the Labour Research Department, the couple announced their engagement. The wedding took place at a registry office adorned by a sign warning: ‘No Confetti: Defence of the Realm Act.’ Margaret wrote a poem, ‘Beechwood’, about that close encounter on the log: the pigeon was mentioned, but not the fact that Douglas fell asleep on the train home. People were startled by their marriage, since Douglas was widely assumed to be more interested in men than women. His idea of a stab at humour was to claim he had been forced into matrimony, but Margaret did not care.
‘Physically,’ she said, ‘he was always under-sexed – low-powered. If he had not married, I doubt very much whether he would have had any sex life at all in the ordinary sense … Up to this time, his physical affections, his desire to caress, had been generally directed towards his own sex; he had fallen in love with various young men … and had written poems to them. But it was all very mild, and needed no sort of legal sanction … his sympathy with homosexuals was intellectual chiefly. For women generally, except his wife, he never seemed to have any sexual use at all … he thought that the mass of women were not good Socialist material.’
In 1926, Christie lost a husband, Sayers found one, and Berkeley was contemplating a change of wife. That year was equally momentous for Douglas and Margaret Cole, but for different reasons. Having abandoned the plans they had discussed with Sayers for forming a crime-writing syndicate, they were now writing detective stories together to supplement their academic income. Fiction, however, was put on hold as they rallied to the cause of the workers during the General Strike.
The Coles and their allies on the British Left were convinced that a determined and united industrial movement ‘could make its will prevail’. That confidence was mirrored by the apprehension of people who supported the status quo, such as Christie. Her anxieties were reflected in The Secret Adversary. The spymaster Mr Carter warns Tommy and Tuppence Beresford about the threat to trade posed by a Labour government. ‘Bolshevist gold’ is pouring into the country, in an attempt to foment unrest among the workers. Thanks to the plucky Beresfords, the ‘strike menace’ and the ‘inauguration of a reign of terror’ feared by the newspapers are averted.
While Christie dreaded the prospect of seismic political change, the Coles devoted their lives to trying to achieve it. The General Strike offered the prospect of worker solidarity toppling the established order. After Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour Prime Minister, lost office in 1924, Churchill’s ‘Silk Stocking Budget’ reintroduced the Gold Standard, creating pressure to cut wages, and when the mine owners threatened to slash pay, the miners threatened to strike. The government bought off the employers with a temporary subsidy, unable to risk a confrontation because stocks of coal were low. Trade unionists rejoiced over their victory, but their celebrations proved premature.
Margaret concluded afterwards that the General Strike was provoked by the government, once it had bought time to prepare for a fight. Coal was stockpiled, and Churchill set up a strike-breaking force, the Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies. Once the subsidy ended, the mine owners again proposed lower pay and longer hours. ‘Not a penny, not a minute’ was the trade union side’s response, but concessions were not forthcoming. Compositors at the Daily Mail refused to set a leader article attacking the miners, and Baldwin retaliated by calling off negotiations. The next day, the ‘front-line troops’ were called out on strike.
At a rowdy protest meeting, members of Oxford University’s Labour Club argued about how to fight back if the Vice-Chancellor conscripted students into the O.M.S. to keep essential services moving. They were interrupted by the arrival of Douglas and Sandie Lindsay, the Master of Balliol, who came to announce a triumph. They had persuaded the authorities to reject compulsory conscription. Douglas, the ascetic intellectual, became an instant hero. A University Strike Committee was set up, based at the Coles’ house in Holywell, to produce propaganda with an ‘inky duplicator’, and organise speakers to address meetings and rally public support.
It was an exciting time. The team of activists borrowed cars to run a courier service between Oxford and London. The plan was to collect messages and instructions from the Trades Union Congress, along with copies of the union newsletter, the British Worker. Margaret was appointed chief courier, and Hugh Gaitskell, one of Douglas’s most gifted students, did most of the driving. Another undergraduate volunteer was Cecil Day-Lewis. He worked on a bulletin arguing that the Archbishop of Canterbury should mediate in the strike., and ruined his only good suit by spilling violet ink over it. Eleven years later, having assumed the identity of crime writer Nicholas Blake, he joined the Coles in the Detection Club.
Margaret was thrilled by the solidarity shown by long-serving employees of the Clarendon Press, who showed the courage of their convictions by walking out of work, even though it meant risking their pensions. For all their brilliance, however, the Coles failed to spot the obvious. The trade union leaders had blundered by calling the print workers out, as this made it harder to get their message across to a fearful public. The government, conversely, was able to influence debate on the radio. After eight days, the engineers and ship workers were called out, but although the miners opposed any compromise, the battle proved unwinnable, and the TUC told its members to go back to work.
Douglas struggled to come to terms with the scale of this defeat, but Margaret concluded that the government’s victory marked the ‘final throw’ of mass industrial action. Yet the Coles’ spirit was unquenchable. Before long they turned their minds back to detective fiction, as well as what to do next in the name of socialism. For all their deeply-felt dismay, they were lucky. The General Strike did not hurt their pockets, as it did those who lost pay they could ill afford. For Margaret, the strike was an enthralling experience, and she had enjoyed Hugh Gaitskell’s company, although it was Douglas who fell in love with him.
Sayers and the Coles bonded on an intellectual level, even though their opinions about life and society were poles apart. Sayers’ priority was to earn a living, and she threw herself into the advertising business with gusto. The Coles believed capitalism was in crisis, and opted for seclusion among the dreaming spires, although Douglas did become honorary research officer to the Amalgamated Society of Engineers.
He was always known as G. D. H. Cole; this was as much a brand name as Sayers’ insistence on her middle initial, although he would have been horrified by anything as redolent of capitalism as the idea of a ‘brand’. Although born in Cambridge, Margaret said later that he ‘developed a violent dislike of Cambridge, partly because it was not Oxford’. At St Paul’s School, he worked on a magazine which G. K. Chesterton praised, and became a devotee of William Morris. By the time he went to study Classics at Balliol, he had embraced socialism.
Douglas fantasized about Britain developing into a society based on ‘Guild Socialism’, with production run and organized by self-governing democratic organisations of workers. He became prominent in the Fabian Society. Chesterton’s novel The Napoleon of Notting Hill, set in London in 1984 (perhaps a date that stuck in George Orwell’s mind) struck a chord with the Guild Socialists, and Chesterton’s often radical views had much more in common with Douglas’s than those of Berkeley, Sayers or Christie. His friend and fellow Guild Socialist Maurice Reckitt found him kindly, but impatient and hot-tempered: ‘He was always resigning … from bodies which failed to do what he required of them.’ His ‘haughty ruthlessness’ prompted Reckitt to write a short poem:
‘Mr G. D. H. Cole
Is a bit of a puzzle.
A curious role
That of G. D. H. Cole,
With a Bolshevik soul
In a Fabian muzzle.’
Margaret’s brother, Raymond Postgate, also admired Douglas’s intellect, but thought him rude. Postgate later wrote Verdict of Twelve, a superb study of jurors in a murder case, biting enough to confound any lawyer with a sentimental attachment to the notion of trial by jury. The book’s ironic and innovative style owed much more to Anthony Berkeley than to Douglas, but Raymond became better known for founding The Good Food Guide, and as the father of Oliver.
Margaret