The Morbid Age by Richard Overy

Author:Richard Overy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141930862
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-04-15T16:00:00+00:00

A ‘Peace Bus’ organized by the Peace Pledge Union at the end of its long journey from Carlisle to London. The Union had an estimated 1,150 branches countrywide by the outbreak of war in 1939, and is still in existence today.

The Congress was prepared with fanfares of publicity and attracted a large number of delegates. Out of the 4,000 who were present 600 came from Britain, sent by more than 200 British peace societies. Cecil wrote to Sheppard asking him to pool their differences sufficiently to at least make an appearance but Sheppard refused. Cecil sent him a harshly worded rebuke in which he accused him of splitting the peace movement and provoking armaments and war. ‘Believe me,’ he added, ‘there is no chance that your policy will be adopted’, but there was every chance of ‘a desolating war’ and ‘centuries of chaos such as followed the downfall of the Roman Empire’.148 Aldous Huxley was also invited, and was inclined to accept until Sheppard warned him that there would be no platform for true pacifism. Instead Sheppard decided to hold a pacifist public meeting in Brussels the same weekend to rally support for the absolute pacifist case.149 The Congress was by any standard a success. It was organized almost as a military operation. Delegates were asked to book in advance a hotel in one of four categories, popular, bourgeois, comfortable or de luxe (a sharp reminder of the broad social mix in the anti-war movement). The richer guests ate as they pleased in the hotel restaurant; the others had to present dinner vouchers at a more spartan communal refectory. The newsagent chain W. H. Smith undertook to get the day’s newspapers to delegates by 10.30 the same day. Special trains left Liverpool Street station for Harwich where the delegates boarded the SS Malines for Zeebrugge, and thence to Brussels, a journey time of over nine hours. Everyone had to display a coloured badge – the Executive Committee, which included Cecil and Noel-Baker, sported white, the platform guests pink, delegates green, guests lilac, and so on. Delegates who could speak several languages wore distinctive ribbons, French white, English pink, German green.150 This brightly tagged assembly gathered on 3 September to hear the opening address by the joint presidents of the Congress, Lord Cecil and the French air minister, Pierre Cot.

Cecil argued that the forces making for war were numerous and could act quickly and with vigour; but the forces making for peace ‘are badly organised and of practically little effect’. Union was necessary, he continued, to give strength to the forces of peace as it had done for the forces of war. The delegations broke up into separate discussion groups organized according to function – churches, trade unions, psychologists, doctors etc. – and reconvened in the evening to approve a four-point statement of principles: respect for treaties, reduction and limitation of armaments, collective security for mutual assistance against aggression, and remedying international conditions that might lead to war.151 The Congress broke up the following day after church services, a sports display and a coach tour of Brussels.

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