The Times of Shaw

EORGE BERNARD SHAW, the greatest dramatist in the English tongue since Shakespeare, and an artist whose work was a ceaseless criticism of capitalism, was for seven formative years the Chairman of the Labour Research Department. Convinced against capitalism by a reading of Marx and associated with the Marxist poet and revolutionary William Morris, to whose abiding influence he paid frequent tribute, Shaw in the early eighties helped to found the Fabian Society and could claim over 50 years ago to be also one of the founders of the Labour Party. Thereafter the main additional public activity of this kind undertaken by him was his chairmanship of the Labour Research Department.

The initial work had been done by Sidney and Beatrice Webb who, on their return in 1912 from a world tour, found a changed situation in the Labour Movement and who got together from members of the Fabian Society a committee of enquiry on the Control of Industry. Within a twelvemonth this had become a semi-autonomous body, with its own elected executive committee and with Beatrice Webb as first year’s Chairman. Shaw became deeply interested in this new development, stood for election to the executive committee and, as its chairman, presided over the changes by which it hived off from the Fabian Society and was transformed into the Labour Research Department. The autonomy rapidly grew greater, non-Fabians soon became members, then membership spread to affiliated bodies and long before the end of the first world war the change was complete and the L.R.D. had taken up the range of functions which it endeavours to fulfil to-day.

The active interest of Shaw in this research was first shown at a summer school run by the Department on Derwentwater in the last fortnight of July 1914. The French Socialist leader Jean Jaures, the founder of l’Humanite, had agreed to be present but could not leave Paris; the news of his assassination of that last Saturday of peace heralded the outbreak of the first world war.

Shaw was engaged for many weeks thereafter in writing his “Commonsense about the War” which brought on his head wild abuse not only from the partisans of Asquith, Grey and Churchill but from many who had previously accepted the Socialist doctrine against imperialist wars. (It need not have done, as the pamphlet was an attempt to combine criticism of capitalist rulers with arguments for participation in the war. But all critics of capitalism were being howled down in the first months of the first world war.) But in the autumn he took up the work of Chairman of the Research Department. He presided at annual general meetings of the Department, and at many of its conferences, besides guiding the discussion at the regular monthly meetings of the Executive Committee. As Chairman at conferences, his thorough knowledge of the rules of debate made him highly acceptable to trade union delegates, while all rejoiced in his remarkable gifts as a speaker in which he combined beauty of tone with beauty of expression and skill in argument.

In the chair at Executive Committee meetings, Shaw was businesslike, and insisted on the Committee being also businesslike. The tradition of short and effective meetings was laid down, though he knew well when to call for a formal written motion (which Siodney Webb, when on the committee, would promptly furnish) or when to allow for latitude in discussion before general agreement was reached. He made keen scrutiny of income and expenditure; and always set an example by being punctual to the minute in his attendance. Anything less like the eccentric and irresponsible individual which the Press and its gullible readers like to fancy (especially to soothe themselves when stung by his criticisms) could hardly have been imagined; and the members of the Committee, or most of them, found in him a fount of commonsense and, on occasion, wisdom. As head of the Department he kept a watchful eye on all that was to be published; and was ready to give much of this time to the drudgery of looking over proofs before publication. I have, or had, two sets of galley-proofs scrupulously and carefully corrected by him throughout, with many changes in content, in style – and in punctuation (which in my own case he said was ‘hopelessly Caledonian’).

In particular, he always amended the draft of the Annual Report, frequently inserting opening or concluding paragraphs. For example, in the 1918-19 Report he wrote, as introduction, what was at once a two-page summary of the seven formative years of the Department and a justification of the Department’s development and of his part in it, beginning with the words “The Labour Research Department, after seven years’ growth, has now taken its permanent form as a vital organ of the Labour Movement generally….” And ending with a paragraph which may well be quoted to-day:

“Before proceeding to report the steps of our progress is dry detail, we must frankly point out that though the Department is now firmly on its feet and practically certain to endure, it is not yet established on the solid basis of the Trade Union tradition that all work should provide the worker with a living wage. For example, the writing of books is a highly skilled trade; and the work of the professional lawyer involves a long and expensive training. Company promoters think nothing of paying their lawyers on such a scale that a successful parliamentary barrister expects to make from ten to twenty thoushand a year; and some authors make very respectable incomes. In the detailed reports below it will be found that a good deal of literary and legal work of a high class has been done in the Department. None of it has been paid for at anything like full rates; and the best of it has not been paid for at all. Practically all the first rate legal work has been done gratuitously. If Labour were unable to pay, this would be unsatisfactory enough. But a Labour can quite well afford to pay, and to pay handsomely, and is holding back solely because it does not as yet know the value of such work as well as Capital does, such a state of things is quite unfair, and cannot be expected to last. People seldom value what they get for nothing; and if our lawyers and literary experts were to insist on receiving the full market value of their time, they would really be acting in the best interests of Labour as well as in their own. As our work grows, it will not always be possible for us to keep pace with it by enlisting workers who present the rare combination of disinterested enthusiasm with high professional qualifications. It will have to be done largely as a matter of business, precisely as it would have to be done for an employers’ federation. We are not complaining; we are only warning. The moral is that we want further affiliations, and a generous sense that we are worth what we cost and perhaps a little more.”

Shaw contributed, by preface or otherwise, to several of the Department’s larger published books. Here his world reputation served us well in bringing wider sales. But this was the least part of such contributions, where he often struck out new ways of expressing old socialist thoughts. In these he was at times self-critical, as when in the preface to the Labour Year Book 1916 (the new venture of the Department in 1914-15) he wrote:

“A proper Labor Year Book ought to set all the Oxford Colleges clamoring for its prosecution on a charge of sedition, and to make half the purchasers of Whitaker go blue in the face with indignation. It ought to give all the information that our rich men and their caterers and retainers try to hide from themselves and everybody else…”

And again when, in the same Preface he wrote that “Labor often drops the substance in clutching at the shadow” in its notions of democracy and added:

”In making Trade Unionism the most jealously democratic institution in the world, it made it in some respects the most autocratic; for it is the simple truth that it used to be easier to turn the whole country against the Prime Minister than to turn a Trade Union against its officials; and the end of that has been a reaction in which officials are hampered in making industrial treaties because they cannot answer for their Unions with sufficient confidence.”

His criticism of his fellow Fabians, now in office, grew sharper in recent years. For that he might have been forgiven. But what could not be forgiven him, as was obvious from the suppressions in the formal or merely anecdotal obituaries of the Press, was his consistent open support of the Soviet Union in the period of the Cold War.