On Friday we had a board meeting of Ernest Benn Ltd which is really doing great things. The first year fully justified our highest hopes, the profit appears to be between 4,000 and 5,000 and reflects the greatest credit to the genius of Victor Gollancz, who is alone responsible. Gollancz is a Jew and a rare combination of education, artistic knowledge and business ability.

Victor Gollancz. I spend alternate periods of 3 months each, hating him and loving him. His business ability is tremendous, his energy abnormal and he has made a great thing of Ernest Benn Ltd. The combination of my finance and his flair has produced the biggest thing in publishing history.

Gollancz goes. His agreement expires next April and ever since last Christmas he has been discussing new terms. These have included the alteration of the name of the firm to Benn & Gollancz. The more we discussed the wider became our differences and the end of it all is that we agree to part. The partnership is an unnatural one. First is the fact that Gollancz must be "boss", he is a natural leader and in his own interest he should set up for himself.

Victor's conception of a Popular Front embraced all opponents of government from dissident Tory to communist - an objective for which there was small support. There was, however, considerable left-wing backing for a socialist-communist United Front, an idea to which the CP was deeply committed and the leadership of the Labour party implacably opposed. Victor therefore saw his immediate political priority as that of persuading the rank-and-file members of the Labour and Liberal parties that they had much in common with those further to the left. Therefore, communist literature must bc brought to a wider reading public, and through an organization that had a broad appeal.

The moment when the LBC germinated from a vague idea into a specific project came in early January 1936. Sir Stafford Cripps, prominent Labour MP and a recent and enthusiastic Marxist convert, invited Victor and John Strachey to lunch, to discuss the possibility of founding a weekly paper to promulgate socialism and oppose fascism. That the meeting produced no concrete plans (though Tribune was launched a year later) no doubt boosted Victor's impetus towards immediate personal action. Strachey, the most influential English Marxist writer of the 1930s (and a Gollancz author) seemed an ideal ally. Although he was a communist, the wise men of the CP had refused him a party card, recognizing the usefulness of his nominal independence. As they left Cripps, Victor proposed to Strachey that he co-operate in selecting books for a Left Book Club, and together they decided that Harold Laski, Professor of Political Science at the London School of Economics and probably the most influential teacher of his generation there, should be the third selector.

They were a formidable trio: Laski the academic theoretician; Strachey the gifted popularizer; and Victor the inspired publicist. All three had known a lifelong passion for politics and all had swung violently left in the early 1930s. Only Victor did not describe himself as completely Marxist, though he was objectively indistinguishable from the real article. The three, through a longing for all-encompassing solutions to the problems of the human condition, were natural followers of a philosophy that admitted no doubts. Laski once explained that his journey to Marxism had given him "an increasing confidence in its will: the paradoxical sense that a fighting philosophy confers an inner peace unobtainable without its possession." Having gained that inner peace, they all showed themselves to be dedicated proselytizers, and won, individually and collectively, the hearts and minds of thousands of young people in pursuit of Utopia.

In choosing his co-selectors, Victor (a Labour Party member) had this deep-running community of ideals and attitudes as the chief criterion, followed by intellectual respectability and an appearance of political breadth. Strachey was under Communist Party direction. Laski was an influential member of the Labour Party's National Executive Committee who contrived meanwhile to hold the conviction that inadequacies in the British democratic system would stymie the introduction of socialism, and he shared Victor's doubts that the classless society could be brought about without revolution. In pursuit of the Popular Front goal, they committed themselves inevitably to a period of nimble, and taxing, ideological footwork.

Strachey was excited by the idea of the Club. Seeking a guarantee of a reasonable income, he wrote to Victor on 10 January that "it might become something really influential if one made it a principal charge on one's interest". Victor wished to harness Strachey's enthusiasm as cheaply as possible, so he offered him just the normal reading fee of two guineas a manuscript. Laski, offered only one guinea on the good socialist grounds that, unlike Strachey, he had a job, kindly refused any remuneration.

From the outset Victor displayed a typical combination of parsimony and generosity. To make the Club as effective as possible he was determined to keep wages and royalties to the minimum, thus freeing funds for advertising or organization. The frequent allegation that the Club was but a cunning entrepreneurial device to make yet more money in the name of anti-capitalism had no validity. Victor was not prepared to risk bankrupting Gollancz and was reluctant to spend an unproductive penny, but in the drive to make converts he gave his money as freely as he gave the time that he could otherwise undoubtedly have used to make himself rich.

The aim of the Club is a simple one: it is to help in the struggle for World Peace and a better social and economic order and against Fascism, by (a) increasing the knowledge of those who already see the importance of this struggle, and (b) adding to their number the very many who, being fundamentally well disposed, hold aloof from the fight by reason of ignorance or apathy.

That the success of this aim is of terrible urgency at the present time, when the world is drifting into war, and when Fascism is triumphing in country after country, needs no emphasis.

Nine considerations impelled my activity: (i) we must prevent war; (2) we could do it only by uniting as many nations as possible in opposition to Hitler; (3) in view of Germany's geographical position, if of that alone, the Soviet Union, France and Great Britain must be the core of any effective combination; (4) no such unity was conceivable unless these peoples and their regimes learned to understand one another; (5) no such unity was conceivable, either, without unity at home - a unity of all anti-fascists, from communists at one extreme to a section of conservatives at the other; (6) domestic unity was demanded, also, by the need for preventing such a triumph of indifference, or even of pro-fascism, here in Britain itself, as would encourage Hitler to strike; (7) this triumph could be further obstructed by (a) the indifferent becoming anti-fascists, and (b) anti-fascists growing keener, more active; (8) the prerequisite for such a change was a greater understanding of what fascism meant by way of internal bestiality and external aggression; and (9) to effect this understanding, an expose of fascism must be supplemented by an expose of its opposite - of the socialism that has for pith and marrow, or alas! (as I must now say) ought to have, the ideal of international brotherhood.

A major reason for the NEC's hesitations on the Popular Front was that the Communist Party had been agitating vigorously for one since 1936. The Communists did not make a fundamental distinction of principle between the united front and the popular front - the first was seen as a preparation for the second. The Labour Party Executive was therefore inclined to regard both with equal suspicion as tactics designed principally to increase Communist influence in the Labour Party. This suspicion was not diminished by the linking of united and popular fronts with the situation in Spain.

Closely associated with the Communist Party, and providing a prolific propaganda backing for Communist campaigns for aid to Spain and for united and popular fronts, was the Left Book Club. The Club devoted all its efforts to the explanation and advocacy of a People's Front, recalls its leading official. The Club certainly printed more on the subject than anybody else, was responsible for getting the idea widely discussed in political circles in Britain - and created a firm association in the minds of most people between the Popular Front and Communism.

The Club was the brainchild of Victor Gollancz, pacifist schoolmaster turned successful publisher. The basic scheme of the Club was simple. For 2s 6d members received a "Left Book of the Month", chosen by the Selection Committee - which consisted of Gollancz, John Strachey and Harold Laski. Left-wing books could be guaranteed a high circulation without risk to the publisher, while members received them at a greatly reduced rate...

The growth of the Club was partly spontaneous, partly a consequence of imaginative organisation. From the start, giant Club rallies were held in large halls all over the country. In attendance and in drama, the Club's biggest meetings outdid any organised by the Labour Party. People came to a Club rally as to a revivalist meeting, to hear the best orators of the far left - Laski, Strachey, Pollitt, Gallacher, Ellen Wilkinson, Pritt, Bevan, Strauss, Cripps, plus the occasional non-socialist, such as the Liberal, Richard Acland, to provide Popular Front balance....

At Bridgwater - where Vernon Bartlett won a famous "Popular Front" by-election victory in November 1938 - Left Book Club activities may have been a crucial factor. Gollancz maintained afterwards that "had there been no Left Book Club there would have been no Bridgwater", and it is very likely that Bartlett gained the backing of the constituency Labour Party (against fierce Transport House opposition) because of Left Book Club activities.

Richard Acland, Liberal MP for the neighbouring North Devon constituency and the Club's most prominent and active Liberal supporter, had taken part in a number of Club meetings in the Bridgwater constituency in the summer of 1938, before the seat became vacant. One of these, at Minehead, was announced by a poster which read "Why not pull together, Liberal, Labour and Progressive Conservative for Peace, Democracy and Security." In September (when the imminence of a vacancy was still unsuspected) the Club's monthly journal, Left News reported that Minehead had no Labour Party but "the LBC Group decided to take the necessary steps to bring one into existence... the LBC will give the new organisation the fullest assistance of its organisation and propaganda departments. The Club Secretary has agreed to become temporary Organising Secretary of the about-to-be-formed Party. Later, Club members set up a local party in nearby watcher, where Labour organisation was also dead.

What we say is rather... that in the Left Book Club we arc creating the mass basis without which a true Popular Front is impossible. In a sense, the Left Book Club is already a sort of popular front that happens to have happened. It is a body of people who happen to have come together and happen to agree on a number of vital topics. Sooner or later, in their various organisations, it is absolutely inevitable that they will act on that agreement.

This brings me on also to the next question, which is: "Are you a new political party?" The answer is emphatically "No." Rather are we a body of men and women of all progressive parties, hammering out our differences, coming to agreement, and then acting in our various organisations.

My feeling is this: if we succeed on a big enough scale in creating this mass basis, then all objections to a Popular Front, from whatever quarter, necessarily and automatically vanish.... Now if I have made myself clear, you will not misconstrue me or think I am describing this as a Popular Front meeting when I say that the whole idea of the Left Book Club is reflected in the composition of our platform this afternoon. We have here Professor Laski, who since I first knew him at Oxford before the War (we are living in such an atmosphere that I had almost said before the last War) has devoted himself unswervingly to the Labour Party. We have Mr Acland, one of the Liberal Party Whips. We have Mr Strachey whom some people allege to be a Communist. We have Mr Pollitt, who certainly is a Communist. We were to have had with us this afternoon, as you know, Sir Stafford Cripps, and it is really with tremendous disappointment that I tell you that he cannot come because lie has influenza. Sir Stafford, as you know, has been in a thousand fights for peace and the working man... And then we have my very clear friend, if lie will allow me to call him so, Pritt, who has also been a tireless worker for peace and freedom... Now Pritt, as you know, is a member of the Executive of the Parliamentary Labour Party. I do not know what his views may be on the question of the United Front and the Popular Front, which his party has boycotted, but I know he clearly has no objection whatever to the sort of unity I have been putting before you; otherwise lie would not be on the platform. Nor for the matter of that, has his leader, Mr C.R. Atlee, who has sent us a message as follows: "I am very glad to have an opportunity of sending a message to members of the Left Book Club.

It is of the utmost importance that there should be as wide a circulation as possible of the views of those people who, though presenting the problem from different angles, are united in a conviction of the need for changing the present system of society. Socialism cannot be built on ignorance, and the transformation of Great Britain into a Socialist State will need the active co-operation of a large body of well-informed men and women. For this reason I consider the Success of the Left Book Club to be a most encouraging sign.

In England and America important voices were being raised in public asking for much more help for Germany and for planned distribution. In Great Britain it was above all Lord Beveridge and Victor Gollancz who aroused the public conscience among the victorious nations. Victor Gollancz published a book In Darkest Germany in which he described the German conditions in detail. He also published a pamphlet entitled Leave Them To Their Fate. It was extraordinarily effectively written. Victor Gollancz gave hard and clear statements of the British views and demands concerning Germany, but then argued that in the final resort the problem of Germany fell under a humanitarian principle of the British conscience for the world. The Times, the Daily Herald, the Observer and the Manchester Guardian published letters by Gollancz in which again and again he pointed to the human aspect of the German problem; he also condemned at a very early stage the amount of dismantling demanded by the Allied governments.

In 1947 I met Victor Gollancz personally and found him to be a very intelligent and wise man. He owned a large publishing house and he had great influence on public opinion in Great Britain. Germany owes Victor Gollancz a great debt of gratitude, a debt which is all the greater in view of his Jewish descent.