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Education or Manipulation? Labour, Democracy, and the Popular Press in Interwar Britain

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2009

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References

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22 Even skeptics about the power of propaganda, such as A. J. Cummings (The Press [London, 1936], 20–32), admitted the power of propaganda in influencing public opinion during the war.

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29 Chris Waters has argued that a Labourist pragmatic ethos had triumphed within the Labour movement by 1914, eroding traditional moralist or “educationalist” tendencies. See his British Socialists and the Politics of Popular Culture, 1884–1914 (Stanford, CA, 1990), 174, 176–177.

30 National Executive Committee of the Labour Party (NEC), Annual Report (London, 1904), 21Google ScholarPubMed.

31 NEC minutes, 6 October 1909, Labour Party Archive, Manchester (hereafter LPA).

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36 Advertisement, Daily Express, 5 December 1918.

37 “Political Advertising,” Daily Express, 5 December 1918.

38 Lansbury refused to run betting tips in the Daily Herald. Henderson resigned as distributing agent for the Labour paper, The New Newcastle Evening News, after he discovered that the paper “became in some way associated with the betting interest,” and he again resigned from the board of the short-lived Labour Daily Citizen when the paper decided to publish betting tips. See “Mr. Arthur Henderson and the Press,” Newspaper World, 29 May 1915, 5.

39 Arnot, R. Page, The History of the Labour Research Department (London, 1926), 47Google Scholar. The total expenditure on all forms of publicity during the nine days was £16,355 (NUR Report and Financial Statement for 1919, cited in Philip Bagwell, The Railwaymen: A History of the National Union of Railwaymen [London, 1963], 396). This figure is all the more incredible when one considers that the National Executive Committee's annual expenditure on publicity during the election year 1918 was only £6,512 9s. 1.5d (NEC, Annual Report [London, 1919]).

40 David Lloyd George, telegraph to the County Council at Caernarvon, 27 September 1919, quoted in Bagwell, The Railwaymen, 393.

41 See London Labour Party (LLP) Executive Committee minutes, 13 May 1920 onward, London Metropolitan Archive (LMA). The first LLP ad was run in the Star on 2 March 1922.

42 Tanner, Political Change and the Labour Party, 1900–1918; see also discussion below.

43 Herbert Morrison, “Labour and the Middle Class, Part VI,” London Labour Chronicle, September 1923.

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53 See also the Daily Herald circular, 21 November 1921, LP/DH, LPA.

54 Tracey, “The Newspaper Trust”; Hampton, Visions of the Press, 167, 173–75.

55 Ernest Bevin, “The Written Word,” Daily Herald, 1 December 1919.

56 Richards, Huw, The Bloody Circus: The Daily Herald and the Left (London, 1997), 76Google Scholar. The Sugar Subsidy Bill was the page 2 story on 19 March 1925.

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58 Richards, Bloody Circus, 1–64.

59 Advertisement, Daily Mail, 9 September 1919.

60 Typescript minutes of Labour Party Conference, 1923, in Trades Union Congress (TUC) MSS 292/790/4, Modern Records Centre (MRC), Warwick.

61 Hamilton Fyfe, “A Nice Bit o’ Reading,” London Labour Chronicle, January 1923, 7.

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66 “Ratepayers’ Revolt,” Daily Express, 2 November 1922.

67 Sidney Strube, “An Obvious Disguise,” Daily Express, 1 November 1922.

68 “As You Like It,” Daily Mail, 1 November 1922 (emphasis in the original).

69 “Don’t Forget to Vote Today: Against Socialism,” Daily Mail, 15 November 1922; “The Tale of a Waistcoat,” Daily Mail, 3 November 1922.

70 Beers, Laura, “Counter-Toryism: Labour's Response to Anti-Socialist Propaganda, 1918–1939,” in Foundations of the Labour Party, ed. Worley, Matthew (London, 2009), forthcomingGoogle Scholar.

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78 See display advertisements in The Times, 3 March, 8 March, and 18 March 1920.

79 Walter Milne-Bailey, “Nation on Strike,” chap. 13, unpublished manuscript, Trades Union Congress Library, London Metropolitan University, London (hereafter TUCL).

80 The editor of the Daily Herald, H. Hamilton Fyfe, who also edited the Worker, had encouraged the TUC general council to allow him to include more “general news” in the paper, to no avail. See Fyfe, Behind the Scenes of the Great Strike (London, 1926), 84.

81 Report of the Publicity Committee, May 1926, G. C. 14/3/1925–26, TUCL.

82 Martin, The British Public and the General Strike, 89.

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95 Tanner, “Class Voting,” 116–17.

96 “W. Herron (Chorley DLP) Speech to Party Conference,” in Report of the Twenty-sixth Annual Conference of the Labour Party (London, 1926), 209.

97 “C. T. Cramp Speech to Party Conference,” in Report of the Twenty-seventh Annual Conference of the Labour Party (London, 1927), 211.

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105 For a full discussion of the negotiations surrounding the sale and relaunch, see Richards, The Bloody Circus, chap. 6.

106 Daily Herald internal memo, n.d., 1938, TUC MSS 292/790/1, MRC.

107 Advertisement, Daily Herald, 4 December 1942.

108 “To the Working Men and Women of Britain,” Daily Express, 26 September 1932; “To Trade Unionists,” Daily Express, 30 September 1932; “To Cooperators,” Daily Express, 1 October 1932.

109 The letter was forwarded to Walter Citrine by G. D. Eusden of the Edmonton Trades Council, 20 October 1933, TUC MSS 292/790/1, MRC.

110 Memo from James Kneeshaw to the annual consultation of organizing staff held in connection with the annual party conference, 10 October 1930; filed in NEC minutes 1930, LPA.

111 “Notes re: Daily Herald,” n.d. [late 1930], TUC MSS 292/790/6, MRC.

112 “To Trade Unionists” (emphasis in the original).

113 Letter from Arthur Pugh to Walter Citrine, 18 January 1934, TUC MSS 292/790.1/3, MRC.

114 Letters column, Labour Organiser, April 1932, 60.

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119 J. S. Middleton, circular to local party secretaries re: Special Conference on Film Propaganda at the 1936 Labour Party Annual Conference in Edinburgh; filed in NEC minutes, LPA.

120 Wring, Dominic, The Politics of Marketing the Labour Party (Basingstoke, 2005), 11; minutes of NEC research and publicity subcommittee, 14 December 1937, LPACrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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124 Sam Davies and Bob Morley, eds., County Borough Elections in England and Wales, 1919–1938: A Comparative Analysis, 3 vols. (London, 1999–2006). Howard (“Expectations Born to Death,” 65–81) has similarly suggested that the party's increased turnout at successive general elections in the 1920s masked a fundamental weakness in its local bases of support.

125 Butler, David, “Trend in British By-Elections,” Journal of Politics 11, no. 2 (May , ed., 1949): 396407CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Addison, Paul, The Road to 1945 (London, 1975), 18, 127–28, 162Google Scholar; John Stevenson and Chris Cook, Britain in the Depression (London, 1994), 131, 139.

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127 Beers, Laura, “Polling Public Opinion before Opinion Polls: The Conservative Party and Election Prediction between the Wars” (unpublished paper, Cambridge University, 2007)Google Scholar.

128 For a detailed analysis of newspaper readership figures and BBC listener data, see Beers, Laura, “‘Selling Socialism’: Labour, Democracy and the Mass Media, 1900–1939” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 2007), chap. 9Google Scholar; and Sian Nicholas, “Politics and the Audience: Political Broadcasting and BBC Listener Research, c. 1936–1950,” paper presented at the North American Conference on British Studies, Boston, November 2006.

129 Hugh Gaitskell at conference on “Selling Socialism,” sponsored by the New Fabian Research Bureau, 23–24 October 1937, Fabian Society J14/7 f. 49, British Library of Economic and Political Science (BLEPS), London.

130 Wring, The Politics of Marketing the Labour Party, 17–19.

131 Black, The Political Culture of the Left, 104, 110, 122. For the argument that the 1940s Labour Party was ill-attuned to the mood of the masses, see Fielding, Steven, Thompson, Paul, and Tiratsee, Nick, eds., “England Arise!” The Labour Party and Popular Politics in 1940s Britain (Manchester, 1995)Google Scholar; and Fielding, Steve, “Activists against ‘Affluence’: Labour Party Culture during the ‘Golden Age’, circa 1950–1970,” Journal of British Studies 40, no. 2 (April 2001): 241–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a broader discussion of the competing strands in the intellectual and political culture of the British Labour Party, see Jeremy Nuttall, Psychological Socialism: The Labour Party and Qualities of Mind and Character, 1931 to the Present (Manchester, 2006).

132 Mandelson, Peter, “Foreword,” in Bernard Donoghue and G. W. Jones, Herbert Morrison: Portrait of a Politician, 2nd ed. (London, 2001), xi–xxvii, xviii, xxGoogle Scholar.