On this day on 30th March

On this day in 1831 Thomas Babington Macaulay comments on parliamentary reform. He wrote to a friend about King William IV and the proposed 1832 Reform Act. "The royal assent was given yesterday afternoon to the Reform Bill. I rejoice at the course which the King has taken. It has had the effect that Lord Grey and the Whigs have all the honour of the Reform Bill and the King none of it. The King makes great concessions: but he makes them reluctantly and ungraciously. The people receive them without gratitude or affection. What madness - to give more to his subjects than any King ever gave, and yet to give in such a manner as to get no thanks."

On this day in 1840 Charles Booth, the son of a wealthy businessman, was born in Liverpool. Booth's father was a Unitarian and head of the Lamport & Holt Steamship Company. When Booth was twenty-two his father died and took over the running of the company. Booth was an energetic leader and soon added a successful glove manufacturing concern to his expanding shipping interests.

In the 1860s Booth became interested in the philosophy of Auguste Comte, the founder of modern sociology. Booth was especially attracted to Comte's idea that in the future, the scientific industrialist would take over the social leadership from church ministers. One of the consequences of reading Comte was that Booth began to lose his religious faith.

In 1885 Charles Booth became angry about the claim made by H. H. Hyndman, the leader of the Social Democratic Federation, that 25% of the population of London lived in abject poverty. Bored with running his successful business, Booth decided to investigate the incidence of pauperism in the East End of the city. He recruited a team of researchers that included his cousin, Beatrice Potter.

The result of Booth's investigations, Labour and Life of the People, was published in 1889. Booth's book revealled that the situation was even worse than that suggested by H. H. Hyndman. Booth research suggested that 35% rather than 25% were living in abject poverty. Booth now decided to expand his research to cover the rest of London. He continued to run his business during the day and confined his writing to evenings and weekends. In an effort to obtain a comprehensive and reliable survey Booth and his small team of researchers made at least two visits to every street in the city.

Beatrice Potter later recalled: "It is difficult to discover the presence of any vice or even weakness in him. Conscience, reason, and dutiful affect in, are his great qualities; what other characteristics he has are not to be observed by the ordinary friend. But he interests me as a man who has his nature completely under his control, and who has risen out of it, uncynical, vigorous and energetic in mind without egotism."

Over a twelve year period (1891 to 1903) Booth published 17 volumes of Life and Labour of the People of London. In these books Booth argued that the stare should assume responsibility for those living in poverty. One of the proposals he made was for the introduction of Old Age Pensions. A measure that he described as "limited socialism". Booth believed that if the government failed to take action, Britain was in danger of experiencing a socialist revolution.

Whereas many of his researchers, including Beatrice Potter, became socialists as a result of what they discovered while investigating poverty, Booth became more conservative in his views. Strongly opposed to trade unions, he was unhappy with the sympathetic treatment they had received from the the Liberal government that took power after the 1906 General Election. Booth now renounced his early support for the Liberal Party and joined the Conservative Party. Charles Booth died on 23rd November, 1916.

On this day in 1850 Charles Dickens published Household Words for the first time.  Dickens became editor and William Wills, a journalist he worked with on the Daily News, became his assistant. One colleague described Wills as "a very intelligent and industrious man... but rather too gentle and compliant always to enforce his own intentions effectually upon others." Dickens thought that Wills was the ideal man for the job. He commented that "Wills has no genius, and is, in literary matters, sufficiently commonplace to represent a very large proportion of our readers".

Dickens rented an office at 16 Wellington Street North, a small and narrow thoroughfare just off the Strand. Dickens described it as "exceedingly pretty with the bowed front, the bow reaching up for two stories, each giving a flood of light." Dickens announced that aim of the journal would be the "raising up of those that are down, and the general improvement of our social condition". He argued that it was necessary to reform a society where "infancy was made stunted, ugly, and full of pain; maturity made old, and old age imbecile; and pauperism made hopeless every day." He added that he wanted London to "set an example of humanity and justice to the whole Empire".

Dickens planned to serialise his new novels in the journal. Another project was the serialisation of A Child's History of England. He also wanted to promote the work of like-minded writers. The first person he contacted was Elizabeth Gaskell. Dickens had been very impressed with her first novel, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848) and offered to take her future work. She sent him Lizzie Leigh, a story about a Manchester prostitute, which appeared in the first issue, on 30th March 1850.

After lengthy negotiations it was agreed that Charles Dickens would have half share in all profits of Household Words. Bradbury & Evans to have one quarter, John Forster and William Henry Wills, one eighth each. Whereas the publisher was to manage all the commercial details, Dickens was to be in sole charge of editorial policy and content. Dickens was also paid £40 a month for his services as editor and a fee was agreed for any articles and stories published by the journal. The first edition of the journal appeared on 30th March, 1850. It contained 24 pages and cost twopence and came out every Wednesday. On the top of each page were the words: "Conducted by Charles Dickens". All contributions were anonymous but when his friend, Douglas Jerrold, read it for the first time, he commented that it was "mononymous throughout". Elizabeth Gaskell described the content as "Dickensy".

On 12th April 1850 Dickens wrote to his close friend, Angela Burdett Coutts: "The Household Words I hope (and have every reason to hope) will become a good property. It is exceedingly well liked, and goes, in the trade phrase, admirably. I daresay I shall be able to tell you, by the end of the month, what the steady sale is. It is quite as high now, as I ever anticipated; and although the expenses of such a venture are necessarily very great, the circulation much more than pays them, so far. The labor, in conjunction with Copperfield, is something rather ponderous; but to establish it firmly would be to gain such an immense point for the future (I mean my future) that I think nothing of that."

Claire Tomalin wrote that with the journal: "He set out to raise standards of journalism in the crowded field of periodical publication and, by winning educated readers and speaking to their consciences, to exert some influence on public matters; and to this end he himself wrote on many social issues - housing, sanitation, education, accidents in factories, workhouses, and in defence of the right of the poor to enjoy Sundays as they chose."

The journal was a great success and it was soon selling 39,000 copies. Peter Ackroyd has argued: "It was nothing like such serious journals as The Edinburgh Review - it was not in any sense intellectual - but rather took its place among the magazines which heralded or exploited the growth of the reading public throughout this period... Since this was not the cleverest, the most scholarly or even the most imaginative audience in Britain, Household Words had to be cheerful, bright, informative and, above all, readable." In its first year Dickens earned an extra £1,700 from the journal and in the second year of trading, £2,000.

On this day in 1882 Melanie Reizes, the daughter of Moriz Reizes and Libussa Deutsch Reizes, was born in Vienna. Her father was born into an orthodox Jewish family but studied to become a doctor against his parents' wishes. He spoke ten languages and was extremely well read.

Her mother was the grand-daughter of a rabbi. Moriz met her while they were staying in the same boardinghouse. He immediately fell in love with this "educated, witty, and interesting" young woman, with her fair complexion, fine features, and expressive eyes". They married in 1875.

Melanie was the youngest of four children, Emilie born in 1876, Emmanuel in 1877 and Sidonie in 1878. The family were in financial difficulties when she was born and her mother opened a shop that sold plants. Libussa was so busy that she was unable to breast feed her. She was handed over to a wet-nurse who fed her on demand, though the older children had all been fed by their mother.

Melanie claims that her father made no secret of his preference for Emilie, who together with Emmanuel, teased her for her ignorance. However, her eight-year-old sister, Sidonie, did take an interest in her and taught her reading and arithmetic during her long illness with scrofula (a form of tuberculosis). Although she survived, her sister, Sidonie, died of the disease in 1886. Janet Sayers, the author of Mothers of Psychoanalysis (1991), claims that this might have "contributed to Melanie's life-long depression."

Melanie later wrote: "I have a feeling that I never entirely got over the feeling of grief for her death. I also suffered under the grief my mother showed, whereas my father was more controlled. I remember that I felt that my mother needed me all the more now that Sidonie was gone, and it is probable that some of the spoiling was due to my having to replace that child."

In 1891, Emmanuel, aged 14, praised and corrected a poem she had written, he was "my confidant, my friend, my teacher". He taught her Latin and Greek in order to enable her to attend the Gymnasium and encouraged her to have her writing published. "He took great interest in my development and I knew that, until his death, he always expected me to do something great, although there was really nothing on which to base it... He seemed to me superior in every way to myself, not only because at nine or ten years of age, he seemed quite grown-up, but also because his gifts were so unusual... He was a self-willed and rebellious child and, I think, not sufficiently understood. He seemed at loggerheads with his teachers at the gymnasium, or contemptuous of them, and there were many controversial talks with my father."

Emmanuel introduced Melanie to the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur Schnitzler and Karl Kraus, all radical thinkers who challenged conventional morality. She also mixed with her brother's friends and it is claimed that four of these young men wanted to marry her. However, she rejected this idea and planned to study medicine like her father but to specialise in psychiatry. Her last years at school, under the influence and encouragement of her brother, were years in which she felt "gloriously alive".

Melanie's plans to go to university ended when her father died in April 1900. This was followed by the death of Emmanuel from a heart-attack. She now agreed to marry Arthur Stephan Klein, a second cousin and the son of Jacob Klein, a successful businessman. They married in 1903. Klein, an engineer, worked for a number of companies in different parts of Europe and was rarely at home.

Melanie's marriage was unhappy from the beginning. "I threw myself as much as I could into motherhood and interest in my child. I knew all the time that I was not happy but saw no way out." She told a friend many years later that he was having affairs from the first years of her marriage. Melanie Klein gave birth to her daughter, Melitta Klein in 1904. This was followed by two sons, Hans in 1907 and Erich in 1914. She was forced to stay with her husband because she had no means of supporting them on her own.

In 1914 Melanie Klein went into analysis with Sandor Ferenczi, an eminent Hungarian doctor, who was a member of a group of doctors who were followers of a group led by Sigmund Freud. Another member of the group was Hanns Sachs who said he was "the apostle of Freud who was my Christ". Another member said "there was an atmosphere of the foundation of a religion in that room. Freud himself was its new prophet... Freud's pupils - all inspired and convinced - were his apostles." Another member remarked that the original group was "a small and daring group, persecuted now but bound to conquer the world".

On Frenczi's recommendation, Melanie Klein read Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams. Freud argued that "If you inspect the dreams of very young children, from eighteen months upwards, you will find them perfectly simple and easy to explain. Small children always dream of the fulfillment of wishes that were aroused in them the day before but not satisfied." The dreams of adults are more difficult to explain. "Certainly the most satisfactory solution of the riddle of dreams would be to find that adults' dreams too were like those of children-fulfilments of wishful impulses that had come to them on the dream-day. And such in fact is the case. The difficulties in the way of this solution can be overcome step by step if dreams are analysed more closely."

Freud admitted that in most cases adult dreams could not look more unlike the fulfillment of a wish. "And here is the answer. Such dreams have been subjected to distortion; the psychical process under lying them might originally have been expressed in words quite differently. You must distinguish the manifest content of the dream, as you vaguely recollect it in the morning and laboriously (and, as it seems, arbitrarily) clothe it in words, and the latent dream thoughts, which you must suppose were present in the unconscious. This distortion in dreams is the same process that you have already come to know in investigating the formation of hysterical symptoms. It indicates, too, that the same interplay of mental forces is at work in the formation of dreams as in that of symptoms. The manifest content of the dream is the distorted substitute for the unconscious dream-thoughts and this distortion is the work of the ego's forces of defence - of resistances."

Sigmund Freud gives the example of a woman patient who had a dream that she was strangling a little white dog. The doctor asked her if she had a particular grudge against anyone. She said yes she had, and added that it was against her sister-in-law. She went on, "She is trying to come between my husband and myself". She was encouraged to talk more about this conflict and after a while she remembered that in a recent argument she described her as "a dog that bites". She also pointed out that her sister-in-law had a remarkably pale complexion. The patient now realised the meaning of the dream.

Freud argued that a woman who dreams that she wants to give a supper but cannot find the food in the shops, is satisfying her wish to refrain from inviting a friend of whom her husband is fond and she is jealous. In another case a woman dreams that her fifteen-year old daughter is lying dead in a box is satisfying her earlier wish for an abortion when pregnant. Freud argued that in these dreams the experience of anxiety is the distorted satisfaction of a sexual desire. He then went on to say that the accuracy of this statement "has been demonstrated with ever increasing certainty".

In The Interpretation of Dreams Freud explained the now famous Oedipus complex. "Being in love with the one parent and hating the other are among the essential constituents of the stock of psychical impulses which is formed in childhood and which in children destined to grow up neurotic is of such importance in determining their symptoms. The discovery is confirmed by a legend that has come down to us from classical antiquity... What I have in mind is the legend of King Oedipus and Sophocles' drama which bears his name."

Melanie Klein also read Freud's Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. In the book Freud put together, from what he had learned by analyses of patients and other sources, all he knew about the development of the sexual instinct from its earliest beginnings in childhood. Freud provided "the foundation for his theory of neuroses, the explanation of the need for repression and the source of emotional energy underlying conscious and unconscious drives and behaviour which he named libido."

Klein began to make observations on her youngest son, Erich, and she was encouraged to carry on when Sandor Ferenczi told her she had a gift for psychoanalytical understanding. She was determined to allow her young son's mind "freedom from unnecessary prohibitions and distortions of the truth". An atheist, Klein decided she did not want to teach him that there was a God. She also was straightforward and truthful with him about sex. This at the time was extremely radical. The results of her experiment was described in a paper she gave to the Budapest Psychoanalytical Society in 1919, entitled The Development of a Child: The Influence of Sexual Enlightenment and Relaxation of Authority on the Intellectual Development of Children. It was published as an article two years later.

Although her son, Erich, was only five-years-old at the time, she found ways of talking to him about sex. At first he did not want to know, but after she told him stories about the sex life of animals he began to show interest. He responded by telling his mother stories where he made symbolic use of the objects around him. He ran his toys over her body, saying they were climbing mountains. He talked of what babies are made of and said he wanted to make babies with his mother. Erich told another story "in which the womb figured as a completely furnished house, the stomach particularly was very fully equipped and was even possessed of a bath-tub and a soap-dish."

Melanie Klein argued that this form of education changed him from being somewhat backward to "almost precocious". His attitude towards his parents changed: "His games as well as his phantasies showed an extraordinary aggressiveness towards his father and also of course his already clearly indicated passion for his mother. At the same time he became talkative, cheerful, could play for hours with other children, and latterly showed such a progressive desire for every branch of knowledge and learning that in a very brief space of time and with very little assistance, he learnt to read."

Klein also analysed her older children. Hans was forced to stop seeing a girl older than himself because of the "identification he was making with the phantasy of his mother as a prostitute". In her article, A Contribution to the Psychogenesis of Tics she argued that "the turning away from the originally loved but forbidden mother had participated in the strengthening of the homosexual attitude and the phantasies about the dreaded castrating mother."

Klein now forced Hans to break off a homosexual relationship with a school friend. "It must have seemed to the boy that he had no area of privacy from his mother, who knew the innermost secrets of his soul. His tic and related homosexual problems she repeatedly links to his sense of inferiority to his father. Arthur Klein was deeply suspicious of psychoanalysis, which he saw as driving a wedge between him and his son, and his wife's obsession with it as a disruptive intrusion in the family."

Melanie Klein considered herself as the world's first child analyst. However, that title went to Hermine Hug-Hellmuth. A former schoolteacher, she published The Nature of the Child's Soul (1913) and A Young Girl's Diary (1919). At the International Congress in The Hague in 1920, she reported on her early efforts in her paper On the Technique of the Analysis of Children. Her work was based on observation and analysis of children's behavior and on the possibility of applying psychoanalytic theory to education and the psychology of children. This included analysing her nephew, Rudolf Otto Hug. The illegitimate child of her half-sister Antoine, he had been raised by Hug-Hellmuth since the death of his mother.

Melanie Klein went to meet Hug-Hellmuth but did not find her very helpful, possibly because she found her a threat. "Dr. Hug-Hellmuth was doing child analysis at this time in Vienna, but in a very restricted way. She completely avoided interpretations, though she used some play material and drawings, and I could never get an impression of what she was actually doing, nor was she analysing children under six or seven years."

Hug-Hellmuth actually warned against analysis for children if it touched their deepest feelings. She suggested that it is dangerous to uncover too many of children's negative and aggressive feelings towards their parents. Hug-Hellmuth was not only afraid of alienating parents by exposing to children their aggression towards their parents, but she also wanted the children to have good and friendly feelings towards themselves.

Melanie left her children with her in-laws in Rosenberg in Slovakia and moved to Germany and became a member of Berlin Psychoanalytical Society in 1922. Along with Anna Freud she was now seen as one of the pioneers of child psychology. Klein by this time had become dissatisfied with the results of her analysis with Sandor Ferenczi and asked Karl Abraham to take her into analysis. She said later that it was her brief analysis with Abraham which really taught her about the practice and theory of analysis.

While in Germany she met Alix Strachey, the wife of Freud's translator James Strachey. The two women became close friends: "She (Melanie) was frightfully excited and determined to have a thousand adventures, and soon infected me with some of her spirits… she's really a very good sort and makes no secret of her hopes, fears and pleasures, which are of the simplest sort. Only she's got a damned sharp eye for neurotics."

Melanie Klein also worked for the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. Others involved included Karl Abraham, Max Eitingon, Ernst Simmel, Hanns Sachs, Karen Horney, Edith Jacobson and Wilhelm Reich. The institute reflected the socialist sentiments widely held by Berlin intellectuals at the time. From the very beginning the institute provided free analytic treatment, often to more than a hundred patients. Later, it provided inpatient treatment to about thirty severely disturbed men who were suffering from the consequences of the First World War. Although Sigmund Freud was not directly involved praised the institute for "making our therapy accessible to the great numbers of people who suffer no less than the rich from neurosis, but are not in a position to pay for treatment."

Ernst Simmel, who succeeded Abraham as institute president, took pride that the clinics free treatment did not differ in the least from that of patients paying high fees. "All patients are... entitled to as many weeks or months of analysis as his condition requires". In this way the Berlin Institute was fulfilling social obligations incurred by society, which "makes its poor become neurotic and, because of its cultural demands, lets its neurotics stay poor, abandoning them to their misery."

Klein was disappointed by Simmel's election as she found Abraham as more supportive of her ideas. Abraham was described as "the very best president I ever met in my life. He was simply magnificent. Fair and absolutely firm. No nonsense. And kept the thing very well in hand. Again, he had his limitations. He didn't like fantasy very much. He didn't have much fantasy himself, but he was very much down to earth, excellent clinician, perfect chairman, and really a fair man."

Karen Horney was so impressed with her work that she decided that the girls' education should be supplemented with a course of psychoanalytic treatment with Melanie Klein. Brigitte, who was fourteen, refused to go for analysis. Marianne, was twelve and more complaint, attended faithfully for two years but developed strategies that kept Klein's interpretations to a minimum. Renate, who was only nine, tried to cooperate but disliked the talk about sexual matters. Later, Horney, psycho-analysised Melitta.

Melitta trained at the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute, before marrying Walter Schmideberg in 1924, another psychoanalyst, who was fourteen years her senior. At the time Schmideberg was a friend of Sigmund Freud and Klein's biographer, Phyllis Grosskurth, claims she had "encouraged the marriage for the reflected prestige it would give her". However, it was not long before Klein turned against Melitta's new husband. These family rows, mainly concerned Schmideberg's drinking problems. The following year he was treated for drug addiction at Sanatorium Schloss Tegel.

On the night of 8th September, 1924, Hermine Hug-Hellmuth was murdered by her eighteen-year-old nephew, whom she had brought up. According to Rudolf Otto Hug, his aunt's writings contained many observations of him and he testified at his trial that she had attempted to psychoanalyze him. After his trial he was sentenced to twelve years in prison. After being released from prison, he attempted to get restitution from the Vienna Psychoanalytic Association, as a victim of psychoanalysis.

This murder had a tremendous impact on the psychoanalytic movement. Members of the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute became increasingly critical of Melanie Klein's theories. They accused her of being "feeble-minded about theory" and her "nursery talk embarrassing and ridiculous". Some of the members suggested that "child analysis was positively dangerous". In May 1925, Karl Abraham became seriously ill and was no longer able to have her as his patient. After his death in December, she began to consider the possibility of leaving Germany.

In September, 1926, Melanie Klein, at the age of 38, accepted the invitation of Ernest Jones, to analyse his children in London. She lived in a maisonette near the Institute of Psychoanalysis in Gloucester Place. Her practice soon included not only Jones's children and wife but also six other patients. She now decided to settle permanently in England, a place that she described as "her second motherland".

Klein's daughter, Melitta Schmideberg, also came to live in England. She gave several lectures on child psychology. This included Criminal Tendencies in Normal Children (1927), Personification in the Play of Children (1929) and The Importance of Symbol-Formation in the Development of the Ego (1930). Phyllis Grosskurth claims that these papers contain "a medley of diverse ideas, a reflection of the creative thinking that had been released in her with a congenial atmosphere".

Over the next few years Melanie Klein wrote several articles where she questioned several of Sigmund Freud's theories. This included the claim that the Oedipus conflict began long before Freud had thought. Freud thought that there was a period in which children loved their mothers without conflict. Klein argued this was not so and believed that even very small babies had to cope with conflicting feelings of love and hatred.

Klein also questioned Freud's account of creativity. He attributed art to sublimation of individual instinct whereas Klein explained it as reflecting our relations with others, in the first place with the mother. In a British Society talk in May 1929 she illustrated this theme by reference to the work of the Swedish artist, Ruth Kjär. Klein quoted from Kjär's biographer, who argued that she suffered bouts of depression until she started painting pictures. "Klein thereby inaugurated a new trend in art and literary criticism focusing on the maternal and reparative aspects of creativity."

Supporters of Sigmund Freud became hostile towards Melanie Klein. This included Ernest Jones and Edward Glover, both senior figures in the British Psycho-Analytical Society. In 1933, Klein's daughter, Melitta Schmideberg decided to enter analysis with Glover. This resulted in her deciding that she "had been in a state of neurotic dependence on her mother" and that if a "state of amicability was to be maintained, it could exist only if Klein recognized her not as an appendage but as a colleague on an equal footing". In late 1933 it was apparent to other members of the Society that Glover and Schmideberg, had joined forces in a campaign to embarrass and discredit Melanie Klein. Schmideberg, later wrote: "Edward Glover and I agreed to ally to fight".

In a letter she wrote to her mother at this time explaining her thoughts on their relationship. "You do not take it enough into consideration that I am very different from you. I already told you years ago that nothing causes a worse reaction in me than trying to force feelings into me - it is the surest way to kill all feelings. Unfortunately, you have a strong tendency towards trying to enforce your way of viewing, of feeling, your interests, your friends, etc. onto me. I am now grown up and must be independent; I have my own life, my husband; I must be allowed to have interests, friends, feelings and thoughts which are different or even contrary to yours. I do not think that the relationship with her mother, however good, should be the centre of her life for an adult woman. I hope you do not expect from my analysis that I shall again take an attitude towards you which is similar to the one I had until a few years ago. This was one of neurotic dependence. I certainly can, with your help, retain a good and friendly relationship with you, if you allow me enough freedom, independence, and dissimilarity, and if you try to be less sensitive about several things."

Members of the British Psycho-Analytical Society tended to take the side of Melanie Klein against the attacks of her daughter. Melitta believed that this undermined her own status in the organisation: "I always felt that the main objection was that I had ceased to toe the Kleinian line (Freud by now was regarded as rather out-dated). Mrs. Klein had postulated psychotic phases and mechanisms in the first months of life, and maintained that the analysis of these phases was the essence of analytic theory and therapy. Her claims were becoming increasingly extravagant, she demanded unquestioning loyalty and tolerated no disagreement."

In April 1934, Hans Klein died while walking in the Tatra Mountains. It is believed that the path suddenly crumbled away beneath him and he plunged down the side of a precipice. Melanie was so distraught that she was unable to leave London and a close friend maintained that Hans's death was a source of grief for the rest of her life. Melitta's immediate reaction was that it had been suicide. At a conference in November she commented: "Anxiety and guilt are not the only emotions responsible for suicide. To mention only one other factor, excessive feelings of disgust brought about, for example, by deep disappointments in persons loved or by the break-down of idealizations prove frequently an incentive towards suicide."

Freud attributed self-reproach in depression to hatred of others internalized in imagination within the self. Klein disagreed with Freud and suggested that the main reason for depression to love of others and despair at feeling unable to restore the harm done by hatred of them. Whereas Freud believed depression is rooted in self-love and attachment to others. Klein rejected this idea and argued that depression does not stem from self-love but from concern for others. "Suicide in such cases involves a last-ditch attempt to preserve those one loves within the self by destroying the bad."

It has been argued that Klein was using her own experience to explain depression. As a child she suffered from chronic depression as a result of "the preference of her father for Emilie; the death of Sidonie; her anguish and guilt over Emanuel; her breakdown following her mother's death; her ambivalent feelings towards Arthur Klein; her devastation after Abraham's death". This was followed by Han's death and "Melitta's treachery".

Klein built up a group of loyal followers but like Sigmund Freud, she could be ruthless in casting off those who expressed doubts about her theories. Hanna Segal pointed out: "Although she was tolerant, and could accept with an open mind the criticisms of her friends and ex-pupils, whom she often consulted, this was so only so long as one accepted the fundamental tenets of her work. If she felt this to be under attack she could be very fierce in its defence. And if she did not get sufficient support from those she considered her friends, she could grow very bitter, sometimes in an unjust way."

In May 1936, Ernest Jones attacked Melanie Klein in a paper delivered to the Vienna Society. He claimed that Freud had provided the "scaffolding" and that they might see "considerable changes in the course of the next twenty years ago". However, he warned of those, who like Klein, who had succumbed to "the temptation to a one-sided exaggeration of whatever elements may have seized her interest".

On 17th February, 1937, Melitta Schmideberg continued her strident campaign against her mother when she delivered the paper, After the Analysis - Some Phantasies of Patients, that was delivered to the British Society. Joan Riviere wrote to James Strachey: "Melitta read a really shocking paper on Wednesday personally attacking Mrs. Klein and her followers and simply saying we were all bad analysts - indescribable."

Melanie Klein was in poor health and in July 1937 she underwent gall bladder surgery. Afterwards she went to live with her younger son Erich and his wife, Judy, who was at the time pregnant with their first child. (As a result of the level of anti-semitism in England he changed his name to Eric Clyne in 1937).

In the summer of 1938 Klein gave a paper to the Paris Congress entitled Mourning and its Relationship to the Manic-Depressive States, where she criticised Freud's views on depression which he believed was rooted in self-love. Klein suggested that grief involves recognizing both external and internal loss. "Loss does not so much initiate internalization of the other as Freud claimed. Rather it painfully disrupts internalization processes began in relation to the mother in infancy."

Melanie Klein met Virginia Woolf at a meeting of the British Psycho-Analytical Society. That night Woolf recorded in her diary her impression of Klein. "A woman of character and force some submerged - how shall I say - not craft, but subtlety, something working underground. A pull, a twist, like an undertow: menacing. A bluff grey haired lady, with large bright imaginative eyes."

Sigmund Freud and most of his family, including Anna Freud, arrived in London on 6th July, 1938, after the annexation of Austria into Nazi Germany. (53) Melanie Klein sent him a letter expressing the wish to call on him as soon as he was settled. He replied with a brief note saying that he hoped to see her in the near future. An invitation failed to materialize, although her daughter, Melitta Schmideberg, was a frequent visitor.

Edward Glover, the scientific secretary of the British Psycho-Analytical Society, found himself increasingly opposed to the innovations and influence of Melanie Klein. For several years he tried to oust the Kleinians as a group within the Society. The problem increased with Klein's supporters who arrived in England from Austria and Germany, fleeing from Adolf Hitler. This included people such as Hanna Segal, Paula Heimann, Herbert Rosenfeld, Nelly Wollfheim and Eva Rosenfeld. By 1938 one-third of its members were from the continent. She also had the support of British members such as Susan Sutherland Isaacs, Joan Riviere, John Rickman, Donald Winnicott and Clifford M. Scott.

However, Ernest Jones, protected Klein from Glover. In March 1939 she wrote to Jones thanking him for his help. "You have created the movement in England and carried it through innumerable difficulties and hardships to its present position... Now, I want to thank you for your personal friendship, and for your help and encouragement in what is of infinitely greater importance to us both than personal feelings - namely our work. I shall never forget that it was you who brought me to England and made it possible for me to carry out, and develop, my work in spite of all opposition."

Anna Freud joined with Glover in the attacks on Klein arguing at a meeting of the British Psycho-Analytical Society Training Committee meeting that "Mrs. Klein's work is not psycho-analysis but a substitution for it. The reason she gave for this opinion was that Mrs. Klein's work differs so greatly in theoretical conclusions and in practice from what they know to be psychoanalysis... Dr. Glover said that her work may either turn out to be a development of psycho-analysis or a deviation from it... Regarding the body of knowledge which should be taught to candidates, he said that controversial contributions should be excluded, referring to Mrs. Klein's work."

Melanie Klein's daughter, Melitta Schmideberg, was also highly critical of the Kleinian group. At one meeting, on 13th May 1942: "Melitta's shrill accusations, based on innuendo and gossip, had been distressing and embarrassing; but Glover's thundering rhetoric in leveling the gravest of charges against the Kleinian group left everyone at the meeting shaken. Glover essentially accused one group of trying to insinuate its way into power through the training of candidates; and if the situation were allowed to continue, within a very few years the British Society would be entirely dominated by the Kleinians." Melanie Klein commented that her supporters were made to look like "a forbidden sect doing some harmful work, which should be prevented from spreading."

Ernest Jones condemned the behaviour of Schmideberg and Glover and that Klein had good cause to bring a libel action against them. Anna Freud agreed and Klein reported to Susan Sutherland Isaac that: "She (Anna) is inclined to regard Melitta's attacks more in the way of a naughty child, and certainly underrates the disruptive effect on the Society which was - and here she is quite right - only so bad because the Society did not know how to deal with it."

Glover argued that "in the six years up to 1940 every training analyst appointed (5 in all) was an adherent of Mrs. Klein". Sylvia Payne carried out research into these claims and wrote to Klein about what she found: "I have studied Glover's speech. He says that there are 8 or 9 of your adherents among training analysts. The following are the actual names. Klein, Riviere, Rickman, Isaacs, Winnicott, Scott (control of child analysis and lectures). To these names he must be adding Wilson and Sheehan-Dare (they accepted many Kleinian ideas, but refused to be described as adherents of anyone). I propose to say that his figures are open to argument."

Edward Glover was outraged by a January 1944 suggestion that the teaching of the organization should cover Klein's controversial ideas. He now resigned, complaining that the Society was hopelessly "women ridden". In a letter to Sylvia Payne he explained his decision: "I have now simply exercised the privilege of withdrawing from the Society (a) because its general tendency and training has become unscientific and (b) because it is becoming less and less Freudian and has therefore lapsed from its original aims."

Glover attempted to persuade Anna Freud to leave the British Psycho-Analytical Society. Phyllis Grosskurth argued that "Glover lacked psychological insight and an understanding of the strength of Anna Freud's inflexibility. She would not allow herself, Freud's daughter, to be pushed out of the Society and branded as a schismatic. She sometimes said that she stayed in because she was grateful to Jones for bringing her family to England, but it is possible that she also felt that she could work things to her own advantage if she played her cards right."

Negotiations continued for two years before an agreement was reached. On 5th November, 1946, a scheme of training was arranged which incorporated both the ideas of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein. "It is disturbing to accept that highly intelligent, well-educated people could succumb to the hysteria that swept through the British Society for some years. But one must realize that all human beings, even psychoanalysts, are subject to the same pressures; when engulfed in groups, they exhibit envy, anger, and competitiveness, whether the group be a trade union or a synod of bishops. The fact that the British Society did not split is, in the view of many members, evidence both of British hypocrisy and of British determination to compromise."

In 1955 Melanie Klein published a paper entitled, Some Theoretical Conclusions Regarding the Emotional Life of the Infant. She argued that the child seeks both enviously to spoil good things in the mother, and greedily to expropriate and devour and destroy them within itself. Such greed and envy, she insisted, begins not with envy of the father's penis as symbol of self-esteem as Freud had claimed. It begins with envy of the mother's breast. She agreed with Karen Horney that both boys and girls envy the breast.

Klein believed that breast-feeding played an important role in the relationship between the mother and child: "A really happy relationship between mother and child can be established only when nursing and feeding the baby is not a matter of duty but a real pleasure to the mother. If she can enjoy it thoroughly, her pleasure will be unconsciously realized by the child, and this reciprocal happiness will lead to a full emotional understanding between mother and child… it is important that a mother should recognise that her child is not a possession and that, though he is so small and utterly dependent on her help, he is a separate entity and ought to be treated as an individual human being; she must not tie him too much to herself, but assist him to grow up to independence."

In 1957 Klein published Envy and Gratitude. In the book she rejected the idea of "penis envy" and instead suggested that men suffered from "breast envy". She argued: "Experience has taught me that the first object of envy is the nourishing breast, as the child feels that the breast possesses all that he desires, has an unlimited amount of milk and love but holds it for his enjoyment. This feeling increases the child's resentment and hatred, and consequently disturbs his reationship with the mother."

Freudians complained that Klein's method threatened to "imprison both patient and analysist in a matriarch world". Julia Segal argues that there was another major reason for the attacks she received: "Many people opposed and still oppose Klein's view that a small baby may have powerful feelings of aggression not only towards its mother in general but even towards her breast at an age when the baby is too small to have a perception of her as a whole person... Teaching about Klein for many years, I have found that the idea that the small baby has feelings of hatred and aggressiveness from the beginning is extremely unpalatable, particularly among those; who like to see the baby as the innocent victim of a cruel world. Those who have given birth to babies themselves tend in my experience to have a view more accepting of Klein's. The idea that a baby has only good, loving feelings towards its mother does not really stand up to nights pacing backwards and forwards with a baby who is screaming and will not be comforted, or who sometimes turns away from the breast and screams for no apparent reason. Clearly, there may be a reason, but it is not a simple matter of being a bad parent."

Melanie Klein found this criticism difficult to take and the main result was an intense feeling of loneliness. This was the subject of her final paper. "Loneliness is not the objective situation of being deprived of external companionship. I am referring to the inner sense of loneliness - the sense of being alone regardless of external circumstances, of feeling lonely even when among friends or receiving love. This state of internal loneliness, I will suggest, is the result of a ubiquitous yearning for an unattainable perfect internal state. Such loneliness, which is experienced to some extent by everyone, springs from paranoid and depressive anxieties which are derivatives of the infant's psychotic anxieties. These anxieties exist in some measure in every individual but are excessively strong in illness; therefore loneliness is also part of illness, both of a schizophrenic and depressive nature."

Melanie Klein died on 22nd September 1960. Melitta Schmideberg did not attend the funeral and instead gave a lecture in London wearing red boots.

On this day in 1883 Jo Davidson was born in New York City. He worked under Hermon Atkins MacNeil before moving to Paris to study sculpture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1907. His realistic busts soon gained him commissions from wealthy patrons such as Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.

Davidson lived in Greenwich Village where he became a close friend of Lincoln Steffens and other writers and artists. Some of his early commissions included George Bernard Shaw, Woodrow Wilson and Joseph Conrad. During the First World War he made busts of General Ferdinand Foch and Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau.

Peter Hartshorn has argued that he attended the Versailles Peace Conference in 1918: "He headed to Paris to take advantage of the historic occasion by making busts of the Allied leaders gathered there. Armed with letters of introduction to French Marshall Ferdinand Foch and Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, Davidson had high hopes." Over the next few weeks he produced busts of John J. Pershing, Arthur Balfour, Edward House and Bernard Baruch.

After the First World War Davidson moved to Paris where he associated with Lincoln Steffens, Ezra Pound, William Christian Bullitt, Louise Bryant, Ella Winter, John Dos Passos, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Ford Madox Ford and Gertrude Stein. According to Justin Kaplan, the author of Lincoln Steffens: A Biography (1974): "Despite their sophistication and internationalism, they belonged to a straggling, authentically native succession of grass-roots radicals (of the right as well of the left) and cracker-barrel sages, men with a populist hunger for drastic solutions and an inclination to spend their time and spirit cussing out the government and the banks while awaiting the arrival of the messiah."

Ella Winter was the wife of Lincoln Steffens and they spent a great deal of time with Davidson and his wife Yvonne, a dress designer. In her book, And Not to Yield (1963), she wrote: "We were almost always with Jo and Yvonne. The Davidsons appreciated food in the French manner, and discussed and selected restaurants all over Paris for their specialties. Their thrill at discovering a new bistro, or a sauce at Chez Pierre or Le Commerce, was a curious experience for me, with my London memories of three-and-sixpenny ABC lunches, and I must confess I was at first somewhat dismayed at so much fuss about mere food."

Steffens wrote in his memoirs, Autobiography (1931): "Jo Davidson is the only artist I have met who was consciously in the stream of life as I knew it. The others, certainly the young Americans in Paris, had been in the water, some of them had been nearly drowned by the flood of the war, but they saw and felt only the waves that broke over them.... Jo Davidson had been at the front, though only as a correspondent, but he never dwelt on those experiences. Like Jack Reed, he saw and felt the big forces that had done it once to us and might do it again... His art saved the sculptor. Busting generals, statesmen, financiers, he talked to them, and he listened to them, and so saw the war and the peace from the perspective of headquarters, the capitals and the markets... I have heard him say that the war had no influence upon art, only on some of its themes. It had turned him from nudes and decorations to heads, mostly of great men, and he often regretted that."

Jo Davidson was a political activist and was chairman of the Independent Citizens Committee of Artists, Scientists, and Professionals (ICCASP), a group that supported the policies of President Franklin Roosevelt. An opponent of the Cold War policies of Harry S. Truman, he joined the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA). Other members included Rexford Tugwell, Paul Robeson, W.E.B. Du Bois, Arthur Miller, Dashiell Hammett, Hellen Keller, Thomas Mann, Aaron Copland, Claude Pepper, Eugene O'Neill, Glen H. Taylor, John Abt, Edna Ferber, Thornton Wilder, Carl Van Doren, Fredric March and Gene Kelly.

Davidson supported Henry A. Wallace in the 1948 Presidential Election. Wallace's running-mate was Glen H. Taylor, the left-wing senator for Idaho. A group of conservatives, including Henry Luce, Clare Booth Luce, Adolf Berle, Lawrence Spivak and Hans von Kaltenborn, sent a cable to Ernest Bevin, the British foreign secretary, that the PCA were only "a small minority of Communists, fellow-travelers and what we call here totalitarian liberals." Winston Churchill agreed and described Wallace and his followers as "crypto-Communists".

During his lifetime Davidson produced busts of Arthur Conan Doyle, Clarence Darrow, Charlie Chaplin, Lincoln Steffens, Israel Zangwill, Albert Einstein, Emma Goldman, Frank Harris, Hellen Keller, John D. Rockefeller, Dolores Ibárruri, Franklin Roosevelt, Henry A. Wallace, Walt Whitman, W. Averell Harriman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, H. G. Wells, Gertrude Stein, Josip Tito, Carl Sandburg, Edward Willis Scripps, George Bernard Shaw, Mahatma Gandhi, James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling, Robert M. La Follette, D. H. Lawrence, Henry Luce, Andrew Mellon, James Barrie, Joseph Conrad, Charles G. Dawes, Will Rogers, Anatole France, André Gide, Robinson Jeffers, John Marin and Ida Rubinstein.

Jo Davidson died on 2nd January, 1952.

On this day in 1909, Dora Marsden, Rona Robinson and Mary Gawthorpe decided to take part in another protest. According to Les Garner, the author of A Brave and Beautiful Spirit (1990): "Dressed in University gowns they entered the meeting and just before Morley began, raised the question of the recent forced feeding of women in Winson Green. There was an uproar, and the three were quickly bundled out and arrested on the pavement." This time they were released without charge.

On this day in 1912 Sarah Carwin was charged with breaking seven windows at 179-183, Regent Street. This included at the jeweller's J. C. Vickery. One of his shop assistants, caught Carwin. In court he said she appealed to a bystander for protection. Carwin said that needed help because the man was acting like a "raging bull". Along with Ada Wright, Olive Wharry and Kitty Marion she was sentenced to six months in Winston Green Prison. Carwin went on hunger-strike and after being forced-fed the "deterioration in her physical condition led to her release". Her biographer, Francis Marbella Unwin, claimed that "she resisted with her utmost strength" and this left her "permanently injured".

Sarah Carwin, the daughter of John Carwin (1835-1888) and Jerusha Brown Carwin (1828-1866), was born in Bolton on 16th August 1863. At the time John Carwin was a "Cotton Carder" working in Rochdale.

In 1866 the family moved to Russia where it is believed that John Carwin attempted to start up a business in the textile industry. They returned to England in 1873. At the age of 18 she became a nursery governess in St Petersburg.

After her return in 1885 she joined the Methodist Sisterhood of the West London Mission. As Diane Atkinson has pointed out: "Many of the young women Sarah Carwin worked with were seasonal workers in the garment trade who were sacked when the fashion was over. By 1891 Sarah aged twenty-eight, had started a co-operative dressmaking business in Marylebone to provide such women with regular employment and a steady income."

Carwin enrolled as a trainee nurse at Great Ormond Street children's hospital, and qualified in 1896 and the following year joined with a friend in "a similar, larger, undertaking" . In 1901 she ran a home for a dozen illegitimate babies in Caterham. This was followed by becoming the nurse in charge of the Invalid Children's Special School founded by Mary Humphry Ward at the Passmore Edwards Settlement.

It is believed that Carwin became a feminist and anti-imperialist after reading the work of Olive Schreiner. Carwin joined the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU) and in February 1909 was arrested along with Mary Allen, Constance Lytton, Emmeline Pethick-Lawrence and Caroline Watts for taking part in a demonstration outside the House of Commons.

On 29th June, 1909, Sarah Carwin and Ada Wright were arrested for breaking government windows. They were sentenced to a month in prison. While in Holloway they broke every window in their cells as a protest. When they were called before the Prison Board, faced with twenty seated men, Carwin went on the attack: "Give me a chair, why should we stand when all these men are sitting down?" (6) Both women were released after being on hunger strike for six days.

Sarah Carwin was imprisoned several times for window-breaking. Described as a "tall, interesting-looking woman" Emmeline Pankhurst wrote to her that: "Women have reason to be grateful that you and others have the courage to play the soldier's part in the war we are waging in the political freedom of women."

In May 1914 she was in trouble again: "Following on the suffragist disturbances at Bow Street Police Court on Friday, five defendants appeared before Sir John Dickinson on Saturday. There was an attempt to make another scene, but this succeeded only in part. One of the defendants, Sarah Carwin, kept up a running comment of "That's a lie" during the police evidence, and she told the Magistrate that she had the utmost contempt for anything that happened in that Court. She was ordered to be bound over, and left the dock protesting against this course."

On the outbreak of the First World War Carwin left the Women's Social and Political Union (WSPU). She lived in the country for many years with a woman friend to whom she was "devotedly attached". When her friend died she lived in France and Italy. Francis Marbella Unwin pointed out: "She spared herself nothing in the pursuit of her ideals... a few weeks before her death she said that if she could choose any part of her life to live over again she would choose the part she had devoted to the suffrage. It had seemed the most worthwhile."

Sarah Carwin died in Elham, Kent, on 30th December 1933.

On this day in 1913 Richard Helms was born in St Davids, Philadelphia. After graduating from Williams College, Massachusetts, he joined the United Press news agency and in 1936 was sent to Nazi Germany to cover the Berlin Olympic Games. On his return to the United States he joined the advertising department of the Indianapolis Times. Two years later he became national advertising manager.

After the bombing of Pearl Harbor Helms joined the United States Navy. In August, 1943, he was transferred to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) that had made established by William Donovan. The OSS had responsibility for collecting and analyzing information about countries at war with the United States. It also helped to organize guerrilla fighting, sabotage and espionage.

After the surrender of Germany in 1945, Helms helped interview suspected Nazi war criminals. Helms remained in the OSS and in 1946 was put in charge of intelligence and counter-intelligence activities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. The following year Helms joined the recently formed Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). His first task was to mount a mount a massive convert campaign against the Communist Party during the Italian General Election. This was highly successful and this encouraged President Harry S. Truman to establish the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), an organization instructed to conduct covert anti-Communist operations around the world. In August, 1952, OPC and the Office of Special Operations (the espionage division) were merged to form the Directorate of Plans (DPP).

Frank Wisner was appointed head of the DPP and he appointed Helms as his chief of operations. In December, 1956, Wisner suffered a mental breakdown and was diagnosed as suffering from manic depression. During his absence Wisner's job was covered by Helms. The CIA sent Wisner to the Sheppard-Pratt Institute, a psychiatric hospital near Baltimore. He was prescribed psychoanalysis and shock therapy (electroconvulsive treatment). It was not successful and still suffering from depression, he was released from hospital in 1958.

Wisner was too ill to return to his post as head of the DDP. Allen W. Dulles therefore sent him to London to be CIA chief of station in England. Dulles decided that Richard Bissell rather than Helms should become the new head of the DPP. Helms was named as his deputy. Together they became responsible for what became known as the CIA's Black Operations. This involved a policy that was later to become known as Executive Action (a plan to remove unfriendly foreign leaders from power). This including a coup d'état that overthrew the Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 after he introduced land reforms and nationalized the United Fruit Company.

Other political leaders deposed by Executive Action included Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, the Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Trujillo, General Abd al-Karim Kassem of Iraq and Ngo Dinh Diem, the leader of South Vietnam. However, his main target was Fidel Castro who had established a socialist government in Cuba.

In March I960, President Dwight Eisenhower of the United States approved a CIA plan to overthrow Castro. The plan involved a budget of $13 million to train "a paramilitary force outside Cuba for guerrilla action." The strategy was organised by Bissell and Helms. An estimated 400 CIA officers were employed full-time to carry out what became known as Operation Mongoose.

Sidney Gottlieb of the CIA Technical Services Division was asked to come up with proposals that would undermine Castro's popularity with the Cuban people. Plans included a scheme to spray a television studio in which he was about to appear with an hallucinogenic drug and contaminating his shoes with thallium which they believed would cause the hair in his beard to fall out.

These schemes were rejected and instead Bissell and Helms decided to arrange the assassination of Fidel Castro. In September 1960, Bissell and Allen W. Dulles, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), initiated talks with two leading figures of the Mafia, Johnny Roselli and Sam Giancana. Later, other crime bosses such as Carlos Marcello, Santos Trafficante and Meyer Lansky became involved in this plot against Castro.

Robert Maheu, a veteran of CIA counter-espionage activities, was instructed to offer the Mafia $150,000 to kill Fidel Castro. The advantage of employing the Mafia for this work is that it provided CIA with a credible cover story. The Mafia were known to be angry with Castro for closing down their profitable brothels and casinos in Cuba. If the assassins were killed or captured the media would accept that the Mafia were working on their own.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation had to be brought into this plan as part of the deal involved protection against investigations against the Mafia in the United States. Castro was later to complain that there were twenty ClA-sponsered attempts on his life. Eventually Johnny Roselli and his friends became convinced that the Cuban revolution could not be reversed by simply removing its leader. However, they continued to play along with this CIA plot in order to prevent them being prosecuted for criminal offences committed in the United States.

When John F. Kennedy replaced Dwight Eisenhower as president of the United States he was told about the CIA plan to invade Cuba. Kennedy had doubts about the venture but he was afraid he would be seen as soft on communism if he refused permission for it to go ahead. Kennedy's advisers convinced him that Fidel Castro was an unpopular leader and that once the invasion started the Cuban people would support the ClA-trained forces.

On April 14, 1961, B-26 planes began bombing Cuba's airfields. After the raids Cuba was left with only eight planes and seven pilots. Two days later five merchant ships carrying 1,400 Cuban exiles arrived at the Bay of Pigs. The attack was a total failure. Two of the ships were sunk, including the ship that was carrying most of the supplies. Two of the planes that were attempting to give air-cover were also shot down. Within seventy-two hours all the invading troops had been killed, wounded or had surrendered.

After the CIA's internal inquiry into this fiasco, Allen W. Dulles was sacked by President John F. Kennedy and Richard Bissell was forced to resign. Helms now took over the Directorate for Plans. His deputy was Thomas H. Karamessines. Helms now introduced a campaign that involved covert attacks on the Cuban economy.

In 1962 Richard Helms became increasingly involved in the Vietnam War. By this time President John F. Kennedy was convinced that Ngo Dinh Diem would never be able to unite the South Vietnamese against communism. Several attempts had already been made to overthrow Diem but Kennedy had always instructed the CIA and the US military forces in Vietnam to protect him. Eventually, in order to obtain a more popular leader of South Vietnam, Kennedy agreed that the role of the CIA should change. Lucien Conein, a CIA operative, provided a group of South Vietnamese generals with $40,000 to carry out the coup with the promise that US forces would make no attempt to protect Diem. At the beginning of November, 1963, President Diem was overthrown by a military coup. The generals had promised Diem that he would be allowed to leave the country they changed their mind and killed him.

When John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Helms was given the responsibility of investigating Lee Harvey Oswald and the CIA. Helms initially appointed John M. Whitten to undertake the agency's in-house investigation. After talking to Winston Scott, the CIA station chief in Mexico City, Whitten discovered that Oswald had been photographed at the Cuban consulate in early October, 1963. Nor had Scott told Whitten, his boss, that Oswald had also visited the Soviet Embassy in Mexico. In fact, Whitten had not been informed of the existence of Oswald, even though there was a 201 pre-assassination file on him that had been maintained by the Counterintelligence/Special Investigative Group.

John M. Whitten and his staff of 30 officers, were sent a large amount of information from the FBI. According to Gerald D. McKnight "the FBI deluged his branch with thousands of reports containing bits and fragments of witness testimony that required laborious and time-consuming name checks." Whitten later described most of this FBI material as "weirdo stuff". As a result of this initial investigation, Whitten told Richard Helms that he believed that Oswald had acted alone in the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

On 6th December, Nicholas Katzenbach invited John M. Whitten and Birch O'Neal, Angleton's trusted deputy and senior Special Investigative Group (SIG) officer to read Commission Document 1 (CD1), the report that the FBI had written on Lee Harvey Oswald. Whitten now realized that the FBI had been withholding important information on Oswald from him. He also discovered that Richard Helms had not been providing him all of the agency's available files on Oswald. This included Oswald's political activities in the months preceding the assassination.

Whitten had a meeting where he argued that Oswald's pro-Castro political activities needed closer examination, especially his attempt to shoot the right-wing General Edwin Walker, his relationship with anti-Castro exiles in New Orleans, and his public support for the pro-Castro Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Whitten added that has he had been denied this information, his initial conclusions on the assassination were "completely irrelevant."

Helms responded by taking Whitten off the case. James Jesus Angleton, chief of the CIA's Counterintelligence Branch, was now put in charge of the investigation. According to Gerald McKnight (Breach of Trust) Angleton "wrested the CIA's in-house investigation away from John Whitten because he either was convinced or pretended to believe that the purpose of Oswald's trip to Mexico City had been to meet with his KGB handlers to finalize plans to assassinate Kennedy."

President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Admiral William Raborn, head of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Helms became Raborn's deputy but became increasingly influential over decisions being made in Vietnam. This included the covert action in neighbouring Laos and the formation of South Vietnamese counter-terror teams.

The following year Johnson promoted Helms to become head of the CIA. He was the first director of the organization to have worked his way up from the ranks. His standing with Johnson improved when he successfully predicted a quick victory for Israel during the Six Day War in June, 1967. However, Helms information about the size of enemy forces in Vietnam was less accurate. Johnson was told in November, 1967, that the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces had fallen to 248,000. In reality the true figure was close to 500,000 and United States troops were totally unprepared for the Tet Offensive.

Under President Richard Nixon, Helms agreed to implement what became known as the Huston Plan. This was a proposal for all the country's security services to combine in a massive internal surveillance operation. In doing so, Helms became involved in a secret conspiracy as it was illegal for the Central Intelligence Agency to operate within the United States.

In 1970 it seemed that Salvador Allende and his Socialist Workers' Party would win the general election in Chile. Various multinational companies, including International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), feared what would happen if Allende gained control of the country. Helms agreed to use funds supplied by these companies to help the right-wing party gain power. When this strategy ended in failure, Nixon ordered Helms to help the Chilean armed forces to overthrow Allende. On 11th September, 1973, a military coup removed Allende's government from power. Allende died in the fighting in the presidential palace in Santiago and General Augusto Pinochet replaced him as president.

During the Watergate Scandal President Richard Nixon became concerned about the activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. Three of those involved in the burglary, E. Howard Hunt, Eugenio Martinez and James W. McCord had close links with the CIA. Nixon and his aides attempted to force the CIA director, Richard Helms, and his deputy, Vernon Walters, to pay hush-money to Hunt, who was attempting to blackmail the government. Although it seemed Walters was willing to do this, Helms refused. In February, 1973, Nixon sacked Helms. His deputy, Thomas H. Karamessines, resigned in protest. The following month Helms became U.S. Ambassador to Iran.

James Schlesinger now became the new director of the CIA. Schlesinger was heard to say: “The clandestine service was Helms’s Praetorian Guard. It had too much influence in the Agency and was too powerful within the government. I am going to cut it down to size.” This he did and over the next three months over 7 per cent of CIA officers lost their jobs.

On 9th May, 1973, James Schlesinger issued a directive to all CIA employees: “I have ordered all senior operating officials of this Agency to report to me immediately on any activities now going on, or might have gone on in the past, which might be considered to be outside the legislative charter of this Agency. I hereby direct every person presently employed by CIA to report to me on any such activities of which he has knowledge. I invite all ex-employees to do the same. Anyone who has such information should call my secretary and say that he wishes to talk to me about “activities outside the CIA’s charter”.

There were several employees who had been trying to complain about the illegal CIA activities for some time. As Cord Meyer pointed out, this directive “was a hunting license for the resentful subordinate to dig back into the records of the past in order to come up with evidence that might destroy the career of a superior whom he long hated.”

In 1975 the Senate Foreign Relations Committee began investigating the CIA. Senator Stuart Symington asked Richard Helms if the agency had been involved in the removal of Salvador Allende. Helms replied no. He also insisted that he had not passed money to opponents of Allende.

Investigations by the CIA's Inspector General and by Frank Church and his Select Committee on Intelligence Activities showed that Helms had lied to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. They also discovered that Helms had been involved in illegal domestic surveillance and the murders of Patrice Lumumba, General Abd al-Karim Kassem and Ngo Dinh Diem. Helms was eventually found guilty of lying to Congress and received a suspended two-year prison sentence.

In its final report, issued in April 1976, the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities concluded: “Domestic intelligence activity has threatened and undermined the Constitutional rights of Americans to free speech, association and privacy. It has done so primarily because the Constitutional system for checking abuse of power has not been applied.” The committee also revealed details for the first time of what the CIA called Operation Mockingbird.

The committee also reported that the Central Intelligence Agency had withheld from the Warren Commission, during its investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, information about plots by the Government of the United States against Fidel Castro of Cuba; and that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had conducted a counter-intelligence program (COINTELPRO) against Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

On 16th May, 1978, John M. Whitten appeared before the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA). He criticised Richard Helms for not making a full disclosure about the Rolando Cubela plot to the Warren Commission. He added " I think that was a morally highly reprehensible act, which he cannot possibly justify under his oath of office or any other standard of professional service."

Whitten also said that if he had been allowed to continue with the investigation he would have sought out what was going on at JM/WAVE. This would have involved the questioning of Ted Shackley, David Sanchez Morales, Carl E. Jenkins, Rip Robertson, George Joannides, Gordon Campbell and Thomas G. Clines. As Jefferson Morley has pointed out in The Good Spy: "Had Whitten been permitted to follow these leads to their logical conclusions, and had that information been included in the Warren Commission report, that report would have enjoyed more credibility with the public. Instead, Whitten's secret testimony strengthened the HSCA's scathing critique of the C.I.A.'s half-hearted investigation of Oswald. The HSCA concluded that Kennedy had been killed by Oswald and unidentifiable co-conspirators."

John M. Whitten also told the HSCA that James Jesus Angleton involvement in the investigation of the assassination of John F. Kennedy was "improper". Although he was placed in charge of the investigation by Richard Helms, Angleton "immediately went into action to do all the investigating". When Whitten complained to Helms about this he refused to act.

Whitten believes that Angleton's attempts to sabotage the investigation was linked to his relationship with the Mafia. Whitten claims that Angleton also prevented a CIA plan to trace mob money to numbered accounts in Panama. Angleton told Whitten that this investigation should be left to the FBI. When Whitten mentioned this to a senior CIA official, he replied: "Well, that's Angleton's excuse. The real reason is that Angleton himself has ties to the Mafia and he would not want to double-cross them."

Whitten also pointed out that as soon as Angleton took control of the investigation he concluded that Cuba was unimportant and focused his internal investigation on Oswald's life in the Soviet Union. If Whitten had remained in charge he would have "concentrated his attention on CIA's JM/WAVE station in Miami, Florida, to uncover what George Joannides, the station chief, and operatives from the SIG and SAS knew about Oswald."

When he appeared before the HSCA Whitten revealed that he had been unaware of the CIA's Executive Action program. He added that he thought it possible that Lee Harvey Oswald might have been involved in this assassination operation.

Richard Helms died on 22nd October, 2002. As one commentator pointed out at the time: "Helms had gone to his grave with the sole knowledge of what Congress did not manage to uncover." His autobiography, A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the CIA, was published in 2003.

On this day in 1919 McGeorge Bundy was born in Boston, Massachusetts. After graduating from Yale University in 1940 he joined the office of Facts and Figures in Washington. After the Second World War he took up a teaching appointment at Harvard University. Eventually he became Dean of Arts and Sciences (1953-61).

When John F. Kennedy was elected he appointed Bundy as his National Security Adviser. William Attwood was the leading advocate inside the Kennedy Administration for talking to Fidel Castro about the potential for improving relations. He was supported by Bundy who suggested to Kennedy that there should be a "gradual development of some form of accommodation with Castro".

In April 1963 Lisa Howard arrived in Cuba to make a documentary on the country. In an interview with Howard, Fidel Castro agreed that a rapprochement with Washington was desirable. On her return Howard met with the Central Intelligence Agency. Deputy Director Richard Helms reported to John F. Kennedy on Howard's view that "Fidel Castro is looking for a way to reach a rapprochement with the United States." After detailing her observations about Castro's political power, disagreements with his colleagues and Soviet troops in Cuba, the memo concluded that "Howard definitely wants to impress the U.S. Government with two facts: Castro is ready to discuss rapprochement and she herself is ready to discuss it with him if asked to do so by the US Government."

CIA Director John McCone was strongly opposed to Lisa Howard being involved with these negotiations with Castro. He argued that it might "leak and compromise a number of CIA operations against Castro". In a memorandum to McGeorge Bundy, McCone commented that the "Lisa Howard report be handled in the most limited and sensitive manner," and "that no active steps be taken on the rapprochement matter at this time."

Arthur Schlesinger explained to Anthony Summers in 1978 why the CIA did not want John F. Kennedy to negotiate with Fidel Castro during the summer of 1963: "The CIA was reviving the assassination plots at the very time President Kennedy was considering the possibility of normalization of relations with Cuba - an extraordinary action. If it was not total incompetence - which in the case of the CIA cannot be excluded - it was a studied attempt to subvert national policy."

Lisa Howard now decided to bypass the CIA and in May, 1963, published an article in the journal, War and Peace Report, Howard wrote that in eight hours of private conversations Castro had shown that he had a strong desire for negotiations with the United States: "In our conversations he made it quite clear that he was ready to discuss: the Soviet personnel and military hardware on Cuban soil; compensation for expropriated American lands and investments; the question of Cuba as a base for Communist subversion throughout the Hemisphere." Howard went on to urge the Kennedy administration to "send an American government official on a quiet mission to Havana to hear what Castro has to say." A country as powerful as the United States, she concluded, "has nothing to lose at a bargaining table with Fidel Castro."

William Attwood read Howard's article and on 12th September, 1963, he had a long conversation with her on the phone. This apparently set in motion a plan to initiate secret talks between the United States and Cuba. Six days later Attwood sent a memorandum to Under Secretary of State Averell Harriman and U.N. Ambassador Adlai Stevenson. Attwood asked for permission to establish discreet, indirect contact with Fidel Castro.

On September 20, John F. Kennedy gave permission to authorize Attwood's direct contacts with Carlos Lechuga, the Cuban ambassador to the United Nations. According to Attwood: "I then told Miss Howard to set up the contact, that is to have a small reception at her house so that it could be done very casually, not as a formal approach by us." Howard met Lechuga at the UN on 23rd September 23. Howard invited Lechuga to come to a party at her Park Avenue apartment that night to meet Attwood.

The next day William Attwood met with Robert Kennedy in Washington and reported on the talks with Lechuga. According to Attwood the attorney general believed that a trip to Cuba would be "rather risky." It was "bound to leak and... might result in some kind of Congressional investigation." Nevertheless, he thought the matter was "worth pursuing."

On 5th November 5, McGeorge Bundy recorded that "the President was more in favor of pushing towards an opening toward Cuba than was the State Department, the idea being - well, getting them out of the Soviet fold and perhaps wiping out the Bay of Pigs and maybe getting back into normal." Bundy designated his assistant, Gordon Chase, to be Attwood's direct contact at the White House.

Attwood continued to use Lisa Howard as his contact with Fidel Castro. In October 1963, Castro told Howard that he was very keen to open negotiations with Kennedy. Castro even offered to send a plane to Mexico to pick up Kennedy's representative and fly him to a private airport near Veradero where Castro would talk to him alone.

John F. Kennedy now decided to send William Attwood to meet Castro. On 14th November, 1963, Lisa Howard conveyed this message to her Cuban contact. In an attempt to show his good will, Kennedy sent a coded message to Castro in a speech delivered on 19th November. The speech included the following passage: "Cuba had become a weapon in an effort dictated by external powers to subvert the other American republics. This and this alone divides us. As long as this is true, nothing is possible. Without it, everything is possible."

Kennedy also sent a message to Fidel Castro via the French journalist Jean Daniel. According to Daniel: "Kennedy expressed some empathy for Castro's anti-Americanism, acknowledging that the United States had committed a number of sins in pre-revolutionary Cuba." Kennedy told Daniel that the trade embargo against Cuba could be lifted if Castro ended his support for left-wing movements in the Americas.

Daniel delivered this message on 19th November. Castro told Daniel that Kennedy could become "the greatest president of the United States, the leader who may at last understand that there can be coexistence between capitalists and socialists, even in the Americas." Daniel was with Castro when news arrived that Kennedy had been assassinated Castro turned to Daniel and said:"This is an end to your mission of peace. Everything is changed."

President Lyndon B. Johnson was told about these negotiations in December, 1963. He refused to continue these talks and claimed that the reason for this was that he feared that Richard Nixon, the expected Republican candidate for the presidency, would accuse him of being soft on communism.

Bundy continued to serve Johnson as National Security Adviser and was later blamed for being partly responsible for escalating the Vietnam War. In 1966 he left office to become President of the Ford Foundation.

Bundy was also Professor of History at New York University (1979-1989). He was also the author of several books including Presidential Promises and Performance (1980), Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years (1988) and Reducing Nuclear Danger: The Road Away from the Brink (1993).

McGeorge Bundy died of a heart attack on 16th September, 1996.

On this day in 1931 women's rights campaigner Margaret McMillan died. Afterwards her friend Walter Cresswell wrote a memoir of the McMillan sisters: "Such persons, single-minded, pure in heart, blazing with selfless love, are the jewels of our species. There is more essential Christianity in them than in a multitude of bishops."

Margaret McMillan, was born in Westchester County, New York, on the 20th July, 1860. Her parents, James and Jean McMillan, had originally come from Inverness but had emigrated to the United States in 1840. In 1865 James McMillan and his daughter Elizabeth died. Margaret also caught scarlet fever and although she survived it left her deaf (she recovered her hearing at fourteen).

Deeply upset by these events, Mrs. McMillan decided to take her two young daughters, Margaret and Rachel McMillan back to Scotland. Rachel and Margaret both attended the Inverness High School and were able to make good use of their grandparents well-stocked library. When Jean McMillan died in 1877 it was decided that Rachel would remain in Inverness to nurse her very sick grandmother, while Margaret was sent away to be trained as a governess.

In 1887 Rachel paid a visit to a cousin in Edinburgh. Her cousin took her to church where she heard an impressive sermon by John Glasse, a Christian Socialist. Rachel was also introduced to John Gilray, another recent convert to this religious group. Gilray gave Rachel copies of Justice, a socialist newspaper and Peter Kropotkin's Advice to the Young. Rachel was impressed by what she read. She particularly liked the articles by William Morris and William Stead.

During the following week Rachel McMillan went with Gilray to several socialist meetings in Edinburgh. When she arrived home in Inverness she wrote to a friend about her new beliefs: "I think that, very soon, when these teachings and ideas are better known, people generally will declare themselves Socialists."

Rachel's grandmother died in July 1888. Freed of her nursing responsibilities, Rachel McMillan joined Margaret in London and the two remained together for most of the rest of their lives. Margaret, who was employed as a junior superintendent in a home for young girls, found Rachel a similar job in Bloomsbury.

Rachel converted Margaret to socialism and together they attended political meetings where they met William Morris, H. M. Hyndman, Peter Kropotkin, William Stead and Ben Tillet. They also began contributing to the magazine Christian Socialist and gave free evening lessons to working class girls in London. Margaret later wrote: "I taught them singing, or rather I talked to them while they jeered at me." It was at this time that the two sisters became aware of the connection between the workers' physical environment and their intellectual development.

In October 1889, Rachel and Margaret helped the workers during the London Dock Strike. The continued to be involved in spreading the word of Christian Socialism to industrial workers and in 1892 it was suggested that their efforts would be appreciated in Bradford.

Although for the next few years they were based in Bradford, Rachel and Margaret toured the industrial regions speaking at meetings and visiting the homes of the poor. As well as attending Christian Socialist meetings, the sisters joined the Fabian Society, the Labour Church, the Social Democratic Federation and the newly formed Independent Labour Party (ILP).

Margaret and Rachel's work in Bradford convinced them that they should concentrate on trying to improve the physical and intellectual welfare of the slum child. In 1892 Margaret joined Dr. James Kerr, Bradford's school medical officer, to carry out the first medical inspection of elementary school children in Britain. Kerr and McMillan published a report on the medical problems that they found and began a campaign to improve the health of children by arguing that local authorities should install bathrooms, improve ventilation and supply free school meals.

The sisters remained active in politics and Margaret McMillan became the Independent Labour Party candidate for the Bradford School Board. Elected in 1894 and working closely with Fred Jowett, leader of the ILP on the local council, Margaret now began to influence what went on in Bradford schools. She also wrote several books and pamphlets on the subject including Child Labour and the Half Time System (1896) and Early Childhood (1900).

In 1902 Margaret McMillan joined Rachel McMillan in London. The sisters joined the recently formed Labour Party and worked closely with leaders of the movement including James Keir Hardie and George Lansbury. Margaret continued to write books on health and education. In 1904 she published her most important book, Education Through the Imagination (1904) and followed this with The Economic Aspects of Child Labour and Education (1905).

The two sisters joined with their old friend, Katharine Glasier, to lead the campaign for school meals and eventually the House of Commons became convinced that hungry children cannot learn and passed the 1906 Provision of School Meals Act. The legislation accepted the argument put forward by the McMillan sisters that if the state insists on compulsory education it must take responsibility for the proper nourishment of school children.

In 1908 Margaret and Rachel McMillan opened the country's first school clinic in Bow. This was followed by the Deptford Clinic in 1910 that served a number of schools in the area. The clinic provided dental help, surgical aid and lessons in breathing and posture. The sisters also established a Night Camp where slum children could wash and wear clean nightclothes. In 1911 Margaret McMillan published The Child and the State where she criticised the tendency of schools in working class areas to concentrate on preparing children for unskilled and monotonous jobs. Margaret argued that instead schools should be offering a broad and humane education.

Rachel and Margaret both supported the campaign for universal suffrage. They were against the use of violence and tended to favour the approach of the NUWSS. However, they disagreed with the way WSPU members were treated in prison and at one meeting where they were protesting against the Cat and Mouse Act, the sisters were physically assaulted by a group of policemen.

In 1914 the sisters decided to start an Open-Air Nursery School & Training Centre in Deptford. Within a few weeks there were thirty children at the school ranging in age from eighteen months to seven years. Rachel, who was mainly responsible for the kindergarten, proudly pointed out that in the first six months there was only one case of illness and, because of precautions that she took, this case of measles did not spread to the other children.

Rachel McMillan died on 25th March, 1917. Although devastated by the loss of her sister, Margaret continued the run the Peckham Nursery. She also served on the London County Council and wrote a series of influential books that included The Nursery School (1919) and Nursery Schools: A Practical Handbook (1920).

In her later years Margaret McMillan became interested in the subject of nursing. With the financial help of Lloyds of London, she established a new college to train nurses and teachers. Named after her beloved sister, the Rachel McMillan College was opened in Deptford on 8th May, 1930.

On this day in 1944 out of 795 Avro Lancaster, Hadley Page Halifaxs and Mosquitos were sent to bomb Nuremberg. It was recorded that 95 bombers did not return, making it the largest RAF Bomber Command loss of the war. Nuremberg suffered 74 casualties and 122 injured; 130 destroyed, 879 moderately damaged buildings and 2505 with minor damages.

The theory of strategic heavy bombing was developed at the end of the First World War. By the 1930s leaders of the the Luftwaffe and the Royal Air Force believed that mass long-range bombing raids had the potential to force the enemy to surrender.

However, at the beginning of the Second World War all air forces had a policy of attacking military targets only. This changed in September 1940, when the Luftwaffe began large-scale night raids on London, Liverpool, Birmingham, Plymouth, Bristol, Glasgow, Southampton, Coventry, Hull, Portsmouth, Manchester, Belfast, Sheffield, Newcastle, Nottingham and Cardiff. Night-time raids dramatically reduced accuracy and it became impossible for pilots to concentrate on bombing military targets.

The Royal Air Force responded by carrying out night-raids on Germany. Poorly trained for this kind of work, pilots lacked the navigational aids for this task. By the end of 1941 the RAF had dropped 45,000 tons of bombs on Germany but these attacks failed to bring the end of the war closer.

Charles Portal of the British Air Staff argued for a change of policy. He advocated that entire cities and towns should be bombed. Portal claimed that this would quickly bring about the collapse of civilian morale in Germany. When Air Marshall Arthur Harris became head of RAF Bomber Command in February 1942, he introduced a policy of area bombing (known in Germany as terror bombing) where entire cities and towns were targeted.

Using incendiary bombs to illuminate targets, the RAF concentrated on the heavy industrial areas of the Ruhr. Harris also ordered massive attacks on the small coastal cities of Lubeck and Rostock. Although a great deal of damage was done these raids had little impact on the German economy or civilian morale.

Massive air attacks on Germany continued and in May 1942 Arthur Harris ordered a 1,050 bomber raid on Cologne. This involved the Royal Air Force using every aircraft available and in two hours over a third of the city was badly damaged.

The introduction of the Avro Lancaster in the second-half of 1942 improved the effectiveness of strategic bombing. This new plane had oboe, an improved navigational device based on radar, and this increased bombing accuracy. The use of pathfinders and the employment of the Mosquito as a high-altitude photo-reconnaissance aircraft also helped improve the success of these raids.

Arthur Harris demanded that Winston Churchill provided more resources for Bomber Command. Along with Charles Portal he argued that if he had 6,000 bombers at his disposal he would force the German government to surrender and there would be no need for an Allied invasion of Europe.

In 1942 scientists in Britain developed an idea that they believed would confuse Germany's radar system. Given the codename of Window the strategy involved the Pathfinder Force dropping strips of metallised paper over the intended target. By early 1943 a series of tests had shown Bomber Command that Window would be highly successful. However, the British government feared that once the secret was out, the Germans would use it to jam Britain's radar system. It was not until July 1943 that permission was finally given to use Window during the bombing of Hamburg.

Window was a great success and was employed by the RAF for the rest of the war. The Germans were forced to change its strategy in dealing with bombing raids. As Air Marshall Arthur Harris later pointed out: "The Observer Corps now plotted the main bomber stream and orders were broadcast to large numbers of fighters with a running commentary giving the height, direction and whereabouts of the bomber stream, and of the probable target for which it was making or the actual target which it was attacking."

Throughout 1943 the Royal Air Force bombed German cities at night while the United States Army Air Force (USAAF) under Carl Spaatz used its B-17 planes for its precision daylight operations. In August 1943 repeated incendiary attacks on Hamburg caused a firestorm and 50,000 German civilians were killed. By the end of 1943 the Allied air forces had dropped a total of 200,000 tons of bombs on Germany.

In early 1944 the USAAF introduced the long-range Mustang P-51B fighter. This new aircraft could escort bombers all the way to targets deep inside Germany. It was an outstanding combat plane and inflicted considerable damage on the Luftwaffe.

Despite objections from Arthur Harris and Carl Spaatz, the bombing campaign changed during the summer of 1944. As part of Operation Overlord, the task of the RAF and the USAAF was to destroy German communications and supply lines in Europe. The destruction of German oil production was also made a priority target and by September, 1944, the Luftwaffe's fuel supply had been reduced to 10,000 tons of octane out of a monthly requirement of 160,000 tons.

By the end of 1944 the Allies had obtained complete air supremacy over Germany and could destroy targets at will. On 3rd February, 1,000 bombers of the United States Army Air Force killed an estimated 25,000 people in Berlin.

Arthur Harris now devised Operation Thunderclap, an air raid that would finally break the morale of the German people. To enable maximum impact to take place Harris chose Dresden as his target. This medieval city had not been attacked during the war and was virtually undefended by anti-aircraft guns. On 13th February 1945, 773 Avro Lancaster bombers attacked Dresden. During the next two days the USAAF sent 527 heavy bombers to follow up the RAF attack. The resulting firestorm killed around 135,000 people.

The United States Army Air Force strategic bombing campaign against Japan was also stepped up. The large number of Japanese buildings made of wood made it easy for the bombers to create firestorms. On the 9th and 10th March 1945, a raid on Tokyo devastated the city. This was followed by attacks on other Japanese cities.

By the summer of 1945 the USAAF was ready to mount its final strategic bombing campaign. On 6th August 1945, a B29 bomber dropped an atom bomb on Hiroshima. Japan continued to fight and a second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki three days later. On 10th August the Japanese surrendered. The Second World War was over.

On this day in 1950 French politician Léon Blum was born in Paris, France. The son of Jewish parents, he studied law at the Sorbonne where he was converted to socialism.

After leaving university Blum worked for Jean Jaures. Rejected for military service by the French Army in the First World War, he entered the Chamber of Deputies in 1919. Blum became leader of the Socialist Party and in 1924 supported the government of Edouard Herriot.

Concerned by the emergence of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany, a group of left-wing politicians, led by Blum, Edouard Daladier, Maurice Thorez, Edouard Herriot, Daniel Mayer formed the Popular Front in November 1935. Parties involved in the agreement included the Communist Party, the Socialist Party and the Radical Party.

The parties involved in the Popular Front did well in the May 1936 parliamentary elections and won a total of 376 seats. Blum, leader of the Socialist Party, now become prime minister of France. Blum therefore became the first Jew in France history to hold this post.

Once in power the Popular Front government introduced the 40 hour week and other social reforms. It also nationalized the Bank of France and the armaments industry.

In July, 1936, José Giral, the prime minister of the Popular Front government in Spain, requested aid against the military uprising led by Emilio Mola, Francisco Franco and José Sanjurjo. Blum agreed to send aircraft and artillery. However, after coming under pressure from Stanley Baldwin and Anthony Eden in Britain, and more right-wing members of his own cabinet, he changed his mind. Blum now called for all countries in Europe not to intervene in the Spanish Civil War.

The Communist Party, that up to then had supported the Popular Front government, now organized large demonstrations against Blum's policy of non-intervention. With the left-wing in open revolt against the government and a growing economic crisis, Blum decided to resign on 22nd June.

Once in opposition Blum campaigned for France to end its nonintervention policy. On 13th March 1938 Blum returned to power as prime minister. He immediately reopened the frontier with Spain to allow vast amounts of military equipment to enter the country. Blum now came under considerable pressure from the right-wing press and political figures such as Henri-Philippe Petain and Maurice Gamelin. On 10th April 1938, Blum's government fell and he was replaced by Edouard Daladier as prime minister.

When the German Army invaded France in May 1940, Blum escaped to southern France but Henri-Philippe Petain ordered his arrest. Along with Edouard Daladier and Paul Reynaud he was tried in February, 1942, for betraying his country. He was handed over to the Germans who held him prisoner until 1945. Léon Blum died on 30th March, 1950.

On this day in 1966 artist Maxfield Parrish died. Parrish, the son of the painter, Stephen Parrish, was born in Philadelphia on 25th July, 1870. He was educated at the Haverford College, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and the Drexel Institute, where he studied under Howard Pyle.

After his marriage to Lydia Austin he settled in Plainfield, New Hampshire. In 1895 Parrish designed his first cover for Harper's Weekly. As well as working for other magazines such as Collier's and Scribner's Magazine.

Parrish also provided the illustrations for a large number of books including Poems of Childhood (1889), Mother Goose in Prose (1897), Dream Days (1906), Tanglewood Tales (1910), The Golden Treasury of Songs and Lyrics (1911) and The Knave of Arts (1925).

Parrish provided the art work for posters and advertisements. His greatest success came with colour prints designed for the mass market. The Garden of Allah (1919) and Dawn (1920) sold in very large numbers. In the 1920s Parrish concentrated on fine art painting. Several of these works featured Susan Lewin. She had been initially hired at the age of 16 as a nanny. She eventually became his mistress and his wife left the family home.

In the 1930s Parrish's work, criticised as being too sentimental, went out of fashion. In 1931, he commented, "I'm done with girls on rocks", and decided to concentrate on landscapes. Though never as popular as his earlier works, he profited from them.

Maxfield Parrish died at the age of 95 on 30th March 1966.

On this day in 1966 Erwin Piscator died. Erwin Piscator, the son of Carl Piscator, a merchant, and his wife Antonia Laparose Piscator, was born in the small German village of Greifenstein-Ulm on 17th December 1893. The family moved to Marburg and in 1913 he went to Munich University to study German, philosophy and art history.

Piscator began his acting career in the autumn of 1914, in small unpaid roles at the Munich Court Theatre, under the directorship of Ernst von Possart. On the outbreak of the First World War he was drafted into the German Army, serving in a frontline infantry unit. "His experience at the front gave him a hatred of the military machine".

Piscator later recalled: "My history begins on the 4th of August 1914. What is the thing called 'personal development'? No one develops himself 'personally'. Something else 'develops' him. Before this twenty-year-old youth stood the war. Fate. He made every other schoolmaster superfluous."

In the summer of 1917, having participated in the battles at Ypres, he was assigned to a newly established army theatre unit. In November 1918, when the armistice was declared, Piscator gave a speech in Hasselt at the first meeting of a revolutionary Soldiers' Council (Soviet). The following month, along with his friends, George Grosz and John Heartfield, he joined the German Communist Party.

Grosz and Heartfield had developed what became known as photomontage (the production of pictures by rearranging selected details of photographs to form a new and convincing unity). We... invented photomontage in my South End studio at five o'clock on a May morning in 1916, neither of us had any inkling of its great possibilities, nor of the thorny yet successful road it was to take. As so often happens in life, we had stumbled across a vein of gold without knowing it." According to Grosz "it was Erwin who brought photomontage into the theatre."

Piscator supported the failed German Revolution but retained his strong socialist beliefs. In October, 1920, he established the Proletarian Theatre in Berlin. Piscator was the founder of the left-wing agitprop theatre, and regarded the stage above all as an instrument for mobilizing the masses. "Comrades! The soul of the Revolution, the soul of the approaching society of the classless and communal culture represent our revolutionary feelings. The Proletarian Theatre wishes to ignite this feeling and help keep it alive. The experiences awakened in us by socialist art fortify us in our consciousness of the seriousness and the greatness of the historical mission of our class."

Radical plays written by people such as Franz Jung that were put on by Piscator upset the authorities and in March 1921, the Berlin police refused to renew the theatre's licence. Over the next couple of years he directed plays written by left-wing writers such as Maxim Gorky, Romain Rolland, Leo Tolstoy, Hans Rehfisch, Berta Lask and Rudolf Leonhard.

In 1924 Piscator directed Fahnen, about the Haymarket Bombing by Alfons Paquet. In 1886 several members of the International Working Men's Association were arrested and eventually, were found guilty of an offence they did not commit. Albert Parsons, August Spies, Adolph Fischer, Louis Lingg and George Engel were given the death penalty. Whereas Oscar Neebe, Samuel Fielden and Michael Schwab were sentenced to life imprisonment. Before being sentenced Spies said: "The contemplated murder of eight men, whose only crime is that they have dared to speak the truth, may open the eyes of these suffering millions; may wake them up. Indeed, I have noticed that our conviction has worked miracles in this direction already."

In the play, Piscator provided short sequences of action that were strung episodically together and reviewing the production in the Leipziger Tageblatt, the theatre critic, Alfred Döblin, called the play "a stepping-stone between narrative and drama", adding that this form provided refuge when "the coldness of a writer's feelings stops him from identifying with the characters' fates or the story's development". Piscator claimed that "in a certain sense Fahnen represented the first Marxist drama and the production the first attempt at laying bare the materialist motive forces of the action."

As Martin Esslin has pointed out: "Piscator sought a topical, highly political theatre. He relegated the author to a relatively minor position, and was often content to compile his productions out of newspaper reports or documentary material. Piscator put these spectacles on to a constructivist stage and used graphs of statistics, explanatory captions, lantern slides of photographs or documents, newsreels, and documentary film sequences to convey the political or sociological background of the play, while the propaganda lesson was drawn by choruses, spoken or sung, on stage or in the auditorium, so that the spectators were inevitably drawn into the action. His aim was a theatre that would be political, technological - and epic. By the latter term he meant a drama which would be utterly different from the conventional 'well-made' play: a kind of illustrated lecture or newspaper report on a political or social theme, loosely constructed in the shape of a serious revue: a sequence of musical numbers, sketches, film, declamation, sometimes linked by one or several narrators."

George Grosz designed sets and costumes for Erwin Piscator. Grosz wrote in his journal that "Erwin has created a great new era for the graphic artist to work in, a veritable graphic arena, more tempting for graphic artists of today than all that stuffy aesthetic business or the hawking around of drawings in bibliophile editions for educated nobs... What a medium, though, for the artist who wants to speak to the masses, purely and simply. Naturally a new area requires new techniques, a new clear and concise language of graphic style - certainly a great opportunity for teaching discipline to the muddleheaded and confused!"

Piscator argued that in Fahnen he had "crossed the threshold from the theatre of art to the theatre of the age" and that he had tried "to lay bare the roots of the case in the epic elaboration of the material". This was a play which documented its period: "it is not the inner arc of the dramatic event that is essential, but the epic course of the epoch from its roots until its last effects are represented as precisely and comprehensively as possible." Piscator wrote no scripts, but he created drama in the way that a film director created cinema. Bertolt Brecht later claimed that "after me, Piscator is the greatest living German dramatist". It is no doubt that in the long term, Brecht had more influence on acting style than Piscator but he owed a great deal to his earlier work.

Brecht was greatly influenced by the work of Piscator and like him wanted a scientific, Marxist drama, loosely constructed so as to make it possible to explain the wider social and historical background of the play. He followed Piscator's example he used posters and placards, songs and choruses. "But while Piscator attached little importance to purely literary values, Brecht laid great stress on the poetic aspects of such a drama. And so, although Brecht became a close collaborator of Piscator's, although he worked on many adaptations of plays for his theatre and they discussed several joint projects, Piscator never tackled one of Brecht's own plays."

In 1925 Piscator produced Despite All, a presentation that traced the history of revolutions from the outbreak of the First World War to the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. For the first time, film was organically integrated into the staging; documentaries derived from the national archives, authentic photos of the war were shown against a gigantic stage set, consisting of terraces, inclines, stairways and platforms on revolving planes.

Ernst Toller, was imprisoned as a result of him being one of the leaders of the German Revolution. While in prison he wrote a series of plays that established him as one of the country's most important writers. By the time he left prison in 1924, plays such as Transformation, The Machine Wreckers, Hinkemann and Masses and Man had been performed all over Germany. After leaving prison Toller wrote Hoppla, Such is Life (1927) which was directed by Piscator at the Theatre am Nollendorfplatz.

Erwin Piscator was not too happy with the first draft of the play as he found it too lyrical and subjective for a documentary exposition of social reality. "All our efforts in the subsequent course of the work were directed towards providing the play with a realistic substructure." Piscator proposed a number of changes which were the subject of lengthy and sometimes heated discussions. He recalled that there were arguments that sometimes turned into heated discussion.

Eventually, Piscator persuaded Toller to rewrite most of the play. Piscator later recalled: "Toller scarcely ever left my apartment. He had made himself at home at my desk and filled page after page at incredible speed with his huge handwriting, consigning the sheets to the wastepaper basket with equal rapidity. And all the while he kept lighting my most expensive cigars and stubbing them out again in the ashtray after a few drags."

The production is one of the landmarks of the early Epic Theater. "Toller’s dissection of political conspiracies, failed revolution, feminist emancipation and class solidarity suggest one answer: it is only in the constant struggle against power that we are alive." What impressed critics and audiences alike was not so much the writing and acting as the use of film, set and sound effects. The play was interrupted with film interludes or illustrations projected on the tall screen in the middle of the stage. The film had been made, on a script written by Toller, using newsreel material and specially shot scenes with the actors. The theatre critic, Herbert Ihering, claimed that "an amazing technical imagination has worked miracles".

At the end of the first performance - which lasted four hours - a section of the audience rose to sing the Internationale. One critic wrote that Piscator had extended the boundaries of theatre, another that he, just as much as Toller, deserved to be called the author of the evening. Some critics suggested that Piscator's production had saved a rather mediocre play. Stefan Großmann, one of Germany's leading critics, commented that it was a triumph for Piscator: "A master of the theatre now has his home. He will allow neither supporters nor authors to distract him."

Erich Mühsam wrote in support of Piscator: "Agitational art is good and necessary. It is needed by the proletariat both in revolutionary times and in the present. But it has to be art, skilled, spirited, and glittering. All arts have agitational potential, but none more than drama, In the theatre, living people present living passion. Here, more than anywhere else, true art can communicate true conviction. Here, the idea of a revolutionary worker can be materialized.... Arts must inspire people, and inspiration comes from the spirit. It is not our task to teach the minds of the workers with the help of the arts - it is our task to bring spirit to the minds of the workers with the help of the arts, as the spirit of the arts knows no limits. Neither dialectics nor historical materialism have anything to do with this; the only art that can enthuse and enflame the proletariat is the one that derives its richness and its fire from the spirit of freedom."

Piscator read The Good Soldier Schweik, a novel by Jaroslav Hašek. The unfinished novel (Hašek died in 1923) was a collection of farcical incidents about a soldier in the First World War that was a satire on the ineptitude of authority figures. With the help of Bertolt Brecht and Felix Gasbarra, Piscator decided to turn the work into a play that was first produced in 1928. It has been argued by Frederic Ewen that this play "proved to be the most lasting and certainly the most important of all Piscator's efforts."

It has been argued that Brecht created a character that he was to use several times in his career. "Schweik is more than a mere character: he represents a basic human attitude. Schweik defeats the powers that be, the whole universe in all its absurdity, not by opposing but by complying with them. He is so servile, so eager to please and to carry out the letter of any regulation or command that in the end the stupidity of the authorities, the idiocy of the law is ruthlessly exposed... Many of the characters in his later plays show features of this ironic servility."

Max Pallenberg, played the role of Schweik, and George Grosz was employed to design the sets. "Grosz... drew whatever was needed in his characteristically spiteful, yet light, comic, economic style: cut-out marionettes, projected backgrounds, sequences of cartoon film. Though some real film shots were worked in - of the streets of Prague, for instance - the general effect was of a highly mobile show being illustrated in passing by one of Europe's most brilliant draughtsmen. It opened with a cartoon-film prologue: Grosz's wriggling line tracing a German and an Austrian general, a death's-head judge and a priest juggling with a crucifix, symbolising the forces with which Schweik has to contend."

In April 1931 the Berlin police banned all agit-prop performances at political meetings. Piscator, along with John Heartfield, Friedrich Wolf, and Hans Richter moved to the Soviet Union to find work. In October it was announced that Piscator would be working for Mezhrabpom-Film, the Soviet film company associated with the International Workers' Relief Organisation. His first project, Revolt of the Fishermen, was based on a novel by Anna Seghers. The movie was originally planned to be filmed in Russian and German versions, but only the first was completed.

Piscator believed that there was a need for a series of short anti-Nazi propaganda films. His idea for the first film was the real story of a senior civil servant murdered by the Nazis, whose ashes were returned to his widow with a bill fore cremation and other costs. This idea was approved by Mezhrabpom and Piscator had a two hour meeting with Lazer Kaganovitch, the First Secretary of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party, and the brother-in-law of Joseph Stalin. However, Kaganovitch insisted that the films must have optimistic endings.

At the beginning of 1935 Piscator invited Bertolt Brecht to Moscow. Others invited included Hans Eisler, Maxim Vallentin, Julius Hay, Ernst Busch (he stayed for two years) and Edward Gordon Craig. Another close associate, Bernard Reich, arrived and worked under Piscator at the Soviet backed International Association of Revolutionary Theatre (MORT): "The idea in appointing Piscator president was to have an attractive figurehead. Piscator however took the cause, and himself, seriously."

Piscator soon found himself in conflict with the Soviet authorities. In an article which was almost a policy statement he argued that MORT had been neglecting the professional theatre and its unions and should pay more attention to the avant-garde, including the Surrealists, who were disliked by the government: "There are artistic elements which are simply anti-fascist by their very essence." Piscator was also visited by Harold Clurman, Cheryl Crawford, Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg of the radical Group Theatre group. However, they were much more interested in the work of Konstantin Stanislavski who had developed "method-acting" in the Soviet Union.

The Soviet authorities became concerned about the direction that film and theatre was taking. Mezhrabpom-Film and International Association of Revolutionary Theatre (MORT) were both closed down. Some of those involved in these projects were arrested and accused of being followers of Leon Trotsky. The German actress, Carola Neher, who Brecht had written the role of Polly Peachum in The Threepenny Opera, was sent to a labour camp where she later died of typhus. Marija Leiko, who had also fled from Nazi Germany, was arrested and shot for belonging to a "Latvian nationalist conspiracy".

In July 1936, Piscator moved to Paris. He lived in the city for two years. He worked on several different projects. His only success during these years was his marriage to Maria Ley, a wealthy widow, whose previous husband, Frank Deutsch, was connected to AEG, the great Berlin electrical engineering firm. She was also the niece of the banker, Otto Kahn and had danced professionally for the German dramatist, Max Reinhardt. "For the rest of his life, Piscator received Ley's unfailing support, both personal and financial, as he desperately tried to re-establish himself as a dramatist." In late 1938, the Piscators secured a visa and sailed to New York.

Piscator wrote while he was in France that "I can only work against bourgeois society, I can never work with it or through it". John Willett claims that "that to say the least, there was some self-deception involved here, for although it is true that... he never became an anti-communist or even openly critical of the Russians, old friends like Wolf and Brecht had commented on the grand style of his life in Paris, and working with and though bourgeois society was precisely what he henceforth did."

Piscator was told that he would not be able to settle in the United States as a director but only as a teacher of theatre. Alvin Saunders Johnson, the head of the New School, a private research university in New York City, decided to set up a drama school, and placed Piscator in charge of what became known as the Dramatic Workshop. It began in January 1940 with twenty students attending evening classes. "Despite the heavy academic load, students spent the majority of their time working in actual productions. Piscator insisted that students could not become dramatists without writing, producing, directing, and performing their own plays. Moreover, through these student productions the Dramatic Workshops became more than a school. It became an experimental theatre."

Although he was not allowed to direct he hoped his teaching would have an impact on the American theatre. The aim from the outset was to make "a school that is a theatre and a theatre that is a school", to train students for the various branches of the profession and if possible, by building up a working ensemble, "to stimulate the development of the repertory theatre as a non-commercial institution of artistic expression with the same position in our society that the symphony or the art museum enjoys."

With the help of Robert Sherwood, Sinclair Lewis, George Kaufman and Paul Muni, Piscator established the Studio Theatre as part of the Dramatic Workshop in September, 1940. "A Theatre of Professional Players" offering subscribers "plays which cannot be done on Broadway, because of their uncertain appeal, or sophisticated intelligence level, or overlarge cast". Piscator's intention was that the audience should be in some measure drawn into the work of the school, attending lectures in connection with the play given, listening to its first reading and going to one or more rehearsals."

In 1945 Piscator was given permission to direct a play for the off-Broadway group The Theatre of All Nations. He selected The Private Life of the Master Race by Bertolt Brecht. However, when Brecht arrived from California, he attended the rehearsals and disliked what he saw and tried to have the performance cancelled. On 29th May, a fortnight before the opening at City College, Piscator walked out and refused to direct the play. Brecht called in Berthold Viertel to help him with the production. The critics found the result amateurish, though it is difficult to discover whose fault this was. Brecht told his friend, Leon Askin: "Our ideas on epic theatre are so different, that I preferred to leave him alone."

Despite this conflict the two men remained friends. Brecht eventually decided to move back to Germany and wrote to Piscator that he would like to work with him again if he visited the city: "Whenever I have mentioned the possibility of a visit I have raised the question of your making one too, because without you I find it difficult to envisage a successful attack on provincialism, hollow emotionalism, etc. in favour of great, mature political theatre." In another letter the following month Brecht said: "Just to get things straight, let me tell you that of all the people who have been active3 in the theatre over the past twenty years no one has been so close to me as you."

The Dramatic Workshop continued to lose money and the New School board began considering whether or not to close it down. Although the end of the Second World War resulted in an increase in student numbers and between 1944 and 1947 income quintupled. However, Alvin Saunders Johnson had retired and political theatre was no longer popular. In March 1948, it was decided close the unit down. An independent board of trustees was set up, with Piscator as chairman and membership included Johnson, Kurt Weill and Robert Penn Warren.

Several people who attended the Dramatic Workshop had good careers in the theatre. This included Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, Walter Matthau, Tony Curtis, Rod Steiger, Ben Gazzara, Elaine Stritch, Jack Creley and Tennessee Williams. The actress, writer and director, Judith Malina, who went on to form The Living Theatre, with Julian Beck, told Piscator: "I have learned to believe what you believe in, to strive for that for which you strive. You are my teacher: the one in whom I have most faith, in whom I trust, from whom I learned and still seek to learn."

Piscator found it difficult to direct plays that had a strong political message. He told The Daily Worker that he found the whole process painful because "it is the business of the theatre to deliver a social message and this is as important as that it should be 'entertaining'... Mere entertainment, 'art for art's sake', is not a reason for a theatre production." He dismissed most American drama as "technically on the level of the naturalistic theatre of the 1890s" and accused the playwrights in the late 1940s of "breathing the air of an unhealthy and reactionary period."

Piscator arrived back in West Germany at the beginning of October 1951. He was nearly fifty-eight and had been away for over twenty years. However, it was not until 1955 that he made his comeback with War and Peace by Boleslaw Barlog at the Schiller-Theatre. The critics found this whole approach dreadfully oversimplified, but it was a success with the public, and the following year the whole production went to the Paris international theatre festival. He followed this with Georg Büchner's Dantons Tod, but this was not a success and Piscator blamed Barlog for not giving him enough rehearsal time.

On 16th June, 1953, East Berlin construction workers went on strike. The following day workers from other industries held mass meetings all over the city and voted to support building workers. Trams and trains came to a halt as transport workers joined the strike. Over 50,000, people gathered at the Lustgarten. Speeches were made attacking the government and political figures such as Walter Ulbricht, the communist leader, had his portrait burnt. Red Army tanks drove into the crowd, killing sixteen people. The rebellion spread to over 700 towns and villages but the revolt was crushed in a couple of days. Piscator found it difficult to give his support to the workers: "The Berlin workers have struck their mother. An unpleasant, severe mother, and possibly a bad one, but a mother none the less."

Piscator was disappointed by the attitude of the German people. He felt that most people did not appear to feel guilt about their behaviour during the years that Adolf Hitler was in control. A fortnight after his sixtieth birthday, he noted in his diary that the basic attitude of the theatre should be grounded in morality and Bekenntnis (knowledge, recognition and confession). "The theatre of the positive people - against existentialists, degenerates and those who have given up hope. I have now been in Germany for 3 years. There is no conscience."

Piscator first visited East Berlin in October 1955. He was elected to the East German Academy of Arts, as one of a small group of members from West Germany. In 1957 he was invited to direct Richard III at the Deutsches Theatre. However, he was upset when the East German critic, Ernst Schumacher, in a book on Bertolt Brecht, dismissed Piscator's brand of epic theatre as "a petty-bourgeois radical theatre movement". Brecht disagreed and pointed out that "Piscator was my teacher".

Erwin Piscator was introduced to Rolf Hochhuth, who had written a play, The Deputy, a Christian Tragedy, which portrayed Pope Pius XII as having failed to take action or speak out against the Holocaust. The play was first performed at West Berlin's Theater am Kurfürstendamm on 20th February, 1963. The controversial play was condemned as being anti-Catholic. Hochhuth replied: "In choosing a Jesuit for my tragic hero I strove to condemn the sin and not the sinner - that is, not the Church but its silence - and to exemplify, after a Kierkegaardian fashion, the enormous difficulty of living up to the Catholic creed and the immense nobility of spirit of those who are capable even of coming close. To read the play as anti-Catholic is not to read it at all." Piscator commented that "thanks to this play, there is some point in working in the theatre."

On this day in 1970 Heinrich Brüning died in Norwich, Vermont. Brüning, the son of a wine merchant, was born in Münster, Germany, on 26th November, 1885. Brüning studied history and philosophy in Munich, Strasbourg and London where he carried out research into British railways.

After obtaining his doctorate in 1915 Brüning joined the German Army where he served in a machine-gun company during the First World War. In 1920 Brüning became an official of the German Trade Union Federation. A member of the Catholic Centre Party (BVP), Brüning was elected to the Reichstag in 1924. He became the party's spokesman on economic issues and in 1929 became leader of the BVP.

In 1928 Hermann Muller became chancellor in a coalition government that included the Social Democratic Party, the Catholic Centre Party and the Nationalist Party (DNVP). When Muller resigned in March 1930, Brüning was asked to become the new chancellor. The British politician, Robert Boothby, met him during this period: "In Berlin I saw Brüning, the Chancellor, who was Snowden's German counterpart - a puritanical ascetic and a bit of a masochist, with considerable charm. His sole indulgence was black coffee and a cigar, which he offered to me. He was a willing listener to the deplorable advice tendered to him by Dr Sprague, the emissary of the Bank of England. This, of course, was to continue his policy of deflation at all costs; and was designed primarily to maintain the value of the fantastic investments made by the City to Germany, at the instigation of Mr Norman.... Brüning was a lonely, saintly man, upon whom the burden of responsibility bore heavily."

Brüning attempted to halt the growth in German unemployed that followed the Wall Street Crash by increasing taxation and by imposing high tariffs on foreign imports. He also reduced government expenditure by lowering unemployment benefits. The policies were not successful and by 1930 unemployment reached 4 million. As Louis L. Snyder has pointed out that "From 1930 to 1932 Brüning struggled unsuccessfully to resolve the deepening economic crisis. Unemployment rose to more than 6 million, and he was attacked bitterly by the Communists on the left and the National Socialists on the right."

In the General Election that took place in September 1930, the Catholic Centre Party won only 87 seats. The party was now much smaller than other parties such as the Social Democrat Party (143) and the Nazi Party (107). Brüning remained in power but now persuaded a more nationalistic foreign policy in an effort to please the growing shift to the right in German politics. Brüning's economic policies continued to be ineffective and with Germany's unemployment rate grow to six million.

In May 1932 General Hans von Seeckt joined up with Alfred Hugenberg, Hjalmar Schacht, Graf Kalkreuth, the president of Junkers' Land League and several industrialists, to call for the uniting of the parties of the right. They demanding the resignation of Heinrich Brüning. Germany's president, Paul von Hindenburg, agreed and forced him to resign and he was replaced as chancellor by Franz von Papen.

In July 1933 Heinrich Brüning reliquished the chairmanship of the Catholic Centre Party. He became aware that he was in danger of being arrested and sent to a concentration camp after Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party gained power. In 1934 Brüning left Germany and emigrated to the United States.

Brüning was appointed as professor of political science at Harvard University (1937-1951). He also worked at the University of Cologne (1951-55) before returning to the United States.

On this day in 1979 Airey Neave, Secretary of State for Northern Ireland was killed by an INLA car bomb outside the House of Commons.

Airey Neave was born in 1916. Educated at Eton and Merton College, Oxford, he achieved a law degree and embarked in a career at the Bar.

Neave joined the British Army on the outbreak of the Second World War. Sent to France he was wounded at Calais in 1940 and taken prisoner by the German Army. After escaping from his first POW camp he was sent to the maximum security prison at Colditz Castle.

In January 1942 Neave became the first British officer to escape from Colditz. On his return to England he helped to train air crews in the means of escape in occupied territory. He was also recruited into M19, a branch of M16 responsible for the support of the French Resistance. As a result of his war service Neave was awarded the Croix de Guerre.

In 1946 Neave was a member of the Nuremberg war crimes team. He joined the Conservative Party and in the 1951 General Election was elected to the House of Commons. Neave held several junior government posts before suffering a heart attack in 1959.

Neave wrote several books about his war experiences including They Have Their Exits (1953), Saturday at M19 (1969) and The Flames of Calais (1976) and Nuremburg (1978). Neave remained a backbencher in Parliament until helping Margaret Thatcher to depose Edward Heath as party leader in 1975. Neave was rewarded by being appointed as head of Thatcher's private office.

On this day in 1990 trade union leader Harry Bridges died in San Francisco, aged 88. Alfred Renton (Harry) Bridges, the son of realtor, was born on 28th July, 1901 in Melbourne, Australia. After leaving school he worked for his father but after reading the work of Jack London, he decided to become a sailor.

While working on a ship travelling to Tasmania he came into contact with members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). Formed in 1905, IWW's goal was to promote worker solidarity in the revolutionary struggle to overthrow the employing class. Its motto was "an injury to one is an injury to all". During this period he became a socialist. This was reinforced by the poverty he witnessed on his travels. He later wrote: “the more I saw the more I knew that there was something wrong with the system”.

In 1920 Bridges moved to San Francisco where he worked for a time as a sailor until becoming a longshoreman. Ella Winter wrote about the situation in her book, And Not to Yield (1963): "Every morning longshoremen had to line up on the dock and wait to see if they would be chosen, and if there was not enough work to go around, they went home empty-handed to their wives. There was no security of income, however small, and the indignity in addition incensed as well as humiliated them. Exasperated hatred and competitiveness replaced what should have been the comradeship of work and the solidarity of workingmen fighting together for their common interests."

As Michael Reagan has pointed out in his article, Harry Bridges: Life and Legacy (2010): "There was no regular work, and to get a job workers had to subject themselves to the hated shape-up. Early each morning those seeking employment would gather at dock gates to be selected individually for that day’s work. The throngs of people looking for work at the gates meant employers could fire any individual at any time without fear of loosing a minute of work for the day." Bridges joined the International Longshoremen's Association.

He was active in what became known as the Albion Hall faction. It was claimed that this group included members of the American Communist Party. During this period he was quoted as saying: "There will always be a place for us somewhere, somehow, as long as we see to it that working people struggle on, fight for everything they have, everything they hope to get, for dignity, equality, democracy, to oppose war and to bring to the world a better life."

Griffin Fariello has argued: "In 1929, freight tonnage in and out of the Golden Gate amounted to more than 31 million tons. San Francisco shipping and stevedoring companies took pride that San Francisco had one of the most cost-efficient longshore workforces in the country. A gang of sixteen men could move - by hand - upwards of twenty tons an hour, and a crew of a hundred men could load a three-thousand ton steamer in just two days and a night, stowing enough cargo to fill a train of freight cars five miles long. The American-Hawaiian Steamship Company calculated that during the years 1927-1931 their agents paid, on average, $0.99-1.03 per ton for loading in San Francisco, compared to $1.85-1.99 in New York and $2.17-2.43 in Boston. But the port of San Francisco was also known for the worst working conditions in the world - and the deadliest."

On 13th June, 1933, the Senate passed the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) by a vote of 46 to 37. The National Recovery Administration (NRA) was set up to enforce the NIRA. President Franklin D. Roosevelt named Hugh S. Johnson to head it. The NIRA allowed industry to write its own codes of fair competition but at the same time provided special safeguards for labor. Section 7a of NIRA stipulated that workers should have the right to organize and bargain collectively through representatives of their own choosing and that no one should be banned from joining an independent union. The NIRA also stated that employers must comply with maximum hours, minimum pay and other conditions approved by the government. Bridges and other members of the Albion Hall faction decided to use the legislation to gain union representation.

On 9th May 1934, the International Longshoremen's Association went on strike in order to obtain a thirty-hour week, union recognition and a wage increase. A federal mediating team, led by Edward McGrady, worked out a compromise. Joseph P. Ryan, president of the union, accepted it, but the rank and file, influenced by Harry Bridges, rejected it.

In San Francisco the vehemently anti-union Industrial Association, an organization representing the city's leading industrial, banking, shipping, railroad and utility interests, decided to open the port by force. This resulted in considerable violence and on 13th July, Bridges appealed to other union members to join the strike. Michael Casey, president of Teamsters 85, said: "In all my thirty years of leading these men, I have never seen them so worked up, so determined to walk out. I don't believe any power on earth can prevent them going on strike unless the maritime strike is settled."

Ella Winter went to interview Harry Bridges during the dispute: "In San Francisco I went first to the longshoremen's headquarters on the Embarcadero and found Harry Bridges, the voluble and tough union leader, a wire spring of a man with a narrow, sharp-featured, expressive face, popping eyes, and strong Australian accent. He heartily greeted a fellow Australian, a limey, as he dubbed me, though I was a little taken aback at my first real taste of a worker's intemperate language."

Bridges told her that previous strikes had been crushed and a company union set up: "The seamen couldn't get together because they were divided into so many crafts, machinists, cooks, stewards, ships' scalers, painters, boilermakers, the warehousemen on the docks, and the teamsters who hauled the goods. The bosses want to keep it that way so they can make separate contracts for each craft and in each port, which weakens our bargaining position. We're asking for one coastwise contract, from Portland to San Pedro, for the whole industry, and a raise too, but the most important thing we want is a hiring hall under the men's control."

Hugh S. Johnson visited the city where he spoke to John Francis Neylan, chief counsel for the Hearst Corporation, and the most significant figure in the Industrial Association. Neylan convinced Johnson that the general strike was under the control of the American Communist Party and was a revolutionary attack against law and order. Johnson later wrote: "I did not know what a general strike looked like and I hope that you may never know. I soon learned and it gave me cold shivers."

On 17th July 1934 Johnson gave a speech to a crowd of 5,000 assembled at the University of California, where he called for the end of the strike: "You are living here under the stress of a general strike... and it is a threat to the community. It is a menace to government. It is civil war... When the means of food supply - milk to children, necessities of life to the whole people - are threatened, that is bloody insurrection... I am for organized labor and collective bargaining with all my heart and soul and I will support it with all the power at my command, but this ugly thing is a blow to the flag of our common country and it has to stop.... Insurrection against the common interest of the community is not a proper weapon and will not for one moment be tolerated by the American people who are one - whether they live in California, Oregon or the sunny South."

Johnson's speech inspired local right-wing groups to take action against the strikers. Union offices and meeting halls were raided, equipment and other property destroyed, and communists and socialists were beaten up. Johnson further inflamed the situation when he turned up for a meeting with John McLaughlin, the secretary of the San Francisco Teamsters Union, on 18th July, drunk. Instead of entering into negotiations, he made a passionate speech attacking trade unions. McLaughlin stormed out of the meeting and the strike continued.

The famous journalist, Lincoln Steffens, supported the strikers. On 19th July 1934 he wrote to Frances Perkins, the Secretary of Labor: "There is hysteria here, but the terror is white, not red. Business men are doing in this Labor struggle what they would have liked to do against the old graft prosecution and other political reform movements, yours included... Let me remind you that this widespread revolt was not caused by aliens. It takes a Chamber of Commerce mentality to believe that these unhappy thousands of American workers on strike against conditions in American shipping and industry are merely misled by foreign Communist agitators. It's the incredibly dumb captains of industry and their demonstrated mismanagement of business that started and will not end this all-American strike and may lead us to Fascism."

In order to bring an end to the dispute, both sides agreed to arbitration. It was not until October, 1934, that an agreement was reached. Wages and working conditions were improved, the agreement established coast-wide bargaining and a joint employer and union hiring hall that would end the shape-up system. Harry Bridges was rewarded for his leadership of the strike by being elected president of the San Francisco local in 1935 and then president of the Pacific Coast District of the ILA in 1936.

In 1937, Bridges was elected president of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU). Bridges arranged for it to be affiliated with the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO). John L. Lewis now appointed Bridges as the West Coast Director for the CIO. By this time Bridges was one of the best known trade union leaders in the country and on 19th July, 1937, he appeared on the front cover of Time Magazine.

Harry Bridges was known for his great charm and became friends with the aspiring politician, Clare Luce, the wife of Henry Luce, the highly successful magazine publisher. Clare later admitted that he nearly converted her to Marxism: "I suspect now that the appeal of Communism for many young people and for me lay in its religious aspect. Communism was a complete, authoritarian religious structure, and the liberal mind had grown weary and confused defending the inalienable right to disorganize and exploit society according to its own notions of liberty. This had led to Hooverism and rugged individualism."

During the 1930s Bridges was associated with progressive causes. As Griffin Fariello explained: "Throughout it's history the ILWU has held to the belief that only in a stable, secure, and peaceful world can social and economic justice be achieved for all. Accordingly, in the 1930s, the union blocked the shipment of supplies to the rising fascist nations in Europe and Asia, and supported the fledgling Republic of Spain in its uneven struggle against the Axis powers. In 1938, they refused to load scrap iron destined for Japan and presciently claimed the iron would return as bombs against the United States."

After the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact in 1939 Bridges attacked President Franklin D. Roosevelt for wanting to go to war against Nazi Germany. He adopted the slogan "The Yanks Ain't Coming" in his campaign to keep the United States out of the European war. The head of the CIO, John L. Lewis, was a supporter of intervention and removed Bridges as West Coast director of the organization. Bridges also upset other union members when he campaigned against Roosevelt in the 1940 Presidential Election.

The Alien Registration Act (also known as the Smith Act) was passed by Congress on 29th June, 1940, made it illegal for anyone in the United States to advocate, abet, or teach the desirability of overthrowing the government. The law also required all alien residents in the United States over 14 years of age to file a comprehensive statement of their personal and occupational status and a record of their political beliefs. Within four months a total of 4,741,971 aliens had been registered. In 1941 Bridges was arrested under the terms of the act and attempts were made to deport him for being a member of the American Communist Party. Bridges denied the charges and was eventually released.

Bridges changed his view on the Second World War after Adolf Hitler ordered the attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941. Bridges now called on President Franklin D. Roosevelt to declare war and after Pearl Harbor adopted a wartime no-strike pledge. Bridges also called on his members to increase production without extra pay. He also condemned Retail, Wholesale Department Store Employees Union for going on strike at Montgomery Ward in 1943. Bridges also supported a proposal by Roosevelt in 1944, to militarize some civilian workplaces.

After the Second World War it was now decided to use the Alien Registration Act against the leaders of the ACP. On the morning of 20th July, 1948, Eugene Dennis, the general secretary of the ACP, and eleven other party leaders, included William Z. Foster, Benjamin Davis, John Gates, Robert G. Thompson, Gus Hall, Benjamin Davis, Henry M. Winston and Gil Green were arrested and charged under the Alien Registration Act. After a nine month trial they were found guilty of violating the Alien Registration Act and sentenced to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Thompson, because of his war record, received only three years.

Harry Bridges was now arrested and tried for fraud and perjury for denying when applying for naturalization that he had ever been a member of the American Communist Party. The jury convicted Bridges and he was sentenced to five years in prison and his citizenship was revoked. The Supreme Court in a 5-3 decision overturned the conviction in 1953 because the indictment on fraud and perjury charges did not occur within the three years set by the statute of limitations.

In 1958 Harry Bridges decided to marry Noriko Sawada, a Nisei Japanese American, in Reno, Nevada. When the court clerk denied them a marriage license on the grounds that it violated the state’s anti-miscegenation law, the couple challenged the law in the courts. They won, and were married at the end of the year. This case prompted the Nevada legislature to repeal the state's anti-miscegenation laws on 17th March, 1959.

Despite attempts to remove him, Bridges remained head of the International Longshoremen's and Warehousemen's Union (ILWU) until his retirement aged 76 in 1977.