Michael Foot: A Life

This was the background into which Michael Mackintosh Foot was born on 23 July 1913. It was cradle, crucible and cauldron for him. The tone was set by Isaac. It was distinguished by a passion for both literature and music (the latter less pronounced in Michael’s case until he met Jill Craigie, who introduced him to Mozart), especially Bach’s choral music, and a passionate devotion to the grand old causes of nineteenth-century Liberalism. It was an intimate family whose members kept up warm relations throughout their lives. Michael and his brothers addressed each other in letters or telephone conversations with the words ‘pit and rock’. This private code recalled a famous phrase from the Book of Isaiah: ‘Look unto the rock whence ye are hewn and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged.’ Hugh thus communicated with Michael while serving at a tense period as Governor of Cyprus in the late 1950s. Life in the Foot family seems to have been inspiring and somewhat pressurizing at the same time, being conducted at a high level of intensity, both political and religious. One newspaper described the household as characterized by ‘bacon for breakfast, Liberalism for lunch and Deuteronomy for dinner’.17

One strict rule was abstinence from alcohol until the age of twenty-one, after which the sons would qualify for a small legacy from their grandfather: Michael and John celebrated their release from this thraldom by getting drunk together on a trip to Paris, in pursuit of culture and self-liberation, in 1934. The child Michael, dominated by his three older brothers, Dingle, Hugh and John, was to find a particular kinship with his slightly older sister Sally. A major factor here was that both suffered from severe eczema – a hereditary condition, apparently – and in Michael’s case from growing asthma as well. Outdoor games were to some extent denied him, and he turned naturally to indoor bookish pursuits, where Sally was a natural mentor and guide, with her own unfulfilled artistic and literary talents which later brought friendship, for instance, with Louis MacNeice. Sally introduced Michael to novels and poems which were to stay with him for ever. He would say that she taught him how to read. His lifelong attachment to female relationships, many of a bookish kind, undoubtedly stemmed from his loyal Sally, and his posthumous essay on her, ‘Sally’s Broomstick’, is deeply felt.18 Her cruel death in the 1960s was a particular blow to him.

It may be that Sally’s presence was a calm refuge in an otherwise hyperactive family. One of the adverse consequences for some of the Foot family was a kind of depressive alcoholism, perhaps a reaction against the dynastic prescription of total abstinence in youth. Dingle ended his career in this sad condition, as did his youngest brother Christopher, whose life ended young, and so too did his sister Sally. Indeed, Sally’s death through apparent drowning may have been more tragic still. Christopher had to give up his solicitor’s work early through some kind of psychological illness. It was Michael, for all his mixed health, who was usually seen as the most stable and normal. So family life was not always as relaxed as when Isaac was telling his stories or Michael was organizing children’s games at parties. Keeping up with the Foots could bring its own pressures.

Every Foot from Isaac onwards showed the influence of family. All shared the unyielding attachment to books, to Cromwell and the West Country, to Plymouth Hoe and Plymouth Argyle. All in important senses remained liberal, or at least libertarian, at heart. Most were political, but with a politics fired in the crucible of Foot family argument, rhetoric and dissent. Nothing showed this continuing tradition more clearly than the sadly posthumous book The Vote by Hugh Foot’s journalist son Paul, long a pillar of the Socialist Worker and a writer of a caustic brilliance equalled only by his cherished uncle Michael.19 Paul was named after the favourite saint; his brother Oliver derived his name from another cult hero. Paul Foot’s book is on many fronts a debate within the family. It conducts a sporadic, if affectionate, argument with Michael in denouncing his adhesion to a right-wing, disappointingly parliamentary Labour Party. The debate would be continued towards the end of Paul’s life, blighted as it was by illness, on the pavement outside bookshops in the Charing Cross Road, with both bibliophile disputants, uncle and nephew, waving their sticks about to the occasional alarm of passers-by. Paul’s book also engages in a covert dispute with his Aunt Jill, a devotee of the suffragettes, but mainly of the Tory Christabel Pankhurst and her mother Emmeline, whereas Paul Foot (like most socialists) found the social radicalism of Sylvia Pankhurst, the lover of the Labour Party’s founder Keir Hardie, by far the most appealing.

But the most startling family argument of all for Paul was with his deceased grandfather Isaac, pillar of the Cromwell Association over so many years. Where Cromwell to Isaac (and to Michael too) was the people’s Oliver, champion of liberty, to Paul he was the establishment enemy of the Levellers, who rebutted the dangerous democracy voiced by Rainboro, Lilburne and their friends at Putney in 1647. Paul was indirectly announcing that he was the first Foot to break away from the family shibboleths, that Cromwell was no real hero for the popular, let alone the socialist, cause, and that in the earliest campaign for the vote the puritan establishment was essentially an obstacle. Those political continuities, traced by Liberals over the centuries from Putney to the Parliament Act, were in reality an illusion. Paul Foot’s was an iconoclastic book, but it was notable that it was the family’s boat that had first to be rocked, if not sunk without trace.

His uncle Michael’s early years were comfortable and elitist. The First World War made little direct impact upon him, unlike say the youthful Jim Callaghan down the coast at Portsmouth, whose father served in the navy and fought at Jutland. None of the Foots had any experience of this or any other war. Basically they had disliked every one since 1651. The dominant feature of Michael’s upbringing is the abiding stamp of loyalty to Plymouth itself It symbolized for him Britain’s worldwide mercantile glories, as well of course as embodying an eternal legend of defence against foreign conquest in the great days of Drake. Plymouth, English to its core, was not therefore the natural base for a devotee of European integration. In 1972 Michael spoke strongly in support of his Conservative successor as MP for Devonport, Joan Vickers, in resisting proposals in Peter Walker’s Local Government Bill to merge Plymouth with the surrounding area. There was, declared Foot, a ‘deep lack of affinity between Plymouth and the County of Devon’. In family vein, he went on:

Charles I tried to subdue Plymouth and failed, and Freedom Fields is a monument which bears that out. Charles II tried to subdue the people of Plymouth by establishing a citadel with the guns facing not seawards towards Plymouth sound but inwards, but he, too, failed.

Foot had the joy of representing Devonport in that city for ten years in Parliament, from 1945 to 1955, and hung on as a predictably unsuccessful candidate in 1959, a decision that Aneurin Bevan declared was ‘quixotic’.20 Well into his nineties, journeys with his friend Peter Jones to see Plymouth Argyle do battle at Home Park were a staple of life. Contact with his private secretary, Roger Dawe, at the Department of Employment in 1974 was greatly eased by the latter’s Devonian and Methodist origins, and his being a fellow Argyle supporter.

During the First World War the Foots moved to Ramsland House in St Cleers, on the edge of the Cornish moors. But Michael always identified intensely with Plymouth, the city which was his boyhood home, where his father was Lord Mayor and where he fell in love with Jill. And to a degree Plymouth identified with him, indeed with all the Foots. David Owen, a future Cabinet colleague and Member for Devonport, grew up there in the fifties under the shadow of the Foots as a dominating dynasty. In the 1970s Michael and Jill, somewhat remarkably, managed to persuade the local authority in Hampstead to rename their road Pilgrims Lane, in tribute to his native city’s most famous exports, and the nickname also of its football team. In later life he would recall happy episodes from his childhood, such as visits to the Palace Theatre. One such recollection became memorable, when in a Commons debate in October 1980 during Labour’s leadership election he spoke of a conjuror who smashed with a hammer a gold watch belonging to a member of the audience, but then forgot the rest of the trick. But it remains open to conjecture how far this was a real Plymouth, or rather an affectionate amalgam of fact, legend and folk memory, specific and selective associations from the Armada to the Blitz, ready for instant political mobilization in argument. Michael Foot’s historical reading and personal background formed a highly usable background. This was true of all his interpretations of past scions of the liberty tree, from the Levellers to the suffragettes, and it applied equally to his vision of a post-modernist Plymouth.

That does not mean, of course, that his childhood memories were necessarily entirely benign. Michael’s schooling was delayed by his severe asthma in 1919, which led him to go to London at the age of six to obtain medical advice. Indeed, his awareness of ill-health and fear of being thought unattractive were important threads in his early years: a robust life into his nineties was not what the doctors might have predicted. His first school in 1919 was a local preparatory school, Plymouth College for Girls, perhaps not a total success for a six-year-old boy. In Recitation, his school report commented, ‘His expression is very good; he should speak out more’ – seldom an injunction needed in later life. Another subject was Needlework – ‘Good, but he works too slowly.’21 In 1921 he went on to Plymouth College and Mannamead School. Going there was not without its hazards, especially being harassed by local bullies as he made his way across Freedom Fields. In 1923, at the age of ten, he went away to a private boarding school, Forres, in Swanage on the Dorset coast. His brother John was already a pupil there. Michael’s progress was often interrupted by bronchial complaints; nor did the school’s occasional penchant for caning its pupils (including Michael himself for one alleged misdemeanour) appeal to him. But he seems to have developed well, and his headmaster, R. M. Chadwick, wrote enthusiastically when he left Forres in 1927 of the immense contribution he had made, and how his name should be inscribed on the school Honours Board. He was first in his form in every subject from Latin to Scripture, while he had also done well in sport as captain of games – ‘a very good example of all-round keenness’. An earlier report at Christmas 1926 had commended his football skills – ‘Fast and a very good shot at goal. Much more determined than he was last season.’ The headmaster added in his final remarks, ‘We have all grown very fond of him during his time with us and he will leave a big gap. We look forward to making Christopher’s acquaintance next term.’22

The fourteen-year-old Michael’s next destination was another private school, Leighton Park, the Quaker boarding school near Reading which his older brother Hugh had already attended (as a scholar, unlike Michael). Founded in 1890, Leighton Park was an elitist school in its way, and was sometimes referred to as ‘the Quaker Eton’. Years later A. J. P. Taylor told Lord Beaverbrook, ‘Michael had been educated at Leighton Park, the snob Quaker school, and I at Bootham [York], the non-snob one.’ Beaverbrook gleefully responded (ignoring Taylor’s extremely wealthy cotton-merchant father), ‘You and I are sons of the people. Michael is an aristocrat.’23 But Leighton Park had much cachet amongst nonconformists in both England and Wales. Its liberal Quaker ethos meant that there was no fagging, no corporal punishment and certainly no cadet corps. Its historian, Kenneth Wright, wrote that it was ‘an unconventional school producing unconventional people who did not fit into predetermined moulds’. It attracted droves of liberal Cadburys from Bourneville and liberal Rowntrees from York, putative pacifists one and all. Michael seems to have found both the teaching and the atmosphere of the school generally congenial. Later on in life he was fiercely to denounce the public schools in the Daily Herald for their atmosphere of snobbery, but clearly Leighton Park escaped this particular contagion. Its school magazine, The Leightonian, gives at that time a cheerful sense of irreverent informality.

At first Michael’s schooling was much interrupted by ill-health. His return for his second term in 1928 was delayed by impetigo and bronchial problems, while his weight was relatively slight. But he soon got into his school subjects with gusto – or at least into those parts of the work which interested him. These clearly did not include a great deal of science. By the spring term of 1928 his science teacher lamented that ‘he has not much aptitude for this subject’ (chemistry). Physics was adjudged to be no better. A year later, science of any kind has disappeared from his schooling, a not untypical instance of the secondary education of the time. By contrast, his mathematics was highly praised for arithmetic, algebra and geometry, with marks in the high eighties in each. But by the end of 1929 that also has vanished from his ken. Michael Foot was never a particularly numerate politician. By contrast, the humanities were going well, especially all kinds of literature, and history, for which he had a fine Welsh teacher. His parents were also pleased to see that he scored 92 per cent in scripture in the summer term of 1928. In the spring term of 1930 his report praised the ‘mastery’ he demonstrated in a paper on the Italian Risorgimento (surely a particularly congenial theme for a romantic young radical), while in European history generally he was thought to be working with ‘considerable intelligence and interest’. The one weakness in his work on humanities subjects appeared to be modern languages. Neither in French nor in German did he distinguish himself French lessons in the spring of 1930 showed that ‘his vocabulary is weak’, and he scored a mere 37 per cent.24 Surprisingly for a man with such a quick and adaptable mind, this remained a weak point throughout his life. He was never a confident linguist; he gloried in the novels of Stendhal and the poems of Heine, but he read them in translation. But in that he was typical of the political generation of his time. He got his School Certificate with honours in 1930, and his Higher School Certificate a year later.

Leighton Park in general seems to have been very good for the teenage Michael Foot academically, and he also flourished in other ways. He was an active member of School House, and in 1930 he became a school prefect. The Leightonian records several of his other activities. He played a role in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance as Sergeant of Police. An old boy of the school wrote that ‘Foot’s performance will go down in the school’s history’: the audience got him to sing one of his songs three times, and ‘in each encore he was even funnier than before’. Despite his asthma and eczema he took his full part in school games, and was commended on his performances as a wing forward in the first rugby XV (‘his dribbling is his best feature’, though his tackling was also sound) and especially at cricket – ‘a good forceful batsman, an excellent cover point fielder and a good bowler who keeps a steady line’. He took six wickets for twenty runs against Bedales, and topped the school bowling averages in 1931, with fifteen wickets at an average of 10.73 apiece.25 Years later he was to demonstrate his cricketing skills when playing for Tribune against the New Statesman: the latter’s captain and political correspondent, Alan Watkins, came to realize that asking his fast bowlers to be charitable to an amiable old gent was a big mistake. Tennis and rugby fives were other games at which he represented the school. He also began to display talent in the school debating society, which he restarted, and took part as the Liberal candidate in the school mock election on 30 May 1929. He won with fifty-six votes, against thirty-eight for the Conservatives and eleven for Labour – a more substantial majority than he ever gained at Devonport, and one of relatively few Liberal victories that year.

This was a time of much political energy in the Foot household. Their new home in Pencrebar became a significant salon for West Country Liberalism, with Lloyd George himself a visitor. The young Michael Foot was heard to deliver impromptu speeches to garden parties even at the tender age of twelve. Past divisions between Coalition and Asquithian Liberals set aside, the Foot household campaigned en bloc on behalf of Lloyd George’s last crusade in the 1929 election with its famous Orange Book to promote economic recovery, We Can Conquer Unemployment. The Liberals’ eventual tally of seats was a mere fifty-nine, and Ramsay MacDonald became Prime Minister for the second time, Labour ending up with 289 seats, the largest number in the House. But there was much joy with the return of Isaac again for Bodmin, though with a majority of less than a thousand over Gerald Joseph Harrison, the Conservative who had defeated him in 1924. Isaac took a prominent front-bench role in the new House, and was appointed as a Liberal member of the Round Table conference on India in 1930. Michael’s elder brother Dingle had also made his first attempt on Parliament, but was defeated by a Conservative in Tiverton, despite polling over 42 per cent of the vote. Hugh was now entering the diplomatic service, and would soon embark on a long connection with the Middle East by serving in Palestine. The schoolboy Michael, a vigorous campaigner for Lloyd Georgian Liberalism in 1929 with its multi-coloured cures for economic stagnation, the Green, Yellow and Orange Books, yielded to none of them in the passion of his political commitment. Lloyd George’s battle hymn, ‘God gave the Land to the People’, was a very popular song at Pencrebar. It was always one of Michael’s favourites, next to ‘The Marseillaise’ and ‘The Red Flag’. In The Leightonian (March 1931) he set out his Liberal creed in idealistic terms: ‘The Liberal Party alone had the courage to think out new schemes and the men of vision to put them into effect … It wages a war for liberty, justice and the abolition of poverty.’ The party was no meek middle way, but ‘possesses ideals, unshared alike by Tories who are a little sentimental and Socialists who are a little timid’.

The most distinctive feature of Michael’s political involvement at this time was in the peace movement. This was hardly surprising for a pupil of Liberal background attending a distinctively Quaker school. Leighton Park’s headmaster, Edgar Castle, was a Manchester Guardian reader and a strong supporter of world disarmament. A League of Nations branch flourished at the school, in which Foot was active. He wrote in The Leightonian (March 1931) a sharp critique of scouting as an activity for young people. Its specious militarism and patriotism, and the unquestioned authority of the scoutmaster, were appropriate targets for the seventeen-year-old boy: ‘Scouting must not, hermit-like, shut itself off from the modern world.’ He added one phrase intriguing for the student of his career: ‘We are not meant to play at backwoodsmen all our lives.’

At the age of eighteen, between 7 August and 4 September 1931, in the summer vacation after his last term at Leighton Park, Michael made his most decisive, emphatic gesture yet by taking part in a young people’s peace crusade that took him abroad for the second time (he had had a trip to Holland in May 1931). He went with another boy, L. H. Doncaster, on a John Sherborne bursary which covered all the costs save for £10. They travelled as far as Colmar in Alsace, sleeping rough on ‘a bed of straw in the village schoolroom or a haystack in the cowshed’, though making only limited contact with the other marchers, who were entirely French-and German-speaking. They sang collectively a French song, ‘Nous faisons serment d’alliance’, the words of which were fresh in Michael’s mind seventy-five years later. He paid tribute to their one mobile assistance, a donkey who discharged his duties ‘in a manner which would have put Balaam’s ass to shame’. Michael pressed on to Strasbourg and then to Germany, to the Black Forest. Here, for the first time, he heard the name of Adolf Hitler. It was virtually a holiday, but he enjoyed ‘a pervading sense of self-righteousness’, for all this was done in the cause of peace. The child was father of the Aldermaston marcher. He had enjoyed his schooldays, and his school seemed pleased with its association with him. In the late 1940s the brass plate from his time at Leighton Park was still on display on the door of his old study in School House. In 1990 he spoke at length, wallowing in happy nostalgia, at a school centenary dinner in a private dining room in the Commons. He remained a faithful Old Leightonian to the end.26

The decisive change of life for the young radical was to come in 1931, when he followed Dingle and John in becoming an undergraduate at Oxford. This had long been a cherished ambition for Isaac, despite the considerable sums he was obliged to pay for Dingle, Hugh and John at the older universities. Michael at school showed a quick intelligence and literary flair, especially in his history essays. But his teachers’ assessment of his abilities was sufficiently cautious that he was sent forward for entrance examination not to Balliol, the destination of Dingle and John before him, but to the less prestigious Wadham in the same college group, where the competition for places might be less demanding. He took papers in his favoured subjects of Modern History and English, but his greatest good fortune came in his general paper, in which a question asked candidates what proposals should be made by the current Round Table conference in London considering the future governance of India. As noted, Isaac Foot was himself a Liberal member of that conference, with first-hand knowledge of the views of Gandhi and others on India’s future. The night before he sat the paper Michael had had dinner with his father at the National Liberal Club in London, and Isaac had given him a lengthy briefing on future proposals for an Indian federation, along with discourses on the social and economic problems of Indian Untouchables and others. Michael’s examination answer in Oxford the following day was therefore unusually authoritative. His interview with Wadham’s tutors went equally well, especially a discussion with Lord David Cecil, then at the college. Asked by Cecil which historians he particularly admired, Foot naturally shone. His enthusiastic defence of Macaulay’s History of England, reinforced by some additional warm comments on Macaulay’s kinsman George Otto Trevelyan, saw him comfortably home, a college award-holder as an exhibitioner.27

So it was to Wadham that he went for the Michaelmas term in October 1931. He stayed for the next three years, the first two years in college, the third in lodgings in the city with his close friend John Cripps. It was a dampish house quite near the river, which did not improve his asthma. Foot’s devotion to his remarkably beautiful college henceforth was unshakeable. Half a century later, in his volume of essays Loyalists and Loners, he hailed it as ‘of all places the greenest and most gracious, the peerless and the most perfect in the whole green glory of Oxford’. Wadham’s virtues were innumerable: it was founded early in the seventeenth century by a woman, Dorothy Wadham, it nurtured the philosophical learning of John Wilkins, the seamanship of Robert Blake, the church-building of Christopher Wren, it spanned almost every aspect of Michael Foot’s intellectual universe. He later became friendly with its formidable future Warden Maurice Bowra, famous for epigrams such as ‘Buggers can’t be choosers.’ Bowra was no socialist, but he shared Foot’s eclectic antiquarianism. On one bizarre occasion in August 1962 he tried to act as a kind of peacemaker between Foot and the Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell when they found themselves, perhaps to their mutual horror, in the same bar in the small Italian town of Portofino, but Gaitskell’s enmity was implacable.28 No honour pleased Foot more than to be elected an Honorary Fellow of the college in later years. Michael Foot was a supreme Oxford man, but also passionate for the collegiate atmosphere of his college. Dorothy Wadham was so admirable a woman that, in his whimsical view, had she lived centuries later she would have applied for membership of the Labour Party.