ABSTRACT
In the three years from 1931, when John lost his seat in Parliament, to 1934, when he lost all his money, a great deal happened, both in the world outside and in John’s own life. Soon after the 1931 election, Jimmy Maxton took the ILP out of the Labour Party and on to the long road which led to its oblivion, and Oswald Mosley turned his New Party into the British Union of Fascists (BUF ). Maxton’s lieutenant was now John’s old ILP friend Fenner Brockway, who had also lost his seat in the 1931 election. Mosley’s deputy was another of John’s ILP “parliamentary suicide club”, Dr Robert Forgan, and he, too, lost his seat in 1931. Another defeated rebel, John Strachey, was moving towards the Communist Party. The left was splintering in all directions. For John, the theatre absorbed a great deal of his energy. But politics was in his blood now. When he thought of Ramsay MacDonald and the Labour establishment, or of the communists, or of the poor who had expected so much of organised labour, he could still feel so angry that I guess he found it hard to breathe. He still wanted to change the world; and he still had friends and admirers in politics. In the first few months after the election, the
Peckham Labour Party was fiercely loyal to John. One activist, Fred Brooks, wrote to me that taking the Mace “won respect and admiration from the people he had been sent to represent”. Mr Brooks thought him “a very sincere man whose one ambition was to do all he could to help the working class. I recall that he had an expression which he used often to describe the Conservatives: ‘Moral perverts’.” Kyrle too was admired: “She was one of the finest people ever to take her seat on the council”, wrote Mr Brooks. “Her care and compassion for the poorer folk within her ward would be hard to surpass and she was literally loved by all.” So it is unsurprising that for a time, Peckham Labour Party defied Labour’s ruling national executive and continued to support John, insisting that he would be their standard-bearer at the next election. When, in 1932, Labour’s executive announced that Lewis Silkin would be Labour’s official candidate for Peckham, all except two of the members of Peckham’s Labour Party decamped into two ILP branches formed by John and Kyrle. John was starting to create at a local level the great new party of the left which he and John Wheatley had planned in 1930 as a national party. Locally, it was not called the ILP but “the Beckettite party”. Local historian Dave Russell writes: “Regular meetings were held at the Old Kent Road Baths and at the Central Hall, Peckham, where Beckett could be heard ‘preaching firebrand politics to rapt audiences’.” But it was no good. The left did what it always seems to do in times of crisis: it degenerated into sectarian squabbling. Preparing for the demonstration against unemployment in February 1933, the chief preoccupation in Peckham seems to have been, not “How many people can we get along?” but “How do we make sure more people march under our banner than under the banners of our rivals on the left?” There were three competing banners: the official Labour Party, the National Unemployed Workers Movement (a communist front organisation) and the ILP. John wrote later:
I had hoped that the ILP, freed of its Labour Party commitments, could act as an independent revolutionary socialist party,
using parliamentary action for the purpose of creating a socialist commonwealth upon British lines and by British methods. The stress of the fight with the Labour Party, however, had worn down a great many members who would have been invaluable, and the Communists had skilfully penetrated the movement with men and women who, while they obeyed every instruction of the Communist International, denied any connection with the Communist Party.
