England awake!

This post is an exercise in -- well, I'm not sure if there's a name for it, but I found some medium-resolution images on eBay of a pamphlet printed by the Hands Off Britain Air Defence League in 1934. (The seller says 1933, but all other evidence I have on this group is from 1934; the first meeting was held in June 1934.) Some examples may exist in archives, but certainly it's a very rare item, which might explain the US$899.00 asking price. Dedicated scholar though I am, that's somewhat above what I'm willing to pay! Luckily, I don't have to, because I can reconstruct nearly all the text by zooming in, zooming out, and some judicious squinting.

The tone is set by the front of the pamphlet:

'England awake!', he demands angrily/defiantly. I don't know if he's anybody in particular, or was just some guy chosen because he resembled the target demographic.

The threat of air attack is outlined on the outside of the pamphlet. (The battleship is the German dreadnought Ostfriesland, an American war prize, which was sunk by Billy Mitchell and co. in 1921 in order to demonstrate that the age of seapower was over.) It's fairly extreme knock-out blow stuff, claiming that London can be wiped out in a matter of hours.

Why Wait for a bomber to leave Berlin at 4 o'clock and wipe out London at 8?

One of the world's largest battleships sinking in 6 seconds after being bombed. [...]

The result of ONE bomb dropped on a house near London during the War.

ENGLAND AWAKE!

Inside is a more detailed explanation of how bombing has come along since 1918 and some more slogans, including the proposed solution: to build a big fleet of bombers to 'smash the foreign hornets in their nests'.

The Peril is Yours!

LONDON CAN BE BOMBED, BATTERED AND BROKEN WITHIN A FEW HOURS

• England was in no real peril during the war. Our sea power counted then and we had the biggest fleet afloat.
• Today what matters most is mastery of the air. We have lost that mastery.
• The latest battleship cost £4,500,000. The bigger the ship, the bigger the target. The great German ship Ostfriesland, thought to be unsinkable, was sunk in six seconds by a bomb from the air.
• In the war no single ship escorted by aircraft was sunk by submarine.
• Mr. Baldwin says: "The bomber will get through any defence you can visualise today." Sir Philip Sassoon says: "There is no effective defence against air attack."
• Remember: no single German aeroplane, which dropped bombs near London, was shot down during the War.
• Recollect: that the biggest bomb dropped on London during the War weighed only 500 lb. and killed 12 people.
• Bombs are being manufactured weighing 4,000 lb.
• In the last war a rifle carried three miles and and a gun under thirty. The range of projectiles now is the distance an airman can travel with bombs.
• A bomber can leave the Continent with two tons of explosives and drop bombs 1,500 miles away from his base.
• He can leave Berlin at 4 o'clock, reach London at 8 and wipe out the heart of the Empire in a few moments.
• Our main aircraft factories are clustered around London and all our depots along the Southern coast.
• Germany has 10,000 gliding pilots; England only 78. England has only 78 aerodromes against 1,000 planned by France.

CREATE A NEW WINGED ARMY of long-range British bombers to smash the foreign hornets in their nests.

Join the "Hands Off Britain" Air Defence League
St. Stephen's House, Westminster, S.W.1

HANDS OFF BRITAIN AIR DEFENCE LEAGUE

Conducted by
COMMANDER O. LOCKER-LAMPSON, C.M.G., D.S.O., M.P.
Treasurer:
SIR GEORGE COLTHURST, BART.
Campaign Secretary:
MR. C. COOLEY, ST. STEPHEN'S HOUSE, WESTMINSTER, S.W.1.

I DESIRE to associate myself with this movement
and enclose herewith £
as a donation towards the funds.

*Name
Address

*[...]

Hands Off Britain Air Defence League,
St. Stephen's House, Westminster,
London, S.W.1.
(Telephone: WHITEHALL [...])

I must admit I had some help from Nowell (Charles) Smith, formerly an Oxford classics don, latterly the headmaster of Sherborne and co-author (with James Clerk Maxwell Garnett) of The Dawn of World-order: An Introduction to the Study of the League of Nations. In July 1934, he received what is clearly the same pamphlet in the post, and was moved to write a letter about it to the Spectator (20 July 1934, p. 88). Nowell Smith helpfully lists the names of the people involved in the Hands Off Britain Air Defence League -- otherwise I'd have had no hope of working them out!

The "Conductor", Commander Oliver Locker-Lampson, was an interesting chap: a long-serving Conservative MP, a commander of RNAS armoured cars during the First World War and, if Time is to be believed, a philo-Semitic fascist! He founded a blue-shirted group called the Sentinels of Empire, vehemently anti-Communist. I suspect Time over-estimated the degree of his fascism, or else his significance: he supposedly addressed a meeting of 20,000 of his Blueshirts in 1931, and in 1934 he was said to rival Oswald Mosley as an 'organizer of British fascists', yet he barely figures in histories of British fascism. It seems that in 1926, Locker-Lampson did hold some joint public meetings with the British Fascists, and in 1931 he met Alfred Rosenberg when the latter visited London. But in 1934 he supported a bill to prohibit the wearing of political uniforms, and later helped to put Arnold Leese in the dock. It seems likely that Locker-Lampson did flirt with fascism, but the increasingly anti-Semitic tendencies of fascism in Britain repelled him. Or perhaps the Sentinels of Empire were just a conservative group which emulated the style of fascism, all the rage at the time.

Of the others, Sir George Colthurst owned some 31000 acres and lived at Blarney Castle, so I suppose he was a good choice for treasurer. C. Cooley I have no information on. And Lord Waleran (to whom, according to Nowell Smith, the donations were to be sent; seems he was the chairman) seems to have had an undistinguished career up until this point (still, he was not yet 30). An advertisement in The Times of 29 June 1934, p. 12, lists the names of others who spoke at the inaugural meeting:¹ the Duchess of Atholl, MP, Admiral Sir Murray Sueter, MP, P. J. Hannon, MP, Everard Gates -- and songs sung by Harold Williams and Flora Woodman!² The Duchess of Atholl later went to Spain to observe the effects of bombing on civilians; Sueter had played an important role in the early RNAS and the defence of London during the war, and was very outspoken on matters of air defence.³ Hannon was involved in all the big Edwardian patriotic leagues -- Navy League, National Service League, Tariff Reform League -- as well as the National Aerial Defence Association, which only lasted a few years. All of these were Tory MPs, or would be one day (Gates was elected in a 1940 by-election with a massive 97% majority, against a BUF candidate). Hands Off was clearly a rather right-wing group, then.⁴

What influence did the Hands Off Britain Air Defence League have? Not much, I suspect: they seem to have vanished after mid-1934. (They did claim to have pressured the government into supporting sport gliding.) But then, not many of the various leagues related to air warfare seem to have achieved much in the 1930s, at least not in public: the Air League, the National League of Airmen, the Hands Off Britain Air Defence League, the Air Raid Defence League. The British just weren't joiners, so mass organisations were out; and the extremist political views of many of these groups probably didn't endear them to the government -- certainly not to Nowell Smith, who thought HOBADL's leaflet 'hysterical propaganda'. The ARDL might have been the most influential of all these groups: it was more high-powered than the others (founded by Sir Arthur Salter and Sir Ralph Wedgwood; see the impressive list of supporters in The Times, 7 February 1939, p. 16), more focused (ARP), less partisan; but it was formed only after Munich so didn't have much time to gain traction. If I get time (ha!), I hope to do a spot of archival research into some of these organisations while I'm in the UK, which will help me to understand their activities both in public and in private.

Anyway, now you know all I do about the Hands Off Britain Air Defence League.

1. This ad is very interesting in itself -- it's clearly designed to look like an article reporting on the meeting. So it's not an unbiased account, but does presumably accurately reflect the League's concerns. Perhaps most intriguing is Locker Lampson's suggestion that the future British air force be used to enforce world peace: 'if the League of Nations lacked a police force, then let this new national striking force be accorded that international sanction. (Applause.)'
2. Locker-Lampson did like music: he wrote an anthem for the Sentinels of Empire, or rather set words to music composed for the film High Treason -- which curiously enough was based on a play written by another airminded right-wing (former) MP, Noel Pemberton-Billing.
3. Sueter also gave a speech to the Sentinels of Empire, according to Time.
4. Philip Noel Baker -- who also quotes this pamphlet -- thought so, too, since he claimed it shared the politics of the Aeroplane, a reference to editor C. G. Grey's notoriously far-right views, though I don't think he was as quite as extreme, or at least as obvious, as he later became. Challenge to Death (London: Constable, 1934), 199.

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