Free Dare to Be a Daniel by Tony Benn Page B

Clem’s. I don’t remember him.
    Dr Bromley was a Russian refugee who had come to England with his brother and had then qualified medically. He became a close friend of the family and it was he who gave David the idea of learning Russian, in which David became fluent. He looked after me when I had appendicitis, and I thought I had been put to sleep by an ‘atheist’. I subsequently learned that the anaesthetist in question was also an atheist – a story that amused Dr Bromley very much.
    My mother thought that Jewish doctors were the best because they were interested in the patient rather than the disease, and I myself came to appreciate that when Caroline and I met our first NHS doctor, Dr Stein.
    My mother’s parents used to come and stay with us in Grosvenor Road because they had no fixed home and travelled continually, living mainly in hotels. When my mother was ill in bed once, and Michael and I were fighting, our grandmother said, ‘If you don’t stop fighting, your mother will die’, which frightened us and greatly angered Mother.
    Father’s office was the centre of the house and everything revolved around it. It was not one room, but was spread over the first floor, ground floor and basement, with trapdoors and ladders built by him connecting the rooms, so that he could easily move up and down and consult and file his papers. His secretary Miss Triggs worked on the ground floor.
    Father was a very serious student of national and international politics and developed the most elaborate filing system based on his daily and meticulous study of
The Times
. Three copies were delivered each day – two of the royal edition, so called because it was printed on rag paper that did not yellow with age. One copy was for my mother and the other two for my father: he would read them carefully, mark them with a decimal system of his own invention and then, by the use of huge guillotines, the newspaper pages were cut, moved over little rollers with sticky paste and stuck onto pages that were then inserted into loose-leaf files appropriate to the subject.
    His indexing system, rather like the Dewey system, was based on giving a number to each subject, all of which were cross-referenced for ease of consultation. For example, his personal files were 101, and Russia, as far as I remember, was 10065. He devised this system because he used to refer, somewhat contemptuously, to a normal filing system where Alcoholism would be filed under A, Drunkenness under D and Teetotalism under T, with various miscellaneous and urgent files under M and U! Such a system – which he sometimes, possibly unfairly, attributed to his brother Ernest – made it impossible Father thought to find anything quickly.
    All my personal files from the time when I was a child until now have always also been marked 101, and some of my children have used 101 for their personal files, too.
    The task of reading, marking, cutting, gluing and filing the day’s news according to their subject took a great deal of his time and Miss Triggs’s, but it meant that at any moment he could pull out any file and remind himself of what
The Times
had said on the subject over the previous twenty years, with some contempt for those colleagues in Parliament who allowed the day’s banner headlines to shape their thinking.
    The guillotines and gluing machines, though invented by my father and very amateurish, made his basement office into a mini-factory; but they did not have the necessary safety precautions that would now be required by law. On one occasion, one of the really big guillotines – whose size can be gauged by the fact that it was able to cut a page of
The Times
from top to bottom in one deadly swoop – fell on my older brother Michael and cut a slice off the side of his thumb. He put it in a bottle of alcohol and showed it proudly to reluctant family members and visitors, who found the whole thing disgusting and felt that my father had been highly