Sylvia Crowther-Smith was born on 20 January 1902 in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Her father, Sydney James Crowther-Smith, emigrated from England to Brazil around 1888, where he met and married the daughter of wealthy Brazilian landowners in the late 1890s. By 1914, the family had moved to England, and settled in Eastbourne, in order for Sylvia and her sister Lydia to be educated in an English boarding school. After the First World War, Sylvia won a scholarship to Royal Holloway College, where she read English and became involved in the college dramatic society. Through the dramatic society, she met Lena Ashwell, a former West End star, and joined the Lena Ashwell Players. She then travelled the country working for touring companies and provincial repertory theatres. Sylvia first met Ronald Kidd, the founder of the National Council for Civil Liberties, when she joined a theatre company in Hertfordshire for a production of Ashley Duke's The man with a load of mischief (1926). Kidd had been engaged as stage manager and also played the part of the nobleman.
Ronald Hubert Kidd was born in 1889 into a medical family and grew up in Hampstead. He read science at University College London, but did not obtain a degree. He then lectured for the Workers' Educational Association and became involved in the campaign for women's suffrage. He was conscripted during the First World War, but never saw active service, being discharged for health reasons. He worked for a year as secretary to the Wellcome Historical Medical Museum, before entering the civil service, firstly in the Ministry of Labour and then the Ministry of Pensions. However his career ended when he resigned in protest at the cuts in pensions for shell-shocked war veterans. Thereafter he found work as a freelance journalist, publicist, actor and stage director. By the time he met Sylvia, he was estranged from his wife Isadora and daughter Anne in Bristol, and living in lodgings in London.
Sylvia moved to London and began living with Kidd in the late 1920s, and entered his Bohemian and radical circles. She began to work as a freelance editor around this time, whilst Kidd opened the Punch and Judy bookshop at 43 Villiers Street. The origins of the National Council for Civil Liberties lie in the work which Kidd began in 1932 of observing the Hunger Marches as they arrived in London and reporting on the policing of the events. Sylvia joined him in this work (including at an anti-Nazi demonstration on 17 December 1933), and when the committee which formed the nucleus of the National Council for Civil Liberties first met on 22 February 1934, she was elected Honorary Treasurer.
In July 1934, she began to receive a salary for her work and the title of Assistant Secretary. Effectively, the organisation's first office was the room at no.3 Dansey Yard, off Shaftesbury Avenue, where Kidd and Crowther-Smith lodged. They ran the NCCL together in its early years, with Kidd as General Secretary, supported by an Executive Committee which included Vera Brittain, Claud Cockburn, Rev. Dick Shepherd, Harold Laski and Kingsley Martin, and by the lawyers DN Pritt and WH Thompson on the General Purposes Committee. However the volume of work put pressure on Kidd's health and from 1938 onwards, the number of office staff employed by the organisation had to be gradually increased. The issues dealt with by the NCCL during the 1930s and early 1940s included the Incitement to Disaffection Bill of 1934, the banning of 'non-flam' films, the operation of the Special Powers Acts in Northern Ireland, the rise of fascism and anti-semitism (especially the British Union of Fascists meeting at Olympia on 7 June 1934), the Public Order Act of 1936, political bias in the letting of public halls and by the police, the Harworth Colliery dispute of 1937, the case of Major Wilfred Foulston Vernon, the freedom of the press and the BBC, and the impact on civil liberties of the outbreak of war.
Sylvia resigned as Assistant Secretary of the NCCL in August 1941, at a time when her mother was dying of cancer and Kidd was suffering from a recurrence of heart problems. In November, Kidd had to give up the post of General Secretary and was made Director of NCCL instead, in an effort to reduce his workload. However he did not recover his health and died at the age of 53 on 12 May 1942.
A few months before Kidd's death, Sylvia entered the civil service, working in the Planning Division of the Ministry of Works on the White Paper on rural land utilisation in wartime. The Division was then formed into an independent Ministry of Town and Country Planning, where she remained until 1944 and her move into the wartime propaganda work of the Publications Division of the Ministry of Information. She was employed in the post-war Central Office of Information until 1952, when she was made redundant in a wave of cuts to temporary civil servant posts by the Conservative government. Using her redundancy money as security, she began to work as a freelance journalist. She also trained as a teacher and worked for a period in a secondary modern school in south London.
In 1958, at the age of 56, Sylvia married John Scaffardi and they lived together in Carshalton in Buckinghamshire. She was widowed in 1971. She wrote two autobiographical books, the first, an account of her work with Ronald Kidd during the 1930s, Fire under the carpet (Lawrence & Wishart, 1986) and the second, about her Brazilian childhood, Finding my way (Quartet Books, 1988). Sylvia died on 27 January 2001. She continued her association with and her support for the NCCL until her death.
This collection contains material gathered together by Scaffardi from several sources in the process of writing her autobiography, Fire Under the Carpet (Lawrence & Wishart, 1986); it includes papers of Ronald Kidd, research papers of Brian Cox and records of the National Council for Civil Liberties, as well as a range of publications. An artificial arrangement has been imposed on the collection, and there is a large amount of overlap between the sections.
National Council for Civil Liberties
This material complements, and in some instances duplicates, the main Liberty archive [U DCL]. There is a bound volume of early annual reports, dating from 1934 to 1957 [U DSF/1/1]; this is significant because there do not appear to be any annual reports before 1938 in the main archive [U DCL/73A]. The early minutes of the NCCL have been lost [a microfilm of minutes dating from 1944 onwards is the earliest survival at U DCL/102] and hence the few bundles in this collection which contain Executive Committee minutes from the 1930s and early 1940s, and some correspondence of Ronald Kidd as General Secretary, are valuable in piecing together the work of Kidd and other founder members [U DSF/1/7-9]. There are also examples of draft articles and speeches by Kidd and Crowther-Smith in these bundles, as well as material about Kidd having to give up the role of General Secretary and the question of who was to replace Henry Nevinson as President [related papers on these last two topics can also be found at U DSF/2/6]. The NCCL pamphlets in the collection span 1935 to 1995, but are concentrated in the 1930s and 1940s [U DSF/1/17-62]. A large proportion can also be found in the main Liberty archive, but this set has been kept together to illustrate the interests of Kidd and Crowther-Smith.
Ronald Kidd
There is very little surviving material on Ronald Kidd in the main Liberty archive and therefore, although these papers are far from extensive, they still comprise a useful source. There are two files relating to Kidd's tour of Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Austria in 1938 [U DSF/2/2-3] and these contain a variety of material, ranging from letters of introduction and correspondence with those involved in the movement in defence of human rights and against anti-semitism in Czechoslovakia, to Kidd's itinerary and notes made during his journey. There is also a set of photographs of Jasina and other places in Sub Carpathian Russia and Slovakia, sent by Dr Maximilián Ryánek in Brno, photographs of anti-semitic graffiti [possibly in London] and contemporary travel brochures and maps of the region. The only surviving example of a personal letter from Kidd to Crowther-Smith dates from this tour and was sent from Bratislava [see file U DSF/2/6]. After his return to England, Kidd travelled the country holding public meetings on Czechoslovakia and this is documented by correspondence, publicity leaflets and cuttings of reports in the press [U DSF/2/3].
Kidd's work for the NCCL in the early 1940s focussed on areas such as editing and writing articles for the journal Civil Liberty, and writing pamphlets. Examples of this can be found at U DSF/2/4-5, including drafts of his pamphlet on The fight for a free press (1942) [there is a printed copy at U DSF/1/34]. There are four surviving pocket diaries, detailing the meetings and appointments which Kidd attended in 1934, 1935, 1936 and 1938 [U DSF/2/9], along with his passport, issued in 1936, and a number of undated photographs of Kidd [U DSF/2/10-11]. Unusual items include some photographs of political posters on display in wartime France, a publicity leaflet for the Soho Literary Group, organised by Kidd, and the annotated script of a play by Lennox Robinson, 'The lost leader', which Kidd must either have directed or played a part in [U DSF/2/14, 13, 12].
Sylvia Scaffardi
There is a small amount of material relating personally to Sylvia Scaffardi and her work, namely evidence submitted to Lord Justice Scott's Committee on Land Utilisation for Rural Areas in the early 1940s, which she gathered in her role as a civil servant in the Planning Division of the Ministry of Works [U DSF/3/1], and papers about her childhood in Brazil and her Brazilian grandparents [U DSF/3/3].
Barry Cox
Barry Cox was commissioned by the NCCL in the late 1960s to write a history of the organisation and this was published in 1975 as Civil liberties in Britain (Penguin). In the course of his research, he undertook a large number of interviews with founder members and contemporary figures in the NCCL, and the interviews were transcribed from tape by Sylvia Scaffardi. The annotated transcripts are included in this collection and include interviews with people such as Elizabeth Acland Allen, DN Pritt, Kingsley Martin, Claud Cockburn, Sylvia Scaffardi herself, Martin Ennals and Tony Smythe [U DSF/4/2-4].
Publications
This set of pamphlets and periodicals has been kept together within the collection (rather than being transferred to library stock), again as an illustration of the interests of Kidd and Scaffardi. There are a number of significant items in the fields of politics and literature, such as the August 1914 edition of the journal English Review containing part 5 of a serialised story by HG Wells, 'The world set free: a story of mankind' [U DSF/5/2]; a typescript on civil liberties in 1918 by Monica Ewer of the first National Council for Civil Liberties (founded in 1915 as the National Council Against Conscription) [U DSF/5/3]; two anti-semitic publications in German dating from 1937 and 1938, the second published by the National Socialist German Workers [Nazi] Party [U DSF/5/33 & 44]; two photographic compilations about the Spanish Civil War, issued by the Spanish Embassy in London in 1937 and 1938 [U DSF/5/34-35]; and the classic 1949 pamphlet, The time of the toad, by Dalton Trumbo, about the anti-Communist blacklist of Hollywood writers [U DSF/5/72]. The vast majority of these publications date from the 1930s and 1940s.
U DSF/1 National Council for Civil Liberties, 1934 - 2001
U DSF/2 Ronald Kidd, 1916 - 1985
U DSF/3 Sylva Scaffard, 1930s - 1975
U DSF/4 Barry Cox, 1965 - 1971
U DSF/5 Publications, circa 1910 - 1978
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Donated by the Estate of Sylvia Scaffardi, via Liberty, 18 September 2001
Records of Liberty (National Council for Civil Liberties) [U DCL]
DSF/1/1-6 Annual reports
DSF/1/7-12 Files
DSF/1/13-16 Periodicals
DSF/1/17-62 Pamphlets and memoranda
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From 1939, these are mainly printed in Civil Liberty
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Including constitution and rules (1946); speech on civil rights for colonial peoples; draft submission about the BBC; annotated typescript by IO Evans, For boys and girls who think freedom worth having (May Day 1935); speech on press freedom by Sylvia Crowther-Smith (1953); Executive Committee minutes; circular letters from Ronald Kidd as NCCL General Secretary; editorial for Civil Liberty (1941); letters from Stefan Zweig (1), JBS Haldane (1) (with Kidds reply), WR Hooper and others; ms. notes by Kidd about the management of the NCCL office; leaflets about NCCLs 21st anniversary; ms. transcripts of anti-Semitic letters received by Lilian Felt and Rose Silverman (1939); decisions of AGM (1953)
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Including NCCL briefings and leaflets; Executive Committee minutes; circulars; correspondence; papers for conferences on war (1934) and freedom of the press (1941); note by Ronald Kidd about observing a strikers march in the East End (26.1.1936); postcard of Kidd; postcard to Kidd from Friedrich R[?] in Moscow; ms. notes on AP Herbert and free speech; leaflets and letters to Sylvia Scaffardi about the Civil Liberties Development Fund (1980); press release about a British report on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; ms. notes and drafts on the history of the NCCL
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Including leaflets; notices of meetings; circulars and memoranda; papers about the presidency sub committee (1942); minutes of Executive Committee, General Purposes Committee and Finance and Appeals Sub Committee; papers for International Conference on Human Rights (1947); reports; information sheets and policy statements; letters, including from A Francis James (RAF Ternhill) (1), Elaine Martin (Ronald Kidds sister) (1), A Koehler (International Federation of Leagues against Racism and Anti-Semitism) (2), Hertha Christie-Curwen (1), and Arthur Clegg (Colonial Information Bureau) (1), and from Ronald Kidd (2)
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Including motions for AGM (1964); black and white photograph of a man addressing a meeting [? mass meeting on press freedom, April 1942]; report of conference on the state of civil liberties in Britain (1952); letters and circulars; annotated typescript by Ronald Kidd/Sylvia Crowther-Smith on freedom of opinion and the BBC; examples of headed paper used by Kidd, with testimonials and curriculum vitae; ts. drafts of history of the origins of the NCCL
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Including press releases (1972); report to 1968 AGM by General Secretary Tony Smythe; ts. The pattern of repression, issued by Action for Peoples Justice; typescripts about Jersey and the Harworth Colliery strike; notes about Ronald Kidds health; ms. and ts. notes about the history of the NCCL; transcripts of letters (2) from Sylvia Crowther-Smith to EM Forster (1955); typescript article for Civil Liberty on The democratic retreat in France (1940); speech by Ronald Kidd on The question of legislation against racial incitement (1937)
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Including a fax copy of the agreement to undertake the research for Liberty and her curriculum vitae
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Travel and tourist brochures for Czechoslovakia and Hungary, maps of Central Europe, black and white negatives of [? Prague] (8) and black and white photographs of anti-Semitic graffiti in [? London] (10)
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Correspondence (including about travel arrangements); letters of introduction; names and addresses of contacts; ts. itinerary; ms. notes made during the visit; pamphlets; black and white photographs (30) of Jasina and other places in Sub Carpathian Russia and Slovakia; ts. lecture notes on Czechoslovakia; letters arranging public meetings in Britain, with related leaflets and cuttings.
Includes letters from Dr O Frey (Czech Legation, London) (3), Sylvia Eltz (German Social Democratic Workers Party, Prague) (1), Victor Gollancz (1), Kingsley Martin (2), Dr Maxmilián Ryánek (Brno) (2), Secretary General of Ligue Française pour la Défense des Droits de lHomme et du Citoyen (1), Willy Werner (Hradec Králové) (1), Czech League against Anti-Semitism, Area Committee for Mähren and Schliesen (1), A Koehler (International Federation of Leagues against Racism and Anti-Semitism) (1)
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Including ms. drafts, cc. typescripts, cuttings and correspondence, with letters from Kingsley Martin (1), Ladipo Solanke (West African Students Union), DN Pritt (2) and Harold Laski (1)
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Ms. notes; ms. and ts. drafts of pamphlet by Ronald Kidd; letter from Elizabeth Acland Allen; published pamphlet, The press and the war (NCCL Press Freedom Committee, circa 1942)
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Bundle of cards left at Ronald Kidds graveside; letter from Kidd to Sylvia Crowther-Smith from Bratislava (16 August 1938); correspondence, reports and recommendations about Ronald Kidds retirement as General Secretary and appointment as Director of NCCL, and about the question of a new president. Includes letters from DN Pritt (2), Elizabeth Acland Allen (4), Henry Miller (Secretary, Cambuslang Branch of National Unemployed Workers Movement) (1), Kingsley Martin (1) and Mary Kidd (1)
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Posters in French
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a) Map of the Mediterranean, showing Italian plans for regional domination, with text on reverse about Spanish Civil War, no date
b) Forces de paix et forces de guerre [comparative chart], no date
c) Display on agriculture at the Spanish pavilion, 1937 Exposition Internationale des Arts et Techniques dans la Vie Moderne, Paris, 1937
d) No pasaran!, issued by the Propaganda Commissariat, Autonomous Government of Catalonia, 1937
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Evidence submitted by Association of British Chambers of Commerce, County Councils Association, Pennine Way Association, Mr SW Smedley, Bolton Chamber of Commerce, Garden Cities and Town Planning Association, Benjamin Seebohm Rowntree and the Ramblers Association; related pamphlets; minutes of Executive Committee of County Councils Association (28.1.1942); report of Committee (Cmd. 6378)
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Collected for Fire under the carpet (1986)
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With letters (2) from Olivia Chalmers about the Brazilian origins of Sylvia Scaffardis grandparents
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Including letters from DN Pritt (2), Tony Smythe (1), AP Herbert (1), Julian Huxley (1), PMS Blackett (1), Kingsley Martin (1), JB Priestley (1), EM Forster (2), Sylvia Scaffardi (2), Ritchie Calder (1) and John Platts-Mills (1). With cc. ts. agreement between Cox and the NCCL to produce a manuscript history of the organisation, and ms. notes
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Including Neil Lawson, Elizabeth Acland Allen, DN Pritt, Geoffrey Bing, Kingsley Martin, Claud Cockburn, Sylvia Scaffardi, George Catlin, Malcolm Purdie and [?] Adams
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Including Dingle Foot, DN Pritt, Geoffrey Bing, Kingsley Martin (with comments by Sylvia Scaffardi), Claud Cockburn, Sylvia Scaffardi and Martin Ennals. Also ts. Ronald Kidds politics. Political standing of NCCL up to 1941. Red smear and transcripts of letters from Kingsley Martin and EM Forster
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Including Tony Smythe, Martin Ennals, Kingsley Martin, Harry Street and David Williams. Also ms. notes on miscellaneous topics and annotated ts. paper by Tony Smythe on The role of the NCCL, at a symposium on direct action and democratic representation
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NCCL bulletins, circulars and letters; photocopies, cuttings and offprints of journal articles; quarterly bulletin of Race Relations Board; details of legal cases under section 6: incitement to racial hatred, of Race Relations Act 1965 (compiled by Anthony Dickey); ms. notes
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Includes part 5 of The world set free: a story of mankind, by HG Wells
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The verbatim record and a discussion (New Statesman and Nation)
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With circular about attempt to form a new association affiliated to the International of Revolutionary Writers
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Social Credit publication
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Anti-Semitic publication, with ts. English translation, stamped National Council for Civil Liberties, January 1937
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Spanish, English and French
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Spanish and English
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Anti-Semitic publication issued by the Nazi Party
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With covering letter
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French
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Brazilian publication in Spanish
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French
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French
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Including from Phil Piratins Our flag stays red, They did not pass: A souvenir of the East London workers victory over fascism (Independent Labour Party), The BUF by the BUF (Communist Party of Great Britain) and Tom Dribergs Mosley? No!
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