"I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire. ...
I am proud to be a member of that vast commonwealth and society of nations and communities gathered in and around the ancient British monarchy, without which the good cause might well have perished from the face of the earth.
Here we are, and here we stand, a veritable rock of salvation in this drifting world...."
Allied army positions in central Europe on 10 May 1945.
The Soviet numerical superiority in relation to the Western Allies was roughly 4:1 in men and 2:1 in tanks at the end of hostilities in Europe.
"The overall political object is to impose upon Russia the will of the United States and British Empire.
Even thought "the will" of these two countries may be defined as no more than a square deal for Poland, that does not necessarily limit the military commitment. a quick success might induce the Russians to submit to our will at least for the time being; but it might not.
That's is for the Russians to decide.
If they want a total war, they are in a position to have it."
"The Bahai represents a split within Islam.... The thing about the British Empire in places like India was that Muslims would not work for the British... So, they had to create a split within Islam, which resulted in the Bahai Faith, which produced the Bahai, and they would work for the British" - Tarpley
"An empty Taxi pulled up outside 10 Downing Street - and Clement Attlee stepped out"
- Winston S. Churchill
Arthur Greenwood, Clement Attlee and Hugh Dalton
"Later it came to my knowledge that on November 22nd [1935], four days before the Party meeting, there was held a meeting of a Masonic Lodge to which at that time a number of Labour MPs and some Transport House officials belonged. A list of members of this Lodge was shown to me. No doubt voting for the Party leadership was discussed, formally or informally, at this meeting, and Greenwood was the Masons’ Candidate. Most members of the Lodge were closer friends of his than of the other two candidates. I have very little knowledge of Freemasonry and no strong feelings either for or against it. But the incident has, I think, some historical interest."
Hugh Dalton,
The Fateful Years, 1956
"Mr. Atlee is just an extremely modest man, Winston."
"He has much to be modest about..."
- Winston S. Churchill
Labour Leader and Future Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Hugh Dalton
"It was a summons to a special meeting of the New Welcome Lodge, dated four days before the meeting of the Parliamentary Party at which Attlee was re-elected Leader after the last
election.
This Lodge is masonic and appears to cater especially, though not exclusively, for Labour MPs. The secretary summoning the meeting was Scott Lindsay [the Secretary of the Parliamentary Labour Party].
He canvassed me for Greenwood at the time and, in reply to my obvious point of doubt, told me that Greenwood promised that, if elected Leader, he would never be out of control on important occasions.
A full list of members of the Lodge was on the back of the summons. The list included Sir Robert Young, Joe Compton, A. Short, Major Milner, J. W. Bowen, Rev. H. Dunnico, Colonel L’Estrange Malone, Colonel H. W. Burton (a Tory M.P. and the only one in this galère), Jack Hayes, F. J. Bellenger, Willie Henderson, F. O. Roberts, Greenwood himself (these two appear to have joined about the same time), W. Dobbie, Ben Tillet[t], George Hicks, Lord Kinnoul[l] (now dead)."
"At this time, of course, Labour were on the verge of forming its first majority government, while at the same time the effects of the depression were hitting hard.
The formation of the New Welcome Lodge reflected the tense political situation in two ways:
first, there was the concern, expressed explicitly by the Prince of Wales [The Nazi King, Edward VIII] , that members of the governing party was not excluded from freemasonry, and,
second, there was the wider belief, held particularly strongly by Rockcliff, that freemasonry could help ameliorate class conflict.
The New Welcome Lodge was, in other words, a strategy to use freemasonry to help avert social revolution. Rockcliff forwarded a memorandum to Colville Smith outlining the philosophy of the new lodge, without explicitly revealing the Labour connection of the lodge.
The aim of the lodge, he declared, was 'to bring home to the industrial section of the community the principles and tenets of the Craft.' 'It is doubtless true', Rockcliff wrote, 'that, in rural areas, social barriers are to some extent broken down in certain lodges which exist in those areas. But, as regards the great centres of population, the same position can hardly be said to obtain.' The members of the new lodge would be missionaries for freemasonry. It was a firm conviction of Rockcliff and others that freemasonry could help reduce 'unsettling influences' on the shop floor, and would encourage loyalty to the crown. Considerable thought was given as to how the reduce practical barriers to membership. Subscriptions would be kept to a minimum, and the meal after the lodge meeting would also be of a more 'homely' variety than the grand feasts usually enjoyed by masonic lodges. Rockcliff proposed three names for the lodge: the Civitas Brittanicus lodge; the Lodge of New Citizenship; and the 1929 Lodge. However, at the Prince of Wales' suggestion, the name of 'New Welcome' was chosen, as more indicative of its purpose.
Throughout these discussions, Rockcliff had carefully avoided committing to writing any explicit statement that the lodge was intended primarily for Labour MPs. The suggestion that the new badge of the lodge should incorporate Big Ben was turned down. The only MP to be involved in these negotiations was the Rev. Sir Herbert Dunnico, a Baptist minister who was at that time M.P. for Consett, and an influential parliamentary figure, as Chairman of Committees of the House of Commons. The other founders of the lodge had friendly society or trade union connections, such as John Bowen, the General Secretary of the Union of Post Office Workers, and Charles Sitch, the Secretary of the Chain Makers Society, both of whom had become MPs by the time the lodge was consecrated in November 1929.
The lodge immediately began actively to recruit further sitting Labour MPs.
The Freemason described how the first four initiates in the lodge were all Labour MPs: Sir Robert Young, the Deputy Speaker, Joseph Compton, J H Shillaker and Walter Henderson, the son of Arthur Henderson, at that time Foreign Secretary.
Scott Lindsay, the Labour Party Secretary, was initiated soon afterwards, and Arthur Greenwood himself was initiated as an entered apprentice in February 1931, made a fellow craft a month later and finally a Master Mason in April 1931.
Over twenty Labour MPs were recruited over the next three years. They came from all parts of the country, but among London Labour MPs who joined the lodge may be noted George Hicks, MP for East Woolwich, who had ironically been creator of the Amalgamated Union of Building Operatives, one component of which was the Operative Stonemasons Society, and Charles Ammon, MP for North Camberwell, who had been Leader of the LCC. The lodge did not only recruit MPs. Clerks and other employees of the House also joined, and others with no obvious connection with parliament, who were presumably connected with the Labour party in London.
By 1934, then, the New Welcome Lodge had certainly achieved the Prince of Wales' aim of ensuring that the parliamentary labour party was not alienated from freemasonry, and a substantial group of freemasons had been built up within the labour ranks. There is no indication however that it achieved much success in pursuing Percy Rockcliff's wider vision of taking freemasonry to the shop floor.
However, the political situation had of course changed dramatically, with Ramsey Macdonald's creation of a National Government and the 1931 General Election in 1931 election, which saw Labour reduced to just 54 MPs.
This reduced the pool of potential recruits to the New Welcome Lodge, so that in 1934, no MP came forward to join the lodge, and it was decided to fundamentally alter its nature. It became a house facility of the Palace of Westminster, open to staff working there and to MPs of all parties. Its membership consequently ceased to be dominated by MPs and it was chiefly run by members of staff of the Palace of Westminster. By the time of the fiftieth anniversary of the lodge, the membership of the lodge stood at 58, but just seven of these were MPs, none of whom took a particularly active part in the life of the lodge.
Between 1934 and 1980, only three MPs served as Masters of the lodge; otherwise the Masters were all members of staff of the Palace of Westminster. The change in the nature of the lodge was indicaed by the abandoning of its original badge, showing an ever open door, and its replacement with a badge incorporating the portcullis of the House of Commons."
MASONIC PAPERS
by Dr ANDREW PRESCOTT
FREEMASONRY AND THE HISTORY OF THE LABOUR PARTY IN LONDON: SOME APPROACHES
Lecture to Labour Heritage, November 2002
Probable Axes of Attack of Warsaw Pact.
Taken from Graham H. Turbiville, "Invasion in Europe--A Scenario,"
Army, November 1976, p. 19.
Churchill's War by David Irving from Spike EP on Vimeo.
"After seven years' research in British and foreign archives like Washington, Moscow, Paris -- because the Churchill trustees still refuse access to his papers to any except their official biographer -- Irving has built up an unusual portrait of the man who brought devastation to Europe and ruin to his own people, while leading them to a Pyrrhic victory. Unstinting in his praise of the achievement of an old man in uniting and inspiring a moribund Mother Country to make one last great effort, Irving conceals little of the uglier detail, like how Churchill thwarted the only chances Europe had of peace in 1939 and 1940, or how he unleashed the cruel bombing war that killed one million Europeans. There are touching sidelights on Churchill' s strained relations with his own family, cast by the unpublished papers of his daughters; but a harsher light is thrown on the demi- corruption, hard drinking, cynicism, brutality, deceit and callousness of Winston's regime. He rejoiced in killing, was intoxicated by the sound of cannon, exhilarated by his own graphic language.
This is a stout picture of a hard old man, aged sixty as the book begins -- emerging from a political wilderness to fight a war with a toughness that appalled men even half his age. "Some chicken, some neck!" was his famous epigram at Ottawa at the end of 1941. He applied it to Britain; this book applies it to him.
Irving is one of the world's most widely read dissident historians: unwilling to rely on published biographies or histories, he cuts across fresh ploughed country, searching in unlikely places for the bare rock of history: diaries, files, and private papers. When Irving offers new theories, sometimes adventurous ones, these are never demolished. "Churchill," he concludes in this book, "was a man who destroyed two empires, one of them the enemy's."
DAVID IRVING was born in Essex, England, in 1938, son of a Navy officer, father of four teenage daughters. After unorthodox education in London University and a Ruhr steelworks his first book, The Destruction of Dresden, became a beststeller in 1963. He applied the same research methods to other controversial works: his biographies of Hitler and Rommel are the best known. Using primarily original documents and diaries, Irving's conclusions often differ startlingly from accepted views. He began researching this Churchill biography in 1976. "
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