ABSTRACT
Before the outbreak of war the Labour Party had been growing. Labourites still hoped, optimistically, for a victory in the national elections set for 14 October, the next year. Eddie Roux, for one, was convinced that ‘there seemed no doubt at all that socialism would soon be established’.2 But the anti-war section were worried that support for the war would alienate potential Afrikaner members and deepen ethnic tensions amongst white workers. ‘Do you think you are going to win [Afrikaners] by aunting the Union Jack?’, Sidney asked his English-speaking readers. ‘Or will you not rather alienate them? And you know what that means to the future hope of the Party ... Remember the once despised pro-Boers’, he reminded them; ‘we are all pro-Boers today.’3
