ABSTRACT
John Beckett was just 30 when he became Labour’s youngest MP in 1924, and he was seen as one of the Party’s brightest rising stars. He was on intimate terms with the greatest political names in the land, as well as the friend and confidant of all those who, two decades later, were to run the 1945 government, especially its Prime Minister, Clement Attlee. By 1929 he had become the most extreme, most newsworthy left-wing Labour rebel of his day. He was more than once physically thrown out of the House of Commons, and in 1930 he seized the Mace from the Speaker’s table and ran off with it, the first person to do so since Cromwell. In the early 1930s he managed London’s Strand Theatre, knew all the leading actors of his day, made money and went bankrupt. And then he became a fascist. His career, which had looked so promising in 1924, ended in the squalid wastelands of neo-Nazi politics, and in prison for nearly four years, for fascists were interned during the war. It’s the stuff of fiction, and at least two popular novels contain characters based on him. In 1922 Mary Agnes Hamilton modelled one of her political agitators in her novel Follow My Leader on the
young John Beckett. Nearly a century later, Carmody in Anthony Quinn’s 2015 novel Curtain Call is based on him. Which is quite suitable, because the father I knew was a bit of a fantasist, though his image of himself would be rather more heroic than Mr Quinn’s Carmody. Perhaps a clean-cut hero from another age taken out of one of his beloved G.A. Henty novels; perhaps a John Buchan hero; perhaps Flambeau, looking for his Father Brown (and eventually, as we shall see, finding him). And his own life, as he chose to present it, was largely fantasy too. It was not so much that he made things up: he only did that occasionally, and always obeyed his own rule of giving his fiction some characteristics of the truth. It was more that he edited his life. His version, as he wrote it in his memoirs in 1938 and as he told it to me, contained heroic highlights. Researching this book has given me the chance to find out the truth about my father. The biggest lie, the strangest, the most important and inexplicable lie, was about the fundamental question of who he was. He talked of his “yeoman ancestors”, the generations of Cheshire farmers from which he had sprung. In the 1930s he embraced anti-Semitism and complained of “alien control of our country”. But he was a Jew. His mother was a thoroughbred: born Eva Solomon of a union between Mark Solomon and Jessy Isaacs. It has taken me years to find out, for she, and later he, went to great lengths to hide it. I was born in May 1945, four days after VE day and a little more than a year after the Home Secretary released my father from prison, in the small Berkshire village of Chenies, 21 miles from the centre of London. It was exactly that distance because the dangerous fascist John Beckett was still under a sort of house arrest, not allowed to travel more than five miles from his home or within 20 miles of London. He died when I was 19, and, in the late 1990s, I wrote a book about his life, The Rebel Who Lost His Cause. It wasn’t a bad book – several people were kind enough to say it was rather a good one – but I have come to see that it did not nail the man or the history through which he lived, it did not face up to what he did and said and wrote, and it did not tell the end of the story – my part of the story – properly.
