Geoffrey Theodore Garratt

Geoffrey Theodore Garratt (born November 7, 1888 in The Grange, Little Tew , Oxfordshire , † April 28, 1942 in Pembroke Dock , Wales) was a British journalist and publicist.

Life and activity

Geoffrey Theodore Garratt was the sixth and youngest son of Vicar Charles Foster Garratt (1837–1925) and his wife Agney Mary, nee. Percival.

Garratt was trained at Rugby School and Hertford College, Oxford University. After graduating, he entered the British colonial service in 1912. From 1913 to 1923 Garratt was used in the Indian Colonial Service (ICS), the British colonial administration in India (official name: assistant collr. And magistrate) (service in Bombay on November 15, 1923). His activity in India was interrupted by his participation in the First World War , in which he was used with the Indian Cavalry from 1916 to 1918.

Garratt left the colonial service in 1923 in protest against the spending policy of the British colonial administration, which in the early 1920s, despite a rampant famine in its area of ​​responsibility, spent considerable sums to build stately new administration buildings instead of investing them in supplying the population. He returned to England, where he ran a farm near Barrington and began working as a freelance journalist and writer.

As a writer, Garratt wrote numerous non-fiction books that initially dealt with agriculture, the British labor movement and the Labor Party as its representative, as well as the conditions in India. In the second half of the 1930s, his writings focused primarily on the threat posed by the fascist dictators in Germany and Italy and their regimes.

As a journalist, Garratt temporarily went to Berlin as a correspondent for the Westminster Gazette . He later moved to the Manchester Guardian for which he reported from Ethiopia (1936) and Finland (1940).

Politically, Garratt was a member of the Labor Party . For this he ran several unsuccessful candidates in elections to the House of Commons in the 1920s and 1930s : in 1924, 1929 and 1931 he applied for the seat for the county of Cambridgeshire , in 1935 for the seat for Wrekin and in 1937 for that for Plymouth Drake . He was also the honorary secretary of the Labor Party's Agricultural Committee.

From 1937 to 1938 Garratt headed the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief in Eastern Spain as honorary administrator.

Garratt also remained connected to his old area of ​​activity, the British colony of India: He traveled several times to Bengal to organize charitable projects. In 1931 he also took part in the Indian Round Table Conference as political secretary.

When the Second World War broke out, Garratt enlisted in the British Army. As was customary at the time with people who were considered to be strongly left-wing - Garratt was credited with sympathies for the Russian Revolution and the Soviet Union - as well as with non-British volunteers in the British army, the engineer corps was assigned.

The National Socialist police officers classified Garratt - who had exposed himself as a sharp opponent of the Nazi system through his writings - as an enemy of the state: In the spring of 1940, the Reich Security Main Office put him on the special wanted list GB , a directory of people who were to be found in the event of a successful invasion and Occupation of the British Isles by the Wehrmacht should be located and arrested by the occupation troops following special SS commandos with special priority.

Garratt died on April 28, 1942, with the rank of major, in an accident that occurred during a military training / demonstration in a basement room of one of the Pembroke Barracks: As Garratt, a gathering of nineteen pioneers and engineers, the use of sharp explosives wanted to demonstrate, there was an explosion of two mines, killing him and seventeen other people immediately, the nineteenth person died the following day of their injuries. Due to censorship during the war, the incident - which the political leadership was concerned about the negative impact its exposure would have on public war morale - was not reported in the press.

Garratt was buried in the Pembroke Dock Military Cemetery.

family

In 1920 Garrett married Anne Beryl Benthall.

Fonts

• The Farmer and the Labor Party. Fair Reward for All , 1928.
• Hundred Acre Farm , 1928.
• The Organization of Farming , 1930.
• The Mugwumps and the Labor Party , 1932.
• Lord Brougham , 1935.
• The Two Mr. Glastones , 1936.
• An Indian Commentary , 1937.
• Mussolini's Roman Empire , 1938.
• The Shadow of the Swastika , 1938.
• The Air Defense of Britain , 1938.
• Gibraltar and the Mediterranean , 1939.
• Europe's Dance of Death , London 1940. (published in the United States as What Has Happend to Europe , 1940)

literature

• The India Office and Burma Office List , 1920, p. 527
• Who was Who. A Companion to Who's Who. Containing the Biographies of Those who Died during the Period , Vol. 2, 1967, pp. 421f.
• Clare VJ Griffiths: Labor and the Countryside. The Politics of Rural Britain 1918-1939 , 2007, p. 359.
• Obituary in: New York Times, May 2, 1942, p. 13.

Web links

• Anniversary article in the Pembroke Dock Barracks where Garratt died in the Daily Post

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Entry on Geoffrey Garratt on the special wanted list GB (reproduced on the website of the Imperial War Museum in London).
2. ↑ Helen P. Fry: German Schoolboy, British Commando. Churchill's Secret Soldier , p. 66.