The People’s Flag: A History of the Union of Britain, 1925-2010

The Royalist Exodus
Eric Hobsbawm

It is a favourite pastime of Royalist intellectuals to wistfully speculate on the futures of those men and women who, either through untimely death or flight from the British Isles, left the British public sphere forever after 1925. A recent bestseller is 'Mr Windsor and Mrs Simpson' by Australasian-born Philippa Gregory. The novel is a racy counterfactual loosely based on the brief courtship between Edward VIII and an American divorcée. Where the courtship broke up in the face of the exiled King’s national duty in ‘OTL’ (‘Our TimeLine’ as I believe the ‘counterfactual community’ refer to it), the novel pictures a world where a cockier Edward finds himself on the British throne, the Revolution having been averted, but out of mad love for Mrs Simpson, abdicates. It was remarked by critic and Chartist culture editor Polly Toynbee that ‘only the poor prose and paper-thin characters can make the absurdity of the plot seem true-to-life.’

But such speculation is not limited to ‘aerodrome fiction’. A more dated example, published in the German Empire in the 1930s, is 'Fuhrerreich'. Banned by Von Papen in 1938 for its ‘exceedingly dark moral tone’,[1] the work portrayed a world created by Entente victory in the First Great War. Casting Imperialist martyr of the Russian Civil War Adolf Hitler instead as a disgruntled dictator, what is more interesting to note is its treatment of Britain. Its author, Otto Strasser, predicted Britain led by the relatively obscure (and disgraced by Gallipoli) former First Lord of the Admiralty, Winston Churchill, with the equally obscure deceased MP Anthony Eden somehow finding his way into the cabinet. More mainstream Royalist thought has speculated on who among the ‘lost political generation’ of 1925 would have done great things for reactionary Britain. Stanley Baldwin, Harold Macmillan, Austen Chamberlain and many others are often mourned as having been forced to waste their talents in political isolation during Exile. There is also something of a habit among Royalists to figuratively beat their breasts like mourning Persians over those rising stars killed during their attempts to leave Britain.

It is with this background in mind that we come to the first of a number of articles in this book by the late Eric Hobsbawm. It was first printed in 1981 in 'History Today', and follows in its unedited entirety.


The Exodus, as it became known, saw the flight from Britain of thousands of men, women and children. This article shall examine the facts of the matter. Who ‘escaped’ from Britain, and why? What were the conditions on the way to Canada? And, perhaps most crucially, what became of those members of the ‘ancien regime’, particularly the large number of aristocrats, who could not get away?

The Exodus began on 26 October 1925. Two days after the collapse of the government and the proclamation of the Union of Britain, Margaret Cole wrote in her diaries that ‘a procession of motorcars, some battered and scratched, some even with bulletholes in them, was speeding down the road towards the docks. Their horns were a cacophony of panic. As we lined the streets to watch them go by, a man next to me cried "and good riddance, too!" I later heard that in one of the cars had been our MP. He was a Conservative, and an agreeable MP as Conservatives went. I do not know if he made it to Canada - one heard such terrible things about the overcrowded ships.'[2]

Cole's experience was far from unique. All across the country, local aristocrats, reactionary MPs and members of the wealthy middle classes were racing towards the coast. Some even tried to buy their way onto aircraft at Croydon Airport, without success. The 'terrible things' Cole referred to is something of a euphemism. Those that survived 'the exodus ships' have, in their own memoirs, detailed the level of squalor they experienced. Former Sea Lord Winston Churchill, who travelled to Canada on board RMS Antonia wrote that 'military-issue sleeping mats were spread across the ballroom, its chandelier and wall furnishings now the only thing that distinguished it from an inner city church hall. Upon entering the room it was impossible not to recoil at the stench. The indignity that some of the society women who were now huddled with their children next to a few tins of corned beef was too much to bear. I found myself standing on the freezing and sea-blasted deck whenever possible.'[3]

Churchill's entry, although published in Royalist Canada, was seized upon by the British press when it was made known to them as a gleefully-upheld example of how the Reactionaries had suffered when they tried to begin their fight against the people's Revolution. It just one of many such examples, so it is quite reasonable to conclude that the conditions aboard the ships were truly awful. Churchill was lucky enough to get onto an ocean liner - many of the Royalists had to buy their way onto cramped destroyers, and be content with sharing a tiny billet with a dozen others for the entire journey.

But let us not make too much of the conditions of the 'escape' itself. The real question is 'who escaped, and why?'. The most famous and most obvious group to escape was the Royal Family. The King, for reasons obvious to the reactionary authorities, was given absolute priority to escape the country. He, his wife, along with the Prince of Wales who had joined them on the way, boarded the humble minesweeper HMS Bagshot[4] and set sail for Montreal on the morning of the 26th. The rest of the immediate Royal Family - the 'Princess Royal', Prince Albert, Prince Henry and Prince George, were to board a similar craft the following day. While Princess Mary, Prince George and Prince Albert made it to Plymouth in time for their evacuation, Henry elected, for reasons that died with him, to lead a battalion of die-hard Army troops (aptly from the King's Rifles), who had volunteered to defend the outskirts of Plymouth's harbour district from the approaching 'mob' of Revolutionary forces. Armed only with his Sandringham training and a Webley revolver, he announced to his tearful brother and sister that he would 'rather die in merry old England than live to see it turn rotten'. His body was recovered a few days after the fighting ended, a Webley round in his skull (it is believed he committed suicide to avoid capture). It was buried, like all the bodies of soldiers who chose to side with the Royalists during the revolution, in a simple grave with his name, rank and unit. There was no publicised funeral.

The more minor members of the Royal Family found themselves in the same boat (the pun is, I must confess, intended) as the aristocracy. The Dukes and Earls of Reactionary Britain, some of whom with ancestors that could be traced back to the Battle of Hastings, suddenly found themselves in a world where your birth meant nothing. Many of them tried to 'escape', too, most famously George Bingham, 6th Earl of Lucan, who was rescued from drowning by local 'Cheapside Militia' in the early hours of the 8th of November, having become extremely drunk and tried to get to the Thames Estuary in 'what looked like a child's rowing boat - the type you see at the fair'[5]. Bingham was far from alone as a member of the aristocracy that failed to escape. There were dozens more like him across the country who, once the window of opportunity to escape had passed (all docks came under the control of the CTU and Britain was declared a 'closed port' on an interim basis), found themselves increasingly worried as to what would happen to them. It is, and remains to this day, a credit to the spirit of our Revolution that not one aristocrat was hanged, or even tried, on grounds of his or her title alone. Of course, those who had served in treacherous Tory, Liberal or 'Labour' governments were tried, and some sentenced to hard labour. The only aristocrats who were executed were members of the armed forces who had been found guilty of 'crimes against the people' for their part in various massacres. Of the four death sentences handed out by People's Courts in late 1926, two were commuted to life imprisonment on appeal.


But what for those men like Bingham who had lived a fairly harmless life but had hardly sought to change the country for the benefit of their 'social inferiors' either? The answer to that came in the opening days of the Inaugural Congress. Setting a precedent that would remain for decades, the CTU unanimously voted to 'extend a hand of comradeship' to the former aristocracy, and welcome them into the working community. Bingham himself was welcomed into a farming collective in Gloucestershire after he had been declared 'de-Bourgeoised' by the CTU's re-education centres in early 1928. Others, including Charles Wood, 2nd Viscount Halifax, travelled with his son to Newcastle, where they took jobs in the accounting office of the local Mining Syndicate[6].

The 'hand of comradeship' movement was by and large a resounding success, allowing for the peaceful and (generally) unresented incorporation of the former aristocracy - and numerous members of the upper middle class whose workers had brought them to trial for Reaction, as well as numerous remaining MPs - into Britain's new society. Some were easier than others - the more radical of Labour's MPs were far more willing to take jobs in their local Syndicates than some of the more 'refined' Ladies and Duchesses of Kent. But it managed to deal with an exceptionally difficult situation in a largely satisfactory manner - for the popular majority at least. The problems that it untangled, however, were a mere triviality compared to the issue that was most pressing for the new state: how to defend our Island while ensuring the removal of any malignant or reactionary elements within our own Armed Forces.

The Armed Forces were, thanks to the decadence of the past few centuries, plagued with reactionary elements and dyed-in-the-wool aristocrats. The response of 'the mob', therefore, was swift and just. Earl Haig, so inconceivably granted a peerage after slaughtering Britain's best against the German guns, was arrested and put before a 'people's court martial', presided over by none other than Tom Wintringham. After being sentenced to death by firing squad, the ageing Field Marshall spluttered in protest, declaring 'I fought for Britain's honour like a lion fights for its pride!'. Wintringham's famous reply 'Nay, sir! Your men fought like lions. You led them like a donkey!' has entered the common lexicon. Haig was executed at the Tower of London after his death sentence was carried by a narrow vote at the Inaugural Congress[7].

But, in a statement commonly said at the time, 'the lieutenants of the last war will be the generals in the next'. Men like Bernard Montgomery and John Gort, who had fought and bled alongside their men in the trenches, were treated with far less distaste. In a lengthy process beginning in July 1926 (ironically the 10th anniversary of the bloody Battle of the Somme), the Army, Navy and fledgling Air Force had their officer corps entirely examined, one by one, in the dock before people's courts. Though few would swear under oath that they were radical socialists, there were many who sympathised with the common man and, perhaps still angry from the loss of the Great War, agreed that the previous regime had let the people of Britain down. The overwhelming consensus from those who stood before the people and testified their support was that they had sworn to serve and defend Britain - to them, defending their 'king' meant nothing compared to that. This was given additional credence by their very presence on the mainland - particularly the naval officers, who would have been free to leave for Canada if they had a ship under their command. Bernard Montgomery, later hero of the Second Great War, captured the mood of the times when he declared 'A socialist I am not. But a Reactionary am I neither. I entered the Army with no interest in politics, but with an interest in the continued wellbeing of the people of this nation. The Union can provide that wellbeing, and I shall strive to defend it!'.

Of course, this was not universally popular. Wintringham in particular wanted to purge the officer corps of all members who were not 100% committed to leftist revolution. But John Maclean himself stepped in and prevented this, arguing (quite correctly) that Britain needed soldiers as its defenders more than it needed ideologues - the Armed Forces would, of course, over time be gradually brought into line with the politics of the Union, but with a large section of the Fleet now rumoured to be rearming in Canada, and the Kaiser's armies allegedly sharpening their bayonets in Kiel, the decision was made to keep on all who would swear simply to uphold the Union and defend its people. The period of an 'Apolitical Army', as Kershaw calls it, had begun.

In conclusion, then, what defined the Exodus? It is perhaps best considered to be the flight of the 'old regime' and its replacement by the new. As Margaret Cole's fellow bystander remarked, there was an element of 'good riddance' to many who fled the Union during those tumultuous days. The reorganisation of the Armed Forces would probably not have been possible had its truly reactionary and rabidly rightist elements remained within. All in all, then, the Exodus was highly beneficial to the Union - many who escaped spared the Union the trouble of a messy trial and potential execution - the fate of Field Marshall Haig was, if one believes contemporary sources, desired for many other members of the 'old regime' by the more bloodthirsty members of the new.

[1] It became available in all four German states after the Second Great War, and has since been translated into English, French, Italian and Spanish.

[2] Margaret Cole, Living for Britain: My Diaries (London: Penguin Publishing Cpv., 1945) p.60

[3] Winston Churchill, The Empire in Crisis (Ottawa: Britannia Books, 1931) p.42

[4] Cpt. Eric Edwards, The King had my Cabin (Ottawa: Britannia Books, 1949) p.12

[5] Derek Hobbs, Onwards, Cheapside: My time in the militia (London: Macmillan, 1955) p.56

[6] Their story was not entirely a happy one - Charles' son, Edward Wood, found himself unable to cope with what he called his 'fall from gwace' and committed suicide in 1930.

[7] He would not be the last to die there.

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