9 - Into Battle, 1936-1939

Summary

The last years before the outbreak of the Second World War saw Armistice Day revert to type in East London. West Ham did see the culmination of an extreme, Christian pacifist campaign but that was almost completely rejected. Instead people seemed to find comfort and even hope in the solid views that had prevailed in the twenties. This time round the concepts were firmly anchored in the reality of the world situation.

The parishioners of Plaistow witnessed an absolutist pacifist campaign orchestrated by the Revd D. C. Tibbenham. He told his congregation that Christ had been captured and crucified without a struggle and therefore war was a sin. In a distinctly pessimistic mood he stated that ‘as far as I can see another war is inevitable unless the miraculous happens'. He concluded that invasion was preferable to fighting, naively implying that it would not be such a bad thing:

Passing under foreign control [was preferable] to the horrors of war of count- less millions, with its leading young men [led] into sin and murder, with its indiscriminate killing by shell and bomb and bullet, with its rousing of an orgy of hate and fear and lying. Of course, we did pass under foreign control in 1066.

A week later the Express printed a letter from an ex-serviceman: he was insulted by Tibbenham's suggestion that he was less of a Christian by virtue of his war service. His letter argued that defending the country was a duty although he believed that there ought to be room ‘for the genuine conscien- tious objector'. A year later Tibbenham was again advocating total pacifism. He exhorted ‘the people to realise the utter futility of war'. At exactly the same moment the Revd G. H. Simpson of Romford Trinity Methodist church ‘said that many of his own congregation - the war generation - were slowly coming to the conclusion that the immense sacrifice of young manhood of twenty years ago was almost in vain'. In Ilford the pacifist cause blended into appeasement. A correspondent to the Recorder wrote to complain about:

those people who say that we should ‘stand up to Hitler'. Unfortunately it would not be a case of ‘standing up to Hitler', it would be a case of throwing millions of innocent people into a senseless mortal combat with one another, and what sane man would advocate this?