One small Quaker meeting, four Nobel prizes!

When I began researching Irene's Pickard's archive in 2012, her daughter, Alison Bush, agreed that I could come each Wednesday at 10.00 in the morning and read and study the archive, making notes as I went, until five in the afternoon. Each time we shared a pleasant lunch together, and Alison would tell me snippets of her memories of their life in Geneva, the city that had been her home for the first fourteen years of her life.

She remembered Carl Jung visiting their home in Geneva, and her sitting on his knees. She would have been about eight years old at the time, far too young to realise the importance of the visitor, or to have any comprehension of her mother's fascination with Jung's theories. Beside, she was used to visitors to their home. It was a sort of open house for so many diplomats, academics, theologians, representatives of NGOs, delegates to conferences connected to the League of Nations, journalists, as well as for students attending the Post Graduate Institute of International Studies at the University, or the summer schools in international affairs run by Alfred Zimmern. It was a rare day in which there was just their family in their home. Her father, Bertram, was master at what we now call networking: anybody and everybody concerned with peace-work in Geneva was known to him. 

To cope with these incessant waves of visitors, Irene taught herself to always be ready to feed an unknown number of people, and to cook to cordon bleu standards for special occasions. Although started before the Pickards arrived in Geneva, Irene and Bertram perfected the informal meals used to bring diplomats together for off the record discussion about the issues of the day. A tradition still continued by the Quaker United Nations Office in Geneva. The seeds of mutual understanding sown at such events sometimes grow and bear fruit.

Geneva at the time of the League of Nations was a place of experiment in international relations. Nothing like it had existed anywhere before. Countries had to work out how to use the channels of communication opened up between them; how to relate to the newly created and emerging international institutions; how to train staff to work in such institutions – hence the Post Graduate Institute; how to relate to the emerging plethora of international non-governmental organisations; how to be part of the self-styled capital of peace. So much that we take for granted about how the world is integrated was first hammered out in Geneva between the wars, from communications to passports. 

Hawks in each country tell a story of peace being maintained by mutual fear. A narrative promoted, at considerable expense, by what has been termed the military-industrial complex: they have very deep pockets and the need for every increasing investment. The truth is that peace is much more effectively constructed by international co-operations and collaboration, and at much lower cost. It is that co-operation and collaborations that the Geneva experiment sought to encourage and expand. It was an attempt to build on the truth that human being collaborate at their core, but compete at their margins. Count the number of collaborative interactions between the peoples of countries compared to the number of military conflicts: peoples trade, communicate, exchange and intermarry – it is their governments and political leaders that tend to impose boarders and make wars. Much that was achieved by the League was about enabling peoples to interact; its efforts with governments was less successful – they were too invested in power and sovereignty. 

The small Geneva Meeting of the Quakers was at best about thirty people, including both residents and visitors, but among them many were engaged in the prevalent peace-work of the city. The result was a harvest of Nobel Prizes! This completely floored me when I began my researches into Irene's archive. Two Nobel Peace Prizes – Emily Green Balch and Philip  Noel-Baker – one Nobel Prize for Economic – James Edward Meade – which was for work on international trade, something he felt to be crucial in peace-building – and the 1947 Peace Prize for the peace-work and relief work undertaken more generally by the British and American Quakers, of which the peace-work in Geneva was a part. Strictly that is a ratio of one Nobel Prize to every ten Friends at the Meeting, if the 1947 prize is discounted (that was only very loosely connected). An extraordinarily high ratio. It would be hard to find a similar concentration anywhere else.

Militaristic interpretations of history often dismiss the League of Nations and other peace work in Geneva between the wars as being idealistic but misguided: time and energy that would have been far better spent making military preparation. The surprising but little told truth is that much of the post 1945 era draws on the work done by the League and others in Geneva, often the more prosaic and not so noticed stuff that enables interconnection between peoples, but which are essential parts of the framework of modern life.

Universal Basic Income – a Quaker idea!

Sifting through Irene's archive revealed a number of pamphlets and other publications by her husband, Bertram Pickard. Whilst most concerned themselves with his dedication to peace-work, and a few with the spread of Quakerism across Europe, one stands apart. It was a radical foray into political economy: A Reasonable Revolution: being a discussion of the State Bonus Scheme – a proposal for a national minimum income. 

Bertram had been at Bootham School, one of the Quaker boarding schools, along with Denis Milner, whose brain child the 'state bonus' was. Denis and his wife, Mabel, wrote a small pamphlet about the idea in 1918. It seemed such an obvious and revolutionary step: pay every single adult a fixed sum of money sufficient to provide for their most basic needs. At a stroke, the demon of absolute poverty, whether caused by sickness, unemployment or incapacity, would be done away with. And it would be simply funded by each person in work, or earning money from investments, being taxed at 20%. 

It was an obvious solution for all to common destitution that followed in the wake of the First World War: the millions of permanently incapacitated x-servicemen; the legions of widows; the masses of unemployed discharged troops; these in addition to the usual burden of the sick, workless and unfortunate. 

Bertram expanded the pamphlet, with its limited circulation largely in Quaker circles, to a small book, published by George and Allan Unwin in 1919. The following year a fuller book by Milner explaining the scheme was also published by George and Allan Unwin under the title Higher Production by a Bonus on National Output. A proposal for a minimum income for all varying with National Productivity. 

Thus the idea of what we now call Universal Basic Income (UBI) was born. It was discussed at the Brighton Conference of the British Labour Party in 2021, and then seems to have been largely forgotten.  

However, elements of UBI have been introduced by different governments over time and applied to sections of their population as a universal benefit: old age pensions and child benefit being the most common; but to date nowhere has tried to apply it across the whole population, as was mooted by Milner and Pickard.

Applying it to the whole populations seems to have been reborn as an idea in the 1980s, often without people realising its earlier iteration. It was Walter Van Trier who in 1995 published his PhD thesis, entitled, Every one a King which put Milner and Pickard back on the map as its originators.

Now UBI is increasingly being discussed and even experimented with. It would seem worthy of consideration in an age of increasingly precarious employment and gross income disparity, with threats of automation, especially with the advent of AI, and globalisation, further disrupting lives.  Is it time for yet another great Quaker idea?

Why did Britain starve to death one million German civilians in 1919?

But the war ended at eleven o'clock on the eleventh of November 1918! We know this because we celebrate it every Remembrance Day. Not that celebrate is the right word, more like commemorate, with the added wash of mournfulness for those who 'gave their lives' – those recruited or conscripted victims of war who are increasingly portrayed as heroes. Why do I say a "wash of mournfulness"? – because those who actually remember the dead of the First World War, who had real memories about those who lost their lives, are themselves all gone. You cannot remember those you never knew, nor mourn their loss. What is carried out is little better than a collective pageant, a pantomime of mourning, an indulgence in nationalistic and militaristic sentiments.  

But the war did not end at 11.00 on 11/11/18. The fighting on the Western Front Ended. The fighting in Italy ended. The war against the Ottoman Empire had already ended. But Britain's navel campaign against Germany continued until to June 28 1919. 

This came as a surprise to me whist researching for the book. The history I had been taught, and, indeed, the history that is taught in our schools even now, focusses on the end of the war being on 11/11/18. It has become the standard version of our history, repeated in film, television and book after book. There is, however, a darker truth, one which we would prefer not to remember because what happened would now count as a war crime, as a crime against humanity: the deliberate starving to death of upwards to a million German civilians.

It pays to remember that not a single allied soldier's boot had landed on German soil. The German Army, for all the push back it had suffered in the autumn of 1918, still held its ground. It was still a cohesive and effective force. It still occupied much of France and Belgium. It was not defeated. A truth that Hitler was to capitalise on later during his rise to power.

The war on the Western Front was a stalemate. For all of the sacrifices made – there was hardly a street, town or village that had not lost someone in those killing fields – there was no clear victory. It fell to the politicians to deliver to a deeply wounded public the victory the fighting failed to provide. 

In the British Cabinet, the hawks, led by Winston Churchill, the Secretary of State for Munitions, argued for the absolute necessity of continuing the navel blockade: Germany needed to be forced to capitulate to every demand the allies might make at the Peace Conference. There was to be no negotiating with them. They were simply to be presented with the terms to agree to.  Churchill continued to hold this position when he became Secretary of State for War in Lloyd George's cabinet following the December 1918 election. The blockade was to ensure that no food supplies reached Germany until after they had signed the Versailles Treaty on 28th June 1919. He was of the opinion that Germany should be crushed to such an extent, if necessary by reducing its population numbers, that it would never again pose a threat. Starvation contributed to doing this. Georges Clemenceau, the French President at the time, even expressed the opinion that there were twenty million Germans to many (Patrick J Buchanan, 2008) 

There is another matter which calls for very prompt settlement. It is the last to which I shall refer before I sit down. I mean the speedy enforcing of the Peace Terms upon Germany. At the present moment we are bringing everything to a head with Germany. We are holding all our means of coercion in full operation, or in immediate readiness for use. We are enforcing the blockade with rigour. We have strong Armies ready to advance at the shortest notice. Germany is very near starvation. The evidence I have received from officers sent by the War Office all over Germany shows, first of all, the great privations which the German people are suffering, and secondly, the danger of collapse of the entire structure of German social and national life under the pressure of hunger and malnutrition.      (Winston Churchill addressing Parliament in March 1919)

This is part of British history that is usually omitted. Far better to end the account of the war with the armistice of 11/11/18 than to face the truth of how Britain reduced the population of Germany to mass starvation in order to ensure acceptance of the peace terms. 

Churchill's role in this as its main instigator does not sit comfortably with the usual laudations he receives as Britain's greatest Prime-Minister. It does not fit well with that narrative – but then a lot that he did and stood for sits less comfortably in modern eyes. He was an imperialist at the height of empire and did not shy away from using force in order to preserve or further British interests, whether by sending the Black and Tans into Ireland, or equipping the air-force with mustard gas bombs to use on Kurdish rebels in Iraq.

The Quaker imperative to 'answer that of God in everyone' led to their perceiving the people of Germany in a very different way. They were not an enemy to be defeated, but men, women and children suffering the consequences of continued hostility. The Friends War Victim Relief Committee in London had been revived in 1914, and, under the secretaryship of Ruth Fry concerned itself with all who were harmed by the war, regardless of the lines of division imposed by Governments. Someone in urgent need of relief is someone in urgent need of relief no matter what their nationality. As soon as it was possible to bring relief to the suffering peoples of Germany, the committee did so. Ruth Fry wrote in her memoir of the period:

Figures given at a meeting of German scientists show 763,000 deaths of civilians during the war due to underfeeding, and in 1918 the deaths from this cause rose to 37 per cent of the total. They estimated further, that one million children died as a result of hunger and its attendant illnesses through the blockade. Deaths were so frequent in Frankfurt-am-Main (March 1920) that there were funerals all day long, and a lady told our workers that she had to wait a whole week for the chance of burying her brother-in-law. On the other hand, the birth-rate fell to about 50 per cent of the normal, so that the deaths exceeded the births, and Dr. Meyer, of the Berlin City Health Department, stated in 1920 that the average size of babies at birth was only one-half of the normal, and that there were no children who were not undernourished. Of the children in the elementary schools 80 per cent were estimated to be unable to follow the lessons because of their enfeebled condition.  (Ruth Fry: A Quaker Adventure. The story of nine years' relief and reconstruction: Nisbet, London, 1926)