Margaret Postgate, the daughter of John Percival Postgate, Professor of Latin at the University of Liverpool and Edith Allen, was born in 1893. Margaret was educated at Roedean and Girton College, Cambridge.
Brought up as an Anglican, at university Margaret began to question her religious faith. After reading the work of J. A. Hobson, H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and Noel Brailsford she became a socialist, feminist and an atheist. Margaret joined the Fabian Society and on the outbreak of the First World War she became active in the peace movement. This included supporting her brother, who was a conscientious objector and was sent to prison for refusing to serve in the army.
During her campaign against conscription, Margaret met G. D. H. Cole. The couple also worked together at the Fabian Research Department. After marrying in 1918 they moved to Oxford where Margaret taught evening classes and worked part-time for the Labour Research Department.
Margaret Cole lost her belief in pacifism in the early 1930s after the the destruction of the socialist movement in Germany and Austria. As a result, she gave her full support to Britain's involvement in the Second World War.
A Labour Party member of the London County Council, Cole was an important figure in the early experiments with comprehensive education. As well as editing the diaries of Beatrice Webb, Cole also wrote several books including The Road to Success (1936), Women of Today (1938), Marriage, Past and Present (1938), Growing Up into Revolution (1949), The Story of Fabian Socialism (1961) and G. D. H. Cole (1971). Margaret Cole died in 1980.
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(1) Margaret Cole, Growing Up Into Revolution (1949)
I have never understood why my parents sent me to Roedean. To remove me from the home was understandable. I was the wrong sort of cuckoo in a horridly alien nest. The cross was too wide, and Roedean was, emphatically, the wrong sort of school for me. But I would go further and say it was not a good sort of school at all. It was very expensive; I only got in as the winner of the single annual scholarship.
Roedean was founded by a formidable group of sisters, Penelope, Millicent, and Dorothy Lawrence. The school did not pit on a polish or train up young ladies for real Society. Nor was it devoted to learning; though we spent the best part of seven hours a day in school, and Saturday morning as well, very few of us went on to Universities, and the standards achieved would have shocked Miss Buss and Miss Beale and the founders of the Girls' Public Day School Trust.
Perhaps this was because the Lawrences themselves, though first-class organisers, not to say advertisers, were no good as teachers and therefore probably not very good pickers; perhaps they were just giving their rich bourgeois clients what they wanted - some instructions, inadequate Christian clients what they wanted - some instruction, adequate Christian training for all but the Jews, discipline partly self-administered (by a prefectorial system and plenty of house and team spirit), and a frill of culture, i.e. concerts and lectures, sometimes with lantern slides, on Sunday evenings. There was also a small school library at one end of the main assembly hall, where girls in the top forms were allowed to read.
(2) Margaret Cole, Growing Up Into Revolution (1949)
I can never be sufficiently grateful to Girton College and the University of Cambridge for the part they played in transforming an unpresentable tadpole into a moderately decent sort of frog. The carping can, of course, find things to criticize in Girton. The mile-and-a-quarter which separates it from the centre of Cambridge is a bit of a nuisance, and was more nuisance in the days before 1914, when there were no buses and we had to cycle to and fro.
We were not allowed to go to meetings unchaperoned, so that before the closing of the debate or whatever it might be we had to rise and go home with our nurse, as it were, in order to get in before the Lodge gates closed. The most unintentionally dangerous chaperone was our junior mathematical don, Miss Cave-Brown-Cave, who was both an enthusiastic stargazer and an indifferent cyclist, and if she caught sight of a pet constellation while climbing Castle Hill would curvet wildly about, head in air, to the great peril of her charges.
(3) While at Girton College Margaret Cole became a Socialist after reading The Science of Wealth by J. A. Hobson.
I slipped into Socialism - the non-dogmatic, idealistic English Socialism of the early twentieth century - as easily as a duck slips into water. The first step in my conversion was a little book called The Science of Wealth, by that generous, profound, and long-neglected thinker, J. A. Hobson. It was a book on economics, not Socialism; but when I read in it the statement, almost causually thrown out, that a certain number of unemployed without wages, living in the last resort on charity and the Poor Law, were a necessary condition of capitalist industry, I was outraged. It must be remembered that in 1911 there was no State unemployment insurance at all; long spells of sickness or unemployment did mean recourse to the Poor Law, and "the workhouse" was pretty real to anyone who knew anything of nineteenth-century popular literature.
(4) At university Margaret Cole began reading the work of H. G. Wells.
I was just one of the many young who over three generations at least took their hope of the world from the vivid, many-gifted, generous, cantankerous personality, and accepted, not merely once but again and again over forty years, his eager conviction that the ideal of Socialism, which included world government, the abolition of all authority not based on reason, and of all inequality based on prejudice or privilege of any kind, of complete freedom of association, speech and movement, and of an immense increase of human welfare and material resources achieved by all-wise non-profit-making organisation of economic life, both could and would save humanity within a measurable space of time. Only at the very end, when he was all but on his death-bed, did H. G. Wells give up hoping for humanity.
Being a Wellsian Socialist, I naturally became at the same time a feminist. I had never in my own life felt any acute sex disability other than the youthful and inescapable one of being a girl in petticoats. My father did not hold with Votes for Women - of course not. But he did not restrain his daughters any more thoroughly than he restrained his sons, and though he strongly opposed the admission of women to degrees at his own University, he paid for their higher education.
(5) By the time that war was declared in August, 1914, Margaret Cole was a pacifist.
In all classes there was some resistance. In the Cabinet, John Morley and John Burns resigned their posts, and put an end to their political careers, sooner than take part; at the other end of the scale a good handful of the working men, particularly engineers on the Clyde and miners in South Wales, who had been especially class-conscious before the war, felt that, whatever statesmen might say, one government was pretty well as bad as another when it came to looking after the ordinary day-today interests of the people, and that, whoever won, the workers would be the losers unless they stood to their rights. With them stood the religious pacifists, Quakers on the left, Christadelphians and odder sects, straight pacifists such as Philip Snowden, Fred Jowlett and Clifford Allen, and some middle-class Socialists like my brother Ray, who had taken seriously the resolutions of the International, and believed that the war was an Imperialist war on both sides and that it was the duty of Socialists to refuse to vote war credits or to serve in any way.
(6) Margaret and her brother, Raymond Postgate, were involved in the campaign against conscription.
Conscription did not arrive until 1916, after every expedient, including solemn promises not to introduce conscription, had been used to man the armies with volunteers; but right from the start any critics of the war suffered a great deal of sporadic persecution by victims of war hysteria. They were booed and pelted, served with white feathers by excited young women, and subjected, particularly at the news of Mons and Charleroi began to come through and it appeared that our army and the French armies were not marching on Berlin but rather running away from it, by a barrage of untrue and idiotic "atrocity stories" about children with their hands cut off by the Germans, priests tied upside-down to the clappers of their own bells, dead bodies boiled down for fat, and the like. (It was a unfortunate that subsequent exposure of all stories as lies conditioned some muddled souls into rejecting any atrocity story whatsoever and so led them to deny or to discount up to the last any reports, however factual, about the doings of the Nazis.
(7) In 1916 Parliament passed the Military Service Act and her brother, Raymond Postgate,was conscripted.
In the spring of 1916 Ray, a scholar in his first year at St. John's College, Oxford, was called up. Of course he refused to go, thereby reducing his father to apoplectic fury; and, after he had failed to secure exemption and was brought before the magistrates as a mutinous soldier, I went up to Oxford be be by his side. At that date it needed a fair amount of courage to be a C.O. Though the Military Service Act allowed exemption on grounds of conscience, it was regrettably vague in its definition of either "conscience" or "exemption"; and the decision as to whether a man had or had not a valid conscientious objection, and if he had, whether he was to be exempted from all forms of war service or from combatant service only, or something between the two, was left to local tribunals all over the country, who had no common standard or guidance, and generally - though not by any means invariably - took the view that every fit man ought to want to fight, and that anyone who did not was a coward, an idiot, or a pervert, or all three.
Objection on religious grounds was for most part treated with respect, particularly if the sect had a respectable parentage; Quakers usually came off lightly, and were permitted to take up any form of service they felt able to do; though Quakers who were "absolutists," i.e., who refused to aid the war effort in any way whatever, were apt to be jailed after a long and futile cross-examination by the Tribunal on how they would behave if they found a German violating their mother. But non-Christians who objected on the grounds that they were internationalists or Socialists were obvious traitors in addition to all their other vices, and could expect little mercy. They would be sent to barracks, and thence to prison - and then nobody quite knew what would happen to them. There was talk of despatching them to France, unarmed, and shooting them there for mutiny.
(8) After her brother Raymond Postgate was sent to prison for refusing to be conscripted into the British Army, Margaret became actively involved in the Peace Movement.
It is almost literally true that when I walked away from the Oxford court-room I walked into a new world, a world of doubters and protesters, and into a new war - this time against the ruling classes and the government which represented them, and with the working classes, the Trade Unionists, the Irish rebels of Easter Week, and all those who resisted their governments or other governments which held them down. I found in a few months the whole lot which Henry Nevinson used to call "the stage-army of the Good" - the ILP, the Union of Democratic Control, the Fellowship of Reconciliation, the Daily Herald League, the National Council of Civil Liberties - and, above all, the Guild Socialists and the Fabian, later the Labour Research Department.
(9) Margaret Postgate and Douglas Cole, like many socialists, welcomed the Russian Revolution in 1917.
On the way to the office we bought our newspapers and read with incredulous eyes that the Russian people, the workers, soldiers, and peasants, had really risen and cast out the Tsar and his government, who were to our minds the arch-symbols of black oppression in the world - far worse than the Prussians. On that day we did not work at all in the office; we danced round the tables and sang, and went to celebrate.
Nor was it merely our small group that was delighted; throughout Britain everyone with an ounce of Liberalism in his composition rejoiced that whatever might come next tyranny had fallen, and thousands of them gathered in the Albert Hall and wept unashamedly as they paid tribute to those who had suffered in Siberia or in the Tsarist prisons.
The news of Russia put immense heart into left-wing forces all over the country. It seemed as though there might be something good coming out of the war after all; for if the Russian people could overthrow their government, could not the Germans and the Austrians - or the French, or the British?
(10) Margaret and Douglas Cole gave full support to the miners during the 1926 General Strike.
Some members of the Labour Club formed a University Strike Committee, which set itself three main jobs; to act as liaison between Oxford and Eccleston Square, then the headquarters of the TUC and the Labour Party, to get out strike bulletins and propaganda leaflets for the local committees, and to spread them and knowledge of the issues through the University and the nearby villages. My job was to be liaison officer, and half-a-dozen times during those nine days I was driven up to London by Hugh Gaitskill or John Dugdale to Eccleston Square, to collect supplies of the British Worker, any other news or instructions that were going, and while we were there to have a look at the centre of things; and to transport anyone who happened to require transport about the city.
The Government had made up its mind that "direct action" must be scotched once and for all, and, that being so, the Unions had no choice between surrendering and going on to civil war and revolution, which was the last thing they had envisaged or desired. They surrendered, ingloriously, but with the ranks unbroken; and though the immediate outcome was, naturally, a falling-off of membership, and a good deal of angry recrimination, the absence of any real revanche, any sacking of the leaders who had patently failed to lead, showed that the movement, when it had time to think things over, realised that it had in effect made a challenge to the basis of British society which it was not prepared to see through and that, therefore, post-mortems on who was to blame was unprofitable.
The industrial workers forgave their leaders. But they did not so easily forgive their enemies, particularly when the Government, to punish them for their insubordination, rushed through the 1927 Trade Union Act. This was a piece of political folly; it did not (because it could not) prevent strikes; what it did was to make it more easy to victimize local strike-leaders and also to put obstacles in the way of the Unions contributing to the funds of their own political Party.
(10) Margaret Cole, Growing Up into Revolution (1949)
Bristol was bombed while we were there: we used to go down to the cellars of our Hall of Residence. We wore trousers over our pyjamas during night raids (but never in daytime or in the street - trousers were not thought respectable for girl students at that time).
One night in my first term King's College Arts library, which was occupying the Great Hall of Bristol University, was set on fire by incendiaries and completely destroyed. Soon after that we were sent home, for an extended Christmas vacation. There was nowhere for us to work without the library space.
Later, students were on a rota for firewatching. We usually did one night a week, on duty for two hours at a stretch, two of us together, working as part of a team. Those off duty slept in camp beds. The most exciting place to watch was the room at the top of the tower of the University building. You could see the whole of Bristol.
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