A Giant Hidden in the Shadow of Giants - Arthur Greenwood and the Alternate History Genre
- cepmurphywrites
- 3 hours ago
- 15 min read
By Adam Selby-Martin.
Minister of Health in the second Labour Government. Deputy Leader of the Labour Party for an entire decade, spanning one of the most turbulent periods in the party's history. Minister Without Portfolio in Winston Churchill's War Cabinet, who was intimately involved in the discussions of May 1940 as to whether Britain should seek peace or continue fighting. Leader of the Opposition during that same conflict.
These were all positions held by one man - Arthur Greenwood.
Yet despite his clear prominence within the Labour Party and one of Churchill's most famous Cabinets, there is almost nothing written about Greenwood. No lengthy biographies of the type dedicated to almost every other senior Labour figure of the time; no chapters in books about the Labour Party or the War Cabinet; not even a single academic paper. The sole academic discussion of Greenwood of any length is his relatively brief entry in the Dictionary of Labour Biography, Vol. XI – a detailed but distinctly obscure volume really only known to a small group of researchers and academics.
Arthur Greenwood has sunk into the deepest depths of academic and political obscurity despite his many achievements, and I for one find this deeply ironic – because I believe that Greenwood was the man who tipped the balance in favour of the War Cabinet agreeing to fight on after Dunkirk and the Fall of France. And his absence might well have altered history permanently towards fascism and totalitarianism.
[Author’s Note: I am in the unusual position of writing a semi-academic article with almost no primary sources available that are focused solely on its subject, and only a handful of secondary sources that mention him, often only briefly and in passing. The two most useful sources have been a pair of biographical articles sourced from the Dictionary of Labour Biographies that I have access to only thanks to the invaluable support of a member of this publisher’s forum; and Lord David Owen’s superb history of the May 1940 Cabinet Crisis, Cabinet's Finest Hour: The Hidden Agenda of May 1940. Ironically, Greenwood’s Wikipedia page is actually the most comprehensive and well-sourced article about him found easily online. As such, I have likely made some mistakes or misattributions that are entirely mine for which I can only pre-emptively apologise – though I one day hope to write something that will provide a robust biography of Greenwood and thereby rectify this lack of sources.]
Part 1 – Arthur Greenwood Before May 1940
Arthur Greenwood was born in Leeds in February 1880, the eldest son of William and Margaret Greenwood. After attending St. Jude’s Board School and Bewerley Street School, the young Greenwood became a pupil teacher and then won a scholarship to Yorkshire College in 1899. After several years of studying, he received the prestigious Board of Education certification and spent the immediate years prior to the Great War teaching in a number of schools, eventually joining Leeds University’s Economics Department in 1913. He slowly but surely became involved in local politics at the same time as pursuing his teaching career, joining the Workers Educational Association (WEA) and being instrumental in creating a Yorkshire District for the WEA in 1914, remaining as its Chairman until 1945. He also began to publish essays in a wide variety of journals on the subject of education, which his entry in the Dictionary of Labour Biographies notes was a natural fit with the earlier stages of the nascent Labour movement as it developed in the United Kingdom.
As the Great War began, Greenwood moved to London and became the Secretary of the prestigious Council for the Study of International Relations, contributing an essay to the Council’s most notable publication, The War and Democracy. By 1916 he had co-authored several study guides on the war, as well as a pamphlet on the reorganisation of industry, and had also taken a step forward in his career: first by becoming assistant secretary to the Reconstruction Committee and then a year later joining the Ministry of Reconstruction where his energy and focus for administrative matters were positively noted.
After the war Greenwood became ever more involved in politics, joining the Labour Party, giving evidence for the Miners’ Federation before the Sankey Commission, and even being a ‘propagandist’ for the National Union of Railwaymen during their strike. In 1921 Greenwood was appointed Head of the Labour Research Department and worked hard to publish materials that promoted unity between the firmly working-class Trade Unionists and the more ‘intellectual’ middle-class elements of the party. Indeed, throughout his political career within the Labour Party, the concept of loyalty and party unity appears to have been a defining element of Greenwood’s ethos, one which he tirelessly worked towards throughout his political career.
Slowly but steadily, Greenwood worked his way towards the heights of political power within the Labour Party, as well as within the British political system as a whole. He was elected as MP for Nelson and Colne in 1922 and retained the seat for almost a decade. He lost the seat in 1931, as part of the wider Labour defeat of that year, but a year later was able to narrowly win a by-election in Wakefield, a seat that he continued to represent until his death. In the short-lived Labour government of 1924, he was Parliamentary Secretary for the Minister of Health, and then would go on to take that Cabinet position for himself in 1929. The time he served in both governments gave him a great deal of experience and several notable achievements to his name, including welfare measures and the provision of birth control advice in women’s health clinics (limited by political and social requirements, but still a significant achievement); and his declaration in January 1931 that he would “die in the last ditch” rather than agree to any cuts in social services served to shore up his left-wing, working-class credentials.
By the mid-1930s Greenwood was arguably one of the most experienced and influential politicians within the Labour Party, and it is perhaps not surprising that he ran for leadership of the party in 1935 when George Lansbury resigned. It was a close-run and bitter election between Greenwood, Attlee, and Herbert Morrison; Attlee triumphed on the second ballot, becoming Leader, and Greenwood became Deputy Leader after Morrison refused to accept second-place, and instead publicly berated Greenwood about his growing alcoholism.
As the end of the 1930s grew closer, Greenwood and Attlee forged a close and effective political relationship that worked well together; in his autobiography, Attlee would later comment that Greenwood “gave me most loyal support and good counsel” in his time as Deputy Leader. While Greenwood struggled with his alcoholism – to the extent that in 1938 his duties as head of the Labour Research Department were mostly taken away from him – he was always supportive of Attlee and was instrumental in defeating several attempts to remove him as Party Leader in the late 1930s. These attempts were often led by Herbert Morrison, and Greenwood benefited from the support of Ernest Bevin, the General Secretary of the Transport and General Workers' Union, who was Morrison’s bitter enemy in the Party.
By the time the Second World War began in September 1939, Greenwood and Attlee worked in lock-step as Deputy Leader and Leader of the Labour Party, and it was clear that Attlee had absolute confidence in Greenwood. This was clearly demonstrated by the fact that Attlee was recovering from a prostate operation the day that war was declared, and did not rush his recuperation in an attempt to return to Parliament in his role as Leader of the Opposition. Instead, he regularly communicated with Greenwood, and the two planned how they could hold the Conservative Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain, to account for what they saw as his failure to fulfil Britain’s obligations to Poland.
Part 2 – Arthur Greenwood and the Road to the War Cabinet
The German invasion of Poland, Britain’s declaration of war on the 1st September 1939, and the ‘Phony War’ period turning into armed conflict by May 1940, eventually led to the fall of Neville Chamberlain and his replacement by Winston Churchill. Churchill’s path to becoming Prime Minister in May 1940 is a well-worn one that has been repeatedly told, time and again, most recently in the feature film Darkest Hour that saw Gary Oldman deservedly win an Oscar for his portrayal of Churchill. Much less well-known, however, is the role that Arthur Greenwood played in both his ascension to that position; and the path he took that allowed Churchill to gain sufficient support in the War Cabinet for a campaign of resistance instead of capitulation.
If Greenwood is remembered at all in the narrative of Chamberlain’s downfall and Churchill’s entry into 10 Downing Street, then it is usually because of the speech that he gave in the House of Commons on the 2nd September. Still deputising for Attlee, Greenwood was preparing to reply to Chamberlain’s statement regarding Britain’s entry into war when Leo Amery – a former Colonial Secretary and vocal critic of Chamberlain – suddenly rose and called out, “Speak for England, Arthur!” Four words – but words that implied that the Prime Minister did not represent the country. Greenwood then followed with a speech that criticised Chamberlain’s conduct of the war so far, ending with the prophetic line that “I believe that the die is cast”.
In the standard narratives of the events leading up to Churchill’s appointment as Prime Minister and then the secretive War Cabinet discussions of May 1940, Greenwood recedes into the background – useful only as a dramatic foil for Amery and his future machinations against Chamberlain, including his infamous speech in the House of Commons that quoted Oliver Cromwell: “You have sat too long for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go.” Yet in reality, Greenwood was a crucial figure in the coming events who, far from lurking in the background, was at the forefront of both the fall of Chamberlain and his replacement with Churchill, and the narrow decision in the War Cabinet to continue Britain’s campaign of resistance against Nazi Germany.
On the 8th May 1940, there was a lengthy debate in the House of Commons, where the perilous state of the war was discussed – including the retreat and evacuation of British and French forces from Norway – that led to a vote that highlighted that Chamberlain’s majority of 200 MPs had fallen to a mere 81. This signalled that Chamberlain had effectively lost the confidence of Parliament and would have to be replaced as Prime Minister. But there were significant debates as to whether his replacement should be Churchill – currently First Lord of the Admiralty – or his rival Lord Halifax, the Foreign Secretary. Although Labour eventually came out in favour of Churchill, there were many tense debates about who to support. On the evening of the 8th May, Greenwood (with the support of influential Liberal MP Clement Davies) had a lengthy and contentious argument with Attlee over whether Labour should support Halifax over Churchill, and it took over two hours for Greenwood to bring Attlee around to supporting Churchill over Halifax.
So united, the Labour leadership were determined that they would not support Chamberlain remaining in Downing Street, or see Halifax as his replacement; and in a meeting in No. 10 on the 9th May with Chamberlain, Churchill and Halifax, Attlee deferred to his deputy to deliver the party’s attitude in no uncertain terms, with Greenwood bluntly stating that “there was no the slightest prospect of the Opposition joining a government under [Chamberlain]; they not only disliked him, but regarded him as something evil”. When Churchill attempted to come to the Prime Minister’s defence, Greenwood was even blunter, cutting him off mid-speech by stating “We haven’t come here to listen to you orating, Winston”. Once again, the soft-spoken Attlee depended on the blunter Greenwood to put his point across in a manner that could not be misunderstood, and who could be depended upon to not be phased even by Churchill’s famous loquaciousness.
When the attempt to replace Chamberlain with Halifax failed – in no short part due to Attlee and Greenwood’s clear refusal to work with anyone but Churchill – the new Prime Minister succeeded Chamberlain on the 10th May and rapidly assembled his new War Cabinet. While Chamberlain would act as Lord President of the Council (effectively Churchill’s deputy) and Halifax remain Foreign Secretary, Churchill invited Attlee to become Lord Privy Seal, and Greenwood as Minister Without Portfolio. While these might seem unimportant roles, both were actually powerful positions and – most importantly – placed them within the much smaller War Cabinet where the key decisions would be made in the coming weeks, as German forces advanced on the port of Dunkirk and courageous French resistance finally collapsed.
It is often not realised just now precarious Churchill’s position as Prime Minister was in those first months. He had not been elected to the position and instead been informally placed within Downing Street through the internal politicking of the highest elements of the Conservative and Unionist Party. His predecessor still wielded significant influence, despite his recent cancer prognosis that would see his death before the end of 1940, and Halifax was still seen as the man who should have ‘properly’ been Prime Minister instead. Much of the internal political machinery of government was opposed to Churchill; upon Churchill’s ascension to office, Chamberlain’s principal private secretaries, Jock Colville and Lord Dunglass, opened a bottle of champagne and toasted Chamberlain as ‘the King over the Water’. As such, it was crucial that Churchill have sufficient allies in the wider Cabinet, and especially the War Cabinet, in the discussions that would decide on whether to resist Nazi aggression – or seek an armistice and peace.
Part 3 – Arthur Greenwood as the Voice of Labour
Although his wider Cabinet was formed of dozens of junior and senior ministers, Churchill’s inner cabinet – which would debate and vote on the most crucial decisions – was formed of five key individuals: himself as Prime Minister; Chamberlain; Halifax; Attlee; and Arthur Greenwood. It was only a matter of days before Churchill and his inner Cabinet would have to begin considering the dire state of the war; by Sunday 26th May, it had become clear that France had all but fallen to rapidly-advancing German forces, and the battered remnants of the British Expeditionary Force were being surrounded in several Channel ports – most notably Dunkirk.
The entire period known as the ‘War Cabinet Crisis’ of May and June 1940 has had entire books written about it, and is impossible to explore in detail in this article; but in summary, between the 24th and 29th May, a series of meetings were held by Churchill and both the inner and wider Cabinets about the key decision for Britain. Namely – whether the country should continue its campaign of resistance, even while it was uncertain whether even a fraction of the British Expeditionary Force could be rescued from the beaches of Dunkirk; or whether an armistice (likely with significant territorial and political concessions) should be sought with the Germans, likely via Mussolini as a ‘neutral’ third party.
Of the five men, Churchill himself wished to continue fighting, as did Attlee and Greenwood. Halifax – although not quite the Arch-Appeaser that he is commonly supposed to be – favoured a negotiated settlement and armistice. Chamberlain found himself moving between both positions during the debates; and as he still held the majority of the Conservative Party within his control, Churchill found himself indebted to Chamberlain and desperate to get him ‘on-side’ with those advocating for resistance. On the 27th May, Sir Archibald Sinclair, Leader of the Liberal Party and Secretary of State for Air, was added to the Cabinet; but while he was an effective debater and in favour of resistance, he had limited power as he was well-known to be a close friend of Churchill’s, and the Liberal Party no longer had the political weight it once possessed.
Thought 3 (eventually 4) against 2 might seem technically triumphant, the Cabinet required some kind of consensus to achieve a decision; and consensus was far from certain during the inner Cabinet’s debates. Halifax and Churchill clashed regularly, with Chamberlain moving between viewpoints; Attlee was determined that Britain stay in the fight, but his political mannerisms tended more towards quiet inflection, listening carefully and speaking only rarely to make some cogent point. By contrast, Greenwood was happy to wade into the debate and vocally assert both his support, and Labour's, for continuing the war effort. As he had acted as Attlee’s ‘voice’ in September 1939, so Greenwood did so again in the Cabinet debates, time and again reinforcing Churchill and Attlee’s narrative of continuing to fight, and in the process effectively becoming the voice of Labour’s support for Churchill.
It was not only Greenwood’s voice that supported Churchill, but also his experience as an economist; in the 26th May meeting, he supplied a rapidly-written yet expertly argued paper on ‘British Strategy in the Near Future’ which focused on economic cooperation with the United States of America, allowing Churchill to make a case for gaining support from allies outside of France, and therefore being able to continue fighting. Indeed, Roy Jenkins, in his biography of Churchill, considered Greenwood to be Churchill’s “most articulate Cabinet ally” compared to Attlee was who more “laconically reliable” during the debates.
By the end of the key part of the War Cabinet meetings at the end of May, those who advocated for continued resistance (Churchill, Attlee, Greenwood and later Sinclair) had been able to achieve a consensus against Halifax, and persuaded Chamberlain as the key figure to support them over the Foreign Secretary. After a meeting with the wider Cabinet on the 28th May that gained him further support, Churchill later would go on to make his famous ‘We shall fight on the beaches’ speech in Parliament that cemented the country’s continued resistance – and eventual victory five long years later.
Part 4 – Arthur Greenwood and New Alternate History
In the above essay, I do not wish to give the impression that I consider Arthur Greenwood to be the sole element to the inner War Cabinet agreeing to a campaign of continued resistance. Churchill’s relationship with Chamberlain, and the latter’s gradual distancing from Halifax as the debates went on, was surely the most important factor; and the support of Attlee and (later) Sinclair was also invaluable, as was Churchill’s considerable political abilities. But during those debates, I believe Arthur Greenwood’s vocal and open support for Churchill – in comparison to Attlee’s resolute but sparsely-voiced support – was key to demonstrating to both Churchill and Chamberlain & Halifax that the Prime Minister not only had the support of the major opposition party in Parliament, but also much of the country as a whole. Greenwood’s assertive responses in the Cabinet meetings, as well as his vast knowledge as an economist and academic, allowed Churchill to be supported by a second, supportive voice that could balance out Halifax’s and (at the beginning) Chamberlain’s proposals for armistice.
We can only imagine the sort of immense moral, social and political pressure that was placed upon Greenwood (and indeed the other members of the War Cabinet) during this period. Not only was he advocating for continuing to fight when British defeat seemed all but certain, but he was also struggling with the increasingly obvious effects of his struggle with alcoholism, as well as having to be the ‘voice’ for Labour in the War Cabinet. How easy – how tempting - would it have been for Greenwood to have advocated less forcefully, less persuasively for Churchill’s cause? In such a scenario, would Attlee alone have been sufficient support in Cabinet, if his deputy failed to support his determination to back Churchill and a campaign of resistance? Or might Halifax have remained determined to seek peace with Hitler, and his position win over Chamberlain and therefore, reluctantly, Churchill as well?
Yet this did not happen, and at every point during the War Cabinet debates, Arthur Greenwood gave full-throated support to the Prime Minister; and in doing so, I believe was crucial to Churchill’s success in gaining Chamberlain’s support and outmanoeuvring Halifax. Without his support – or perhaps even a different Labour Deputy Leader in the War Cabinet – Britain might have gone down a very different path during the Second World War.
Tragically, this was Arthur Greenwood’s highest point politically. Though he acted as Leader of the Opposition for most of the war, his struggle with alcoholism rapidly became more apparent, and he resigned from the Cabinet in 1942. He was elected as Treasurer for the Labour Party in 1943 and served to the end of the war; and was Minister without Portfolio and Paymaster General during Attlee’s first Ministry. But he died in almost complete obscurity in 1954. He left only sparse and incomplete papers in his personal archives, nowhere near sufficient to write a biography, and had only begun sketching out an autobiography upon his death.
I find it telling that, when considering the references used in writing and evidencing Greenwood's Wikipedia page, not a single source is actually directly about him; instead, his entire life is sourced from biographies of more well-known historical figures, and populist histories of the period. Here we perhaps see the ultimate example of Greenwood existing in the shadows of giants, glimpsed only as a cameo, a walk-on part to facilitate the onward progress in history of Great Men like Churchill. To me, this is the most poignant example of the disservice done to Greenwood – but also a sort of rallying cry for the Alternate History genre. Perhaps it is only our genre that can truly do Greenwood justice, by penning stories that demonstrate how his absence could have led Britain – and the world – down a very different path.
During my research into Greenwood, it slowly became clear that writing anything more detailed than Richard Whiting’s (superb) entry about him in the Dictionary of Labour Biography would be near-impossible. His papers in the Bodleian Library at Oxford lack any political correspondence, the core of any politician’s biography, and only a limited amount of personal letters and other correspondence. To the historian, then, Arthur Greenwood remains an ephemeral figure who lurks in the background of history and on the sidelines of major historical events, any further serious analysis prevented by a lack of primary sources to review and dissect.
But that is then where the Alternate History genre can play to its strengths: unshackled by the requirement of the historian to cite every source and document every single fact, it can instead take the essence and character of the Arthur Greenwood we have witnessed and use counterfactual fiction to tell a story about him that makes him memorable again and does him justice. And if we can do so for Arthur Greenwood – then what other unjustly forgotten or obscure historical figures can our genre help do justice for by highlighting how their absence or inaction could have affected the course of history?
Adam Selby-Martin is an author who has contributed stories to Comedy Through the (P)ages, Fight Them on the Beaches, and Grapeshot and Guillotines.