In July 1945, Lewisham was the scene of a high-profile and ill-tempered exchange in the final days of a General Election, focussed on a visit by Prime Minister Winston Churchill. Ahead of a post marking the 80th anniversary of the V1 flying bomb strike on Lewisham market on 28 July 1944, this short post describes its surprising part in the 1945 election.
Mr Churchill comes to Lewisham
The UK went to the polls on 5 July 1945, 79 years to the week before the up-coming 2024 General Election. The Second World War had ended in Europe nearly two months earlier but was still going on in the Far East. Millions of voters were away with the armed forces, evacuated, or working away from their usual homes. But still, following the collapse of the wartime coalition government, an election was called soon after Germany was defeated (as it had been in after the Armistice of 1918).
On the eve of polling day, on Wednesday 4 July, Prime Minister Winston Churchill arrived in Lewisham as part of his tour of London. The tour had not been a resounding success. This was an election campaign that was largely a contest between the great war leader (“Let him finish the job” read one election poster) and a Labour party now deemed trustworthy (after five years in the wartime coalition) and promising to redress the problems of the 1930s.
Labour presented a team ready to form a government, while Churchill seemed to be losing his touch. Most famously, he had used a radio broadcast early in June to claim that a socialist government could not afford to allow opposition or dissent and “would have to fall back on some form of Gestapo”. On his London tour, he met a hostile and patchy crowd at Walthamstow on Tuesday 3rd, not natural Conservative territory but close to the constituency he was contesting at Woodford.
On the evening of 4 July, a large crowd gathered in the market area on Lewisham High Street, close to the junction with Lewis Grove. The Conservative candidates who had been the MPs for Lewisham’s two constituencies throughout the war waited too, chatting with their activists. The meeting’s location was in Lewisham East, represented by Sir Assheton Pownall since the December 1918 election, before which he had had a prominent role as a recruiter in the First World War (including for a local battalion in Lewisham). The other local MP was Henry Brooke, who had won a by-election in 1938 to represent Lewisham West.
Churchill was coming to show his support for Pownall and Brooke in their appeals to the people of Lewisham to return them to Parliament. The Prime Minister was over 45 minutes late.
This part of Lewisham was still a wreck following the V1 flying bomb strike on 28 July 1944. As we will see in a blog post to mark the anniversary, this not only killed 51 people and injured hundreds more, it also demolished – or damaged beyond repair – several shops on both sides of the High Street. The ‘island’ site between the market area and Lewis Grove was basically destroyed other than the banks and offices at the northern end. Marks and Spencer’s and the neighbouring shops were also destroyed on the west side.
Almost a year on and the pre-election crowd gathered in the street and on the bombsite, including clambering onto some of the wrecked buildings.
According to the Lewisham Borough News (10/7/1945), “many of them [were] cheering; some of them booing; all stirred one way or the other by Mr Churchill’s appearance.” One woman apparently displayed a banner reading “Arrest Churchill Cabinet for High Treason”!
When the Prime Minister did arrive, he spoke from the back of a car, addressing the audience through a loud hailer. Amazingly we can see and hear snippets of the speech in the video below. From around 2:20, you can see his car arriving by the High Street from the south (greeted by boos and cheers), past ruined buildings and the bright white of Woolworths, before stopping outside the ruined Albion pub:
Following some comments about the constituency and the locals’ resilience, Churchill went on the attack against the former Home Secretary in his wartime coalition government: the Labour candidate for Lewisham East, Herbert Morrison.
Morrison and the Lewisham V1 incident
Herbert Morrison was one of the most prominent and important figures in the Labour party in the 1930s and 40s. After losing his Hackney South seat in the 1931 General Election, he had been leader of the London County Council in the mid-1930s, before returning to parliament in 1935 and losing out in the contest that saw Clement Attlee made Labour’s leader. Joining the wartime coalition government in 1940, he became a Cabinet minister as both Home Secretary and Minister for Home Security.
Morrison was the main author of Labour’s 1945 manifesto Let Us Face the Future and one of the main organisers of the party’s campaign both nationwide and in London. After another decade as MP for Hackney South, Morrison switched in 1945 to stand in Lewisham East, which had always voted Conservative before the war.
At the end of June, Morrison was (by his account) coming under pressure to explain why no siren was sounded when the flying bomb approached Lewisham the previous July. Following a speech in his would-be constituency on 26 June, the News Chronicle (27/6/1945) reported – presumably based on Morrison’s words:
“In the early days of the V1 Mr Churchill, as Minister of Defence, had given an order that when one flying bomb entered a warning area, the sirens were not to be sounded.
“After this [Lewisham] incident, Mr Morrison said, he took the responsibility of countermanding the Premier’s order, which he was entitled to do as Minister of Home Security”
Doubling down a few days later, Morrison repeated the accusations in front of a crowd in Greenock and stated that that the lack of a siren meant that “the casualties, in my judgement, were double what they need have been” (Daily Record, 9/7/45).
Unsurprisingly, these comments did not go unnoticed by his opponents. Henry Brooke wrote a note (presumably to the Conservative and Unionist Party Central Office) alerting the party to Morrison’s statement and his own concerns about the impact on local candidates like him and Pownall who supported Churchill. Noting the strength of feeling locally, he felt that votes lost because of Morrison’s accusations could lose Pownall his seat, although Brooke felt himself to be safer.
The Prime Minister and his staff had also noted the remarks. On 27 June, Churchill asked officials to look into the order he was alleged to have given, which they duly did. On 1 July, one of the vice-chairmen of the party wrote suggesting that Churchill should “deal with this matter” when he visited Lewisham on Wednesday 4th.
Churchill responds
Once he had arrived in Lewisham, and after some preliminary call-and-response introductions, Churchill said:
“We are met here, at one of those tragic spots in the war where a bomb has fallen and taken many lives. I want to compliment you in Lewisham upon the fortitude and courage with which you have withstood your long and painful ordeal. […]
“I was going to say a word to you about the tragic event that occurred here. Now I dare say there are some here who are afraid to hear my words. You had better listen, because you’ll find it interesting.
“I understand Mr Morrison (cheers and boos) has made a statement to the effect that I am responsible for it. All I can tell you is that as Minister of Defence I take full responsibility for everything that happened or did not happen in the course of the defence of London (Cheers.)
“Don’t you think it rather a cowardly and un-British thing for a Cabinet Minister, sitting with his colleagues and taking part in the proceedings to try to throw the blame of a particular incident on someone else? But it is thoroughly characteristic of Mr Morrison himself. […] Of all the colleagues I have lost, he is the one I am least sorry to have seen the last of.
“I hope that Lewisham will throw this intruder out. He only came here because he ran away from a Communist in Hackney”
Winston Churchill at Lewisham, 4 July 1945
He ended by calling on local voters to vote for Brooke and Pownall and make it a landslide. (LBN 10/7/1945 – reported speech modified to match the phrasing in the video clip)
The same issue of the local paper carried Morrison’s reply:
“The nearer we get to polling day, the more incapable, it would seem, is the Prime Minister of any degree of good temper or accuracy. He says that I accused him of being responsible for the incident at the Clock Tower, Lewisham, which had tragic results.
“My statement was fairly reported in the Press, and what I said was that he personally was responsible for no warnings being given. Clearly the Germans were responsible for the incident […].
“He had given instructions himself, without consultation with his colleagues, that no warnings should be given in respect of single V1s. In light of the Lewisham Clock Tower experience, I cancelled that direction.
Morrison’s response to Churchill
He then commented that he only made his original statement because there were allegations locally that he was responsible, and he had had to defend himself from those. He then accused Churchill of becoming “more dictatorial as the days go past” and called his remarks “unworthy of the leader of a political party, let alone a Prime Minister.”
These exchanges were widely reported in national and local newspapers across the country – and in the newsreel as shown in the clip above. All in all, it was a rather unsavoury end to the campaign and reflected badly on the Prime Minister. As the authors of The British General Election of 1945 (the first of the famous ‘Nuffield’ election studies) summed it up:
“With these bitter recriminations, arising out of one of the tragic incidents of the war in London, the campaign came to an end. In the last few days, in his letters to Mr Attlee [about the role of Labour’s National Executive Committee and its chair Harold Laski], in his utterances in his London tour, in his bitter attack on Mr Morrison, Mr Churchill seemed to be showing less than his usual mastery of speech and action. There seemed almost an air of desperation about it all[…].
Dan Todman puts it more concisely in his excellent two-volume history Britain’s War 1937-47: the Lewisham argument was “a fitting end to a vicious campaign.”
The election
The people of Lewisham East did not “throw this intruder out”, let alone give Pownall a landslide.
Contrary to Churchill’s accusation about running away from a Communist, the move to Lewisham was an important move for Morrison. As well as being closer to his home in Eltham, it represented Labour’s aim to win votes in more middle-class areas (aided by changes in the demographics of the constituency, with more working class housing). As Todman puts it:
“Grasping the electoral potential of the metropolitan lower middle class, Morrison led from the front, leaving his former constituency in South Hackney to become a candidate for East Lewisham. Labour had never previously won the seat, but it was exactly the sort of area Morrison believed that the party needed to capture if it was to achieve power.”
Pownall’s majority of 6,500 in 1935 became a majority for Morrison and Labour of over 15,000, albeit in a constituency much changed over that decade. It helped that Morrison outspent his opponent by two-to-one, the largest disparity in Labour’s favour in the country. For all that change and expense, the 17% swing was roughly the same as for London as a whole – albeit larger than the national 10% swing.
In the Lewisham West, Arthur Skeffington overturned the 5,600 majority Henry Brooke had obtained in a by-election in 1938 (and 12,400 Tory majority at the last general election) and returned a 2,500 vote majority.
Nationally, of course, that 10% swing to Labour created a rather unexpected landslide victory, with their 49.7% of votes delivering 393 seats in the House of Commons. Ironically, given his jibe at Morrison, Churchill too had moved seats – and his former constituency at Epping was taken by Labour’s Leah Manning.
Lewisham’s MPs after the 1945 election
Once the Labour victory was clear, Morrison leapt into action and attempted to become Prime Minister himself. Citing reforms from 1931, he argued that the leader of the Parliamentary Labour Party (and therefore Prime Minister at this point) was to be elected after the general election. Attlee ignored him and went to the palace to be appointed PM.
Despite this attempted coup, Morrison rejoined the Cabinet as lord president of the (privy) council and deputy prime minister. A “supremo on the home front”, according to his Oxford DNB entry, he was responsible for implementing major domestic reforms and getting vital legislation through Parliament. He also led the creation of the 1951 Festival of Britain.
After Labour’s subsequent election defeats in 1951 and 1955, Attlee resigned as leader and Morrison (by now MP for a new Lewisham South seat) once again failed to win that prized role. He was appointed to the Lords as Baron Morrison of Lambeth after standing down from the Commons at the 1959 election. By then he had also become the grandfather of Peter Mandelson, who played an important role in a later Labour government.
While Lewisham East and later South remained Morrison’s home for 14 years, Lewisham West switched back to the Conservatives in 1950. Arthur Skeffington was beaten in 1950 and in 1951 by Henry Price. Skeffington later became MP for Hayes and Harlington, while Price remained Lewisham West MP until 1964, after which it switched between Conservative and Labour until 1992 when Jim Dowd was elected and retained the seat (and its successor Lewisham West and Penge) until he stood down in 2017.
The argument continues
And what of the substance of the argument between the former coalition Cabinet colleagues? Churchill did not let the issue rest. Presumably taking Morrison’s claims (and tone) to heart, he gathered information from officials and – after the election result was announced and he was out of office – wrote to his accuser. (These notes and letters are all collected in the Churchill Archive here).
On 1 August, Churchill wrote (copying his letter to Clement Attlee) saying that – having reviewed the official papers – he felt that the accusations “do not at all do justice to the facts”. He ran through the key points around the original policy, which had seen him chair a staff conference on 16 June 1944, which included military staff and civil servants but not Morrison. The conference recommended there should be no siren for single “pilotless aircraft”, as they were known at that stage – the concern with sounding the siren being that the disruption of work would be widespread and disproportionate to the danger posed by a single flying bomb.
Churchill had reported back to the Cabinet and Morrison’s Civil Defence Committee, neither of which objected so the policy was adopted. In mid-July, Morrison had started to recommend a policy of discretion for Warning Officers in the outer districts of London but not central areas, which was referred to the Civil Defence Committee whose agreement was signalled on 28 July – the day of the Lewisham bomb. Thus, Churchill concluded, none of Morrison’s accusations stood up – there was no personal decision by the PM to stop the sirens and no “countermanding” by Morrison. Churchill stated his expectation that Morrison would publicly withdraw his comments and apologise.
Morrison did not agree or apologise. In fact, he firmly maintained his original position and criticised Churchill’s personal style, while also claiming not to want to undermine their personal relationship. Opening by referring to Churchill’s “Gestapo” broadcast as inflaming the election debate (which in any case would “inevitably” include “argumentative blows”), he confessed to taking part in a “light way” in the heightened tone of the campaign.
Reviewing the official account, he commented that the reader needed to understand how wartime government actually worked:
“Nobody who was not a member of your Government can judge the facts on the official records alone; they would have to understand your individual and, as I venture to think, sometimes unfortunate way of conducting government business.” (Morrison to Churchill, 10 August 1945)
Far from accepting that he and the Cabinet were fully implicated in the “no siren” decision, he referred to Churchill’s “tendency to rush” Cabinet proceedings or “to confuse them by too much eloquence”, making it hard to intervene. The PM’s liability to be roused to anger apparently meant that Morrison picked his battles and, regrettably, did not speak out on the sirens. His account was that this approach coloured the whole “siren” issue.
The staff conference, he noted, was mainly military men and civil servants not ministers, when the issue at stake was “essentially a matter for Ministers”, and should have been taken by ministers who understood ordinary people. Ministers, that is, like Morrison himself.
Further, he claimed, the move to a “discretion” approach was only grudgingly accepted by the PM. After the Lewisham bomb, Morrison claimed, he had “seen red” and had indeed ordered officials set about reversing the previous “no siren” policy.
Far from a public apology, Morrison considered that the issue should be dropped. Churchill was not pleased by this response (which he felt did not deal with the substance of his letter, but simply repeated the original claims) and threatened to publish his 1 August letter.
The last letters in the file are an exchange later in August between Churchill and press baron Lord Beaverbrook, from whom the former prime minister sought advice on whether to publish his letter to Morrison. Beaverbrook cautioned against doing so, fearing it would be a “red rag” to Morrison, who wanted to be the object of Churchill’s attack.
Lewisham and the 1945 election
The final days of the 1945 General Election campaign brought Lewisham and its devastating flying bomb strike back to public attention in a surprising and highly politicised way.
The exchange between Churchill and Morrison (both public and private) was indicative of both the ill-tempered tone of the campaign and the high feelings that bomb incidents such as that in Lewisham could arouse.
The election itself marked a watershed moment for British politics with the first majority Labour government and the start of the “postwar consensus”. In Lewisham the result, and Morrison’s arrival as a local MP, marked the start of a shift from being a Conservative borough to beung a Labour one.
Sources/references
- Lewisham Borough News and other papers’ coverage of the 1945 election
- Daniel Todman, Britain’s War 1937-47 (two vols)
- R.B McCallum and Alison Readman, The British General Election of 1945
- Orford Dictionary of National Biography, entry for Morrison, Herbert Stanley, Baron Morrison of Lambeth
- Churchill Archives: CHAR 20/231 Official: Prime Minister: Lewisham [London] Flying Bomb Incident: papers and correspondence
Long & Lazy Lewisham 