John Strachey, Part Two

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Introduction. Part one of this article looked at how John Strachey featured in the life and writings of George Orwel. Here In I give some background by looking at the life of (Evelyn) John (St Loe) Strachey.

Family background. John Strachey was born on 21 October 1901 at Newlands Corner near Guildford, the youngest of three children and only surviving son of John St Loe Strachey who owned and edited the Conservative weekly the Spectator; and Henrietta Mary Amy Strachey née Simpson.

John Strachey junior’s great-great grandfather Sir Henry Strachey was Private Secretary to Robert the 1^st Lord Clive i.e. Clive of India. John Strachey junior and (Giles) Lytton Strachey, of Bloomsbury and Eminent Victorians, fame were second cousins once removed. To quote the Dictionary of National Biography, the Stracheys benefitted from Clive’s financial gains in India. This is putting it politely. The Stracheys had Spanish blood. The DNB describes John Strachey junior as being of Mediterranean appearance.

Early Life. John Strachey junior was educated at Eton 1915 to 1919 and Magdalen College, Ozford, 1920 to 1922. He left after two years without taking a degree because he was suffering from peritonitis. At Oxford he and Robert John Graham Bob Boothby jointly edited the Conservative journal the Oxford Fortnightly Review.

The Socialist. After leaving Oxford John Strachey junior briefly worked for his father on the Spectator. However he found upper class social conventions intellectually and emotionally stifling. In 1923 he began writing for the Independent Labour Party (ILP) journal The New Leader.

John Strachey junior (his father died in 1927) was the Labour candidate for Aston, in Birmingham, at the October 1924 General Election. The sitting Conservative MP Evelyn Cecil received 14,244 votes and held the seat. He was a member of the aristocratic Cecil family of Marquis of Salisbury fame who had risen through service to Queen Elizabeth I and James I. John Strachey got 11, 85 votes.

Evelyn Cecil had slightly increased his majority but at this general election Labour lost sixty and gained twenty seats. Stanley Baldwin’s Conservative received their first solid majority for a generation. John Strachey remained the prospective Aston Labour parliamentary candidate.

At this general election Oswald Ernald Mosley, a former Conservative and then independent Harrow MP, was the Labour candidate at Ladywood, in Birmingham. The sitting Ladywood Conservative MP Neville Chamberlain held his seat but his majority was seventy eight and Chamberlain moved to be the Prospective Conservative candidate for Edgbaston, in Birmingham, which remained a Conservative seat until 1997.

John Strachey and Mosley became friends. In the 1925 Birmingham Proposals they called for an expansionist economic approach based on increasing the money supply, income redistribution, and state planning. They believed this would incentivise manufacturers, help the working class, and reduce unemployment. John Strachey’s 1925 book Revolution by Reason outlined their plans and backed them up with arguments based on Marxist and Keynesian theories.

In 1926 Strachey and Mosley supported the Miners’ Strike and the General Strike; Mosley was elected the Labour MP for Smethwick an industrial town just outside Birmingham; and Strachey was appointed editor of the ILP Socialist Review and of the Miner. In 1928 he visited Soviet Russia and was impressed. He became a Marxist but disliked class warfare.

Strachey had met Esther Knesborough Murphy,  whose father Patrick Francis Murphy owned a New York department store, . in the USA. On 24 April 1929 they married at St Mary’s Roman Catholic Church, a Victorian building in Cadogan Street in Chelsea.  Oswald Mosley was Strachey’s best man. One of the few people who attended the wedding was Strachey’s uncle, Edward Strachey the 1^st Baron Strachie, a former Liberal MP and junior minister.

Aston MP. At the May 1929 General Election Strachey stood for Aston again. He got 18,872 seats. The Conservative John Percival Whiteley, a First World War veteran, got 17,114 votes. Sir Oswald Mosley (he had inherited a baronetcy in 1928) retained his Smethwick seat and his first wife Lady Cynthia Mosley was elected Stoke on Trent Labour MP. Nationally Labour won 288 seats, the Conservatives 276, and the Liberals 58.

Ramsay Macdonald became Prime Minister again, formed the second Labour government and appointed Mosley Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster i.e. Minister without Portfolio, with the job of assisting the Lord Privy Seal James Henry Thomas to draw up plans to stimulate the economy and reduce unemployment. Sir Oswald Mosley appointed Strachey his Parliamentary Private Secretary.

Sir Oswald Mosley and Strachey drew up plans for a small economic war cabinet with a general staff headed by John Maynard Keynes to run the economy; protective tariffs to protect the home market; government help to modernise industry; and a massive public works programme. They were rejected by the Labour government which believed they would bankrupt Britain. In May 1930 Mosley and Strachey resigned from the government.

The 1930 Labour Conference narrowly rejected Mosley and Strachey’s economic plans. On 6 December 1930 Mosley published his Mosley Memorandum, an expanded version of these plans. Seventeen Labour MPs supported it including himself and his wife; Strachey; Aneurin Nye Bevan; and thirteen others.

The Mosley Memorandum is discussed in Bret Rubin’s “The Rise and Fall of British Fascism”

On 28 February 1931 Mosley left the Labour Party and formed the New Party. Five Labour MPs including Lady Mosley and John Strachey also joined the New Party as did a Liberal MP and an Ulster Unionist MP. Two Labour MPs – Oliver Baldwin (sic) and William John Brown – left the New Party after a day. John Strachey who had visited Russia again in 1930 wanted the New Party to develop closer Russian links. Sir Oswald Mosley rejected this idea and was clearly moving towards Fascism. In July 1931 Strachey left the New Party.

At the October 1931 General Election Strachey stood at Aston as an independent Labour candidate. The Conservative Arthur Oswald James Hope, a First World War Military Cross winner, got 22,959 votes; the Labour candidate Thomas James May, a van driver and First World War Military Medal winner, 6.212 votes; and Strachey 3,236 votes, losing his deposit.

The New Party stood twenty five candidates at this election. They were all defeated and only two saved their deposits including Mosley himself who stood at his wife’s former Stoke on Trent seat. She had stood down for health reasons.

The Fellow Traveller. John Strachey’s marriage broke down and in 1932 Esther Strachey sued him for divorce for alleged adultery with Celia Simpson. Celia Simpson, an Anglican vicar’s daughter, was born in 1900 and had worked for the Spectator until 1931 when she was sacked for being too left wing. The divorce was made absolute on 10 October 1933 and three days later he married Celia Simpson. They were to have a son and a daughter.

Strachey had mental health problems and underwent psychoanalysis. In 1932 he applied to join the Communist Party but was rejected as an unreliable intellectual. For the next eight years he was a communist fellow traveller. His book The Coming Struggle for Power was published in 1932; The Menace of Fascism in 1933; and The Nature of Capitalist Crisis in 1935.

Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club published four of Strachey’s books in this period – The Theory and Practise of Socialism; (1936) The Coming Struggle for Power (1937); and What are we to do?; and Why you should be a Socialist (1938). Strachey’s sister Amabel, who had married the architect Clough Williams-Ellis, worked for Gollancz at this time, and it was she who selected the photographs to appear in George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier – Orwell and his wife being in Spain.While the photographs showed typical scenes described in the book, none of them show any of the places or people described by Orwell.

A Patriot After all. Victor Gollancz left the Communist Party in 1939 after the Russian-German non-aggression pact. In 1940 Strachey broke with the Communists. He worked as an Air Raid Warden; and in December 1940 joined the RAF. He was first a fighter squadron adjutant and then a bomber group PR officer. Later he joined the Directorate of Bomber Operations and gave air commentaries on BBC Radio. He continued writing for the Left Book Club. It published his Federalism or Socialism and A Programme for Progress (1940); and A Faith to Fight for (1941). In 1942 he re-joined the Labour Party. In 1943 he was selected as a Dundee Labour Prospective Parliamentary Candidate. Dundee was then one of the few remaining two member constituencies.

The Minister. At the 1945 General Election at Dundee the Labour candidates, Thomas Fotheringham Cook, an electrician, and Strachey got 48,804 votes and 48,393 votes respectively, and were elected. They defeated the sitting MPs – Dingle Mackintosh Foot (Michael Foot’s older brother) a Liberal who received 33,230 votes; and Florence Gertrude Horsbrugh a Conservative who won 32,309 votes. Arthur William Donaldson the SNP candidate received7,775 votes.

Clement Attlee the Labour Prime Minister appointed Strachey Under-Secretary of State for Air., reporting to the Secretary of State for Air, William Wedgwood Benn the 1^st Viscount Stansgate i.e. Tony Benn’s father. As Viscount Stansgate was in the House of Lords Strachey represented the Air Ministry in the House of Commons.

In May 1946 Strachey was promoted Minister of Food. He replaced Benjamin Smith, a taxi driver, who was the Rotherhithe MP. In July 1946 Strachey introduced bread rationing. This aroused massive protests from bakers and a Tory inspired Housewives League, but it was probably inevitable – even in the USA bread rationing was introduced post-war. Most people grudgingly accepted it. It was abolished in 1948.

The Groundnuts Scheme was another matter. This was a plan to grow peanuts in Tanganyika and other British African colonies to increase vegetable oil and margarine production. It was a costly fiasco to put it mildly.

By 1950 Dundee had been split into two one member constituencies. At Dundee West Strachey received 28,386 votes. He defeated the Conservative Captain Henry Scrymgeour Wedderburn, a Second World War veteran, who won 23 685 votes; and the Liberal Colin James Canning 986 votes. Nationally the Labour Party won a very narrow majority.

In 1950 Clement Attlee appointed Strachey Secretary of State for War. This infuriated the Americans. The Conservatives won the 1951 General Election with a small but workable majority helped by the Ulster Unionists. At Dundee West Strachey held his seat. He held it again at the 1955 and 1959 General Elections.

John Strachey swung right. In Labour Party internal struggles he supported Gaitskell against Nye Bevan, and George Brown against Harold Wilson. His 1956 book Contemporary Capitalism argued that a Labour government could manage capitalism; his 1958 book The End of Empire supported giving British colonies independence; and his 1962 books On the Prevention of War and The Strangled Cry supported the nuclear deterrent and criticised communism.

The Society of Authors. In 1928 Strachey had joined the Society of Authors. He was on its Management Committee and did five two year spans as its Chairman. As an MP he supported copyright reform, reducing the tax burden on authors and public lending right.

Conclusion. In his fifteen years as an MP Strachey spoke in the House of Commons, 9,696 times. He died in London after a spinal operation on 15 July 1963 aged sixty one. Celia Strachey died in 1980 aged seventy nine.

A Dundee West by election was held after Strachey died. Peter Muir Doig a sales supervisor, Second World War RAF veteran and Dundee councillor held the seat for Labour getting 22,449 votes. Robert Richardson Taylor QC a lawyer the Conservative candidate got 17,494 votes. Dr James Corson Lees, a pathologist, the SNP candidate got 3,285 votes and lost his deposit. So did David Proctor Bowman a Communist who got 1,170 votes.

John Strachey, an Old Etonian, had been a close associate of Mosley; a communist fellow traveller; and was responsible for the Groundnuts Scheme. Yet he was appointed Secretary of State for War in 1950. This sort of thing helps explain a lot.