Dare to Be a Daniel by Tony Benn Page B

time.
    Mrs Hipsey had a cottage where she took in washing, and in 1945 we collected from her the laundry we had left there to be washed in 1939 – and it had all been done and kept carefully.
    Along the street was Mr Dash, who had a horse and cart and advertised his work with the simple words painted on the shed next door: ‘ D ASH 1868’, which remained there for many years.
    Further away was Southminster and occasionally we would go to Maldon, or even Chelmsford, which seemed like a teeming metropolis compared to Steeple.
    We sat on the lawn, played games, sunbathed, collected chalk and pebbles from the beach and swam in the river, which was at that time clean enough to do so safely.
    Once a week we had a musical evening and I would play some 78 rpm records on an old gramophone – all of which are still in my possession – and we would sit and drink tea (or rather the grown-ups did, because I was not allowed to drink tea or coffee until I was twelve, on the same day that I wore long trousers for the first time).
    Stansgate was – and still is – my idea of a real holiday and, apart from a one-day trip to Boulogne, I never went abroad until my war service; the happiest time for me is to have my children and grandchildren down for a weekend and discuss with them more and more improvements.

4

    Growing Up
    WHEN I WAS born in 1925, my father was, as I said, the Liberal Member of Parliament for Leith. Two years later he left the Liberals, resigned his seat and joined the Labour Party. In 1928 he was asked to stand for Aberdeen and was successfully elected there in a by-election.
    In that year, when I was three and a half, I visited the home of a Labour MP, Sir Oswald Mosley, who had joined Labour from the Conservatives. I must have been invited to a children’s party, although I don’t remember that; Mother recalled that we regularly played with Cynthia and Oswald Mosley’s children, so presumably that was why we were there. I remember there were enamelled fire ‘dogs’ – one in the shape of a soldier and one a sailor – and at the end I was asked to say thank you and said, ‘Boys and girls and sailors, thank you for a nice tea’: my first speech. Mother had no time for ‘Tom’ Mosley, as he was known, or the British Union of Fascists, which he later formed.
    In June 1930, at the age of five (by which time my father was in the Cabinet as Secretary of State for India), I went to 10 Downing Street to watch the Trooping of the Colour from the balcony, and Ramsay MacDonald gave me a chocolate biscuit. My mother told me that I said afterwards, ‘I expected to meet the Prime Minister, but I didn’t expect a chocolate biscuit.’
    Ramsay MacDonald had been left a widower with five young children, and by the time he was Prime Minister for the second time, his daughter Ishbel acted for him as his host at Number 10. In her hand-written letter of invitation to my mother to take us to see the Trooping of the Colour, she added:
    Of course if it is against your principles to make them picture soldiers as fine fellows belonging to a good institution I shall quite understand. I should like to have an anti military lecture for the children after the show, but I think I had better leave that to the parents.
    Father had devoted his period at the India Office to an attempt to bring about Indian self-government, for which he was sharply criticised by Churchill. It was at Father’s initiative that a Round Table conference was arranged in London in late 1931 to discuss the future of India. In the election in October that year, Labour was heavily defeated and my father lost his seat. Nevertheless he took me to meet Mahatma Gandhi with my older brother Michael, and I remember the occasion vividly because Gandhi, who was sitting on the floor on a carpet, invited us to sit down next to him. Though I don’t remember what he said, I was much struck by the power of the man who both defeated the British empire and reconciled the British