Domestic Soldiers (16 page)

So it was with the offer of independence in shreds and British fortunes in the east at their nadir, that Gandhi devised a plan to wrest India once and for all from the hands of the empire. Axis forces seemed irresistible that spring. The Japanese had closed the Burma Road, the Allies’ crucial supply line to China, and now roamed the Bay of Bengal with impunity. In Gandhi’s mind, the only way for both India and Britain to survive was for Britain to leave. ‘Britain cannot defend India, much less herself on Indian soil,’ he argued. ‘The best thing she can do is leave India to her fate. I feel somehow India will not do badly then.’
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In August, the Indian National Congress agreed to support Gandhi’s Quit India Movement. The next day, Gandhi declared ‘open rebellion’ against the British and told his supporters that this was the moment to ‘do or die’. ‘We shall either free India or die in the attempt,’ he declared to the cheering audience.
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That night, he and a number of leaders of the Congress were arrested. Once news of the arrests broke, waves of violence and arson erupted across India, which took over six weeks to quell.

Nella Last learned of Gandhi’s arrest and the resulting chaos while listening to the news over tea. A ‘wee bright fire’ burned in the fireplace as Will and Nella lingered over some wholemeal bread and a few poached eggs from her chickens. Neither one seemed particularly interested in doing much else but to stare at the fire, meditating wistfully about their son and the deteriorating situation in India. Cliff had recently been deployed overseas and all they knew was that he’d been sent ‘east’. Now they wondered if Cliff was landing in India, perhaps helping to subdue the local population or fighting off a Japanese invasion.

To Irene Grant, the chaos in India was a direct result of years of ‘capitalist’ meddling and ‘bad neglectful treatment at our hands’, but she was more concerned with her own struggles with debilitating sciatica and arthritis. Over the course of July and August, she received nine gold injections that were supposed to heal her ailments. Unfortunately, the treatment did little to help, and she complained of ‘pains very bad indeed’, spending most of her time ‘dazed and in pain’. It was a battle just to walk out to her garden.

Edie Rutherford received the news of Gandhi’s arrest with satisfaction. Although she expected India
to erupt in rebellion, she also thought it would benefit the British to have him ‘out of the limelight’. Edie respected Gandhi and his stance on non-violence, but she felt it was treacherous and unsporting to raise opposition while Britain was in the fight of its life. She hoped that his incarceration would give him time to think over the fact ‘that the freedom of India at this moment was not worth exchanging for the freedom of the rest of the free world’.

While Edie could be, and often was, quite critical of the government, she nonetheless believed wholeheartedly in the righteousness of the war against the Axis powers. As Churchill repeatedly reminded the British people: not only freedom, but the very fabric of civilization was at stake in this fight. For Edie, active opposition to Britain at such a time was an unnecessary, inexcusable and dangerous diversion. Indeed, she had no time for those who sat on the fence, either. In a war of good versus evil, there could be no neutrality, she believed.

Reports of hardship in neutral countries failed to move Edie to sympathy. When she came across an article in the newspaper regarding Eire’s difficulties in wartime, her only response was, ‘I hope we’re not expected to feel sorry for the mutts? Neutrals deserve to suffer for their blindness.’ In fact, Edie was so fed up with Eire’s neutrality that news from the island only made her ‘just spit and spit and spit and make raspberries’. After an earthquake struck San Juan, Argentina, in January 1944, leaving 2,000 people dead and 4,000 injured, she wrote indifferently, ‘Can’t say I have much pity for Argentina … they are neutrals waxing fat on the war, faugh.’

Edie was a fierce supporter of the war effort and, as a daughter of empire herself, the performance of the Commonwealth and colonies in aid of Britain was a point of personal pride and significance. As such, she closely followed the happenings elsewhere in the empire, especially in her native South Africa, with great interest. The ‘Boer Diehards’ of her native country, who refused to fight for Britain, were a constant source of Edie’s ire.

She did not write a M-O diary at the time, but one suspects that, had Edie kept one, there would have been a hearty cheer for Jan Smuts on 6 September 1939. It was then that Smuts had forced a parliamentary debate against anti-British and pro-Nazi Boers led by J.B.M. Hertzog, in order to bring South Africa into the war on the side of the British. The majority of the Union’s parliament sided with Smuts, who became premier on the force of this debate. Still, there was a significant minority of South Africans who were never supportive of the British war effort – a fact that continued to exercise Edie throughout the war.

Edie’s extended family, however, contributed wholeheartedly to the war. Between her own and her husband Sid’s family, there were at least ten servicemen involved in the fighting, with whom she kept continual correspondence. Sid’s nephew served in the RAF in Cairo, India and the Middle East and a cousin fought with the Cameron Highlanders in France after the D-Day invasions. Her brother and brother-in-law, as well as Edie’s nephew, all fought in South African regiments. These volunteer forces saw action against the Italians in East Africa, the Germans in North Africa in 1942 and later were involved in the Italian offensive in 1944 and 1945.

It irked Edie that the British media, and Britons in general, rarely mentioned the significant events or endeavours of the empire. In order to balance matters a bit, Rutherford made a point of enlightening M-O on many Commonwealth efforts. In July 1943, she spent an entire week listening to the BBC for election news from South Africa to be broadcast, but when nothing was reported, she figured that the ‘BBC considers [the] news not worthy of notice’. The next year, when the BBC mentioned South African Union Day on 31 May, Edie could hardly believe it. ‘Hold me before I fall,’ she quipped, ‘the BBC actually mentioned our National Day!’ But, when Anzac Day (a commemoration of Australian and New Zealand forces who fought in the First World War) was celebrated in April 1945,
she
made sure to mark it, but sniped, ‘not that it means a thing to folk here’.

She was most proud by far, though, of the South African ‘Springboks’, and made sure their efforts were always reported in her diary, as when she reminded M-O that it was South African troops that helped recapture Bardia, on the Libyan border with Egypt, in early 1942. Edie compared them to others in the empire, noting with pride that, despite the ‘wretched Boers’, South Africa contributed more troops than other Commonwealth nations with similar numbers of whites. But although she applauded the bravery and participation of South Africa’s volunteers, Rutherford was disgusted that the best of South African blood was spilt on foreign battlefields while, ‘The anti-British Boers with all their narrow prejudices are safe at home breeding more youngsters to whom they can pass on their poisonous ideas.’

The ‘poisonous ideas’ refer not only to the animosity towards the British, but also their aggressive racism.
When racial matters cropped up in the news, Edie wrote with authority and sympathy, though not without a hint of racism herself. She held a deep conviction that the ‘colour bar’ should be abolished, not only throughout the empire, but globally. Early on in the war, Edie was happy to learn that the ‘coloured children of my country’, when given a chance, volunteered in droves. Military service was an excellent opportunity, she thought, to give them a good job, decent food and a chance to better themselves. Plus, it highlighted the treachery of Boers, demonstrating that colour was a poor indicator of loyalty.

When famed West Indian cricketer Learie Constantine was refused a room in 1943 at a hotel in Russell Square, London, Edie was delighted to learn that he sued them. Although Edie told M-O that she felt ‘many English folk have no colour sense at all,’ this was not the first time that racial discrimination had reared its head in wartime British society. Just two years earlier, the distinguished Indian jurist, poet, novelist and vice-president of Delhi and Nagpur universities, Sir Hari Singh Gour, had been turned away by another West End hotel. Even the Royal Navy’s recruitment policy was questioned when George Price, a young man born in Edinburgh of a West Indian father, was refused entrance into the service in 1940.

The problem of racism in Britain, however, became exacerbated once American GIs arrived en masse. By July 1942, just six months after Americans landed on British soil, complaints of American mistreatment of black Britons began to filter through official channels. Indeed, Constantine’s experience was directly related to this issue, for the hotel manager who denied the dynamic cricketer a room maintained that the
American officers who frequented the hotel disliked the presence of blacks.

Popular opinion in Britain seemed to be with Constantine. Newspapers covered the story and Parliament debated the issue, coming to the conclusion that, as Home Secretary Herbert Morrison put it, ‘responsible public opinion’ would ‘condemn’ discrimination against ‘a fellow British subject on the grounds of race or colour’.
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Learie Constantine won his suit. Still, this by no means solved the problems of race. Constantine, who also acted as a local Ministry of Labour welfare officer for Jamaicans in Liverpool, later complained to the ministry after being accosted by two American GIs in a pub that the government was unwilling to confront the issue with their allies. Indeed, it was a delicate situation, for Britain needed
both
American and imperial support.

To Edie, the hotel incident shed light on British rule throughout the empire. ‘It is more than time that we decided if the coloured people in our Empire are to enjoy the privileges whites in it enjoy,’ she argued. Otherwise, ‘We should withdraw from their countries in favour of others who will afford them equality. We can’t have it both ways.’ Her openness towards ‘coloured people’, however, was tempered by an underlying assumption that they could not lead their own countries without help. They were, after all, as she put it, ‘children’ and according to Edie, it was therefore up to some other nation, presumably European or American, to
give
them equality.

Even if her feelings were fraught with contradictions, at base, Edie saw herself as a champion for justice and equality. This was especially true in the shifting sands of women’s rights during the war. In August 1942,
controversy flared on the home front when the government instituted compulsory fire-watching duties upon women. Women who were pregnant or who had children under the age of fourteen were exempt, but all others between twenty and forty-five years of age were required to either take turns watching at their place of employment or to register for local duties.

Objections to this new directive abounded. Letters to the editors of newspapers across the country registered the variety of those complaints. Some women argued that they were already pulling double shifts, working in full-time employment and coming home to take care of their families; the addition of overnight fire-watching duty was entirely too much to ask, they thought. Men chimed into the debate as well. One man who wrote to the
Liverpool Daily Post
felt that the order placed women in dangerous work that should be carried out by men only, and was thus a ‘serious reflection on my manhood’. Others worried less about women’s physical safety, and instead felt that the order put women’s moral safety in jeopardy. In the darkness of the night, who knew what moral dangers women would face?

Edie thought the moral panic embedded in this debate ridiculous. First, she argued, women were already doing the work: she had served as a firewatcher during Sheffield’s Blitz the year before and understood the realities of the work. To her, the moral arguments against women’s fire watching suggested that women could not be trusted in the presence of men under the cover of darkness. ‘If my husband had so little trust in me when the country called on me to do a duty away from home at night, I would tell him precisely where he gets off,’ she told M-O. She didn’t
doubt that there would be liaisons, but she felt that the debate also demonstrated the ‘nonsensical’ idea that women’s transgressions were worse than men’s. ‘Does it not occur to men’, she enquired rhetorically, ‘who sleep with odd women that some man could be as indignant about them as they are at the thought of their wives doing it?’

What truly infuriated Edie about the compulsory fire-watching order, however, was its underlying inequality: a woman injured in the line of duty did not receive the same compensation as a man. Under the Personal Injuries Act for civilians, men were given 7 shillings more per week than women who sustained the same injuries during civil defence work. Labour MP Dr Edith Summerskill, who fought in the House of Commons against this discrimination, summed up the issue when she asked the Minister of Pensions, Sir Walter Womersley, ‘Will the Right Honourable Gentleman say why a woman’s arm or leg is not of the same value as a man’s?’
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This was the core of the issue for Edie, and, she told M-O, for the men and women alike who she knew supported women’s fire watching
and
equal compensation for injuries sustained during such work for the nation. When Home Secretary Herbert Morrison shut down Conservative MP Mavis Tate’s attempt to ensure that equal compensation would be part of the firewatching order before Parliament recessed in August 1942, Edie was furious. ‘It would serve the Government right if women refused,’ she told M-O. But, ‘Fortunate for the government, women are not so base as Gandhi and Co.’

Things looked bleak that August for equal compensation, but soon the tide would turn. Fuelled by the
efforts of Mavis Tate and Edith Summerskill, a committee was formed to investigate the matter in November. Based on their findings, the government reversed its stance on the issue, and in April 1943 equal compensation was granted for civil defence injuries.