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

POLITICAL INITIATIVES 137

dedication.” Whilst the central group members were to be the guardians of the movement, the basic unit of organisation was acknowledged to be the local group which should be “autonomous and self-moving” within the guidelines established by central group members.

The constitutional proposals were eventually passed with only four dissenters amongst the 160 present. The formal conference finished on the afternoon of Monday August 6th, but for those who remained a week long summer school had been organised—lectures, demonstrations and classes by the Valerie Cooper School of Movement, and cricket in between the rain showers. For those who participated it was a memorable communal experience. As the report of the conference that appeared in the Autumn issue of New Britain claimed:

New Britain as a movement made an important step forward in action by the acceptance of a clear statement of aims—but the value of the eight days spent at Glastonbury was a new experience of personal relationships in a new order without which political agreement would be a mere continuance of the old.*

This statement was, in fact, a clear pointer to the direction that the movement was henceforth to take. Without a weekly paper, with funds exhausted, it became clear even to the most committed and optimistic that the days of New Britain as a popular public initiative for the re-ordering of individual and social life were numbered. This was acknowledged in a letter that Watson Thomson wrote in his capacity as Secretary of the Movement inviting people to attend the first of a number of conferences held at 46 Lancaster Gate through the winter of 1934-35.

Our feeling here is that the next phase should be one of interior concentration, personal equipment and research rather than of enlarged publicity.

At the first of these, held over the weekend of December 15th/16th, it was resolved that the New Britain Movement should devolve into four separate, if related, organisational forms, each focussing on a major aspect of the overall programme of the movement. Thus it was decided to inaugurate a League for the National Dividend, a British League for European Federation, a League for the Three-fold State, and a House of Industry League. Although each of these Leagues met at some stage or another, issued leaflets and had their own letter-heads, it was really only the House of Industry League that developed beyond a small study circle into anything approximating a public organisation.

S. G. Hobson accepted the invitation to become President of the fledgling organisation whilst an even greater luminary of the trade union movement,