During the first of his Ford lectures of 1956, AJP Taylor drew an analogy with religious conscience in order to distinguish the great dissenters of British foreign policy of the previous two centuries from the mere critics: ‘A conforming member of the Church of England can disagree with the Bishops and, I understand, often does. A Dissenter believes that Bishops should not exist.’ The same rule, Taylor insisted, applied in foreign affairs. ‘A man can disagree with a particular line of British foreign policy, while still accepting its general assumptions. The Dissenter repudiates its aims, its methods, its principles.’¹ According...

In the official history rushed out by the LNU in summer 1935, its author justified the Peace Ballot as a unique exercise which had, for the first time, made knowable the will of the people on vital questions of foreign policy. ‘If our democracy is a true democracy,’ the book observed, ‘John Smith and Mary Brown, and the sum of their opinions, are the things that matter. They are the rock upon which the fabric of our Government is based. Upon their response all advance ultimately depends.’³ By invoking public opinion in this manner, the LNU pressed into service a...

‘On many political issues public opinion is, no doubt, adequately educated by party machinery. There are, however, some questions – and world affairs are among them – which must be kept out of the maelstrom of party politics. Such was the reason which led the leaders of all the political parties fourteen years ago to join in the formation of the League of Nations Union.’³ ThisHeadwayeditorial of 1933 neatly summarised the foundation myth which explained and legitimised the LNU’s much-advertised ‘non-party’ status. Given that the League was an institution which knew no party, this narrative went, so too was the...

In a pamphlet published shortly before the end of the First World War, the Bishop of Oxford, Charles Gore, fastened upon the League of Nations as a source of spiritual regeneration for a society reeling from the collective trauma of bereavement and brutalisation. For far too long, he argued, power-hungry nations had pursued ‘economic selfishness and a narrow patriotism’ unchecked by the Christian conscience. Now, statesmen and religious authorities alike had no choice but to embark upon a ‘great repentance’, recognising that the nation was but ‘the servant in a cause which is to minister impartially to the good of...

On 13 May 1929, the Director of Education at Bedfordshire County Council, Mr SC George, wrote to local head-teachers inquiring as to the nature of Empire Day celebrations in their schools. This annual event, founded in 1904 by Edwardian imperialist zealots, had become a routine feature of school-life for British children by the interwar period. The half-day holiday, preceded by themed lessons, rousing songs and colourful parades, was designed to impress upon young minds the enduring bonds of empire and signalled, as one historian has recently put it, ‘society’s generalised acceptance of Britain’s imperial role’.⁴ Most of the reports received...

On 30 October 1930, the LNU played host to a sumptuous banquet at the historic Guildhall in the City of London in honour of delegates from India and the Dominions attending the Imperial Conference. Some 600 guests were cordially received by the Lord Mayor and treated to a lavish meal before being invited to raise their glasses to a series of lengthy toasts. The impressive line-up of speakers included the Labour Minister JH Thomas, Conservative elder statesman Austen Chamberlain and the Prime Minister of Canada, RB Bennett, but the night undoubtedly belonged to the Prince of Wales, whose address was...

In 1921, the LNU issued a short story telling the tale of how a little girl named Peggy became converted to the League of Nations.² The daughter of a vicar living in a small village, Peggy is discovered in chapter one in a state of considerable agitation, having just received news that her beloved uncle, the eminent Sir Christopher Falconer, is shortly to leave Britain for an appointment in Geneva. Peggy decides she must learn more about her uncle’s new employer and, encouraged by her governess, Miss Russell, joins the League of Nations Union. Peggy soon becomes a star recruiter...

Writing in the feminist weeklyWoman’s Leaderin 1920, Dorothy Gladstone remarked that women’s maternal sensibilities naturally fitted them for the task of championing the League. ‘The instinct of motherhood in women should make them quick to see this opportunity of mothering the world, and saving it from the sorrow and suffering that war must always bring.’² In deploying such gendered language, Gladstone, like many other peace activists of the day, drew on an age-old binary opposition twinning femininity with the values of pacifism and masculinity with those of militarism. Such oppositions are always imaginatively ‘constructed’, sometimes in the face...

For the fifteen years preceding the Peace Ballot, the League movement’s success was the product of a dual policy of non-partisanship in the political arena and broad-based organising within civil society centred on the capacious concept of ‘enlightened patriotism’. This strategy was never flawless, yet for a decade and a half it succeeded in amassing a substantial membership for the LNU, in securing an extraordinary turn-out at the Ballot, and in preserving the League’s salience as a live issue within the centre-ground of British politics. After the Abyssinian affair, however, this operating logic unravelled almost completely. The factors involved would...

When asked for their thoughts on Britain’s foreign policy by a Mass-Observation investigator in March 1938, 35% of respondents failed to answer and of those who did a full 40% were unable to express any definite view.³ Other M-O polls of the late 1930s provided further evidence of the public’s apparent lack of interest in events abroad. At the time of Eden’s resignation, a full two-thirds of a nationwide sample could offer no opinion as to its broader significance for the country’s foreign policy.⁴ When asked a year later to rank foreign affairs and home affairs in order of importance,...