Glimpses of the Blitz

My father, Raymond Postgate, died in 1971. Yet he is still remembered, principally as the founder of The Good Food Guide in 1950 and the author of successive editions of The Plain Man's Guide To Wine. He is remembered, too, as a labour historian (he was co-author, with G.D.H. Cole, of The Common People), as a journalist, novelist, reviewer and broadcaster. He was a dedicated Socialist; so strong were his convictions that, as an undergraduate of St John's College, Oxford, during the First World War, he went briefly to prison as a conscientious objector, and was later expelled from his college for pacifist activities. At the end of the 1914-18 war, his intensely Tory father disinherited him because he married Daisy, a daughter of the Socialist MP, George Lansbury (later Leader of the Labour Party and a cabinet minister). He was a founding member of the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1921 but broke with it 'noisily' after about a year. In the General Strike of 1926, he was considered to be so important an activist that his mail was tampered with.

In 1930, on a part-time basis, my father became European representative of the progressive New York publishing duo, Alfred and Blanche Knopf. The business letters they exchanged often included personal and political gossip, and after the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, Postgate's news and comments from London, where he lived, were much appreciated by the Knopfs for the glimpses they gave of life in wartime Britain. These extracts convey a vivid impression of how a man of Postgate's background and interests saw London life during the early years of the war.

Writing on September 12th, 1939, his two sons safely evacuated to Devon, Postgate was gloomy and irritated, like many Britons in those early days, by the demands of security and by air raid precautions:

Do you remember the early Chaplin comedies? or rather Mack Sennett? Full of convicts with broad bars all over their clothes, and that was somehow supposed to be funny. Well this house looks like one of them. Every window has broad bars of brown paper horizontally across it, with a single stripe zigzagging down ... [he went on to describe how he had put mattresses into downstairs cupboards] ... Also I am getting a twelve foot wall of sandbags outside the kitchen, and in that case we may be able to use one room during air raids...

There were a number of false alarms (or at least unfruitful ones) immediately after the declaration of war and I became so fretted by having to get out of bed and shelter that for some days I slept in the boot-cupboard. Douglas and Margaret [G.D.H. Cole and his wife, Margaret, Postgate's sister) have a dugout seventy feet away down the garden. Often there is an alarm they have to go out there and sit on a bench in the night and wait ... No light of any kind may be shown after dark. It takes us thirty minutes to cover up our windows each night. You must have thick cardboard lined with black ...

There are accidents of course. Yesterday [after dark] a man ran into a bus outside Douglas' house and was severely injured. They got a doctor quickly. But Douglas had to stay in the road for thirty minutes shouting at every passing car to keep clear ...

Alfred Knopf responded on October 3rd, reporting rumours that the US administration 'rather expected to be dragged in' within six months; that the US would probably supply munitions for just so long as the British could pay and no longer; that non-interventionist, even anti-British, feeling was strong, fostered by Irish-Americans. He was anxious about the failure of even his articulate fellow Americans to 'realize the revolutionary implications of Nazism'.

By December 28th, Postgate, again like much of the nation, had recovered his spirits. It was the period of 'phoney war', with little military action:

It is odd, but not wholly unpleasant, to live in London. Everyone, I suppose has half a wish to walk back in time; and that is what has happened to us. [At night] You go out; there are no lights, and you must consult the moon. All the houses are strange; no depth, and remarkably variant tones of grey which will never be seen again, but which were seen by all in the eighteenth century. Private motoring and even delivery is fiercely curtailed; the incompetent dealer who stuck to his old horses laughs Ha Ha and delivers before the great stores. Dark falls, and it is an adventure to go out. What are your resources in yourself? your family? your books? For you are back on your own now; you cannot expect people to come casually across five miles of darkness. When you shut your front door, it is shut. It is a nuisance; and yet a good many like me who are very English don't dislike it.

On a similar theme, three weeks later:

...the Westminster Council has put up some shaded lamps which are colloquially called 'starlight' which is a fair description. And one picks one's way out with torches. I saw the other day a rich & purse-proud couple who were preceded by a flunkey eclairant their steps. So we now have link-boys. You and Alfred ought to make a point of seeing eighteenth-century London. It has its own beauty, and you won't see it again.

But by the spring of 1940 the war had started in earnest. Writing on May 20th, after the Nazis had taken over the Low Countries, by- passed the Maginot Line and encircled the British Expeditionary Force, and were squeezing it towards Dunkirk, Postgate's spirits had plummeted:

The thing is so near that all one can do is to be tormented by regrets. Why didn't I learn to shoot? Why am I useless, fat and forty-five? Why didn't I train myself like a stupid Tory, physically? Mentally, I have no regrets – it wasn't the Labour people who let this monster grow until it is near to eating us all. But at the moment there is nothing I can do except write useless and unnecessary words; if this were a truly rational government it would look at me and say 'Better dead, it eats too much.' Absolutely right, too.

He went on to express his view that the US would provide sympathy, but no real military help, just as Britain had done nothing practical for the Czechs at Munich.

...We said when Czechoslovakia fell: 'Maybe it will save the peace of the world', and why should you not say when we go out 'Maybe it will save the peace of the Americas~' There won't be anyone here to contradict you. Not alive, that is...

It's queer to realise that when you read this circumstances may be quite different. But I'm trying to put down the mood of the moment truly. Practically no-one but a few Communists says 'Give way'; and they are pretty well despised even in working-class circles now. I believe though that what sustains us now is an almost mystical obstinacy – that Nazism cannot be allowed to win because it is too evil and would mean the end of life. That is, that we think there is somewhere a force which will not permit this, and that somehow that force will find its means. But I am not a mystic and I do not think that is a sound basis for prophecy...

Well! Salud y victoria! It is a great reinforcement to obstinacy to know that if you are defeated you will be better dead ...

Both Knopfs replied tactfully and sensitively: Alfred with reciprocal gloom, Blanche with deep sympathy. By June 6th, Postgate was more cheerful, bemused by an unfamiliar sentiment which afflicted many of the less dogmatic left: his newly-acquired patriotism:

...We are asked to spend nothing that we needn't: and to hand the resultant economy to the government. And dear me, despite my strict revolutionary past, I think I shall. Do you think I am a tadpole, growing into something quite different? And what shall I be? Shall I become an enraged colonel with a bald head? Or a bishop? Certainly I catch myself sometimes in remarks or attitudes that remind me of my father, the most intolerant and ignorant Tory I ever knew, except my godfather, Sir William Ridgeway ...

You perceive a slight lifting of the gloom. Note that this is written after it has been confirmed that we got nearly all of them out of Dunkirk ...

Postgate's letter of June 20th reflected what has come to be known as 'the spirit of Dunkirk', a well-authenticated national surge of high morale and determination to win in the aftermath of the Dunkirk disaster. In Parliament, Chamberlain was sacked and Churchill took his place; but it was more than just a matter of the right leader emerging at the right time: the remarkable success of a piecemeal co-operative rescue effort that cleared the Dunkirk beaches in the face of a tremendous defeat caused the nation to come together in a way that was quite unprecedented, and took the nation itself by surprise. From the now-patriotic Left-wing, Postgate expressed his own view of the national mood:

Oddly enough ... I am not so dark in my mind as I was ... If we can hold out we shall see something very queer. Two main things have happened. One is that the Labour people, trade unionists and others, have had the belief in their own incapacity and impotence smashed. This is due partly to the running start made by Bevin and Morrison [who had joined Churchill's War Cabinet in May] but even more to the sudden spurt in reply by all the working class. So that instead of negativism and sitting in despair at Oxford study circles there is a wide feeling of 'we can do it'. This is, irrationally, reinforced by the returned BEF from Dunkirk which went out boys and came back soldiers who thought that, given equipment, they need not fear the result of a war with the Jerries. The second is that the Churchill-Beaverbrook-Amery group does appear to indicate the existence of a part of the Conservative party which believes its own propaganda and puts its country before profits. This is quite breathtaking and maybe I am seeing pink rats. But at the moment I see them. They say Chamberlain in the Cabinet is quite dilapidated and spends his time in saying 'Yes' and praying. That is symbolic. But there are still relics of the old days in office and they had to be removed.

Alfred replied with a pessimistic, 'I can only say that I hope with all my heart that what you say is true and that you are not seeing pink rats'. But even he felt constrained to add, 'Churchill's speech Sunday seemed absolutely magnificent. To think you had him all the time Chamberlain was on the bridge! Somehow it seems to me, and I guess to a great many others, that Britain paradoxically is stronger now without allies than she ever was with them'.

On July 12th, Postgate wrote to Blanche:

... my elder son was at a seaside place [Teignmouth] the other day when a Heinkel dropped a couple of bombs on the beach. No-one was hurt, but every one rushed into a pavilion and remained there five minutes, after which they emerged feeling a little foolish. He said he had never thought a small building could contain as many people as were discharged from the ladies lavatory. He then went to a place four miles along the coast where he and a friend told their stories and were the centres of attraction and cynosure of all eyes, etc., until a later arrival came and said he knew T. had been machine-gunned over the whole beach and bombed for over thirty minutes. I forget what the moral of this was to be ...

On July 15th, he wrote to Blanche giving news of his third attempt to join the Local Defence Volunteers (which later became the Home Guard):

...Withhold your laughter, but your representative is now under military discipline, at his own request. In other words, I have joined the Volunteers. Yes, mam; me with my habits and lack of knowledge of one end of a rifle from the other. But still, I feel that something should be done A in that case I must do it too. I look back at various things I lose and find regret only at no longer being able to sit down through God Save the King, which I would this year have consistently done for twenty-one years, on the valid grounds that I am a Republican and so not interested in what Byron called God's large economy in saving him and that it was an example of herd instinct and I forget what else. Once in the Golders Green Hippodrome a man wanted to punch my nose for this; he shouted 'Go back to Palestine' and we both leaned across for combat but fell over plush chair arms, and that was all. And now never again. I shall stand strictly to attention and deny even to my most intimate friends that he stutters and she has most awful hats, and my dear her frocks and that piece of fur round her neck.

(Postgate was not Jewish, but the Knopfs, who were, would have known of Golders Green's substantial Jewish community.)

But the war was coming closer to home: blitzkreig had been waged from the air for several days. On August 21st, he wrote to Blanche:

...The Germans came regularly about 1 and 5.50, each day, while the show was on. You could set your watch, almost. Phlegm, you will be pleased to hear, was displayed by all the Postgate family. We retired to the kitchen, which has been sandbagged, and ate Sunday roast mutton (braised onions, own potatoes, own spinach) and drank one bottle Wehlener Nonneberg 1927, as I felt it an occasion when the family should be soothed, and what more sardonically right than some Rhine wine? No bombs near us; the most alarming thing indeed is the sirens, which have a horrid warning cry quite improperly called 'warbling'. It goes a-a-a- a-wooo-a-a-a-a-wooo-a-a-a-a-wooo-a-a-a on for 120 seconds straight, the Wooo being long drawn out and like the damned howling in hell of a French railway train or for that matter the noise the trains used to make on the long curve near Katonah when I was out your way. The all- clear is a steady WOOO which is less suggestive of agony ...

Then a bomb came very close to his Finchley home. On September 18th he addressed Alfred and Blanche jointly:

The two evacuees were given the cellar that night; the women slept in the sandbagged kitchen; and the Volunteer on a divan in the long room, which you remember perhaps. The mattress had been removed for others' use and the springs from time to time struck him playfully on various parts of his person, with a pleasing metallic noise. But it was not that which kept him awake so much as the guns which are near and roar violently. He thought how his friend Wintringham [Tom WinEringham, socialist and expert on then contemporary warfare] had told him that that room was the most dangerous in the house as it formed a funnel down which blast would come with exceptional violence. Philosophical reflections on this occupied him profitably for the remaining eight hours of the raid ...

Tonight the barrage has just started up again ... The story of the oil bomb on the House of Lords the other day is absurd. As told me by one of the MPs in the Home Guard for Parliament it is this. Raid was on, it was night. They (the Guard) heard a strange noise and rushed out – brandishing weapons, one hopes, and shouting cries of defiance. They found that one of the regular guardians had had a natural need, and had retired to one of the Peers' lavatories. In due course he was prepared to leave and pulled the chain. At that moment there fell through the roof onto the seat, accompanied by bricks and rubble, a large oil bomb, which poured out a flood of oil and did not explode. Whether the wretched guardian thought this was a punishment for lese-peerage or whether he thought he had done it himself I don't know. Anyway, the Home Guard was covered in glory; he was covered in oil; and I expect he will be constipated for life.

Postgate was much flattered when, on October 14th, Alfred wrote of that letter:

The letter is so good that I would like permission to use it, if I may, by way of any magazine which will take it. It is the most detailed and pictorial view of a bombing I have seen ...

Postgate agreed, though he pointed out that it was not a real bombing:

The house wasn't flat and I wasn't fished out in pieces by a warden ... Bombing is now so common that you don't talk of it. You are a Bomb Bore. Up in NW London someone had the bright idea of standing by the Spitfire fund box with a notice 'If you give 6d to this Fund I will let you talk about your bomb.' He did rather well ... The Spitfire fund was to finance the building of new fighter planes these for the RAF. Postgate's letter was used in a pro-British fund- raising operation.

In a letter to Blanche on December 16th, 1940, Postgate returned to his impressions of bombed London, now partly tidied up:

... I ... still feel a little sick when I go round a street where the bombs have crushed one house. It is a peculiar sight, just like one tooth drawn out of a row. There is the street, just as it was meant to be, and suddenly one house isn't there. No sign of why except that the windows are broken on either side. But there is just a flat heap (very curiously flat) of wood and bricks, and under it, you reflect, may be people; or may have been people. On the side of the upright houses is wallpaper, and maybe a picture hanging quite straight or part of a handbasin or other plumbing. Now this is much more disquieting than a big burnt out stores like John Lewis'. You just say 'My! ' to that; but these things look too much like home ... It is very tiresome and straining ...

Shortly after that letter Postgate's office itself was hit. It was in part rented for him by Knopf and several of the fittings were the Knopf's property. Having cabled the bad news earlier, Raymond wrote to both Alfred and Blanche on January 2nd, 1941:

I went down today to my/your old office. There was a thing which might have been a safe and another object which archaeologists confidently said was the mummy of a typewriter. The rest is cold air ... I pottered among the ruins a little apprehensively, for, far above, portions of floors were hanging at odd angles and no one knew when they would decide to pour on us burnt relics of twisted metal, or even themselves. (By the way, let no one tell you of the clean element fire. Fire stinks. All these fires smelt abominably, of death arid corruption; and you went away because it was disgusting. It is a quite distinctive smell; I remember it now from my youth when Laurie McConnells, a big grocers and drapers in Mill Road, Cambridge, burnt out; but I had forgotten it because of literary cant. Fire makes a smell which rouses every one to the feeling: 'That must be stopped; it is like leprosy') ...

Later in the same letter, a long one, he reported that, because of the air raids, his military duties had changed to include fire-watching:

...Every third night if there is a warning (and when isn't there?) I patrol the streets of Finchley all night, armed with rifle, shovel and blanket. Rifle to alarm foe; shovel and blanket to pick up and smother his firebombs. The citizens of Finchley are soothed, and sleep calmly, saying: 'Mr Postgate is watching over us'.

The flippancy in the face of disaster which informed Postgate's letters had become widespread during the bombing of London and the Battle of Britain. It was as if the whole nation, after a period of depression, had entered a sort of manic phase. The Knopfs seem to have taken philosophically the disappearance of their quite substantial investment in the London office. In May 1941, for reasons which are still debated, Hitler's Deputy, Rudolf Hess, flew to Britain, and was promptly imprisoned. Alfred cabled: 'SUGGEST REGISTERING INTEREST IMMEDIATELY MY ESCAPE FROM THE HUN BY HESS KNOPF'

A joke. Yet apparently publishers were already 'hopefully making enquiries' and Ray agreed to keep his ear to the ground. Nothing, of course, came of it.

Bomb-damaged London had begun to take on a bizarre familiarity, and Postgate wrote on September 22nd:

...I habitually walk through the Temple to get my lunch. (My office is three small rooms opposite the Law Courts, on the edge of Fleet Street). This as you know has been bombed heavily; the effect is in places very beautiful and always strange. Some of the courts are immensely improved by the blind striking dawn of buildings; there are vistas you will never see again. St Clement Danes is most impressive as a shell, with Johnson's dirty statue still gesticulating under it. Soon after it was down I went to look at Paternoster Row and that area. It was much as you would suppose, but the ruins were all orange. That is a very common phenomenon, and why I cannot imagine. But there was a bright blue sky, and the whole effect was exotic. As if a view of Algiers had been concealed behind the brick at Ludgate Circus...

The wrecks, now being tidied out in the English way, are so frequently behind the main roads and leap out at you. I went to see my old office at Moorgate. Well, Moorgate was the same as ever. There had been some fires; you could see that. I turned left along my old side-street, and it wasn't there. I'd gone a few steps, and there I was in flat land. About it there were standing a few isolated, tall craggy ruins. They looked rather like illustrations – steel engravings – to THE CASTLE OF OTRANTO or THE MONK. Obviously fake ruins that Horace Walpole or Beckford had erected to astonish the passer-by...

On October 10th, 1945, Postgate's letter indicated that a pre-war custom – the publisher's cocktail party – had not quite vanished from London life, and gave a glimpse of a literary pundit in action. J. Hamish [Jamie] Hamilton was a successful London publisher: ...

JHH – who must still have two ha'pence for a penny and be the only one in London – gave an old-style cocktail party at the Dorchester with all sorts of sandwiches and sardines and things in aspic and drink to swim in and everyone was there; but everyone. Noel Coward and H.G. [Wells] and Sybil Colefax and Jonathan Cape grinning like Satan and Norman Collins holding on to the bar and looking glassy and Mrs Belloc Lowndes and all the editors and Storm Jameson drinking soda and milk. I do not approve of the habit of cairousing, even genteely, during this crisis, but as a geste, and for once, it was enjoyable.

I did not get much out of it but an indication from H.G. which may quite well be valueless, and is giving me immense trouble to follow up. You can judge of how helpful he was by the conversation. I think, since he is after all a great man, the conversation is worth recording if only as an example of the manners of the aged and distinguished:

'You ought to have published the greatest novel that has been written in the last five years. I don't suppose you have even heard of it. Don't you say I haven't given you the chance. It" s the best thing ...' (a sort of wave of the fingers ended the sentence) 'It's by an Australian called Xavier Herbert.'
'Xavier Herbert?'
'Yes, yes, yes. I told Hodder to publish it, but of course they didn't.'
'Thank you very much.' (Indications of gratitude, being greatly honoured). 'What was the title?'
"O, I don't remember that.'
'You don't happen to have a copy of it, do you?' 'No, 1 didn't keep one. But it was published by someone in Brisbane, or Adelaide or Sydney. You could find out very easily.'
'Do you think he had an agent, or someone? Do you remember how you got hold of it? I am very interested, really I am.'
'I don't know. I don't know. My dear Postgate, don't he so difficult. You are all the same. I give you the chance of publishing the greatest book I have read for years, and you only ask silly questions. Never mind. I am going to do something absolutely dreadful. It will shock everyone.' (He calls Hamilton). 'Hamilton. This is a splendid party. But it lacks one thing. Why didn't you ask Lady Rhonnda and Odette Keun?'

Nobody was shocked and Hamilton only smiled amiably. The old gentleman sulked a little and I faded away...

Lady Rhonnda was Editor and Chairman of a literary journal called Time and Tide; Odette Keun was a former mistress of Wells from the late 1920s, dedicatee of The Bulpington Of Blup; she later wrote three disparaging articles about his character for Time and Tide. The book in question proved to be Capricornia, by X. Herbert, and the Knopfs had already rejected it.

The correspondence between Postgate and the Knopfs continued throughout the war, but the peculiarities of life on the 'Home Front' became familiar and were displaced by themes such as Pearl Harbor, GIs in Britain, and newly-liberated France. After the war the correspondence dwindled because, in 1949, Postgate ceased working for the Knopfs. There was goodwill on both sides and they continued to meet and to correspond occasionally. The Knopfs' business, with its 'Borzoi Books' trademark, flourished; it remains a leading US publishing house today. Postgate returned to full-time writing, and was in due time disconcerted to find himself 'Public Stomach No. 1': the success of The Good Food Guide and his other gastronomic writings came to overshadow his historical, political and literary works in the public eye.

The Postgate-Knopf letters have been quoted with permission from the curators of Alfred A. Knopf Inc. Rare Books and Manuscripts Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and the Tilden Foundation.

• John Postgate lives in East Sussex and is author of ‘Remembering Raymond Postgate’ in Encounter 71 (1955) and ‘Raymond Postgate and the Socialist Film Council’ in Sight and Sound 60 (1990/91).