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

POLITICAL INITIATIVES 139

According to Peacock the House of Industry League had some influence with engineers and intellectuals, but gained “sparse support from trade unionists generally.”8* Consequently a new medium was created in 1937: the Council for Workers’ Control of Industry with the same platform as the League but catering specifically for trade unionists. The activities of both organisations continued until the outbreak of the European war which Mitrinovié had foreseen so many years previously. The war succeeded in bringing the curtain down not only on public ventures such as the House of Industry League, it also dispersed the group of people who had formed themselves into an intimate circle around Mitrinovi¢, forming a household which became the main focus of his attention in the years after the New Britain Movement until the war. It was with these people that he worked to create the seed of the new social order in microcosm, and it is to an examination of their experiences and life in and around Bloomsbury during the latter half of the 1930s that attention will be paid in the next chapter.