidents of damage to property to large political demonstrations, the NCCL’s activities – monitoring police actions, gathering evidence to support allegations of irregularities, lobbying MPs – were at the centre of the stream of complaints about police actions that were aired in Parliament. Among them two events, the fascist rally at the Albert Hall and opposition meeting in Thurloe Square in March, and the violence at Cable Street in October, stand out above others in a troubled year for policing in the metropolis. The Albert Hall and Thurloe Square Game was wholly unwilling to account for police actions in response to allegations made or evidence provided by the NCCL. Home Office interest in the findings of the NCCL’s Commission of Inquiry into police actions at Thurloe Square led him to protest, ‘If we are going to hold enquiries every time Ronald Kidd chooses to say we have exceeded our powers, or been rough, there will be no end to it. I really do not see why we should encourage him.’5 Scotland Yard’s response to the complaints about police actions from the NCCL and its supporters was consistently to reject its evidence and allegations and to attempt to discredit the organisation. Objections always focused on Kidd as the protagonist of the complaints against the police, and the contention that the politicians and professional people among its membership were simply taken in by his cleaver oratory and lobbying tactics. This stance was wearing thin with

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the Home Office by the middle of 1936, and the questions raised following the events in Thurloe Square are an example. Simon was not the first Home Secretary to find the balance between effective policing and interference with liberties a difficult one but John Simon had further to contend with an established pressure group through which the allegations of critics would be organised and coordinated in public debate. Game had been prepared well in advance for Mosley’s meeting at the Albert Hall on 22 March 1936. Always able to engage in amicable dialogue with BUF leaders, the Commissioner had received the required notice some two months before the rally. He had insisted on ticket-only admission and had ‘informed’ the Communist Party that no formed procession or opposition meeting would be allowed within half a mile of the Albert Hall. Traffic was to be diverted away from the area and a heavy police presence maintained along the routes to the Hall. 6 Special Branch intelligence advised that the Communist Party was intent on creating disorder and that the ‘hooligan element’ was looking forward to the opportunity of smashing fascism. Following a call from the NCCL for volunteer observers, published in the News Chronicle, the intelligence reports advised that observers would be both inside and outside the Hall and accompanying the marchers, their ‘known object’ being to ‘collect evidence to prove that on such occasions police discriminate in favour of fascists’.7 In contrast to the qualms about Mosley’s litigious intentions that had beset his predecessor at Olympia, Game insisted that uniformed police would be inside the Albert Hall for the purpose of ‘escorting’ individuals ejected by stewards out of the building to avoid a repeat of the ‘somewhat serious fracas at Olympia’. In all some 2500 police were to be drafted into the area, with a further 400 in reserve.8 Kidd appealed directly to the Home Secretary with a reminder that trouble often arose when police interfered with the perfectly legal activities of the opposition demonstrators, such as distributing anti-fascist leaflets, and that this invariably led to the arrest of anti-fascists alone, giving rise to complaints about police partiality.9 Worries that the NCCL would make capital out of the reply ensured the response required several drafts before Simon could agree a content that would ‘avoid the inference that any interference with what is lawful could be contemplated’ and stick to an assurance that police actions would be limited to their public order responsibilities.10

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The day produced the rowdy opposition to the speakers and aggressive stewarding at the Albert Hall normally associated with BUF events. Reports of the event in the national press did nothing to dispel the belief that police methods favoured fascists. Under the headline ‘Police Guard Blackshirts’, the Daily Mail reported considerable trouble in the hall, with a number of people being ejected and 12 arrests. Editorial such as ‘Sir Oswald instructed his followers to hand those ejected over to the police’11 implied co-operation between police and fascists. The Times too reported an account of police–fascist co-operation with ‘when a banner was unfurled by men and women from one of the boxes police helped the stewards to eject those who occupied it’, and ‘very few who interrupted escaped being hurriedly carried, feet in the air, from the hall’.12 Police reports praised Mosley’s patient forbearance with interrupters who were ‘only ejected after repeated warnings’. Game was satisfied that had it not been so well handled by officers on the spot it might have developed into something more serious.13 It was not, however, the events at the Albert Hall but those in nearby Thurloe Square that were to claim media and public attention and give rise to serious allegations about police behaviour. Exhibition Road had been advertised as the venue for an anti-fascist counter-demonstration and the large number of people who gathered there were within the half-mile exclusion limit imposed by the Commissioner. It is not clear whether the venue was switched to Thurloe Square by anti-fascist leader John Strachey or whether the swelling crowd was moved there by the police; in either event, there is no evidence of disorder or that force was used. In Thurloe Square a sparse presence of foot police had maintained a relatively orderly if noisy crowd of some 2000 to 3000 people for almost an hour as they listened to the speakers. According to Mrs. Geraldine Young, an NCCL observer, the arrival of a police Inspector dramatically changed the atmosphere. Young testified to the NCCL inquiry that on arrival in Thurloe Square the Inspector approached one of the police constables to ascertain the nature of the meeting. On being advised that it was ‘mainly communist’ the Inspector made a telephone call from a nearby telephone box and within 5 minutes about 20 mounted police officers and a number of foot police had arrived. Police reports and the testimony of witnesses concur in the view that police officers made no attempt to contact the speakers or organisers of the meeting to inform them of the intention to

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close the meeting, but instead police confined their attention to the crowd.14 Superintendent Ballentyne was the senior officer in Thurloe Square. He later reported that he had been approached by a man from the crowd who was ‘obviously of communist sympathies’ and had seen D. F. Springhall, whom he believed to be the organiser of the demonstration, ‘go towards the crowd, presumably to address it’. He confirmed that he had spoken only to a man on the edge of the crowd and asked him to ‘persuade the crowd to disperse’.15 According to the evidence given to the NCCL inquiry, it was some few minutes later that Ballentyne gave the instruction to clear the Square and mounted police forced their way into the crowd, drew their batons and started striking people. The crowd were taken completely by surprise and large numbers were pinned against railings.16 The Daily Mail reported the following day that ‘many people climbed 5 ft high railings into the gardens of houses where they remained until police drove them away’.17 MPs demanding explanations for police actions from the Home Secretary in the House of Commons wanted to know what action would be taken on the witness statements made available by the NCCL. Dingle Foot MP led the call for an official inquiry.18 In all 46 individual complaints arising from the Albert Hall and Thurloe Square meetings had been received at the Home Office by the end of March, most of them collected by the NCCL. The allegations received the consideration of Senior Home Office official Sir Arthur Dixon before being sent on for further action to the Commissioner.19 The Home Secretary’s public support for police actions was not in question; nevertheless, it is clear that, largely due to the NCCL’s involvement, this had become an incident that could not be lightly dismissed by the Home Office or the Commissioner. Game’s response referred to ‘long talks’ with the Superintendent and Inspector in charge at Thurloe Square. They were clearly inconclusive and Game had to concede that it was a matter of opinion whether it had been necessary to break up the meeting. Even so, both senior police officers had wide experience of dealing with difficult areas of London and Game was inclined to ‘accept the opinion of the man on the spot’. Moreover, he considered many of the complaints received to be ‘rather coloured’, and suggested that complaints arising from NCCL activities were in essence produced by Ronald Kidd and were ‘to a certain extent manufactured’. Calling on hearsay evidence he alleged that Kidd had been heard

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putting words into the mouths of witnesses. He was not prepared to pursue individual complaints and would go no further than to acknowledge receipt and leave it to the NCCL to ‘take any further action if they like’.20 Home Secretaries do not easily succumb to pressure for official inquiries into police behaviour and the events at Thurloe Square were to be no exception. With press and parliamentary support Kidd considered the NCCL case was strong and an unofficial Commission of Inquiry was set up with the intention of forcing the Home Secretary’s hand. The Commission, which first met on 10 July 1936, was chaired by Prof. Norman Bentwich, a barrister attached to the Colonial Office in Palestine until 1931 and brotherin-law of NCCL treasurer Hugh Franklin. Other members of the Commission included MP Eleanor Rathbone and J. B. Priestley. Witnesses were sought through the national press and 100 signed statements were collected. The Inquiry heard evidence from 31 witnesses including 9 NCCL observers; only evidence that would be admissible in a court of law was heard. The findings of the Inquiry were published in a report at the end of July 1936. As only one witness came forward who was prepared to speak in favour of the police it was a one-sided account of events. Nevertheless, witnesses’ statements appear broadly consistent. They suggest that the crowd in Thurloe Square was ‘quite orderly’ within the meeting and the few police present early on had made no attempt to interfere with the conduct of the meeting until the baton charge took place. Witnesses describe indiscriminate use of truncheons as ‘horrifying’ and ‘absolutely terrifying’, causing ‘many screams from the crowd’ who were ‘taken completely by surprise’. The NCCL Commission found that: the evidence of no less than fifteen of the witnesses … forces us to the conclusion that the mounted police struck both men and women on the head and shoulders quite indiscriminately, and that they seemed more concerned with inflicting injuries than with dispersing the crowd. 21

The Inquiry concluded that the baton charge was carried out unnecessarily, without warning and with a totally unjustifiable degree of brutality and violence that might have caused serious or fatal injuries, and called for an official public inquiry. 22 The Commissioner, of course, declined an invitation to present the case for the

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police.23 However, Special Branch officers were apparently present and recorded a detailed account of the proceedings. According to Special Branch reports around 70 people attended the hearing, most of whom were of the middle-class ‘intelligentsia’ type along with a proportion of ‘the working-class element’. It was noted that several people in the audience ‘whiled away their time’ while waiting for the proceedings to start by reading the Daily Worker, which was on sale outside.24 Dixon took the view that, in spite of the one-sidedness, ‘the report seems to me to give evidence of careful preparation and to merit careful consideration’.25 This plainly alarmed the Commissioner with the prospect that an official inquiry might be considered. He did not hold back in his condemnation of the proceedings. He referred to the ‘so-called Commission’ and to witness statements being ‘couched in such extravagant terms as to be utterly discredited’. He discounted witnesses who were ‘accredited observers for the Council of Civil Liberties’. Witnesses were referred to as ‘of the hysterical variety’. He concluded: A more biased judgement I have never read and do not consider that either the mental attitude of the Commission or the ability with which they set out their case warrants their being treated so seriously as to agree to their demand for a public enquiry.26

He argued that the grant of an inquiry ‘would undoubtedly react to a certain extent on police morale and tend to discourage resolute action with sooner or later, but inevitably one day, unfortunate results’.27 He insisted that the question of whether police took unnecessarily drastic action was not capable of proof one way or the other, and that those responsible were ‘experienced officers and in the best position to appreciate the whole situation’. Furthermore, an inquiry would ‘take up a lot of police time and energy’ when the Force was already occupied with ‘a spate of meetings’, ‘an endeavour to reduce road accidents’ and ‘a seasonal increase in crime’. Game maintained that his objections to the NCCL’s demands for an official inquiry were not from ‘any anxiety as to the outcome’. 28 With more than a touch of exasperation he advanced a view of the NCCL as a self-constituted body with no authority or statutory powers, whose principal activity is to criticise and attack the police … and which has arrogated to itself the right to set up commissions to inquire

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into the actions of constituted authorities in the exercise of their ­responsibility. 29

He went on to warn: If they are accorded an inquiry it will give them some status and encourage their troublesome activities, which have, I think it is true to say, no public backing whatever.30

There was not unanimous sympathy with the Commissioner’s views at the Home Office. Dixon noted: ‘it is a pity that it is not possible to test more fully some of the allegations of unnecessary use of force against individual constables.’31 Nevertheless, Game’s protestations prevailed and the NCCL’s Commission was advised that its report had been given ‘careful consideration’ and ‘no sufficient grounds’ could be found for modifying the decision of the Secretary of State.32 It was a disappointing outcome for the NCCL. The weight of evidence the Commission was able to gather from official observers and from the widely varied witnesses to events in the Square had seemed to promise more. Nevertheless, the Inquiry was worthwhile for the NCCL and was recognised as having generated tremendous support and introduced ‘a raft of new people’ to the organisation.33 Publicly the Home Secretary had given his backing to the Commissioner’s handling of the Albert Hall and Thurloe Square proceedings. Privately the affair had done nothing to assure his confidence in the effectiveness of the Commissioner’s public order policy. The Home Secretary, the Commissioner and fascist anti-semitism The case of Thurloe Square was one of the more noteworthy incidents of complaints about police methods but it was not an isolated event. Rather it added to the parliamentary pressure about the effectiveness of public order policing that had built up during the spring and summer of 1936. Most of the civil liberties lobby in Parliament was from the opposition benches but a question from Conservative MP Vyvyan Adams interestingly led Simon to make his own personal inquiries into police behaviour at fascist meetings. Adams had been an NCCL vice-president in the early days of the organisation. He had resigned in November 1934 because of the difficulties he faced from his Party as the only Conservative associated with the NCCL administration.34 He continued to share its convictions and to maintain his connections with the civil

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liberties movement, and was prompted to raise the question by a letter handed to him by Kingsley Martin and published in the New Statesman. Adams asked the Home Secretary if he had had any reports from the police of the Sunday evening fascist meetings at Hampstead Heath and whether he was aware of allegations that police had allowed speakers at a BUF meeting there on 17 May to indulge in obscene references to Jews as ‘venereal ridden vagrants who spread disease to every corner of the earth’ and had acted as stewards for the fascists throughout the meeting.35 Simon told the House that the Commissioner had reported considerable heckling at the Hampstead meetings but on the occasion in question the attention of the police officer present had been distracted by the noisy crowd.36 In fact, the Commissioner had claimed to be satisfied with the explanation of the Chief Inspector attending the meeting that he had heard the remark but could not tell who actually said it and he, therefore, considered his instructions to ‘err on the side of taking action at once in the case of abuse of Jews’ had been generally followed. He had also expressed his view that questions of this kind, from the protagonists of civil liberties, were ‘likely to do more harm than good and to militate against … the maintenance of the right of free speech’.37 Sir Albert Clavering, a personal friend of the Home Secretary, was at a subsequent BUF meeting at Hampstead. The meeting that Clavering witnessed produced the usual noisy heckling from the crowd. In response to the speaker’s remark, ‘you stand there shouting, but you haven’t the guts to come over here and do it’ and an indication towards the fascist bodyguard, a number of youths rushed forward. One of the youths who ignored the Police Inspector’s instruction to return to his place in the crowd was forcibly removed. Another youth demanded the Inspector’s name ‘for the National Council of Civil Liberties who will raise the matter in Parliament’. Significantly, the protester understood that complaints against the police would not only be taken up by the NCCL but could expect to be aired in Parliament. Clavering approached the police officer and asked why the youth was removed when he was just responding to a request from the speaker. Clavering identified himself as propaganda agent of the Central Conservative Office and personal friend of the Home Secretary and said he was there at Simon’s request to ‘keep observation’. The beleaguered Inspector, with not only observers for the NCCL but also for the Home Secretary on

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his patch, was able to convince Clavering that a breach of the peace would have been the likely outcome had he not removed the youth and to secure his promise of support should a complaint be made by the NCCL.38 Unfortunately, nothing of any subsequent conversation between Clavering and Simon is recorded but clearly Simon did not have complete confidence in the police reports. Despite the Home Secretary’s promises of special measures for the most troubled areas, the complaints and questions in Parliament continued.39 The promised additional uniformed police and plain clothes officers had moved the problem from one district to another rather than resolved it and the ‘deteriorating situation’ was the subject of a meeting arranged by L. H. Gluckstein MP for representatives of the Board of Deputies of British Jews to meet the Home Secretary at the beginning of July. Neville Laski, president of the Board, admitted that his organisation had failed to persuade Jews to stay away from fascist meetings and warned that the offensive language used by fascist speakers was bound to incite counterattacks by Jews. He suggested that trained police officers ought to attend fascist meetings specifically to arrest speakers who indulged in the use of offensive language, and like the Commissioner Laski wanted fascist meetings prohibited on grounds that they were likely to lead to a breach of the peace. Simon was unwilling to take that step in case it should fail with ‘unfortunate consequences’. His offer to make an announcement on the measures being taken did not impress Laski, who felt that the best evidence of effective policing would be cases in the courts.40 Nevertheless, in spite of his anxiety Laski was most anxious a few days later to disassociate himself and the Board of Deputies from a debate in the Commons on police powers and civil liberties and the allegations made by D. N. Pritt MP that the police exercised partiality in connection with Jews.41 The Commons debate on 10 July 1936 was an important one. Pritt’s opening salvo argued that police actions were ‘steadily crushing the ordinary freedom of expression of political views’. He reasoned that the middle class and working class agreed on many things but on the matter of the police and the administration of the law ‘the most tremendous differences occur’. According to Pritt’s view, the middle class regarded the police as ‘well nigh perfect’ whereas ‘almost without exception working-class opinion about the police was completely unprintable’. Attlee, Foot, Harris and Lansbury were among those who joined the attack on the state

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of policing in the East End with allegations that police stood by while Jews were verbally and physically assaulted by fascists and suggestions that there had been a change away from the traditional character of policing towards ‘greater efficiency and militarisation’. Lansbury argued that in nearly every East End district east of Aldgate there was real terror among the Jewish population and demanded to know why the Home Secretary had not been able to put a stop to fascist violence. The Home Secretary’s suggestion that the public could do more to help the police if they made better effort to identify their assailant drew an acerbic response from the newly elected MP for Oxford University, A. P. Herbert. Herbert remarked: ‘It is difficult for anyone lying prone on the floor of a public hall having been hit over the head with one or two people assaulting him from either side and one or two more stamping on his kidneys to take the name and address of anyone.’ R. W. Sorensen, Labour MP for West Leyton, argued that an increase in arrests on suspicion was a sign that ‘we should consider gravely the operation of the police force in the way that it does not assist civil liberties’.42 Simon’s public defence of police practices did not waiver, but the weight of evidence and the extent of concern were incontestable. A few days later, he issued instructions to the Commissioner on ‘further measures to be taken by the police to deal with fascist and anti-Jewish activities’. Simon required a concentration of police officers in the Jewish districts, even if they had to be taken temporarily from other duties. He demanded ‘intensive action’ to prevent the situation developing into ‘unmanageable proportions’ and wanted to be assured that: Senior officials at Scotland Yard and the higher ranks in the police divisions [and] each individual police officer who may be called on to deal with anti-Jewish incidents is made fully aware that grossly abusive language of the Jews, either individually or as a race, is a serious offence and that there can be no question in this matter of good-humoured toleration of language which in other circumstances might not call for intervention on the part of the police.43

Shorthand notes were to be taken of all fascist speeches in Jewish districts and instructions were to be given that ‘the law does not allow interrupters of meetings to be ejected with more force than is reasonable’. Police officers were to be reminded that it was their duty to bring assailants to justice and should themselves conduct

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whatever inquiries necessary to achieve that; they should not assume nothing could be done about a complaint of assault because they themselves had not witnessed it. Definite evidence that communists or anti-fascists were organising counter-demonstrations at fascist meetings for the purposes of disorder were to be reported to the Home Office for a decision on whether the organisers should be bound over to keep the peace, and a careful watch was to be kept on fascist publications for material that might ‘constitute defamatory or seditious libel or public mischief’. Monthly reports of the general situation in Jewish districts were to be submitted to the Home Office by the Commissioner.44 The Commissioner circulated the Home Secretary’s requirements to all districts on 2 August with instructions that they should be read to all ranks at the earliest possible opportunity and then retained by station officers under lock and key. He required a return to be submitted from each district on the first of each month giving the numbers of meetings where police attended; where shorthand notes were taken; where violence occurred; and the number of arrests for seditious or abusive language. The content of these returns survives only as the monthly summary of activities provided by Special Branch’s Superintendent Canning, which were in essence the basis of Game’s report to the Home Office. Exploiting anti-Jewish sentiment had been an object of fascist organisations from the outset but anti-semitic provocation at fascist meetings and intimidation of the Jewish community had not been officially recognised by the authorities as an issue for public order policing before the end of 1935. Thus the Home Secretary’s concerns that culminated in his directive to the Commissioner in July 1936 were conceived in the NCCL’s police discrimination campaign and in the demands of the mostly Labour MPs that supported the aims of a civil liberties pressure group, rather than from any explicit policing policy or objectives. Although the NCCL did not officially affiliate to anti-fascism until the summer of 1936 many of the cases it pursued involved Jewish organisations or individuals. The NCCL newsletter from October 1935 drew attention to the reluctance of the police to take any action against the anti-semitic rhetoric of BUF speakers despite the extreme provocation offered by statements such as ‘Jews, Communists and other scum’ and ‘hook-nosed, yellowskinned dirty Jewish swine’. As the NCCL’s activities focused increasingly on fascist anti-semitism, pressure mounted on the

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Home Secretary to address the difficulties in the East End. The August 1936 newsletter featured four pages on the escalating incidents of ‘Jew baiting’ and concluded that the continuing absence of any attempt to police fascist speakers more effectively indicated that it was the ‘settled policy at Scotland Yard that insulting words and behaviour shall be overlooked by the police when uttered by Blackshirts’. The Home Secretary’s statement in the House of Commons that ‘In this country we are not prepared to tolerate any form of Jew-baiting’ is described as ‘rather pathetic’. It was doubted that either the Home Office or Scotland Yard had ‘issued any instructions whatsoever to the police to deal seriously with the question’.45 In the summer of 1936 the NCCL extended its activities in a specifically anti-fascist direction.46 As far as Kidd was concerned the NCCL’s practice of observing and recording police irregularities was, in effect, anti-fascist since it was largely with the help of ‘one-sided police protection’ that the fascists were able to make headway. There were those who, although committed anti-fascists, were wary of the NCCL and felt that opposition to the BUF from Jewish groups encouraged support for the fascist organisation and that Jews should simply stay away from BUF meetings so as not to provide Mosley with publicity. This view was endorsed by the Board of Deputies, the official voice of British Jewry, that saw anti-semitism as a religious issue transcending political boundaries that should not be fought on political lines. Nevertheless, Kidd did involve the Board of Deputies with the NCCL’s anti-fascist activities and although they were not anxious to be embroiled in East End politics they were not hostile to the NCCL or its objectives. Board of Deputies’ secretary A. G. Brotman readily shared with Kidd any accounts of fascist anti-Jewish activities that came to his notice.47 The NCCL commanded respect from the Jewish community, such that it was considered essential that the NCCL be represented at an International Conference Against Anti-semitism held in Paris in September 1936. Strapped for cash, as was commonly the case, Kidd was given £5 by a ‘Jewish friend’ to enable him to attend and he raised a further £5 for a second delegate from ‘well-to-do Jewish friends’.48 Kidd’s speech to the Paris Conference referred to the Home Secretary’s assurances in Parliament as ‘no more than phrases of goodwill designed to pour oil on troubled waters’. Critical too of the attitude of the Board of Deputies he argued that:

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it would be criminal if any rich and influential Jews in Great Britain, who can exercise such powerful pressure on our Government, were to sit back and say, ‘Gentiles created anti-semitism; let gentiles destroy it.’ Fascism tries to make this a racial question … this is a question of our common humanity.49

The conference came at the end of month-long negotiations that had failed to establish co-operation between the newly formed Jewish People’s Council (JPC) and the co-ordination committee of the Board of Deputies. The more militant JPC eventually decided the battle against fascism must be fought with or without the Board and the activities of the organisation began in earnest on 14 September, 50 a few days before the now infamous battle of Cable Street. The battle of Cable Street Mosley’s plans to march through the East End on 4 October 1936 raised difficult questions for Simon, about whether exceptional police measures should be taken to re-route or prohibit the march or bind over fascist leaders to keep the peace, and he would have consulted the Cabinet if Parliament had been sitting.51 The Commissioner was not persuaded that such measures were necessary or advisable. He assured the Home Secretary: ‘the march … will probably produce the usual few arrests for minor disturbances but I do not anticipate any serious trouble.’52 Privately, he welcomed a showdown. The day before the march he wrote to a friend: ‘I expect there will be some fun and a few broken heads before the day is out. I shall be glad if it brings things to a head as I hope it might lead to banning processions all over London.’53 The political repercussions and the difficulties of drawing the line between various organisations and locations made the selective banning of meetings an unattractive option for the Commissioner. Neither did he favour the binding over of leaders of the rival organisations. He was keen not to create martyrs by sending leaders to prison if they did not comply. Moreover, there was dialogue between the BUF and the police and an expectation that Mosley’s co-operation could be secured. BUF leaders were expert at exploiting the perception of police favouritism but Game was careful to leave the fascists ‘no loophole to claim that they were acting with the permission or concurrence of the Commissioner’.54 Therefore, routes for marches and venues for meetings were approved with the proviso that if it

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should be considered necessary, ‘the police will indicate meetings must be held elsewhere or abandoned’.55 As communist and anti-fascist groups organised their opposition to Mosley’s plans in the weeks leading up to 4 October, local concerns mirrored those of the Home Secretary. The House of Commons received mayoral deputations from East End boroughs. The JPC delivered a petition of more than 100,000 signatures to the Home Secretary via a deputation led by Whitechapel MP James Hall.56 Board of Deputies president Neville Laski had advised the Home Office that the Board would have nothing to do with the overtly anti-fascist aims and communist connections of the JPC and the organisation was in no sense representative of Jewish opinion in Britain. The deputation, in fact, created a ‘very favourable impression’ at the Home Office.57 Liaison with anti-fascist leaders was not an option considered by Scotland Yard. It was from a Special Branch memorandum of 2 October that the Commissioner learned that the CPGB had cancelled all other activities to concentrate on opposition to the BUF demonstration, and the streets of the East End were whitewashed with the anti-fascist slogan ‘They shall not pass’.58 The decision to cancel all police leave and draft some 4000 mounted and foot police into east London as late as 3 October suggests that the strength of opposition to the BUF proposals may have taken the Commissioner by surprise, and that his confidence in anticipating ‘no serious trouble’ just three weeks earlier may have been misplaced.59 On 4 October the mobilisation, by the CPGB and anti-fascist groups, of 100,000 people ensured that Mosley’s march did not pass at Cable Street.60 The BUF procession, numbering around 2000 Blackshirts, gathered at Victoria Embankment as arranged but by that time the strength of anti-fascist opposition and the extent of disorder in the surrounding streets were such that the Commissioner had made the decision to prohibit the East End processions. As he had anticipated, Game was able to secure the co-operation of the fascist leaders. Mosley accepted the Commissioner’s decision; the Blackshirts marched westward and, apart from a few sporadic incidents, dispersed.61 However, the violence and hostility unleashed were directed at least as much at the police as at fascists. The Commissioner’s decision to stop the processions averted clashes between rival demonstrators and possibly many injuries but it did not restore order; there was no mechanism for securing the

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6.1  Sir Philip Game, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, 1935 to 1945

co-operation of anti-fascist leaders in the way there had been with Mosley. Police officers reported being met at Cable Street by ‘a volley of stones, bottles and brickbats’. A lorry loaded with bricks, stolen from a local builder’s yard, had been overturned in the street and the bricks distributed to demonstrators to throw at police. Police reported general conflict ‘in all directions’ and numerous baton charges were made to clear the crowds.62 Before order could be restored all police and reserves had been used, truncheons had been drawn and used at various places, 74 arrests had been made, 33 police and 12 members of the public had been injured, and Cable Street had secured its place in the history of the policing of public order in London.63 Anthony Crossley MP, who witnessed first hand the events in Cable Street, saw it as a clash between communists and the police. According to Crossley, ‘the Jew–communist attitude was aggressive in the extreme’ and there were ‘no fascists present at all’ throughout most of the disturbances. He described a scene of ‘Jewish spectators’ in Cable Street ‘like boxes at the theatre’ from which women shouted, ‘We don’t want the police. We’ll look after ourselves.’ Young men smashed glass along the road to deter

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6.2  Fascist march, Cable Street, 4 October 1936

mounted police. The police operation to clear the street was ‘swift and effective’ according to Crossley. In one and a half minutes ‘the whole crowded yelling street’ was cleared as demonstrators were forced down side streets. Men were led back ‘with bloody heads’ and a woman, her shoes removed, ‘kicking unscrupulously’.64 In his October 1936 report to the Home Secretary, Game pointed out that the police were as much a target of anti-fascist demonstrators as were fascists. The events justified his view of the troubles as predominantly instigated by East End hooliganism and he concluded that ‘this hooligan element [of the East End] includes many Jews and the foreign Jews are more anti-police than anti-fascist’.65 The Public Order Bill Press reports of police activity in the East End following the troubles at Cable Street show that expectations of further serious disorder were high. On 12 October the Daily Mail reported 14 arrests as ‘Police 20 abreast charged with batons’ and on 15 October its

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headline read: ‘4000 Police Guard East End Last Night’.66 Game may well have welcomed a showdown to force tougher action against political disorder but his appeal to Simon to declare fascist organisations illegal was heartfelt. The Commissioner was in no mood to enter into the debate on civil liberties. His priority was to ensure that his force was able to maintain control of the streets of the East End but he was also intent on keeping up the hoped for momentum the events on 4 October had created. When a large fascist meeting in Victoria Park on 14 October, in excess of 1000 people, attracted little opposition and went off peacefully, Game advised the Home Secretary, ‘the unexpected happened last night’. His explanation was that, ‘there was dog racing handy and the Jews patronise this, and it was a working day, not a Sunday’. In fact, Special Branch reports showed a marked lessening in incidents of disorder in the East End following Cable Street. This was attributed in part to anti-fascist fears that ‘their tactics’ might result in legislation that would be more harmful to them than to fascists.67 Nonetheless, Game was not deterred by one peaceful event from implementing his plan for strong, decisive action. He put his proposals to the Home Office. It was his intention, if it became necessary, to ‘ban all meetings and processions in the five East End boroughs concerned’. He would then draft a large force of additional police into each area for three nights running, extending it to a week if necessary. Officers would be instructed that anyone attempting to start a meeting should be stopped on grounds that ‘we had reason to believe that it would cause a breach of the peace’. Anyone objecting would be arrested for obstructing the police in the execution of their duty and ‘not on any account because he disregarded my ban’. Having taken legal advice he was confident his proposal was ‘watertight from the side of the law’.68 Frank Newsam, the police liaison official at the Home Office, was usually understanding of the Commissioner’s position but Game’s proposals went too far even for him. It was thought unlikely a challenge in the courts could be defended. Furthermore, it was considered ‘very undesirable on grounds of policy to take such drastic action’ and as good as an admission that the situation was ‘completely out of hand and that the executive authorities were unable to maintain the liberty of free assembly and free speech’. It was, in any event, considered to be impractical to enforce a prohibition over such a large area and a ‘superhuman task’ for the

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police. Somewhat sardonically, Simon wanted to know whether the Commissioner proposed to include meetings of the Salvation Army or intended that Mr. Morrison should not address his constituents.69 Game’s assurance that he anticipated such a show of force would be effective in a very short time and would, therefore, be no real hardship on the Salvation Army or on Mr. Morrison made little impression and the Home Secretary concluded, ‘In the circumstances this proposal can be regarded as dropped.’70 The NCCL and the Jewish People’s Council were just as anxious to exploit the momentum around events at Cable Street as the Commissioner had been. A mass protest meeting organised by the JPC on 5 October attracted a healthy turnout and promised well for a delegate conference planned for 15 November, under its auspices.71 Surprised by the extent of support for the JPC the co-ordination committee of the Board of Deputies hastily circulated a warning to the Jewish community that the ‘so-called Jewish People’s Council’ functioned without the ‘authority or approval of the Co-ordination Committee’. It called upon Jewish organisations to ‘refuse to support, directly or indirectly, either by sending a representative if summoned, or otherwise, any Conference called by this body’.72 Nevertheless, the conference was attended by 163 delegates from 91 Jewish organisations. It proclaimed that the ‘co-ordination of forces within Jewry’ was the paramount need. The attitude adopted by the Board of Deputies was viewed with concern and Jewish organisations and individuals were called upon to give their ‘utmost financial support’ to the JPC.73 The view of the co-ordination committee was by no means wholeheartedly embraced by all of those associated with the leadership of the Board of Deputies. Writing in the Jewish Chronicle, the Revd. James Parkes supported the non-political position of the Board of Deputies and said it had been both ‘adequate and wise’ in dealing with ‘an undercurrent of prejudice [that] exists in the general community’. At the same time he recognised that the position had materially changed since 1934, creating an ‘embarrassing position for the Board’. Parkes wrote: ‘not only is there room for both the Board of Deputies and the Jewish People’s Council but both are necessary and their spheres of activity must be independent’.74 In a personal letter to Parkes, the Board’s president Neville Laski admitted to his own doubts. ‘It may be wholly wrong of myself, and the Board’, he wrote, ‘to take up the attitude we have done to the Jewish Peoples Council’.75

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Although the NCCL and the JPC had in common anti-fascist objectives, they were not natural bedfellows. While the JPC now concerned itself with a campaign against racial incitement and political uniforms and was in favour of further legislation, Kidd’s concern was that the pressure for legislation presented grave dangers that ‘Mosley’s provocation of the Jews will be used to suppress our civil rights of free speech and free assembly’. The NCCL called its own delegate conference so that ‘Labour and other progressive organisations’ would have an opportunity to meet and hear the NCCL’s views on the legal position and for dealing with the situation. An invitation to send delegates was extended to a wide range of organisations, including divisional Labour parties and trade councils, co-operative guilds, and the Fabian Society, as well as the Board of Deputies, Jewish societies, synagogues and other representative organisations.76 At the same time a statement issued to the press drew attention to the NCCL’s view that legislation already existed that could be used to curb the activities of the BUF without additional police powers and the resulting threats to civil liberties. Accepting the events at Cable Street must not be allowed to recur, it called on the Government to consider of the BUF whether: the organisation of a uniformed semi-military force with motor cycle dispatch riders and ambulance brigades, its parade and review in the public streets by its leader, and a proposed march through a Jewish neighbourhood to the accompaniment of slogans such as ‘We gotta get rid of the Yids’, is a procession for the purpose of propaganda or whether its only purpose was a display of force and terror, and whether such a display is not a breach of the law relating to unlawful assemblies.77

Three hundred delegates accepted the invitation. At the conference the principal speaker, Harold Laski, spelled out a history of legislative attacks on democratic liberties imposed under successive Governments, from the Emergency Powers Act 1920, through the Trades Disputes Act 1927 and the Incitement to Disaffection Act 1934, culminating in the Public Order Bill then before Parliament. A unanimous resolution condemned the proposals contained in the Bill as ‘a most serious attack on civil liberties’ and recorded the ‘strong disapproval’ of its provision that permitted the use of political uniforms on certain occasions, those relating to the restriction and prohibition of processions and to the offence of ‘insulting behaviour’. A party of 12 delegates was appointed to lobby

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the leaders of the three main political parties to urge resistance to the ‘objectionable features’ of the Bill.78 Introducing the Bill for its second reading Simon acknowledged the dilemma between what he claimed was a general support for tougher action and ‘our essential liberties’ and recognised there were reservations among some Members concerned with the protection of civil liberties. The parliamentary debates show there was a general feeling of inevitability, that something must be done, no matter how unpalatable in relation to the ideals of freedom and liberty.79 Percy Harris, Dan Chater, Herbert Morrison and Ernest Thurtle all expressed concerns about the preservation of personal liberty but concurred with the need for action to be taken.80 Both Pritt and Dingle Foot supported one of the most controversial provisions of the Bill, that relating to the wearing of political uniforms, in that it would predominantly affect fascists. Pritt’s oratory on the proposal provoked the suggestion that he had surrendered the views of the NCCL, which was opposing the clause. Foot, who said he was speaking as a fellow vice-president of the NCCL, put forward the viewpoint that the greatest danger of an attack on civil liberties came ‘not from any outside body or faction, but from the growing power of the executive itself’.81 He was joined by Pethick-Lawrence in warning that the proposed police powers to impose an indefinite ban on processions were ‘unnecessarily wide’.82 A lengthy debate surrounded the role of the police at private meetings, a matter of as much concern for the Commissioner as for opposition MPs. Game was keen to ensure that the police should not be drawn into the position of stewards.83 The Commissioner wanted an unambiguous understanding that the prosecutions of interrupters would not be instituted on police evidence alone but only where those responsible for organising the meeting were prepared to give evidence, so as to avoid ‘the certainty of a great deal of complaint as to why the police [had] not prosecuted’.84 As the Bill received its final reading, opposition MPs lined up to justify their role in passing the legislation. Foot observed that there were ‘certain clauses which simply bristled with points to which we took objection’ but he was satisfied that many of the points had been dealt with by the Government.85 Lansbury made clear that he did not like the Bill and considered it was being allowed to go through solely because of ‘the circumstances in which we find ourselves after events in East London’.86 Pethick-Lawrence

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concluded: ‘we have co-operated with the Government not to weaken the liberties of the people of this country. Our position in this respect is well known. On the contrary we wish to extend the liberties which we at present enjoy.’87 The Bill passed into law on 1 January 1937. As well as the usual publication of the Bill in Police Orders, a substantial and careful re-draft of the sections of General Orders that dealt with meetings and processions was required. It was considered particularly important that the instructions to be sent out to the Force should show ‘what we are going to do not what we should do’.88 Philip Game was all too aware that the NCCL was able to mobilise a body of opinion that saw anti-left bias as inherent in police policies. The fascist ‘Jew baiting’ campaign had made anti-semitism the most difficult public order issue for the Commissioner throughout 1936, not least in that it effectively focused the attention of the NCCL on anti-fascism and the Jewish community of the East End, and led Members of Parliament representing a large area of London to air the grievances of their constituents in Parliament. Association with anti-fascism was something of a double-edged sword for the NCCL. Its active opposition to fascist anti-semitism presented a persuasive argument with which mainstream politicians, particularly MPs with East End constituencies, were willing to be associated. On the other hand it reinforced suspicions of communist connections for those who perceived it as a satellite organisation of the CPGB – notably Scotland Yard. The intimidation and persecution of Jews were taken seriously by the Home Secretary. This ensured that the NCCL’s activities could not be construed as seditious in the way that left-wing labour and political organisations such as the NUWM and the League Against Imperialism were. It was not a coincidence that Philip Game was more aware of fascist anti-semitism at the end of 1936 than he had been a year earlier. The activities of Ronald Kidd and the NCCL had ensured that the issue was high on the public order agenda and, as the following chapter will show, was to remain so for the remainder of the decade, despite the introduction of the legislation. Notes 1 The violent clash between police and protesters at Cable Street will be discussed in greater detail later in this chapter.

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2 MEPO 3/2490, Letter and enclosure from Philip Game to John Simon, 9 October 1936. 3 Ibid. 4 MEPO 3/2490, Memorandum from the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis to the Secretary of State, 12 October 1936. 5 HO 144/20147, Letter from Philip Game to A. L. Dixon at the Home Office, 8 April 1936. 6 HO 144/20146, Memo from the Commissioner to the Home Secretary, 16 March 1936. 7 HO 144/20146, Special Branch report by Superintendent Canning, 21 March 1936. 8 HO 144/20146, Memo from the Commissioner to the Home Secretary, 24 March 1936. 9 HO 144/20146, Letter from Kidd to Sir John Simon, 13 March 1936. 10 HO 144/20146, Home Office minutes, 19 and 20 March 1936 and letter to Kidd, 20 March 1936. 11 Daily Mail, 23 March 1936, p.16. 12 The Times, 23 March 1936, p. 14. 13 HO 144/20146, Memo from the Commissioner to the Home Secretary, 24 March 1936. 14 MEPO 2/3089, Report of the NCCL inquiry. 15 HO 144/20146, Statement made by Superintendent Ballentyne. 16 MEPO 2/3089, Report of the NCCL inquiry. 17 Daily Mail, 23 March 1936, p. 16. 18 Parl. Debs, 25 March 1936, vol.  310, col.  1231. Full debate col. 1227–32 and col. 1361–78. 19 Sir Arthur Lewis Dixon was a Home Office official with responsibilities for the police. He had been secretary to the committee under Lord Desborough to review the police service in 1919–20 and is credited with having modernised the police service. 20 HO 144/20147, Letter from Philip Game to A. L. Dixon, 8 April 1936. 21 MEPO 2/3089, Report of the NCCL inquiry. 22 Ibid. 23 MEPO 2/3089, Letters from Dudley Collard to the Commissioner, 30 June and 11 July 1936. 24 HO 45/25462, Special Branch report signed by Superintendent Canning, 16 July 1936. 25 MEPO 2/3089, Home Office minutes dated 23 July 1936. 26 MEPO 2/3089, Police analysis of NCCL inquiry reports. 27 Ibid. 28 MEPO 2/3089, Memo to the Secretary of State from the Commissioner dated 17 September 1936.

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29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 MEPO 2/3089, Home Office minutes dated 23 July 1936. 32 HO 45/25462, Home Office minutes, 21 and 23 September 1936. 33 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 4/2, Barry Cox interview with Sylvia Scaffardi, c.1969. 34 NCCL, DCL 74/1, Letter from Vyvyan Adams to E. M. Forster, 17 November 1934. 35 Parl. Debs, 26 May 1936, vol. 312, col. 1859–60 and HO 144/21378, Letter from Vyvyan Adams to John Simon, 19 May 1936 with letter from John Boulting to the editor, The New Statesman & Nation, 18 May 1936. 36 Parl. Debs, 26 May, 1936, vol. 312, col. 1859–60. 37 HO 144/21378, Memo from Philip Game to the Secretary of State, 20 May 1936. 38 HO 144/21378, Report from Hampstead Police Station ‘S’ division, Meetings – Preservation of Order, 5 July 1936. 39 Parl. Debs, 17 June 1936, vol. 313, col. 1008; Parl. Debs, 29 June, 6 and 10 July 1936, vol. 315, col. 35–6, 815 and 1576–9; Parl. Debs, 22 June 1936, vol. 313, col. 1425–8; Parl. Debs, 30 July 1936, vol. 315, col. 1706. 40 HO 144/21378, Notes of a meeting of the Home Secretary with representatives of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, 8 July 1936. 41 HO 144/21378, Note from Donald Samuel to Simon, 16 July 1936. Parl. Debs, 10 July 1936, vol. 314, col. 1547–634. 42 Parl. Debs, 10 July 1936, vol. 314, col. 1547–634. 43 MEPO 2/3043, Jew-baiting aide memoir from John Simon to the Commissioner, 16 July 1936. 44 Ibid. 45 NCCL, DCL 48/1, NCCL News Sheet No. 4, August 1936. 46 NCCL, DCL 74/1, Proposal for the extension of the activities of the NCCL in a specifically anti-fascist direction, undated (but after the police baton charge in Thurloe Square in March 1936). 47 NCCL, DCL 37/4, Letter from A. G. Brotman secretary of the Board of Deputies, to Kidd, 25 February 1936. 48 NCCL, DCL 37/4, Letter from Kidd to H. Shanson, 3 September 1936. 49 NCCL, DCL 75/2, NCCL Newsletter, Jewish Civil Rights in Great Britain, Speech delivered in Paris on 20 September 1936. 50 University of Southampton, Parkes Papers. MS60/17/16, Jewish People’s Council Against Fascism and Anti-Semitism, Report of Activities, July–November 1936. 51 MEPO 3/551, Home Office minute, 20 September 1936.

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52 MEPO 3/551, Memo from Philip Game to the Secretary of State, 11 September 1936. 53 Cited in Moore, Andrew, ‘Sir Philip Game’s “Other Life”: The Making of the 1936 Public Order Act in Britain’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, Vol. 36, No. 1, 1990, p. 67. 54 MEPO 3/551, Letter from Sir Philip Game to the Secretary of State dated 11 September 1936. 55 MEPO 3/551, Commissioner of the Metropolis, Proposed B.U.F. Parade, March and Meetings in the Jewish Districts on 4th October 1936, John Simon minute, J. S., 20 September 1936. 56 HO 144/21060, Letter from J. Pearce, Jewish People’s Council to John Simon, 30 September 1936. 57 HO 144/21060, Home Office minutes, 2 October 1936. 58 MEPO 3/551, Special Branch memo dated 2 October 1936. 59 MEPO 3/551, Police Leave Cancelled – New Orders, dated 3 October 1936 and Daily Mail, 5 October 1936, p. 13. 60 Thurlow, ‘The Straw that Broke the Camel’s Back’, in Kusher and Valrian (eds), Remembering Cable Street, p. 89. 61 MEPO 3/551, Report from D. A. C., 3 Division, 4 October 1936. 62 MEPO 3/551, Report from Leman Street Division, 4 October 1936. 63 MEPO 3/551, Report from D. A. C., 3 Division, 4 October 1936. 64 MEPO 3/551, Letter and enclosure from Anthony Crossley MP to Geoffrey Lloyd MP, 14 October 1936. 65 MEPO 2/3043, Report from The Commissioner to The Under Secretary of State dated 8 October 1936. 66 Daily Mail, 12 October 1936, p. 14, and 15 October 1936, p. 15. 67 MEPO 2/3043, Special Branch report on fascist and anti-fascist meetings for the month of October 1936. 68 HO 144/21062, Letter from Game to the Home Secretary, 15 October 1936. 69 Herbert Morrison was a founder member and, at one time, secretary to the London Labour Party. He was a much respected leader of the London County Council from 1934–40 and was Home Secretary in the wartime Coalition Government. 70 HO 144/21062, Home Office minutes, Disorder in the East End of London, 15 October to 13 November 1936. 71 Parkes Papers, MS60/15/53, Circular letter from Neville Laski, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, 5 November 1936. 72 Ibid. 73 Parkes Papers, MS60/17/16, Jewish People’s Council Against Fascism and Anti-Semitism, Report of Activities, July–November 1936. 74 Parkes Papers, MS60/15/53, Letter to the editor, The Jewish Chronicle from James Parkes, 25 November 1936. The Rev. Dr. James Parkes

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was an influential figure in Jewish/Christian relations and the fight against anti-semitism. He was involved in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion trial in Geneva in 1935. 75 Parkes Papers, MS60/15/53, Letter from Neville Laski to Rev. Dr. James Parkes, 30 November 1936. 76 NCCL, DCL 40/3, Letter from Kidd to Jewish and labour organisations (listed), October 1936. 77 NCCL, DCL 40/3, Press statement, 8 October 1936. 78 NCCL, DCL 48/1, NCCL News Sheet No.5, January 1937. 79 Parl. Debs, 16 November 1936, vol. 317, col. 1373–455. 80 Parl. Debs, 16 November 1936, vol. 317, col. 1373–9, 1384–6, 1433–8, 1454–5. 81 Parl. Debs, 26 November 1936, vol. 318, col. 590–3. 82 Parl. Debs, 23 November 1936, vol. 318, col. 177–8. 83 HO 144/20159, Letter from Philip Game to the Home Secretary, 29 October 1936, and Home Office minutes, 25–30 October 1936. 84 Parl. Debs, 23 November 1936, vol. 318, col. 177–8 and HO 144/20159, Letter from Philip Game to the Home Secretary, 20 November 1936 and Sir John Simon’s reply to the Commissioner, 12 December 1936. 85 Parl. Debs, 7 December 1936, vol. 318, col. 1702. 86 Parl. Debs, 7 December 1936, vol. 318, col. 1765–6. 87 Parl. Debs, 7 December 1936, vol. 318, col. 1757. 88 MEPO 3/2513, Minutes, 12 to 20 November 1936.

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7

Police powers and politics: police and Home Office responses

The passage of the Public Order Bill through Parliament had seen the acquiescence of many Labour and opposition MPs to the view that, although unpalatable, new legislation was needed to deal with the worsening public order situation in the capital. But the fears that additional legislation would obstruct the activities of the left as much as fascists were almost immediately shown to have been sound. Within weeks of its reaching the statute books the first arrests under the Public Order Act 1936 related to an industrial dispute at Harworth Colliery in Nottinghamshire rather than to the militarisation of politics on the streets of east London. Less than a month after the implementation of the Act, five striking miners were charged under Section 5 with the use of threatening words and behaviour.1 As the NCCL had warned, the legislation introduced to put a stop to provocative fascist uniforms and militaristic methods gave the police wide powers to interfere with the activities of the left. There were aspects of the legislation that the Commissioner was little more in favour of than the NCCL. He welcomed the provisions of the Act that gave the police greater powers in relation to public meetings and processions but he did not have a free hand to fully implement them without the sanction of the Home Secretary. For most of the decade he was to find his policing strategies frustrated and his hands tied by politics and the representations of politicians, mainly from the opposition benches of the House of Commons. What is more, he was anxious about the difficulties of policing political uniforms. The definition of uniforms was problematic. The Act did not define ‘uniform’, leaving definition to the police and the courts. The Metropolitan Police General Orders described non-political organisations rather than political. The Salvation

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Army, Boy Scouts, Church Lads’ Brigade and hospital nurses were excluded from the scope of the Act. Ceremonial uniforms and emblems such as rosettes were permitted. Stewards employed at public meetings were permitted badges or distinguishing signs. 2 There was never any doubt as far as the police were concerned that the legislation would be aimed at the political left. A few days before it was introduced a list of organisations identified by Special Branch as either ‘fascist or communist’ received a warning from the Commissioner that the police would ‘take steps that may be necessary to secure compliance with the law’ should their supporters continue to wear uniforms in public after 1 January 1937.3 The responses are interesting. The Young Communists’ League advised that it was ‘definitely not a uniformed organisation’.4 The Imperial Fascist League claimed to be ‘rather grateful to the Home Secretary’ for saving its members the expense of uniforms worn to compete with other groups.5 Fenner Brockway claimed that the red shirt worn by Independent Labour Party members was for rambles, sport and weekend outings and was not political.6 The BUF wanted a test case and argued that a black shirt worn with a tie under an overcoat did not contravene the terms of the Act.7 Game did not care to enter into dialogue on the matter with the BUF, especially as his legal advice considered that the legislation was wide enough to allow any party who ‘paraded in the new fancy dress’ to be prosecuted if the Attorney-General gave consent, albeit undesirable to do so.8 In reality it was not the practice of the BUF to flout the law openly. There were sporadic reports of black shirts, or other emblems such as black leather boots, being worn at fascist meetings but there is little evidence of widespread breaches of the law or of zealous policing, and arrests were few. The legislation effectively ended the issue of political uniforms and the columns of Blackshirts largely disappeared from the streets. Despite his initial concerns, within weeks the Commissioner was able to say that the wearing of political uniforms had been discontinued.9 However, if political uniforms ceased to be a problem, fascist provocation did not. In the event it was the provisions of the Act for the control of meetings and processions, rather than the repression of political uniforms, that commanded the attention of the authorities and of the NCCL throughout the remainder of the decade.

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Meetings and processions: racial tensions in the East End of London From the latter part of 1936 Mosley targeted the East End of London with an anti-Jewish campaign, intentionally playing on the volatile racial tensions in the region to rouse support for the BUF. The disorderly public meetings, assaults and damage to property that were the inevitable outcome of Mosley’s tactics, and the failure of the police to deal adequately with the situation, were at the heart of the NCCL’s anti-fascist campaign. There is no better account of fascist objectives in the East End than that given by one of its own officials, Charles Wegg-Prosser, East End area co-ordinator and BUF candidate in the 1937 London County Council elections. Wegg-Prosser resigned from the BUF in June 1938 because he had become disillusioned with anti-Jewish policies that he saw as distracting from the real issues of social betterment, something calculated to ‘get a mass support in East London’. In his resignation letter to Mosley he wrote: I know and you know that vile, unprovoked assaults have been made on a single Jew by a group of Fascists, even looting has occurred … You side-track the demand for social justice by attacking the Jew, you give the people a false answer and unloose mob passions.10

Jewish responses to this systematic fascist provocation were uncoordinated. The Board of Deputies encouraged a non-aggressive response. Speakers at East End meetings organised by the Board’s co-ordination committee often encountered anti-Jewish opposition but, in contrast to other anti-fascist organisations, they generally reported the good behaviour and supportive actions of the police. However, meetings of the co-ordination committee were poorly attended.11 The ‘turn the other cheek’ message that it promoted was not well received by the Jewish community of the East End, where allegations that police ignored complaints of assaults and damage to property were common. The JPC offered more hard-line anti-fascist opposition but this, alongside its Communist Party connections, made for uneasy relations with the Board. It was only in joint venture with the NCCL that the JPC was able to bring its allegations to the notice of the Board and of local MPs. Laski, Thurtle and Lansbury were associated with both organisations, which ensured that an NCCL–JPC enterprise was sympathetically

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received and the Board agreed to talk to JPC secretary Julius Jacobs, albeit warily.12 East End MPs represented large Jewish communities that were the target of the fascist violence and anti-semitic propaganda but that did not ensure the matter would be aired in Parliament. They also represented large communities of non-Jewish constituents who would have been less likely to associate themselves with allegations of police bias in favour of fascists. Anti-Jewish feeling was not difficult to find. Many people who were neither fascist nor would have considered their views anti-semitic nevertheless admitted to anti-Jewish opinions. For example, George Orwell recorded the views of a young intellectual of communist sympathies: ‘I do not like Jews. I’ve never made a secret of that. I can’t stick them. Mind you, I’m not anti-semitic, of course’; and a ‘middle class’ woman: ‘Well, no one could call me anti-semitic but I think [Jews] are responsible for a lot of what happens to them.’13 Even though some of the MPs were themselves Jewish it was not inevitable that they would sympathise with anti-fascist activism. It is evident from the attitude of the Board of Deputies that Jewish leaders did not necessarily support the East End Jewish community perceived as having close links with communism. It was J. H. Hall, Labour MP for Whitechapel, that Kidd approached with the JPC’s complaints about the ineffective policing of fascist practices.14 Presenting its evidence to a group of MPs at the House of Commons and subsequently to the Home Secretary via a delegation of East London MPs (F. C. Watkins, Dan Frankel, Dan Chater and J. H. Hall, along with D. N. Pritt KC), the JPC produced a list of allegations. Included was the anti-semitic language used by fascist London County Council (LCC) election candidate Raven Thomson at a BUF meeting in Victoria Park Square; an assault on a prisoner in the charge room at Bethnal Green Police Station; assaults by fascists on members of the Labour Party during the LCC election campaign and allegations that the police protected fascists rather than Bethnal Green citizens; a fascist victory parade following election results that included a band to drown out the sounds of window smashing; and the obstruction and intimidation of voters by fascists during polling.15 The discussion with the Home Secretary aired the view that the new public order legislation was not being fully utilised and questioned the police interpretation of their duties under the Act, whereby

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the legislation had been readily used against the striking miners at Harworth while the ‘incipient anti-semitism’ and actionable speeches being made by fascists went on unhindered. Simon reasoned that a great deal of trouble had been taken to draw up new instructions and that a recent increase in prosecutions suggested a ‘definitely improving’ situation. In spite of his outward optimism, however, Simon accepted that there were a number of individual cases that needed looking into with the Commissioner.16 Separately, Simon had received a report from Sir Stafford Cripps MP, Fascists and the L.C.C. Election, published by the NCCL, in which Cripps argued that the police had failed to protect the people of the East End from fascist violence and had ignored fascist intimidation which might well have influenced the outcome of the election.17 The Home Office investigation into the allegations and the policing operation found that the fascist practice of marching back to their headquarters after meetings was a source of considerable disorder, caused a great deal of annoyance to local residents and excited an expectation of police action. Under cover of darkness the police found the shouting, stone throwing and fighting associated with these processions difficult to prevent. Police reports acknowledged that police officers were on occasions ‘hopelessly outnumbered’ and that their actions in relation to damage to property had led Jewish traders to the erroneous belief that the police were in sympathy with the fascists. Measures to address the difficulties included banning the distribution and display of anti-semitic literature, preventing ‘young hooligans’ from congregating on street corners and stopping fascists heading their processions with a band. The content of a fascist song sheet distributed at a meeting in Victoria Park was acknowledged to be objectionable, but there was nothing recorded in police reports of the insulting language used by fascist speaker Raven Thomson. The NCCL’s intervention was an unwelcome development as far as Scotland Yard was concerned. Police reports accused the organisation of exaggerating and distorting the complaints, making police inquiries unnecessarily difficult, and suggested that ‘had the complaints been made direct to the police in the first instance, a true picture of the grounds for complaint would have been made’.18 Undeterred, the Home Office wanted a copy of the notes of Raven Thompson’s speech taken by Special Branch. Details were also required of the number of cases since the beginning of the year in which police had either warned or instituted proceedings

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against fascist or anti-fascist speakers.19 The Commissioner argued that there was no justification for the considerable expenditure of police time and, in any event, from the transcripts of Special Branch shorthand notes he regarded the language of fascist speakers as ‘not particularly scurrilous’.20 He saw the NCCL as part of the public order problem and was not about to give credence to its allegations. He was more concerned with the likelihood of further trouble in the East End and the contingent difficulties for his policing operation. In a tense exchange of views with the Home Office Game took his opportunity to point out that his proposals under the new legislation for a ban on processions in the area had been rejected. He had been warned that the time was ‘not yet ripe’ to impose an order under section 3[3] of the new Public Order Act which would have allowed the prohibition of all political processions in the area and lessened the chance of disorder.21 It was, in fact, not the first investigation into allegations made by the NCCL that the Commissioner had been obliged to carry out since the introduction of the legislation. Since February he had been under pressure to conduct an inquiry into police actions at a fascist meeting at Hornsey Town Hall, where violent fascist stewarding had left four people seriously injured. At Hornsey, police officers were alleged to have ignored the brutal attack and failed to intervene despite requests from members of the public. The NCCL launched an investigation with the backing of local MP Fred Messer and with a view to forcing the Home Secretary to hold a public inquiry. The Home Secretary resisted the pressure for an inquiry but insisted that the Commissioner carry out a full investigation. The Commissioner’s aversion to accounting for police actions in response to allegations orchestrated by the NCCL is nowhere more obvious than in the investigation into the Hornsey affair. Even though the police investigation revealed aspects of the policing operation with which he himself was not entirely satisfied, and found at least one police officer to have been blameworthy, Game was unwilling to ‘dignify’ the NCCL’s representations with a response. It was after prompting from Messer, and the Home Secretary’s insistence, that the Commissioner acknowledged that there had been ‘a certain amount of difficulty in ascertaining exactly what transpired at this meeting’. But he noted: Mr Bolton [one of the injured men] is a member of the National Council for Civil Liberties, and one is, I feel, entitled to draw the

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conclusion that he attended the meeting, as members of this body do, with the express purpose of blaming the police for any trouble that might occur. From what I have been told in confidence I have reason to believe that the Council are the instigators of the question to the Home secretary. 22

Game condemned the expenditure of time and police resource on further inquiries. He argued that it was ‘only to be expected that the National Council for Civil Liberties is trying to make capital out of what happened’. Police reports dismissed witness statements as ‘couched in the usual hysterical style adopted by persons giving evidence before the NCCL’ and ‘so extravagant as to be unworthy of serious consideration’.23 Even so, the Commissioner was not very satisfied either with the report of the senior police officer present that stated that no excessively violent stewarding had been witnessed by the police, or that the officers left in charge of the entrances had handled the matter with ‘that degree of activity and helpfulness that was expected’. They were found to be ‘blind to the necessity of trying to do something for the person assaulted’24 and would have been better advised ‘at least to have made a show of interesting themselves in the assaults’.25 Special Branch officers inside the hall reported the usual large number of stewards on duty who showed ‘every indulgence’ to hecklers and it was not considered necessary or desirable for uniformed police to be called in to restore order. The only disturbance of note to be recorded was ‘caused by a Jew’ who asked whether the late Mrs. Mosley had been a Jewess. He was ejected by two stewards who ‘used some force … dragging this Jew past the steps to the gangway because he was struggling’.26 Game accepted that there were questions over whether his senior officers exercised their discretion wisely and that the fascist stewards were ‘somewhat out of hand and over violent’. Nevertheless, he had little sympathy with those ejected, and concluded: The Council of Civil Liberties have, as always, done their best to exploit the disorder, primarily caused by their own supporters, in order to attack the police. I should most strongly deprecate giving a fictitious importance to this self-constituted body by acceding to their demand for a public inquiry. 27

Home Office minutes testify to an ‘uneasy feeling’ that ‘on this occasion the police did not do all that they might have been expected

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to do’. The police version of events was noted to be inconsistent and to differ substantially from that of the witnesses. The Special Branch information was questionable. Only one person was seen to be ejected when it was clear from the reports of uniformed officers that there were at least five. Special Branch officers did not see any violent stewarding even though they reported that BUF headquarters had acknowledged an unnecessary display of force by some of the stewards. In view of the very visible facial injuries sustained by some of those ejected, it was questioned whether Special Branch had ‘a wrong view’ of the amount of force which could lawfully be used by stewards, and whether the police might need ‘further advice’ on the point of entering meetings where there was reason to believe assaults were taking place without waiting until they were called in.28 Although Game was not satisfied with police actions he maintained that a reprimand to the responsible officer would be inappropriate. He considered it arguable whether the injuries were as a result of assaults or of resistance to the stewards. What is more, he argued, there was a reasonable tendency for the police to think that, ‘if a man goes to a meeting to make trouble, he ought not to complain if trouble comes to him’. The Commissioner was reminded that there was no desire to give ‘fictitious importance’ to the NCCL but, nevertheless, officers placed in a similar position in the future must have a better understanding of their responsibilities.29 Despite the Commissioner’s reluctance, Simon assured Messer that prompt action would in future be taken at the first indication of an unreasonable amount of force being used by fascist stewards and that police would not hesitate to enter the hall whether or not they had been asked for assistance.30 Messer had personally interviewed witnesses that he considered to be of unimpeachable character who saw acts of brutality committed and the refusal of police officers to act. He found the Home Secretary’s response unsatisfactory and he felt that there was justification for an official inquiry.31 Fascist methods had changed little between the Hornsey meeting and Olympia two and a half years earlier. The BUF remained a very violent organisation. At Hornsey hired thugs were brought in from outside the area to act as stewards with the specific purpose of forcibly ejecting hecklers. However, the expectation on the part of the Home Office that the police would enter an indoor meeting

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if excessively violent stewarding was suspected was a noteworthy change of view. While Game faced continued demands to account for these operational failures to police public order effectively,32 neither Simon nor his successor as Home Secretary, Samuel Hoare, was prepared to fully sanction the use of the new police powers to interfere with meetings that he believed would have enabled him to deal with the situation. Instead, in June 1937 the Commissioner’s office was forced to draw the attention of all ranks to the Home Secretary’s directive of the previous year on the subject of policing fascist speakers. It was pointed out that the Commissioner was by no means satisfied that the general instruction given … was being carried out in the manner he intended. There have been several occasions during the last few months when speakers at meetings have indulged in violently abusive language without any action whatever being taken by the police. On more than one occasion the commissioner has, in view of the scurrilous language used, felt bound to proceed by summons subsequently.33

It was to be ‘clearly understood’ that it was the duty of the police at all ranks to hear what was being said by a speaker and to act at once should ‘reasonable criticism and political controversy degenerate into insult and abuse’.34 Neither the Commissioner nor the Home Office could escape the reality that many of the complaints about the police would not have reached Parliament without the vigorous efforts of Kidd and the NCCL. As Special Branch information warned of a proposed NCCL–JPC deputation to present the resolutions of its joint conference,35 advice to the new Home Secretary, Samuel Hoare, was that the NCCL was regarded as A body with close subterranean connections, particularly through its Secretary Mr Ronald Kidd, with the Communist Party. Although it has a long nominal roll of distinguished persons as Vice-Presidents and no doubt attracts a considerable body of support for the ideals for which it professes to stand, its modus operandi is to vilify the police on all possible occasions, the favourite charges being that the police consistently abuse their powers and infringe the liberty of the subject.36

In the same vein the Jewish People’s Council was ‘not a body which commands respect in responsible Jewish quarters’.37 Home Office

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counsel further reminded Hoare that the propagation of fascism as a political philosophy was as lawful as any other creed and it was therefore inappropriate for the Home Secretary to receive a deputation from one political faction protesting against another. Hoare delayed his reply to Kidd until he had made a statement to the House of Commons on his proposals for the East End. This he did on 21 June, imposing an Order under section 3[3] of the Public Order Act prohibiting political processions within the most troubled areas.38 The announcement led to an immediate postponement of proposals for the deputation in favour of presenting a case against the ban.39 An article in the autumn edition of the NCCL journal Civil Liberty argued that the proper course for the Commissioner would have been to bind over the organisers of fascist meetings to keep the peace and to use the Public Order Act only to target specific meetings likely to cause disorder. It anticipated that a total ban in the East End would lead to further disorder, would do nothing to prevent racial hatred and intimidation, and would interfere with legitimate labour and trade union activities.40 The period from the end of January to the middle of June 1937 had seen intense agitation from the NCCL. Paradoxically, this had raised awareness of the extent of political tension in the East End and in doing so had significantly strengthened the Commissioner’s case for the implementation of a total ban. Police powers and the politicians The outright prohibition on all political processions within a specified area of East London was imposed under section 3[3] of the Public Order Act. This required the approval of the Home Secretary. Assurances had been given to Parliament during the debate on the Bill that section 3[3] of the legislation would only be used in wholly exceptional circumstances. A few weeks earlier the Home Office had been of the view that ‘the time had not yet come’ to prohibit all processions in the East End and Game’s request for a prohibition order to be imposed had been refused. The Commissioner had powers to prescribe the time and route of a procession under section 3[1] without recourse to the Home Secretary. Since fascist processions generally took place at the end of an evening meeting, restricting processions to daylight hours

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essentially amounted to a prohibition of the procession altogether, even in the summer months. It was not difficult for the Commissioner to issue directions for fascist events as the BUF were always careful to notify him of their intentions because they wanted police protection.41 But Game was concerned that it was open to challenge and, besides, it confined the effect of the legislation to fascists. Game was not inclined to capitulate and his opportunity to press the point came at the beginning of June when Special Branch intelligence warned that Mosley proposed to conduct a propaganda march through the East End to a meeting in Trafalgar Square on 4 July. Special Branch reports cautioned that co-ordinated action was advocated by anti-fascist movements, including the JPC and the Communist Party, which presented the likelihood of anti-fascist opposition on the scale of the previous 4 October.42 The Commissioner advised the Home Secretary of his intention to use his powers under section 3[1] of the Public Order Act to ‘prohibit the Fascist procession from entering all the highways in the mainly Jewish part of the East End’. He acknowledged that this was tantamount to banning the procession altogether.43 Game’s proposal was not well received at the Home Office. The use of police powers in this way was thought to be open to challenge in the courts. More importantly, it would not be ‘keeping faith with Parliament’ if powers given for one purpose were used for another. Nevertheless, it was the events at Cable Street on 4 October 1936 that had led to questions about whether police powers were adequate to deal with such emergencies. The new legislation presented the opportunity to resolve the problem with the implementation of an overall ban on processions in the area and there was likely to be wide dissatisfaction with the police if the situation were not now handled more effectively. Reluctantly it was agreed that, while unpalatable, there was little alternative. The Commissioner was finally given leave to proceed under section 3[3] to obtain approval for an outright ban initially for a period of three months. Hoare was careful to secure the agreement of opposition MPs Clement Attlee, Herbert Morrison, Archibald Sinclair and Percy Harris before giving his approval.44 He met little opposition in the Commons as he announced the prohibition. It was to cover all political processions in an area to the north of the Thames approximately bounded by the rivers Lea and Thames, the City boundary and the Midland and Scottish Railway, an area that was home to ‘a

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large population of Jews’.45 Hoare was able to maintain that he was carrying out ‘the spirit and the letter of the policy that was adopted by parliament’.46 Mosley immediately gave notice of his plans to take the BUF procession to Trafalgar Square from Kentish Town. The revised route predictably generated fervent opposition and demands for the procession to be prohibited. Kentish town had no large Jewish population but the area was believed to support ‘a good many communists’.47 According to Special Branch many members of the Communist Party in the area also belonged to the Labour Party and virtually every member of the St. Pancras Trades Council was a Communist Party member, ‘open or secret’. Special Branch reported that the communists had successfully persuaded the local Labour Party to lead the agitation against the fascist march.48 Fifteen thousand leaflets were produced and a deputation was arranged which presented a petition bearing 3000 signatures to the Mayor. The predominantly Conservative Borough Council agreed to forward the petition to the Home Secretary without further comment. With the endorsement of the Cabinet Hoare declined to prohibit the fascist march. He argued that he could not ‘go on prohibiting meetings indefinitely’ and the best course of action would be to confine the procession as far as possible to the ‘safe streets’.49 In the event the procession was a relatively peaceful affair. The local Labour Party had appealed for calm and claimed the credit for the absence of widespread disorder. Nevertheless, the policing operation was judged a success, although, in all, 24 arrests were made and 5 members of the public and 7 police officers received injuries. Hoare sent congratulations to the Commissioner on the efficiency of his arrangements, which were considered to have prevented anti-fascist opposition from escalating into serious disorder.50 The prohibition of processions minimised the threat of large-scale disorder in the area as it was intended to do, but it did interfere with legitimate political activities. The term ‘political character’ which defined prohibited processions was intentionally wide so as to include anti-fascist victory marches and the like irrespective of whether there was a likelihood of disorder, but the interference with the interests of labour organisations was controversial and difficult for opposition MPs to swallow. The Home Office struggled with the Commissioner’s decision to include a march by the Bethnal Green Trades Council within the scope of the prohibition on the grounds

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that the involvement of ‘a communist’ and a member of the NCCL confirmed its political nature.51 Trade unions and trades councils had the support of MPs such that any prohibition was likely to be challenged in Parliament. The Commissioner’s view prevailed on this occasion although an ‘unofficial’ approach to Mr. Attlee before any decision to prohibit the procession was announced was considered to be the way forward. Somewhat ironically, the existence of the ban focused attention even more sharply on public meetings and police behaviour. The NCCL had an extensive network of very effective observers and close contacts with anti-fascist activism in this period and police behaviour was widely monitored and any irregularities challenged. Such was the case at a fascist meeting in Stepney Green in July 1937, following which a number of flimsy cases were brought to court. One man had been arrested and charged with insulting behaviour when he put two fingers in his mouth and whistled, and another when he blew his nose in a way that offended the police inspector. The NCCL observers present at the event reported several incidents of police brutality. Witnesses attested that a baton charge was ordered quite unnecessarily after the crowds had started to disperse peacefully. There were reports of women and children ‘screaming in terror’, a pregnant woman in a state of shock having been threatened with a police truncheon, and a man hospitalised for five days. Another man arrested and charged with insulting behaviour had been so roughly handled he needed hospital treatment. All of the charges were dismissed by the magistrate.52 Geoffrey Lloyd’s defence of police actions in the Commons, following a question put down by Dan Frankel, failed to convince opposition MPs.53 Kidd presented a dossier of eye-witness evidence to a meeting of MPs at the House of Commons, following which the News Chronicle reported, ‘Labour MPs are making serious allegations against the police handling of political meetings in the East End.’54 And under the headline ‘East End Police Terror Alleged’ the Daily Herald subsequently reported that MPs Frankel, Pritt, Chater and Hall would be asking the Home Secretary to receive a deputation to discuss police behaviour at Stepney Green.55 Allegations of police brutality such as those at Stepney Green very effectively kept alive support for the NCCL. Mainstream support for the organisation may well have suffered following its alliance with the JPC and widening associations with anti-fascism.

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Special Branch noted declining enthusiasm for the Council from ‘many of the more moderately minded persons who supported it in its early stages’.56 Ernest Thurtle MP, usually supportive of the NCCL’s objectives, warned Kidd that ‘wisdom lies in keeping on friendly terms with the police if this is possible’. As to the deputation, Thurtle was clear that, ‘if its purpose is to argue that the police are showing partiality towards the Fascist lawbreakers I am not anxious to be identified with it’.57 Dan Frankel, who had been one of the most vocal of the MPs to question policing operations in the East End, was found to be ‘more inclined to lend an attentive ear’ to Kidd and the NCCL following the events at Stepney Green.58 Such police actions stimulated public debate and undoubtedly consolidated support for the NCCL’s campaign. They may also have legitimised the activities of the JPC. The Commissioner’s report to the Home Secretary for the month of July 1937 indicated increasing anti-fascist activity from the Board of Deputies. It was reported that the Board had opened an office in Whitechapel Road and was taking control of all arrangements for meetings to combat anti-semitism in co-operation with the JPC.59 As the expiration of the Order approached, Mosley announced his plans for a procession through the East End to mark the occasion. There was no doubt that a large fascist demonstration, were it allowed to go ahead, would lead to serious disorder. The Home Office view was that if the ban had been justifiable on 21 June then the situation had certainly not improved. Following ‘some further talk with Messrs Attlee, Morrison, Harris and Sir A Sinclair’, the Order was extended without amendment for a further six weeks. 60 Bringing a ban on political processions to an end would clearly be problematic. There was no indication throughout 1937 that time would lessen the difficulties and the expiry of the second Order approached with no sign that the risk of disorder had diminished. The Commissioner’s request for a further extension to the Order cited communist intentions to march through the East End on the first Sunday after the cessation of the Order on 13 September and fascist plans to stage a large-scale demonstration in early October. The certainty that any East End procession would result in disorder was not doubted. However, the Home Office view is interesting. It was noted that it would be very convenient for the Government if the Order were allowed to expire so that:

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the communists came out into the open and matured their plans for a march. A new order would then appear to be directed against the communists in the same way as the earlier orders were represented as being directed against the fascists.61

Upon reasoned reflection, the risks that both sides would organise processions at very short notice from one of their many meetings were thought to outweigh the potential benefits to the Government, and in any case it was felt that a further extension to the ban was unlikely to be opposed. According to Dr. Mallon of Toynbee Hall, who was regarded as a particularly important influence on left-wing opinion, the prohibition was justified and necessary until both sides were willing to show a greater measure of tolerance towards each other.62 Hoare wrote confidentially to Attlee, Harris, Morrison and Sinclair with his concerns about communist and fascist plans for processions immediately following the cessation of the Order. He proposed a new Order to extend the ban for three months to ‘tide over’ the period of the municipal elections.63 Although none of the recipients opposed Hoare’s proposal they were growing anxious that the prohibition was to be continued for so long.64 On this occasion Mosley’s revised plans routed the BUF procession from Millbank through main streets to a meeting in Rotherhithe. A vigorous anti-fascist campaign of leaflets, chalking and propaganda in the left-wing and communist press ensued. In a new manoeuvre Mosley demanded that communist leaders be prosecuted for incitement to obstruct the highway and incitement to unlawful assembly. Home Office opinion was divided. It was thought that prosecution might be a salutary lesson and would ‘usefully demonstrate to extremists in their fight against fascism’ that they were not entitled to claim exclusive use of the streets for their own political activities or to ‘do what the authorities refused to do’ – effectively to frustrate fascist objectives. More cautious views reasoned that public opinion might be inclined to see Mosley as the offender; that prosecution of the communist press for ‘political offences’ might assist communists and the Independent Labour Party in creating a united front; and that the presence of one anti-fascist on a jury might result in an acquittal, with embarrassing consequences for the authorities.65 Although the Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) advised that there was evidence to justify proceedings he acknowledged ‘certain difficult questions of policy’ and would only institute proceedings under the direct instructions

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of the Attorney General.66 Following discussion with the DPP and the Attorney General, Hoare concluded there was no case sound enough to prosecute.67 Billed by Mosley as a ‘national anniversary procession’ the BUF event promised to attract serious disorder. The widespread local concerns were brought to the attention of the authorities by a deputation led by the Mayor of Bermondsey and Ben Smith MP, and including representatives of the Communist Party, the Trades and Labour Council, and the Church. The deputation, received by the Commissioner and Sir Alexander Maxwell at the Home Office, wanted the Commissioner’s assurance that he would use his powers under section 3[1] of the Public Order Act to impose conditions on the organisers as to the route and the preservation of order. The procession would pass close to the area covered by the ban and there was little doubt that anti-fascist opposition would be attracted from outside Bermondsey. While the deputation pledged to make every effort to persuade local residents to boycott the demonstration it accepted that ‘the class of people who were deaf to such appeals would assemble in large numbers’ and it was considered ‘optimistic’ to suggest that a fascist march would take place peacefully and without opposition. Game declared himself ‘fully alive to the possibility of disorder taking place’ and gave assurances that he was ‘making the necessary arrangements’. He was not prepared to share the details with the representatives of Bermondsey.68 The BUF anniversary procession on 3 October 1937 proved a difficult affair for the police. The scale of anti-fascist opposition to the march and the resulting serious disorder necessitated the intervention of senior police officers to change the proposed route during the course of the procession and to specify an alternative venue for the meeting.69 Special Branch reported crowds of more than 35,000 in ‘very ugly and hostile’ mood and made up largely of ‘Jews and apparent non-residents’. Wooden railings and paving slabs torn up by the ‘mob’ barricaded the streets to prevent the fascist procession from passing. Police and fascists were showered with stones, bottles and fireworks. All 2500 police detailed to the demonstration were employed and reinforcements had to be called. One hundred and thirteen people were arrested, 37 of whom were charged with assaults on the police – none were known to be fascists. Forty-one police officers were injured along with 28 members of the public.70

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There were a large number of NCCL observers at Bermondsey on 3 October. Their reports, along with the evidence provided by a number of those arrested and who sought the assistance of the NCCL, allege police brutality and indiscriminate use of batons. Witnesses and observers described mounted police striking randomly at men and women, one woman hit over the head with a baton and left bleeding on the pavement, perfectly orderly sections of the crowd being threatened by police with truncheons, and one man being kicked repeatedly in the back by a police officer as he was frog-marched along the street.71 The President of the Westminster (St. George) Divisional Labour Party described being driven at by a police car and threatened with a truncheon. He witnessed a man being beaten about the head with a police truncheon and then dragged 50 yards along the street to a waiting police car.72 One witness described the systematic clearing of streets by mounted police, who appeared to be signalled by the calculated firing of fireworks to mount increasingly violent charges.73 In fact, the NCCL struggled to deal with the number of cases arising from the Bermondsey demonstration and had to be selective in those it was able to defend. Kidd did, however, provide assistance to the Rotherhithe Labour Party in collating details of individual cases for possible publication. There were concerns that some of those who had been arrested and received heavy sentences had no involvement with the demonstration and that police actions, rather than protesters’, had caused many of the incidents.74 The Commissioner and political processions: more troubles, more police powers? Game had a tendency to seek rather drastic solutions to situations such as the disorder at Bermondsey. Just as had been the case in the aftermath of Cable Street his proposals went far beyond anything the Home Secretary was likely to sanction. He proposed a general ban be imposed as soon as possible on all political processions throughout the whole of the Metropolitan Police area for a period of three months. He reasoned that he had tried forbidding processions at the last moment, banning processions in a special area, escorting processions along published routes, and diverting processions at the last minute to unscheduled meeting places. He warned that he would not be able to employ a ‘fresh technique’ on every occasion

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and the disorder showed every sign of becoming more serious. In these circumstances he understood his powers under section 3[3] of the Public Order Act to be extensive enough to allow such a ban to be imposed. Although he accepted that use of the legislation to that extent had been ‘deprecated in debate’, he argued that the ‘present state of public feeling’ indicated that it would be accepted as a wise precaution. Game went further. He called for consideration to be given to new legislation ‘to make processions of all kinds in the streets illegal once and for all’. He argued that adult suffrage had rendered street processions an outmoded and unnecessary method of allowing citizens to make their views known. It was, he suggested, a habit almost entirely confined to minorities and ‘extreme political elements’. He cited an enormously increased population and traffic congestion as reasons for processions causing far greater nuisance than they had in the past.75 Game was concerned too that the ‘constant vigilance’ required to prevent breaches of the peace impacted on regular police duties. He was confident that, by acting quickly while memories of the disorder at Bermondsey were still fresh, he would have public opinion with him. At the Home Office the Commissioner’s proposals were viewed as rash. It was thought that the circumstances would not support them, having regard to the tenor of the discussion on the Public Order Bill and fearing also that such a ban would be widely challenged as contrary to the intentions of Parliament. It was considered that the current legislation could not be used to prohibit political processions across London without obtaining the express authority of Parliament.76 The Commissioner’s view that a London-wide ban ‘would not be very controversial if the case were fully presented and given adequate publicity’ was viewed as very optimistic. It was felt that a large body of opinion in Parliament, the press and the country would take the view that more experience of working with the current legislation should be gained before further powers were sought and that firm action by the police and magistrates was the way forward.77 Hoare was mindful of the assurances given to Parliament by his predecessor that the power to prohibit political processions across the whole of London would only be used in ‘wholly exceptional circumstances’. He considered that the Commissioner’s proposed ban would stretch unduly the provisions of the Act. Hoare circulated the Commissioner’s memo to the Cabinet. In anticipation of questions in the Commons he wanted to know

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‘how the minds of his colleagues were moving’. He suggested that he would welcome the introduction of further legislation if there was a feeling that decent citizens should be spared the experiences of Bermondsey but would be averse to it if he were not satisfied that the House of Commons generally approved of it.78 There was clearly no will to introduce further legislation or to extend the ban beyond the East End. The prohibition remained in force unchanged and was again renewed without amendment in December 1937 for a further three months. Game recognised that his interpretation of his powers under section 3[1] may, at times, have been ‘too wide’. In fact, he blamed ‘The psychological effect of October 3rd’ for his erroneous decision to disallow a fascist procession in daylight hours even though no disorder or traffic congestion were anticipated – which set a precedent followed by his senior officers at subsequent fascist events. The BUF complained that the policy of prohibiting processions after dark appeared to have been arbitrarily extended into daylight hours. Game, ‘not inclined to give any facilities for having [his powers] challenged in court’, instructed that, in future, such decisions would be his own rather than left to senior officers.79 With his elaborate plans thwarted, Game was ambivalent about further extensions of the ban. He wanted the whole matter discussed in Parliament and a future policy clarified.80 The parliamentary debate that followed, however, was not the one that Game wanted. On 15 December 1937 George Strauss, Labour MP for Lambeth, raised a motion of no confidence in the Government’s public order policy. Strauss proposed: This House views with alarm the extent to which the liberty of the subject has suffered encroachment within recent years, and records its opinion that such encroachment threatens the maintenance and impedes the development of a healthy democracy  … That liberty I maintain has been interfered with during recent years by Parliament, by the Judiciary and by the police – particularly by the police.81

He cited the Incitement to Disaffection Act that ‘allowed an 18 year old boy of exemplary character to receive a 12 month prison sentence for a silly prank’ and the Public Order Act introduced to curb fascist militarism and immediately used to arrest miners and to help break a strike at Harworth. He referred to police inaction against fascist stewards at Hornsey and anti-semitic remarks at Stepney Green

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and to police violence at Thurloe Square. He applauded the NCCL as ‘a body for which every person who appreciates and desires to preserve our civil liberties should be grateful’.82 Geoffrey Lloyd, speaking on behalf of the Home Secretary, accused Strauss of having dredged the records for every police misdemeanour and of delivering a ‘bitterly partisan and sectional’ speech. Nevertheless, it provided Lloyd the opportunity to congratulate Parliament on the success of legislation that had led to the abandonment of political uniforms and subsequent reduction in disorder. He labelled as deplorable the troubles in Bermondsey and an incident in Liverpool where Mosley was injured by anti-fascist demonstrators, but he insisted that the legislation had relieved the anxieties of most law-abiding citizens and put an end to the possible militarisation of politics in the country. The vote went in favour of the Government but the remarkably high number of 92 MPs voted in favour of the motion as opposed to 124 voting against. This suggested a sizable body of scepticism about public order policing policies and considerable consensus with the NCCL’s campaign that Strauss had drawn widely upon in his Commons motion.83 The Commissioner anticipated that there would be trouble whenever the ban in the East End was lifted but he was not convinced that there was a strong argument for re-imposing it beyond March 1938. Labour leaders viewed a further extension with growing concern. Herbert Morrison wanted Hoare to be aware of ‘signs of restiveness among his people at the continuance of the prohibition’.84 However, Special Branch intelligence revealed BUF plans for a May Day procession. May Day was traditionally the preserve of the left, and Labour and communist processions were expected to be larger than usual in the prevailing political climate. With the temporary nature of prohibition Orders already compromised by the nine months’ uninterrupted prohibition in the East End, Hoare successfully argued that the ban continued to be of great value both in preserving the peace and in contributing to a perceived decline in the influence of the BUF. In fact he offered little hope of an early end to the prohibition and warned that it might be necessary to renew the order again in June and possibly also in September since processions were most likely to take place during the summer months.85 Although opposition leaders had agreed to the extension of the ban, frustrations at local level were beginning to show. A

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number of organisations complained to the Home Secretary that traditional May Day celebrations had been interfered with without good reason. The West Leyton Labour Party found it ‘a big blow to liberty and freedom of expression’.86 The Cambridge University Socialist Club considered it ‘a violation of the democratic rights of the people’.87 Even though Attlee concurred with the extension of the ban, the Limehouse Divisional Labour Party of which he was president asked for it to be lifted for a period of two months.88 With the support of Will Thorne MP, West Ham Trades Council announced its intention to proceed with its annual march from East London to Hyde Park ‘to give expression to the solidarity and freedom of the working class in this country’.89 Once again the BUF proposed to process through Bermondsey. Ben Smith, once again, headed a deputation to the Home Secretary to protest. He warned of ‘grave trouble’ if the march went ahead. The previous march, he argued, was still fresh in the minds of the people of Bermondsey, ‘a one hundred per cent left neighbourhood’ that could easily be provoked beyond reason. Whereas he had kept 10,000 people in check previously, he could not guarantee to do so again and warned that the authorities must take the consequences. In the event the May Day celebrations passed without serious disorder. The joint London Trades Council and London Labour Party meeting in Hyde Park was attended by some 70,000 to 80,000 people. Special Branch reported no disorder and no ­contravention of the ban on processions through the East End.90 There was little resistance from any quarter to a further extension to the ban in June 1938 although Game was particularly concerned that it should not be allowed to lapse in the middle of September when it would coincide with the height of the police leave season and when Parliament would have adjourned for the summer recess. Unless he could be sure that the ban would continue at least until the middle of October he wanted it lifted in June.91 In fact the ban remained in place into the war years, when it was finally superseded by a total prohibition of all public political processions in the Metropolitan Police district imposed under regulation 39E of the Defence (General) Regulations, 1939.92 After four years of wartime regulations Game’s recommendations again went further than could be reasonably upheld by the Home Secretary. He appealed for the ban to become a permanent prohibition on processions in London. He reasoned that ‘freedom

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of meeting, freedom of speech, a free press and the wireless surely afford us all plenty of opportunity of lodging our protests or airing our grievances’.93 He was advised that his recommendation could not be adopted. It was felt that there would be strong opposition to any such legislation and that ‘people would be very sensitive to any attempt to deprive them permanently of liberties which they surrendered for the purpose of winning the war’.94 The ban was lifted on the cessation of hostilities in 1945. One year after its introduction the Home Secretary was able to claim that the Public Order Act had led to a ‘considerable diminution’ of real opposition between rival political factions and ‘relieved [the police] of a good deal of anxiety’.95 Nevertheless, in practical terms it had energised the civil liberties movement. Interference with the legitimate activities of the left by prohibiting all political processions rather than specifically those that were likely to result in disorder – notably fascist events – intensified criticism of the police. So too did the perceived failure to make appropriate use of police powers under the legislation to stop anti-semitic rhetoric by fascist speakers. This situation provided momentum for the NCCL’s fight against fascist anti-semitism and police discrimination. Special Branch reports suggest extensive NCCL observer activity at political meetings in this period and Kidd himself attended all the events of any note. There is no doubt that this intense interest in police actions maintained an awareness of civil liberties issues and influenced opinion. This was reflected in the sustained number and constant nature of questions debated in the House of Commons through the course of 1938. Tom Groves, Labour MP for Stratford, for example, asked for an explanation for the failure of the police to prosecute speakers who used insulting language at a fascist meeting in his constituency on 27 February.96 A transcript of the shorthand notes provided by the Commissioner amounted to only 350 words. The Home Office minute notes ‘some uncomplimentary remarks about Russia … but none about Jews’. Hoare gave assurances to Groves and to the House that the police heard nothing to warrant the institution of proceedings. Privately he noted that it would be inadvisable to make the notes available for fear that it ‘set a precedent which might be awkward on some future occasion’.97 Groves was not satisfied. On this occasion he had attended the meeting himself and stood with the police Inspector who had warned the speakers against remarks such as ‘red scum’

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and ‘hook nosed unmentionables’.98 Will Thorne wanted to hear the Commissioner’s account of a Labour Party meeting in Stoke Newington where police had taken no action against a number of disorderly fascist demonstrators.99 Percy Harris raised concerns that a fascist procession had been allowed through the streets of Bethnal Green, inside the prohibited area. Geoffrey Lloyd explained that the Commissioner had given a full report of the incident in which fascists had to be escorted from the area by the police for their own safety, giving the impression of marching.100 Home Secretaries were generally supportive of police actions – publicly at least – but complaints from Members of Parliament of police brutality and of failure to deal with verbal and physical attacks on Jews were not something any Home Secretary was ready to ignore. By the summer of 1938 Game had become exasperated by Hoare’s willingness to listen to MPs’ complaints of police tolerance of fascist ‘Jew baiting’. In correspondence with Norman Brook, Principal Private Secretary to Sir John Anderson, the Lord Privy Seal, Game barely concealed his frustration. Referring to the discussions arising from a deputation received by the Home Secretary, Game implied that he had a map ready showing all the meeting places used by the rival factions. He wrote: I suggest that if the S. of S. decides to consider any further suggestion that we proscribe certain places as being altogether too Jewish … that I should consult friends Attlee and Frankel with my map and ask them which particular meeting places they consider come under that category.101

The Commissioner now had a much finer line to tread between the robust policing of political protest and accusations of police bias and brutality. Kidd could rally parliamentary support whenever police were perceived to have resorted to violence or exceeded their authority. As the Home Office observed, he was ‘the prime mover in organising pressure on the Secretary of State’ to grant an investigation into allegations of police violence at an ‘Arms for Spain’ demonstration at the end of January 1939.102 This event is a good example of NCCL methods and of the extent of MP involvement with the organisation towards the end of the 1930s. Kidd’s plans for observers to attend the demonstration in Whitehall and Piccadilly Circus had noted the police could turn nasty ‘in their present temper’. Edith Summerskill MP was one of those

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who agreed to his request to act as observer and who subsequently challenged the Home Secretary to carry out a full investigation into complaints against the police.103 Witnesses and observers alleged that police officers indiscriminately batoned and punched orderly demonstrators and innocent passers by, dragged people who had committed no offence to justify arrest from buses and from a café, and that the police themselves provoked panic and disorder.104 The NCCL presented a dossier of evidence to four MPs for debate in the House of Commons on 13 February 1939 and subsequently provided 64 statements from independent witnesses. Hoare resisted the pressure for a public inquiry but claimed, ‘I am prepared to look into these cases myself.’105 This was not the common reaction of a Home Secretary and was regarded as ‘very substantial success’. But Kidd was warned to provide only the most reliable witnesses and to have them accompanied by an MP at their interview with Hoare. Otherwise the likelihood would be that ‘Hoare will sit still looking judicial while [an] official browbeats the witness into making admissions’.106 Hoare’s eventual findings, released to the press ‘in view of the public interest in the case’, confirmed that the Commissioner could find no case for disciplinary action against any police officer for the use of unnecessary violence or assault, that Kidd’s statements on police control of crowds were flawed, and that the matter could not be taken further unless there were to be an official inquiry, for which he did not consider a case could be made.107 Stafford Cripps and Sydney Silverman responded to the press statement, protesting that Hoare had failed to carry out his undertaking to the House of Commons but that received little publicity. The same could be said of Kidd’s response – The Times having declined to publish it even though a whole column was dedicated to Hoare’s statement. Nevertheless, whitewashing Home Office responses such as this had the effect of garnering more liberal-minded supporters. Margery Fry, for example, although keen to give overstretched policemen the benefit of the doubt, had found the statements and incidents arising from the ‘Arms for Spain’ demonstration ‘really horrifying’.108 It is clear that the NCCL of the 1930s was far more than a bit part player in the public order debate. Through its tireless commitment to collecting and putting forward evidence in a skilled, professional way it had been instrumental in presenting the allegations of ineffective policing of fascist activities that had forced the

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Commissioner to account for the performance of his policing operation. But this had also led him to seek additional police powers to control political activists and to demand the authority to prohibit all political processions in the East End. Through the sophisticated lobbying process that the NCCL had established, it was able to influence parliamentary debate and the views of the Home Secretary, and more specifically policing policy. In public the Commissioner could be just as confident of the Home Secretary’s endorsement of his policies at the end of the 1930s as he had been at the beginning. Privately, however, the Commissioner had come under increasing pressure from the Home Secretary to account for police behaviour and to address allegations of inappropriate use of police powers. Public endorsement of police actions was, of course, to be expected from the Home Secretary but it did nothing to dispel concerns for civil liberties. Indeed it could be said to have kept them alive. Throughout the decade, Home Office and police responses to political activism were more inclined to rally than to diminish support for the NCCL, and to strengthen the apparatus that the organisation had put in place to articulate complaints against the police to the Home Secretary and in Parliament. Notes 1 Kidd, British Liberty in Danger, p. 75. See Appendix B for extracts of the Public Order Act 1936. 2 MEPO 8/11, General Orders and Regulations, 1937, Section 26 Nos 243–5. 3 MEPO 3/2513, List of organisations and uniforms worn, provided by Canning, Special Branch, December 1936, and Letter from the Commissioner’s office to fascist and communist organisations, 22 December 1936. 4 MEPO 3/2513, Letter from John Gollan to the Commissioner, 29 December 1936. 5 MEPO 3/2513, Letter from P. J. Ridout to the Commissioner, 28 December 1936. 6 MEPO 3/2513, Letter from Fenner Brockway to the Commissioner, 30 December 1936. 7 MEPO 3/2513, Letter from N. Francis-Hawkins to the Commissioner, 31 December 1936. 8 MEPO 3/2513, Minute sheet, December 1936. 9 Parl. Debs, 12 April 1937, vol. 322, col. 634, and Ewing and Gearty,

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The Struggle for Civil Liberties, pp. 321–2. There were six convictions under section 1 of the Act in the first month of its operation but very few thereafter. 10 MEPO 2/3043, Transcript of letter from Wegg-Prosser to Mosley in Special Branch Report of Fascist and Anti-Fascist Meetings held during May 1938, 3 June 1938. 11 Board of Deputies, Hendon, Papers of the Jewish Defence Committee, C6/3/1B/4, Progress report, August 1937. 12 Board of Deputies, C6/9/1/3, Letter to Board of Deputies from J. Jacobs, 11 March 1937, and reply to J. Jacobs from Board of Deputies, 15 March 1937. 13 George Orwell, ‘Antisemitism in Britain’, Contemporary Jewish Record, April 1945. 14 NCCL, DCL 37/4, Letter to Ronald Kidd from J. H. Hall MP, 16 March 1937. 15 MEPO 2/3109, BUF activities in East End, protests by several MPs, 24 April 1937, and DCL 37/4, Letter to MPs from Kidd, 17 March 1937. 16 HO 144/21063, Notes of MPs’ interview with the Home Secretary, 24 March 1937. 17 MEPO 2/3109, Letter and report to Sir John Simon from Sir Stafford Cripps, 24 March 1937, and Home Office minute, 27 March 1937. 18 MEPO 2/3109, BUF activities in the East End, Protests by several MPs, 24 April 1937. 19 HO 144/21063, Letter to Philip Game from F. A. Newsam, 13 May 1937. 20 HO 144/21063, Letter to F. A. Newsam from Philip Game, 24 May 1937. 21 HO 144/21063, Letter to F. A. Newsam from Philip Game, 11 May 1937. 22 MEPO 2/3104, Minute note signed Commissioner of Police, 22 February 1937. 23 MEPO 2/3104, Minute note 26, 4 March 1937. 24 MEPO 2/3104, Report from Wood Green Station ‘Y’ Division, Superintendent Darke, 4 February 1937. 25 MEPO 2/3104, Minute note 13, 9 February 1937 and minute note 19, 13 February 1937. 26 MEPO 2/3104, Special Branch report, 16 March 1937. 27 MEPO 2/3104, Memo to the Secretary of State from Commissioner of Police, 2 April 1937. 28 HO 144/21063, Memo on BUF meeting at Hornsey Town Hall on 25 January 1937, Criticism of police action by the NCCL, F. A. Newsam, 13 April 1937.

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29 HO 144/21063, Letter to the Commissioner from A. Maxwell, 16 April 1937. 30 NCCL, DCL 40/6, Letter from John Simon to Fred Messer, 17 May 1937. 31 HO 144/21063, Letter to Sir John Simon from Fred Messer MP, 25 May 1937. 32 Parl. Debs, 29 April 1937, vol. 323, col. 511–12. 33 HO 144/21380, Confidential memo to D. A. C.s 1 to 4 from the Commissioner’s office, 29 June 1937. 34 Ibid. 35 HO 45/25463, Special Branch report on a delegate conference on fascism and anti-semitism held by the JPC and the NCCL, 28 April 1937. 36 HO 144/21380, Home Office minutes, National Council for Civil Liberties, 7 June 1937. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., and HO144/21086, Order made by the Commissioner of Police under Public Order Act 1936, 21 June 1937. 39 NCCL, DCL 8/5, Letter to J. H. Hall from Kidd, secretary to the NCCL, 22 June 1937. 40 Civil Liberty, No.2 (New Series), Autumn 1937, p. 15. 41 HO 144/21086, Home Office minute, 3 May 1937, and Report of the Commissioner’s discussion with Maxwell and Dawson headed Disturbances in the East End. 42 HO 144/21086, Memo to the Commissioner from A. Canning, Chief Constable, Special Branch, 1 June 1937. 43 HO 144/21086, Memo to the Secretary of State from the Commissioner, 9 June 1937, and Memo to the Under Secretary of State, 12 June 1937. 44 HO 144/21086, Home Office minutes on proposed march of British Union of Fascists, 11–16 June 1937. 45 HO 144/21086, Letter to the Under Secretary of State from the Commissioner, 16 June 1937. 46 Parl. Debs, 21 June 1937, vol. 325, col. 846–9. 47 HO 144/21086, Extract from conclusions of a meeting of the Cabinet, 23 June 1937. 48 HO 144/21086, Special Branch report, 25 June 1937. 49 HO 144/21086, Extract from conclusions of a meeting of the Cabinet, 23 June 1937, and Home Office minutes, 26 June 1937. 50 HO 144/21086, Letter from Samuel Hoare to Philip Game, 8 July 1937. 51 HO 144/21086, Memo to the Commissioner from Canning, Special Branch, 13 July 1937.

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52 Civil Liberty, No. 2 (New Series), Autumn 1937, p. 13. 53 Parl. Debs, 19 July 1937, vol. 326, col. 1794–5. 54 DCL 38/4, Letters to D. Frankel from Kidd, 17 July 1937 and 28 July 1937, and News Chronicle, 21 July 1937, p. 13. 55 Daily Herald, 21 July 1937, p. 1. 56 HO 45/25463, Special Branch report, Summary No.8, 14 May 1937. 57 NCCL, DCL 8/5, Letter to Kidd from Ernest Thurtle MP, 8 June 1937. 58 NCCL, DCL 38/4, Note to Kidd from H. Blumfield, 17 July 1937. 59 HO 144/21380, Home Office minutes, Jew baiting during July, 7 August 1937, and Commissioner’s report to the Home Secretary for the month of July, 7 August 1937. 60 HO 144/21086, Home Office minutes, Commissioner of Police, Proposed Marches and Demonstrations in the East End of London, 17 to 30 July 1937. 61 HO 144/21086, Home Office minute, Commissioner of Police, Political Processions in the East End of London, F. A. Newsam, 6 September 1937. 62 Ibid. James Mallon was Warden of Toynbee Hall from 1914–54 During the 1930s he was appointed to a number of Commissions, including the League of Nations Union, British Empire Exhibition and Royal Commission on Licensing. He was on the Board of Governors of the BBC from 1937–39. 63 HO 144/21086, Letter from Samuel Hoare to Attlee, Harris, Morrison and Sinclair, 9 September 1937. 64 HO 144/21086, Letters to Hoare from Archibald Sinclair, 13 September 1937 and from Attlee, undated. 65 HO 144/21087, Home Office minutes, Sir Oswald Mosley, Police action against organisers of counter-demonstration, 2 to 11 October 1937. 66 HO 144/21087, Letter from E. H. Tindall Atkinson, Director of Public Prosecutions, to the Commissioner, 8 October 1937. 67 HO 144/21087, Home Office minutes, Sir Oswald Mosley, police action against organisers of counter demonstration, 11 October 1937. 68 HO 144/21086, Fascist Procession in South London, minutes of deputation to the Home Office, 22 September 1937. 69 HO 144/21086, Memo from D. A. C. 4’s office, 4 October 1937. 70 HO 144/21086, Special Branch report of BUF demonstration, 3 October 1937. 71 NCCL, DCL 40/5, NCCL report, Incidents at the Fascist March, Sunday 3 October 1937. 72 NCCL, DCL 40/5, Letter to Kidd from H. W. M. Peel, Westminster (St. George) Divisional Labour Party, undated.

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73 NCCL, DCL 40/5, Letter to Ronald Kidd from Eleanor Singer, 4 October 1937. 74 NCCL, DCL 40/5, Letter to The NCCL from H. C. Balman JP, Organising Secretary of the Rotherhithe Labour Party, 5 October 1937. 75 HO 144/21087, Memo from Philip Game, Commissioner of Police, to the Secretary of State, 5 October 1937. 76 HO 144/21087, Home Office minutes, 6–8 October 1937. 77 HO 144/21087, Memo to the Secretary of State, public processions in London, from F. A. Newsam, 6 October 1937. 78 HO 144/21087, Memo to the Cabinet, prohibition of political processions in London, from the Home Secretary, 7 October 1937. 79 MEPO 2/3120, Minutes, British Union of Fascists, Marching after Sunset, 4 January 1938. 80 HO 144/21087, Memo to the Secretary of State from the Commissioner, 5 October 1937, and Home Office memo, Public Processions in London, 6 October 1937. 81 Parl. Debs, 15 December 1937, vol. 330, col. 1239–98. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid. 84 HO 144/21087, Handwritten note to Secretary of State, East End Processions, 7 March 1938. 85 HO 144/21087, Notes for conference with opposition leaders, 7 March 1938. 86 HO 144/21087, Letter to the Home Secretary from West Leyton Labour Party, 11 April 1938. 87 HO 144/21087, Letter to the Home Secretary from the Cambridge University Socialist Club, 28 April 1938. 88 HO 144/21087, Letter to the Home Secretary from the Limehouse Divisional Labour Party, 22 March 1938. 89 HO 144/21087, Letter to the Home Secretary from West Ham Trades Council, 28 March 1938. 90 HO 144/21087, Home Office minutes, 4–5 May 1938. 91 HO 144/21087, Norman Brook, political processions in East London, 8 June 1938. 92 MEPO 2/8656, Order under Defence (General) Regulations, 1939 dated 21 August 1941. 93 MEPO 2/6264, Memo to Home Office, 26 September 1944. 94 MEPO 2/6264, Letter to Philip Game from Sir Alexander Maxwell, 25 October 1944. 95 HO 45/25463, Note for debate, December 1937. 96 Parl. Debs, 3 March 1938, vol. 332, col. 1273–4. 97 Parl. Debs, 24 March 1938, vol. 333, col. 1394.

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98 HO 45/25388, Private letter to the Home Secretary from Tom Groves, 23 March 1938. 99 Parl. Debs, 5 May 1938, vol. 335, col. 1066. 100 Parl. Debs, 20 June 1938, vol. 337, col. 706–7. 101 MEPO 3/2490, Letter to Norman Brook from Philip Game, 27 June 1938. 102 HO 45/25463, NCCL, Activities in connection with disturbances on 31 January 1939, 5 May 1939. 103 NCCL, DCL 8/6, Letter to Dr. Edith Summerskill MP from Ronald Kidd, 4 February 1939. 104 NCCL, DCL 7/4, Whitehall and Piccadilly Circus demonstration – 31 January 1939, index of statements, February 1939. 105 Parl. Debs, 13 February 1939, vol. 343, col. 1514. 106 NCCL, DCL 8/6, Letter to Kidd from D. N. Pritt, 14 February 1939. 107 HO 45/25463, Letter to S. S. Silverman MP from Samuel Hoare, 5 May 1939. 108 DCL 7/4, Letter to Ronald Kidd from Margery Fry, 4 April 1939.

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The NCCL: recognition and regime change

By the end of the 1930s a strong civil liberties movement had been established and a mechanism was in place that was able to rally the support of MPs to bring questions to Parliament whenever repressive legislation or the excessive use of police powers provoked protest. Outside the parliamentary sphere, press and public perceptions of the NCCL show that, by the latter part of the decade, the organisation had achieved wide recognition as an important pressure group allied with national and international interests in civil liberties. From a political viewpoint the non-party organisations that flourished in interwar Britain were problematic, and the NCCL occupied a complex and finely balanced position in the political spectrum. The sustained attack by the police on the NCCL’s political orientation did not damage support for the organisation but when, towards the end of the decade, Labour politicians voiced fears that the organisation was under Communist Party direction, its mainstream support was threatened and Kidd was forced to defend his own political position and that of the NCCL. Scotland Yard had seen the politics of the NCCL as those of Kidd but it was as Kidd’s influence on the administration of the organisation began to weaken at the beginning of the 1940s that it came increasingly to be seen as under the direction of communist interests. From the early days of the NCCL Special Branch intelligence had promoted the view that Kidd was a pawn of the Communist Party. It had been perceptions of Kidd’s own politics and his apparent willingness to ‘follow the party line’ that had precipitated Special Branch attention in the organisation.1 However, as Special Branch turned its attention to the NCCL’s wider connections from the beginning of 1938 it gradually came to question whether the Communist Party found Kidd useful to its ambitions.

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The NCCL: a national pressure group The work the organisation was involved in from 1937 shows an increasing confidence in its position as an important pressure group player involved with a wide range of civil liberties issues at home and with British interests overseas. The NCCL contributed to an international conference in Paris in July 1937. Kidd’s speech was a joint enterprise in association with the Haldane Society and, among other issues, called attention to the raft of legislation introduced in England throughout the 1920s and 1930s that had led to the erosion of individual liberty, and to the arbitrary use of police power to interfere with political meetings such as that in Thurloe Square. 2 Kidd was invited to speak on the question of legislation against racial incitement at the Second World Congress against Racism and Anti-Semitism in Paris in September 1937. He later became vice-chairman of the British committee of the Congress and remained so until the outbreak of war, when it suspended its activities.3 During the same month he accompanied the Liberal MP Richard Ackland on a visit to the Brazilian Charge d’affairs in London to protest about the inhumane conditions in Brazilian prisons. In October the NCCL convened a conference in conjunction with the India League on Civil Liberty in India. Representatives of 50 organisations attended the conference and messages of support came from a number of MPs as well as literary and political figures, including some of the founder members of the organisation such as Gerald Barry, Kingsley Martin, Ellen Wilkinson and Stafford Cripps.4 At the beginning of 1938 the NCCL organised a series of meetings in London to protest against labour conditions and the actions of the authorities in the West Indies. The speakers included Arthur Creech Jones MP whose article on ‘Civil Liberties in the Colonies’ was published in the spring 1938 edition of Civil Liberty.5 Kidd contributed to papers on academic freedom and racial discrimination in Poland. He organised a protest against religious segregation in Polish universities in the form of ‘An Open Letter from British Scholars to their Colleagues in Poland’, collecting more than 250 signatures from academics at British universities. To mark the coronation of King Edward VIII, he campaigned for a political amnesty and the release of political prisoners in Northern Ireland, British India and British Crown Colonies, Protectorates and Mandated Territories.6

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Kidd spent five weeks in the summer of 1938 ‘fact finding’ in the Sudeten-German areas of Czechoslovakia and subsequently addressed crowded Labour Research Department and Left Book Club meetings on what he regarded as the ‘scandalous sacrifice [of] our Czech friends’ by the British and French Governments.7 An NCCL conference, ‘Without the Law – Peoples and Refugees’, was held in November 1938 to highlight the plight of refugees from Germany and Czechoslovakia. On the matter of refugees and the right to asylum the NCCL organised deputations to the Foreign Secretary and the High Commissioners of Canada, New Zealand, Australia and South Africa. Kidd, Eleanor Rathbone MP and H. G. Wells were among those involved. The aim was to impress upon representatives of British Dominion Governors the importance of accepting responsibility for large-scale schemes for settlement of refugees under the terms of the Munich Agreement.8 In October of 1938 and in association with the National Peace Council, the NCCL hosted a conference at University College London on ‘War Preparations and Democratic Liberties’ to highlight the threat that the intensification of war preparations posed to civil liberties. Five hundred delegates and visitors attended, representing 40 national and 100 local bodies. The first months of the war saw a profusion of NCCL conference activity. In April 1940 a weekend conference in Brighton addressed ‘The Press, Civil Servants and Trade Unions in Wartime’.9 In July an emergency conference on the same issues held in London attracted 1300 participants, who filled the conference venue and a second adjacent hall to capacity, necessitating two parallel meetings. One hundred and forty-two political organisations and 104 ‘religious, cultural and progressive bodies’ were represented. It was reported in Civil Liberty as ‘one of the most effective and successful conferences which the Council has held’.10 One month later more than 1500 delegates attended the NCCL’s ‘largest and most representative conference’ since its foundation, at Central Hall Westminster. Messages of support for the ‘Civil Liberty and Defeat of Fascism’ initiative were received from David Lloyd George, Harold Laski and a string of MPs.11 This was a successful period for the NCCL. Kidd himself was a popular and respected champion of civil liberties. He and the activities of the organisation were able to influence varied political interests. It was recognised by politicians and press and public

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opinion as an important pressure group. But the situation was more complicated than these achievements suggest. The NCCL’s position was as finely balanced in the complexities of left-wing politics as it was in its relationship with the police and the Home Secretary. Special Branch saw it as more of a threat than ever and reported communist influence on the organisation increasing markedly towards the end of the 1930s. Special Branch intelligence often exaggerated communist connections but this view was not without foundation. It was a matter that also troubled Labour politicians. At the same time the practice of observing and challenging police behaviour ensured that the NCCL had an uneasy association with operational policing and with Scotland Yard. And yet the Home Office was influenced by its representations. Ronald Kidd: the end of the affair Part of Scotland Yard’s strategy was to focus on Kidd as the perpetrator of the unwanted attention on police actions. Special Branch reports were summarised as ‘a précis of information relating to Ronald Hubert Kidd and the National Council for Civil Liberties’. He had been deemed the motivating force of the organisation, responsible for promoting the enrolment of ‘non-communist progressives and liberty lovers’ to further the interests of communism. His whereabouts, his attendance at events, and the content of his speeches and correspondence were extensively recorded.12 Kidd’s own activities and the activities of the NCCL were reported as essentially one and the same. NCCL literature and press statements were regarded as ‘over Kidd’s signature’ and the launch of Civil Liberty was dismissed as under Kidd’s editorship.13 However, from 1938 Special Branch began to recognise communist influence within the NCCL distinct from Kidd. Its report for the month of August dropped the focus on Kidd in favour of ‘information relating to the National Council for Civil Liberties’ and devoted two pages to an explanation of fractions within the NCCL that were believed to be outside Kidd’s influence.14 It claimed to have ‘received’ detailed information ‘which throws an interesting light on the manner in which Communist Party contacts penetrate the NCCL’, and identified the NCCL as one of the two most important front organisations for the Communist Party in Britain (the other being the Haldane Society). It described ‘secret’

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groups of professional people who acted as ‘militant left-wingers’ rather than become Party members, and were attached to a Middle Class Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. These groups operated as communist fractions within organisations such as the NCCL and the Haldane Society. Much was made of Dudley Collard’s involvement with both organisations.15 He was understood to be at the centre of a highly effective communist fraction within the Haldane Society. As secretary of the Society his ‘energetic leadership’ was thought to have doubled its membership within a few months.16 Quoting from the Society’s Annual Report for 1937–38 Special Branch listed 64 barristers and solicitors willing to ‘advise or appear in court in matters involving the principle of civil liberty’ and who were at the disposal of the NCCL. The Special Branch information did recognise that not all those acting in a legal capacity for the NCCL or holding office on its various committees were communists. Kidd himself was described as ‘hand in glove’ with the communist fractions but not a Party member.17 The communist element was reported to be sufficiently powerful to ensure that ‘the policy pursued by the council in all matters of importance is that desired by the Communist Party’.18 Lawyers associated with the Haldane Society, Collard among them, had been at the centre of the legal arm of the NCCL’s membership from the outset. But it was following the more formal association between the two organisations at the international conference in Paris that Special Branch attached this import to the relationship. According to Special Branch information the first meeting of the NCCL’s legal sub-committee controlled by the communist fraction was held in June 1937. Collard chaired the meeting and outlined the objectives to give legal advice on civil liberties issues and represent in court all suitable cases. A rota of lawyers would be available for weekly ‘surgeries’ at the NCCL’s offices. The legal services were given free and attention was drawn to the importance of limiting cases to issues of civil liberty so as to avoid acting as ‘poor man’s lawyers’.19 However, the panel may not have been so committed or pro-active as Special Branch information might suggest. After just four weeks of the rota Kidd complained of ‘a certain slackness in members not informing the secretary when they are unable to attend’ and no case had been recommended as suitable for defence in court. The bulk of the cases presented in the first weeks had been connected with Mosley’s St. Pancras march

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and were felt to arise from ‘the undue enthusiasm of those who sought advice’.20 Moreover, the arrangement may not have been entirely benevolent – it was made very clear to members of the legal panel that no cost to the NCCL would be accepted unless previously authorised. However, there may have been some difficulty on that issue since the policy was subsequently clarified and reissued some months later.21 It is not obvious either from Special Branch reports or from the records of the NCCL that the increased communist influences identified by Special Branch made any immediate impact on the administration of the organisation, which was undertaken almost exclusively by Kidd. That may, of course, reflect Kidd’s determination to retain control of the functions of organisations but in any event Kidd’s activities dominated the August 1938 summary as they had earlier reports. Previous summaries had reported some criticism from NCCL members of Kidd’s dictatorial style as secretary, 22 but there is no indication that his personal initiative in implementing committee decisions had been moderated by shifting influences within the organisation. In effect, Special Branch reports of Kidd’s activities appear to indicate that he remained responsible for the execution of all aspects of the Council’s work. Letters of complaint from the NCCL sent to the Metropolitan Police were summarised as correspondence from Kidd. Details of events at which NCCL observers were present in almost every case referred to Kidd’s own attendance. Kidd appears among the speakers at many meetings and conferences. He wrote articles for the press and was editor of Civil Liberty, the NCCL’s journal. He entertained visiting guest speakers such as Indian leader Jawaharlal Nehru and Miss Koo Chu Chen, daughter of the Chinese ambassador in Paris.23 There was little sign of delegation. In fact, Kidd’s punishing schedule took its toll on his health. In the late autumn of 1938 heart trouble enforced a period of hospitalisation. He later wrote: ‘The surgeon who attended me in hospital, and specialists whom I consulted later, all said that in their opinion the heart was not diseased but that the trouble was due to prolonged overwork.’24 It was above all ill health that was eventually to force Kidd to relinquish some of the control of the organisation. In fact his increasingly extended periods of absence may well have exacerbated the worries over growing communist influence that began to be expressed beyond the confines of Special Branch intelligence. Signs

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of concern in the labour movement were apparent in the publicity around an NCCL conference, ‘Civil Liberty and the Defeat of Fascism’, on 24 August 1940. The conference was concerned with the freedom of the press in wartime and the suppression of the Daily Worker. According to Special Branch every individual or organisation thought to be remotely sympathetic was being supplied with ‘liberal doses of literature’ and a number of trade union leaders and politicians were invited to speak. A subsequent meeting at the House of Commons had attracted 150 MPs, 40 of them Conservatives. However, criticism of the Daily Worker had notably come from Labour Party members. The National Council of Labour issued an open letter to all its affiliated bodies disassociating itself from the conference and claiming that it had all matters that concerned the labour movement constantly under review. It emphatically repudiated the suggestion that any other body might make representations to ministers under the guise that they were made on behalf of the Labour movement.25 The NCCL’s reply to TUC General Secretary Walter Citrine was signed by Nevinson and Kidd. It vigorously denied any intention to make representations on behalf of the labour movement and expressed regret that at a time when the focus should be on the eradication of fascism the National Council of Labour should make charges against the NCCL without any foundation whatsoever.26 A conference resolution to arrange deputations to the Home Secretary and MPs was similarly not readily received, although the large attendance at the conference and presence of Frank Owen (editor of the Evening Standard) and Lord Strabolgi (opposition Chief Whip) on the same platform as men like Professor Haldane and William Rust (editor of the Daily Worker) caused some disquiet. The consistent Home Office advice against receiving deputations from the NCCL, this ‘semi-communist body’, was tempered on this occasion. In the light of the hostile reaction from the labour movement it was felt the reply need not be couched in too forthright language.27 Special Branch information gives an idea of the dilemma in the Labour Party. Labour leaders shared the Special Branch view that the London District Committee of the Communist Party had a separate agenda to assume tighter control of the NCCL. Nevertheless, the request for a deputation to be received came from Attlee and was understood to have caused extreme embarrassment in the Labour Party. The communist fraction was considered to be

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behind the conferences but, at the same time, there were fears that if no deputation were arranged the suggestion would be made that Labour leaders had finally forsaken the cause of civil liberty.28 The following month Special Branch reported signs that the NCCL was on the point of disintegration because of its success. The two London conferences and follow-up regional conferences had been very successful, resulting in greatly increased activity and membership. There were doubts that the central management of the organisation was sufficiently strong to co-ordinate the additional administration. The Special Branch intelligence suggests that Kidd had had to relinquish some control. Lawyer Geoffrey Bing was believed to have been almost solely responsible for the organisation of the conferences. There was criticism of Kidd and Sylvia Crowther-Smith, now regarded as ‘poor organisers and … becoming increasingly hostile to the Communist Party’. The executive committee was understood to have approved the recommendation of the communist fraction to appoint Miss Nancy Bell, ‘a Party member’, as national organiser.29 A further period of illness kept Kidd from his work for the NCCL throughout January and February of 1941. In March he asked his consultant for a letter confirming his medical condition in support of his request to the executive committee for additional clerical assistance. His physician recommended limiting physical activity and working hours, and bed rest whenever the frequent bouts of illness occurred.30 Although still the figurehead of the organisation, Kidd’s personal involvement in its activities was now gravely impeded by his failing health. Nevertheless, despite the prognosis of Special Branch, Home Office sources considered disintegration of the NCCL unlikely. An undercover Home Office source within the NCCL suggested that a ‘Liberty Campaign’, prepared by the Communist Party Bureau attached to civil liberties work, would be launched in January 1941. This fraction was considered to be vigorous and relatively popular and likely to thrust the less effective and more academic elements into the background.31 The subsequent changes brought in Harold Laski as a new addition to the executive committee. Laski was especially interested in freedom of the press and had published on the subject. A solicitors’ department had been formed under the direction of a Miss Angela Tuckett, reported to be ‘head of the CP secret legal group’ and a ‘salaried organiser’. Miss Nancy Bell had been appointed. Home Office observations

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noted that the appointment of additional staff had been made possible by the ‘staggeringly generous support of the Civil Service Clerical Association’ and an addition of 620 new members and 290 affiliated societies.32 Despite the changes, increased membership inevitably impacted on the already inadequate financial and administrative resources of the organisation. Throughout the seven years of its existence Kidd had managed the increasing workload with no additional resource. In the light of the increased membership he proposed a reorganisation of the administration, a move to larger premises to accommodate essential additional staff, and the appointment of a second Assistant Secretary.33 Special Branch reported that the communist fraction was putting up Miss Elizabeth Ackland Allen, formerly organiser of the International Peace Campaign, for the post of Assistant Secretary. According to Special Branch the Communist Party saw in Miss Ackland the necessary forcefulness to ‘manage’ Kidd and ‘an excellent opportunity to introduce efficient administration’. Clearly, the wavering Labour Party support was a blow to the organisation. Kidd and Laski had been forced to denounce the communist influence and to defend objections to D. N. Pritt’s membership of the Council following his expulsion from the Labour Party in 1940 for his anti-war views and communist associations.34 His continued involvement with the NCCL left it vulnerable in particular to the communist paranoia of the labour movement. Correspondence with Nevinson suggests that Kidd was concerned about Pritt’s continued position on the executive.35 Kidd and his fellow founders of the organisation were about to face their biggest challenge. The controversy around the suppression of the Daily Worker and the freedom of the press campaign had divided opinion. All the more so since the organisation had remained silent on the issues for civil liberties raised by Mosley’s internment without trial.36 A major blow for the organisation was the resignation of Harold Laski. Laski had been a highly respected and influential member of the organisation and one of its first vice-presidents. He wrote: I have regretfully come to the conclusion that I cannot serve on a body which contains communist members. I do not I fear, believe that they are interested in any problems except as they can exploit the council for their own purposes.37

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Freedom of the press in Britain, then as now, provoked strong views. According to Special Branch it was ‘persecution mania’ that had led the Communist Party to believe that Laski had been asked to resign by the National Council of Labour prior to its blacklisting the NCCL and that other resignations were expected to follow.38 At the same time, Home Office sources admitted to being unsuccessful in gaining press publicity for propaganda suggesting that the Communist Party was behind a proposal to hold the Joint NCCL and NUJ Press Freedom Committee meeting on 7 June. The Daily Herald, the Daily Express and The Times all refused to use the story.39 However, five days before the joint meeting, A. M. Wall, leader of the Labour Trades Council, made damaging allegations at a Labour Party Conference that the NCCL was under the control of communists. Wall’s statements were particularly injurious because as a member of the committee set up to investigate alleged ‘Fifth Column’ activities and as a former vice-president of the NCCL, who had often shared the speakers’ platform with Kidd and other NCCL supporters, he would be expected to have specialist knowledge of the supposed communist intrigues. A furious Kidd insisted that Wall had never taken the trouble to investigate the Council’s affairs or visited the offices but rather had joined the whispering campaign started by the National Council of Labour following its boycott of the NCCL’s freedom of the press conferences during the previous summer.40 Kidd’s repudiation was circulated to the press and was endorsed by fellow founder NCCL members Henry Nevinson, E. M. Forster and W. H. Thompson, who insisted the organisation would not be under communist or any political domination while under their stewardship.41 Kidd appealed to Kingsley Martin to make a special effort and to publish the piece in the next issue of the New Statesman, adding that two of the NCCL’s most liberal statesmen, Nevinson and Forster, were ‘very upset’ and ‘very anxious for our repudiation to be published’.42 The unsteadiness of Labour support threatened serious consequences for the organisation, but equally so for its leading personalities, some of whom were deeply disturbed by the communist association and eager to disassociate themselves from it. The Council’s public response involved ‘a good deal of desultory and lengthy discussion’ within the executive committee. Laski, not confident that his resignation would free him from the communist slur, and Kingsley Martin were particularly keen that any press

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statement should conform to their own personal views. They were fearful that the recommendations of Kidd and Miss Tuckett might be construed as exhibiting a ‘communist trend’. An article that appeared in Time and Tide a few days later, making unfavourable reference to the NCCL leadership, was suspected to have been orchestrated by Kingsley Martin.43 Time and Tide agreed to publish the Council’s response and both Forster and Nevinson also wrote personally to the editor, even though it was anticipated that the repudiations would likely be tempered by editorial comment. Kidd recognised that the allegations were near impossible to defend. He wrote: if one denies absolutely being a Communist or ever having been one, one is suspected of being a secret member of the CP … In the language of the heresy-hunt, one may also be labelled ‘near-Communist’ or ‘half-Communist’. One really cannot keep up with this sort of thing and unless one’s word is to be trusted I do not see what one can do about it.44

Kidd deplored the heresy hunting in which the Labour Party was engaged. He regarded any suggestion that doctrinal tests should be carried out into the opinions of employees as scandalous and disgraceful. He quoted Winston Churchill, ‘a tough old Tory’, who had condemned heresy hunting for personal opinions as thoroughly objectionable and alien to all instincts of a democratic people.45 By the summer of 1941 Kidd’s failing health made it increasingly difficult for him to direct the affairs of the NCCL although he did remain involved. The Special Branch report for October, perhaps rashly, advised that ‘Miss Crowther-Smith has resigned and Ronald Kidd is not expected to return’. According to Special Branch the administration of the NCCL was in the charge of Miss Bell and as such more firmly than ever under Communist Party control. The new administration was reported to be reorganising the NCCL’s financial affairs, still thought to be in serious difficulty, to effect savings and to sideline Kidd and Crowther-Smith. But while a restructuring of staff dispensed with the services of CrowtherSmith, it was judged both wrong and possibly harmful to discharge Kidd, who was now terminally ill, because he was ‘such a well known figure and so closely connected in the public mind with civil liberty matters’. In a new departure the report was copied to MI5.46 Bearing in mind the subjective nature of Special Branch intelligence,

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the extent of communist influence within the organisation in this period is uncertain. It is, however, clear that a new regime was directing the activities of the NCCL by the end of 1941. He was no longer in control of the organisation. Kidd himself was critical of the executive and of the new regime. He shared with Forster a view that much of the Council’s difficulties arose from ‘grave mismanagement’ by the executive committee and the complacency of some of its members. He found the continued insinuations of office inefficiency under his administration insufferable and saw no difference between the financial difficulties with which the new administration was grappling and those he had dealt with over the previous seven years.47 Kidd was clearly not close to the executive at this time and, although he initiated the recommendation, he does not appear to have been involved in the office reorganisation. Whether, like Special Branch, he recognised increased interests of the Communist Party in the organisation is not clear. His insistence that a ‘distinguished national figure’ should be found to take on the presidency following Nevinson’s death perhaps indicates his concern that the importance of connections with prominent people and a non-party persona had not been appreciated. Kidd himself had been offered the presidency but he turned it down, reasoning that: my name is broadly known in what I may perhaps broadly call ‘the progressive movement’, it is a fact that I am in no sense a national figure, and I feel strongly that such a national figure is essential for the prestige of this Council.48

He preferred the title of Director and wanted to concentrate on producing Civil Liberty and pursuing a public relations role with trade union leaders and Members of Parliament – a role with which he was familiar and in which he felt he had had some success.49 It was Pritt, together with Nancy Bell and L. C. White, General Secretary of the Civil Service Alliance and chairman of the executive committee, that put together the final proposals for Kidd’s role in 1941. They recognised an obligation ‘to be as generous as possible to Ronald Kidd, and … to cause him the minimum apprehension about the future’.50 This view was evidently not universally shared within the organisation. Kidd found it necessary to write personally to White offering to circulate members of the executive, at his own expense, with a brief explanation of his views on the presidency and of his own position. He promised to avoid reference to any

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ill-feeling that might have existed behind the scenes between himself and W. H. Thompson.51 Kidd gave assurances that he would not interfere with the authority of Miss Allen as General Secretary, or with her responsibility for the administration of the office and staff, but that his specialist knowledge was at her disposal for any difficulties, large or small.52 Nevertheless, Kidd’s final days at the NCCL were not the happiest. A ‘private and personal’ note from Kingsley Martin read: I am not really on the inside of this particular row. I am extremely sorry that it should have developed to such proportions. I did not know that any particular member of the Council had an animus against you such as you suggest in one case, nor did I hear the particular charges to which you refer made against you at the sub-committee I attended … If you wish to talk things over with me some time before the matter is again discussed, I should of course be happy to see you.53

Ronald Kidd died on 12 May 1942. Obituaries and memorials remembered him as a selfless champion of civil liberties whose faith in freedom transcended the philosophical difficulties inherent in the idea of freedom and who, even in his last days, cared more for the fight for the rights of the individual than for his own failing health. Among the many tributes Lord Olivier remembered him as ‘one of the foremost fighters for the liberty of this country, India and the Colonial Empire’. Gerald Barry described the NCCL as ‘a valuable monument to his enthusiasm and integrity’. Ruth Fry hoped for his work to be ‘carried on with the vigour that he would wish’. Geoffrey Bing praised his energy, courage and self-sacrifice and wrote of the NCCL as his ‘living memorial’.54 The NCCL of the 1930s had been driven by Kidd’s own strong beliefs and sustained by his personal connections with friends and colleagues, politicians, lawyers and journalists who he inspired with his eloquence, his loyalty, his stubborn courage and refusal to admit defeat.55 The outbreak of war changed the dynamics of liberty and freedom. As fascism became discredited the focus of the NCCL moved away from the policing of political activism to other concerns such as the freedom of the press and the rights of members of the armed forces, civil servants and trade unions in wartime. The issues had changed but the mechanisms to challenge repressive government measures and excessive police powers had been established. It is notable that, despite the attempts to discredit the organisation, when the Daily

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8.1  Ronald Kidd as a young man

Mirror was threatened with suppression in 1942, the NCCL had no difficulty in securing a number of MPs and literary figures prepared to participate in a deputation to the Home Secretary.56 Perhaps Kidd put it best himself. Writing of his disappointment at not being well enough to address the NCCL’s annual general meeting in 1942, as he had done on every previous year, he wrote: As founder of the Council just over eight years ago I have devoted every energy and every moment to building up a strong and stable Council – almost literally day and night. That was only possible by the generous and willing aid of lawyers, speakers and others, but we did manage to build up something that has taken its place in the nation’s life – something that is worth preserving if we are to preserve the very elements of our democratic state.57

The monthly returns to the Home Secretary on ‘Jew baiting’ required since the summer of 1936 finally stopped at the request of the Commissioner in June 1940. Anti-fascist activities had ceased to feature in the Commissioner’s Annual Report from 1939.58 The NCCL, nevertheless, remained a part of the political scene. After Kidd’s death Special Branch reported: ‘following the death of Mr

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Ronald Kidd, the communists are likely to have their way with this body’.59 Its interest in the organisation continued undiminished. From around the time of Kidd’s death Special Branch appears to have had a highly effective contact inside the organisation. Confidential reports and minutes of NCCL committee meetings formed the content of Special Branch reports to the Home Secretary and to MI5; they were still submitted fortnightly into the 1950s. The financial position of the organisation remained perilous. In 1955 it was reported to be ‘dire’ and the Council ‘leading a hand to mouth existence … kept solvent by occasional legacies and special appeals for funds’.60 The NCCL’s relationship with the police and the Home Secretary remained complex. On one occasion the decision not to prosecute a purveyor of anti-semitic material was made because of fears it would give credence to the organisation,61 and yet on another occasion the Home Secretary was prepared to receive a deputation from the NCCL to discuss how meetings intended to incite racial hatred might be stopped.62 In 1951 Special Branch was prepared to concede that the NCCL’s first vice-presidents had included several individuals who had become distinguished members of the Government or representatives of independent thought. At the same time the involvement of communists and communist sympathisers was believed to have markedly increased since the early days and the individual NCCL member was still thought to be unaware of the true political colour of the organisation.63 The survival of the NCCL beyond Kidd’s death in 1942 was attributable, as it had been during his time as General Secretary, to widespread genuine concerns for police powers and civil liberties and the mainstream cross-party support for a civil liberties movement. Its demands for Government action against inequality and injustice were often not met to its satisfaction but the success of its representations was in its ability to keep the issue of civil liberties within the public consciousness and on the political agenda. The NCCL was fundamentally not about anti-fascism; indeed it was conceived in the politics of labour, unemployment and the hunger marches. From the outset the organisation did have the support of MPs that was essential to its survival. But it was through its campaign against fascist anti-semitism during the latter half of the 1930s that the NCCL most successfully secured vital representation in Parliament and thus the ear of the Home Secretary. The perception of ineffective or biased policing that appeared to tolerate

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Mosley’s anti-semitic methods was of grave concern to those MPs whose constituencies included large Jewish communities, and was abhorrent to those who valued individual liberty. Lawrence’s view of Olympia as a watershed for fascist violence has been questioned, as discussed earlier.64 Nevertheless, the wide support for the NCCL’s aims suggests there was, as Lawrence argues, a substantial body of opinion that found political violence unacceptable. Further, it suggests that this extended to condemnation of policing policies that appeared to tolerate violent fascist provocation. Through the activities of the NCCL these views were articulated in the parliamentary arena and thus they contributed to the Home Office dialogue with the Commissioner and ultimately to policing policy. It was the fight against policing policies perceived as tolerant of fascist anti-semitism that most notably identified the NCCL’s activities and campaigns through the 1930s and did most to establish the organisation as a recognised pressure group. The mechanisms put in place by the campaign against anti-semitism ensured that oppressive legislation and the excessive use of police power would not in the future go unchallenged. Notes 1 The Special Branch view of Kidd and the NCCL is discussed in chapter 3. 2 NCCL, DCL 75/2, Conference reports and correspondence, 1937. 3 Ibid., and DCL 44/3, Correspondence on British committee of the World Congress Against Racism and Anti-Semitism, 1937–39. 4 NCCL, DCL 75/2, Conference reports and correspondence, 1937. 5 HO 45/25463, Special Branch report on the NCCL, 24 August 1938 and Civil Liberty, No. 3 (New Series), Spring 1938. 6 NCCL, DCL 75/2, Conference reports and correspondence, 1937 and TNA, CO 323/1469/3, Letter to Rt. Hon. W. Ormsby-Gore MP, Foreign Office from Ronald Kidd, secretary of the NCCL, 22 March 1937. 7 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 2/3, Letter to Victor Gallancz from Ronald Kidd, secretary to the NCCL, 7 October 1938. 8 NCCL, DCL 75/2, Conference reports and correspondence, 1937 and Civil Liberty, No. 2 (New Series), Autumn 1937. 9 HO 45/25463, Special Branch report, 20 April 1940. 10 Civil Liberty, No. 18 (New Series), August–September 1940. 11 Civil Liberty, No. 19 (New Series), October 1940.

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12 HO 45/25463, Special Branch reports on the activities of Ronald Kidd and the NCCL, 1936 to 1939. 13 HO 45/25463, Special Branch report on the activities of Ronald Kidd and the NCCL, Summary No. 8, 14 May 1937. 14 HO 45/25463, Special Branch report on the NCCL, Summary No. 11, 24 August 1938. 15 Collard was a barrister and involved with the administration of the Haldane Society. He was Hon. Secretary of the organisation in 1938 and chairman in 1940. He was also associated with the NCCL from the outset. (The LSE holds some records of the Haldane Society.) 16 HO 45/25463, Summary No.11, Special Branch report on the NCCL, 24 August 1938. 17 HO 45/25463, Home Office minute, Disturbances etc., NCCL, 28 August 1938. 18 HO 45/25463, Special Branch report on the NCCL, Summary No. 11, 24 August 1938. 19 NCCL, DCL 32/1, Report of first meeting of the legal sub-committee, 8 June 1937. 20 NCCL, DCL 32/1, Report of legal sub-committee, 20 July 1937. 21 NCCL, DCL 32/1, Memo for the attention of the General Purposes Sub-committee, 19 April 1939. 22 HO 45/25463, Special Branch report of Kidd and NCCL, Summary No. 8, 14 May 1937. 23 HO 45/25463, Special Branch report of Kidd and the NCCL summary No. 11, 24 August 1938. 24 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 1/11, Letter from Ronald Kidd, 12 March 1941. 25 NCCL, DCL 32/5, Circular letter from the National Council of Labour, 9 August 1940. 26 NCCL, DCL 32/5, Open letter to Walter Citrine of the National Council of Labour from the NCCL, 15 August 1940. 27 HO 45/25464, Home Office minute, Sir Waldron Smithers MP. NCCL emergency conference held at Conway Hall in London on 21 July 1940. 28 HO 45/25464, Special Branch report on the NCCL, 16 August 1940. 29 HO 45/25464, Special Branch report on the NCCL, 24 September 1940. Sylvia Crowther-Smith was Kidd’s partner and subsequently became Sylvia Scaffardi. 30 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 1/7, Letter to Dr. John Parkinson from Kidd, 10 March 1941 and DSF 1/11, Copy of letter from Dr. Parkinson to Kidd and from Kidd to the NCCL, 12 March 1941. 31 HO 45/25464, Home Office minute, Commissioner of Police, NCCL, 3 October 1940; Special Branch report, 21 December 1940 and Memo to Alexander Maxwell, 23 December 1940.

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32 HO 45/25464, Home Office minute, Commissioner Special Branch, Annual General Meeting of the NCCL, 8 March 1941. 33 HO 45/25464, Copy memorandum of staff and premises, 14 April 1941. 34 HO 45/25464, Special Branch report, NCCL, 7 May 1941. 35 DCL 32/8, Letter to Henry Nevinson from Kidd, 26 June 1941. 36 DCL 32/8 has examples of correspondence highlighting the concerns of some NCCL members such as Letter from J. Stewart Cook to Kidd, 2 May 1941 and Letter from Arthur Palmer to Kidd, 15 May 1941. 37 DCL 32/8, Letter to Kidd from Harold Laski, 13 May 1941. 38 HO 45/25464, Minutes, NCCL appeal to Daily Waker Defence League for financial assistance, 20 May 1941. 39 HO 45/25464, Confidential memo to Sir Alexander Maxwell, 21 June 1941. 40 NCCL, DCL 32/8, Letter to Nevinson from Kidd, 5 June 1941. 41 NCCL, DCL 32/8, Letter to The Editor of The Journalist from Kidd, 14 June 1941 and Open letter to The Editor from Kidd, 10 June 1941. 42 NCCL, DCL 32/8, Letter to Kingsley Martin, New Statesman, from Kidd, 10 June 1941. New Statesman and Nation, 14 June 1941, p. 605. 43 NCCL, DCL 32/8, Letter to E. M. Forster from Kidd, 25 June 1941. 44 Ibid. 45 NCCL, DCL 32/8, Various correspondence between Owen Rattenbury MP and Kidd, July and August 1941. 46 HO 54/25465, Special Branch report, NCCL, 3 October 1941. 47 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 2/6, Letter to E.  M.  Forster from Kidd, secretary to the NCCL, 8 September 1941. 48 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 2/6, Memo from Ronald Kidd, The Presidency of the NCCL, undated. 49 Ibid. 50 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 2/6, Letter to Pritt from Nancy Bell, 8 December 1941 and Letters to L. C. White from D. N. Pritt, 5 and 10 December 1941. 51 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 2/6, Letter to L. C. White from Ronald Kidd, 12 December 1941. 52 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 2/6, Circular letter to Members of the Presidency Sub-Committee of the NCCL from Ronald Kidd, 8 January 1942. 53 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 2/6, Letter to Ronald [Kidd] from Kingsley [Martin], 23 January 1942. 54 Civil Liberty, Vol. 3, No. 3, June 1942, pp. 2–3. Lord Olivier was an uncle of the actor Laurence Olivier. 55 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 2/8, Obituaries and newspaper extracts, May 1942.

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56 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 1/7, Minutes of emergency meetings of the executive committee, 26 and 28 March 1942. 57 Scaffardi Papers, DSF 2/6, Letter to Dear Friends from Ronald Kidd, undated. 58 HO 144/21382, Home Office minute dated 19 June 1940, note initialled J. M. R., 22 October. 59 HO 45/25465, Minute sheet 648133/158, Special Branch New Scotland Yard report of [NCCL] Annual General Meeting, 27 March 1943. 60 HO 45/25465, Special Branch report of NCCL AGM, 11 June 1955. 61 HO 45/25465, NCCL (Edgware Group), Display of fascist and anti-semitic books, 23 February 1945. 62 HO 45/25465, Note on NCCL deputation received by the Home Secretary, 18 June 1948. 63 HO 45/25465, Letter to Miss E. H. Harting, 4 July 1951. 64 Lawrence’s work is discussed in chapter 4.

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9

Conclusion

The report of Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary on the policing of the G20 protests in London on 1 April 2009 refers to a policing dilemma with regard to public protest as ‘balancing the rights of protesters and other citizens with the duty to protect people and property from the threat of harm or injury’. The report cites the Home Secretary John Simon’s introduction of the Public Order Bill in 1936 as evidence of a longstanding commitment to preserving the right to peaceful protest. It says: ‘demonstrations by way of procession are an old and well-established method of exhibiting a point of view’.1 Yet the ‘up-for-it’ police rhetoric ahead of the G20 protests and the actions of some police officers on the day – withholding identity; indiscriminate use of batons; unprovoked violence against peaceful protesters – show that lessons from that turbulent period played little part in the police response to the dilemma on 1 April 2009. Politicians and policy makers habitually claim a commitment to preserving people’s right to protest while the evidence suggests this has often been a fragile truth. It was complaints about police behaviour and the arbitrary exercise of police powers to ban or break up meetings and processions that precipitated the 1936 Act. This gave police greater powers to interfere with political protest and made possible a total ban on political processions in the East End of London implemented a few months later. The protest and criticism of police actions continued. In that era, police action was less visible, and easier to deny. At the anti-fascist demonstration in Bermondsey in 1937, for example, witnesses complained that a woman was hit over the head with a baton and left bleeding on the pavement, perfectly orderly sections of the crowd were threatened by police with truncheons and a man was kicked repeatedly in the

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back by a police officer as he was frog-marched along the street. The demands for a public inquiry into the policing of the BUF event were summarily rejected. As the second decade of the twenty-first century begins this enduring debate has lost none of its vitality. Freedom of speech and the right to peaceful protest continue to be included among the human rights and civil liberties issues that Liberty (formerly the NCCL) fights for today.2 The New Statesman and the Guardian are not alone among today’s press in challenging interference with people’s freedom and liberties, and continue to demand restraint and accountability from the police as they did three-quarters of a century ago. The circumstances of the death of Ian Tomlinson after he was struck and pushed to the ground by a police officer at the G20 protests in 2009 remain contested, unresolved after almost two years; the police officer believed to be responsible will not face criminal charges because of conflicting post mortem evidence. The New Statesman, influential in the formation of the NCCL in an earlier era, protested in July 2010 that ‘When it comes to the relationship between law enforcement and citizens, it’s still a one-way street.’ It reminded its readers that the outcome of the investigation into Tomlinson’s death came five years to the day after the shooting by a police officer of Jean Charles de Menezes at Stockwell Tube Station in south London, when he was mistaken for a terrorist. Again, in that case, nobody was charged in connection with the death of an innocent man.3 The Guardian, under its earlier title the Manchester Guardian, a leading player in the interwar critique of police methods and fight for the defence of civil liberties, drew a parallel between Tomlinson’s death and the death of Blair Peach in April 1979. Peach died from a blow to the head during a demonstration against the National Front in Southall, west London. The Metropolitan Police had resisted demands to release material relating to Peach’s death for almost 30 years. When it was finally released following Tomlinson’s death Sir Paul Stephenson, the Metropolitan Police Commissioner, admitted that the report made ‘uncomfortable reading’ and expressed his ‘regret’ that a Met officer was likely to have been responsible for the death.4 By remarkable fortuity there were no deaths attributed to police actions during the labour protests or fascist and anti-fascist troubles of the 1930s, but there were many injuries. The maintenance of

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liberty and policing of political activism and public protest were as difficult and controversial then as they are today. At first glance the emergence of the National Council for Civil Liberties, the foundation of the civil rights movement in Britain, might be seen as merely a chance event, an angry letter to the editor of a weekend paper that caught the imagination of influential left-wing lawyers, politicians and press men and inspired the launch of a pressure group aimed at police powers and civil liberties. Chance did play a part, but at the same time there had been protest about the politicised policing of public meetings since the origins of the modern police. The complaints about police behaviour and interference with free speech that had periodically surfaced over the intervening 100 years, had been the subject of fierce debates in the press and in Parliament. The use of the streets and of public meetings to promote labour activism and the aims of political extremes through the 1930s ensured this continued unabated. The 1930s were pivotal in terms of the means of public protest about police powers and civil liberties. The period was characterised by political divisions and extremes, where partisan or violent policing was at the centre of debates about free expression; where the enduring ideal of British policing as a fine and worthy institution revered around the world had recently been challenged on a number of fronts – corruption scandals, allegations of the use of third degree methods and intimidation in the questioning of suspects, and the increasingly invasive ‘political policing’ methods of Special Branch surveillance of labour and political activists. The emergence of the NCCL in that decade can be viewed as probable, if not inevitable. Crucially, the NCCL brought new tactics and vital non-party political pressure to relations between the state and public protest. Backing for the organisation and its campaigns came from politicians and prominent social and economic commentators who represented a valuable network that promoted the NCCL’s ideals and its credibility as a non-party organisation, from which it was able to build vital cross-party contacts and support in Parliament. Sir Stafford Cripps, for example, found that the NCCL represented a collective accord that avoided the controversy of partisan politics when his advocacy of a united front with the Communist Party and the Independent Labour Party brought him onto a collision course with Labour’s executive that eventually led to the winding up of the Socialist League.5 Sir Arthur Creech Jones found association with

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the NCCL a useful means of rousing the awareness of the condition of civil liberties in Britain’s colonial countries among an ambivalent British public. This was despite his own strong position on colonial issues within the Labour Party.6 The interest of Scotland Yard and the Home Office and the regular and frequent information on Kidd and the NCCL’s ubiquitous activities reported by Special Branch are testament to the volatile public order situation and fragility of civil liberties in the period. The Scotland Yard view of the organisation, as a troublesome new feature of the political left that ought to be discouraged, might have prevailed had the NCCL not shown its sound grasp of skilful lobbying, coaching and propaganda techniques from the beginning. From the furore around the behaviour of the police at Olympia and the widespread opposition to the Incitement to Disaffection Bill; to its unofficial inquiries into the working of the Special Powers Acts in Northern Ireland and into police actions at Thurloe Square; to the introduction of a new Public Order Act and the anti-fascist campaign for more effective policing of BUF anti-semitism, MPs were willing to work with the NCCL because it approached them in a professional manner and backed its representations with hard evidence and sound legal knowledge. Moreover, the NCCL was able to capitalise on the changing attitudes to violence in politics during the interwar period that more and more MPs were prepared to speak up for in Parliament. Some individuals may still have supported the violent confrontations between adversaries epitomised by fascist activities. Pugh observed that the criticism of fascist methods in the press and in Parliament did not diminish admiration for fascist ideals among some Conservative politicians and Party members;7 equally it was not revulsion at fascist methods that prompted the Commissioner to reinforce his instructions to his officers to be more aware of ‘Jew baiting’ by fascist speakers and the ‘reasonable force’ allowed to stewards. Nevertheless, disorderly protest was increasingly less acceptable and it was pressure from Labour and Liberal MPs and the NCCL’s campaign that forced the Home Secretary to demand more effective policing of fascist violence. The idealised, self-consciously non-partisan culture of the 1930s provided a forum where the NCCL was able to demand that the police, too, must be restrained and civilised. Throughout the period the true political orientation of the organisation was problematic. But the NCCL did not attract the full

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weight of Special Branch and Home Office attention merely because it was suspected to be a front organisation for the Communist Party. Front organisations and individuals associated with them were kept under surveillance as part of a state response to political subversion and fears of incitement to disaffection within the military and state institutions. This was not the main concern in the case of the NCCL. As far as the authorities were concerned the NCCL was more than a front for the Communist Party masquerading as a non-party pressure group. It was organised and effective criticism of the police. They were worried about the effects of the NCCL’s activities on public opinion, the reputation and authority of the police and the morale of police officers. Police attempts to write off the NCCL were based on a determination to maintain the status quo in public order policing. The suspicions that the organisation was associated with the Communist Party were derived from the associations of some of its membership and allowed Scotland Yard to accuse the NCCL of itself being guilty of political bias. Special Branch intelligence both informed the Commissioners’ views and evidenced police demands for wide powers over political protest. Special Branch observed that the NCCL was essentially under Kidd’s control and direction throughout the 1930s and during much of that time Kidd himself was regarded as an agent of the Communist Party. Nonetheless, he was a popular figure. His enthusiasm for the protection of individual freedoms earned him recognition across political boundaries and wide public regard. Home Secretary John Simon’s admission that he found the Commissioner’s view of the NCCL problematic in the light of genuine and legitimate concerns for civil liberties of some of its supporters highlighted a clash between police and ministerial attitudes.8 This became increasingly apparent through 1937 as the Commissioner repeatedly pushed the boundaries of his powers to interfere with political meetings and processions under the new Public Order Act beyond actions that any Home Secretary was prepared to sanction.9 The founding of the NCCL changed the dynamics between the state and public protest and affected relations between the Home Secretary and the Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police. Home Secretaries have rarely intervened in operational policing unless forced to do so by public or parliamentary pressure. The NCCL was able effectively to apply that pressure by providing a non-partisan

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mechanism for complaints about the conduct of the police to be raised in Parliament. Publicly, the Home Secretary’s backing for police actions was never in question. Frequent calls for a public inquiry into police behaviour were all rejected but the Home Secretary’s response to NCCL allegations and demands for detailed internal investigations and regular reports on police actions were the source of tension between the Home Secretary and successive Commissioners. It is not the aim here to determine whether the NCCL was under the covert control of the Communist Party – although the balance of evidence suggests not. Others have very ably explored the objectives of the CPGB in this period.10 More significantly, the NCCL’s campaigns reflected genuine social and political grievances and, despite its ambiguous position with the Communist Party, a wide support for cross-party pressure group protest about police powers and the maintenance of civil liberties. It laid the foundations for a civil rights movement and a public awareness in Britain that ensured police powers and behaviour would be challenged in the future. There is much in the complaints about the policing of the G20 protesters and contemporary events that mirrors the policing of public protest in the past. Technology has made protesters smarter and public consent less assured. The challenge for the police in maintaining public confidence is greater as a result. The dilemma relating to the policing of public protest is an enduring one and the purpose and objectives of the civil liberties movement remain relevant. Notes 1 Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary Report, Adapting to Protest, 7 July 2009 (London: The Central Office of Information, 2009), p. 5. Also available from the HMIC website: http://inspectorates.justice.gov.uk/hmic. 2 For the current aims and objectives of the organisation see the Liberty website at www.liberty-human-rights.org.uk/index.php, accessed 25 November 2010. 3 New Statesman, Laurie Penny, ‘What the Ian Tomlinson Case Tells Us about the Police’, 22 July 2010; www.newstatesman.com/blogs/ laurie-penny/2010/07/police-tomlinson-death, accessed 27 October 2010.

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4 Guardian, ‘Ian Tomlinson Death: Police Officer Will Not Face Criminal Charges’, 22 July 2010; www.Guardian.co.uk, 27 October 2010. Guardian, ‘Blair Peach Killed by Police at 1979 Protest, Met Report Finds’, 27 April 2010; http://www.Guardian.co.uk, 27 October 2010. 5 Clarke, Peter and Toye, Richard, ‘Cripps, Sir (Richard) Stafford’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 6 See Civil Liberty, Spring 1938, pp. 11–12 and Pugh, Patricia M., ‘Jones, Arthur Creech’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Creech Jones was (from 1935) a member of the Labour Party’s advisory committee on imperial questions and a founder member of the TUC colonial affairs committee. He was to become Secretary of State for the Colonies in the 1945 Labour Government. 7 Pugh, Martin, ‘The National Government, ‘The British Union of Fascists: The Olympia debate’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 41, No. 2, 1998, pp. 529–43. 8 For discussion see chapter 5. 9 For discussion see chapter 7. 10 See inter alia Worley, Labour Inside the Gate; Thorpe, Andrew, A History of the Labour Party, (London: Macmillan Press, 1997).

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Appendix A: Biographical Information

Further biographical information is contained in the chapters and notes. Listed here are additional details of the most significant or influential characters. Attlee, Clement Clement Attlee (first Earl Attlee) was Prime Minister throughout the 1945 to 1951 Labour Government. Attlee had abandoned a career in law on the death of his father in 1909 to pursue social work and politics. He took a particular interest in the way of life of the East End, where his lack of ‘swank’ helped win the respect of East Enders. He joined the Stepney branch of the Independent Labour Party in 1908. He became secretary of Toynbee Hall (the best known of the East End university settlements) the following year but left a year later because the atmosphere did not ‘chime’ with his socialism. He was subsequently appointed lecturer in the Social Service department at the London School of Economics. Attlee was returned as Labour MP for Limehouse in November 1922 and held the seat until February 1950. He held office in both the MacDonald Labour Governments and deputised for Lansbury as Party Leader before holding the position in his own right. He served on the Simon Commission on the government of India between 1927 and 1930. Attlee was among the NCCL’s first vice-presidents and one of its most enduring supporters throughout the 1930s.1 Barry, Gerald Reid Gerald Barry became a journalist for the Daily Express following demobilisation in 1919 from the Royal Flying Corps where he had

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attained the rank of captain. He joined the Saturday Review in 1921 and became its editor 3 years later at the age of 26. However, he resigned from the paper in 1930 when it committed to support Lord Beaverbrook’s Unionist Empire Party. The Weekend Review was launched just six days after his resignation with Barry as its editor. He received well wishes from Prime Minister Baldwin and public figures of all parties and was applauded for his defence of independent journalism. In 1934 Barry joined the Board of Directors of the New Statesman as the two papers merged. He became features editor of the left-leaning News Chronicle in the same year. Barry was a founding member of the Labour think-tank Political and Economic Planning and in 1948 was appointed to the job of director-general of the Festival of Britain of 1951. Barry was instrumental in the founding of the NCCL. He attended the inaugural meeting and was one of its first vice-presidents.2 Bevan, Aneurin Appointed Minister for Health and Housing in Attlee’s 1945–51 Labour Government, Bevan’s achievements included the creation of the National Health Service and a building programme that provided over one million permanent homes by 1950. As a young man in Tredegar, South Wales Bevan was a trade union activist and member of the local Independent Labour Party. He was active in anti-war campaigns throughout the First World War and in protests against inadequate wartime provision of housing and food. He entered national politics in 1929, when he was elected Labour MP for Ebbw Vale. He was an outspoken opponent of Ramsey MacDonald’s National Government. He urged an interventionist approach to the Spanish Civil War which he witnessed first hand in 1938. He was an irrepressible critic of the Coalition Government during the Second World War and an articulate and dangerous opponent in Parliament. His outspoken views were often at odds with his own Party. He was, nevertheless, widely regarded with affection and respect. Bevan was one of the NCCL’s founders and first vice-presidents.3

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Bing, Geoffrey Geoffrey Bing was a barrister. He practised law in Gibraltar, Ghana (previously Gold Coast) and Nigeria. Bing was elected Labour MP for Hornchurch in 1945 and held the seat until 1955. In 1957 he was appointed attorney-general in Ghana by Dr. Kwame Nkumah but left the position in 1961 to become Nkumah’s adviser. Following the ousting of Nkumah in a coup d’etat in 1966 Bing was arrested and ill-treated before eventually being sent home. During the 1930s he gave energetic support to the Haldane Society and the NCCL. He had a particular interest in Ulster that fuelled a hatred of discrimination and determination to defend human rights.4 Cockburn, Claud Cockburn was correspondent of The Times in New York and Washington from 1929 to 1932, when his ‘socialistic tone’ forced his dismissal.5 From the beginning of 1933 until 1946 he was editor of The Week, a left-wing paper appealing to the ‘more cultured members of the socialist and communist groups’.6 He was diplomatic and foreign correspondent for the Daily Worker from 1936 to 1946 and subsequently wrote, principally for Punch, the New Statesman and Private Eye. Cockburn wrote novels, one of which, Beat the Devil (1953), was made into a film. He became a regular columnist for the Sunday Telegraph.7 Cockburn was at the inaugural meeting of the NCCL and was well acquainted with a number of individuals involved from the very early days of the organisation. Foot, Dingle Mackintosh Foot was a politician and lawyer. From an intensely political family he was the son of MP Isaac Foot and three of his brothers also became parliamentarians. Dingle Foot became Liberal MP for Dundee in 1931 but lost the seat in the Labour landslide of 1945. He became increasingly aligned with the radical wing of the Liberal Party and eventually resigned from the position of vice-president of the Party to join the Labour Party in 1956. He was appointed solicitor-general in 1964 and at the same time accepted a knighthood. Throughout the 1950s Foot had pursued his legal career in the Commonwealth, being admitted as an advocate in the Gold

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Coast, Ceylon, Nigeria, Rhodesia, Sierra Leone, India, Bahrain and Malaysia, where he specialised in constitutional and civil liberties cases. Foot was among the NCCL’s first vice-presidents.8 Forster, E. M. Forster is one of the most acclaimed English novelists of the twentieth century. His many novels include A Room with a View, Howard’s End and A Passage to India. During his lifetime he refused permission for his books to be made into films but in the 30 years after Forster’s death in 1970 Merchant–Ivory films very successfully took his work to a new generation. It has been said that he wrote with simplicity and originality in defence of the well-worn concepts of liberty, democracy and tolerance. Forster wrote articles that quietly championed reform of the law on homosexuality and in 1960 he was a defence witness in the case brought by the Crown against Penguin Books after the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. He refused a knighthood in 1949 but in 1953 became a Companion of Honour and on his ninetieth birthday received the Order of Merit. Forster was the first president of the NCCL and held the post until 1939. He continued to support its aims throughout his life.9 Franklin, Hugh Hugh Franklin was the son of a wealthy Jewish banker. He abandoned his university education in the second year to pursue his interest in politics. He joined the Fabian Society and the ILP and was a member of the Men’s Political Union for Women’s Enfranchisement. Returning to politics in 1931 after a break of 10 years, Franklin held a position in the New Fabian Research Bureau and the national executive of the Labour Party. He was elected to Middlesex County Council in 1946. Franklin was treasurer of the NCCL throughout the 1930s.10 Game, Sir Philip Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police from November 1935 until his retirement in 1945. Game was a slightly built, quietly spoken, somewhat accident-prone man. A striking contrast to

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his predecessor – Boom Trenchard. Although handpicked as his successor, Game did not share Trenchard’s view that the higher ranks in the police, as in the services, should be recruited directly as officers and trained for responsibility, Game preferred to bring men on from the ranks to fill senior posts. He valued the view of the ordinary constable and worked hard to improve relationships with the Police Federation. Game’s list of high distinctions, DSO, CB, KCB, GBE, KCMG, GCVO and GCB, reflect a distinguished career that, as well as Commissioner included air vice-marshal and air officer commanding RAF India, and colonial governor of New South Wales, where he had experience of dealing with right-wing political activism.11 Herbert, Alan Patrick Although called to the bar in 1918, A. P. Herbert did not practise as a barrister and was best known as a writer and politician. The author of several novels, in 1924 he joined the staff at Punch where his crusading spirit and talent for literary entertainment found expression. In Punch Herbert aired social and political causes that he subsequently championed in Parliament and elsewhere. He was independent MP for Oxford University from 1935 to 1950. From otherwise very different political perspectives, Herbert shared with Ronald Kidd a belief in individual liberties. He was instrumental in the founding of the NCCL and one of the first vice-presidents.12 Kidd, Ronald Kidd was born in Blackheath, London in 1889. His grandfather and uncles were doctors, his father was a surgeon. There is no indication that he hankered to continue the family interest in medicine although in his early career he did work for a time for the Wellcome Institute in London as a cashier and book-keeper. His bohemian temperament was more suited to journalism and the theatre, where he tried his hand at acting and stage management. Towards the end of the 1920s he met his lifelong partner, Sylvia Crowther-Smith (later Scaffardi), 15 years his junior, while working as a stage manager for a provincial repertory company. Already married, his estranged wife and their daughter lived in Bristol. In the early 1930s he was making a modest living selling radical books from his tiny

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bookshop. As a young man he campaigned for women’s suffrage and lectured for the Workers’ Educational Association.13 Further biographical information on Ronald Kidd can be found throughout the book. Lansbury, George Lansbury was Labour MP for Bow and Bromley from 1910 to 1912. He resigned his seat in 1912 to stand as an Independent in support of women’s suffrage; he lost but he was re-elected from 1922 to 1940. He was leader of the Labour Party from 1931–35. Lansbury was a founder of the Daily Herald in 1912 and edited it until 1922. He was Mayor of Poplar in 1921.14 Lansbury joined the National Council Against Conscription in 1916 and was subsequently a member of its executive committee.15 In 1925 he was treasurer of the International Class War Prisoners’ Aid, suspected by the security services to be controlled by Moscow.16 He was a founder member and vice-president of the NCCL. Laski, Harold Professor Harold Laski was lecturer in political science at the London School of Economics from 1920 until his death 1950 and a member of the Fabian Society executive in 1922 and 1936. He was a member of the executive committee of the Labour Party from 1936 to 1949 and chairman from 1945 to 1946. Laski wrote extensively for the Nation and the Manchester Guardian.17 Together with Victor Gollancz and John Strachey, Laski founded the Left Book Club in 1936.18 He was one of the first vice-presidents of the NCCL in 1934. Martin, Basil Kingsley Political journalist and editor Kingsley Martin spent three years as assistant lecturer in politics at the London School of Economics, where he forged a lifelong friendship with Harold Laski. In 1927 he resigned his post at the LSE to join the staff of the Manchester Guardian, moving on again in 1930 to become editor of the New Statesman and Nation, which he determined to make the flagship weekly of the left. Through the columns of the New Statesman,

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Martin and his colleagues articulated the ideals of liberal middleclass opinion in mid-twentieth-century Britain. Martin’s personal and political connections were a significant influence in the founding of the NCCL.19 Nevinson, Henry Henry Nevinson had a long, outstanding career as a journalist and correspondent. Between 1897 and the end of the 1930s he covered some of the most important world events for many papers, including the Daily Chronicle, the Manchester Guardian, the Daily News and the Herald, and was on the staff of the Nation from its origin in 1907.20 Nevinson and his wife Margaret were active supporters of the Women’s Social and Political Union and in 1907 Nevinson founded the Men’s League for Women’s Suffrage. Henry Nevinson was among the first vice-presidents of the NCCL and appointed president upon Forster’s resignation from the position in 1939. Pethick-Lawrence, Frederick Frederick Pethick-Lawrence was barrister and Labour MP for West Leicester from 1923 to 1931 and was appointed Financial Secretary to Philip Snowden following Labour victory in 1929. He resigned following Snowden’s decision to cut public spending. He was re-elected in 1935 and following the 1945 general election he was appointed Secretary of State for India. He became a Baron in 1946.21 Pethick-Lawrence and his wife Emmeline were leading members of the Women’s Social and Political Union. He was owner and editor of the left-wing Star from 1902 to 1905 and in 1907 started the journal Votes for Women. He was a founder of the Union of Democratic Control and was UDC parliamentary candidate for Aberdeen in 1917.22 A conscientious objector during the First World War, he was an early member of the National Council Against Conscription and a member of its executive committee in 1916.23 Pethick-Lawrence was a vice-president of the NCCL from its first days in 1934.

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Pritt, Dennis N. Dennis N. Pritt was an eminent and well-connected barrister. In 1927, when his application for King’s Counsel was considered, he had a ‘large and lucrative practice’ dealing mainly with ‘commercial work of the most substantial kind’. Of all the names put forward he was considered to be ‘the man most likely to attain to high professional distinction’.24 Pritt was elected Labour MP for Hammersmith North in 1935 but was expelled from the Party in 1940 for his increasingly pro-soviet stance and anti-war views. He held the seat as a Labour Independent until 1950. He was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize in 1954.25 Pritt was one of the founder members of the NCCL and a vice-president from the outset and until his retirement from the bar in 1960. Trenchard, 1st Viscount Hugh Montague Trenchard is best known as the ‘father of the air force’, but it was after an already lengthy military career that he was seconded to the newly formed Royal Flying Corps in May 1912, in his fortieth year. Nicknamed ‘Boom’ for his foghorn voice, he has been described in his youth as ‘an inarticulate, prickly young man, socially inept and without money’. His social skills improved little but in later years he was noted for his capacity for effective organisation and exacting, unquestioned obedience to orders. His belief in careful selection of recruits, thorough training and efficient working methods secured the future of the Royal Air Force and earned him wide respect before his retirement from the Force in December 1929. Disappointed not to be offered the post of Viceroy of India he reluctantly accepted Ramsey MacDonald’s offer of the position of Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in March 1931. Apart from his controversial reforms during his term as Commissioner, Trenchard was instrumental in the opening of a police college and forensic laboratory at Hendon and the introduction of a central control room and cars fitted with a wireless.26

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Notes 1 Whiting, R. C., ‘Attlee, Clement Richard’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, www.oxforddnb.com May 2005, accessed 14 February, 2007. 2 Conekin, Becky E. ‘Barry, Sir Gerald Reid’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, accessed 8 February, 2007. 3 Smith, Dai, ‘Bevan, Aneurin [Nye]’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, accessed 25 June, 2007. 4 Platt-Mills, John, ‘Bing, Geoffrey Henry Cecil’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, accessed 30 April 2007. 5 KV 2/1546, Special Branch report on Claud Cockburn, 19 March 1934. 6 KV 2/1546, Memo to Newsam, Francis Claud Cockburn and The Week, 19 June 1934. 7 Cockburn (Francis) Claude, Concise Dictionary of National Biography, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 8 Ingham, Robert, ‘Foot, Sir Dingle Mackintosh’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, accessed 30 April 2007. 9 Beauman, Nicola, ‘Forster, Edward Morgan’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, accessed 14 February 2007. 10 7 HDF, Papers of Elsie Duval and Hugh Franklin (1910–1950), The Women’s Library, www.londonmet.ac.uk/thewomenslibrary. 11 Parker, Kenneth, ‘Game, Sir Philip Woolcott’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, accessed 3 December 2006. 12 Pounch, Reginald, rev. Mullin, Katherine, ‘Herbert, Sir Alan Patrick’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, accessed 3 December 2006. 13 Pottle, Mark, ‘Kidd, Roland Hubert’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, accessed 3 December 2006; Scaffardi, Fire Under The Carpet; Scaffardi Papers, DSF/2. 14 Lansbury, George, Hutchinson Encyclopedia of Britain (Abingdon: Helicon Publishing, 2004). 15 KV 2/665, National Council Against Conscription, list of members, 10 March 1916. 16 People’s History Museum, Manchester, The Labour History Archive and Study Centre, LP/ID/C1/10/1, List of officials and committee members, 1925. 17 Laski, Harold J., Who Was Who. 18 Left Book Club Collection, University of Sheffield www.shef.ac.uk/ library/special/leftbook.pdf, accessed 13 November 2003. 19 Smith, Adrian, ‘Martin (Basil) Kingsley’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, accessed 28 June 2007.

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20 Nevinson, Henry, Who Was Who. The Nation was merged with the New Statesman in February 1931 and published as the New Statesman and Nation until July 1957. 21 Pethick-Lawrence, Frederick, Concise Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 22 Pethick-Lawrence, Frederick, Museum of London Picture Library, www.museumoflongon.org.uk/MOLsite/piclib/pages/bigpicture. asp?id=979, accessed, 25 May 2005. 23 KV 2/663, National Council Against Conscription, 17 January 1916. 24 TNA, LCO 6/927, Letter from Claud Schuster to Rt. Hon. Lord Stanfordham, 7 March 1927. 25 Pritt, Denis Nowell, Concise Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992). 26 Orange, Vincent, ‘Trenchard, Hugh Montague, first Viscount’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, online edition, accessed 28 June 2007; Boyle, Trenchard.

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Appendix B: Extracts from the Public Order Act 1936

Prohibition of uniforms in connection with political objects 1. (1) Subject as hereinafter provided, any person who in any public place or at any public meeting wears uniform signifying his association with any political organisation or with the promotion of any political object shall be guilty of an offence:

Provided that, if the chief officer of police is satisfied that the wearing of any such uniform as aforesaid on any ceremonial, anniversary, or other special occasion will not be likely to involve risk of public disorder, he may, with the consent of the Secretary of State, by order permit the wearing of such uniform on that occasion either absolutely or subject to such conditions as may be specified in the order.

[…] Prohibition of quasi-military organisations 2. (1) If the members or adherents of any association of persons, whether incorporated or not, are – (a) organised or trained or equipped for the purpose of enabling them to be employed in usurping the functions of the police or of the armed forces of the Crown; or (b) organised and trained or organised and equipped either for the purpose of enabling them to be employed for the use or display of physical force in promoting any

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political object, or in such a manner as to arouse reasonable apprehension that they are organised and either trained or equipped for that purpose;

then the person who takes part in the control or management of the association,

or in so organising or training as aforesaid any members or adherents thereof, shall be guilty of an offence under this section. […] Powers for the preservation of public order on the occasion of processions 3. (1) If the chief officer of police, having regard to the time or place at which and the route taken or proposed to be taken by the procession, has reasonable ground for apprehending that the procession may occasion serious public disorder, he may give directions imposing upon the persons organising or taking part in the procession such conditions as appear to him necessary for the preservation of public order including conditions prescribing the route to be taken in the procession and conditions prohibiting the procession from entering any public place specified in the directions: Provided that no conditions restricting the display of flags, banners or emblems shall be imposed under this subsection except such as are reasonably necessary to prevent risk of a breach of the peace. […] (3) If at any time the Commissioner of the City of London police or the Commissioner of Police of the Metropolis is of the opinion that, by reason of particular circumstances existing in his police area or in any part thereof, the powers conferred on him by subsection (1) of this section will not be sufficient to enable him to prevent serious public disorder being occasioned by the holding of public processions in that

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area or part, he may with the consent of the Secretary of State, make an order prohibiting for such period not exceeding three months as may be specified in the order the holding of all public processions or of any class of public procession so specified either in the police area or in that part thereof, as the case may be. (4) Any person who knowingly fails to comply with any directions given or conditions imposed under this section, or organises or assists in organising any public procession held or intended to be held in contravention of an order made under this section or incites any person to take part in such a procession, shall be guilty of an offence. […] Prohibition of offensive weapons at public meetings and processions 4. (1) Any person who, while present at any public meeting or on the occasion of any public procession, has with him any offensive weapon, otherwise than in pursuance of lawful authority, shall be guilty of an offence. (2) For the purposes of this section, a person shall not be deemed to be acting in pursuance of lawful authority unless he is acting in his capacity as a servant of the Crown or of either House of Parliament or of any local authority or as a constable or as a member of a recognised corps or as a member of a fire brigade. […] Prohibition of offensive conduct conducive to breaches of the peace 5. Any person who in any public place or at any public meeting – (a) uses threatening or abusive words or behaviour, or (b) distributes or displays any writing, sign or visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting,

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with intent to provoke a breach of the peace or whereby a breach of the peace is likely to be occasioned, shall be guilty of an offence.1 Note 1 Thornton, Peter, Public Order Act 1936 (London: Financial Training, 1987), pp. 207 ff.

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Index

Adams, Vyvyan 15, 33, 59, 111–12 Allen, Elizabeth 168, 172 Anti-fascists battle of Cable Street 118–20 Hyde Park 68–70 Thurloe Square 107–11 see also Communist Party of Great Britain; Jewish People’s Council Attlee, Clement 15, 22, 23, 47, 49, 74, 113, 140, 142–4, 150, 166, 186 Baldwin, Stanley 48, 187 Barry, Gerald Reid 5, 15–17, 32, 34, 47, 59, 64, 161, 172, 186–7 Battle of Cable Street 83, 117–20 Bevan, Aneurin 15, 22, 25, 36, 187 Bing, Geoffrey 80, 167, 172, 188 Board of Deputies of British Jews 113, 116–18, 122–3, 132–3, 143 British Union of Fascists battle of Cable Street 117–20 Hornsey Town Hall 135–7 marches 133–4, 141, 144, 145–6, 150 Olympia 58–64 Royal Albert Hall 106–7 Buchanan, George 22, 25

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Chater, Dan 94, 98, 124, 133, 142 Childs, (Sir) Wyndham, Major General 38–40 Clavering (Sir) Albert 112–13 Cockburn, Claud 23, 44, 46, 188 Cole, G. D. H. 34 Collard, Dudley 34, 90–1, 164 Communist Party of Great Britain 40–2, 44–7, 49–50, 59–60, 65, 67, 71, 83–5, 91, 106, 118, 141, 160, 163–71 Creech Jones, (Sir) Arthur 161, 181 Cripps (Sir) Stafford 22, 32, 49, 134, 153, 161, 181 Crowther Smith, Sylvia (also known as Sylvia Scaffardi) 46, 90, 91, 167, 170, 190 Fabian Society 34–5, 41–2, 123, 188, 191 Foot, Dingle 15, 22, 108, 113, 124, 188 Forster, E. M. 16, 58, 73, 169–70, 171, 189 Frankel, Dan 94, 133, 142–3 Franklin, Hugh 43, 47, 86, 109, 189 Fry, Margery 81, 153 Game (Sir) Philip 6–7, 57, 85, 96–8, 104–10, 117–25, 135–7, 140, 145, 146–8, 150–2, 189–90

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index

Gilmour, John 25, 60, 61, 65–6, 69, 71, 74 Gluckstein L. H. 113 Groves, Tom 94, 151 Haldane Society (also known as Haldane Club) 41–2, 91, 161, 163–4, 188 Hall, James 118, 133 Hannington, Wal 23–5, 57 Harris, (Sir) Percy 15, 22, 94, 113, 124, 140, 143, 144, 152 Henderson, Arthur 49 Herbert, Alan Partick 12–16, 19, 23, 47, 114, 190 Hoare, Samuel 138–9, 140–1, 144–5, 147, 149, 151, 153 Horwood, (Sir) William 35, 38–40 Hudson, Austin 94–95 Hunger marches 4, 5, 12, 17, 23, 25–6, 31, 42, 57, 66 Huxley, Julian 23, 33, 34, 59 Incitement to Disaffection Bill 1934 57–8, 64, 66, 182 India League 161 International Labour Defence 19, 46, 50, 80 Jewish Peoples Council 117–18, 122–3, 132–3, 138, 140, 142, 143 Jones, George 96

Laski, Harold 15, 19, 23, 26, 34, 47, 123, 132, 162, 167–9, 191 Laski, Neville 113, 118, 122 Lawson, Neil 19, 41, 81, 90 League of Nations Union 5, 32 Left Book Club 50, 162, 191 Liberal Internationalism 5, 8, 32 MacDonald, Ramsey 5, 21, 39, 49, 186 McGovern, John 25 MacMillan, Harold 33 Mallalieu, Edward 15, 22, 81, 82 Mann, Tom 25 Martin, Basil Kingsley 15–17, 19–20, 23, 32, 34, 42, 44, 46, 91, 112, 161, 169–70, 172, 191–2 Maxton, James 22, 25 Messer, Fred 135–7 MI5 37, 40–1, 44, 46, 65, 174 Morrison, Herbert 122, 124, 140, 143, 144, 149 Mosley, Oswald 63, 72, 74, 84, 117–19, 141–2, 144–5 see also British Union of Fascists Munzenberg, Willi 20

Kidd, Ronald background 41, 42 changing role 164–72 personal acclaim 161–3 politics 45–6 Weekend Review 12–15

National Unemployed Workers Movement 4, 14, 17, 23–6, 34, 42, 50, 66, 87, 92, 94 Nevinson, Henry 43, 47, 68, 166, 168, 169, 170–1, 192 New Statesman 15–17, 35, 89, 180 Non-party political pressure 5–8, 32–3, 36, 45, 47–50, 160, 181

Lansbury, George 15, 22, 33, 35–6, 43, 47, 49, 113–14, 124, 132, 191

Pacifism 36, 42–3, 82–3 Pethick-Lawrence, Frederick 19, 43, 47, 124, 192

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index

Police agents provocateur 5, 12–13 anti-fascists 68–71, 107–11, 140–1, 145–6 complaints against 94–8, 133–7 hunger marches 23–6 Public Order Bill 124–5 Special Branch 14, 19–20, 36–44, 60–2, 70–2, 85, 91, 106, 110, 137, 141, 145, 160–3, 170–4 see also Game, (Sir) Philip; Trenchard, Hugh Montague, 1st Viscount Police Bill 1933 18, 20–2 Police Federation 21, 26, 190 Pollitt, Harry 45, 71 Priestly, J. B. 109 Pritt, Denis N. 23, 41, 44, 68, 113, 124, 133, 142, 168, 171, 193 Public Order Act 1936 130–1 prohibition of marches 139–40, 147, 196 Rathbone, Eleanor 3, 22, 33, 57, 109, 162 Reichstag fire Commission of Inquiry 4, 17–20, 41, 81 Samuel, Herbert 33 Scaffardi, Sylvia (formerly Crowther Smith) 46, 90, 91, 167, 170, 190

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Sheppard, Revd. H. R. L. (Dick) 36, 59, 64 Simon, John 74–5, 85–6, 94, 96–8, 104–6, 111–14, 117, 122, 124, 134, 137–8 Sinclair, Archibald 140, 143, 144 Smith, Ben 94, 145, 150 Socialist League 33, 49, 181 Sorensen, R. W. 114 Special Powers Acts of Northern Ireland Commission of Inquiry 80, 182 Strauss, George 148–9 Tawney, R. H. 34 Thomas, Alun 19, 46, 73 Thompson, W. H. 41, 90, 169, 172 Thomson, Basil 37–8, 40, 42–3 Thorne, Will 150, 152 Thurtle, Ernest 96, 124, 132, 143 Trenchard, Hugh Montague, 1st Viscount 1, 4–6, 12–16, 20–2, 25–6, 40, 62, 64–7, 69–72, 74, 83, 95, 193 Watkins, F. C. 133 Weekend Review 12–19, 32, 187 Wells, H. G. 23, 34, 162 Wilkinson, Ellen 161 Woodman, Dorothy 18, 19, 44

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