Personal recollections by IVOR BULMER-THOMAS
When Mussolini brought Italy into the war on the Nazi side on 10th June 1940, those of us who knew that he did not represent the great mass of democratic, peaceloving Italians were temporarily at a loss to know what to do. As 1941 opened we realized that we had a duty to remind our countrymen of the true Italy that underlay the Fascist crimes and saw that what had happened opened the possibility of overthrowing Mussolini’s evil régime and bringing that true Italy back to life. We were a small group of persons connected with Italy in various ways – academics, journalists, members of the London Council of the British Institute of Florence, broadcasters, former residents in Italy. Many others who later became prominent in the British-Italian Society would have been with us if they had been available, but they were in the armed forces or otherwise out of reach, and even for those civilians in England travelling was difficult.
We met from time to time to consider what could be done. A prominent part in our discussions was taken by Miss Isabella Massey, a lecturer at Bedford College in the University of London and a close friend of the anti-Fascist historian Gaetano Salvemini, whose ideas she shared. She was also a friend of Alessandro ("Sandro") Magri, that delightful son of a Bergamasco father and an Irish mother, and it was he who brought me into the discussions. At that time I had been seconded from the Army to direct a secret radio station Radio Italia (as we are now allowed to say), which was supposed to be in Italy but was in fact in Bedfordshire, and Magri was one of the broadcasters 1. Cecil Sprigge had been on the staff of the Manchester Guardian since 1923 and had been its Rome correspondent. His wife Sylvia – who had a talent for intrigue that was admired even in Rome – was Assistant Diplomatic Correspondent of Reuters. Their flat at 11 Buckingham Street by the Water Gate on the Embankment was our first headquarters and one of our meeting-places. The Hon. Hugh Wyndham, who succeeded his brother as 4th Lord Leconfield in 1952 and is commemorated by our annual Leconfield Lecture, was first a member and then Chairman of the London Council of the British Institute of Florence. Aubrey and Lena Waterfield were wartime exiles in England from their historic house, Villa di Poggio Gherardo (Villa Ross), just outside Florence, where Boccaccio’s youths and ladies, flying from the plague, spent their first three nights of story-telling. Aubrey was a talented artist and I treasure the drawing he gave me of Don Luigi Sturzo, the exiled head of the radical Catholic Partito Popolare. Mrs Janet Trevelyan, a daughter of Humphrey Ward and his famous wife the novelist, was married to the historian of the Risorgimento and Master of Trinity, G.M. Trevelyan. Mrs Marion Rawson, married to Graham Rawson, was another link with the British Institute of Florence; she also knew Salvemini well and had worked with him during the time he was in England before going to the United States. The Hon. Lucile Frost had links with many countries besides Italy: in a varied matrimonial life she had been married to Count Czernin, the Czechoslovak Foreign Minister, and she was related to Anthony Eden (later Earl of Avon) who had been our own Foreign Secretary. Gino Valentine-Selsey was a handsome Anglo-Italian who had been confined on one of the Italian islands for his anti-Fascist activities. Mrs Lyn Evans was a friend of mine with a good knowledge of Italian who later became my private secretary.
We were a deliberately British group because we wished to demonstrate that Italy itself still had British friends. (Magri had necessarily to be kept in the background because of his secret broadcasting, and in any case was half Irish, while Valentine-Selsey was the ideal of what foreigners used to expect Englishmen to be, and could truly claim to be English.) Moreover plans were afoot, fostered by Ion Munro, then in charge of Italian affairs at the Ministry of Information, for a similar body among the Italian exiles in Great Britain, of which more later. The outcome of our discussions was a decision to form a society with the self-explanatory and apt name, Friends of Free Italy. (There may in the name have been a subconscious or possibly conscious recollection of the "Friends of Italy" founded in London by Mazzini in 1851.) I am not able to give a precise date for the formation but it must have been in the spring of 1941. To fulfil the aims of the society we needed figureheads, a secretary and an office. Sir Frederick Kenyon, whom we invited to be President, and Sir David Ross and Professor G.M. Trevelyan, whom we asked to be Vice-Presidents, were scholars of world renown who would have added lustre to any body; they readily accepted, and this greatly strengthened a small and young body advocating a course that in the circumstances of the time could hardly be popular. The first Hon. Secretary was A.C. Sleigh, who had been on the staff of the British Institute of Florence. As we had no funds to pay rent, our first office, as already stated, was in the Sprigges’ flat, but later Sleigh administered the nascent society from his own house – Roscombe, 4 Dover Park Drive, Roehampton, London SW15.
Thus the Friends of Free Italy was brought into being. We were marked by a "Simon Pure" attitude to Fascism and would have nothing to do either with Italian or with British individuals who had compromised with the régime, however innocently they might have been caught in its toils; and we endeavoured to impress on the Government and public that it was not, in Churchill’s phrase, "one man alone" but "the régime he has created" that was the enemy. So when Mussolini was dropped and arrested we had no confidence in the King or Badoglio but looked for the emergence of the anti-Fascists to power. In one important respect we were not typical of the historical Italy or of the post-war Italy to emerge: we were rather an anti-clerical lot, very much in line with Salvemini. My own High Anglican background made me think differently, and so I think did the Waterfields, friends as I have indicated of Don Luigi Sturzo, whose persecuted Partito Popolare, in the guise of the Partito Democratico-Cristiano, was to become the dominant influence in Italy after the war.
The purely Italian body 2, to which reference has been made, was formed about the same time. On 22nd September 1940 there had been constituted in London a committee known alternatively as the Comitato Nazionale Italia Libera and in English as the Free Italy Committee. For President it had Alessandro Magri and for Secretary Carlo Petrone, and its official address was his home – 52 Cromwell Road, London SW7. Petrone was a friend of Don Luigi Sturzo and after the war represented his own birthplace, Salerno, in the Italian Parliament, but he died soon afterwards. The Deputy Secretary was Count R. Priuli Bon, bearer of a famous Venetian name. The Treasurer was N. Simoni, and the other members of the Executive Committee were A. Cappella, G. Gatti, R. Montuschi, B. Oglietti and R. Vineis. A letter to selected Italians in England sent out on 24th April 1941 over the signatures of Magri and Petrone noted a substantial growth in adherents, and at an extraordinary meeting held on 26th July 1941 all the members of the Free Italy Committee resigned and the Movimento Libera Italia was established in its place. (Some amusement was caused by the Anglicism of putting "Libera" before "Italia", which the Committee had avoided.) At the same time an elaborate constitution was adopted.
The Italian body issued to its members a Lettera Italiana. Under a wartime regulation to save paper supplies it was unlawful because it had not been in existence before August 1939. The Ministry of Information could have authorized continued publication, and I did my utmost, but in vain, to persuade the Ministry to do so.
The Movimento was not a happy ship and arguments within it were fierce and eventually self-destructive. The atmosphere may be gauged from a diary note that I made on 14th January 1942:
"I give a talk to the Free Italy Movement at 11 Buckingham Street, WC2 (the Sprigges’ flat) on ’Mazzini’s English Essays’. It is a useful peg (a) to tell the Italian fuorusciti that if they want to succeed they must not antagonize the Church and (b) to get in some digs at the Diplomatic Service. Hugh Wyndham in the Chair demurs at the digs; the conference gets into a furious argument for and against the Catholic religion."
In a letter Ruggero Orlando has noted that Piero and Paolo Treves, sons of the Socialist leader 3, objected strongly, for instance, to an Italian correspondent in London who had supported Fascism but disapproved of Mussolini’s entry into the war and remained in England. There were changes in the high command. Petrone was ousted, and I have a note from Guido Foà 4 of a meeting held at the Ivy Restaurant 5 when Decio Pettoello, Lecturer in Italian at Cambridge, was elected President with Magri as Vice-President and either Priuli Bon or Nello Simoni as Secretary. I have seen it stated that the Movimento was later merged with the Friends of Free Italy, but I have no record or recollection of such a formal merger. It appears to be more probable that the Movimento just died and individual members joined the Friends.
When the Fascist régime was overthrown in 1943 and Italy came into the war on the Allied side we began to think that the cause for which we had been founded had been vindicated, and that the Society could be transformed and enlarged. At the outset we had elected Hugh Wyndham as our Chairman and the meetings of the Executive Committee came to be held in his flat at Wyndham House, near Sloane Square, but at some point late in 1943 or early in 1944 he stepped down and I became Chairman in his place, he becoming Vice-Chairman.
In February 1942 I was elected Member of Parliament for Keighley, and promptly started an Anglo-Italian Parliamentary Group and made the cause of a free Italy my main activity in the House. It is not always easy to distinguish in my mind what I did as an MP and what as Chairman of the Friends of Free Italy, and sometimes I would arrange for a speaker to address the Parliamentary Group in a committee room at the House and later the Friends of Free Italy outside. This is particularly true of the two most outstanding Italians who came to London as the fortunes of the war changed. I had corresponded with Count Carlo Sforza - who had been the Italian Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1920-21 and Ambassador to France in 1922, but whose anti-Fascist views forced him into exile when Mussolini came to power – and when he arrived in London in October 1943 on his way back from the United States to Italy I well remember the gracious way in which he received me at Claridge’s. We struck up a firm friendship which lasted until his death.
Unfortunately Churchill thought that Sforza had broken a promise to him to try to keep the King on the Italian throne, whereas Sforza had correctly advised him that the only way in which the House of Savoy could be saved was for the King to abdicate, for the Crown Prince to renounce his right to the Throne, and for the grandson to succeed with a regency; before his death Churchill made amends to Sforza for his misunderstanding. The Foreign Office, moreover, had a belief inherited from the French Revolution that exiles were unacceptable in their native land, and while in some cases this has been true the Italian parties soon made clear that they would have liked Sforza as Prime Minister, though because of the Allied veto they had to be content with him as Foreign Minister. This still lay in the future, but the Friends of Free Italy were able to hear his hopes and plans from his own lips as he passed back to Italy from his long exile. When the time came for him to appoint a diplomatic representative in London – the title Ambassador was not at first allowed – he selected Count Nicolò Carandini. It was a brilliant choice. I arranged for Carandini to address the Anglo-Italian Parliamentary Group soon after his arrival in November 1944, and he won all hearts immediately. "Peccavimus", "We have sinned", was his theme, although he himself, a consistent opponent of Mussolini, had been the most guiltless of men. A little later I arranged for him to address the Friends of Free Italy, and here also he won all our hearts.
Before leaving the subject of our lectures I may notice that our meetings were several times attended by no less a person than H.G. Wells, brought by Isabella Massey. When he asked permission of me, being Chairman, on a warm summer afternoon to take off his coat I lost a splendid opportunity of saying, "Provided that there is no black shirt underneath".
Apart from lectures we began publishing pamphlets. The first one, entitled The Problem of Italy, with no named author, was published in March 1943, price 6d. It was a discursive account of the various problems of Italy, and although I cannot now recollect how it came to be written, I think it must have been a composite effort. The second was written by myself under the title A Free Italy in a Free Europe. It was published, also for 6d, in July 1944 and it developed a theme of Count Sforza’s, "No discussion of Italian problems as such, but of Italian sides of European problems", and was in effect a plea for a united Europe in advance of its time. The third pamphlet, published in October 1945, was by Valentine-Selsey under the title Italy works her passage, and it gave a detailed and convincing account of the help rendered to the Allied cause by the partisans and the three armed forces. The fourth (and final) pamphlet published in 1945 was written by Isabella Massey under the title The Question of Trieste. It was a scholarly historical and ethnographical account of what was then and was to remain for several years a burning issue. Miss Massey held very moderately that Fiume and Zara should go to Yugoslavia, and Trieste should become a free port. I felt that I ought to consult the Foreign Office before publication as, with the triumph of our views, our relations with the British Government, which had not always been cordial – I had several brushes in Parliament with the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden – had now become extremely friendly. Oliver Harvey (later Lord Harvey of Tasburgh), then an Assistant Under-Secretary of State, was nervous about the publication of views on such a contentious issue when it was sub judice and asked if it would not be better as an article in a review. But he did not seem to veto it and we decided to publish.
One of Oliver Harvey’s difficulties was that we had invited Sir Percy Loraine, the last British Ambassador in Rome, and Count Carandini, as the Italian representative in London, to give their patronage to the Society; they naturally required the agreement of the Foreign Office, and that agreement had been given in July 1945. Harvey felt that they might be put in an embarrassing position by publication of pamphlets on contentious political issues by the Society. In the end no harm was done, and the British and Italian representatives in the respective capitals regularly gave the Society their patronage.
In the meantime, as a recognition of the changed circumstances since the Society was created, at a general meeting of the Friends of Free Italy held on 3rd March 1945 it was unanimously agreed to change the name to British-Italian Society, a name which it has since borne. At the same meeting an amended constitution was also adopted. The aims and objects of the Society were redefined as being "to increase the understanding in Great Britain of Italian history, Italian institutions, the Italian way of life and the Italian contribution to civilization, to increase the knowledge of the Italian language in Great Britain, and to encourage and promote the traditional friendship between Great Britain and Italy". Membership was declared to be open to all British and Italian nationals who desired to promote the objects of the Society (though other nationals who were members on 3rd March 1945 were allowed to retain their membership) provided that they were proposed and seconded and that the Executive Committee was satisfied as to their suitability – words clearly designed to prevent the infiltration of former supporters of the Fascist régime. We were still on our guard! The annual subscription was kept at the figure it had been for the Friends of Free Italy, 10s a year, reduced to 5s for those under twenty-one.
It was soon afterwards that I approached the British and Italian diplomatic representatives with a view to their patronage, and this was part of a general policy of increasing the Society’s influence by the adhesion of distinguished personages in different fields. The Regius Professor of Greek at Oxford, Gilbert Murray, and the Camden Professor of Ancient History, Hugh M. Last agreed to become Vice-Presidents, as also did my parliamentary colleague, Harold Nicolson; Francis Rennell – Lord Rennell of Rodd, son of a famous British Ambassador in Rome – forgiving me for having described him in Parliament as "a Rodd for Italian backs"; the Earl of Perth, a former Ambassador in Rome; and Sir Kenneth (now Lord) Clark. The Executive Committee was joined by Colin Hardie, subsequently Public Orator at Oxford, Barbara Ward, later Lady Jackson, and Lord Strabolgi.
It is evidence of the standing achieved by the Society at this time that in the summer of 1945 we were consulted by the Rappresentanza Italiana – soon to be called an Embassy again – about the establishment of an Italian Institute in London.
I think that about this time A.C. Sleigh must have returned to Italy. At any rate he resigned as Hon. Secretary. Mrs Lyn Evans took his place, and the office was transferred to her house in Christchurch Terrace, Chelsea. When she returned to Malaya, my wife’s sister-in-law, Mrs Pamela Bulmer, became Hon. Secretary, and in due course Miss Vera Z. Pompei succeeded her.
But this was after my time as Chairman. When the post-war Government was formed in August 1945 I was invited to join it as Parliamentary Secretary for Civil Aviation. This made it necessary for me to resign the chairmanship, though I continued to play some part behind the scenes and in my new post had the satisfaction of helping to bring Alitalia to birth and in due course of seeing my old friend Nicolò Carandini become its Chairman. My place as Chairman of the B.I.S. was taken for a short time by Charles Emmott, who had helped the Italian cause in debate and in the Anglo-Italian Parliamentary Group 6; he had been on our Executive Committee for some time. I was honoured in due course by the President of Italy with the Stella della Solidarietà Italiana and was gratified to be made a Vice-President of the Society. From the end of the war the history of the Society is documented, and if these recollections of the origins bring any early documentation to light they will have served a useful purpose.