Constant Reader From Miners’ Sweat

ALBURY ParK, in Surrey, which I visited during the Christmas break, is one of those stately homes which are open to the public at certain hours so that, for half a crown a head, we may view the pictures, furniture, porcelain and other aids to gracious living accumulated over the centuries by the present occupant’s forbears.

‘This particular house belongs to the Dowager Duchess of Northumberland, who is Mistress of the Robes to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother; photographs of ‘Helen Northumberland’ in her Coronation finery appear incongruously among the old masters.

In one room the visitor finds gazing sternly down the arrogant face of the 8th Duke, Helen’s deceased husband, and a man well remembered by the older generation of miners. (He died in 1930, portrait by de Laszlo, of course.)

The Northumberland family were among the biggest owners of coal royulties in this country. Payments to them and their like, as the owners of the land under which coal was being mined, constituted a heavy burden on the miners’ backs.

The 8th Duke was a bitter enemy of the organized miners, whom he saw as ignorant men stirred up by Russian-paid

agitators to disturb the Albury Park way of life.

Through the papers he controlled—the daily Morning Post (now absorbed in the Daily Telegraph) and the semi-fascist weekly the Patriot—he never ceased denouncing them for their idleness and greed.

They’re doing well An all-round reactionary, the Duke also screamed against peace with Ireland, recognition of Soviet Russia, and what he called the ‘fallacies’ of democracy.

The royalty owners were bought out during the second world war for £66 million—about sixteen years of their income.

The coal industry bears the responsibility of repaying the government for the money handed over to these parasites.

The Northumberland family, thus ‘compensated’, are doing well; the Dowager Duchess and her son, the current (10th) Duke, have, besides Albury Park, residences at Alnwick Castle and Syon House and in Eaton Square, and the Duke is a director of several companies. * For Americans only In World Marxist Review’s formulation on the second world war, which I quoted last week, there is a coy absence of names when ‘those countries which were victims of aggression by the fascist powers’ are mentioned.

Would this’ include Poland, perhaps? During 1939-41 one of the activities of the resistance movement in Poland was sabotaging the transport of vital economic aid to Hitler which Stalin was then sending across Polish territory.

Regarding this episode the well-known fellow-traveller D. N. Pritt has written that the Soviet authorities ‘owed no moral duty to the western democracies, who as yet were not fighting a truly anti-fascist war’.

Presumably the Poles were too stupid to see that. After all, when Poland had been partitioned between Hitler and Stalin, the two dictators had proposed that the world make ‘peace’ on the basis of accepting this crime.

And Mr Pritt wrote of this proposal that ‘it would have been of great service to the world, and in particular to the task of ultimately uprooting fascism, if the war had stopped —for a time—then’.

Both of these passages are taken from a book of Pritt’s, ‘The State Department and the Cold War’ (1948), which he has seen fit to publish in New York but not in London.

Lefts and ‘Lefts’

As the tide of working-class militancy rises we see some people in the Labour movement moving further to the Left, while others, hitherto known as Lefts, begin moving in the opposite direction.

The key to the latter type of development is perhaps provided by an explanation given at the time for the collapse of we ‘Left’ leaders of the trade unions during the General Strike.

‘These people were all Left so long as they could safely reckon upon Thomas [the dominant Right-winger of the time] to stop any action being taken. When Thomas and Co. failed to stop action, then all the Left garments dropped .. . in a flash’ (The Worker, organ of the National Minority Movement, September 17. 1926).

Not true any more?

‘We contend that in the majority of cases our officials are much more concerned with averting any trouble, at whatever expense or sacrifice—on the part of their members—than they are with the betterment of the conditions of those who pay them their salaries—salaries which in themselves divorce the recipients from the working class.’

—From a memorandum of the Printing Trades Minority Movement, 1928.

BRIAN PEARCE Printed by Plough Press Ltd. (T.U.), r.o. 180 Clapham High St., S.W.4 ‘BOOMERANG