Guilty Men - Authorship and Publication

Authorship and Publication

Guilty Men was a British polemical book written under the pseudonym "Cato" and published in 1940. It attacked fifteen public figures for their policy towards Germany, Italy and Japan in the 1930s and for their failure to equip the British armed forces adequately to stand up to the dictators of those countries. It is regarded as the classic denunciation of appeasement, which it defined as the "deliberate surrender of small nations in the face of Hitler's blatant bullying."

The book's slogan, "Let the guilty men retire," was an attack on members of the National Government before Winston Churchill became prime minister, most of whom were Conservatives, although some were National Liberals and one was Ramsay MacDonald, the late leader of the Labour Party. Several remained members of Winston Churchill's government. The book shaped popular thinking about appeasement for twenty years and has been seen as destroying the reputation of ex-prime ministers Stanley Baldwin and Neville Chamberlain and contributing to the defeat of the Conservative Party in the 1945 general election.

The authors were three journalists, Michael Foot (a future Leader of the Labour Party), Frank Owen (a former Liberal MP), and Peter Howard (a Conservative). They wrote pseudonymously because their employer, Lord Beaverbrook, was active in the Conservative Party and banned his journalists from writing for other publications. Foot, Owen and Howard would meet on the roof of the Evening Standard building after the late edition had been put to bed, surveying the London skyline and considering what might happen in the imminent Battle of Britain.

They believed that Britain had suffered a succession of bad leaders, who, with junior ministers, advisers and officials, had conducted a disastrous foreign policy toward Germany and had failed to prepare the country for war. They persuaded Victor Gollancz, creator of the Left Book Club, to publish the book, divided the twenty-four chapters among themselves and wrote it in four days, finishing on June 5, 1940. Gollancz asked for some of the rhetoric to be toned down, fearing the reaction it might provoke.

The so-called guilty men were:

• Neville Chamberlain
• Sir John Simon
• Sir Samuel Hoare
• Ramsay MacDonald
• Stanley Baldwin
• Lord Halifax
• Sir Kingsley Wood
• Ernest Brown
• David Margesson
• Sir Horace Wilson
• Sir Thomas Inskip
• Leslie Burgin
• Earl Stanhope
• W. S. Morrison
• Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith

Guilty Men was published in early July, shortly after Churchill took over as Prime Minister, after the Dunkirk evacuation had shown Britain's military weakness, and after the Fall of France, which left the country with few allies. The major book wholesalers, W H Smith and Wyman's, and the largest book distributor, Simpkin Marshall, refused to handle the book. It was sold on news-stands and street barrows and went through twelve editions in July 1940 selling 200,000 copies in a few weeks. The police are alleged to have visited bookshops and to have told them they were selling a banned book, although Guilty Men was never banned.

There was speculation as to Cato's identity; some thought that he was Aneurin Bevan. The authors had some fun reviewing their own work, Michael Foot entitling an article, "Who is This Cato?" Beaverbrook was as much in the dark as anyone, but joked that he "made do with the royalties from Guilty Men". The authors earned no royalties, as their literary agent Ralph Pinker made off with them.

Guilty Men remains in circulation and has been reprinted for its historical interest, for example, by Penguin Books to mark its sixtieth anniversary in 2000.