Robert Bernays | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Member of Parliament forBristol North | |
| In office 1931–1945 | |
| Preceded by | Walter Ayles |
| Succeeded by | William Coldrick |
| Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Health | |
| In office 1937–1939 | |
| Preceded by | Robert Hudson |
| Succeeded by | Florence Horsbrugh |
| Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport | |
| In office 1939–1940 | |
| Preceded by | Austin Hudson |
| Succeeded by | Frederick Montague |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Robert Hamilton Bernays (1902-05-06)6 May 1902 |
| Died | 23 January 1945(1945-01-23) (aged 42) Adriatic Sea |
| Cause of death | Plane crash |
| Political party | Liberal National |
| Other political affiliations | Liberal Party |
| Spouse | Nancy Britton (m. 1942) |
| Children | 2 |
| Education | Worcester College, Oxford |
Robert Hamilton Bernays (6 May 1902 – 23 January 1945) was aLiberal Party and laterLiberal National politician in theUnited Kingdom who served as a Member of Parliament (MP) from 1931 to 1945.
Bernays was the third son and fourth and youngest child of Lillian Jane (Stephenson) Bernays and Stewart Frederick Lewis Bernays, aChurch of England clergyman who became Rector first ofStanmore, and later (1924) ofFinchley, both inNorth London. He was the great-grandson ofGerman Jewish ProfessorAdolphus Bernays. He was educated atRossall School andWorcester College, Oxford, where he was president of theOxford Union in 1925. After university he became a journalist onThe Daily News (which became theNews Chronicle in 1930 after a series of newspaper mergers), and practised the profession until entering government, despite occasional clashes with his employers because of the independent line he took in the internal clashes among Liberal factions in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Finding himself dropped by theNews Chronicle after it supplanted theDaily News in the summer of 1930, he travelled with the then leader of the Liberal Party in theHouse of Lords,Earl Beauchamp, toAustralia, and thence, alone, toIndia. The result was his book aboutMahatma Gandhi,Naked Fakir (1931; published asNaked Faquir in theUnited States in 1932).
He stood unsuccessfully for Parliament as a Liberal atRugby in the1929 general election (losing, after the campaign was interrupted and polling delayed for six weeks by the Labour candidate's death, to the incumbent Conservative, the future Chief WhipDavid Margesson);[1] but, following the positive reception affordedNaked Fakir, he was adopted as Liberal candidate forBristol North – a seat once held by the distinguished Liberal Cabinet MinisterAugustine Birrell – at the1931 general election. He was elected with a majority of 13,214 over the incumbent,Labour MPWalter Ayles, who had twice won the seat, in1923 and1929, when the non-Labour vote was split between two other candidates. That there was no Conservative candidate, in an election that saw the Conservatives win 55% of the national vote, does much to explain the size of Bernays's majority; and this fact, coupled with Ayles's record of winning when he had two opponents rather than one – he lost to a single Liberal rival in both1922 and1924, while beating a Liberal and a Conservative in 1923 and a Liberal and an independent in 1929 – likewise explains why, throughout theperiod 1931–1935, one of Bernays's chief preoccupations was to ensure that the Conservatives should hold him in sufficiently high esteem to refrain from opposing him at the next election. (Writing to his married sister Lucy Brereton in July 1935, he commented that "my problem is not to capture the Liberal vote but to hold the Conservatives".)[2]
Bernays made a slow start in theHouse of Commons – his maiden speech was affected by the stammer which continued in debate (he preferred making prepared speeches rather than impromptu interventions because of it), and he washors de combat for some time in 1932 afterhaving his appendix removed.[3] That autumn, however, he visited Germany for the first time to observe political developments there; he subsequently developed an expert knowledge of the country and was a consistent and determined critic of the Nazis after their accession to power in early 1933. His account of his journalistic and political travels between 1930 and 1933,Special Correspondent, was published in 1934. During his visit toNazi Germany he nearly secured an interview withAdolf Hitler before admitting to the Foreign Press Bureau chiefErnst Hanfstaengl that he was an MP for the Liberal Party led by theBritish Jewish politicianSir Herbert Samuel.[4]
When the official Liberal Party (the 'Samuelites', so named after party leader Herbert Samuel) left theNational Government, led byRamsay MacDonald, over theImperial Preference-versus-Free Trade issue in November 1933, Bernays (along with three other followers of Samuel:Joseph Leckie,William McKeag, andJoseph Maclay) remained on the government benches, with theLiberal National Party MPs (or 'Simonites,' led bySir John Simon), although Bernays himself, unlike Leckie and McKeag, did not yet openly become a 'Simonite.' As early as July 1934, however, in a letter to Lucy Brereton, he was distinguishing himself from "[t]he poor old Samuel Liberals" and their "frightful position";[5] yet in December of the same year, writing to Lucy once more, he referred to the official Liberals as "we" and called Samuel his "leader";[6] while in March 1935 he told his sister that he was "very seriously thinking" of "asking for the government whip".[7] In short, he agonised about his party affiliation for some time. He was re-elected at the1935 general election as a "Liberal independent of all groups in the party"[8] – again without Conservative opposition, though with a drastically reduced majority (over Ayles) of 4,828 – and finally joined the Liberal Nationals in September 1936 (though he seems to have been in negotiations with them even before the 1935 election).[9] His decision to end his period of vacillation may have been motivated by a sense that he had burned his bridges with the official Liberals (no longer 'Samuelite', since Samuel had lost his seat in 1935 and the party was now led bySir Archibald Sinclair), and that it would be hard for him to advance in his political career as an independent Liberal; while as a Liberal National he would be eligible for office in the National Government without having to go the whole hog and become a Conservative (an option which, many entries in his diaries suggest, would have been not only politically but also personally repugnant to him). It may also have been connected with the tragic death of his mother Lillian, who, after a long period of depressive illness and voluntary residence in nursing homes, was found dead in theRiver Thames just before Christmas 1935. Bernays' sense that he needed to recover his psychological equilibrium and rebuild his career after his mother's death and the publicity it provoked is evident in his diary entries from early 1936.[10] (A coroner's inquest recorded an open verdict on Mrs Bernays, but suicide must have been suspected, at a time when the stigma attached to it could still be seriously damaging to any relative of the victim who was a public figure in Britain.) Bernays's father remarried in 1937; Bernays acted as his best man.[11]
WhenNeville Chamberlain replacedStanley Baldwin as prime minister in May 1937, Bernays was appointed asParliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Health in theNational Government, serving underSir Kingsley Wood. Wood was succeeded, upon being appointedSecretary of State for Air in May 1938, by Bernays's old friend and occasional political patronWalter Elliot. Personal loyalty to Elliot (the two had remained friendly even after Elliot, in 1934, had marriedKatharine Tennant, whom Bernays himself had courted in the early 1930s)[12] may have helped to keep Bernays in his job after theMunich crisis that autumn, whenHarold Nicolson and many of Bernays's other friends and associates thought he should have followed through on his earlier threats to resign because of the government's policy ofappeasement of Hitler and the Nazis.[13] He moved in July 1939 to becomeParliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport (underEuan Wallace), and held that post until he left government whenWinston Churchill took over as prime minister in May 1940. (Although he was on friendly terms with Churchill during the 1930s and sometimes supported his attacks on the National Government over such matters as India,[14] their association seems not to have been close enough to keep him in office when it became necessary forWinston Churchill to find places in hiswar cabinet for members of the Labour Party.)[15]
He was also, especially after their ten-week trip toEast Africa Protectorate in early 1937 as members of a governmental commission on colonial education, a very close friend of the writer andNational Labour MP Harold Nicolson, in whose celebrated diaries he is frequently mentioned. This, along with remarks in Bernays's own diaries and letters (such as "I suppose that what I really want in a woman is that kind of mental affinity which I get from someone like H[arold] N[icolson]" and "he is very fond of me as I am of him",[16] has led to suggestions that they were actually involved in a discreet homosexual relationship.[citation needed] PreviouslyHugh Grosvenor, 2nd Duke of Westminster had reported, toKing George V among others, that Bernays had been a lover of the7th Earl Beauchamp – Westminster's brother-in-law – on their Australian travels in 1930.[17] (Bernays remained on friendly terms with Beauchamp after the latter's disgrace and departure for exile in Paris, visiting him there at least once, in April 1936.)[18] Whatever the truth of these rumours (and his published diaries are full of appreciative comments about the beauty of young women, some of whom he seems to have pursued with a view to marriage, which may suggest that he was at mostbisexual – as perhaps was Beauchamp, who fathered seven children), Bernays eventually, in 1942, married Nancy Britton, the daughter ofGeorge Bryant Britton (Coalition Liberal M.P. forBristol East from 1918 to 1922). He had met Nancy shortly before the collapse of his relationship with actressLeonora Corbett.[19] They had two sons.
In theSecond World War, Bernays joined theBritish Army as a sapper in 1942 and was commissioned as a subaltern into the Movement Control Section of theRoyal Engineers in January 1943; according toWho's Who he was promoted to Captain in 1944,[20] although his casualty record with theCommonwealth War Graves Commission, by whom he is commemorated on theCassino Memorial in Italy, lists his rank as Lieutenant.[21] After he died in a plane crash in theAdriatic Sea in January 1945, while flying fromItaly toGreece as part of a parliamentary delegation to visit British troops, noby-election was called, and the Bristol North seat remained vacant until the1945 general election, when it was won by the Labour candidateWilliam Coldrick.
| Parliament of the United Kingdom | ||
|---|---|---|
| Preceded by | Member of Parliament forBristol North 1931–1945 | Succeeded by |
| Political offices | ||
| Preceded by | Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Health 1937–1939 | Succeeded by |
| Preceded by | Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Transport 1939–1940 | Succeeded by |
