Eighty Years Ago This Week

  In a New Year message to the Japanese people Emperor Hirohito explicitly labelled the conception of his own divinity as false . He had never in fact been openly designated as a god although his claim to be descended from Ameratsu, the sun goddess and senior divinity in Shinto, had lent him at least indirect divine status. By force of uninformed repetition during the war years it had become generally thought that he was truly divine. Hirohito did not disclaim  Ameratsu as an ancestor but, on a more practical level, he also declared that the belief that the Japanese people was superior to all others and fated to rule the world, as false. Demoting Hirohito to human status was part of an American strategy designed, on the one hand, to extirpate any possibility that Japanese militarism would revive but, on the other, positioning him to be accepted as a relatively normal constitutional monarchial figurehead for a democratic Japan fit to become a stable member of the community of n...

  The foreign ministers of the US and Britain travelled to Moscow for a three power conference at the suggestion of US Secretary of State Byrnes. There was no pressing agenda. The conference discussed a number of second-tier questions touching Korea and Iran amongst others and endorsed the Soviet puppet regimes in Bulgaria and Romania. The true purpose of the meeting was to establish the US and the Soviet Union as the arbiters of any residual questions from the war; Britain was included in the hope of creating rifts with the US. The other victor powers, France and China, were entirely excluded. The Soviet Union overplayed its hand by launching claims to massive swathes of Turkish territory, the provinces of Kars and Ardahan. These had been seized from the moribund Ottoman Empire by Russia in 1878 but returned to Turkish rule by the Treaty of Kars in the aftermath of the First World War when the Bolshevik regime was anxious to avoid Turkish participation in the civil war. The inhabi...

  The London County Council discussed the project for a national theatre, which had been kicking around for over a century. The location proposed was on the south bank of the Thames in the heavily bombed area between Waterloo Station and two long established features of the river front, the Shot Tower and the Lion Brewery. The theatre was indeed built on the site but over ten years later.  The  Brewery  (admittedly abandoned since 1930)  was demolished to make way for the Festival of Britain in the late 1940s and the Shot Tower followed it into oblivion as the National Theatre was built.  The brewery's iconic huge Coade stone lions were preserved by the order of King George VI; one stands facing Parliament and the other at Twickenham Stadium. In what was described as a major easing of wartime controls, men aged 31 and over and all women other than nurses and midwives were to be released from the "Control of Engagement Order". In reality 8.75m people were ...

  Britain's Labour government faced a censure motion tabled by the Conservative opposition in a lively debate in Parliament. Oliver Lyttleton led for the motion with a vigorous and telling speech. Given the scale of the challenges that faced the government to bring Britain back to a peacetime footing, he had easy targets. He described the massive residue of wartime controls as a "Whitehall twilight" which was holding industry back and extended the attack on heavy regulation by claiming that  "thou shalt not" was the government's motto. He criticised the shortages still prevalent notably clothing which the government had promised to alleviate and the slow restoration of damage done by German bombs, of the replacement of bombs, "all words, no houses." Stafford Cripps delivered a lacklustre response for the government but its huge majority ensured that the motion was heavily defeated by 381 to 197. Afterwards Aneurin Bevan, responsible for the task as...

  The trial for treason of John Amery took place and lasted a mere eight minutes. He was the son of senior Conservative politician Leo Amery but had gone from being the black sheep of the family to defecting to Nazi Germany where he recruited for the SS British unit and made propaganda broadcasts. He had been arrested in Italy by British troops including Alan Whicker, later famous as a journalist. Attempts to present him as mentally ill and unfit to plead or as a Spanish citizen had failed. Amery pled guilty, which was tantamount to suicide as the only penalty for the offence was death. He was duly sentenced to be hanged. Yugoslavia was declared a republic by the communist dominated Constituent Assembly. The monarchy was abolished permanently. The now ex-king protested feebly but the British government, which had been the chief backer of Tito's partisan movement during the Axis occupation and de facto civil war,   accepted the assembly's decision with only the faintest qualif...

  Three officers - a major general and two colonels - who had  defected from the British led Indian army to the Japanese controlled Indian National Army were put on trial by court martial at the Red Fort in Calcutta on charges equivalent to treason. All came from the Punjab but one was Muslim, one Sikh and the third Hindu. They all chose to be defended by the Indian National Congress. The trial provoked extensive protests in which hundreds were injured.   Two police manned coast guard stations in Palestine were blown up  in protest at British measures to halt illegal Jewish immigation causing some injuries. The British responded with an attack on kibbutzim suspected of harbouring the attackers. Some 10,000 soldiers of the 6th Airborne Division conducted the operation in which eight settlers were killed and dozens injured. The settlements were searched and some forty Jews were taken away for interrogation. British led forces including Gurkhas were heavily engag...

  Britain was facing the challenge of its effective bankruptcy. The lead British negotiator Lord Keynes was on the verge of collapse after navigating aggressive American nit-picking and confused views in London; the Chancellor of the Exchequer Hugh Dalton was at sea, barely reading the papers which he might not have understood anyway; the Bank of England showed little signs of awareness that Britain's financial might had dwindled since 1914. Three weeks of gruelling negotiations in Washington yielded a public offer from the US of a loan of £875m at 2% interest and £125m applied against lease-lend debts. The stark truth was that unless Britain were prepared to retreat into complete autarky based on the relics of Empire ("starvation corner") it held no cards. The near-truce between the Labour government and the Conservatives was breaking down. The government had yet to roll out its full detailed five year plan for nationalising industry including utilities, in particular ho...