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Title: Witness for the Prosecution
Author: Colin Ward
Date: 1974
Language: en
Topics: anti-militarism, anti-war, Great Britain, Wildcat Inside Story
Source: Scanned from original.
Notes: Wildcat Inside Story No. 1, 1974. At the end of the war Colin Ward was a young soldier beginning to be interested in anarchist ideas. Here he describes how he was called to give evidence against the group he later joined.

Colin Ward

Witness for the Prosecution

The revival of interest in anarchism at the time of the Spanish

Revolution in 1936 led to the publication of Spain and the World, a

fortnightly Freedom Press journal which changed to Revolt! in the months

between the end of the war in Spain and the beginning of the Second

World War. Then War Commentary was started, its name reverting to the

traditional Freedom in August 1945.

As one of the very few journals which were totally opposed to the war

aims of both sides, War Commentary was an obvious candidate for the

attentions of the Special Branch, but it was not until the last year of

the war that serious persecution began.

In November 1944 John Olday, the paper’s cartoonist, was arrested and

after a protracted trial was sentenced to 12 months’ imprisonment for

‘stealing by finding an identity card’. Two months earlier T. W. Brown

of Kingston had been jailed for 15 months for distributing ‘seditious’

leaflets. The prosecution at the Old Bailey had drawn the attention of

the court to the fact that the penalty could have been 14 years.

On 12 December 1944, officers of the Special Branch raided the Freedom

Press office and the homes of four of the editors and sympathisers.

Search warrants had been issued under Defence Regulation 39b, which

declared that no person should seduce members of the armed forces from

their duty, and Regulation 88a which enabled articles to be seized if

they were evidence of the commission of such an offence. At the end of

December, Special Branch officers, led by Detective Inspector Whitehead,

searched the belongings of soldiers in various parts of the country. I

was in a Military Detention Camp at the time and was escorted back to my

own unit at Stromness, Orkney, where the commanding officer searched my

belongings and my mail and retained various books and papers. Shortly

afterwards I was released from detention and applied for the return of

my property. The officer said he had no authority to return them, and a

day or two later I was sent for to be interviewed by Inspector

Whitehead. I wrote to Lilian Wolfe telling her about these events, but

(as I learned later) the military censor obliterated the greater part of

my letter. I wrote a further letter and got it posted by a civilian on

the mainland of Scotland. This was subsequently passed back to me at the

trial. After much searching I have found this letter, and I see that I

wrote: Whitehead drew my attention to the article ‘All Power to the

Soviets’ in the November War Commentary, and to the duplicated Freedom

Press Forces Letter of about the same date, and asked if I had read

them. I said Yes. He pointed to one paragraph in the article, referring

to the revolutionary effect of Soldiers Councils in Russia in 1917, and

to a paragraph in the letter, which asked its readers in general terms

about the existence and use of Soldiers Councils. He asked what

conclusion I drew from these two articles in conjunction, and whether I

considered them an incitement to mutiny. I gave a noncommittal reply.

He said, looking at some of the newspaper cuttings: ‘I see you’re

interested in the case of T. W. Brown.’ He then made some observations

about the case, and I said: ‘I don’t think that was said at the trial.’

Whitehead replied: ‘I ought to know. I’m the man that put him inside.’

Meanwhile in January Philip Sansom was jailed for two months ‘for being

in possession of an army waterproof coat and for failing to notify a

change of address’ — crimes uncovered when he was raided.

On 22 February 1945 Marie Louise Berneri, Vernon Richards and John

Hewetson were arrested at 7.30 in the morning and charged with offences

under Defence Regulation 39a. At the court they were joined by Philip

Sansom who had been brought from Brixton Prison. They appeared four

times at Marylebone Magistrates Court and their trial took four days at

the Old Bailey. On 26 April Richards, Hewetson and Sansom were found

guilty and each was sentenced to nine months’ imprisonment. Marie Louise

Berneri was found not guilty and discharged on a technicality which

infuriated her. Marie Louise was married to Vernon Richards, and her

defence counsel had simply to point out that, since husband and wife are

legally as one, a wife cannot be accused of conspiracy with her husband!

Although Marie Louise was furious about this, she was not as furious as

Inspector Whitehead, who realised he had dropped a clanger.

The judge was Norman Birkett and the prosecution was conducted by the

Attorney General (Sir Donald Somerville). But the whole prosecution case

was simply that laid down by Inspector Whitehead: to connect the

circular letter sent to the hundred or so members of the forces who were

subscribers to War Commentary with various articles on the history of

soldiers’ councils in Germany and Russia in 1917 and 1918, and on the

situation in European resistance movements which, as the Allied armies

advanced in 1944, were being urged to hand over their arms to the

governments then being set up under military auspices. One of the

headlines in War Commentary, for example, demanded ‘Hang on to Your

Arms!’ and this was used by the prosecution to show that the paper was

telling British soldiers to keep their rifles for possible revolutionary

action. The article was in fact — and the context made it clear —

addressed to the Belgian underground, after the Germans had withdrawn,

but before a new government had been imposed upon them. Much of the

prosecution’s ‘evidence’ was as flimsy as this.

The defence solicitor was a man named Rutledge, who was overshadowed by

his clerk, the genial and flamboyant Ernest Silverman, a tragic

character most of whose life was spent in prison for innumerable cases

of petty embezzlement (he later died in Parkhurst serving a long

sentence of preventive detention). The Freedom Press trial was probably

his finest hour. He was certainly a good and honest friend to the

defendants, and they in later years made great efforts to alleviate his

lot. Ernest briefed some very eminent barristers: John Maude (later a

Tory MP and a judge) to defend Hewetson and Richards, Derek Curtis

Bennett for Marie Louise, and James Burge for Philip Sansom. Here of

course were the tactical dilemmas for anarchists. Having engaged an

expensive defence you put yourselves in their hands, and the defence

line was that here were four upright citizens (Richards was working as a

civil engineer at the time and Hewetson was casualty officer at

Paddington Hospital) putting forward their idealistic point of view with

no intention of causing disaffection. The four soldiers called by the

prosecution (including me) to establish that the offending material had

been received by them, testified for the defence that they had not been

disaffected.

None of the accused liked the way their case was presented. Marie Louise

in particular wanted to defend herself and did not want to rely on the

technicalities of the law for an acquittal. On the other hand, if the

object of the whole proceedings was to silence the Freedom Press it

would have been foolish to strike intransigent attitudes and get, in

consequence, far longer sentences. In the event, she and George Woodcock

were able to carry on the work of the paper during the period when their

comrades were in jail.

A Freedom Press Defence Committee was organised to raise funds for the

defence (energetically collected by Simon Watson Taylor — who was also

raided by the police, who, discovering his fascinating library, declared

their anxiety to join the surrealist movement!) and this won the support

of many public figures — George Orwell, Herbert Read, Harold Laski,

Kingsley Martin, Benjamin Britten, Augustus John, Bertrand Russell and

many others. It subsequently became the Freedom Defence Committee, which

was involved in many other civil liberties issues. I ought to explain

that at that time the National Council for Civil Liberties was dominated

by the Communist Party and was totally uninterested in the defence of

anti-patriotic people because of the alliance with Stalin. Its principal

activity at that time was demanding that Sir Oswald Mosley should be put

back in prison — and hanged.

The particular regulation under which the Freedom Press trial was

conducted was rescinded very shortly after the editors were jailed,

though its provisions were substantially the same as those of the

Incitement to Disaffection Act. After all these years, two questions

remain. Were the defence tactics correct? And why was the prosecution

brought in the first place? On the first question, I think that there is

a world of difference between the individual prepared to face martyrdom

for a cause, or for its propaganda effect, and a group of people who

have a functional task to perform: the production of a newspaper. (And

in spite of Herbert Read’s rhetoric at the time about the ‘hundreds who

were willing to step into their place’, the truth was that there were

pitifully few.) There was every reason to suppose that if the defendants

(who incidentally were not the authors of the alleged subversion) had

not adopted the usual rigmarole of defence, they would have got very

long sentences. As it was, they were given shorter sentences than T. W.

Brown or John Olday, whose ‘crimes’ were much more trivial. They emerged

to make Freedom the outstanding journal that it was in the late 1940s.

The second question is very hard to answer. Actually the state and the

armed forces had very little to fear from the anarchists. There was not

the slightest threat of the kind of mutiny that was so savagely

repressed in, say, the French army in 1917. The government obviously

took the trial seriously since the Attorney General himself prosecuted.

Who ordered the trial? Was it the War Department under Sir Edward Grigg?

Or the Home Secretary, the vindictive Herbert Morrison? Or was it just

our old friends of the Special Branch intent on proving what diligent

fellows they are?

My own marginal part in the proceedings brought me a rich reward. The

defendants became my closest and dearest friends.