Britain

Abstract

My first visit to England was in 1921, when the Macdonald Labor government had its first but brief reign by sufferance of the Liberals. I married an English girl in 1931, and my wife and I subsequently spent every other summer in Britain until 1939. I met the late Dr. William Temple, Archbishop of York, in a preparatory meeting for the Oxford Conference on “Church, Community and State” in 1938. My contacts with Britain were chiefly on the Left in both Church and State. Dr. Temple was a member of the Labor Party and, with Professor R. H. Tawney, one of the founders of the Workers Education Association. Temple was certainly partly responsible for the general diffusion of “labor” opinion through the middle classes of Britain and beyond the limits of the industrial classes to which socialism was confined on the Continent. This diffusion laid the foundation for the victory of Labor after the War, in spite of Churchill's great eminence as the architect of British victory. The slogan “Fair shares for all” represented the conscience of the whole war-impoverished nation.