Читать книгу Enemies Within: Communists, the Cambridge Spies and the Making of Modern Britain - Richard Davenport-Hines - Страница 24

One momentous fact is always overlooked: for MI5’s first two decades Britain was not yet a full parliamentary democracy. Property-owning qualifications restricted the franchise, and all women were excluded from parliamentary elections. In 1910, at the first general election after the formation of the security services, the electorate numbered 5.8 million for England, 357,566 for Wales, 785,208 for Scotland, 698,787 for Ireland, making a total of 7.6 million. The combined population of England, Scotland and Wales was about 40 million (this includes children). During the war of 1914–18, Britain was depicted as the world’s leading parliamentary democracy, although only about 40 per cent of its troops had the vote, whereas universal male suffrage had prevailed in Germany since 1871. In Britain in 1918 the franchise was extended to all men over the age of twenty-one and to women aged over thirty. The English electorate accordingly rose to just over 16 million, the Welsh to 1.2 million, the Scottish to 2.2 million and the Irish to 1.9 million – a total of 21.3 million. There was subsequent discussion of equalizing the franchise for both sexes at twenty-five, but in 1927 ‘the Cabinet went mad’, as one of its members, Lord Birkenhead, explained, and authorized the extension of the vote to women above the age of twenty-one – ‘a change so dangerous and so revolutionary’ that Churchill fought it. This was called the Flapper Vote.²⁴

The general election of 1929 was the first in which the British parliamentary franchise was extended to all men and women aged over twenty-one, except for prisoners, peers and lunatics. For the first time women comprised the majority of the electorate: 52.7 per cent were female and 47.3 per cent were male (15.2 million women and 13.7 million men). There had been an almost threefold increase in the electorate in under twenty years. Conservative activists believed that the Baldwin government’s defeat by Labour was made inevitable by the extended franchise. Other conservative thinkers saw this as part of a wider dégringolade. ‘The two most important happenings in my lifetime’, said Hensley Henson, Bishop of Durham, ‘are the revolt of women against their natural and traditional subordination, and the repudiation of Christianity lock, stock and barrel in Soviet Russia. The one destroys the family, and the other banishes God.’²⁵

‘The Flapper Vote … had to come, but came too soon,’ Vansittart judged. After the election of 1929, ‘electoral power passed from the thoughtful – pessimists said the educated – in a crucial decade, which first popularized the impracticable’. His deputy Sir Victor Wellesley was likewise convinced that the instability of British foreign policy during the 1930s was ‘largely due’ to the recent expansion of the electorate to include women. ‘The pressure of an uninstructed public opinion’ after the Italian invasion of Abyssinia resulted in policy swerves and a fatal diplomatic crash which forced the resignation of the Foreign Secretary. ‘We like to think of democracy’, wrote Wellesley, ‘as the best guarantee against war. The events of 1935 prove that it can be as dangerous as a war-minded autocracy.’ Wellesley, writing from the perspective of 1944, made a further point: universal adult suffrage was obtained just at the moment when ‘the authority and prestige of parliaments’ were declining in democratic countries; legislatures were ‘steadily losing their sovereign power’. The volume and intricacy of public business required such specialization that parliaments were slackening control of the administrative machinery: real power had shifted to highly capitalized international companies, argued Wellesley, who founded the Foreign Office’s Economic Relations section in 1933. Britain’s epoch of full democracy began just as the deification of the nation state was occurring elsewhere in Europe: Italy had its Duce, Germany its Führer, Spain its Caudillo and Hungary its Serene Regent; but the most enduring absolutism was in Soviet Russia, where the dictatorship of the proletariat became the dictatorship of Generalissimo Stalin.²⁶

One fact about the departments of state was so enormous, omnipotent and matchless that it is seldom mentioned. Whitehall was overwhelmingly masculine. The departmental culture was a body of assumptions, judgements, tastes and habits that, even when they underwent adaptation and reformulation, remained irrefragably male. No woman exerted any influence within any ministry. The security services were exceptional in employing women – Jane Sissmore, Ann Glass and others – in positions that mattered. Women were required to resign from the civil service if they married: their first thoughts must henceforth be for their husbands and their homes, so the Home Civil Service judged, and they should not be taking a salary into a household which already had a male breadwinner. The first marriage waiver was given to a principal at the Ministry of Labour in 1938. A year or so later Jane Sissmore, afterwards Jane Archer, became an outstanding exception to this rule. The former Oxford communist Jenifer Hart at the Home Office obtained a marriage waiver in 1941 with the support of her boss, Sir Alexander Maxwell, who advised her to announce in The Times that she wished to be regarded as married although she was barred by the civil service from being so. (She also endured sexual advances in the office from Sir Frank Newsam, who succeeded Maxwell as PUS in 1948.) Under wartime conditions most other women were required to resign on marriage, and were then re-employed as temporary civil servants for the duration of the war.

The married-women ban was formally lifted from the Home Civil Service in 1946, although it endured unofficially for many years longer. In the 1960s officials of the Civil Service Commission justified the bar in the Diplomatic Service on married women as necessary to clear the way for men to get promotion. The interdiction on married women continued in the Service until 1973. There were three women Cabinet ministers between 1919 and 1964 with a combined length of service of seven years. The first female PUS was installed at the suitably domestic Ministry of Housing in 1955. Although the bicameral Westminster legislature was idealized as ‘The Mother of Parliaments’, women were excluded from membership of its upper chamber, the House of Lords, until 1958. Such were the sacrifices expected of mothers that all the early life peeresses were childless. Hereditary women peers, unlike their male counterparts, were debarred from the Lords until 1963. The first woman judge was appointed in 1962, the first woman ambassador in 1976 and the first married woman ambassador in 1987; the first female chief of a security agency was Stella Rimington of MI5 in 1992; the Whitehall mandarins’ preferred club, the Athenaeum, admitted its first women members in 2002. Women were excluded from full membership of Cambridge University until 1948: the first all-male colleges there began admitting female undergraduates in the 1970s.

These facts were more important to departmental temper, to office procedures and to relations between colleagues than the fluid or ductile gradations of class. It is compelling to note that critiques of the Whitehall ministries – starting in earnest after 1951, when Burgess and Maclean absconded from the Foreign Office – as class-bound in their recruitment, sectional and exclusive in their operations, inimical to modern technological progress, averse to private enterprise were all written by men. The position of women in government employment was seldom raised before a woman prime minister took office in 1979. Even then, it was treated as an issue for women writers, whose criticisms were discounted, sometimes with contempt, as a minority issue – despite Disraeli’s axiom that the history of success is the history of minorities. The hegemony of class explanations belonged to a phase of thinking that should be long gone. As this book will show, gender exclusivity – not class exclusivity – helped men in their espionage for Soviet Russia. Whitehall’s response to the discovery of such espionage was fashioned by male affinities, not class connivance.

The ideal of fraternity among men was fundamental to the way that everything worked. Collin Brooks, editor of the Sunday Dispatch, was among thirty journalists invited to the Treasury for a briefing on gold-conversion policy in 1932. ‘We had tea and plum-cake in the Chancellor’s room, talking very informally over pipes,’ Brooks recorded. ‘It was an interesting confidential pow-wow, and a beautiful example of the informality of British government.’ This relaxed manliness in action required gender exclusivity: women subordinates may have prepared the tea and plum-cake, but they were not present to inhibit the men pulling on their pipes.²⁷

Manliness can be defined in many ways: virility, fortitude, enterprise, aggression, logical powers, compassion, gullibility, boorishness, sentimentality, lumbering thoughts. ‘They can laugh at anything – including themselves,’ Vansittart said of his male compatriots. ‘They boast of their smallest possession, common sense, and win victories for which no foresight qualified them.’ Among colleagues, in offices and committees, nicknames proliferated as a way of bringing cheerful cohesion: ‘Waterbeast’, ‘Snatch’, ‘Moly’ and the rest. (Unaffectionate nicknames, such as ‘Sir Icicle’ for Alexander Cadogan, were not used openly.) Manly good humour was prized. ‘I doubt if he has a very powerful head,’ the Solicitor General, Sir Donald Somervell, said of the Home Secretary, Sir John Gilmour, in 1934; but ‘he has a very robust & humorous outlook … & knows how to deal with men’. This seemed preferable to the volatility of brilliance.²⁸

Masculine hardness was especially valued by Conservative leaders: their admiration for fascists and Nazis was expressed in gendered terms. Speaking of ‘national glories’ to the Anti-Socialist Union in 1933, Churchill thundered: ‘I think of Germany, with its splendid, clear-eyed youths marching forward on all the roads of the Reich, singing their ancient songs, demanding to be conscripted into an army; eagerly seeking the most terrible weapons of war; burning to suffer and die for their Fatherland.’ He praised, too, the Italian hard man Mussolini for inspiring his fascists with their ‘stern sense of national duty’. This was men’s stuff.²⁹