Part of a tremendous small archive, offering a fascinating glimpse of Churchill, six months after the crushing setback of the immediate post-war election of July 1945, in which despite widespread praise and admiration of Churchill’s role in the war itself, the Labour party scored a landslide victory. Churchill himself was quite widely criticised for the party’s defeat, in particular after a widely criticised speech in which he overplayed the threat of the Labour Party by comparing them to the Gestapo.
Churchill was still the leader of the Conservative Party in 1946 and the letter to the Chairman demonstrates that his anxiety about the aims of the Labour Party was still at a high level. In it he forwards a clipping from the Sunday Express (a naturally Conservative newspaper) about an advertisement by the National Savings Bank promoting the private purchase of houses. The news story told of the suppression of the advertisement by the government since “such dreams do not fit in with with the housing plans of Mr. Aneurin Bevan, or with the town planning of Mr. Lewis Silkin, Minister of Town and Country Planning”. A subeditor seems to have turned up the dial of the story slightly by promoting the “advertisement” to “poster” in the headline.
Churchill writes that “I am of the opinion that the enclosed might be made into a very valuable piece of propaganda. It shows so clearly the division between the free world of a property-owning democracy and the Socialist conception of State employees living in Council Houses, and no doubt ultimately removable from them if they do not vote the Party ticket.” He moots reprinting the poster “and the repudiation of it by the Socialist Government” for use at bye-elections. The letter was received by Marjorie Maxse, the vice-chair of the Party who forwarded it on to Woolton “I enclose a letter which has come for you from the Leader”. The letter is a model of concision, and she attaches two memoranda from party workers. One Mr. Stelling concludes that “there was no truth in the Sunday Express story. There was no poster, the Press advertisement had never been been withdrawn and, in fact, was still appearing in outlying provincial journals… .I got the impression that Captain Morris was speaking the truth, but even if he were making a case it seems to me a cast-iron one.” The other is from W.E. Bemrose, who worked in the publicity department of Conservative Central Office, who acknowledges that the story as a whole is a dead letter: despite that they will continue to “exploit the incident in attacking the Socialist policy of land nationalisation and their emphasis on building houses to let.”
