Thread
Couldn't resist taking a peek at the second-place file in the January vote: just what was the Disaffection Act of 1934, and what had the student done? thread... 
It is the case, or as the Yorkshire Evening News has it, the ‘tragedy of young Hugh Phillips’, a 18 year old student of Leeds University, sentenced for 12 months at Leeds Assizes on 9 March 1937 
Phillips had sent ‘a crazy letter … full of woolly stuff about world revolution’ to an RAF airman asking him to fly a bomber to fight fascists in the Spanish Civil War. The result: 12 months, the first conviction under the still new Incitement to Disaffection - Sedition - Act 
There was considerable indignation at the sentence for this vicar’s son. His father telegrams the King 
H.G. Wells called it ‘an idiotic sentence in an imaginative boy’ 
… while the Daily Worker spies the underhand work of a police provocateur … 
Contextualising, the Yorkshire Evening Post sees in Phillips the continuing tragedy of the Great War: a generation ‘conceived in the wrack of pain’, a childhood in a ‘world half-mad with confusion and dislocation’, unbalanced, intelligent, sensitive.. 
The Vice-Chancellor of Leeds writes to the Home Secretary, pleading for clemency. He sees Phillips as foolish, perhaps entrapped by the airman. His ‘mind has the usual early enthusiasm for novel ideas, without the ability to see the difference between ideas and actions’ … 
The response from students, organizations, and members of the public protesting against Phillips’ conviction is strong. There are nine pages of petition signatures from Manchester University 
Letters from youth wings of political groups from all over the country, here: Huddersfield Labour Party’s League of Youth, the National League of Young Liberals, the Maesteg Branch of the Socialist League 
… and women’s groups: the Standing Joint Committee of Industrial Women’s Organisations (representing ‘a million working women’), the West Hampstead Womens Guild (representing fewer) … 
… even the 150 members of the Dragon Parade Methodist Men’s Fireside, Harrogate 
This letter is fascinating. It’s from Prof J.H. Jones, head of economics at Leeds, to the Home Secretary: on what happens when students come from the straight jacket of school, where they are not talk to think, to uni where freedom to think is abused by ‘strong minded seniors’ 
(it’s worth reading and puzzling over. A fearful account of radicalization, 1930s-style)
Here are the prison reports on Phillips: the medical officer thinks psychological treatment would do no good; the Governor says:
‘A typical modern product of Leeds University. He holds unorthodox views, is self-opinionated, and endowed with a full measure of conceit’
‘A typical modern product of Leeds University. He holds unorthodox views, is self-opinionated, and endowed with a full measure of conceit’
Phillips is released having served his time. The punishment is viewed from the Home Office as ‘exemplary’
It’s not quite the end though, and the end is rather sad, given the moment’s rashness (at the least in the eyes of his apologists) of the incident of the letter
Phillips finished his undergraduate degree, and starts a PhD. During the Second World War he researches, retrains as an engineer, examines tanks, works at Rolls Royce at Derby, and teaches 
But in 1946 it is Hugh Phillips turn to write to the Home Secretary: at every turn “Security” have dogged his footsteps, breaking his home, health and career. Yet he has always tried to be a ‘good, honest citizen - hard working … endeavouring to serve the community’ 
… and Phillips was right: even though he would be told that enquiries were made and ‘cannot find any foundation’ that “Security” authorities had sought dismissals, the same document speaks otherwise
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