Ocean Devil: The life and legend of George Hogg. James MacManus

a backbencher in his wilderness years, termed it ‘abject, squalid and shameless’.

      The big issues of the day dominated the student union debates and inspired long and self-regarding editorials in the student newspapers: the powerlessness of the League of Nations as Japan, Italy and Germany trampled on the international agreements that they had signed in the decade following the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, and the question of rearmament in the face of the rise of Nazi Germany.

      The views of the majority of students were predictable. They backed the republican side in the Spanish Civil War and roundly condemned the Italian invasion of Abyssinia. The League of Nations was damned as ineffectual. Some of those who had supported the King and Country resolution would later claim in The Times that they had really been voting for collective security and a stronger League of Nations. It was a thin argument which convinced no one. The two Oxford student magazines, Isis and Cherwell, published lengthy leaders questioning whether students were truly serious about such matters or were merely posturing.

      As far as Wadham was concerned, much of the student debate took place in the King’s Arms or the college dining hall. There were no noisy demonstrations outside the Spanish or Italian embassies in London, nor angry letters to the national papers. George Hogg’s Oxford may have been a noisy, political place, but his own memories of his time there dwell on student pranks such as burning lavatory seats, the pleasures of toasting muffins in front of the fire, and the hard work of trying to get a rugby blue. His name appears in the college gazette, and occasionally in the student newspapers, but only to report his prowess on the rugby pitch. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that he was more concerned with having a good time than with worrying about Abyssinia or the struggle against fascism in Spain.

      With the help of Maurice Bowra, Hogg took the best that Oxford had to give. It was an enchanted world, and one he recalled with great affection throughout his brief life. The experience did not, and indeed could not, have prepared him or any of the university’s graduates for the realities of a world in which fascism was building a powerful popular appeal in a Europe racked by depression; in which the militarism in Japanese culture was about to embroil China and the whole Pacific region in a tide of warfare; in which centuries of feudalism in the most populous nation on earth, China, were being bloodily replaced by a modern totalitarian political concept.

      The political ideas that Hogg took to Oxford, pacifism and the Christian socialism of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, remained intact if dormant during his student years. As a tutor Maurice Bowra equipped him to test the ideals drummed into him by his mother. Oxford’s real gift to Hogg was to give him the freedom to live and enjoy himself beyond the confines of a repressive home life.

      Rugby was probably as important as anything else for him at Oxford. Gerald Parker played in the college team with him, and in 2007, at the age of ninety, he recalled his captain well: ‘The Wadham team did very well against the other colleges in the two years I played with the team. Hogg was a very good captain and led by example on the field. There were no long pep talks before the game, it was pretty much “Follow me and do what I do on the field.” As a team we always had some beers together afterwards. We were not a political bunch really – rugby was the thing.’

      Hogg spent his long vacations travelling. In 1936 he set out on a hitch-hiking tour of central and south-eastern Europe with £4 in his pocket and a Rhodes Scholar as a companion. The violent and sectarian politics of the Balkans, the hotbed of nationalist rivalries elsewhere in eastern Europe and the racism and militarism of Nazi Germany opened his eyes to the real world beyond the dreaming spires of Oxford.

      In the early summer of 1937 Hogg left Oxford with a secondclass degree (two of his brothers, Stephen and Daniel, had obtained third-class degrees, while the eldest brother, Gary, got a second) and returned home to plan his future. He did not really know what to do. His friends were planning to disappear into the civil service or the City. The world around him offered little inspiration. In May the coronation had taken place of King George VI and Queen Elizabeth at Westminster Abbey. A month later the former King Edward VIII, now the Duke of Windsor, married the woman for whom he had abdicated, Wallis Simpson. While these royal events attracted widespread public attention and comment, they probably did not elicit much interest in the Hogg household, where Aunt Muriel’s views on the British Empire were firmly in place.

      The Hoggs’ daily newspaper, the Herald, presented a bleak view of the world that summer. Hitler and Mussolini stated publicly that they would intervene in Spain after General Franco had suffered a setback at the battle of Guadalajara. In Russia, Stalin’s purge of the army led to a wave of executions of senior officers. A brief news agency item from Berlin stated that Heinrich Himmler, chief of the German police, had announced the establishment of a new concentration camp at Buchenwald to house those considered enemies of the state. Camps at Dachau and Sachsenhausen had already been set up. At the end of August most British newspapers carried a dramatic picture of a badly burnt Chinese baby crying in the wreckage of Shanghai’s bombed-out south railway station. The battle for the city had begun, and Japanese planes were being used to clear a path for their advancing army. Two thousand British women and children were evacuated from the city aboard the P&O liner Rajputana. A British battalion arrived to reinforce the garrison and protect the remaining expatriate population.

      Aunt Muriel came to stay at Wayfarings in August. By now she was known to the press as ‘Mother of World Peace’, and regularly travelled the world on lecture tours. Untroubled by the outbreak of hostilities in the Far East, indeed probably because of them, she announced her intention to travel across America to Japan, China and India to promote her pacifist message. Japan was the rising imperial power, and Muriel wished to make contact with the Christian co-operative movement there. She believed that while the government might pursue the politics of imperial aggrandisement, the Japanese people wanted peace.

      Kathleen was a passionate gardener, and took her sister into the garden to discuss the plan over some serious weeding. Muriel had taken George’s elder brother Daniel to India to meet Gandhi a few years previously. Why not take George with her on this latest journey?

      George jumped at the idea. The problem was money. The Hoggs had few savings left after educating six children privately, and taking expensive annual winter holidays in Switzerland. Then there was the question of George’s career. The idea of taking time off after university to travel was a novel one. Most of George’s university friends were going straight into the professions. The Depression was far from over, unemployment was still high, and the international outlook was threatening. This did not seem the time to be travelling the world seeking adventure.

      George solved the money problem by cashing in a small legacy. This would cover the £18.10s. third-class single fare to New York, and the passage from San Francisco to Japan. What little was left over would cover his expenses while he hitch-hiked across America to rejoin his aunt for the voyage across the Pacific. As for the return journey, he would find a way of earning his passage back from India.

      It was settled that aunt and nephew would sail on the Queen Mary for New York in September 1937. The night before he left, George said his farewells to Muff Nelson and other friends in the Silver Cup (which is still one of the better pubs in Harpenden). The following day he was so engrossed in the new American bestseller that had just been published in Britain, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind, that he had to be dragged from his armchair for the drive to Southampton.

      There is, or was, in the Hogg family album a faded Box Brownie photograph of members of the family standing on the dockside at Southampton that September day, with the Queen Mary in the background. The group are facing a westering sun, with George in the middle, wearing a snappy trilby and suit, and his parents and Rosemary and Stephen around him.

      Third-class cabins on the Queen Mary were at the front of the ship, and thus experienced the worst of the pitching and rolling in rough weather. And the weather was bad throughout the six-day voyage. Many of the 580 third-class passengers were European migrants to North America, and for their convenience the menus in the ship’s restaurant were printed in both English and French. No one read them. The restaurant was largely deserted, as the passengers remained confined in their cabins. The little deck space available to third class