The MP who spoke out to help Jewish refugees
THE NAZIS had been in power for less than six months when Josiah Wedgwood rose to his feet in the House of Commons and addressed the Home Secretary. “Is the Right honourable gentleman aware that the position of the Jews in Germany is daily getting worse,” he asked, “and are we to understand that the British government are going to do nothing to help the people who are being persecuted in Germany to escape from that country?”
Tellingly, Sir John Gilmour made no effort to respond, and the debate moved on with Wedgwood’s unanswered question left hanging in the air.
It was neither the first, nor by any means the last, occasion on which the former Labour Cabinet minister had harried ministers on the topic.
But while Wedgwood’s relentless campaigning on behalf of Jewish refugees in the 1930s has been largely forgotten, this is now starting to be redressed. Later this month, the Wiener Library will host a travelling exhibition on Wedgwood devised by the History of Parliament Trust and hold an accompanying event.
Wedgwood, the great-great grandson of the founder of the famed pottery company, was also a fierce opponent of appeasement and advocate of the establishment of a Jewish state. “Unlike many of the more famous British gentile supporters of Zionism, Wedgwood was an active campaigner for a Jewish homeland in Palestine during the 1920s,” argues his biographer, Dr Paul Mulvey, who is speaking at an event at the Library on October 23.
Wedgwood’s 1928 book, The Seventh Dominion, advocated that, at the end of the British Mandate, Palestine should be granted a status similar to Australia, Canada and New Zealand and become a Jewish state within the British Empire. The idea was warmly welcomed by many revisionist Zionists . Wedgwood was a friend of both Ze’ev Jabotinsky and Chaim Weizmann.
By this time, Wedgwood, who had originally been elected as a Liberal in the party’s 1906 landslide, had joined the Labour party, serving in its first Cabinet in 1924.
Wedgwood grasped almost immediately the peril German Jews were in after Hitler became chancellor. “He took Hitler at his word as expressed in Mein Kampf,” Mulvey believes. “Wedgwood always tended towards a rather manichean view of things — politics for him was about black and white, not shades of grey. In many instances this led him to extreme and even foolish views, but in the case of the Nazi threat to the Jews it turned out to be exactly the right way to see things.”
Wedgwood thus appealed in in March 1933 for Britain to make “Palestine a haven of peace” for the Jews. His repeated attempts to persuade the government to increase the quotas of Jews who could emigrate to Palestine were, however, rebuffed.
But Wedgwood also wished to see a relaxation of the tight restrictions on immigration to Britain imposed by the early 20th century Alien Acts, which made barely any provision for the admission of refugees into the country.
In frequent interventions both inside the House of Commons and beyond, Wedgwood deployed a range of appeals to his fellow parliamentarians and the wider public. On occasion, he made an altruistic case, attacking the “vast moral evil violating justice” that was occurring in Germany. He also attempted to shame his listeners by, for instance, reading out the letter of an impoverished young Austrian Jewish woman who pleaded for a visa for herself and her four year-old son. “To do nothing,” he suggested, “should feel the average Englishman with a feeling of pity and shame.”
At other times, Wedgwood tried a more hard-nosed approach. “I am not pro-Jew,” he suggested, “but pro-English, I set a higher value on the reputation of England all over the world for justice than for anything else.” He also attempted to take on the supposed economic argument against admitting migrants. The refugees, he told parliament in 1939, were “intelligent people, capable of producing wealth, and useful assets to any country”. Had not, he asked, Britain benefitted in the past from “countless immigrations”, he said, citing the case of the Protestant Huguenots who fled France to Britain in the 17th century.
After the outbreak of war, he found a new argument. Protesting against the Home Office’s refusal to admit a French Jewish teenager to Britain in 1942, Wedgwood – who by now had been elevated to the House of Lords – suggested: “This is madness. We should welcome every refugee, we should use every refugee. We want them for munitions, we want them for roads, we want them all.”
By now, of course, the door – which Wedgwood and fellow camJosiah Wedgewood: fighting for Jews paigners such as the independent MP Eleanor Rathbone had forced ajar to admit the Kindertransport – had once again been firmly shut. Indeed, alongside Rathbone, he had railed against the government’s decision to intern refugees as “enemy aliens” in spring 1940.
But Wedgwood combined public campaigning with private generosity. He personally paid the £50 guarantee (around £3,000 today) for each of the more than 200 refugees whose admission to Britain he sponsored. Many found themselves accommodated at Wedgwood’s Staffordshire home. When the Home Office refused to accept any more applications by him, Wedgwood pressured friends to submit them on his behalf. “I did it in the teeth of every obstruction from Government, from anti-Semites, and from many English Jews who feared for themselves lest antiSemitism should increase here,” he later wrote in his memoirs.
As Lesley Urbach, who has extensively researched and written about Wedgwood and also will be speaking at Wiener on 23 October, argues: “Those fortunate enough to be given refuge, including my parents and aunts, were, understandably, indebted to the country that took them in. However, in the main, they, and other refugees, remained unaware of the arguments, the official debates and discussions, and the behind-thescenes manoeuvring that went on by the government as they made efforts to appear to have a generous entry policy, whilst keeping the numbers of endangered men, women and children admitted as low as possible.”
Unsurprisingly, Wedgwood was a fierce critic of appeasement and the Munich agreement, and strong supporter of Winston Churchill. “So long as you have people acting in a medieval manner, you cannot trust what they may do in their international relationships,” he warned the Commons as early as May 1933. Wedgwood was, though, no armchair general: he had volunteered to fight in the Boer War and First World War (he was injured at Gallipoli) and he was the first MP to join what was to become the Home Guard in 1939.
Wedgwood died in 1943. He did not live to see either the revelation of the full horror of the persecution of the Jews he had warned against for the past decade, or the establishment of the State of Israel which he had pursued with equal determination.
While his contributions were recognised by many Jewish groups at the time, it is too often forgotten today, believes Urbach.
The exhibition is, however, just one element of the History of Parliament Trust’s work to raise public awareness of Wedgwood’s work. Thanks to a grant from the National Lottery Heritage Fund, it has prepared a teaching pack for use in schools.
The pursuit of justice, Wedgwood believed, was “the duty of the good man”. Few would now dispute that, while others looked away, this good man fulfilled that duty.
“Josiah Wedgwood and the Defence of Democracy” is at the Weiner Library October 22-25