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From International Socialism, No.14, Autumn 1963, p.37.
Thanks to Ted Crawford & the late Will Fancy.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Pethick-Lawrence: A Portrait
Vera Brittain
Allen & Unwin. 25s.
Pethick-Lawrence was one of the Attlee generation of Labour politicians. Like Attlee, he belonged to a well-off middle-class family, and after a public school and Cambridge education in which he won high academic honours he evolved, via social work in the East End, from liberalism to the Labour Party. The two high points in his public career were his activities in the militant suffragette movement – which led to a widely-publicised trial for sedition and a term of imprisonment in 1912 – and, towards the end of his long life, his leadership of the Cabinet mission to India in 1946, which paved the way to the recognition of Indian independence in the following year.
What at least one reader wondered, on finishing this book, was why it should have been thought worth writing or publishing. The subject cannot be regarded as more than a minor political figure. There is no evidence from this book that his ideas or policies played any significant part in the development of the causes he espoused. All that his biographer can do is to give an extremely potted version of the events with which he was associated, and even so there are serious gaps. There is, for instance, no, indication of the attitude he took in the bitter struggles between right and left in the Labour movement between the wars. Judged as straight rather than as political biography the verdict must be much the same. The impression given is that he had a pleasant unassuming personality, was sincere, and a devoted husband: all very admirable, but hardly of absorbing interest to future generations.
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Last updated on 24 March 2010