Michael Foot: A Life. Kenneth O. Morgan
Portland Square was hit, and so were ninety-six sailors in the naval barracks. In the final assault on 29 April, the Devonport High School for Girls was hit, forty-three sailors were killed on HMS Raleigh, and 100,000 books destroyed by fire in the Central Library. The rebuilding of Plymouth after the war inevitably became a theme of bitter political contention. Foot wrote an article in Reynolds News in October 1944, ‘Plymouth is Betrayed’, condemning the government for refusing to grant national funding to assist the local council’s Plymouth Plan. Lord Astor, the outgoing Conservative Mayor of Plymouth, supported the plan, as did his wife.36 So too did the incoming Mayor, none other than Isaac Foot. But Hore-Belisha insisted that local reconstruction could only be a local responsibility. The entire issue occasioned intense debate. The clerk of a local district council warned Isaac Foot that his son’s support of the ‘extravagant’ city plan, ‘creating unnecessary overspill’, might lose him half his supporters.37 Foot also gave his backing to the plan of the celebrated town planner Patrick Abercrombie for Plymouth in 1943, which would have created a large, multi-purpose Tamarside local authority.
By the early spring of 1945, the end of the war was clearly in sight. Twelve days after VE-Day on 8 May, the Labour Party decided to leave the Churchill coalition. A purely Conservative ‘caretaker’ government took over, to prepare the way for a general election, eventually announced as to be held on 5 July – or rather, it was a government which also included some of the ghostly National Liberals, known briskly to Michael’s brother Dingle as the ‘Vichy Liberals’.38 To Foot’s immense derision, the man appointed as the new Minister of National Insurance in Churchill’s ‘caretaker’ government was none other than Mussolini’s erstwhile acquaintance Leslie Hore-Belisha, perhaps another Caligula’s horse; though not of Cabinet rank.
Michael Foot’s journalism reached a climax now. In mid-April he was sent by the Herald to San Francisco to cover the conference to launch the new United Nations; it was his first visit to America since his debating tour with John Cripps in 1934. He wrote eight somewhat atmospheric articles describing the conference, which were published in the Herald between 17 April and 29 May. He focused mainly on trying to convey the mood of the conference, discussed some of the issues, notably Poland and the Lublin government, and assessed some key personalities including the Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, whom he found ‘mysterious’ and who of course he knew as a key figure in the pre-war show trials. He had a number of interesting encounters, notably with the future Australian Foreign Minister Dr H. V. Evatt. In a relaxed aside he noted that at one meeting he sat next to the romantic French film actor Charles Boyer.39
But Foot was anxious to return home. There was a vital election to fight, and time was getting short. He also had an even more pressing reason to get back, something to change his life even more fundamentally than his election to Parliament. He had met Jill Craigie.40 Previously his affections had focused strongly on Connie Ernst, who had returned to New York at the end of 1944 and whom he had asked to marry him. He travelled to San Francisco via New York, and was with Connie on 12 April 1945, the day President Roosevelt died. But, to the disappointment of Koestler amongst others, Connie regretfully but decisively declined the offer: she did not wish to live in post-war London. She went on to marry Simon Michael Bessie, a publisher who in the 1960s actually became Foot’s publisher and remained friendly with him, even though his marriage to Connie ended in divorce. Bessie was also to publish in America the works of Jill’s later great friend and heroine Rebecca West.
Jill Craigie was quite a different proposition from Connie. Part Scots, part Russian, she was two years older than Michael. Although only thirty-four, she had already been married twice, and had a young daughter. Her first marriage had ended before the war, and she was now in an unsatisfactory marriage with a playwright and screenwriter, Jeffrey Dell. Jill was a notable example of how London’s cultural life was galvanized by the experience of war. She went into films, and wrote an ambitious documentary, Out of Chaos, in 1943, inspired by the socialist philosophy of William Morris. She focused on the war artists, and got to know eminent figures like Paul Nash, Graham Sutherland, Stanley Spencer and especially Henry Moore. She also met the writer on urban theory Lewis Mumford during the war, and the influence of his book The City in History inspired her to make a documentary on the rebuilding of a war-damaged city. A title that suggested itself was ‘The Way we Live Now’, and one possible city for the location of the film was Plymouth, where Patrick Abercrombie was to be part-architect of a post-war city plan.
In the autumn of 1944 she met Michael Foot at a party given at his home in Montpellier Row, Twickenham, by the eminent architect Sir Charles Reilly, the father of Foot’s Oxford friend Paul. Foot invited her to dinner at ‘a very posh restaurant’, the Ivy in Covent Garden. Evidently they instantly attracted each other. Foot was captivated by her charm and beauty. She was ‘a raging beauty thrust on susceptible wartime London … She had the colouring of an English rose but everything else was a romantic, mysterious addition.’41 He told his mother, who worried about his bachelor status, ‘That’s the girl for me.’ Her attraction for him is very understandable. Apart from her beauty, throughout her life Jill had a sensitive, rapt way of being deeply appealing to men of all ages. No woman listened with more intense attention to the conversation of men, not least Welsh men. But she also had close women friends, including Jenny Stringer in later life. She had in her few years in London attracted the interest, personal as well as intellectual, of an extraordinary group of celebrities: Paul Nash, Henry Moore, Charles Reilly and even the aged Ralph Vaughan-Williams all flirted with her. Another strong admirer was the former Cabinet minister and son of the former Prime Minister, Malcolm MacDonald, who proposed marriage. She looked after his Hampstead house for a time, her neighbour, improbably enough, being General de Gaulle.42
Jill also attracted Michael with her quick intelligence, her artistic flair, her social poise and (possibly) her vigorous feminism. She herself was immediately smitten by Michael, his honesty, his air of myopic charm. It was love at first sight, even if in Michael’s case it was short sight. The severe eczema which had worried him in his relationships with women was of no consequence to her. She and Michael both had unfinished relationships to unscramble. Jill ended matters with Jeffrey Dell and briefly moved into the Hampstead house of a fellow film-maker, William Macquitty: she was a Hampstead personality years before Michael. Meanwhile Michael had to sort matters out with Connie Ernst.
The relationship between Jill and Michael developed rapidly. His still somewhat undeveloped sexual experience flourished under her confident tutelage. She visited her ‘Mayfair socialist’ several times in 62 Park Street, bought him a new gramophone and encouraged his interests in Mozart and in opera generally.43 Most important, she told him of her plan to make a documentary on Plymouth, and came down there to work with him on it. Foot himself appeared in the film, looking unusually well-tailored in a smart dark suit. She promised to help in his election campaign. When he went off to America the prospect of her moving into 62 Park Street, cramped though it would be, was a real one.
The partnership of Michael and Jill is a leitmotiv through the rest of this book. It was a marriage of two strong-minded people, each of whom had powerful relationships with the opposite sex, while remaining faithful and trusting. Each gave the other a kind of radiant confidence that lasted for the next fifty-five years. Jill admired Michael’s socialist passion, his literacy, his lack of affectation, his generosity in personal relationships, his humanity. Without changing his personality or his style, she wanted him to succeed. He admired her dedication to work on the feminist movement, while her artistic interests and many friends in the cultural world greatly developed his own somewhat eclectic interests. They did almost everything together: the constituency visits, the trips to Venice or later Dubrovnik, the joint reading of lyric poetry or the prose of Wells or Conrad. Just Plymouth Argyle remained for men only. For Michael, a romantic, passionate man, Jill was the perfect partner.