By the time he was married, Shapurji had left Tatas and was on the staff of British Westinghouse, having, for the moment at least, given up the unequal struggle between himself and Dorabji. He also joined Lincoln's Inn and intended to become a barrister, a project that had been in his mind ever since his arrival in England. My Mother said that he gave up the idea because he felt that with his political views he would probably never be tolerated in the legal profession.
As soon as he had arrived in England, he gave the National Liberal Club as his address and seemed to be following in the tradition of his family in the political sphere. His Uncle Jamsetji had greatly admired John Bright, Gladstone and Lord Morley and there is little doubt that in this, as in so many other important issues, Shapurji was profoundly influenced by the grand old man of the family. But he obviously soon became disillusioned with the Liberal Party for they did not seem to him to be doing enough for the working people; for him it was not sufficient merely to bestow benefits upon the workers; he believed that the power of Government had to be transferred into their hands; so, although he did not actually resign from the Liberals until 1910,he became involved with the Socialist movement almost as soon as he arrived in England. Certainly, from 1907,he took an active part in the Socialist Party in East Finchley; this was a vigorous and expanding Branch and, politically, I think this was a time of great optimism for him. Also at East Finchley there was a mock Parliament and Shapurji was a zealous frequenter of all their sessions. My Mother went with him quite often and it was there that she first heard Bernard Shaw speak and, of course, made his acquaintance: she never missed a production of Shaw's plays and my older sister was called Candida in his honour. Shapurji also gave his active support to the Suffragette Movement from this time, and knew Sylvia Pankhurst well; he joined in their demonstration that marched to Hyde Park in 1908. He was also active in the India Reform Group. No doubt his eloquence and sincerity were already being noticed in all these organisations.
Some time in 1907, Shapurji's boon companion from his school and college days, Kaikoo Mehta, (eldest son of Sir Phirozeshah Mehta who had been such a friend of Jamsetji) came to work in the office of Tata Ltd in London. He was an affectionate friend to all the family and was invariably in the house at or soon after the birth of each one of us. We all loved him dearly as he was much more lighthearted than my father. It was with him that we romped and fooled around when we were small, whereas my father was always somewhat stern and aloof and it was Kaikoo who played tennis and cricket with us as we grew older. He was very handsome with a curling, waxed moustache and he was always jolly and laughing. He was very fond of Mother and always said that Father was lucky to have found her before he did! We always teased my mother about this later on; but of course, it always remained a very proper, decorous friendship which we all enjoyed. Kaikoo had a period cottage in St John's Wood which to all of us was like a doll's house and we loved to visit him there. His arrival in London was a great comfort and support to Shapurji at a time when he found himself cut off from the family for the first time.
My Grandmother Saklatvala sailed to America that summer to visit her sons, Phirozeshah and Beram. She died in New York on the 23rd November, 1907, I think as a result of anaesthetic poisoning during a minor operation. Perhaps because her brother Jamsetji was buried in Brookwood, or perhaps it was Shapurji's wish, her body was sent to England and she was also interred in the Parsee burial ground there, in a grave immediately in front of Jamsetji's mausoleum. Shapurji was greatly saddened and depressed by her death and he and Sehri took a furnished cottage in Brookwood to be near his mother's grave. My eldest brother, Dorab, was born there. It was there, too, that the doctor introduced a Scottish lady, Mrs Gray, to the household as a midwife and nurse. She remained a close friend to all of us and I was with her when she died in her nineties. She attended at the birth of three of my Mother's five children. (She could not be with her in Manchester because she had a husband and son of her own to look after.)
Shapurji's parents both accepted Sehri as a welcome daughter-in-law; but when she produced a son (alas, too late to make Grandma happy) Granddad Saklatvala was overjoyed and declared of the new infant:- "This is the Dorabji Saklatvala of the future!" He showered my Mother with gifts and sang her praises and generally rejoiced at the birth. After this, he spent much of his time in England, mostly in Manchester, where he was in business buying and selling mill machinery; consequently, he saw a great deal of the older children. It was probably one of the happiest periods in his life, after all the dissensions within the family.
In the spring of 1909 Shapurji had to leave British Westinghouse. It seems that they had engaged him in the hope of doing business with Tatas through his personal connections, not knowing, of course, that his personal relations could well have the opposite effect! He joined a firm of consultant engineers in Manchester and the family, now three in number, moved to Ashton-upon-Mersey. My sister Candida was born there on my Mother's twenty-first birthday, 1909. Kaikoo Mehta came to stay to join in the family jollifications. In those days, a mother was not allowed any solid food for days after the birth and was kept strictly in bed for a couple of weeks. Father, terrified of anything going wrong, insisted on obeying the doctor's orders; but Kaikoo used to sneak bread and butter and cups of tea upstairs for Sehri who was fit as a flea and ravenously hungry.
In Manchester, Shapurji joined the Clarion Club and attended their weekly meetings with unfailing regularity and spoke there on many occasions. Bipin Chandra Pal, a great Indian orator and fighter for Indian freedom, also addressed meetings there. He was, of course, already acquainted with my Father and at this period they saw much of one another. My parents shared their house with another Indian couple, Mr and Mrs Chaman Lal, who also had young children. This meant that Sehri was able to accompany Shapur on many of his political meetings which she greatly enjoyed and no doubt she learned a good deal from listening to and meeting the many political figures who participated in them. While she, like her Father, was always a Liberal, she nevertheless always gave her husband her wholehearted support in all his political activities, even when his politics were moving at a swifter pace than those of the Liberal Party.
In the early nineteen hundreds there was an eccentric English socialist called Arthur Field who devoted much of his time to matters oriental, particularly the Arab cause. He was a frequent and vociferous visitor to our house and was very much a family friend. He said of this period;-"Having come in contact with Manchester Labour Organisations including the Clarion Movement, from 1909 we may suppose that he was trying to influence them, as he had tried to influence the Liberals previously, to take up the matter of organising the workers of India and voicing their claims to justice in the English Labour Circles. In 1911, he addressed to leading men of the Trades Union Congress and the Labour Representation Committee a document outlining the desired activity. He told me the response was disappointing and disillusioning."
It seems he was not the only Socialist to be critical of the Labour Movement. When George Bernard Shaw attended the Labour Party Conference in 1909, he disapproved of the Members singing at such an event; when they burst into Auld Lang Syne at the end, he voiced his disgust thus:- "When Moses received the Tablets of the Law, he did not sing 'For he's a jolly good fellow' by way of acknowledgment!"
Shapurji also attended regularly the sessions of The County Forum held in Cromford Court, Manchester. There he was known as a very earnest and considerable debater with pronounced Socialist ideas. One of the members wrote of this time:- "I remember his opening a debate and bringing his wife with him. It created some little interest, as unusual things and persons always do. The debate went well and everyone was congratulatory, even his opponents."
During his period in Manchester he frequently saw Clynes and also met Ramsay MacDonald. While he realised that MacDonald was an astute and educated man, he never felt he was the right person for the leadership of the Labour Movement. This first impression was confirmed in later years when he was a Member of Parliament; he favoured J.R.Clynes rather than MacDonald for the leadership of the Labour Party, and MacDonald won the day by quite a slender majority. How different might have been the history of the Labour Party had Clynes instead of MacDonald become Prime Minister.
For much of his life in England, Shapurji came under Scotland Yard surveillance but unfortunately I cannot have sight of his dossier until seventy years after his death - by which time I shall be beyond reading it. I am therefore unable to state precisely when this surveillance began. But a letter from one of the Party Members with whom my Father stayed in Glasgow, said that detectives were at his heels within a very short time of his arrival in England; though there is no evidence of any activities in India or in the very early months in England that would warrant such suspicion by the authorities. But certainly, very early in his political involvement he was followed by a detective; in a way, it flattered him and gave him importance; he certainly never seemed to resent it. Once, when it was pouring with rain and he went into a restaurant for lunch, he went out and invited the detective to come inside out of the rain; he said he knew he was there and that he was only doing his job, so why get wet? He seems, anyway, always to have proclaimed his political beliefs as loudly and as widely as he knew how and there was certainly nothing clandestine about his activities; it seems, therefore, to have been something of a waste of money to have him so meticulously scrutinised. Once, when he was to address a meeting in a part of London unfamiliar to him, he had forgotten the address of the hall; he went into the local police station and asked them if they could tell him where Saklatvala was scheduled to speak that night, and they at once told him! This no doubt appealed to his sense of humour for he related it as a joke during the meeting when he got there.
Some time in 1911, thanks largely to the intervention of his cousin Ratanji, arrangements were being made for him to rejoin Tatas in India. But his father wrote to him and warned him that he was likely to be arrested if he returned home. So it seems that he was already regarded by the British Government as a threat to their continuing dominance over India; for at that time, the thought of freeing India from the tyranny of British rule was considered to be dangerous sedition. Now, of course, no one, even to the right of the Tory Party, would consider it right or desirable to resume the roles of Empire builders and subjugate other countries. So Father's philosophy, condemned as revolutionary and a threat to peace and stability, was merely ahead of his generation. It took thirty years for British politicians to catch up with him. Like all men who promote good ideas too early, he paid the price of their backwardness and intolerance; and, alas, he did not live long enough to be able to say, "I told you so!"
However, when the opportunity finally came in May, 1912,for him to go back to India, he and all the family went to Bombay, fully intending to settle there. He insisted on chancing arrest and said he would not give in to intimidation. He took no active part in politics while he was India, as far as I know, but, at the end of about a year, he was again sent back to England, presumably by Dorabji as Head of the firm.
By the time they got back to London from India in 1913, his cousin Ratan had purchased a palatial house in Twickenham called York House. It is at present the Town Hall. It was surrounded by beautiful gardens,which are now a public park and he built an indoor swimming pool and lived there in considerable style and luxury. Ratan and Shapur had always been good friends and were as affectionate as brothers, and it was to York House that the family repaired on their return to England. Both Ratanji and Dorabji had been knighted by this time and were in the social whirl of London life, which Shapurji watched with some amusement from the side-lines. At this time, he worked as Personal Assistant to Ratanji and remained in this position until Ratan's death in 1918, working mostly at York House but also in the offices of Tata Ltd in London. During this period, Shapurji was content to be once again within the fold of his family and enjoyed the close links with his cousin Ratanji. Ratan had no children of his own and made a big fuss of Shapur's increasing brood. He often encouraged them to entertain him with songs and recitations, and they enjoyed playing in the spacious gardens of York House; especially the Japanese garden with its miniature trees and slender bridge over a little stream.
Shapurji found a suitable house at 51, Lebanon Park, close to York House and the family took up residence there late in 1913. My youngest brother, Kaikoo, (named after Kaikoo Mehta, of course) and I were both born there in 1915 and 1919 respectively. Nurse Gray presided at both births. I might mention here that my Father was before his time in many things, and he apparently wanted to be present when Kaikoo was born. Nurse Gray was scandalised at such a proposition and threatened to walk out and abandon her patient when the birth was imminent if Father persisted in remaining in the bedroom. This was one occasion when my Father had, perforce, to yield - and to a woman, too! Nurse won the day and he was not allowed to witness the birth as he had so wished to do.
In 1914 my Father went alone on a short visit to India, returning in April 1914. Mother went to Marseilles to meet him and they had a week together in Paris. Father bought Mummy the latest thing in hobble skirts from a fashionable shop in Paris and she felt she was being outrageously daring wearing it in the demure streets of Twickenham. I have a picture of them taken on the Eifel Tower during that visit; they obviously had enormous fun together that week, alone and far from all cares, domestic and political. Although the Great War was so near, no one seemed to be much aware of the impending sorrows.
On his return to Twickenham,Shapurji now added the conscientious objectors to his political causes and groups of them in Twickenham used to meet in each others' houses. He continued his association with the suffragette movement and also attended the meetings of the Independent Labour Party at this time. He had joined the Independent Labour Party in Manchester in 1909. He also went to Fabian Society meetings.
Herbert Bryan, a correspondent for the Daily Herald, remembered that he first saw "Sak" at the City of London Branch of the I.L.P.in about 1915.in Prince Henry Room, Fleet Street. He recalls:- "On that occasion Sak was not one of the speakers, but he spoke in the discussion from the back of the hall. I did not know who he was then, but I remember being impressed by his striking and original way of speaking.
....he soon became active in the City Branch, both in Branch and public meetings. Then his reputation began to spread throughout the London movement and afterwards, throughout the country, so that he soon began to receive many requests to fulfil speaking engagements from London and provincial branches."
Quite late in the War he did receive his call-up papers but the authorities must have had second thoughts, suspecting that he might be more trouble than he was worth, because I think it was withdrawn. I have not verified this but that is the impression I had from my Mother; but she was talking to me some fifty years after the event.Certainly he never enlisted and, as far as I know, never appeared before any tribunal.
The 1917 Revolution in Russia had a profound effect and influence on Shapurji's political outlook. He saw the predominantly peasant population of Russia as being similar to the Indian population and became convinced that the solution that the U.S.S.R. had found to combat the poverty and illiteracy of her masses, could be effective in India also. He became totally and irrevocably convinced that Communism was the only system that could relieve the sufferings and injustices of the poor in all countries. It might deprive a very few of the population from expressing intellectual convictions, but at least it would ensure that the other downtrodden numberless masses would be fed, housed and educated, and would have a voice in the Government of the land. He visited the U.S.S.R. in 1923, in 1927 and again in 1934 when he toured and lectured extensively, giving his attention particularly to Samarkand and the Eastern areas that had, he felt, perhaps the greatest affinity with India, and he remained steadfast in his belief in Communism. Once, when he was addressing a meeting of the International Club of Glasgow University, he thrilled his audience with an impassioned lecture on how the subjected races of Soviet Asia had freed themselves, and on the way home, he explained to his host how he had made up his mind never to admit even the tiniest criticisms of the Soviet Union because that, for him, ' was like a sin against the Holy Ghost!'.
Many enemies of Communism are of the view that those who embrace it are necessarily unpatriotic to Great Britain. This is not so. Father was convinced that Communism would lead to the happiness of all people and nations. He wished ALL nations well. To love one's country does not necessarily entail setting it above other countries; bringing happiness to ALL peoples does not diminish the well-being one brings to one's own. To love humanity in toto does not mean that one loves one country less than another. But if the people of each land are encouraged by a false sense of patriotism to think that their particular country must be stronger and more dominant than all the others, we are left with an arms race and often with an armed contest, to prove the supremacy of each over the other. Sabre-rattling is really not a manifestation of love of one's country. Patriotism not only entails feeling love for members of the Government and the Upper Crust, one has to love the workers and unemployed too, for they are all equally members of their country and society. Shapurji Saklatvala assuredly loved and worked tirelessly for the working people of England as he worked strenuously and unceasingly for the good of working people everywhere. So, lest anyone should think that Father did not love England, let me say at once that they are wrong; he once said that India was HIS mother-country, but that England was the mother-country of his children and certainly he had a devotion to England; but he also loved all men and women in other lands. He firmly believed in the universality of man and that no man or groups of men should build their own happiness on the unhappiness and suffering of others. A capitalist economy that depends for its survival on having millions of unemployed could not, in his view, be considered moral or desirable. His patriotism embraced loyalty to the working men and women of England; indeed, he fought harder than most for the miners of England and went to prison in 1926 to serve their cause. He worked all his life to better the lot of people everywhere.
After all, my Marsh grandparents loved all twelve of their children, my own parents loved all five of us; none of them would have wanted to better one child at the expense of the others. But loving many does not diminish the devotion to any ONE; it rather enhances and increases it. So with the love of countries. The human heart is well stocked with love and has enough to distribute to people everywhere in the world.
He became totally absorbed in the various political movements to which he subscribed and spent hardly any week-ends at home. He travelled all over Britain addressing meetings and inspired great affection and devoted loyalty from working people all over the country. The fact that he came from India does not appear to have bothered or upset anyone. In fact there was one occasion during his second General Election campaign when the audience rallied to his defence at a public meeting. His opponent in the election was H.C.Hogbin, a National Liberal; there were rowdy demonstrations at Mr Hogbin's meetings by people claiming to be followers of Comrade Saklatvala. In the end, Mr Hogbin said he would not address any more meetings. Father published a notice for distribution calling on local people to give all politicians a fair hearing. Copies were sent to Mr Hogbin, for distribution at his meetings. One Captain Godfrey, representing Mr Hogbin, addressed a public meeting, sharing the platform with Saklatvala and, after referring to 'Sak' 's "splendid sportsmanship", added, "but I have an instinctive preference for an Englishman." This remark brought a torrent of abuse and indignation from the audience. A newspaper of the day reported that men and women rose to their feet and shouted protests. "You're asking for it!", "Shame!", and "How about Lady Astor?", were some of the remarks distinguishable through the din, which continued until Mr Saklatvala himself intervened. Captain Godfrey was forced to say that "if Mr Saklatvala thinks he has been insulted, I withdraw." But it is interesting to note that the ordinary rank and file members of that audience would not stand for any derogatory allusion to the fact that Father was an Indian. How sadly different things are today.
In those days, of course, there were few Indians living here and most of them were doctors or lawyers or students or well-to-do business men. So the local United Kingdom populace did not then, as now, feel threatened by Indians; they were not then in competition for jobs and houses. I have certainly never heard of any antagonism being expressed by working men or women due to Father being a non-European. He was an outstanding orator and always had complete control of his audiences. There were never any incidents of unruly violence or disorder in his meetings. He dealt with hecklers as he dealt with any political situation, with humour and logic. People everywhere affectionately cut his name down to more manageable and pronouncable size and he was universally known affectionately as 'Sak'. He was of only average height, with a neat, trim figure, vigorous in his speech and general deportment. He had dark, wavy hair, warm, shining hazel eyes that were most expressive of his ernestness, his anger or his twinkling and mischievous humour. Everyone who knew him was impressed by his kindliness, his warmth, his sincerity. His compassion was personal even when he was speaking of poverty or sickness or deprivation on a wide scale, and people never became mere statistical numbers for him; he felt for the thousands as keenly as he would feel for the individual next door. As a speaker, he always drew the crowds, and his public meetings were usually full to overflowing. But, at the same time, no group was too small for him to address, and he would willingly go to talk informally to little groups of students or trade union members.
No one now would say he was not robust - indeed, he seemed to have limitless energy, often travelling through the night and addressing two and three meetings in the day. His stay in Matlock, one way and another, had certainly made a new man of him! He was not only a fiery advocate of socialism, he was also a walking advertisement for the healing springs of Derbyshire!