THE B.I.S’s 40th ANNIVERSARY: Talk by IVOR BULMER-THOMAS at the Launching Party for the pamphlet on the Society's origins

The pamphlet on the Society’s origins and development, 40 YEARS: The British-Italian Society 1941-1981, was launched at a party at The Queen’s Nursing Institute, 57 Lower Belgrave Street, London SW 1, on 9th December, 1981, in the presence of some 60-70 members and friends. It was the second night of the snow, so this was really a very satisfactory attendance. Sir Guy Millard, in the Chair, read out a telegram of good wishes from our President, Lord Hastings, regretting that he had been prevented at the last moment from attending, and good wishes were also received from Sir Ashley and Lady Clarke. We were especially glad to have with us Professor Alessandro Vaciago, the new Director of the Italian Institute. Sir Guy, introducing Mr Ivor Bulmer-Thomas, said this occasion was the climax of the B.I.S’s 40th anniversary year. The pamphlet being launched that day was a record of the Society’s wartime origins and subsequent activities. Mr Bulmer-Thomas was a founding member of the Friends of Free Italy; the group of English "Italianists" formed in 1941 which in 1945 became the British-Italian Society.

Mr Bulmer-Thomas has kindly provided us with the following resume of his talk:

The Society was certainly founded as the Friends of Free Italy in the spring of 1941. I cannot now give a precise date but I can be certain of the founding members. They were Dr Isabella Massey, Alessandro Magri, Cecil and Sylvia Sprigge, the Hon. Hugh Wyndham, Aubrey and Lena Waterfield, Mrs Janet Trevelyan, Mrs Marion Rawson, the Hon. Lucite Frost, Gino Valentine-Selsey and Mrs Lyn Evans. I have been asked to introduce the Society’s pamphlet 40 Years because I appear to be the only survivor of the original members, and no minute books or other early documents are known to exist. But I am still hopeful, for the writing of the pamphlet has just brought to light the fact that Mr A. C. Sleigh, our first Hon. Secretary, is still alive at the age of over 90 and lives in Florence, and it may be that he will have some papers or at any rate recollections to supplement my own.

Ours was not a popular cause for the first two or three years, and we made it our main task to counter five of the current orchestrated themes.

(i) When Mussolini entered the war on the Nazi side in the hope of sharing the spoils, Duff Cooper, Minister of Information, made a deplorable speech condemning Italy out of hand and threatening destruction to her cities; we had to convince the British people that in this jackal venture Mussolini did not represent the Italian people with their tradition of civilised achievement and that the Italian nation could be detached from the Axis and could give valuable aid to the Allied cause.

(ii) In addressing the Italian people over the radio, Winston Churchill avoided Duff Cooper’s mistake but went too far in the opposite direction; he alleged that it was "one man alone" who had led the Italian people along the disastrous path, and we had to convince him and the whole British people that it was not "one man alone" but "the regime he has created" that must be swept away.

(iii) When the British Army, after being completely routed by the Germans, encountered the Italians and began to obtain some easy victories, the prevalent tendency was to pour scorn upon the fighting qualities of the Italian nation, and we had to convince the British people that the Italians were not fighting but staging a "soldiers’ strike".

(iv) When the invasion of Italy began we had to plead with the authorities, sometimes successfully as over Rome, sometimes unsuccessfully as over Monte Cassino, for respect for the great monuments of Italian civilisation if we ourselves were not to lose the name of civilised.

(v) When Fascism was overthrown, we had to urge that the fullest use be made of the Italians as our allies, and how well they proved their worth in a cause in which they believed!, and we had to urge the earliest possible restoration of good relations between Great Britain and the revived democratic Italy.

In all these aims we were eventually successful. I am not, of course, saying that we were wholly responsible for the change in attitude, but for several years we were almost alone. Under wartime conditions we had few instruments that we could use.

(i) We held regular meetings at which lectures were given. They could not in the conditions attract large audiences, but what they lacked in numbers they sometimes made up in distinction; for instance H. G. Wells, brought by Miss Massey, attended several of them. In addition, I and other members of the Committee addressed meetings at local societies throughout the country, gently moulding public opinion, as we hoped, against the prevailing trend.

(ii) Few of us in the early Committee had access to the radio - perhaps the Sprigges did - but the message we wished to convey was constantly propagated by the Italian section of the B.B.C. and in particular by Colonel Harold Stevens, whose voice with the characteristic "Buona sera" was worth at least a division to the Allied cause; and the same message was daily sent out by the clandestine service, Radio Italia, which I had myself directed in 1941 – which explains how I came to be involved in the formation of the Friends of Free Italy.

(iii) It was important that from February 1942 onwards I was a Member of Parliament and able to put in the House of Commons the point of view of the Society, at first alone, but gradually winning support until I was able to form an Anglo-Italian Parliamentary Group.

(iv) There was lastly the printed word. We could not do much in the newspapers in their slimmed-down wartime format, and we could not start a periodical of our own under a regulation forbidding publication of periodicals not in existence before August 1939. (The Movimento Libera Italia, the counterpart of the Friends among the Italian exiles, innocently started a Lettera italiana, but the Ministry of Information required it to cease publication.) There was, however, no regulation forbidding the issue of pamphlets, and we issued four. They are now rare works. The only places where I know a complete set to exist are Chatham House and the British Library, though I hope we sent copies to the other copyright libraries. [Photostats of the four pamphlets are also available in the B.I.S. office]. The first, The Problem of Italy, was unsigned; I wrote the second myself under the title A Free Italy in a Free Europe; the third, by Valentine Selsey, Italy works her Passage, gave a detailed account of the Italian contribution to the Allied effort; and the fourth, by Isabella Massey, The Question of Trieste, gave a scholarly account of that problem and constructive suggestions for its solution. Each pamphlet had a distinctive front cover with a map of Italy in green; this has been reproduced as the front cover of the pamphlet I am introducing tonight, 40 Years: The British-Italian Society 1941-1981.

By the spring of 1945 almost all our ideals had come to be accepted as official policy – though the putting of them into effect was often slower than we could have wished, we had the goodwill of the Foreign Office, and we had attracted distinguished support. By this time I had succeeded Hugh Wyndham as Chairman, and I felt that in the changed conditions the original name, Friends of Free Italy, was no longer appropriate. This was agreed, and at a general meeting on 3rd March, 1945 it was decided to change the name to British-Italian Society and to adopt a new constitution appropriate to the friendly status that had been restored between our two countries.

Sir Guy Millard warmly thanked Mr Bulmer-Thomas for his talk, so full of little-known information about our Society's origins (and which, incidentally, skilfully avoided covering much of the ground given in the lecturer's own contribution to the pamphlet so there is still every inducement to buy it!) and this auspicious evening ended happily with Italian wine and conversation among old friends, some of whom had not met for a long time. We were especially glad that Professor Lorenzo Minio-Paluello (with Ivor Thomas, among the five authors of the Pentad book, The Remaking of Italy, 1941, mentioned in the pamphlet) and his wife were able to come especially from Oxford for this launching party.