Kingsley
Martin, the son of Basil Martin and Margaret Turberville,
was born in London in 1897. Kingsley father
had initially been a Congregational
minister but later he became a Unitarian.
The Rev. Martin was a pacifist and
in 1899 campaigned against the Boer War.
He was also a socialist and a active member
of the Labour Party.
Kingsley won a scholarship to Mill Hill, a
nonconformist public school. He
was still at school when he was called up to the British
Army in 1916. As a pacifist he
was totally opposed to Britain's involvement in the First
World War. A conscientious objector, he refused to serve in the
armed forces but was willing to carry out non-military duties. After
a few months working as a medical orderly in a British hospital treating
wounded soldiers, Martin joined the Society
of Friends' Ambulance Unit (FAU) and later that year was working
on the Western Front.
In 1919 Martin took up his place at Magdalene
College that he had won at Cambridge
before the war. While studying at university he joined the Union
of Democratic Control and the Fabian Society
where he met George Bernard Shaw, Graham
Wallas, John Maynard Keynes, Douglas
Cole, Beatrice Webb, Sidney
Webb and Harold Laski.
After obtaining a degree at Cambridge University,
Martin taught at Princeton University (1922-23) in the USA. When Martin
returned to England, Maynard Keynes employed
him as a book reviewer for his journal, The
Nation. Keynes also persuaded William
Beveridge, to give Martin a teaching post at the London
School of Economics (1924-27).
Harold Laski suggested to C.
P. Scott, the editor of the Manchester
Guardian, that Martin would make a good replacement for C.
E. Montague, the chief leader writer, who wanted to retire and
write novels. In the autumn of 1927 Martin accepted Scott's offer
of £1,000 a year and ended his career as an academic.
Martin stayed at the Manchester Guardian
until 1930. Soon afterwards, Arnold Bennett,
one of the directors of the New Statesman,
asked him to become editor of the journal. Under Martin's guidance
the New Statesman became Britain's
leading political weekly.
Martin's books include The
Triumph of Lord Palmerston
(1924), French
Liberal Thought in the Eighteenth Century
(1929)
and two autobiographical works, Father
Figures
(1966) and Editor
(1968). Kingsley
Martin died in 1969.
(1) In his book, Father
Figures, Kingsley Martin explained the influence that his father
had on his political and religious opinions.
I was proud of holding my father's opinions. I was a pacifist and
socialist among conservatives without knowing what these labels meant.
This was bad for me. All boys in adolescence must break with their
parents. My trouble was that my father gave me no chance at all to
quarrel with him. If he had been a dogmatic Christian, I should have
reached my later humanism long before I did. If he had been an atheist
I might have relapsed into some form of Christian faith. But he was
ready to discuss everything and to yield when he was wrong. I could
not quarrel. On the contrary, I fought side by side with him, and
was a dissenter, not against his dissent, but with him against the
Establishment. His causes became my causes, his revolt was mine.
(2) Kingsley Martin, Father
Figures (1966)
My father was involved in the passive resisters' fight against Balfour's
Education Act of 1902. Each year father and the other resisters all
over the country refused to pay their rates for the upkeep of Church
Schools. The passive resistors thought the issue of principle paramount
and annually surrendered their goods instead of paying their rates.
I well remember how each year one or two of our chairs and a silver
teapot and jug were put out on the hall table for the local officers
to take away. They were auctioned in the Market Place and brought
back to us.
Mother and I were taken for our first motor ride to one of these village
auctions where father would explain the nature of passive resistance
before the sale began. We drove to a village some fifteen miles away,
sometimes travelling at the frightening speed of twenty miles an hour.
In those days roads were deep in dust, and you could tell if a car
had passed because the hedges were white. I remember three small boys
running behind each other pretending to be a motor. The first said
he was the driver, the second a car, and the third the smell.
(3) Kingsley Martin and his
school friend, Tom Applebee, both refused to join the British
Army when called-up in 1916.
We agreed it was no good calling yourself a Christian, promising to
return good for evil and love your enemies, if you took part in a
vast horror of lies, hatred, and slaughter.
I appeared before a tribunal while I was still at school. This had
an unpleasant side. I was turned out of the study which I shared with
other prefects, and the boys would hit me on one cheek and ask whether
I would offer the other. This mild persecution rather flattered my
vanity.
I wrote a defence in the school magazine, which was refused because
it was thought to reflect badly on the school's reputation. It was
passed round, and some of the older boys read it and treated me with
a kind of deference. One simple-minded athlete looked at me with genuine
contempt.
Since then I have often asked myself whether he was right, whether
the men who became C.Os. were really those who were, consciously or
subconsciously, more afraid of a bayonet in their guts than other
people. Analysis might show that C.Os. had more than the usual repulsion
from pain and death. But the matter was more complicated than that.
The demand for courage came in France, not in England, where the herd,
and particularly one's womanfolk, usually made it difficult to refuse
a uniform.
For my part, my predominant fear was that I might miss the war. No
doubt I was glad that I was less likely to be killed than other people,
but though I was in many ways a coward I have no memory of being frightened
of death. Physical courage scarcely enters the question when one is
eighteen.
(4)
In 1916 Kingsley Martin worked as a medical orderly in a hospital
treating wounded British soldiers.
In
my ward, there were twenty-five men who were literally half dead.
They were very much alive in their top halves, but dead below the
waist. The connection between their brain and their natural functions
were broken. They could feel nothing in their hips or legs, and in
spite of being constantly rubbed with methylated spirit, they had
bedsores you could put your hands in.
(5)
When Kingsley Martin arrived in France in 1916 he worked at the Society
of Friends Ambulance Train in Rouen.
I tracked down my ambulance train
at Sootteville railway siding, not far from Rouen. It was an ancient
train, with modern coaches only in the centre, and coaches and fourgons
without corridors at both ends.
Two of us worked in the ward, a couple of doctors and two or three
nurses lived in the central coaches. Each coach was arranged to take
twenty lying patients, with floor-space on which to dump five more
on stretchers if necessary. Alternatively, forty or fifty men would
sit in the coach if they were walking cases.
There were two pails for soup or cocoa or tea, a brass urn for drinking
water. A primus stove was the most important object; a good deal of
life turned on the question of whether one could get enough paraffin
by fair means or foul. Another major objective was to get as many
decent blankets as possible. If you could steal a soft khaki blanket
of the type used for officers you were proud of yourself. At each
hospital base you swiftly and surreptitiously swapped new blankets
for the bloodstained and muddy ones that came into the ward.
(6)
The Ambulance Train would travel to the Western
Front where it would collect the wounded and take them back to
Rouen.
The
front was comparatively quiet when I first joined the train. The Battle
of the Somme was over, and we travelled up that stricken valley without
incident. Everywhere shell-holes, barbed wire and stumps of trees.
Places like Ypres, and many villages whose names we saw on the railwayside,
had disappeared. Arras had a line of latticed ruins, and a church
which looked as if it was still a place for visitors - until one got
closer and found it was a shell.
We would load at a casualty clearing station behind the lines, and
travel down very slowly indeed to Rouen or Etaples. Perhaps it would
be four in the morning when we loaded. We would reach our base at
seven at night, unload, sweep out, clear up, and would be preparing
for some sleep about ten, when a message would come that we were evacuating
a load of Blighty convalescents from Boulogne at five a.m. Then we
got out our disgusting groundsheets again, lowered the beds for the
sitting cases and dozed until the load arrived of cheerful patients
bound for England, with arms in slings, legs in bandages, or head-wounds
that weren't too serious. We would take them to Boulogne, unload them,
scrub out the ward, shake out the blankets, ready for another slow
progress to the back of the front.
(7)
In his autobiography, Father Figures, Kingsley Martin wrote
about how soldiers reacted when they had been wounded.
I
recall the wounded as being incredibly patient and unhappy. The one
thing they asked, hopefully, prayerfully, was whether they'd caught
a 'Blighty' this time. Was their wound bad enough to get them home?
Did I think it might get them out of the war altogether? That was
perhaps too much to hope for. After all, they were damned lucky to
be wounded. Most of their company or battalion would never come home.
A common dodge was to shoot your foot through a sandbag so that the
powder did not show. A guard was put to watch anyone who damaged himself.
What I recall most from that time is the total loss of belief that
the war had any object; it was just an incredible calamity that had
to be endured. They were men without faith or hope. They were bitterly
critical about people at home. They never grudged your comparatively
cushy job. They would give you a dig in the ribs, "Oh, you're
a Quaker, are you? Good luck to you. I wish I'd thought of that dodge
myself." You'd been smarter than they had. A disconcerting view
as long as you remained any kind of idealist.
(8)
In 1918 Kingsley Martin had to treat soldiers that had been attacked
by German mustard gas.
It was our first experience of mustard gas. The men we took were covered
in blisters. The size of your palm most of them. In any tender, warm
place, under the arms, between the legs, and over the face and neck.
All their eyes were streaming, and hurting in a way that sin never
hurts.
(9) In his book, Father
Figures, Kingsley Martin described the German attempt to breakthrough
at the Western Front in March 1918.
Suddenly, as we were arranging our game of football, someone noticed
that an engine was arriving for our train. We bundled in, and up to
the casualty clearing station. Something new. The Germans had broken
through. No one who did not know the stability of trench war can realise
the astonishment of the German push. Thousands and hundreds of thousands
of men had died pushing the line forward a hundred yards; that had
been the rule for the past two years. And here was a push of thirty
miles and an army crumpled up in a day or two. French soldiers shouted
at us, "What's happened to the bloody Fifth Army?" The British
had lost the war. It was said not to be safe to go out because the
French were so angry.
Up at the line again we became aware in the early morning mist - I
remember it vividly today - of thousands of bodies, acres and acres
of them, lying out on the ground, with scraps of German grey or British
khaki hanging out over the stretchers. They were very few bearers,
and so we loaded the train ourselves, making no distinction between
England and Germans; every inch of the train was full.
(10)
Kingsley Martin argued that the British Army
was close to mutiny when the American army arrived at the Western
Front.
The British army, like the French, might have followed the Russians
and mutinied in 1917-18. The arrival of the American army - brash,
unpopular as it was - meant a change in mood. The Allied counter-offensive
seemed astonishingly well organised and tidy.
Delays in demobilisation and lack of jobs brought disillusion. Before
long the men were singing 'Homes for Heroes' and cursing Lloyd George.
The Canadians and the Australians fought in their camps. The only
time in my life when revolution in Britain seemed likely was in 1919.
(11) In
1921 Kingsley Martin, Eileen Power and Barbara
Wootton were invited to spend a weekend with Beatrice
Webb and Sidney Webb. Afterwards Beatrice
wrote about the weekend in her diary.
Kingsley Martin was unkempt and with the appearance of being unwashed,
with jerky, ugly manners, but tall and dark - with a certain picturesque
impressiveness of the Maxton type. He is a fluent and striking conversationalist
- intellectually ambitious - with a certain religious fervour for
social reconstruction. One of the promising younger members of the
Fabian Society.
(12)
Kingsley Martin, Father Figures
(1966)
In the autumn of 1924 I started work at the London School of Economics.
It was then, as it always has been, a wonderful home of free discussion,
happily mixed race, and genuine learning. It seemed my natural home.
My socialist views were vague, but not my sympathies. Like my friend
Harold Laski, I believed passionately that capitalism was evil and
doomed, and that it was useless to talk of liberty unless it was based
on a large measure of social equality. I came into contact with most
of England's leading Socialists, who completed my conversion.
Sir William Beveridge was director when I joined the staff in 1924.
He accepted me first on a part-time basis. I never hit it off with
Beveridge, though I recognised from the beginning that he was a man
of extraordinary ability. I once, and only once, pleased Beveridge.
I said that he "ruled over an empire on which the concrete never
set". He was so delighted with this remark that he constantly
quoted it, always attributing it, however, to Eileen Power, with whom,
like everyone else, I assume was more or less in love. Eileen, indeed,
was one of the most attractive women I have ever known. She was good-looking,
and carried her erudition as a medieval scholar with wit and grace.
She wrote delightfully, her account of the domestic life of nunneries
would never bore anyone, and her Medieval People showed that
careful scholarship can be made popular and achieve large sales.
We used to speculate on whether she would marry; on the whole the
betting was that an air ace would carry her off her feet, but in the
end it was the excellent historian, Michael Postan, on whom the choice
fell. There was no one who did not deeply regret her loss when she
died suddenly of heart failure.
(13)
In his book Father Figures, Kingsley Martin describes how C.
P. Scott asked him to join the Manchester
Guardian.
C. P. Scott wrote he had long been looking for a leader writer and
would I take C. E. Montague's place on the Manchester Guardian
at a salary commencing at £1,000 a year. This was an extraordinary
offer from C. P. Scott, who usually thought anyone should pay for
the privilege of writing for the Manchester Guardian.
(14)
In his autobiography Editor, Kingsley Martin explained the
influence that Leonard Woolf had on the
New Statesman (1968)
Leonard Woolf had a powerful influence on the policy and character
of the New Statesman. He had been literary editor of the Nation,
to which I had often contributed in the past. I had known him and
Virginia Woolf ever since the First World War, and found him, as I
still do, the most companionable of men. He was already to advise
me and became, I think, something of a Father Figure to me. No one
was ever so ready for argument and, I must add, so obstinate and lovable.
(15) Kingsley
Martin, Father Figures (1966)
Arnold Bennett was a director of the New Statesman and immensely
proud of being a director of the Savoy Hotel as well. He was one of
the very kindest of men, with a formidable stutter. He would begin
a sentence and stop. If you looked at him you found yourself staring
straight down his gullet. He gave a lunch party to the other directors
at the Savoy, at the same time rather embarrassingly putting me through
my paces.
"What are your... p-p-politics?"
I said, rather too timidly, for I did not know his politics, that
I should call myself a Socialist. "I should hope so," said
Bennett, as if it would be disgraceful to be anything else.
I was appointed editor only just before Arnold Bennett died, unexpectedly
and I believe unnecessarily. I persuaded the board to appoint David
Low in his place; that was the beginning of a long friendship.
(16)
After thirty years as editor of the New
Statesman, Kingsley Martin described his contribution to the
development of the journal.
My own contribution, it seems to me looking back today, was first
high spirits and second "a concern for fine and often unpopular
causes". Clifford Sharp once said that the New Statesman
should have an 'attitude' to public affairs rather than a 'policy'.
That suited me. I was a political hybrid, a product of pacifist nonconformity,
Cambridge scepticism, Manchester Guardian Liberalism, and London
School of Economics Socialism.
Always a poor man, I combined in myself many of the inconsistencies
and conflicts of the period which long tried to reconcile pacifism
with collective security, and a defence of individual liberty with
the necessity of working with Communists against Fascists. I suppose
my prime attitude was a dissenter's. A dissenter sees the world is
bad and expresses his moral indignation.
This was rather the Nation aspect of my training than the New
Statesman part. Like Massingham, I tended to be angry. War was
always the ultimate horror, and I could not bear to be silent about
the sufferings of minorities and cruelty inflicted on individuals,
even when the aggressors were my friends. At times the paper became
more than anything else the voice of the minorities and a vehicle
of protest. It also had a constructive, Socialist side.
In general we supported the Left Wing of Labour. Our independence
was infuriating to the leaders of the party. Politicians think in
terms of votes, and do not understand that in the long run it is the
climate of opinion that matters. Herbert Morrison, whom I backed wrongly
as I realised later, against Attlee as leader of the party in 1935,
was often very angry with me; he thought a Socialist paper ought to
be putting the case for the Labour Party without reservation and bringing
people along to the polls. He didn't see that it was the teachers
and preachers of all types who as a result of steady reading of the
paper were converted to Socialism. It was they who became the real
backbone of the party, and not the mass who could be swayed one way
or the other by propaganda.
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