Michael Foot: A Life. Kenneth O. Morgan
Lord Tredegar or the Dukes of Beaufort. It was strong hunting country, and the Beaufort Hunt was an ancient local institution: here was a pastime that Foot particularly disliked, for social as much as for humane reasons. Monmouth was also an area of immense natural beauty, hailed by early enthusiasts for the ‘picturesque’, along the river Wye and around Tintern Abbey, immortalized by Michael Foot’s much-admired Wordsworth. The South Wales Argus, published in Newport, detailed the placid panorama of rural Gwent ‘from Grosmont to Magor, and from Llanfihangel-Crossenny to Chepstow’.20 There were pockets of Labour strength in the western parts of the constituency close to the mining valleys further west, while there was a strong railway interest around Abergavenny in the north-east, including the family of Raymond Williams. The fifteen-year-old Williams and his railwayman father, an activist in the Labour Party, campaigned for Foot. In fact the youthful Labour candidate did not impress the schoolboy Williams: ‘He was a new phenomenon, straight out of the Oxford Union, who did sound a bit odd in Pandy village hall. I said to my father: “What has this to do with the Labour Party?”’21
Monmouth had remained stolidly Conservative/Unionist during the Liberal ascendancy in Wales in the later nineteenth century, until the famous Liberal upsurge of 1906 when Major-General Sir Ivor Philipps captured the seat and held it until the end of the First World War. Since then it had been solidly Tory. In 1931 the Conservative candidate, Sir Leolin Forestier-Walker, held it easily in a straight fight with Labour, with a fourteen-thousand majority and 70 per cent of the vote. Michael Foot’s slender hopes were given an early buffeting at a meeting in Usk when his agent greeted the electors with the immortal words, ‘Here we are again in bloody old Tory Usk.’ The Conservative member since a by-election in 1934 was Major J. A. Herbert, a Tory of imperialist persuasion, later to be Governor of Bengal.
Nevertheless, the fledgling Labour candidate fought a spirited, even sparkling, campaign. Foot’s address and his speeches focused on the twin themes of peace and poverty. ‘The armaments race must be stopped now,’ and the League of Nations must be supported, including in the current crisis caused by the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. At home there should be public ownership of all major industries and banks (‘exchange’ had been added to ‘production’ and ‘distribution’ in Clause 4 of the Labour Party’s constitution at the 1934 party conference) together with social reforms, some of which were targeted on farm labourers, including a minimum wage and the abolition of tied cottages.22 His early speeches at Caerleon and Chepstow defied the ethos of the constituency by being uncompromisingly socialist: ‘The community should take into its own hands the factories and land in order that the masses should share in the abundance.’ ‘One small section’ should not be allowed to ‘exploit the masses’ (applause).23 In an article in the local newspaper he wrote that ‘Labour advocates as the main feature of its programme the national ownership of the factories and other wealth.’ The private owners of the means of production were ‘enemies of society at large’. There were vague echoes of Wells in imprecise calls to adopt scientific methods of production and to promote new inventions.24 At Caldecot he urged that unemployment (rife in many parts of the constituency) should be made a national charge. Always there were assaults on the National Government’s record on international peace and its failure to promote disarmament. He attributed the recent increase in stock exchange prices to the rise in armament shares. He shrugged off criticisms that, at twenty-two, he was too young to be a Member of Parliament. After an evening meeting at Rolls Hall, Monmouth, the press recorded that ‘never before has a Labour candidate received such applause at the close of an address’.25
There were, inevitably, few outside speakers in Labour’s forlorn Monmouth campaign. Foot was assisted by Stafford Cripps’s youthful protégé, the Quaker Geoffrey Wilson, and indeed Cripps came down to pay the young candidate a remarkable tribute, saying that he hoped to see him in an incoming Labour administration after the polls. Cripps was as robust as Foot: the Labour Party ‘sought to get rid of private ownership of production … in order to give the workers a decent life’.26 There was also a resounding eve-of-poll meeting, addressed by two coming stars, Aneurin Bevan and James Griffiths. It rained heavily on polling day. The outcome was a reduced Conservative majority of 9,848. Major Herbert polled 23,262 votes and Foot 13,454. Labour was to remain a relatively weak force in the constituency thereafter, until a passing victory in 1966 and a more sustained period of power in 1997–2005 under the banner of New Labour. But old or new, the Labour Party was never going to find it easy in so traditional an area.
Nevertheless, Foot had fought a spirited and creditable campaign. He told the post-election crowd in Agincourt Square, Monmouth, ‘We shall go on fighting until we are victorious.’27 The Labour poll had increased by three thousand, and was the highest ever in the constituency. The Tory Western Mail, which had left Foot’s campaign virtually unreported, quoted him as saying: ‘I have enjoyed myself in the Monmouth division more than I can say.’28 He never thought of fighting Monmouth again, and in 1938 was to be adopted in his native Plymouth for the Devonport division, not obviously a more hopeful prospect. But he had caught the bug for electioneering. This general election, incidentally, was mostly unfortunate for the Foots. While Dingle, bolstered by an electoral pact with the Tories, romped home in two-Member Dundee, John Foot came eight thousand behind the Conservative in Basingstoke. More calamitous, father Isaac was unseated by the Tories at Bodmin after a ferocious personalized campaign directed against ‘Pussyfoot’. He particularly resented the campaign against him by two neighbouring ‘National Liberal’ ministers, Walter Runciman (Member for St Ives) and Leslie Hore-Belisha (Member for Plymouth, Devonport). Isaac bitterly quoted against them Lord Alfred Douglas’s poem of betrayal, ‘The Broken Covenant’:
And when all men shall sing his praise to me
I’ll not gainsay. But I shall know his soul
Lies in the bosom of Iscariot.
Hore-Belisha, representing part of Isaac’s own Plymouth, was one who would lodge in the collective Foot memory, leaving the entire family eager for revenge. Another sharp critic of Isaac, as it happened, was the author of the ‘Crossbencher’ column of Beaverbrook’s Sunday Express. This was a young journalist called Peter Howard – with whom Michael was later to co-author Guilty Men. Isaac was to try to return to Westminster when he fought a by-election in 1937 after the egregious Runciman went to the Lords. Narrowly, by 210 votes only, he lost again.
After the election, Foot had no job and no immediate objective. He lived in lodgings in London, at 33 Cambridge Terrace, near Paddington station, which he rented for thirty shillings a week, and often seemed lonely. Nearly seventy years later, he recalled how on Christmas Day 1935, at the age of twenty-two, he found himself all alone in London with nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no girlfriend for comfort. Then he discovered that Plymouth Argyle were playing Tottenham Hotspur at White Hart Lane on Christmas morning. He took the bus to Tottenham and saw Argyle triumph by 2–1, one of their goals being scored by their record goal-scorer Sammy Black, perhaps the finest player ever to don the black-and-green shirt of the ‘Pilgrims’. To celebrate, Foot went to the Criterion restaurant in Piccadilly to enjoy his Christmas turkey: ‘Never in the realms of human conflict had two away points been so spectacularly or insouciantly garnered by one man.’29 To add to the joy, the next day Plymouth defeated Spurs again, this time at Home Park. But it still sounds like a bleak and lonely time in an unfriendly metropolis.
In fact, he found a role and companionship for the next year or more through the Socialist League and the patronage of Sir Stafford Cripps. The Socialist League was still a lively force amongst urban intellectuals after the 1935 election campaign, though in retrospect it may have passed such a peak as it attained following defeats at the