Chapter 1

British McCarthyism

Vansittartism

Robert Vansittart fancied himself as a British Cassandra of the twentieth century. Like the character from the Greek legend, he warned of impending threats, but most refused to take heed.³ However, many of his contemporaries viewed him quite differently. They called him the British Joseph McCarthy and mockingly labelled him ‘VanWitchhunt’. In 1902, Vansittart joined the FO at the age of twenty-one. After numerous diplomatic and governmental posts, he attained the position of permanent undersecretary of state for foreign affairs in 1930.⁴ Shortly after the rise of Hitler, Vansittart began an unsuccessful attempt to warn against the dangers of Nazism to his FO superiors. His strong opposition to appeasement policies led to him being stripped of his position by Neville Chamberlain in 1938. Vansittart officially retired from the FO in 1941, and the same year Winston Churchill raised him to the peerage as Baron Vansittart of Denham. A marked shift occurred in Vansittart after he left the FO in failure. Friends and colleagues noted the change. While visiting ‘Van’ (as his intimate friends called him) during the war, journalist Malcolm Muggeridge described his host as ‘an aggrieved man’ with ‘a deep underneath of real conceit’. Muggeridge found it difficult to understand this, since ‘he was head of his profession, received every honour, was given a peerage, married a rich and lovely wife and is now a national figure’. He guessed that a ‘wounded conceit’ was the cause of Vansittart’s ‘bitterness’.⁵ Muggeridge did not catch Vansittart on a bad day; in years to come others saw the same general sense of acrimony in the lord. After having lunch with Vansittart in May 1948, Harold Nicolson described his dining companion as gloomy over world affairs and with a bitter disposition. Nicolson deduced Vansittart’s mood came from a ‘disappointment in his own career’ and a sense of grievance over failed ambitions.⁶ This personal bitterness and anger were not limited to Vansittart’s private interactions. A 1949 profile piece appearing in the Observer described how when Vansittart expressed his political views he showed ‘an intensity of passion which he is not always able to control … And there is little in the language of invective that Lord Vansittart will not use to release the pent-up fury that boils within him’. When sparring with political opponents, the article stated he resembled ‘a ferocious tiger, driven by uncontrollable emotion to rend his victim in pieces’.⁷

This change in temperament was perhaps only more evident after leaving government employment. Years earlier, John Colville surmised that ‘hatred and harsh words are the methods which he prescribes’ in dealing with perceived enemies.⁸ Focusing on his time running the FO, historian John Ferris maintained that Vansittart often circulated reports against his opponents, withheld information that damaged himself and used allusions to secret sources to bolster his authority.⁹

A lifelong opponent and critic of what he termed Prussian militarism, Vansittart spent much of the interwar period and the entire span of the Second World War warning against the evils of Germany. It obsessed him to the point that both a number of his contemporaries and later historians argued he was a vehement Germanophobe.¹⁰ When reviewing Vansittart’s writings of the time, the charge is hard to dispute. In 1941, Vansittart published a book titled Black Record: Germans Past and Present in which he argued that the Germanic race and culture were as responsible for the current war as were the Nazi Party and Hitler. He wrote that the history of the Germans could be summated in a three-word quote from the Roman Tacitus – ‘they hate peace’.¹¹ Vansittart claimed ‘for generations Germany has been trying to annex not only the earth but the heavens’.¹² During the war, he argued for the harshest terms towards Germany in any future postwar settlement. In 1942, he declared in the Lords that ‘this time the world will not allow any government to weaken from the pledge to exact the punishment of German butchers as a condition of peace’.¹³ Writing in a 1944 article, he described the Germans as a duplicitous people who always blamed their woes on ‘a man, a clique, a class, but not we’. For this duplicity, Vansittart continued, he despised them, and ‘what I despise I cannot trust’.¹⁴ After the failed 20 July attempt to kill Hitler, he refused to give the plotters any credit. He claimed that their motive was only to quickly ‘wind up’ the failing war to have a ‘fresh run at it a third time’.¹⁵

From these wartime contributions of Vansittart the concept of ‘Vansittartism’ emerged. The term, used by critics, was meant to denounce those who pressed for postwar destruction of the German state and held its citizens collectively accountable for the sins of the Nazi regime.¹⁶ The anti-Vansittartists were mostly left-leaning in their politics (pacifists, Labour MPs, and so on), with a prominent number being members of the clergy.¹⁷ However, the divide over opposition to Vansittartism did not break down along partisan lines – a large number of Labour politicians had no issue with such an uncompromising anti-German position.¹⁸ A key argument against Vansittartism was that such vicious attacks against the German people and pledges of a forthcoming Carthaginian peace only served to undermine the war effort, since it strengthened the resolve of Germans to fight on. Even the Nazi leadership were in agreement with Vansittart’s domestic critics on that assessment. Joseph Goebbels once quipped that somewhere in Germany after the war they should erect a monument to him engraved with the words ‘to the Englishman who rendered the greatest service to the German cause’. The chief Nazi propagandist also gleefully wished for ‘Vansittart [to] carry on’, since ‘he is merely supplying grist for our propaganda mill’.¹⁹

Because of its negative connotations, few in the UK classified themselves as ‘Vansittartists’ or self-identified with the concept – except Vansittart himself, who appropriated the term to fit his purpose. In Lessons of My Life (1943), he wrote:

I must clear the ground by explaining very briefly what Vansittartism is and what it is not. I did not invent the word. My opponents did. I should not have been vain enough to credit myself with a doctrine. They did that; and I hasten to assure them that they are mistaken. It is not a doctrine: it is common sense, based on professional knowledge.²⁰

For Vansittart, the defeat of Nazism at the end of the Second World War did little to dampen his distrust of the Germans. For him, 8 May 1945 did not spark a road to Damascus moment on the ‘German question’. The record suggests such a moment never came. In 1946, he asserted the Germans remained unrepentant and that 75 per cent of them were ‘still Nazis at heart’.²¹ A year later he stated that ‘the democratisation of Germany is a difficult, if not impossible, task’.²² In 1950, Vansittart remained ‘sure that the German danger will return’.²³ However, the postwar era did mark a turning point for Vansittart; it shifted his focus towards what he soon came to consider an even more diabolical enemy. As he did with German militarism, he endeavoured tirelessly through the coming years to warn his fellow countrymen of the ‘red menace’ of communism. Norman Rose eloquently wrote in his biography of Vansittart, ‘Like a latter-day Cincinnatus, he returned from his estates to save his countrymen from new dangers.’²⁴

All-out war

Unlike many of his cold warrior contemporaries, before the end of the Second World War Vansittart voiced little concern over the threat of communism. When working at the FO in the 1930s, he argued for the UK and France to ally formally with the Soviet Union. He considered this the only realistic prospect in deterring Nazi aggression.²⁵ During the war, Vansittart praised on numerous occasions the many sacrifices the Soviet Union had endured against the German war machine.²⁶ However, in the aftermath of Moscow’s refusal to assist the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944, he gradually began to speak out against the UK’s wartime ally.²⁷ Vansittart showed increased concern over the developing global situation and voiced his opinions frequently as international tensions rose again. His rhetoric soon soared against communism and the Soviet Union to the level of odium he had earlier displayed against Nazism and Germany. In Events and Shadows (1947), a book written warning of increased dangers of the Cold War, he contended that the objective of the ‘Muscovites’ was nothing less than the world-rule of communism.²⁸ He stressed that unlike the nationalist ideologies of Nazism and fascism, the creed of Marxist-Leninism held universal appeal to many around the world. The quasi-religious nature of it bred zealots who were willing to betray their country and use deceitful tactics in obtaining their goals. Communists of all nationalities worked in uniform fashion; they ‘turn to Moscow as Moslems to Mecca’. Using charged language, he cautioned ‘they are more convinced and convincing believers than Mahomed’s invading sectarians a dozen centuries ago; also their creed is somewhat more concrete’. He surmised that, similar to Islam, communism worked as a ‘primitive doctrine’, only it used tanks instead of camels. Hence, the UK diligently needed to expose and root out its red fifth columnists to survive the coming onslaught, which it had failed to do so far.²⁹ In a 1947 hard-hitting debate broadcast by the BBC, R. Palme Dutt, chair of the CPGB, denounced such assertions as ‘stale red scare and anti-Soviet calumnies’.³⁰ Dutt’s biographer wrote that in the intense argument the communist ‘ran rings around’ the lord.³¹ Almost assuredly, the loss of such a dispute did nothing to weaken Vansittart’s resolve.

An irksome fact plagued Vansittart in his efforts – the inability of Britons to realise that a third world war had begun. It started ‘considerably before the end of the second’ and it needed winning; there was ‘no room or reason for timidity’.³² While the communists, ‘who were always at war’, understood the gravity of the situation, the West had yet to get to grips with the reality. To start winning the war, Vansittart argued Britons needed to fight back both at home and abroad against the enemy. Such was Vansittart’s assessment of the Yangtze Incident. In April 1949, the forces of the Communist People’s Liberation Army were on the verge of winning their long-fought struggle against the Nationalist Chinese government. The fall of China, for the West, was at hand. As the civil war raged, the admiralty ordered the frigate HMS Amethyst up the Yangtze River to assist in guarding the British Embassy in Nanjing. The Amethyst came under fire from communist artillery, and while attempting to evade the shelling, it ran aground. The incident resulted in the death of seventeen British sailors, including the ship’s captain. Vansittart argued that for the ‘ruthless murders’ of British servicemen ‘communism must be taught a sharp lesson’. He lamented that in earlier times such a transgression would have brought an open declaration of war by previous governments and that the RAF should have bombed the artillery batteries that molested the Amethyst. Yet such measures ‘would have involved courage in high places, so nothing was done’. The incident proved ‘communism is our open and implacable enemy’, thus ‘we should treat all communists and their pals accordingly’.³³ This included those in the UK. Prior to the attack on the Amethyst, and for too long, the ‘British public has been patient with the communist conspiracy’. ‘All over the country let British communists be called to account’ for the murderous assault on the Amethyst, he urged. It was the only way to show them ‘it’s an ugly game’ and ‘not worth the candle’.³⁴ Although Vansittart’s statements never openly called for violence towards British communists, they bordered on the edge of the edge. Such bellicose and provocative rhetoric did not go unnoticed. Labour MP Konni Zilliacus denounced Vansittart for using the ‘tragic incident’ as a casus belli for war with China and ‘inciting a pogrom against communists and socialists in Britain’.³⁵

Vansittart did not hold a monopoly on such combative language. Another Briton preached the need for an alternative measure than just bombing a single artillery battery on the Yangtze or formally declaring war on Red China. To end the threat of international communism, tougher stuff was required. Kenneth de Courcy, a journalist and editor of his own newsletter, Intelligence Digest (domestic circulation around 70,000 in 1950), caused numerous heads to spin in Whitehall when he advocated for a pre-emptive atomic attack on the Soviet Union in 1950. De Courcy, a would-be spymaster and want-to-be kingmaker, had long been a thorn in the side of the British government. By his own admission, Churchill came very close to locking up the self-described committed patriot and ardent anti-communist during the Second World War.³⁶ Since then, the FO, MI5 and Downing Street had sought ways to impede de Courcy’s journalistic efforts as well. All were concerned about the hyperbolic and sensationalist new stories that appeared in Intelligence Digest, alongside de Courcy’s uncanny ability to glean sensitive intelligence from a wide range of governmental and international sources. In many ways, the ‘de Courcy issue’ plagued and consumed government officials more than other pressing concerns. However, the matter proved delicate. The well-connected de Courcy had several Conservative backbenchers in Westminster at his beck and call. However, the need to muzzle him was even more apparent in 1949 when de Courcy became the first to report the initial test of an atomic bomb by the Soviet Union.³⁷ His revelation of Russia going nuclear scooped all news outlets, and, as described in the US’s paper of record, the New York Times, de Courcy had published ‘long before the United States, Britain and Canada jointly announced it’.³⁸ De Courcy’s stock in certain intelligence circles soared – especially those in Washington. He used his newly amplified influence to scaremonger the Atlantic world over the threat from the ‘Soviet Marxist aggressive empire’ and to denounce the UK’s ‘socialist government’ for its unwillingness to stand up both at home and abroad to communism.³⁹ ‘The public have not been told that in twenty-four months from now the Russians will be in a position to launch “A” [atomic] and “H” [hydrogen] bombs from the latest type of submarines against all our maritime cities’, de Courcy claimed. The only possible safeguard to stop such a Soviet attack, he argued, came from ‘the threat of retaliation’, one which ‘we do not yet possess’.⁴⁰ Yet the Americans did.

Perhaps, for that reason, de Courcy embarked on a lecture tour across North America in 1950. On 6 April, to a packed house in Toronto’s Massey Hall, he warned his Canadian audience that war with the Soviet Union was likely in two years and presently ‘Russia could wipe out maritime facilities of the democracies in a week if it attacked’. The well-attended assembly garnered a significant amount of press attention. In its coverage of his address, Canada’s paper of record, The Globe and Mail, described de Courcy as the ‘top man in a personal spy system’ supported by his ‘extremely wealthy’ magazine.⁴¹ Indeed, such talk gave credence to his alarmist views to the newspaper’s readership. In the past, such talk had allowed de Courcy to glean intelligence from unsuspecting British officials both in the UK and abroad. Cognisant of such abilities, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin had drafted a secret, and unofficial, advisory to embassies and consuls specifically pertaining to de Courcy only eight days prior to his lecture in Toronto. In the memo, Bevin describes de Courcy as ‘a man of considerable drive and ability’ who is ‘violently anti-Soviet’ and who ‘believes that the Catholic faith of General Franco is the surest bulwark against Soviet domination of Europe’.⁴² While Bevin praised de Courcy as ‘an able journalist’, he admonished his reporting, since de Courcy ‘makes little or no attempt to check the accuracy of his information and is quite undiscriminating in the methods which he employs to obtain it’. ‘Mr. de Courcy might again, as he has done in the past, constitute a serious embarrassment to His Majesty’s Government or official circles, in this country or abroad’, the memo concluded. Thus, ‘He should not, therefore, be given any special facilities during his travels.’

Surely, if de Courcy discovered the existence of the FO warning regarding him, he would have considered it a plot by the Labour government to silence him – which, in all fairness, it was. It had little effect in stopping de Courcy, and regardless of the memo, several British officials considered both the man and his speeches as valuable assets. Reporting on de Courcy’s time on the lecture circuit in Canada, the UK trade commissioner in Montreal stated the general impression he got of de Courcy’s visit was it ‘had given people a better understanding of the imminence of danger from Russia’.⁴³ The deputy undersecretary for Commonwealth relations J.J. Saville Garner wrote he ‘heard privately … Mr. de Courcy had electrified his Canadian audience into a real understanding of the communist menace’.⁴⁴ The department head of the information office at Commonwealth relations found it perplexing that the FO were so against de Courcy’s ‘violently anti-Soviet’ activities: ‘I would have thought that at any rate, [they were] something to be thankful for.’ He went on to ponder whether de Courcy’s support for Franco might turn out to be the correct stance to take, since ‘it is anybody’s guess’ and ‘perhaps it will work!’⁴⁵ Garner speculated that the FO’s animosity towards de Courcy – ‘an enterprising journalist who has built up some reputation’ – came from his attitude ‘during the war against Hitler, when his violent antagonism to communism led him into very doubtful views about Germany’. Garner disagreed with the FO holding such a grudge; de Courcy’s ‘violent’ anti-communism was what was needed, ‘since the situation is very different today and I do not see that there is any need to treat him as sinister’.⁴⁶

Regardless of how various mandarins felt on the matter, de Courcy continued issuing his hyperbolic warnings of impending doom for the West. However, he soon changed tactics. In his new estimation, the threats of reprising atomic attacks were no longer sufficient in halting the impending world war, which he warned was just on the global horizon. De Courcy shifted his earlier stance of retaliation to one of an immediate attack on the Soviet Union. It stood as the only solution, since it decapitated the head of the international communist conspiracy. In a November 1950 speech delivered at the Executives’ Club in Chicago, de Courcy put the argument in these terms:

We are not fighting Red China. They do not want to fight us at all. We are not fighting North Korea … You are fighting a single inspiration from the Kremlin. All their equipment comes from Russia. All the general staff direction comes from Russia. All the organization comes from Russia. The boys being killed in Korea were killed by communist bullets with Russian artillery and they are facing an army supported and inspired by the Russian general staff. The Russians have fired the first shot in the Third World War.⁴⁷

The longer the ‘Atlantic System’ waited, he surmised, the stronger its mortal enemy, ‘Marxist imperialism’, grew. ‘Are we to fool about the periphery when the decision lies in our grasp by striking a very deadly, fatal blow at the guts of the Russian Empire?’, he rhetorically asked the audience. De Courcy recommended that the US immediately attack with its atomic capabilities the main oil-producing areas in the Soviet Union to neutralise the threat or it faced losing the Cold War.⁴⁸ All-out war constituted the only way for the West to survive.

Such talk caused fear back home in London; de Courcy proved, oddly enough, ‘an anti-communist menace’ promoting a war which would likely result in the deaths of countless millions and leave the UK in ruins. The palpable threat of his words came from information originating from the British embassy in Washington reporting ‘that de Courcy is being taken seriously in some quarters in the US defence department’; indeed, quite high quarters. Through a contact the embassy discovered that the assistant to the secretary of defense for international security affairs, Major General James Burns, was ‘warmly’ recommending both ‘the [Intelligence] Digest, as well as Mr. de Courcy’ to colleagues. In addition, on one occasion, when de Courcy visited Washington, he had dinner with Burns’s superior secretary of defense, Louis Johnson, ‘who was considerably impressed’ with the British journalist.⁴⁹ In 1952, Anthony Eden reported to MI5 the news that Johnson’s soon-to-be replacement, John Foster Dulles, ‘was in close touch with de Courcy’.⁵⁰ The British government would continue to keep a close watch on de Courcy for the forthcoming years until multiple convictions of fraud placed him in Wormwood Scrubs.

Putting de Courcy’s longing for nuclear war aside, the failures of the government were becoming more the focal point of Vansittart’s anti-communist rhetoric as the 1950s approached. The Yangtze Incident and the seeming refusal of Attlee and Labour to enact more robust counterinsurgency measures were factors for the lord’s attitudinal shift. He concluded that, in theory, governments must do more, since the only ‘effective action that can be taken against communism’ came from state power.⁵¹ While he had earlier praised Attlee and other Labour leaders for their ‘courageous anti-communist utterances’, he became disillusioned by their apparent unwillingness to follow them up: ‘we need not words, but anti-communist action’. In 1949, Vansittart accused the Soviets of operating a spy ring through the London embassies of the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies. He also charged that international friendship societies (the Anglo-Rumanian Society, the Anglo-Bulgarian Club, the Hungarian Club and the Hungarian Association) acted as Soviet fronts and hubs for espionage activities.⁵² He pressed the government to deport Soviet diplomats en masse and close all such friendship associations. Stoking his fury, Labour refused to do either.⁵³ Vansittart came to see the Attlee government and the Labour Party as inadequate agents for winning the Cold War. His attacks on communism were then often tinted with an anti-socialist narrative. He started stressing that the ‘British left’ needed to realise that ‘communism had always used’ socialism as a ‘stalking-horse’ in rising to power.⁵⁴ ‘Too many socialists in all Western countries’ were politically too close to ‘communism to conceive the deadly danger which they promote’. Many socialists were ‘either fellow-travellers or they have not sufficient sense to come in out of the rain’. Vansittart campaigned that ‘vigorous resistance to communism’ was ‘the acid test of party politicians’ and Labour had failed to pass it.⁵⁵ Thus, during the 1950 and 1951 General Elections, Vansittart lobbied against the Attlee government.⁵⁶ In 1955 he warned that ‘grave dangers faced us’ if Labour was returned to power.⁵⁷ Alongside his anti-Soviet stance, de Courcy took a hard line against domestic communism as well. He cosied up to Vansittart and wholeheartedly supported the lord’s charges against governmental failures to halt the red infiltration throughout British institutions.⁵⁸

By 1950, Vansittartism had crept back into the political consciousness of the nation, albeit directed at a new enemy: the scourge of international communism. Vansittart, in language reminiscent of the 1930s, warned that guilty men were turning a blind eye to the threat at hand and appeasers roamed the halls of British institutions foolishly seeking an unrealistic peace. For men like de Courcy and Vansittart, the times called for aggressive action, not lasting coexistence. The ‘Russians’ and the ‘Red Chinese’ were desperately in need of a virtuous bombing and domestic communists a lesson that they had chosen the wrong side in a very ‘ugly game’.

Lord VanWitchhunt

The apotheosis of Vansittart’s anti-communist campaign came in the form of an eighty-minute address he gave in the House of Lords on 29 March 1950. The speech solidified his image as one of the UK’s most dedicated cold warriors but also presented him with the dubious honour of being labelled the British McCarthy.⁵⁹ It consisted of an onslaught of charges and accusations, which even keen observers of the time could have easily confused with the utterances of the most die-hard American McCarthyite. ‘What this country needs is a good shaking up’, stressed Vansittart, ‘and if it cannot take that, it must take the consequences – and they will be bitter.’ Vansittart did not hold back; he claimed that communist fifth columnists had infested the majority of the political and civil institutions of the country. These included the Church of England, the civil service, the FO, the armed forces, the universities, the BBC, the trade unions, the British Legion, the Joint Industrial Council (known as the Whitley Council) and even the planning offices for the Festival of Britain. As Joseph McCarthy had done less than two months before in Wheeling, West Virginia, Vansittart claimed to possess a list of known communists working inside the government. Vansittart’s list included the names of sixteen employees of the Department of Inland Revenue.⁶⁰ He maintained he knew the identities of communists inside other government departments as well, including the War Office and the ministries of food, health and education. Although he refused to name them, he maintained that communists had no place inside the civil service on any level and thus they needed removing. This included those at the BBC. ‘Passing to another infected field’, Vansittart accused the government of employing 2,000 communists as teachers who used ‘a dozen different ways of inculcating communism’ to the youth of the nation.⁶¹ He concluded his speech by arguing that the UK needed to put its own house in order against the evil and motioned: ‘That attention be called to the extent of communist infiltration into the public service and other important branches of public life in this country; and to resolve that continuous and resolute precautions are necessary for public security.’⁶²

The immediate reaction to Vansittart’s speech inside the chamber ranged from enthusiasm to cautious opposition. Rising directly after Vansittart’s remarks, Lord Milverton agreed that ‘We cannot tolerate enemies within our gates’ and went on to argue that there ‘is no room in the world for communism and freedom and one or the other must eventually win’. He urged that a step in the right direction was for the censorship of the Daily Worker. Shortly afterwards, Viscount Swinton contributed to the dread generated by Vansittart’s more bellicose statements by adding that actions by the Soviet Union were tantamount to war. Praising J. Edgar Hoover and calling it a ‘pleasure’ to have worked closely with him during the Second World War, Swinton also stated that he sympathised with the need for secrecy that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) required to work under. Swinton added that communism stood as a threat unlike any the UK had since encountered because of its insidious and hidden nature. It is not easy to discount these supportive statements as insignificant or of minor consequence by little-known lords. Both Lord Milverton, a former colonial governor of Gambia, Fiji, Jamaica and Nigeria, and Lord Swinton – previously president of the board of trade, secretary of state for the colonies and later secretary of state for air – were accomplished and respected politicians in their own right. Speaking from the Labour benches, the lord chancellor Viscount Jowitt gave a tepid response:

First of all, I must be careful what I say; and, secondly, I feel we have to avoid the traditional dangers of Scylla and Charybdis. I do not want to convey to your lordships that this is not a serious matter, or that there is any justification for complacency, because I do not think there is. On the other hand, I do not want to convey to the public at large, and to our friends overseas in particular, the idea that we are riddled with communism.⁶³

After recommending a minor adjustment to the wording of Vansittart’s motion, Jowitt put the question to a vote which the lords unanimously passed.

Coming only weeks after similar charges made by McCarthy in the US, Vansittart’s speech garnered international news. Cognisant of the adverse British reaction McCarthy received, Vansittart had attempted to distance himself from the perception that he sought to follow in the senator’s footsteps. In his opening remarks, he denounced the US politician by saying his charges held ‘nothing in common with the shy-making ballyhoo of Senator McCarthy’.⁶⁴ For many journalists it appeared this was not the case; a number of newspapers across the globe readily made the easy comparison between the two. After the speech, headlines announced ‘Witch-Hunting Fever Is on in Britain’ and reporters dubbed its author ‘Lord VanWitchhunt’.⁶⁵ ‘We would hate to see Lord Vansittart becoming another Senator McCarthy’, the Guardian worried, since ‘when one gets the anti-red fever it is hard to check it.’⁶⁶ Not surprisingly, the harshest condemnation of the speech in the UK came on the pages of the Daily Worker – it labelled the lord a vulgar liar.⁶⁷ Tribune magazine, a mouthpiece for the Labour left, took a harsh line against the speech as well. ‘It has been clear for some months’, it wrote, ‘that there is a vociferous section in this country determined to begin a witch-hunt’ and that no better example existed of the fact than ‘the ravings’ of Vansittart.⁶⁸ Commentators remarked that a new form of Vansittartism had arisen.⁶⁹

Politically speaking, no disapproval came from the Labour government. Embroiled in its own efforts against communism, it did not denounce Vansittart or refute his claims to the public. However, political condemnation for Vansittart came, led by the Labour peer Lord Stansgate – father of Anthony Benn. On 5 April, Stansgate announced his intention to introduce in the Lords a motion to censure Vansittart. He claimed that Vansittart ‘without due regard to their truth or falsehood’ made serious allegations against the character and conduct of specific persons or groups who, because of parliamentary privilege, had no opportunity to defend themselves. The announcement proved controversial since such an unusual and extreme step held no recent precedent.⁷⁰ However, the likelihood of such a motion passing was not remote. A key point of Stansgate was that on 29 March Vansittart had directly criticised a sitting member of the Lords, the bishop of Branford, as being a communist. Such an attack on one of their own did not sit well with many in the chamber – especially since the bishop claimed the charge untrue, and that his accuser had used ‘a misrepresentation of fact and a revision of my words’ in the case against him.⁷¹ The threat of censure did not sway Vansittart; he wrote to Stansgate that he looked forward to the debate over the matter and ‘shall have the greatest pleasure in saying what I think of it’.⁷² He got the opportunity on 2 May when the lords put the matter to debate.

For their showdown, Stansgate came well prepared. Viewing Stansgate as their prime defender, a number of the accused groups and individuals provided evidence to him of their innocence prior to the debate. The general secretary for the Festival of Britain told Stansgate that no one under his employment was distributing Marxist literature, as Vansittart claimed. An ‘exhaustive enquiry’ discovered the existence of a single communist pamphlet which had been delivered in the post to the Festival Office and ended up in the rubbish bin.⁷³ Stansgate received a similar letter from the deputy director of the Bureau of Current Affairs which argued that Vansittart’s claim that it employed a communist on its staff was simply untrue.⁷⁴ In defence of his motion during the lords’ debate, Stansgate cited these sources in asserting Vansittart ‘did not use due care’ when making his earlier accusations. Speaking in turn after Stansgate were the accused bishop of Branford and Lord Simon – the general director of the BBC. Both were highly critical of Vansittart and charged that his earlier speech contained gross inaccuracies.⁷⁵

When given the opportunity to defend himself, Vansittart remained unrepentant and defiant. He labelled Stansgate ‘my adversary’ and a fellow traveller on the ‘red train of thought’. ‘The substance of the motion is that we must not mention names’, he scoffed; ‘you cannot possibly fight a cold war that way.’ A third world war had begun, the accused argued, and ‘we are fighting for our lives’. He ended the speech in the role of the aggrieved victim: ‘Why should I give up the last good morsel of life merely to be insulted as I have been today?’⁷⁶ Then he added he had not expected thanks for his efforts but did not expect the lords to subject him to such terrible treatment. In a visual act of contempt, he took a physical copy of the motion against him and crumpled it up.⁷⁷

Speaking on behalf of the government, the leader of the House of Lords, Viscount Addison, quickly sought to defuse the heated situation. He voiced his support for Vansittart’s resolution passed on 29 March and stressed that both he and the government took the threat of domestic communism seriously. He paid tribute to Vansittart for raising public awareness of the issue but stressed the government was not as ineffective in dealing with it as Vansittart maintained. He then employed a little-used procedure to shut down debate and quash the motion without it coming to a vote. Supporting him in this decision was Lord Salisbury, the Conservative leader of the Lords. Despite vigorous protests from Stansgate, the matter of the question was settled, at least in the halls of the British upper chamber.

Spiritual warfare – religious anti-communism

Although Vansittart accused a litany of British institutions of communist penetration in his 29 March address, the one he attacked the most vigorously was the Church of England. When he named communists individually, the majority were Church clergymen. Alongside the bishop of Branford, Vansittart labelled the infamous Hewlett Johnson, the dean of Canterbury, as a communist. By then, Johnson had long been a lightning-rod for criticism for his pro-Soviet views and stated sympathies to the communist ideology; for these, his opponents labelled him the ‘Red Dean’.⁷⁸ Johnson was continually irking the British government, since many foreigners confused him with the archbishop of Canterbury and thus believed the Church officially sanctioned his pro-communist activities.⁷⁹ Calls for the removal of Johnson from his post were quite frequent. Yet, according to the head of the Church, Archbishop Geoffrey Fisher, he had no authority to do so, since Johnson never broke ecclesiastical or civil laws.⁸⁰ In order for Fisher to dismiss Johnson, an act of parliament was needed granting him the power to do so. Although the archbishop considered Johnson a ‘fanatically minded person’ who made ‘outrageous statements’, he did not think the matter worth pursuing, since ‘his intolerable opinions carry no weight in this country now and do no harm’. Vansittart viciously disagreed; he called for the excommunication of the ‘evil charlatan’ Johnson. However, Vansittart’s animosity towards Johnson paled in comparison to the contempt he held for a little-known priest named Gilbert Cope. Vansittart took issue with Cope for an earlier political tract he wrote titled Christians in the Class Struggle. The lord claimed Cope’s pamphlet urged ‘the liquidation’ of opponents to Marxism. On 29 March, Vansittart denounced him as a ‘murderous priest’ and ‘potential killer’ and wondered aloud why Birmingham University, where Cope worked, had employed him.⁸¹ By 1950, Vansittart’s animus for clergymen like the bishop of Branford, Johnson and Cope was long held. Earlier, he denounced the three in a chapter of his appropriately titled book, Bones of Contention (1945). He wrote that he objected to these collections of ‘Christians’ who with ‘episcopal backing should sponsor a policy of persecution, imprisonment and eventual slaughter, to suit their own material fancy’.⁸²

Although a lifelong member of the Church of England, Vansittart did not hold the institution in high regard because it allowed such clergymen to hold ecclesiastical positions and because of its unwillingness to combat communism enthusiastically. The same went, he argued, for the rest of the Protestant denominations. They had all abandoned out of apathy the central spiritual struggle of the time; these churches ‘were an army without discipline or generalship’.⁸³ The ‘impertinent puritans’ were unwilling to put ‘their own house in order’; instead, they harboured ‘communising priests’ in eminent positions and a number of their clergy were spineless men who ‘would sooner submit to communism than resist’. If the Church of England did not ‘cleanse itself and play its part’ against the red threat, then it ‘will fade away’. Until all of ‘protestantism realised that communism is its deadly and irreconcilable foe’, the UK ‘shall go on losing the Cold War, as we are doing now’.⁸⁴

However, Vansittart stressed on various occasions that a constructive model to follow for these churches existed. He spoke of it with affection and longing. The saving grace for religious opposition to Marxism rested in the hands of the Catholic Church. In the struggle against communism, ‘Catholics are better equipped than we are’.⁸⁵ He ‘envied’ them for seeing the fundamental incompatibility of communism to Christianity and ‘knowing how to fight for existence’. In Even Now, Vansittart explained:

The Catholic Church is in a better way owning to superior discipline. The Catholic record toward Hitler warrants some blushes, but toward Stalinism the performance is more virile; indeed the Catholic Church is the only well-organized body of resistance on earth; more organization seems needed. It may be true that protestantism, owning to its latitudes, is less a religion than a religious state of soul. The real reason, however, why it is not yet pulling its weight is that it cannot unite in seeing its own external dangers, and is disarmed by its own disarming charity.⁸⁶

Vansittart had little use for ‘disarming charity’ or any such benign creeds. He saw them as weaknesses, ‘which lead many churchmen and socialists still to look upon the communist as only some slightly erring brother, and which leads Liberals and Conservatives also to say in my astonished presence that some particularly bad fellow-traveller is “not a bad chap really at bottom, you know”’.⁸⁷ Ex-editor for the Daily Worker turned die-hard anti-communist, Douglas Hyde held quite similar sentiments. Hyde preached that the spread of communism was made possible by the spread of such ‘wrong ideas, wrong values, wrong standards’. The ex-communist wrote that if a CPGB takeover of the UK occurred, several in the Church of England would work as ‘stooge leaders’ for the new regime. ‘The world stands today at the cross roads and men and nations are having to choose between communism and Christianity’, Hyde argued, ‘and in practice, for men and nations, as events are proving, this means … a choice between communism and the Catholic Church.’⁸⁸ In Hyde’s judgement, only his religion could answer Marxism.⁸⁹ Hence, he considered the three million British Catholics as the nation’s most potent defence against a communist takeover. Indeed, while Catholic anti-communism had always been strong, the Cold War only intensified it further. The Church considered the growing influence of the Soviet Union and its doctrine of ‘godless communism’ as a direct threat to both the spiritual and corporal holdings of Catholicism.

Not surprisingly, the archbishop of Canterbury found it difficult to see eye to eye with Vansittart and Hyde. During the debate over the censure motion, he conceded that a small number of priests in the Church of England and the ‘free churches’ held ‘communist opinions’ and defended their freedom in doing so. This by no means meant he felt sympathy towards communism. He vigorously opposed it and urged the British government and statesmen to ‘take every possible political step to deliver us from the threat’ it posed only short of outright war.⁹⁰ It was in fact ‘their absolute duty’, since communism ‘is evil and its consequences are evil’.⁹¹ Such anti-communist feelings resulted in a very pro-American sentiment throughout the Anglican hierarchy. Fisher denounced ‘communist-inspired attempts’ to belittle ‘the remarkable help which the United States is giving us’.⁹² A number in the Church viewed the continuation of US assistance under the Marshall Plan as crucial for the survival of the UK. Cyril Garbett, archbishop of York, argued that without it ‘we could not resist Russia’ and the UK would ‘either be invaded by the Soviet Union or become another of her helpless satellites’.⁹³ Despite these cold warrior-type sentiments, Archbishop Fisher argued that the fight against ‘political communism’ should not be Anglicanism’s primary concern. Vansittart labelled this sentiment a dereliction of the Church’s duty – ‘this is not leadership but abdication’.⁹⁴ Like Fisher, the local clergy were sceptical of adopting anti-communism at any price, even the more theologically conservative-minded ones. Reverend Arthur Burrell, vicar of St George’s in Birmingham, warned his parishioners in 1955 that the Church does not:

[S]mugly think that communism is the main source of danger. That kind of ideology I believe to be the sworn enemy of that way of life which we know as Christians in our hearts to be right. But the main indictment of our age and society … is that the non-communist world believes it can fight communism only by violent fits of anti-communism.⁹⁵

The ‘surest answer’ to the ‘black threat of communist tyranny’, stated Reverend Edward Ashford in 1950, at the height of the Korean War, was simply ‘a great swelling-forth of pity and charity and religion in the hearts of non-communists’. He added: ‘If the churches of England were filled each Sunday with God-fearing men and women that would be enough to turn the tide of human history away from the dreadful threat hanging over us.’⁹⁶ In stark comparison, British Catholics were not guided by such sanguine beliefs. The Catholic bishop of Leeds received international criticism when in 1954 he claimed France would not even fight to defend itself against a Soviet attack, since ‘perhaps half of the Frenchmen have allegiance which is not to France’ but the communist ideology.⁹⁷ Only a month earlier a crowd of over 3,000 packed into St Columb’s Park in Londonderry to listen to the bishop of Derry urge ‘all peoples in Northern Ireland’ to take the threat from the ‘red menace’ seriously. ‘Make no mistake about it’, he warned, ‘[t]he aim of materialistic communism is to enslave man mentally, spiritually, and physically.’⁹⁸

Fisher fundamentally rejected Vansittart’s suggestion that Anglicans should follow the example of the Catholics. In 1949, the Vatican excommunicated, ipso facto, all its members who were communists or who aided and abetted communism. Fisher called this decision a ‘tragedy’, since it added a doctrine ‘which had no foundation in scripture to its creed’.⁹⁹ The archbishop argued that Catholicism allowed no freedom of speech and ‘in its own way [is] as totalitarian as communism’.¹⁰⁰ Indeed, a number in the Church of England argued that alongside its efforts in speaking out for the rights of Christians behind the Iron Curtain, it should likewise draw attention to the persecutions done to ‘Christians’ by Catholics in Spain and Latin America.¹⁰¹ Conversely, Vansittart urged for the full integration of Catholic Spain into the Western defence apparatus or, he warned, the UK risked being at the mercy of the ‘communist barbarians’.¹⁰² Such was the similar view of many British Catholics, including, most notably, Labour MP and member of the faith John McGovern; they doggedly campaigned for the total restoration of diplomatic relations with the ostracised Franco regime.¹⁰³ While Vansittart lauded the uniformed and dogmatic way in which the Catholic Church opposed communism, Archbishop Fisher viewed these as a show of weakness in personal faith and a ‘dangerous’ appeal to authority – ‘a weakling may run to the Church of Rome because he cannot trust himself [or] his own judgement’.¹⁰⁴ In January 1954 the Belfast Newsletter took umbrage at a forthcoming report by an Anglican Church assembly that stated that while ‘the communists regard the Roman Catholic Church and its members as its main enemy’, it must be noted that not ‘everything’ the Catholics ‘do in opposition to the communists is necessarily good’.¹⁰⁵ Disagreements on the appropriate course of action against communism further increased friction between the two Christian faiths. Unlike the Anglicans, the Catholics were visibly unwilling to render the struggle against the red peril completely into Caesar’s hands. ‘The Vatican’s struggle to assert the superiority of Christian values over Marxist communism is not confined to prayer alone’, reported Robert Shearer in a 1949 article appearing in the Western Mail. ‘Pen, radio, cinema and lecture tours’ have all been ‘utilised for many months past to weaken the strength of communism’.¹⁰⁶ A year later, the Church of England felt it wise to follow the Church of Rome a little way down this path, albeit not in such an overt manner.

Although publicly disputing the charges that it had not done enough to oppose communism, the Church of England secretly launched an initiative against it shortly after Vansittart’s attack. The bishop of Chichester in a letter to the archbishop proposed the creation of a committee, ‘whose existence would be unknown to the public’, to discuss ways and means of opposing the falsehood of communism in England. The idea had come forth during an unofficial meeting of several clergymen and prominent lay members of the Church. They all agreed that the Church ‘could take a wise and active part’ in opening the eyes of their fellow countrymen to the dangers it presented. Those proposed for such a committee included Harold Macmillan, Lord Salisbury, Ian Jacob of the BBC and the poet T.S. Eliot.¹⁰⁷ The archbishop supported and approved the committee’s creation, provided that its existence ‘remain[ed] confidential’. He conceded that no Church body was yet dedicated to giving ‘special attention to the communist propaganda and the possible action and reaction from the side of the Church of England’ and such a committee would rectify this shortfall. Noting the external pressure that had recently been brought to bear, Fisher added: ‘Vansittart would say that it is quite time that we did something to purge our own ranks!’¹⁰⁸ After its establishment, the committee regularly received assistance and intelligence from the Information Research Department (IRD) of the FO to bolster its efforts in spreading anti-communist propaganda.¹⁰⁹ The Church of Scotland had already commissioned such a committee to combat communism, with similar ties to the IRD, in 1949.¹¹⁰

Waldron Smithers: the prophet of woe

Many might find it hard to believe that Waldron Smithers existed outside the pages of a novel or the Middle Ages. Like a mythical antagonist from a Charles Dickens book, he railed against the destitute and wished that the ‘poor ignorant masses knew their place’. Although he longed for the ‘Real Toryism’ of the nineteenth century, Smithers viewed himself not as a Dickensian character but more as an Old Testament prophet – in the words of the Daily Herald, a ‘prophet of woe’ preaching the gospel of ‘reaction’.¹¹¹ Although he followed in his wealthy father’s footsteps and became a stockbroker, he had an earlier ambition to pursue his dream of being ordained in his beloved Church of England. Instead, Smithers transferred this religious zeal into zeal for electoral politics. After standing for and winning his father’s old constituency in 1924, Smithers played the role of a lay bishop crusading for the UK to return to the Victorian values of the nation’s golden age. His deep-dyed support for Stanley Baldwin’s National government earned him a knighthood in 1934. It also garnered him national attention after he wrote a campaign song titled ‘Stanley Boy’, whose lyrics appeared on ten million leaflets and its tune on ten thousand gramophone records, both issued by the Conservative Central Office.

Unlike Vansittart, Smithers supported the appeasement policies of the Chamberlain government. He voted for the 1938 Munich agreement and supported Chamberlain against Churchill in 1940.¹¹² For Smithers, the threat to the UK came not from Nazism but communism. In 1938, he wrote that nothing demanded support more urgently than ‘the efforts of those who are engaged in countering the work of communism’, since it represented a ‘fiercer and more brutal’ enemy than that of the simple ‘rule of tyrants’.¹¹³ In a memorandum to the Home Office, Smithers praised ‘Herr Hitler’ for expelling communists from Germany, and in 1938 reminded Lord Londonderry that ‘Jewish propaganda is always on the side of communism’.¹¹⁴ ‘There is no doubt that the communists are working with their usual subversive methods’, he earlier wrote to Londonderry, warning the lord: ‘It is not easy to estimate what progress they are making.’¹¹⁵ Throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, Smithers lobbied cabinet ministers and the Home Office to take a harsher tone towards the communist foe. He also attempted to create a ‘Right Wing Book Club’ to counteract the ‘communist-controlled’ Left Book Club.¹¹⁶ During the period, he officially supported a host of private anti-communist organisations including the Economic League, Fund to Fight Communism, Anti-socialist and Anti-communist Union, and International Entente against the Third International.¹¹⁷ By the end of the Second World War, as British politics turned to deal with Cold War affairs, Smithers had long established himself as a veteran in the war against the ‘red menace’.

By 1945, many found it hard to take Smithers seriously.¹¹⁸ One reason perhaps was that, as one contemporary delicately phrased it, he held the reputation of having a robust appetite for ‘the consoling effects of alcohol’.¹¹⁹ Or perhaps it was more likely that his beliefs were decidedly outside the political mainstream of the period. As a devoted follower of the free-market economics of Friedrich Hayek, Smithers routinely joined the Austrian-born economist in criticising any expansion of state control and opposing ‘socialists of all parties’.¹²⁰ Smithers’s defence of Hayek’s theories made him a vocal critic not only of the ruling Labour government but also economic moderates within his own party. Seeking converts to their ideas, both Smithers and Hayek were eager to convert Churchill to their neoliberal theories.¹²¹ However, Hayek’s version of classical liberalism did not begin to rise inside Conservative circles until the late 1960s.¹²² Often Smithers’s foes only laughed at his reactionary and histrionic statements. When Smithers asked Attlee in the Commons to read an inflammatory pamphlet titled British Socialism Is Destroying British Freedom by Cecil Palmer, Attlee simply retorted he could not, since his time for reading fiction was quite limited.¹²³ During the 1950 election, the pro-Labour Daily Herald ran verbatim quotes of Smithers’s speeches which they titled ‘Blithers’. In 1947, Guy Liddell labelled him that ‘silly old blimp’ and another MI5 employee preceded the Herald, labelling him ‘Sir Waldron Blithers’.¹²⁴ When Smithers introduced into the Commons a petition from Newfoundlanders opposing confederation, a Labour MP wryly asked him how many names on the list were communists.¹²⁵ When Smithers requested – hopefully in jest – that Churchill place a number of ‘fellow travellers including members of this house and of the church’ at the site of the UK’s first atomic bomb test, former Labour minister George Isaacs said such a proposal would risk MPs being blown into ‘Smithereens’.¹²⁶ Communist MP William Gallacher stated that if communists did not exist, then Smithers ‘would be struck with vocal paralysis’.¹²⁷

Despite being dismissed as a buffoon, Smithers’s position in the Commons allowed his anti-communist attacks a wide audience. Because of the gravity of the topic, many of his questions and speeches could not simply be laughed off. No one retorted with wit or humour to his repeated calls for the UK to mirror the US by establishing a parliamentary committee – or conversely a Royal Commission – to investigate ‘un-British activities’. The red-hunting reputation of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) in the UK was no laughing matter. When responding to Smithers’s request, governmental ministers were cautious in their tone. Mindful of not upsetting certain American politicians, Herbert Morrison stated he could ‘express no opinion as to its [HUAC’s] suitability in the United States’, but he did not believe such a similar ‘method of procedure would be appropriate in Great Britain’.¹²⁸ Nor did many laugh when Smithers called for not only the executions of uncovered ‘atomic spies’ but also the public hanging of the ‘Red Dean of Canterbury’, Hewlett Johnson, for being a communist traitor.¹²⁹ Upon one memorable occasion in the Commons, he found himself thoroughly rebuked for his antagonist rhetoric. In the late evening of 27 June 1950, Smithers launched into a lengthy sermon-like speech on the perils of communism. In usual fashion, he labelled communism as the ‘most momentous and awful menace with which mankind has ever been faced’.¹³⁰ He proceeded to frame the East–West international tensions as a ‘spiritual war’ and cited biblical scripture in denouncing the Labour government as ‘wicked’ for not vigorously fighting the threat. He then claimed ‘that for America to give money to this government is to subsidise communism’. Smithers argued, in principle, that the Attlee government was comparable to the totalitarian rule of Stalin and Hitler. Labour MP George Wigg called Smithers’s quoting of scripture in such a political manner something ‘near to blasphemy’. ‘There is a view held on this side of the house that the honourable gentleman is an amiable idiot’, Wigg continued. ‘I dissent from that view. I do not think he is amiable.’ Home Office Undersecretary Geoffrey De Freitas questioned Smithers’s devotion to democracy, saying his words rang of ‘hatred and intolerance and generally display[ed] marked totalitarian tendencies’.¹³¹ Geoffrey Bing wondered aloud whether the government should consider detaining Smithers, as it did with pro-Nazi MP Archibald Maule Ramsay during the Second World War.¹³²

The Strachey controversy

Smithers’s diatribes advocating public executions and classifying the government as a ‘den of vipers’ garnered attention, but little to no support – yet, not all of his red-baiting antics proved ineffective or seemed to many as outlandish. A reshuffling of the Labour government after the 1950 General Election brought increased fears of communists creeping into the halls of power. The move of John Strachey from the minister of food to the post of secretary for war was the catalyst. During the 1930s, a much more politically radical Strachey left the Labour Party to stand for MP as a pro-communist independent candidate. He also published a book titled The Coming Struggle for Power (1932) in which he wrote, ‘The coming of communism can alone render our problems solvable.’¹³³ In 1935 he ran afoul of American authorities when, after conducting a lecture in a suburb of Chicago, he was arrested and later deported on the charge of seeking the violent overthrow of the US government. In the interwar period, it would have been hard to describe Strachey as anything less than a communist sympathiser or fellow traveller; he defended Stalin’s purges and supported the formation of a Popular Front with the CPGB.¹³⁴ However, Strachey put all this aside in 1940 by denouncing communism and renouncing his earlier-held beliefs. Nonetheless, Smithers did not believe the conversion had been genuine and argued that Strachey remained untrustworthy. This time he had powerful allies; he was not alone in his suspicion.

The campaign against Strachey’s appointment to secretary of war started in the broadsheets of the British press, specifically, those newspapers owned by publishing magnate and Conservative politician Lord Beaverbrook. On 2 March 1950, the Evening Standard carried a front-page story claiming Strachey ‘remains an avowed communist’ and ‘has never publicly retracted his belief in communism’.¹³⁵ It stated the move to his new post was unwise, since it allowed him access to sensitive intelligence which could be compromised. Aware of the potentially damaging reaction such a charge carried, the Labour government quickly sought to refute it. In an unprecedented move, Downing Street issued a late-night press release mere hours after the accusations had hit the newsstands. It described the headlines as untrue and disgraceful, and maintained that ‘Strachey was no communist.’¹³⁶ That same night Strachey also personally gave a statement in which he admitted that while it had ‘always been public knowledge that I supported the communist doctrine in the years preced[ing] the last war … I have never been a member of the Communist Party’, and that he had renounced its policies in 1940.¹³⁷ These immediate repudiations did little to halt the red-baiting charge.

Beaverbrook did not relent; the Evening Standard refused to withdraw the accusation. Instead, the newspaper’s editor, Herbert Gunn, and Beaverbrook conspired to find a smoking gun proving Strachey’s communist affiliations. Gunn enlisted the help of John Baker White, a Conservative MP and Economic League official, and Douglas Hyde, an ex-communist turned vicious anti-communist, to discover proof that Strachey had in fact been a member of the CPGB.¹³⁸ Despite the failure to uncover anything new, Gunn promised Beaverbrook the ‘investigation into Strachey would continue’. Beaverbrook and Gunn’s zeal for attacking Strachey drew the worried attention of the National Union of Journalists (NUJ). The NUJ requested a report from the editorial board of the Evening Standard on whether union members employed by the newspaper were pressured to carry out ‘unethical’ work on the ‘Strachey story’. Gunn refused to comply, arguing, ‘the preparation of a news story was no business of the NUJ’.¹³⁹ An infuriated Strachey agreed the hits he was taking from the Standard were far below the belt. He went so far as to consult Attorney General Hartley Shawcross about suing the paper, and Gunn personally, for criminal libel. Shawcross talked him out of such a move, explaining no jury would convict on the charge, and the case could stretch on for months until it failed¹⁴⁰ – something the government surely wished to avoid.

The Evening Standard’s reporting on Strachey not only alarmed the NUJ but many in the US too. To its dismay, the British embassy in Washington reported to the FO: ‘the Beaverbrook attack on the new secretary of state for war has attracted a good deal of attention here and the papers carry long reports from their London correspondents on the subject’. It worried that even ‘pretty sensible and levelheaded’ papers, such as the Washington Post, were covering the story, so the allegations could not ‘altogether be disregarded’.¹⁴¹ In mid-April the largest pictorial and news magazines in the US, respectively Life and Time, both owned by the ardent anti-communist and powerful magazine magnate Henry Luce, savaged Strachey. The editorial appearing in Life said it anticipated being told that the political attitudes of Strachey ‘are none of America’s business’, but argued:

To this we say in advance, nonsense. The Atlantic Pact is American business. The strength and security of Western Europe is American business. The attitudes, the capacities and innate loyalties, intellectual and political, of those who govern Western Europe are therefore of legitimate interest to Americans … A Marxist of John Strachey’s stripe has no business being British minister of war. It just won’t do.¹⁴²

Such stories, the British embassy warned, could have a lasting negative impact on Anglo-American cooperation in the matters of intelligence sharing if US officials deemed Strachey unreliable. Its apprehension over the subject proved more than credible. British contacts in Washington informed the government that Beaverbrook and Luce’s attacks on Strachey’s trustworthiness had garnered a powerful convert, that being Kenneth de Courcy’s one-time lunching companion, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson.

An international controversy erupted over the Strachey allegations after a North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) conference held in Hague in early April. A report circulated by the Associated Press stated ‘American officials’ sought the removal of Strachey from his post and that during the conference the US had withheld intelligence secrets from the UK.¹⁴³ A follow-up article by the New York Times claimed an anonymous ‘high United States official’ stated that the US had clandestinely received the consent of British Defence Minister Emanuel Shinwell for withholding intelligence in the presence of Strachey.¹⁴⁴ The charges attracted significant press attention, since they gave the impression that the US was attempting to pressure the Attlee government to remove Strachey or otherwise face being denied vital intelligence.¹⁴⁵ The American and British governments officially denied anything like that had transpired at the Hague. Johnson, who had met privately with Shinwell during the conference, publicly labelled the story as nonsense. Yet the historical evidence cast doubt on Johnson’s official denial. Herbert Gunn reported to Beaverbrook the anonymous source for the New York Times story was indeed actually Johnson, who remarked, off the record, that the attendance of Strachey at the conference ‘forced the US to withhold all top naval and military secrets from Britain’.¹⁴⁶ Confirming Gunn’s account were press sources of the British government which ‘inferred very clearly that Johnson himself was the source of the original leakage in the Hague’. This came as no surprise to British officials who had already regarded Johnson as ‘somewhat of a devious character’. They had been informed of Johnson’s distrust of Strachey’s political reliability. An FO contact in the US reported that when the charges first appeared in the Beaverbrook press, Johnson had confided to journalist Drew Pearson that ‘he was damned if he would be told by anyone what information he should or should not give to British ministers and would act as he thought fit about passing on information to Mr. Shinwell and Mr. Strachey’.¹⁴⁷

The FO was also privy to the fact that Johnson personally requested the State Department to conduct an inquiry into the past activities of Strachey and Shinwell. But for the FO, a key mystery over Johnson and the Hague conference remained. What exactly transpired during the meeting between Johnson and Shinwell? A memo addressed to the high-ranking diplomat Gladwyn Jebb stated the FO knew that Johnson had brought Strachey up with Shinwell, ‘but in exactly what context and what Mr. Shinwell replied’ remained unknown.¹⁴⁸ The FO requested the defence ministry to provide a summary of the meeting, yet no reply exists in the relevant FO files on the subject.¹⁴⁹ Both the statements attributed to Johnson and the seeming refusal of the defence ministry to provide a summary of the private meeting between Johnson and Shinwell hint to the likelihood that Johnson did attempt to pressure the British government into removing Strachey from his ministerial post. Ultimately, the FO decided the best response for the Washington embassy to take over the matter was ‘to induce oblivion’ on the ‘Strachey controversy as rapidly as possible’.¹⁵⁰

Taking the direct opposite approach of the FO on the whole affair was Waldron Smithers. He sought not to induce oblivion but to promote controversy. While Beaverbrook denounced Strachey in the press and Johnson worked against him in Washington, political opposition against the newly appointed minister of war galvanised around Smithers. In more accurate terms, Smithers constituted the entirety of the political opposition, since he was the only British politician who demanded the removal of Strachey from his post.¹⁵¹ Even Lord Vansittart – who Smithers affectionately looked up to for giving him ‘renewed hope and confidence’ in their collective anti-communist struggles – refused to denounce Strachey publicly.¹⁵² As usual, Smithers used his parliamentary position to make his attacks. In mid-March, alluding to the Strachey dispute, Smithers asked Attlee to explain what steps were being taken regarding ministerial appointments ‘from a security point of view’. Refusing to take the bait, the prime minister replied he did not have to accept the implication of the question, since the responsibility of selecting governmental ministers rested solely in the position of the prime minister.¹⁵³ Thus he did not have to answer any questions posed by members of the Commons on the matter. Attlee’s straightforward refusal to debate the appointment of Strachey did not deter Smithers. He decided to take the matter directly to the king by way of a public petition. Throughout April, Smithers gathered signatures calling for the Commons as a whole to recommend to the crown the removal of Strachey, and also Shinwell, from their posts, since ‘both men showed earlier in their careers sympathies for communism’.¹⁵⁴ On 8 May 1950, to both cheers and boos, Smithers introduced onto the floor of the House the petition signed by over 18,000 Britons. While the petition garnered press coverage on both sides of the Atlantic, it provoked no official governmental action. After the petition, the controversy over Strachey began to fade. However, Smithers’s attacks did not diminish; in June he went so far as to classify Strachey as ‘a Marxist tumour’ on the body politic.¹⁵⁵ Yet the moment had gone. The matter of Strachey’s past was shortly to be overshadowed by the first shots of the Korean War later that summer.

Reds in the BBC?

Since 1946, Smithers had begun accusing the BBC of having a pro-communist slant. In a letter sent that year to BBC chairman Sir Allan Powell, he stated his discomfort when appearing on ‘Brains Trust’, a panel show, in which he criticised Soviet foreign policy. Smithers stated he felt he was in the ‘presence of evil’ and that a ‘Russian agent’ obviously wrote a question put to him.¹⁵⁶ Throughout the coming years he charged that the BBC promoted Marxist-Leninist propaganda. Once, Smithers went so far as to shout at BBC parliamentary reporter Roland Fox, calling him and the rest of the reporters employed by the BBC ‘all a lot of commies’.¹⁵⁷ Smithers did more than shout; he urged for a governmental investigation into the matter.

Joining Smithers in his disdain for the BBC was Lord Vansittart. In fact, the key opening volley in Vansittart’s contentious speech of 29 March 1950 focused on communist infiltration in what Vansittart dubbed the ‘most potent weapon in the Cold War’ – namely, the BBC. He claimed that allowing the continued employment of communists within the BBC hampered its ability to fight against Russian propaganda and permitted subversive elements of the population to indoctrinate the nation. These and other similar accusations appear to come directly from lengthy communications Vansittart had with a former employee of the BBC. In the months leading up to his speech, Vansittart and Smithers regularly conversed with Count Alexis Bobrinskoy, a White Russian emigre. Later a professional actor, whose credits included Alfred Hitchcock’s The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), in 1950 Bobrinskoy was a laid-off employee of the BBC with an axe to grind. Hired in September 1946 as a Russian translator and announcer for the international wing of the BBC, he was discharged in 1949. In his writings to Vansittart and Smithers, Bobrinskoy claimed the cause for his dismissal ‘had a purely political background, whatever other reasons my chiefs may put forward’.¹⁵⁸ In his service report to the Broadcasting Committee of the BBC, Bobrinskoy stated that the sole justification for his firing laid in the summation by other members of the Russian section that he delivered the text in a ‘counter-revolutionary, bourgeois voice’ and such a ‘perfectly senseless and unfounded statement has ruined my career at the BBC’.¹⁵⁹ Bobrinskoy reasoned that communist sympathies held by several employees at his former employer were affecting the editorial content of the broadcasts and slanting them towards a more pro-Soviet worldview. Bobrinskoy found a welcoming audience for convincing Vansittart and Smithers that a communist conspiracy existed deep within the BBC. It proved quite an easy task.

Unbeknownst to Smithers and Vansittart, the security service already had its own similar suspicions. In 1947, MI5 obtained a Home Office-issued warrant to look into the matter.¹⁶⁰ The agency wiretapped the phone lines of BBC employees, seeking evidence on those with ‘communist connections’. The probe proved inconclusive. Although MI5 suspected three people working in the Eastern European Department were attempting ‘to get their point of view across by wrapping it up with other information’, they did not have enough evidence to act.¹⁶¹ In 1952, MI5 returned to the hunt – this time to satisfy the persistent urgings of Smithers.

To Smithers’s dismay, the overall governmental attitude towards domestic communism did not fundamentally alter with the return of a Conservative to Downing Street after the 1951 General Election. Like his predecessor, Winston Churchill refused Smithers’s request to set up a Royal Commission to investigate communist activities in the UK and also his suggestion to outlaw wildcat strikes, which communists usually supported.¹⁶² Such refusals are not surprising, since Churchill typically showed less concern over domestic communism than Attlee. However, the possibility of communists exerting their influence through the BBC stood as a notable exception. In 1950, Churchill became alarmed at the possibility after receiving a letter from an organisation headed by Lord Craigavon, the son of the first prime minister of Northern Ireland, called the Listeners’ Association. Both Vansittart and Smithers were avid supporters of the organisation, whose raison d’être appeared to be exposing communism infiltration in the BBC. The letter to Churchill contained an attachment reproducing correspondences between the group and the BBC over the airing of a programme highly critical of Churchill titled ‘The Soviet Point of View’. It documented how when the Listeners’ Association asked why the programme was allowed to be aired, a BBC programme director replied that they had an ‘editorial responsibility’ to let all sides be heard. When pressed why several anti-communists were barred from expressing their opinion on the network, the programme director refused to comment.¹⁶³ Churchill forwarded a copy of the attachment to Herbert Morrison, asking him to investigate the issue; Morrison replied that he would take the matter up with the BBC directors.¹⁶⁴

A parliamentary question by Smithers brought the issue back to Churchill’s attention in 1952. He told the prime minister that reliable sources had provided him with evidence of subversive influences inside the BBC. Instead of merely dismissing Smithers, as usual, Churchill requested him to pass on what information he had dealing with the matter. Taking him up on the offer, Smithers persistently wrote Churchill requesting for an investigation. He provided the names of eight individuals who worked at the BBC who he claimed were using the institution to spread communist propaganda. These included A.W. Morrison, second in charge of the Overseas Department, and ‘a Jew called Mr. Goldberg’ who controlled the selections of BBC programmes. Smithers warned that ‘we have traitors in our midst and although I should deplore suppression of free speech, they should be treated as traitors’.¹⁶⁵

Churchill forwarded the claims to the Home Office and responded to Smithers, telling him he had ‘all these matters in mind’.¹⁶⁶ The Home Office contacted MI5 over Smithers’s allegations and administered an inquiry into the situation. They reported to Peter Oates, Churchill’s principal private secretary, that MI5 held records on 147 BBC employees whom it determined were communists, communist sympathisers or suspected communists. An MI5 report to Oates provided notes to Downing Street on the individuals Smithers had named. After reviewing the situation, the security service concluded that communist influence in the BBC did ‘not constitute a serious danger’; however, ‘the position is carefully watched’ and the security service was in ‘constant touch with the BBC about communists in their employment’. It was reported that the security service secretly vetted employees and prospective employees for evidence of communist sympathies. In full compliance, the BBC submitted to MI5 a weekly average of twenty-four names of its workers for review. In turn, MI5 reviewed them and reported their findings to the BBC, though it lamented ‘the corporation sometimes finds it difficult to rid itself of established staff known to be communists’.¹⁶⁷ Satisfied that MI5 had the matter well in hand, Churchill wrote to Smithers saying the situation was under control. Unbeknownst to Smithers, the public or the BBC employees under investigation, MI5 was already covertly addressing the situation.

Conclusion

Despite Vansittart’s protestations to the contrary, Smithers and the lord sought a McCarthyite response. In searching for parallels in their own nation’s history, some are easily found. Smithers’s demand for an un-British activities committee eerily mirrors the times of Pitt the Elder and his establishment of the Grand Inquest of the Nation in 1742. Vansittart’s call for attacks on the communist conspiracy infecting the UK reverberated like the charges of Titus Oates of a popish plot in 1678. ‘Vansittartism’, in its loosest definition, never took hold, nor did it ever come close to garnering the level of support McCarthyism gained in the US. To Smithers’s chagrin, no British HUAC ever materialised. Despite the urgings of Vansittart, no pogroms against domestic communists arose. However, the two have strikingly similar parallels. Vansittart’s assault on Protestantism for its perceived failure to combat communism directly correlates to the opinions voiced by J.B. Matthews, a long-time congressional investigator and confidant to McCarthy. In 1953, Matthews wrote that the ‘largest single group supporting the communist apparatus in the United States today is composed of Protestant clergymen’.¹⁶⁸ The same is true of Smithers’s accusations against Strachey and Shinwell. These attacks are comparable to McCarthy’s statements questioning the loyalty of two US cabinet members Dean Acheson and George Marshall. However, what these men were able to achieve was a move by British institutions to a more anti-communist standpoint.

One institution in particular was the Church of England. While some could argue the decision by Fisher to form an official Church body to fight communism shortly after Vansittart made his remarks against the Church was mere coincidence, it seems highly unlikely, since Fisher explicitly mentions Vansittart when agreeing to its establishment. Also, Vansittart’s criticisms of Anglicanism’s ‘soft’ response and his praise for the Catholic ‘hard’ reaction to communism are telling. They speak to the broader theme of what part religion played in the anti-communist movement inside the UK. Much has been written on this subject, a good amount of it emphasising the prominent role religion played in the international struggle between the ‘godless’ East and Christian West. Religion certainly factored into the propaganda battle between the two, with the West’s ‘appropriating of Christianity’ for its usage against the East, as Dianne Kirby argued.¹⁶⁹ Anti-communist literature and rhetoric played up maltreatments of fellow Christians behind the Iron Curtain and claimed that if communism came into power in the Atlantic world, churches and cathedrals would burn there. However, it must be noted that anti-communism worked as its own quasi-spirituality; it needed no prior religious faith to function. Although an Anglican, Vansittart rebuked the Church when it refused to fully embrace the anti-communist crusade to his liking. He did not stand as the only prominent politician whose belief in anti-communism trumped their faith in a higher power. Herbert Morrison – arguably the Labour Party’s witchfinder general of communists – is famously quoted as saying he belonged to no religious denomination and ‘socialism was [his] religion’.¹⁷⁰ Clement Attlee stated during an interview with Kenneth Harris that he did not believe in Christian ‘mumbo jumbo’ and regarded himself as a person ‘incapable of [having a] religious experience’.¹⁷¹ For the most part, Churchill was a committed secularist; only on the best occasions did he profess to be something akin to an ‘optimistic agnostic’.¹⁷² Even when religious beliefs did factor into the equation, they were generally not overriding. The perfect example might be Smithers. Although a devoted churchgoer, it is hard to believe that if he had lapsed in faith, Smithers would have expressed any less animosity to the red religion of communism. His calling for the public execution of his fellow Anglican Hewlett Johnson acutely supports such an argument. Shifting from personalities to institutions, the Church of England held a more tolerant acceptance of communism than the Labour government of the time – a reality that is evident when examining the anti-communist efforts put forth by Labour in the subsequent chapter. Conversely, when sticking solely to religious opposition to communism, a strong argument stands that the Moral Rearmament Movement, which is covered in detail in Chapter 4, clearly outshined the Church of England in the fight against domestic reds as well.

Returning to the efforts of the central figures, the establishment of a secret Anglican anti-communist committee is but one empirical example of their impact. Also of note are Smithers’s roles in promoting covert investigations into the BBC and the international controversy over John Strachey. Nevertheless, Vansittart and Smithers’s influence was less far-reaching than that of their American counterparts. Because of the uniform nature of the British government, they were unable to independently conduct investigations from within the Commons or the Lords as their anti-communist counterparts in the US were able to in the Senate and the House of Representatives. This did not mean they were entirely dismissed. Clandestinely, MI5 investigated Vansittart’s unsubstantiated charges of governmental subversion, though without the fanfare of a public hearing as occurred in the US when McCarthy made similar allegations.¹⁷³ Vansittart’s charge that communists infested higher education only produced one named casualty. After Vansittart’s 28 March 1950 speech, the University of London suddenly dismissed lecturer Andrew Rothstein, a known communist; in response, the student union passed a resolution criticising his removal on ‘political grounds’.¹⁷⁴ Although the Rothstein incident obviously does not represent a systemic removal of communists from academia, it does suggest a shifting of attitudes in the universities during the early Cold War. Curiously, that same year, MI5 began surreptitiously compiling a list of all communists working in both universities and colleges.¹⁷⁵ Official restrictions were placed on communists in the field of adult education; lecturers were proscribed from working as tutors in departments which provided educational services to the armed services.¹⁷⁶ After the attack on HMS Amethyst, the admiralty ordered the ousting of all communist members of staff from Pangbourne Nautical College.¹⁷⁷ Taking note of the era, historian Eric Hobsbawm stated that ‘no known communists were appointed to university posts … nor if already in teaching posts, were they promoted’.¹⁷⁸ Since communist professors and lecturers were quietly denied a future in academia, no outright purge was even necessary.

The type of red-hunting promoted by Vansittart and Smithers did not stop at the hallowed halls of academia. The central council of the John Lewis Partnership voted in place a ban on communists from working in its businesses.¹⁷⁹ The firm employed 12,000 workers and owned twenty department stores throughout the UK, including the prominent shopping venues of Peter Jones and John Barnes in London, alongside the nationwide Waitrose chain.¹⁸⁰ When Lord Stansgate questioned the move in the Lords, the chairman of the company, J. Spendan Lewis, admonished Stansgate for his troubles. In a personal letter to the lord, he argued it was ‘very harmful indeed’ to criticise or doubt the right of a private business from excluding employment to ‘communists or for any other reason, such as a disinclination to worship golden calves or an inclination to play the part of Moses on a duodecimo or any other scale’.¹⁸¹ Joining the effort to purge themselves of reds was the Boy Scouts Association. During the 1950s, a number of its young members were expelled for having communist affiliations.¹⁸²

Although previous historians have contested the fact, like McCarthy and his followers in the US, the rantings and ravings of Vansittart and Smithers had a real impact on the political culture and governmental policies in the UK. However, the anti-communism preached by Vansittart and Smithers smacked of partisan attacks and right-wing fears – which limited its more general appeal. Alongside others like de Courcy, both viewed British socialism as only providing weak-kneed protection against the threat to the rise of Marxist totalitarianism inside the UK and the rest of the world. As is discussed in Chapter 4, Smithers and Vansittart, like the Conservative Party leadership, sought to associate Labourite ideas of democratic socialism and social democracy with the spread of undemocratic communism and the destruction of British liberty. Few in the UK found this link credible. Neither of these two proved a successful vessel in galvanising their brand of extreme anti-communism into a national movement. Neither the reactionary and alcoholic Smithers nor the retired and embittered Vansittart were able to sway the British populace to garner a national following as the young and media-savvy McCarthy did in the US.¹⁸³ However, as the following chapters show, a disproportionate anti-communist response within the UK did exist – yet not the type envisioned or pushed for by Vansittart and Smithers who promulgated a McCarthyite message. They represented the vocal extremes, not the shadowy consensus that ultimately formed to combat the ‘red menace’.

Notes

1. 1.  Daily Herald, 15 February 1950, p. 7.

2. 2.  Hansard, HL, vol. 167, c. 29 (2 May 1950).

3. 3.  Daily News (New York), 25 August 1954, p. 35.

4. 4.  I. Colvin, Vansittart in Office (London, 1965), p. 19.

5. 5.  Like It Was: The Diaries of Malcolm Muggeridge, ed. J. Bright-Holmes (London, 1981), p. 256.

6. 6.  Harold Nicolson Diaries 1945–1964, ed. N. Nicolson (London, 2004), p. 308.

7. 7.  Observer, 13 March 1949, p. 7.

8. 8.  John Colville, The Fringes of Power (London, 1985), 398.

9. 9.  J. Ferris, ‘Indulged in all too little? Vansittart, intelligence and appeasement’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, 10 (1995): 122–75, at p. 128.

10. 10.  J. Charmley, Chamberlain and the Lost Peace (London, 1989), pp. 6–7.

11. 11.  R. Vansittart, Black Record (London, 1941), p. 20.

12. 12.  Vansittart, Black Record, p. 3.

13. 13.  Western Daily Press, 20 May 1942, p. 4.

14. 14.  New Europe, October 1944, p. 8.

15. 15.  Hansard, HL, vol. 133, c. 168 (26 September 1944).

16. 16.  M. Roi, Alternative to Appeasement (London, 1997), p. 10.

17. 17.  A. Goldman, ‘Germans and Nazis: The controversy over “Vansittartism” in Britain during the Second World War’, Journal of Contemporary History, 14 (1979): 155–91, at p. 156.

18. 18.  See I. Tombs, ‘The victory of socialist “Vansittartism”: Labour and the German question, 1941–5’, Twentieth Century British History, 7 (1996): 287–309, at p. 287.

19. 19.  Goldman, ‘Germans and Nazis’, p. 167.

20. 20.  Vansittart, Lessons of My Life (London, 1943), p. 30.

21. 21.  Nottingham Journal, 17 April 1946, p. 1.

22. 22.  Daily Worker, 11 November 1947, p. 2.

23. 23.  Vansittart to John Percival, 2 January 1950, VNST II 1/36.

24. 24.  N. Rose, Vansittart (London, 1978), p. 278.

25. 25.  Roi, Alternative, p. 174.

26. 26.  Goldman, ‘Germans and Nazis’, p. 179.

27. 27.  N. Davies, Rising ’44 (London, 2003), p. 296.

28. 28.  Vansittart, Events and Shadows (London, 1947), p. 63.

29. 29.  Vansittart, Events and Shadows, p. 146.

30. 30.  Daily Worker, 11 November 1947, p. 6.

31. 31.  J. Callaghan, Rajani Palme Dutt (London, 1993), p. 234.

32. 32.  Vansittart to editor of The Times, 19 March 1948, VNST II 1–25.

33. 33.  Everybody’s, 13 August 1949, p. 8.

34. 34.  Everybody’s, 7 May 1949, pp. 2–3.

35. 35.  Everybody’s, 21 May 1949, p. 3.

36. 36.  Winston Churchill, handwritten note, undated, document 349, Churchill Papers (henceforth CHUR) 2-67A-B, Churchill College, Cambridge.

37. 37.  Intelligence Digest, vol. 11, no. 10 (September 1949), p. 1.

38. 38.  New York Times, 8 January 1950, p. 19.

39. 39.  US State Department report sent to Walter Bedell Smith by W. Park Armstrong, 8 January 1951. Freedom of information request by the author.

40. 40.  Western Mail, 16 February 1950, p. 4.

41. 41.  Globe and Mail, 6 April 1950, p. 4.

42. 42.  ‘Mr. Kenneth de Courcy and Intelligence Digest’ by Ernest Bevin, 29 March 1950, TNA FO 115/4511.

43. 43.  J. Paterson to Godfrey Shannon, 7 August 1950, TNA DO 231/28.

44. 44.  File note by J.J. Saville Garner, 4 September 1950, TNA DO 231/28.

45. 45.  File note by Alec Joyce, 1 September 1950, TNA DO 231/28.

46. 46.  File note by J.J. Saville Garner, 4 September 1950, TNA DO 231/28.

47. 47.  Vital Speeches of the Day, vol. 25, no. 5 (1950), p. 137.

48. 48.  Intelligence Digest, vol. 16, no. 1 (1950), p. 5.

49. 49.  N.W.H. Gaydon to Mr. Stephens and Mr. Burrows, 22 May 1950, TNA FO 115/4511.

50. 50.  Liddell diary, 29 December 1952.

51. 51.  Vansittart to Waldron Smithers, 9 October 1949, VNST 1/36.

52. 52.  Vansittart to A.L. Kennedy, 31 January 1950, VNST 1/41; Daily Mail, 20 March 1949, p. 1.

53. 53.  Guardian, 10 March 1949, p. 5.

54. 54.  Vansittart, Even Now (London, 1949), p. 143.

55. 55.  Daily Mail, 24 January 1950, p. 4.

56. 56.  Daily Mail, 24 January 1950, p. 4; Vansittart to G.M. Lindsay, 28 December 1949, VNST II 1–35.

57. 57.  Sunday Dispatch, 1 May 1955.

58. 58.  C. Moran, Classified (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 117–19.

59. 59.  Rose, Vansittart, p. 280.

60. 60.  Hansard, HL, vol. 166, c. 627 (29 March 1950).

61. 61.  Hansard, HL, vol. 166, c. 613 (29 March 1950).

62. 62.  Hansard, HL, vol. 166, c. 631 (29 March 1950).

63. 63.  Hansard, HL, vol. 166, c. 649 (29 March 1950).

64. 64.  Hansard, HL, vol. 166, c. 608 (29 March 1950).

65. 65.  Argus Melbourne, 4 April 1950, p. 2, on the moniker ‘VanWitchhunt’ given to him by the Reynolds News. Vansittart scoffed, calling it ‘the sort of jibe that I would have made at my prep. school on an off-day’.

66. 66.  Guardian, 31 March 1950, p. 6.

67. 67.  Daily Worker, 11 April 1950, p. 2.

68. 68.  Tribune, 7 April 1950, p. 3.

69. 69.  New Statesman and Nation, 19 August 1950.

70. 70.  Birmingham Daily Gazette, 5 April 1950, p. 1.

71. 71.  Birmingham Daily Gazette, 3 April 1950, p. 4.

72. 72.  Vansittart to Lord Stansgate, 4 April 1950, Papers of William Wedgwood Benn, 1st Viscount Stansgate (henceforth ST) ST 1/125, Westminster Parliamentary Archive.

73. 73.  Gerald Barry to Stansgate, 26 April 1950, ST 1/125.

74. 74.  Boris Ford to Stansgate, 26 April 1950, ST 1/125.

75. 75.  Hansard, HL, vol. 167, cc. 16–23 (2 May 1950).

76. 76.  Hansard, HL, vol. 167, c. 45 (2 May 1950).

77. 77.  Northern Whig, 3 May 1950, p. 1.

78. 78.  J. Butler, The Red Dean of Canterbury (London, 2011), pp. 242–4.

79. 79.  Kirby, ‘Ecclesiastical McCarthyism’, p. 190.

80. 80.  Geoffrey Fisher to Waldron Smithers, 22 March 1951, G 26 Papers of Council of Foreign Relations (henceforth CFR), Lambeth Palace Library.

81. 81.  Daily Mail, 30 March 1950, p. 1.

82. 82.  Vansittart, Bones of Contention (London, 1945) p. 122.

83. 83.  Vansittart to the editor of Daily Telegraph, 20 September 1950, VNST 1/42.

84. 84.  Vansittart, ‘Christianity and Communism’, 10 August 1949, VNST 1/37.

85. 85.  Donegal News, 30 July 1949, p. 3.

86. 86.  Vansittart, Even Now, p. 117.

87. 87.  Hansard, HL, vol. 166, c. 616 (29 March 1950).

88. 88.  D. Hyde, The Answer to Communism (London, 1949), p. 52.

89. 89.  From Communism towards Catholicism, pamphlet by Douglas Hyde, 1948.

90. 90.  Fisher to Canon Scrutton, 29 December 1955, Fisher vol. 154.

91. 91.  Archbishop’s address to the Diocesan Conference, 12 July 1949, CFR G/61.

92. 92.  York Diocesan Leaflet, no. 254, August 1949, p. 3.

93. 93.  Derry Journal, 9 July 1954, p. 1.

94. 94.  Vansittart, ‘Christ or Stalin?’, reprint located in Fisher vol. 70.

95. 95.  Quoted in I. Jones, ‘The clergy, Cold War and the mission of the local church: England ca. 1945–60’, in Religion and The Cold War, ed. D. Kirby (London, 2002), 188–99, at p. 191.

96. 96.  I. Jones, ‘The clergy’, p. 195.

97. 97.  Belfast Telegraph, 25 November 1954, p. 5.

98. 98.  Londonderry Sentinel, 7 September 1954, p. 2.

99. 99.  Fisher to Eleanor Adlard, 21 August 1950, Fisher vol. 70.

100. 100.  Fisher to Lady Roberts, 12 April 1950, Fisher vol. 70.

101. 101.  Church Council on Foreign Relations meeting notes, 18 November 1949, CFR G 6/1.

102. 102.  Daily Mail, 29 March 1950, p. 4.

103. 103.  Catholic Herald, 14 July 1950, p. 8.

104. 104.  Fisher to Waldron Smithers, 2 April 1953, Fisher vol. 131.

105. 105.  Belfast Newsletter, 29 January 1954, p. 10.

106. 106.  Western Mail, 31 December 1949, p. 2.

107. 107.  Lord Bishop of Chichester to Fisher, 31 March 1950, CFR G 6/1.

108. 108.  Fisher to Bishop of Chichester, 3 April 1950, CFR G 6/1.

109. 109.  Kirby, ‘Ecclesiastical McCarthyism’, p. 190.

110. 110.  See E. McFarland and R. Johnston, ‘The Church of Scotland’s special commission on communism, 1949–1954: Tackling “Christianity’s most serious competitor”’, Contemporary British History, 23 (2009): 337–61.

111. 111.  Daily Herald, 18 May 1949, p. 2.

112. 112.  J.B. Wilson to K.J. Robertson, 1 June 1944, D/497, Beaverbrook Papers (henceforth BBK), Westminster Parliamentary Archive.

113. 113.  Smithers to Members of the Carton Club, 1 December 1938, TNA HO 45/25476.

114. 114.  Memorandum by Waldron Smithers, undated, though likely written in 1938, TNA HO 45/25476; Smithers to Lord Londonderry, 22 December 1938, D3099/17/40, Papers of Lord Londonderry, Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (henceforth PRONI). Smithers’s distrust of ‘Jews’ is also evident in a 1944 letter he wrote to Anthony Eden. See TNA FO 954/26B/352.

115. 115.  Smithers to Lord Londonderry, 25 April 1938, PRONI D3099/17/40.

116. 116.  Smithers to Lord Halifax, 24 November 1936, LH/1/59, Records of the Leader of the House of Lords, Westminster Parliamentary Archive.

117. 117.  Smithers to John Anderson, 15 March 1940, TNA HO 45/25476.

118. 118.  E.J. Robertson to J.B. Wilson, 23 June 1944, BBK/D/497.

119. 119.  J. Boyd-Carpenter, Way of Life (London, 1980), p. 79; A. Farrant and N. Tynan, ‘Sir Waldron Smithers and the long walk to Finchley’, Economic Affairs, 32 (2012): 43–7, at p. 44.

120. 120.  F. Hayek, Hayek on Hayek, ed. S. Kresge and L. Wenar (Chicago, 1994), p. 107.

121. 121.  R. Toye, The Roar of the Lion (Oxford, 2013), p. 211.

122. 122.  A. Farrant and N. Tynan, ‘Sir Waldron Smithers and the muddle of the Tory middle’, Economic Affairs, 32 (2012): 63–7, at p. 63; A. Farrant and N. Tynan, ‘The control of engagement order: Attlee’s road to serfdom?’, in F.A. Hayek and the Modern Economy, ed. S. Peart and D. Levy (London, 2013), 157–80, at p. 159.

123. 123.  Hansard, House of Commons debates (henceforth HC), vol. 473, c. 1001 (4 April 1950).

124. 124.  Liddell diary, 24 October 1947.

125. 125.  Hansard, HC, vol. 462, c. 451 (2 March 1949).

126. 126.  Daily Mail, 11 July 1952, p. 2; Hansard, HC, vol. 503, c. 1517 (10 July 1952).

127. 127.  Hansard, HC, vol. 437, c. 252 (22 May 1947).

128. 128.  Hansard, HC, vol. 456, c. 502 (20 September 1948).

129. 129.  Derby Daily Telegraph, 7 March 1950, p. 1; Daily Herald, 10 December 1954, p. 7.

130. 130.  Hansard, HC, vol. 476, c. 2244 (27 June 1950).

131. 131.  Hansard, HC, vol. 476, c. 2252 (27 June 1950).

132. 132.  Hansard, HC, vol. 476, c. 2254 (27 June 1950).

133. 133.  J. Strachey, The Coming Struggle for Power (London, 1932), p. 357.

134. 134.  P. Corthorn, ‘Labour, the Left, and the Stalinist purges of the late 1930s’, The Historical Journal, 48.1 (2005): 179–207, at p. 202.

135. 135.  New York Times, 3 March 1950, p. 16.

136. 136.  Sheffield Daily Telegraph, 3 March 1950, p. 1.

137. 137.  Western Morning News, 4 March 1950, p. 1.

138. 138.  Herbert Gunn to Lord Beaverbrook, 17 March 1950, BBK/H/252.

139. 139.  Gunn to Beaverbrook, 28 April 1950, BBK/H/252.

140. 140.  H. Thomas, John Strachey (London, 1973), p. 260.

141. 141.  F.R. Hoyer Millar to Michael Wright, 4 April 1950, TNA FO 371/81635.

142. 142.  Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer, 15 April 1950, p. 1.

143. 143.  New York Times, 3 April 1950, p. 1.

144. 144.  New York Times, 6 April 1950, p. 27.

145. 145.  K. Young, ‘Cold War insecurities and the curious case of John Strachey’, Intelligence and National Security, 29 (2014): 901–25, at p. 910.

146. 146.  Herbert Gunn to Lord Beaverbrook, 6 April 1950, BBK/H/252.

147. 147.  F.R. Hoyer Millar to Michael Wright, 4 April 1950, TNA FO 371/81635.

148. 148.  E.M. Rose to Gladwyn Jebb, 28 April 1950, TNA FO 371/81635.

149. 149.  Gladwyn Jebb to William Elliot, 28 April 1950, TNA FO 371/81635.

150. 150.  File notes on file AU 10210/4, 4 May 1950, TNA FO 371/81635.

151. 151.  New York Times, 4 April 1950, p. 6.

152. 152.  Smithers to Vansittart, 27 November 1949, VNST II 1/36.

153. 153.  Hansard, HC, vol. 472, c. 37 (14 March 1950).

154. 154.  Hansard, HC, vol. 475, cc. 1–2 (8 May 1950).

155. 155.  Daily Worker, 7 July 1950, p. 4.

156. 156.  Perth Daily News, 27 July 1946, p. 6.

157. 157.  N. Robinson, Live from Downing Street (London, 2012), p. 112.

158. 158.  Alexis Bobrinskoy to Vansittart, 9 September 1949, VNST 1–39.

159. 159.  BBC Service Report on Bobrinskoy, VNST 1/39.

160. 160.  Liddell diary, 8 November 1947.

161. 161.  Liddell diary, 1 January 1948.

162. 162.  Hansard, HC, vol. 522, cc. 835–6 (19 January 1954); Hansard, HC, vol. 526, cc. 1784–5 (29 April 1954).

163. 163.  C.H. Rolleston to Winston Churchill, supplement to letter, 9 February 1949, CHUR 2/99 A-B.

164. 164.  Churchill to Herbert Morrison, 13 April 1950; Morrison to Churchill, 15 April 1950, CHUR 2/99 A-B.

165. 165.  Smithers to Churchill, 18 June 1952, TNA PREM 11/995.

166. 166.  Churchill to Smithers, 8 July 1952, TNA PREM 11/995.

167. 167.  R.J. Whitlock to P.G. Oates, 15 August 1952, TNA PREM 11/995.

168. 168.  Reds and Our Churches, pamphlet by J.B. Matthews, 1953.

169. 169.  Kirby, ‘Ecclesiastical McCarthyism’, p. 201.

170. 170.  Forward, 22 April 1916, p. 1.

171. 171.  ‘The politics of faith’, Guardian, 5 May 2010.

172. 172.  ‘Optimistic agnostic’ is how Churchill’s last private secretary described his superior. A. Browne, Long Sunset (London, 1995), p. 204.

173. 173.  Liddell diary, 23 July 1951.

174. 174.  Sunday Mirror, 2 April 1950, p. 2.

175. 175.  Liddell diary, 1 December 1950.

176. 176.  See R. Fieldhouse, Adult Education and the Cold War (Leeds, 1985).

177. 177.  S. Parsons, ‘British McCarthyism’, p. 235.

178. 178.  E. Hobsbawm, Interesting Times (London, 2002), p. 182.

179. 179.  Gazette of the John Lewis Partnership, vol. 31, no. 14, 7 May 1949, p. 1.

180. 180.  Daily Herald, 26 April 1949, p. 1.

181. 181.  J. Spendan Lewis to Lord Stansgate, 14 May 1949, ST 1/125.

182. 182.  See S. Mills, ‘Be prepared: Communism and the politics of scouting in 1950s Britain’, Contemporary British History, 25 (2011): 429–50.

183. 183.  T. Doherty, Cold War, Cool Medium (New York, 2003), p. 16.