This small cloud : a personal memoir

258 Pages·1986·18.314 MB·English

by  Harry Daley

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THIS SMALL CLOUD
A Personal Memoir
Harry Daley·
1
\X'c1dcnfrld ;111d Nicolson
London
Text Copynght© 1986 David Daley
Foreword Copyright© 19 8 6 P. N. Furbank
Afterword Copyright© r 9 8 6 Clive Emsley
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording
or otherwise, without the prior permission of
the copyright owner.
First published in Great Britain by
George Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd
91 Clapham High Street
London sw4 7TA
Printed in Great Britain by
The Bath Press Ltd
CONTENTS
List of illustrations
Foreword by P.N.Furba11k
lX
A recollection
I
Part One: LO\vestoft 1901-16 3
Part Two: Dorking 1916-25 51
Part Three: l\1etropolitan Police 19 2 5-50 79
Afterword by Clive Emsley
232
ILLUSTRATIONS
Daley's grandfather
Daley's father
Lowestoft harbour (Suffolk Record Office, Central Library,
Lowestoft)
Daley's mother as a parlour maid
Daley's mother in Dorking
Harry with Joey and Janet
Harry aged fifteen in Dorking
Daley on point duty in Hammersmith Broadway
Friends of Daley's, mostly out of work
Daley with a friend at the swimming pool
Arrested friends of Daley's
Daley off duty with two friends
Daley in sergeant's uniform
Vine Street police station (Metropolitan Police Historical Museum)
Wandsworth police station (Metropolitan Police Historical Museum)
Portrait of Daley by Duncan Grant
Vll
FOREWORD
Harry Daley's memoirs This Small Cloud were begun as an act of
contrition or self-rehabilitation. Daley had served for twenty-five
years in the Metropolitan Police, after which he had joined the Mer
chant Navy as a Master-at-Arms; but after a few years in his new
career he fell ill with diabetes. It is a disease which can cause acute
depression, and under its influence he began to brood on his past
life and to tell himself he had met with great injustice. 'It was becoming
an obsession', he wrote later, 'so, to prevent this, I decided to write
out exactly what happened to me'. The therapy was successful, and
as he wrote on, he found, or convinced himself, that the truth was
quite otherwise: he had in fact had a very fortunate life and, for
the most part, had been treated with great kindness and much toler
ance.
This became the theme of his memoirs; and there was, no doubt,
an element of self-°persuasion in it, nor was Hany Daley quite the
sunny, easy-going and benevolent figure that he depicts. E.M.Forster,
who had a brief and chequered friendship with Daley, remarked:
'He places too many models before himself'. It was meant censor
iously, but it touches on an essential point. Harry Daley was a born
self-improver; and this, as Yeats would have agreed, can be a thor
oughly creative habit of mind. Self-persuasion, that is to say, is by
no means the same as insincerity, and Daley was unquestionably
sincere in what he wrote, as well as scrupulously careful over factual
accuracy. What is more to the point, he turned out to be a really
gifted writer. He was quite genuinely surprised when he found he
had produced 'a sort of book', but all the same he knew that it
a
was good one.
The name of E.~1. Forster comes in aptly, for Daley's feelings of
injustice in a sense centred upon Forster; and it was important to
him, as a symbol of his recovered self-respect, that he should not
discuss Forster in his memoirs, nor the fact that he had been friendly
with various other 'Bloomsbury' figures.
This episode in his life began in 1925 when, as a young police
IX
FOREWORD
constable in Hammersmith, he became acquainted withJ.R.Ackcrley.
They met casually in the street early one Sunday morning, and by
a pleasant chance it turned out in conversation that Daley, who was
an indefatigable theatre-goer, had seen a production of Ackerley's
play The Prisoners of War at the Lyric, Hammersmith. It initiated
a long, indeed a lifelong, friendship, and quite soon, through Ackerley,
Harry had become friendly with quite a number of Ackerley's literary
and artistic acquaintances, among them Raymond Mortimer, Duncan
Grant, Gerald Heard, Leo Charlton and E.M. Forster. (Forster was
by now a very close intimate of Ackerley's, seeing him most days
that he was in town.) For Daley, being a dedicated self-educator,
it was a delightful enlargement of his life. There would be lunches
at cheap Soho restaurants, visits to concerts and the latest Russian
films, and parties at Ackerley's flat in Hammersmith Terrace. In a
sense, 'enlargement' is the right word also to describe his effect on
his new friends, for he was immensely knowledgeable about Ham
mersmith working-class life, a largely unknown subject to them.
Moreover he was a wonderful raconteur, knowing exactly the right
story to interest any company.
The next few years he remembered later as a time of sunshine
and happiness. The keynote was a cheerful homosexual camaraderie.
He recalled a night-time visit to the zoo: 'Animals are liveliest in
the dark, so the zoo decided to open at night every summer Thursday.
There was a band, a good restaurant, fairy lights in the trees, and
lots of laughter. Everyone went in their gayest clothes - it was very
camp .... Chiefly I remember Raymond arm in arm with his friends,
Francis Birrell and Eddie Sackville-West, and all so happy.' Harry
was also invited to Ackerley's family home (he is the 'intellectual
policeman' mentioned as dining at Richmond, in My Father a11d
Myself), and before long Ackerley's entree into the police began to
arouse rivalry. 'Soon almost everyone had their policeman friend',
wrote Daley, ·and other friends too in all sorts of uniforms right
down to bus conductors. Lionel Fielden, who wasn't even in the
competition, went far afield, and outside the Mansion House spotted
a lovely \Vestminster Council road sweeper in a natty Australian
bush hat turned up at the side. This shook Joe.'
The sergeant-in-charge at the Hammersmith police Section House
encouraged Daley to entertain his friends there (both the boxers and
the intellectuals) and he once threw a large party for his Bloomsbury
friends, giving them a ham-and-egg supper before raking them off
X
FOREWORD
to the circus. Their loud chatter, and Raymond Mortimer's fur coat,
caused some restiveness amongst the other policemen.
Politically, Harry's friends were very much of the left, and Ackerley
and Gerald Heard, with Harry's help, did a good deal of unadvertised
philanthropy among the local unemployed. Among these unemployed
was a friend of Daley's, who had taken part in a strike at Lyons'
factory. Ackerley persuaded his father, who was a managing director
of Fyffes Bananas, to offer him a job; but when Ackerley senior found
he had been a striker, he would have nothing more to do with him.
Daley recalled discussing the disappointment with Ackerley: 'Joe
shook his doormat angrily over the Thames, then, puffed and dusty,
his hair blowing in the wind, he said "You see, Harry - he is a
different sort of person from you and me."'
Daley admitted once to Gerald Heard that, as he has described
in his memoirs, he and his fellow-policemen accepted a regular weekly
half-crown of hush-money from street bookmakers (often, in fact,
passing it on to down-and-ours in the park). Heard was shocked,
telling him that a corrupt police could lead to fascism, and offered
to give him 5 shillings for every illicit half-crown he refused. As a
result, though of course he refused Heard's offer, Daley took no more
of these bribes. .
In I 928 Ackerley became a Talks Producer at the BBC, and he
arranged for Daley to give a series of talks (sometimes under his
own name and sometimes as 'Joe Daley' or 'Harry Firman') about
his life in the police and the work of Lowestoft fishermen. Round
about this time he had his portrait painted by Duncan Grant and
had his photograph taken by Cecil Beaton.
Early on in this period of his life, there developed an affair between
him and E.~1.Forster. From a sexual point of view it was more impor
tant to Forster than to Daley, who, though homosexual, was only
physically attracted to heterosexuals. On the other hand, as a writer
and thinker, Forster meant an enormous amount to Daley. Much
later he said: 'That I am now often considered to be a nice old chap
may be due to the influence his main work has had on me'. Forster,
as was his habit, took great pains over the relationship, suiting his
arrangements to Harry's timetable and taking the trouble to get to
know his mother and younger brother in Darking. Occasionally he
spent an evening walking with Daley along his beat. 'You must pic
ture', wrote Daley, 'deserted streets except for a few casters' barrows,
and a friendly police protecting the public'. The people about were
Xl
FOREWORD
often Daley's personal friends. There might be Arthur G--, the leader
of the 'coffee-stall gang', who rather alarmed Forster, or the handsome
J--
Fred the boxer. 'I liked Fred best', Forster told Daley. 'He speaks
my language.' They would go swimming in the local baths and to
the theatre in very cheap seats, paying alternately. Daley had an up-to
date E.M.G. gramophone and a large library of records in his dormi
tory cubicle, and he and Forster liked to keep up with each other's
musical tastes. When the first recording of Cesar Franck's D minor
Symphony appeared, Forster was enraptured by it and imposed a
taste for it on all his circle - so that when Ackerley asked, 'Did
you hear the symphony last night?', nobody had to ask which sym
phony. (Daley noticed that, when everyone else turned against 'the
symphony', Forster calmly remained loyal.)
It was all a mutual education for the two, and for a while they
were very happy in each other's company. Forster was attentive and
charming, and Daley, who was a voluble talker, chatted unguardedly,
not realising till later that judgements were silently being made on
him. As it turned out, the two were ill-matched. Daley began to feel
Forster too much inclined to 'mother' him, always worrying that
Daley should not spend too much of his meagre wages on him, also
suspecting (what was actually not the case) that Daley was feckless
over money. They could never get the issue of money right between
them. Forster was intensely generous with it, but upon his own very
carefully thought-out principles: gifts of money might be large, but
loans should be very small and must be punctiliously repaid. His
carefulness irritated Harry, who once during a quarrel exclaimed
sardonically, 'Well at least you once gave my mother some beetroot!'
- a remark which made him blush later, when Forster paid for an
expensive operation which possibly saved his mother's life. Daley
also formed the impression, probably correctly, that Forster used
Ackerley to pump him on various topics and report what he said.
He once burst out to them, 'It isn't a friendship, it's a conspiracy!'
Forster merely smiled and wagged his head.
Forster, for his part, thought Harry brash and too self-obsessed,
as well as madly indiscreet. He wrote to his friend Sprott in November
r927: 'I will certainly report faithfully on Harry, though it is as
easy to report on the position of a windmill sail. He is tragically
unhappy, he has a cold, and speaking parentally he is spoilt.' More
serious was the fact that Harry could easily fly off into a rage, not
necessarily very lasting, and this was something that Forster disliked
XII
FOREWORD
and was not good at coping with.
The affair petered out, and in 19 3 2 Forster became deeply attached
to a policeman friend of Daley's, Bob Buckingham, not without caus
ing some jealousy on Harry's part. Before long a definite coolness
sprang up between them, and Harry began to sense or imagine hos
tility on the part of Forster's friends.
His relationship with Forster's and Ackerley's circle had, of course,
always involved some social tensions. He would complain that they
were allowed to introduce him to people as 'a policeman', but he
was told not to introduce them as 'writers'. Then, he might be at
a party, or lunching at Gennaro's restaurant, with some of these
friends, and next day be on duty at some fashionable reception where
they were guests, being greeted by them with no more than an embar
rassed wink. With his touchiness, he sometimes imagined slights on
their part, and there was much fuss when, according to Daley, Leo
Charlton 'cut' him in a restaurant. (Charlton hotly denied it, and
offered to take him out to lunch every day for a week to prove the
contrary.) The growing rift with Forster intensified these tensions;
and before long it led to the collapse of his whole connection with
this circle. He even, for a few years, ceased to see Ackerley, though
later they became close again.
He had, of course, many other friends and interests, but the friend
ship with Forster had, symbolically, meant a very great deal to him,
moreover he remained in his heart very fond of him; and for some
years their break rankled. During the later 1930s he would occasion
ally write Forster an angry letter out of the blue. When Forster said
in the Daily Mail that Britons must defend themselves and their fami
lies against Hitler, Daley wrote to him complaining he was letting
down his uneducated friends, to whom he had always preached paci
fism and disarmament. Later Forster, hearing a rumour (actually
untrue) that a young policeman friend of Daley's was talking against
the Jews, wrote the young man a letter of rebuke, spelling out the
evils of anti-Semitism. The young man was hurt, and Harry wrote
Forster a ferocious letter, condemning his interfering ways, and asking
him how, amid so much social deprivation, he could justify possessing
three homes. Forster took it in very bad part and warned his friends
against Harry. They did not make contact again for many years,
though they had a last meeting in 1960, when Ackerley won the
\XI.H.Smith award and invited Harry to the celebratory dinner at
the Savoy. The encounter went very amicably. Daley told Forster
Xlll