Initiation and initiative : an exploration of the life and ideas of Dimitrije Mitrinović

122 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

Readers were urged to form New Britain groups in their own localities and neighbourhoods. Within two months of the launching of the paper there were 57 groups established around the country. By September 1933 the number had grown to 65, 13 of which were in the London area. David Davies was appointed national organiser, with Professor J. MacMurray as President. The central office was snowed under with requests for leaflets, pamphlets and literature, whilst Watson Thomson and Davies in particular found themselves travelling the length and breadth of the country addressing meetings and local groups.

Amongst the most active of the provincial groups were those of Rugby, Birmingham, Merseyside and Oxford. One of the members of the Oxford group who was later to become a close associate of Mitrinovi¢é recalled the feelings and experiences which led to his involvement in the New Britain movement.

In my younger days the two things I saw wrong with the world were war and violence on the one hand and ugliness on the other. This ugliness struck me largely in the form of slums and dismal houses round London. It was the ugliness which struck me before the poverty, of which when I was very young I was hardly aware. Later I came to see that this was not just—or even primarilyan aesthetic question but also—and rather—a moral one; that the disgrace was not merely the ugliness but even more the social injustice. This realisation was developing during my adolesence and by the time I got to Oxford I had it quite clearly in my mind that the two world problems to be dealt with were war and poverty.

The only political club at Oxford which seemed to be at all alive to these problems was the Communists. The Conservative, Liberal and Labour clubs seemed to be full of young people who were practising debating for the sake of a future political career. One of my closest friends belonged to the October Club, which he persuaded me to join. I did, and stayed for about a year, but in the end I found them mindless. They just kept on repeating the same old stuff, full of catchwords and slogans, and I got to know exactly what statements would merit the abuse ‘Counter-revolutionary!’. So I left.

My problem was that my sympathies were basically with the ‘left, but I could not go the whole way with them. I did not accept the need for violent revolution as the Communists did—even though they said that they were only preparing for the violence which would be started by the ruling class when they found themselves being dispossessed of their wealth. Nor did I see the struggle or the solution as a class one. ‘Workers and students unite!’ was to me an unconvincing slogan. The world seemed to me to be more divided between those who saw and wanted to do something about the social problem and those who did not, than between proletariat and bourgeoisie. I was not willing to believe that everything