The King and Country debate

The King and Country debate was a discussion at the Oxford Union debating society on 9 February 1933 of the resolution: "That this House will in no circumstances fight for its King and Country". It was passed by 275 votes to 153,^[1] and became one of the most well-known and notorious debates conducted in the Union.

The resolution was moved by Kenelm H. Digby of St John's College and opposed by Mr. K. R. F. Steel-Maitland of Balliol College. Among other speakers, Quintin Hogg argued against it, and C. E. M. Joad and Mr. David Maurice Graham of Balliol, the Union's Librarian at the time and the original drafter of the motion, argued in favour.^[2] The teller for the Ayes was Max Beloff and for the Noes Mr. R. G. Thomas.^[3] The President of the Union at the time was Frank Hardie.^[4]

The debate

Digby addressed the packed chamber: "It is no mere coincidence that the only country fighting for the cause of peace, Soviet Russia, is the country that has rid itself of the war-mongering clique. The justification urged for the last war was that it was a war to end war. If that were untrue it was a dastardly lie; if it were true, what justification is there for opposition to this motion tonight?" Isis, a student magazine of the University of Oxford, reported that Digby had a "tub-thumping style of oratory which would be more appreciated in Hyde Park than in the Union".

Hogg argued that the policy that Digby advocated would cause, not prevent war. In his opinion, a powerful England was a factor for peace and a disarmed Britain would have no more influence for peace in Europe than she had in the Far East where Japan had invaded Manchuria.

Joad delivered what was described as a "tour de force of pacifist rhetoric". He claimed that the motion really meant "that this House will never commit murder on a huge scale whenever the Government decided it should do so", and argued that although limited wars might have been justified in the past, the scale of destruction now possible with modern weapons meant that war had become unthinkable.

All told, there were five opening speakers, nine others supporting the motion, and ten against. Future Oxford Union president, David Lewis, was the eighth of the nine speakers in support of the motion.^[5] When the motion was put, President Frank Hardie declared it carried by 275 votes to 153. Digby went to shake hands with Hogg but his opponent refused to do so.^[4]

Reaction

A Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford at the time, R. B. McCallum, claimed that the "sensation created when this resolution was passed was tremendous. It received world-wide publicity.... Throughout England people, especially elderly people, were thoroughly shocked. Englishmen who were in India at the time have told me of the dismay they felt when they heard of it.... 'What is wrong with the younger generation?' was the general query".^[6]

The Daily Express said of it: "There is no question but that the woozy-minded Communists, the practical jokers, and the sexual indeterminates of Oxford have scored a great success in the publicity that has followed this victory.... Even the plea of immaturity, or the irresistible passion of the undergraduate for posing, cannot excuse such a contemptible and indecent action as the passing of that resolution". The Manchester Guardian responded differently: "The obvious meaning of this resolution [is] youth's deep disgust with the way in which past wars for 'King and Country' have been made, and in which, they suspect, future wars may be made; disgust at the national hypocrisy which can fling over the timidities and follies of politicians, over base greeds and communal jealousies and jobbery, the cloak of an emotional symbol they did not deserve".^[7]

A Daily Express reporter claimed to have found the Mayor of Oxford, Alderman C. H. Brown, and his wife sitting in front of the fire reading their bibles, with Brown claiming "I say that as mayor of a city that fathers a university of such foreign communistic sentiments, I am ashamed". Cambridge University was reported to have threatened to pull out of that year's Boat Race because of "incompatibility of temperament."^[4]

An anonymous critic sent the Oxford Union a box containing 275 white feathers, one for each vote for the resolution.^[8] A second box followed, and Hardie announced that each member who had voted 'aye' could have two feathers.^[4]

Winston Churchill condemned the motion in a speech on 17 February, 1933 to the Anti-Socialist and Anti-Communist Union as "That abject, squalid, shameless avowal... It is a very disquieting and disgusting symptom":

My mind turns across the narrow waters of Channel and the North Sea, where great nations stand determined to defend their national glories or national existence with their lives. I think of Germany, with its splendid clear-eyed youths marching forward on all the roads of the Reich singing their ancient songs, demanding to be conscripted into an army; eagerly seeking the most terrible weapons of war; burning to suffer and die for their fatherland. I think of Italy, with her ardent Fascisti, her renowned Chief, and stern sense of national duty. I think of France, anxious, peace-loving, pacifist to the core, but armed to the teeth and determined to survive as a great nation in the world. One can almost feel the curl of contempt upon the lips of the manhood of all these people when they read this message sent out by Oxford University in the name of young England.^[9]

In March 1933 the "Oxford Pledge", as the resolution came to be called, was adopted by the University of Manchester and the University of Glasgow.^[10]

Three weeks after it was passed, Randolph Churchill proposed a resolution at the Oxford Union to delete the "King and Country" motion from the Union's records but this was defeated by 750 votes to 138 in a rowdy debate, where Churchill was met by a barrage of hisses and stink bombs. A bodyguard of Oxford Conservatives and police escorted Churchill back to his hotel after the debate.^[4][11]

Speaking after the debate, Digby said: "I believe that the motion was representative neither of the majority of the undergraduates of Oxford nor of the youth of this country. I am certain if war broke out tomorrow the students of the university would flock to the recruiting office as their fathers and uncles did."^[4] He was proved right: when the Second World War broke out in September 1939 the War Office organised a recruiting board at Oxford which invited undergraduates and resident postgraduates under 25 to enlist: 2,632 out of a potential 3,000 volunteered.^[12] McCallum recalled at the outbreak of war two students, "men of light and leading in their college and with a good academic record", visited him to say goodbye before leaving to join their units. Both of them had separately said that if they had to vote on the "King and Country" resolution then and there, they would do so. One of them said: "I am not going to fight for King and Country, and you will notice that no one, not Chamberlain, not Halifax, has asked us to".^[13]

Telford Taylor, chief United States prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, wrote "the 'King and Country' debate was a colorful reflection of the British temper between the two great wars. Exhausted and disgusted by the prolonged bloodbath in Flanders Fields, wracked by internal economic strains and already tiring of the burdens of empire, neither the people nor their leaders were in any mood to embark on new crusades."^[4]

Sixty years after the event, Digby mused "It was just a debate. I don't know what all the fuss was about. Frank Hardie had asked me to propose the motion and I agreed. That's all there was to it. But ever since the debate security intelligence organisations seem to have taken an interest in me." Certainly Digby's subsequent career in Sarawak and the UK suffered through his association with the debate.^[4]

Foreign reaction

In a speech in the House of Commons on 20 July, 1934, the Liberal MP Robert Bernays described a visit he made to Germany:

I remember very vividly, a few months after the famous pacifist resolution at the Oxford Union visiting Germany and having a talk with a prominent leader of the young Nazis. He was asking about this pacifist motion and I tried to explain it to him. There was an ugly gleam in his eye when he said, "The fact is that you English are soft". Then I realized that the world enemies of peace might be the pacifists.^[14]

Benito Mussolini was particularly struck by the sentiment expressed by the undergraduates and became convinced that the Joad declaration proved that Britain was a "frightened, flabby old woman".^[15] While considering whether to take British threats seriously while embarking on his Abyssinia adventure Mussolini often referred to Joad declaration on why he didn't cave into British demands. ^[15] Sir Winston Churchill would after the war write how Japan and Germany too took note of the Joad resolution which altered their way of thinking about Britain as a "decadent, degenerate ... and swayed many [of their] calculations."^[16]

Bibliography

Notes

1. ^ Smith, Cameron (1989). Unfinished Journey: The Lewis Family. Toronto: Summerhill Press. pp. 180–181. ISBN 0-929091-04-3. 
2. ^ Ceadel, Martin. "The King and Country Debate, 1933: Student Politics, Pacifism and the Dictators" The Historical Journal, 22, 2 (1979), pp. 397-422.
3. ^ Jan Morris, The Oxford Book of Oxford (Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 374.
4. ^ ^{a b c d e f g h} Derek Round and Kenelm Digby (2002). Barbed Wire Between Us: A Story of Love and War. Random House, Auckland. 
5. ^ Writer, Staff (1933-02-15). The Isis (Oxford: Holywell Press): pp. 7. 
6. ^ McCallum 1944, pp. 177–80
7. ^ Morris, pp. 374–75.
8. ^ Robert Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and America's First Mass Student Movement, 1929–41 (Oxford University Press, 1997), pp. 79–80.
9. ^ Martin Gilbert, Prophet of Truth. Winston S. Churchill. 1922-1939 (Minerva, 1990), p. 456.
10. ^ Cohen, p. 80.
11. ^ Morris, p. 275.
12. ^ Paul Addison, 'Oxford and the Second World War', in Brian Harrison (ed.), The History of the University of Oxford: The Twentieth-century. Volume 8 (Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 167.
13. ^ McCallum, p. 179.
14. ^ Quintin Hogg, The Left was Never Right (Faber and Faber, 1945), p. 50.
15. ^ ^{a b} Churchill 1986, p. 150
16. ^ Churchill 1986, p. 77

References

• Churchill, Winston S. (1986). The Gathering Storm (1986 ed.). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. ISBN 9780395410554.  - Total pages: 752
• McCallum, Ronald Buchanan (1944). Public opinion and the last peace (1944 ed.). Oxford University Press.  - Total pages: 214

Further reading

• Martin Ceadel, ‘The 'King and Country' Debate, 1933: Student Politics, Pacifism and the Dictators’, The Historical Journal, Vol. 22, No. 2 (June, 1979), pp. 397–422.