Eighty years ago, the first IRA mainland bombing campaign begins, the Labour Party fights off an extreme left hijack attempt and Chamberlain takes "peace for our time" on tour
After years of inactivity the IRA
launched a bombing campaign in mainland Britain. A more militant faction had
recently taken control of the organization and wrote to Lord Halifax, the
Foreign Secretary, “declaring war” on Britain. The grandly named “S Plan” was
intended to damage vital infrastructure but the manpower and technical skill
available to the IRA were not up to the job. The campaign started with five near
simultaneous explosions in London and Manchester. One man was killed and two
were injured, all civilians. There was extensive damage. One of the targets was bridge on the
Liverpool and Leeds Canal.
The extreme left wing Labour MP
Sir Stafford Cripps launched a one man bid to drive the party into a “popular front”
with the Communist Party, supposedly to provide more effective opposition to Chamberlain’s
government. After his proposal to the National Executive was soundly defeated,
he appealed to branches directly in defiance of the rules. His only notable
supporter on the National Executive was Ellen Wilkinson MP. Neither he nor she was controlled by the Communist Party but they naively imagined that it was
motivated by the same high-minded considerations as themselves. The party set
in train the mechanism to censure Cripps formally.
Chamberlain and Halifax held
their long heralded talks in Rome with Mussolini and the other Fascist leaders.
Quite what Chamberlain hoped for beyond generally improving relations and promoting
appeasement is unclear. Nothing concrete was achieved but Chamberlain basked in
his genuine popularity. The conversations were considerably more agree able
than those Chamberlain had had with the German leaders, but afterwards
Mussolini privately expressed his poor opinion of his visitors, “These men are
not made of the same stuff as the Francis Drakes and the other magnificent adventurers
who created the Empire. These are after all the tired sons of a long line of rich
men and they will lose the Empire.” Hardly had the British party left Rome when
the Italian press resumed its clamour for France to cede territory in North Africa
to Italy. The British had avoided Italian attempts to secure their "mediation" in these claims, which would have given them the appearance of legitimacy, which they lacked entirely but neither did they offer the kind of vocal support which might have sent a clear signal to the Fascist powers. Chamberlain did not want to put at any risk his dream of appeasement.
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