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Pamphlet No. 2
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From Handsworth to the Soviet Union:The tanks that toppled Hitler
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Britain’s Road to Socialism The new edition of Britain’s Road to Socialism, the Communist Party’s programme, adopted in July 2011; presents and analysis of capitalism and imperialism in its current form; answers the questions of how a revolutionary transformation might be bought about in 21st Century Britain; and what a socialist and communist society in Britain might look like. The BRS was first published in 1951 after nearly six years of discussion and debate across the CP, labour movement and working class. Over its 8 editions it has sold more than a million copies in Britain and helped to shape and develop the struggle of the working class for more than half a century. Other previous editions of the BRS have been published in 1952, 1958, 1968, 1977, 1989 and 2000 as well as multiple substantially revised versions.
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HISTORY
Our History No. 2
R U O
Pamphlet No. 2
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From Handsworth to the Soviet Union The tanks that toppled Hitler CONTENTS page The Hawthorns Soviet Ally The Carriage & Wagon Works Maisky speaks The old BRC&W Looking Back
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The Hawthorns On an old industrial site, a stone’s throw from the West Bromwich football ground, and at the edge of Handsworth as it proceeds towards the Black Country, lies an intriguing memento of Britain’s wartime alliance with Soviet Russia. Yards from Hawthorne’s Halt (now the Hawthorn), the special railway junction between Birmingham and Wolverhampton that now only disgorges fans on their way to the Celebrating the Allies in style– the Baggies’ ground, lies a site that some half a USA, French, British and USSR flags century ago hosted one of the largest railway carriage and train wagon manufacturing plants in the world. A site that spread across the border of both Handsworth & Smethwick and was divided by the railway. Over the years, this site has given way to various warehouses and small workshops and, for a time in the 1970s, part of the old works was used for a Manpower Services Commission (whatever happened to that?) training centre. Today, even that has been demolished and a brand spanking new supermarket has arisen from the dust. Unusually, Morrison’s have permitted rail enthusiast Colin Wheeler to provide local colour by supplying pictures of the former factory to decorate the walls of the new palace of food.
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Soviet Ally One picture (left) brings to life the moment when the wartime Ambassador for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) to Britain, Ivan Mikhailovich Maisky (18841975), came to the site of Birmingham Railway Carriage and Wagon Company. Also the Soviet’s Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maisky’s boss was Vyacheslav Molotov, perhaps only second to Stalin in Maisky speaks to 2,000 workers at BRCSW in front of the Stalin tank. the then Soviet leadership. (No doubt, the many `V’s on the tank was for both `V for Victory’ and `V for Valentine’!) Maisky (pictured right) came to symbolically collect the first Valentine tank off the production line before it began its dangerous route to the Second Front via the Murmansk Convoys. These were the merchant ships that went around the north of Norway, deep into the Arctic sea. German U-boats terrorised the Atlantic but not as mercilessly as they did in destroying British seamen bringing relief to the Second Front. Indeed, not many men made the Murmansk run twice and lived.
Ivan Maisky
The tanks were provided by the UK to the USSR by means of a LendLease scheme similar to that which the USA had set up with the UK earlier in the war. As Churchill put it in a letter to Stalin, the tanks were given: “upon the same basis as the American Lend-Lease Bill, of which no formal From Handsworth to the Soviet Union: the tanks that toppled Hitler
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account is kept in money”. In his reply, using language echoed in all communications between Britain and the USSR at the time, Stalin welcomed the UK’s “comradely co-operation”. [Ivan Maisky Memoirs of a Soviet Ambassador: The War 1939-43 trans. Andrew Rothstein London: Hutchison & Co. Publishers Inc. (1967) p194]
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The Carriage & Wagon Works The firm that produced the tanks was Birmingham Railway Carriage and Wagon Company (BRC&W), established in 1854 when it had originally had its wagons built and maintained by another company elsewhere. The expansion onto its own 10acre site partly in Smethwick, on the south side of the Birmingham, Wolverhampton and Dudley Railway, off Middlemore Road and mainly across the Handsworth boundary, enabled the company to engage in massive growth. This is an historic site for the West Midlands; Edmund Fowler, the BRC&W manager back then, even had a house built for himself and his family on the north east side of the site, called the Laurels, and caused Middlemore Road, which now lies between the supermarket site and the football ground, to be upgraded from a bridleway to a highway.
A Valentine tank in action on the Eastern Front.
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Maisky speaks A fluent English speaker, Maisky addressed workers at the Handsworth end of the gigantic site, which made Valentine tanks (see pic left – in action on the Eastern Front) amongst other war material. On the very spot where the supermarket now stands, on 27th September 1941, Maisky received a warm welcome when he took delivery of the first Valentine tank, named after the then soviet leader “Comrade Stalin”, off the Smethwick/Handsworth production line. This speech was during 'Tanks for Russia' week, an all-Britain drive that started the production of several thousand Valentine tanks for the Eastern front. A six-and-a-half minute BBC recording of Maisky’s speech can be heard at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/ ussr/6701.shtml
Mrs Maisky at the factory
He outlines the increasingly difficult conditions and huge losses on the Soviet front in the war against Hitler, which demand close collaboration between Britain and the USSR. He stresses the importance of Britain's 'Tanks for Russia' scheme, for which the Soviet people were grateful, and declares that the war effort depends on “tanks, more tanks and yet more tanks”. But even more stirringly, you can watch a short video of Maisky’s visit on: http://backup.britishpathe.com/record.php?id=12948 The crowds of workers at the factory are beside themselves as Maisky From Handsworth to the Soviet Union: the tanks that toppled Hitler
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and his wife appear. A young Harold Macmillan, later a Tory Prime Minister, can be seen walking behind Maisky, completely ignored by the crowd. There is a scene of the Valentine tank with a Soviet flag covering a part of it which, is pulled off to reveal the name "Stalin" on the side. We see various shots of the crowd as Maisky makes his speech and expresses gratitude for the tank. He concludes by saying the more tanks they have the quicker the victory will be and the first tank is driven away to cheers from the workers.
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The old BRC&W All that is currently known about the politics of workers at the factory is that a very large Communist Party branch existed there in 1942 – many hundred strong. It must have seemed odd to have a mass meeting with a fraternal delegate speaking from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union! One of the pictures includes a large group of workers with clenched fists raised in a manner reminiscent of the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War (see next page).
Maisky’s speech was recorded for the BBC and for the Pathé News, a kind of ‘News at 10’ for cinema .
Although mostly remembered now as a global railway rolling stock manufacturer, the factory also made aeroplanes, buses, trolleybuses and tanks. Of the latter, there were the A10 Cruiser, the Churchill, Cromwell, and Challenger. The Hamilcar glider used in the D-Day landings and at Operation Market Garden in Arnhem were also made there.
The company closed in 1963 and two thousand workers lost their jobs after British Railways rejected the prototype diesel locomotive Lion, which had been entirely financed, designed and built by BRC&W. The Beeching cuts now making heavy inroads into Britain’s train building capacity. An earlier campaign to avert closure of the rival publicly owned Derby loco works, succeeded in attracting more political support and survived. BRC&WC now found itself in financial difficulties as its former dominance over captive markets overseas faded, as the British Empire retreated. In 1963 the works, now covering 56 acres, were closed and the site redeveloped into the Middlemore Industrial Estate, which opened in 1966. From Handsworth to the Soviet Union: the tanks that toppled Hitler
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Looking Back Today few people remember the special day in September 1941 when the Soviet Union came to west Birmingham and the Black Country. But Maisky, who died in 1975, never forgot his experience in the West Midlands. The virtually mobbing he had received at the factory was but a tip of the iceberg as far as the popularity of the Red Army went. The level of political support for the Soviet alliance was unforgettable to many and would have resonances for decades.
BRC&W workers celebrate with clenched fists
This had been no one-off. Whilst Maisky does not record receiving the first tank in his later memoirs of his London posting, modestly, he does record another event that impressed him about the West Midlands. A few months after his own visit, Maisky’s deputy, K V Novikov, went to Birmingham to attend an open air meeting convened to demand the immediate opening of a second, western, front. This proved to be a particularly successful event, far beyond anyone’s wildest dreams. An astonishing 50,000 people turned up and “the mood was one of enthusiasm”. The organisers, in an attempt to maintain national unity in support of the joint struggle with the Soviet Union The Communist Party against fascism, had invited the then Lord Mayor of used stickers on lampposts, possibly the Birmingham, Alderman Tiptaft, to chair the mass rally. earliest use of such Overwhelmed by the buoyant mood, the rather staid material, to call for centre-right politician found himself commenting on the the second front. From Handsworth to the Soviet Union: the tanks that toppled Hitler
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sudden enthusiasm for Communism, when he said, seemingly in an offhand way out of his own sense of astonishment: “…if now we were to have a vote on that question, the majority of the country would probably prove to be Communist!” Maisky records that “the meeting responded with a thunderous `yes!’, and drowned Tiptaft’s next words “in tremendous applause”. [Ivan Maisky Memoirs of a Soviet Ambassador: The War 193943 trans. Andrew Rothstein London: Hutchison & Co. Publishers Inc. (1967) p300] The Ambassador applies his own pinch of salt about the Lord Mayor but duly notes the significance of the popular mood. Handsworth & Smethic had been neighbours containing many different metal bashing industries all of these industries were turned from civilian production to war time production overnight. It was because of this that tanks made in Handsworth ended up in the Soviet Union in the world wide fight to defeat fascism. And so should posterity remember the day Handsworth shouted `tanks for Joe’! Today almost seventy years after the defeat of Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, and Tojo’s Japan, it is all too easy to forget the war against fascism. This was an evil theory that some peoples in the world are born inferior and others are naturally inclined to rule. It was a set of political ideas that are Signing up to join the Communist Party on the believed in fiercely repressing those Eastern front in 1942 who differed with this. Above all, Fascism in Germany led to the deliberate extermination of six million Jews and another six million considered to be inferior– Communists, Socialists, Trades Unionists, Homosexuals, Travellers, the mentally ill and those who From Handsworth to the Soviet Union: the tanks that toppled Hitler
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Our History No. 2 simply opposed Fascism. Over 28 million citizens of the soviet union died in the war –far more than in Britain. The factory workers of Birmingham and the Black Country all those years ago knew how effective the tanks they made would be in eastern Europe. The largest tank battle ever held occurred in Kursk in the USSR, which saw the tide against Nazism turn. Before the Battle of Stalingrad saw room -to –room fighting in every building but the city never surrounded. No wonder that their work was going to be put to good use!
“Fly higher and higher and higher, our emblem the Soviet star...” a hugely popular song about the Red Airforce sung by YCLers from 1942.
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From Handsworth to the Soviet Union: the tanks that toppled Hitler
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