Churchill and The Focus

👤 Mike Hughes  

Introduction

From 1935 until the outbreak of the Second World War Winston Churchill was a determined and vociferous opponent of the British government’s policy of appeasing Hitler. In the popular imagination Churchill’s prominence at the head of the anti-appeasement movement has become a picture of the prophet crying in the wilderness. A fantasy encouraged by himself and his friends, this was also a view endorsed by some of those who had sought to explain their support for appeasement in the light of some notion of a pro-appeasement consensus.

In fact there was a group around Churchill which called itself The Focus. Through this group Churchill came to dominate the campaign against appeasement. Unable to persuade the government to change its policy, Churchill had to campaign. Churchill might complain that he had ‘no party base or backing, no platform, no press’ but this simply was not the case. Not only did Parliament and The Focus give him a platform, in Parliament he could eventually count on the support of some forty Conservative MPs, the Liberals under Archibald Sinclair, and, after Munich, almost all of the Labour Party.

Origins of The Focus

The Focus was partly a dining club and partly a campaign co-ordinating committee. If not strictly secret, it was private and avoided publicity. For example, after attending his second Focus lunch on 6 April 1938, the National Labour politician Harold Nicolson wrote in his diary: ‘This is a mysterious organisation. I do not understand who pays.’ When it did make public appearances, it was under the guise of other organisations, generally the League of Nations Union.(1) The group which eventually became The Focus was founded by Walter Citrine, the General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress. In 1933 the World Jewish Economic Federation, under the direction of a New York attorney called Samuel Untermyer, had organised a trade boycott of Germany. The following year Untermyer and the Mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guardia, established the World Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi Council. Soon afterwards Untermyer was visited by Citrine who, on his return to Britain, established the British Non-Sectarian Anti-Nazi Council to Champion Human Rights (BNANC). (2)

On March 7 1936 Hitler’s troops marched into the demilitarised zone of the Rhineland. At an emergency conference on March 19 and 20 Walter Citrine and Transport and General Workers Union leader Ernest Bevin launched a campaign for re-armament. Speakers included the former Bradford Labour MP and Nobel Peace Prize winner for 1933, Norman Angell, and Henry Wickham Steed, a veteran diehard Tory, former editor of The Times and agent of the Czechoslovak government. (3) A month later, after a rousing Commons speech on the subject of Germany on April 6 1936, the BNANC approached Churchill, and on 19 May 1936 what can be regarded as the first Focus lunch took place at the Hotel Victoria. Apart from Churchill, those present included Sir Robert Mond, the leader of the Liberal Party, Sir Archibald Sinclair, Labour MP Hugh Dalton and, at Churchill’s suggestion, another leading Liberal, Violet Bonham Carter. (4)

The meeting appointed Steed, Sir Robert Whaley-Cohen, chairman of British Shell, and Violet Bonham Carter to draft a manifesto. Hugh Dalton insisted that the manifesto should ‘point the finger’ at Hitler. (5) Meeting under the auspices of the BNANC, Churchill wanted a less cumbersome title. Two months later, on 24 July, a second BNANC lunch was held in Morpeth Mansions, Churchill’s London home. Ten key members were present and the group adopted the name ‘The Focus’ — though the name was to be kept to themselves.

Funding

Some initial finance had been made available by an exiled German socialist Eugen Spier who contributed £9600 between 1936-39. Additional funds were arranged by Sir Robert Whaley-Cohen who launched a £50,000 fund of which half was paid immediately and half pledged. According to his biographer (who was also the treasurer of the BNANC), Whaley-Cohen was ‘the veritable dynamic force of Focus.’ (6) Further money came from Sir Robert Mond who gave £5,000 to organise research, under Steed’s supervision. (7)

At the next identified Focus meeting on 15 October 1936 it was decided that the group would have no formal membership and would set up a new movement, Defence of Freedom and Peace, under the auspices of the League of Nations Union. (8) Churchill wrote to his son Randolph, explaining that ‘this committee aims at focusing and concentrating the effects of all the peace societies like the New Commonwealth and League of Nations Union in so far as they are prepared to support military action to resist tyranny or aggression.’ (9)

For the next three years The Focus organised public meetings, and prepared and disseminated information and propaganda — what we might now call networking and campaigning — among Britain’s political classes, up to and including two serving Foreign Secretaries, Eden and Halifax. (10) On October 3 1937 Churchill invited Anthony Eden, then Foreign Secretary, to a Focus lunch. The Focus, wrote Churchill, in his letter of invitation,

‘hold meetings all over the country, at which the municipal authority usually presides, and socialists, Liberals and Tories advocate organised resistance to Nazi and communist propaganda. The League of Nations Union and the New Commonwealth, of which I am President, are both closely associated and many of our meetings are held under this aegis. I may add that our contacts go right into the heart of the Trade Union world, and act with them in the utmost harmony…. It may well be that in the future Trade Unionists will detach themselves from particular parties…. Pray treat this for your private information only.’ (11) Eden accepted the invitation and on October 23 Churchill wrote to Lord Derby to tell him that the Focus was entertaining Eden on November 2 with Joseph Toole ‘the socialist mayor of Manchester’ and about 35 others. The meeting ‘would involve no political commitment, and is of course strictly private’.

As early as 1937 Churchill began to consider turning The Focus into a formal cross-party opposition to the National Government. In early April that year Kingsley Martin of the New Statesman put out feelers to Labour and Liberal politicians to assess the interest in a coalition dominated by The Focus. (12)

Focus friends in the media

In the media The Focus eventually recruited Wilson Harris (The Spectator), Kingsley Martin (New Statesman), Lady Rhonda (Time and Tide) and Harcourt Johnstone (The Economist). Using a publishing company it had set up, Union Time Ltd, The Focus bought the League of Nations Union magazine Headway. The Headway agreement, wrote Focus Secretary A.N. Richards to Churchill, ‘should be a powerful instrument for the advocacy and the advancement of our aims and objectives….’ Headway was relaunched and its first issue contained articles by Nicholson, Angell, Bonham-Carter, Liddell Hart (who became Focus military advisor), Crabourne, Steed, Harper Poulson, Sir John Orr and Roger Fortune. However Headway was in a decline which the change of ownership did not reverse. (13)

The Focus and Churchill’s intelligence network

The 1930s came to be called the ‘wilderness years’ for Churchill because during that period he failed to be given any position of political authority. But his exclusion from government did not mean he was excluded from the state. He served on a secret sub-committee of the Committee for Imperial Defence which reviewed and commissioned research into aerial warfare. (14) More significantly, Prime Ministers Macdonald, Baldwin and Chamberlain allowed him access to the intelligence product of Desmond Morton, head of the Industrial Intelligence Centre, and of Group Captain Frederick Winterbotham of the SIS Air Section.’ (15) Other sources were less formal. John Baker White, for example, the Director of the Economic League from 1926 til the end of the war, ran his own intelligence network, ‘Section D’, and prepared regular reports for Churchill until 1939. (16)

Politics and the Focus

The Focus was an extraordinarily broad political coalition, ranging from Diehard Tories to the trade unions and Labour Party. Although the origins of the war-time coalition government led by Churchill can be seen in the multi-party Focus meetings, the significance of The Focus in the politics of the period is impossible to evaluate. Historians of the period have not taken The Focus seriously. There is Eugen Spier’s first-hand account — but Spier was a peripheral figure (17); there are a few passing references in memoirs, and a frustratingly incomplete collection of fragments in Gilbert’s companion volumes to his authorised biography of Churchill. Though well known to many contemporary politicians, The Focus made no appearance in newspapers and one respected insider commentator came to believe that it had faded away in 1938. (18) Unfortunately the only historian who has devoted any significant space to The Focus is the Nazi apologist David Irving, who adds little to the story, omits much that was known, and bends the rest to fit his conspiracy theory that the Second World War was the work of an International Jewish Conspiracy. (19)

Notes

  1. Members of The Focus, including Churchill, continued to be secretive about The Focus after the war. When Churchill found out that founding member Eugen Spiers was planning to publish an account of it in 1963 he attempted to dissuade him. On the League of Nations Union see Donald S. Birn, The League of Nations Union 1918-45 (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1981)
  2. Irving, citing Walter Citrine’s Men and Work (London, 1964). The following year the BNANC’s officers were listed as Chair, George Latham; Vice Chair, Sir Robert Mond; Vice Presidents, Norman Angell, Herbert Morrison, Sylvia Pankhurst, Cannon F. Lewis Donaldson, Eleanor Rathbone; Secretary, F. Rodgers; Treasurer, C.O. Henriques.
  3. According to David Irving, beginning in 1923 Steed had been an agent of some kind for the Czechoslovak government, receiving an initial payment in 1923/4 of 23,000. However it is not clear if these monies were simply to fund the teaching of Central European History by Steed at King’s College, London. David Irving, Churchill’s War — Vol. 1: The Struggle for Power, (Veritas, Australia, 1987) pp. 55-56.
  4. Those who have been identified as supporting Focus in one way or another are: Leo Amery, Norman Angell, Duchess of Atholl, Ronald Cartland M.P., Violet Bonham Carter, Sir Walter Citrine, A. J. Cummings, Sir Robert Whaley Cohen, Duff Cooper, J.R. Clynes M.P., Hugh Dalton, Earl of Derby, Paul Emrys Evans M.P., John Eppstein, Megan Lloyd George, Wilson Harris, C.O. Henriques, Arthur Hudson, Harcourt Johnstone, Sir Walter Layton, Lord Lloyd, Earl of Lytton, J. McEwan M.P., Kingsley Martin, Henry Mond, Sir Robert Mond, Harold Nicolson, Eleanor Rathbone M.P., James de Rothschild, Lady Rhonda, A. H. Richards, Sir Malcolm Robertson, Duncan Sandys, Sir Arthur Salter, Sir Archibald Sinclair, Eugen Spier, Earl of Stamford, Henry Wickam Steed, Alderman Toole and Alfed Wall.
    The inner circle of The Focus consisted of Churchill, Bonham Carter, Angell, Whaley-Cohen, Steed and A.H. Richards.
  5. Violet Bonham Carter to Churchill, 19th May 1936. (Churchill Papers 2/282). Michael Gilbert, Winston S. Churchill, Volume V campanion part 3 Documents, (Heinemann, London 1982), pp. 162-3.
  6. C.O. Henriques, Sir Robert Whaley-Cohen, 1977-1953 (London, 1966)
  7. A.H. Richards to Churchill, 29th July 1939, published in Gilbert’s companion volume, p. 295
  8. Churchill to Austen Chamberlain, 17th October 1936, published in Gilbert, p. 367.
  9. Winston Churchill to Randolph Churchill, 5th November 1936, cited by Irving, p. 59.
  10. Eden attended a Focus meeting in December 1937 and others after his resignation from the government. Halifax attended a Focus meeting early in 1939.
  11. Churchill to Eden, 3rd October 1937, published in Gilbert’s companion volume, p. 774.
  12. At a Focus meeting on 22 June 1938 Churchill raised the idea again.
  13. Birn op. cit. p. 190 states that Headway’s circulation had dropped to 8,000 by March 1939. Werner Kop, foreign news editor of Brendan Bracken’s Financial News and Banker, was appointed editor. Bracken was a Tory M.P. and confidant of Churchill. David Irving claims that Union Time Ltd also funded ‘Stephen King-Hall’s pamphleting in Nazi Germany’ but gives no evidence.
  14. See for example, Stephen Roskill, Hankey, Man of Secrets, Vol. 2, (Collins, London, 1972)
  15. Christopher Andrew, Secret Service (Heinemann, London, 1985) pp. 502-3.
  16. John Baker White,True Blue (Frederick Muller, London 1970) pp. 160-164. Private intelligence organisations were a feature of the right before the war, presumably because the state’s intelligence organisations were inadequate. Sir Robert Vansittart was running his own semi-official, anti-appeasement outfit at the Foreign Office and the Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, had a private intelligence organisation run by Kenneth de Courcy, and a clandestine propaganda organisation run by Sir Joseph Ball. On Ball see ‘Chamberlain and Truth’, The Historical Journal 33, 1 (1990) pp. 131-42. De Courcy’s intelligence gathering role for Chamberlain is the source of the ‘Special Office’ in the title of de Courcy’s newsletter, Special Office Brief, still going as far as I know.
    This much is certain. The most interesting — but unsupported — claim about Churchill’s private intelligence network of the 1930s is in William Stevenson’s 1972 biography of Sir William Stephenson, A Man Called Intrepid, (Sphere, London 1978). According to Stevenson (p. 56), ‘Focus was one of these influential groups pulled together by Admiral Hall.’ Admiral William ‘Blinker’ Hall was Director of Naval Intelligence during WW1, and had developed its Code Breaking section in the now famous room 40 at the Admiralty. After the war he became a leading Diehard Tory MP, was one of the founders of the Economic League, and became the first Conservative M.P. to also run the Tory Party’s administration as Principal Agent. Further, he was the General Manager of Winston Churchill’s newspaper The British Gazette during the 1926 General Strike and is said to have been involved in other key incidents of the period, including the Zinoviev letter. Hall was perhaps the British state’s most significant covert political operator of the period, and it would make perfect sense if this claim of Stevenson’s were true. Unfortunately he offers no evidence and I am aware of none since the book’s publication. On ‘Blinker’ Hall, follow index references in Andrew’s Secret Service, op. cit.
    Despite the comments in the introduction by former SIS officer Charles Ellis, intended to give the book a quasi official status, the status of A Man Called Intrepid is low among historians of the intelligence services.
  17. How peripheral Spier was is suggested by the fact that he was arrested and interned as an enemy alien in 1939, deported to Canada and not released until 1941.
  18. James Margach, The Anatomy of Power, (W.H.Allen, London, 1979) pp. 113 and 4.
  19. The strength of Irving’s obsession is demonstrated by his choice of The Focus Policy Group for the name of his own little group.

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