G. T. Garratt (1888 - 1942)

[KALKI]

Geoffrey Theodore Garratt

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

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

Garratt was trained at the Rugby School and Hertford College, Oxford University. After his graduation 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 , during which he was deployed from 1916 to 1918 with the Indian Cavalry.

Garratt left the colonial service in 1923 to protest against the British colonial administration's spending policy, which in the early 1920s, despite a rampant famine in its jurisdiction, expended considerable sums to build new administrative buildings instead of investing them in the supply of the population. He returned to England, where he took over the management of a farm near Barrington and began to work as a freelance journalist and writer.

As a writer, Garratt wrote numerous books dealing primarily with agriculture, the British workers' movement, and the Labor Party as their representative as well as the conditions in India. In the second half of the 1930s, he focused on the threat posed by the fascist dictators in Germany and Italy as well as their regimes.

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

Politically, Garratt belonged to the Labor Party . 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 the Plymouth Drake . In addition, he was honorary secretary of the Agricultural Committee of the Labor Party.

From 1937 to 1938, as an honorary administrator, Garratt headed the United National Committee for Supporting the Republican side in the Spanish Civil War.

Garratt also remained connected to his old field of activity, the British colony of India. He traveled extensively to the organization of benign projects in Bengal. In 1931 he also took part as a political secretary at the Indian Round Table Conference.

At the outbreak of World War II, Garratt reported to the British army. As was then the case with persons who were regarded as strongly left-wing-Garratt, sympathy for the Russian revolution and the Soviet Union, as well as for non-British volunteers in the British army was assigned to the pioneer corps.

Garratt, who had been exposed by his writings as a keen opponent of the Nazi regime, was classified as a state enemy by the nationalsocialist police forces. In the spring of 1940, the Reich Security Office placed him on the special search list GB , a list of persons who, in the event of a successful invasion and Occupation of the British island by the Wehrmacht by the occupying troops following Sonderkommandos of the SS with special priority should be found and arrested.

Garratt died on April 28, 1942, in the rank of a major, during an accident that occurred during a military training / demonstration in a cellar of one of the Pembroke Barracks barracks: as a garratt assembly of nineteen pioneers and engineers, the use of sharp explosives , There was the explosion of two mines that immediately killed him and seventeen others, the nineteenth person died the next day of their injuries. Because of the censorship during the war, the political leadership was not reported in the press out of concern for the negative effects that would be brought to bear on the public's morale.

Garratt was buried on the Pembroke Dock Military Cemetery.

In 1920 Garrett married Anne Beryl Benthall.

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