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

134 LIFE AND IDEAS OF MITRINOVIC

Socialist advocacy of the New Britain Movement is inextricably entangled with, and irretrievably marred by, a simultaneous panic propaganda of materialistic religious militarism which can only serve to strengthen the forces of reaction and help to plunge this country into another European War . . .”77 The Secretary of the Coventry group recorded that the issue of re-armament revealed a “fundamental cleavage of opinion . . . resulting in the most heated discussion in the history of the group,”’’® and urged the central group “in future to avoid mentioning rearmament or any other term likely to antagonise the left wing and pacifist elements in the movement.””?

Whilst a number of groups joined Southend in severing their connection with the movement, others were complaining about the quality of the weekly following Purdom’s resignation. The articles were too heavy and required too much concentration from the readers. There was a lack of consistency in policy between articles—whilst this might be stimulating it was also extremely confusing for the average reader. In addition at least one of the seven so-called leaders found the demands too exacting. On July 19th Harry Rhodes wrote a letter of resignation to Watson Thomson:

My reasons are quite definite. I am very busy and pressed. I never have more than three hours notice of any meeting, and then I do not know what the meeting is to be about. Last night is an excellent example: a number of people, I don’t know how many or whom called to ask me to attend an urgent meeting. Of course, I was not in. I never am unless you arrange to see me, so | didn’t get your message until too late . . . lam not withdrawing out of annoyance or anything of that sort. I merely feel that my position is impossible.*°

Rhodes, in fact, was only witness to a fraction of the chaos and frenetic activity that characterised the life of the central group during this period as they struggled to maintain regular publication of the weekly paper. It had never carried a great deal of advertising and, perhaps not surprisingly for a paper advertised as the sixpenny weekly for tuppence, it had never made a profit. As the membership of the movement declined, so did the readership of the paper and the revenue from sales. The supply of funds from original patrons of the paper such as Gladys MacDermot was also drying up. David Davies recalled the nightmare situation in which he found himself as he sat in the editor’s chair:

The paper had exhausted its initial funds, so that it experienced increasingly enormous difficulty in keeping alive, and its circulation went catastrophically down. We literally did not know from week to week whether the next number would appear or not. I was not initiated into the mystery of the paper’s finance;