(1) Margaret Storm Jameson, Man the Helpmate (1932)

The cherished and precious independence of ours - for which we fought, bit policemen (yes, this I did, in Hyde Park, of a fine Saturday afternoon in the year before the Great War), cut off our hair, grew it again, drove omnibuses, entered Parliament, and walked all day in the rain, carrying a change of clothing, with bare knees and untidy hair - must it be marked down to a doubtful bargin?

 

(2) Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain 1914-1945 (1980)

Margaret Storm Jameson... sense of outrage at the Great War in which so many of her contemporaries , including her brother, had been killed suddenly erupted into overt pacifism while writing memoirs of her early life - "an otherwise polite book that had every chance of pleasing by its polite simplicity", as she later described it. Brooding upon the depressing consequences of the war, she felt an acute sense of guilt at having supported it, and turned her book into an outspoken anti-war polemic.... By the end she had gone so far as to declare herself a pacifist.

 

(3) Guy Chapman, A Kind of Survivor (1975)

She (Storm Jameson) was wearing a heavy coat over a faded pink knitted dress, and a hat which did not suit her, and she smiled at me. She was rather lovely, with long cool grubby fingers, and she held herself badly: she made me think of a well-bred foal, unbroken and enchantingly awkward. Something she said at that first meeting, I forget what, made me laugh with pure pleasure.

 

(4) Vera Brittain, Modern Women (Febuary, 1934)

A few organized women, such as the members of the Women's International League, are working nobly and continuously. One or two women writers - Miss Storm Jameson, for instance, whose brilliant No Time Like the Present was one of the outstanding books of 1933 - constantly urge upon their readers the waste and futility of war.

 

(5) Storm Jameson, No Time like the Present (1933)

In 1932 what lying gaping mouth will say that it was worthwhile to kill my brother in his nineteenth year? You may say that the world's account is balanced by the item that we have still with us a number of elderly patriots, army contractors, women who obscenely presented white feathers. You will forgive me, if as courteously as is possible in the circumstances, I say that a field latrine is more useful to humanity than these leavings.

 

(6) Jennifer Birkett, Margaret Storm Jameson: A Life (2009)

Her engagement with the pacifist movement, and indeed with PEN itself, was taking her further into Left-wing circles. Amabel Williams-Ellis, who described Jameson as being in the early 1930s "a political mentor of mine" was now enthusiastically fellow-travelling down the Communist road that her brother had already taken. John Strachey, having declined to follow Mosley into the British Union of Fascists in 1932, would soon be joining with Victor Gollancz and Harold Laski, to found the Left Book Club (1936). Working alongside the Communists was, Amabel wrote in her memoirs, a key step towards Left unity, a view shared, she said, by the Webbs and Shaw: "I was one of those who found it possible and necessary to work with the Communists... the failure of the German Left to unite was for me a terrible precedent". She belonged to a group that met in a pub in Fitzrovia and included Edgell Rickword, Ralph Fox, Hugh MacDiarmid, Bert Lloyd, and Tom Wintringham; this group set up the Society for the Defence of Culture and the Revolutionary Writers group, and then founded Left Review, of which Amabel was an editorial board member. For the first number, which appeared in October 1934, she wrote a report on the First Soviet Writers' Congress in Moscow, where she was the only British delegate (she didn't, according to later critics, understand much of what was on the agenda). She was actively involved in setting up the 1935 London Congress of Peace and Friendship with the USSR, and the "awed fellow-writer'"at whom Jameson raised an eyebrow when she approved of Soviet writers being ordered to write in praise of a factory was probably Anabel." The red-haired novelist Sophie Burtt in the internment camp of In the Second Year, viciously beaten by the women guards in a sadistic little scene, is certainly her.

Eyebrow-raising against repression in the USSR was at this stage as much as Jameson was prepared to do. There was far worse going on in the West, and in June 1934, she listened with chill terror to Dorothy Thompson's account of the Night of the Long Knives. A month later, on 7 July, like others on the left, including Aldous Huxley, Vera Brittain, and Dick Sheppard, all like herself future founding members of the Peace Pledge Union, she attended the meeting at Olympia organised by Oswald Mosley.

 

(7) Margaret Storm Jameson, The Daily Telegraph (9th July, 1934)

A young woman carried past me by five Blackshirts, her clothes half torn off and her mouth and nose closed by the large hand of one; her head was forced back by the pressure and she must have been in considerable pain. I mention her especially since I have seen a reference to the delicacy with which women interrupters were left to women Blackshirts. This is merely untrue.... Why train decent young men to indulge in such peculiarly nasty brutality?

 

(8) Margaret Storm Jameson, Time and Tide (6th June, 1936)

The reanimation of the Labour Party - by (1) a change in its constitution. The statement that the Labour Party is ruled by the Trade Unions is delusive. As constituted, it is ruled by a narrow oligarchy of Trade Union leaders, as much out of touch with their rank and file as is the executive of the Labour Party with the Party rank and file. (2) An alliance, on the basis of an exactly defined programme, with the progressive Liberals, I.L.P. and Communist Party, as distinct from a shabby vote-catching agreement between leaders - is a preliminary step towards the only form of Popular Front worth voting for.

Apart from a People's Front, what indeed is there to hope for in the political future? And without it, what hope of averting the eventual triumph of reaction by the default of the Labour Party?

 

(9) Storm Jameson, Journey from the North (1969)

If this country... is got into another Great War I shall take every means in my power to keep my son out of it. I shall tell him that it is nastier and more shameful to volunteer for gas-bombing than to run from it or to volunteer in the other desperate army of protestants. I shall tell him also that war is not worth its cost, nor is victory worth the cost.

 

(10) In her autobiography, Journey From the North (1969), Storm Jameson explained why she became involved in political campaigns during the period leading up to the Second World War.

The impulse that turned so many of us into pamphleteers and amateur politicians was neither mean nor trivial. The evil we were told to fight off was really evil, the threat to human decency a real threat. I doubt whether any of us believed that books would be burned in England, or eminent English scholars, scientists, writers forced to beg hospitality in some other country. Or that, like Lorca, we would be murdered. Or tortured and then killed in concentration camps. But all these things were happening abroad, and intellectuals who refused to protest were in effect blacklegs.

 

(11) Jennifer Birkett, Margaret Storm Jameson: A Life (2009)

Germany's invasion of France resolved Jameson's hesitations over her pacifist commitment. Along with many others, including Louis Mumford and Bertrand Russell, she resigned her PPU membership in May. Vera Brittain remained, and later joined the PPU Executive. As British forces were being evacuated from Dunkirk, Ould and Jameson persuaded the London Executive Committee on 31 May 1940 to issue the "Appeal to the Conscience of the World" that Jameson had drafted the previous September. Dated 24 May 1940, and sent out to all Allied countries, it urged respect for the enemy alongside defence of freedom of speech and the free movement of ideas, and told writers "to repeat, if necessary to die repeating that any word, any act, any treaty which debases the dignity and freedom of the common man is evil and to be rejected."Centres in neutral countries were specially adjured to remember their responsibilities. The Macmillan office in New York distributed the appeal throughout America, and it appeared in local and national journals and newspapers from Washington to Tennessee. In The Nation, published in New York, it figured prominently on 27 July 1940 on a page full of letters challenging American isolationism.