OOKS
The Doctor
By CHRISTOPHER•HOLL1S DR. DALTON is a most extraordinary man. He opens his book* with a paragraph of specula- tion how, if it had not been for his narrow defeat at the election of 1931, he might well have become leader of the Labour Party in the 1930s and Prime Minister after the war. It is true that chance plays a large part in political fortunes, but it is safe to say that Dr. Dalton is the only Man in Europe who believes this and the only man in Europe who, if he believed it, would have printed it. However the accident of the cards might have fallen, no one can believe that any mere play of chance could have kept Dr. Dalton permanently ahead of Lord Attlee. The difference in stature is too great.
' Whoever made the selection of the extracts from this book for the Evening Standard rendered Dr. Dalton a very ill service. From them the pUblic has derived the impression that Socialist politics in those years consisted of nothing but a ceaseless intrigue for position, of which the Doctor, telephone in one hand and carving knife in the other, was continually at the centre. Dr. Dalton makes, it is true, no attempt at all to conceal his extreme dislike for almost all of his SOcialist colleagues of those days, and, as for what did or did not happen in those con- flicts, one can but leave it to those colleagues to fight it out with him. But it is important to under- stand that such intrigue was not the whole of his life.
Dr. Dalton's knockabout prose style, whether it be in debate or in writing, is vigorous. There is at any rate the useful element of surprise in the manner in which he sweeps away the whole bagful of ideas of such a colleague as Sir Stafford tripps as 'a piece of clotted nonsense,' and 'hell's bells' as a commentary on an economic policy makes up in colour for what it lacks in technical precision. But in his more studied prose there is a curious quality which makes it sound like a parson who is reading the lesson and has got the wrong place.' As a parodist of Bunyan he is second to Lord Beaverbrook alone. Take, for in- stance, his speech as chairman of the Labour Party Conference. 'Mankind stands today at the crossroads, hesitant whether to go forward or back. Backward into darkness or forward into light? We speak unto the people that they go forward, for now is the appointed time.' The prophet Isaiah could hardly have done it better. There are recurring phrases such as 'the trumpets had sounded for the advance.' Dr. Dalton's approach in practice to a problem was so entirely different from that of the frontal attack of a * THE FATEFUL YEARS: 1931-1945. By Hugh Dalton. (Muller, 30s.) medimval army that one cannot help wondering whether such phrases were deliberately used in the hope that they would prove to be funny without being vulgar.
Dr. Dalton's great personal merit, as he makes. clear—and as indeed, to do him justice, others such as Lord Pakenham also make clear—was that he was .willing to take much more trouble about the young than is common among Front Bench politicians. His oddity is his extraordinary domination by politics. There arc indeed a few references to the countryside where he is fond of walking, but, though he is a well-read man, there is not from beginning to end of the book a single reference to anything that was going on in art, literature, religion or, indeed, even in sport during those years. It is a curiosity.
But the interest of the book lies, of course, in its record of his political opinions, and the record, once the personalities are forgotten, is, creditable. The Doctor lost his seat in the 1931 election and was, therefore, oUt Of ParliaMent until 1935. The years from then up till the war were dominated by the growing Nazi menace. Legitimate as were his criticisms of the Chamberlain Government, he perhaps does not allow sufficiently for the very teal dilemma that both the German and the Russian Governments were at that time urt Scrupulously aggressive. Yet the case against the Chamberlain Government is by now sufficiently familiar and its mere re-statement would not be of great interest. What is of interest is the Doctor's story of his fight to commit the Socialist Party during those years to a support of rearmament. Whatever the defects of the Chamberlain Governmentand they were many —Socialist poliCy during those years was frankly insane. The Socialists demanded that we `standup to Hitler.' They demanded 'Arms for Spain' and at the same time 'continued to vote against our having arms for ourselves or Spain or anybody else. Even after Munich and Prague they opposed conscription. In view of all that happened after- wards it is a wonder that men with such a record did not go away and hang themselves. Now against all that it is to the Doctor's credit that he was one of the few within the party who fought a steady, if not very successful, fight. This was his finest hour, and on account of it much telephoning in less worthy causes may be excused.
When the war came, the part that he played was not so important. He served under Churchill first as Minister of Economic Warfare and then as President of the Board of Trade, and, though one may fairly say that he makes the most of both of these two tasks, it is doubtful how great an influence he really had on the winning of the war. Whatever the theoretical rights or wrongs of blockade, for obvious geographical reasons blockade did not play as large a part in the second as in the first German war, and the trouble about blockade, so long as the Germans held all Europe, was that, if things got, tight, the German would see to it the occupied countries rather than Germany suffered from the shortage. He had the nominal ministerial responsibility for special operations, but it is not clear how much he really had to do with them. It is greatly to his credit that he had learnt from his experience with his constitutents at Bishop Auckland a real sympathy with the-unemployed in the depressed areas, and his most notable achievement during these years was his provision as President of the Board of Trade for the Development Areas. It was on account of them that he had—and, it appears, still has—`a song in his heart' : a stand- ing example of his curious capacity of making even his good deeds appear somewhat ridiculous by the absurd phrases which he coins to describe them:
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