A Devilish People

I was recently asked to identify the various historical elements that led to the creation of Victorian Britain, the high-water mark of our national story, a time of innovation, of self-reliance and self-assurance, things that now seem a distant memory in our present state of senesce.  It comes really at an opportune time, right in the middle of my Trollope period, a novelist who did much to identity some of the significant political and intellectual trends in nineteenth century English life.  I also have a particularly close acquaintance with the work of Charles Dickens, another great chronicler of the day. 

The transformation that characterised the times, particularly in the Industrial Revolution, is the stuff of a thousand school essays!  The obvious things can be marched out with ease – the improvements in agriculture, in communication, in transport, in technology; innovations of all sorts.  Much of the mechanical improvement was directly related to the ever increasing demand for coal, a power source significant as far back as the Middle Ages.  But the mines go even deeper here, deep into our history.

On the eve of the Victorian period feudalism was a distant memory, effectively killed off as early as the fourteenth century.  In contrast it was a living reality on the Continent, in France, in Prussia and in Russia.  In the case of the latter it was to be a living reality as late as the early 1860s, with shadows long thereafter.  It is England not France that is the true home of liberty.  In France Liberty came late, trailing clouds of terror and bringing streams of blood. 

In England freedom was far more than a word.  From the myth of Robin Hood to the reality of Magna Carta, the first great break on royal power, it was a living reality.  I find it difficult to define this properly but I know a poet who can;

It is not to be thought of that the Flood
Of British freedom, which to the open Sea
Of the world's praise from dark antiquity
Hath flowed, "with pomp of waters, unwithstood,"
Road by which all might come and go that would,
And bear out freights of worth to foreign lands;
That this most famous Stream in Bogs and Sands
Should perish; and to evil and to good
Be lost for ever. In our Halls is hung
Armoury of the invincible Knights of old:
We must be free or die, who speak the tongue
That Shakespeare spake; the faith and morals hold
Which Milton held. In every thing we are sprung
Of Earth's first blood, have titles manifold.

We recently dug up the remains of Richard III, a reminder of the great fifteenth century dynastic struggle known as the Wars of the Roses.  But that event was far more significant than a simple game of thrones.  It decimated the hereditary nobility that had effectively ruled the country since the Norman Conquest.  In its place came a new nobility, made up quite often of the middling sort.  Thomas Wolsey and Thomas Cromwell, the two most powerful political figures during the reign of Henry VIII, were respectively the son of a butcher and the son of a blacksmith.  I can think of no other country at the time that where such a rapid ascent would have been possible.

Then there is Parliament, a uniquely assertive body in English history, present from the thirteenth century onwards.  It was to be an effective scrutiniser over time of national finances, granting fresh supply only after various grievances had been addressed.  It may have started on a Continental model of an assembly of estates but it became so much more, the best firm of accountants that the nation has ever had. 

So, if the Wars of the Roses saw the beginning of the end of aristocratic power, the political struggles of the seventeenth century saw the absolute end of royal absolutism.  It is not to be thought that the Restoration of the monarch in 1660, after a republican interlude, marked the victory of Crown over Parliament.  Charles II was to have almost as much trouble from his loyal assembles as his father did from his rebellious ones.  The Glorious Revolution of 1688, which saw the overthrow of James II, sent all pretence of divine right monarchy to the grave.

The long Reformation of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was an important precursor here, freeing people from more traditional forms of thought and religious practice.  The process was also fairly uniform throughout mainland Britain, uniting people in a common Protestant ideology.  Where there is religious liberty and freedom of thought political liberty follows.  In France such religious liberty was the gift of the state, ended in a stroke of royal absolutism.  As England wakened to freedom France sunk deeper into the sleep of absolutism. 

If any one man supplied the ideological impetus for the Glorious Revolution, and the subsequent Bill of Rights, then it surely has to be John Locke.  For me Locke serves as an avatar of the English intellect, far more precise and empirical than the cloudy abstraction of so much Continental thought.  English itself is a precise language which, if used properly, is concerned with meanings and ends.  It is a language that does not readily lend itself to obscurity.  When it does it simply looks ridiculous.  A free language given to free expression, that is of crucial importance in understanding who we are, in understating our values and our dow-to-earth sense of what is right and what is wrong.  We must indeed be free or die, who speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake.  The corruption of our spoken and written language is among our greatest contemporary dangers.

Our political struggles did not end with the Glorious Revolution, merely took on a different form.  The early Victorian period saw a new and bloodless civil war, fought between the passing of the Great Reform Act in 1832, which expanded middle-class representation in Parliament, and the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, which saw the final victory of the industrial over the landed interest.  Through this period, though passions were often heightened, problems were solved by pragmatic compromise rather than violence, another characteristic of the English.

Take the career of Benjamin Disraeli, for example, another kind of avatar.  He first made his mark in Parliament by a ruthless assault on Sir Robert Peel, his own party leader and the Prime Minister responsible for the repeal of the Corn Laws.  At the time Disraeli spoke for the landed interest.  But when he became Prime Minister himself later in the century there was no return to the past.  For him laissez-faire capitalism and free trade, defined by Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, was the wealth of the nation.

Britain was fortunate in being the first industrial nation among a world of primary producers.  But while free trade opened the agricultural sector to foreign competition in did not entail terminal decline.  Instead the nation’s farms and farmers became more proficient, as proficient as their manufacturing counterparts in adopting new methods and techniques.  Farms became pure commercial enterprises with little of the inefficient and underproductive peasant agriculture that continues to be a defining feature of the French system.

The country was also fortunate in not having a standing army on the Continental model, a drain on national resources.  Instead there was the navy, based on the need to defend ever lengthening trade routes.  Naval officers were generally of a far higher level of ability than those in the army, many of whom bought their commissions.  An idiot could command a regiment; an idiot could not sail a ship.  The defeat of France in the Seven Years War established Britain as the leading sea power in the world, something that was to continue right into the twentieth century.  Secure trade meant growing wealth; growing wealth meant an ever greater flow of capital; more capital meant more investment, and onwards and upwards.

The English don’t do revolution by doing it so well!  The changes are outwardly subtle, so subtle than they can scarcely be seen to have happened.  Consider the difference between the England of Richard III and that of Queen Victoria.  In institutional terms little has changed.  They are all in place, the monarchy, the aristocracy and Parliament, both Lords and Commons.  But the balance between them has changed dramatically and continued to change.  The monarchy is now the decorative part of the constitution, something that would have caused Richard a new winter of discontent! 

If I take Disraeli as one avatar of the Victorian age the other has to be Charles Dickens, at once the least and most political writer we have ever had.  His work is in so many respects another human comedy along the lines of Dante, but he never lost sight of the various social, politic and institutional abuses of his time.  He is really the great giant of mid-Victorian liberalism, best caught in Charles Dickens, George Orwell’s brilliant pen portrait, which concludes thus;

When one reads any strongly individual piece of writing, one has the impression of seeing a face somewhere behind the page. It is not necessarily the actual face of the writer. I feel this very strongly with Swift, with Defoe, with Fielding, Stendhal, Thackeray, Flaubert, though in several cases I do not know what these people looked like and do not want to know. What one sees is the face that the writer ought to have. Well, in the case of Dickens I see a face that is not quite the face of Dickens's photographs, though it resembles it. It is the face of a man of about forty, with a small beard and a high colour. He is laughing, with a touch of anger in his laughter, but no triumph, no malignity. It is the face of a man who is always fighting against something, but who fights in the open and is not frightened, the face of a man who is generously angry — in other words, of a nineteenth-century liberal, a free intelligence, a type hated with equal hatred by all the smelly little orthodoxies which are now contending for our souls.

I don’t think there is any better description of the free English intellect.  It’s an insightful portrait of Dickens just as it’s an insightful portrait of Orwell himself. 

The English have never been hung on a cross of theory.  The Victorian age provides plenty of examples of this, of people reaching for practical solutions to practical problems. Karl Marx would have crucified us.  Though he spent many years in exile in London, he never understood the people among whom he lived.   Always expecting great things from the English proletariat, the most advanced in Europe, by the lights of his theory, he came to see that England was the one country in Europe with a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois working class as well as a bourgeois bourgeois! His last recorded words were “To the Devil with the British.”

To be cast to the Devil by Karl, is there any better compliment, I wonder? 

Daft Dominion

Here are the facts. The year is 1952. In the east the German war with Russia, now eleven years old, shows no sign of ending. On a line roughly extending from Lake Ladoga in the north-west to the Caspian Sea in the south-east, the struggle is in stalemate, a contest punctuated by blows and counter blows which settle nothing.


In the west Britain, having made peace with Germany after the brief war of 1939-40, is governed by a crypto-fascist regime headed by Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, the press magnate. Oswald Mosley, whose fascist party made substantial gains in the rigged parliamentary election of 1950, is Home Secretary, in charge of the normal police and black-shirt recruited auxiliaries. Enoch Powell is Secretary of State for India, where Britain is still fighting a rearguard action to retain the Jewel in the tawdry Crown. Under the Treaty of Berlin, which ended the western war, the Isle of Wight has been turned over to Germany as a base.

In Berlin, Hitler, suffering from increasingly acute Parkinson’s disease, is nearing the end. The future is uncertain, with no clear succession. There are those who want to end the hopeless war in the east; there are those, chiefly in the SS, who want to carry on the struggle against the Slav ‘sub-humans’ until that elusive final victory.

We are, of course, in past futures, a foreign country which did things differently; we are in the country of C. J. Sansom’s Dominion, a ‘what if’ novel along the lines of Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, Len Deighton’s SS GB and Robert Harris’ Fatherland.

The premise is a plausible one. The novel opens with a real historical scene, the meeting in the Cabinet Room of 10 Downing Street on 9 May, 1940. Neville Chamberlain, the Prime Minister, has announced his intention to resign, discredited by Britain’s disastrous campaign against the Germans in Norway. The contenders are Halifax and Churchill. Halifax, the Foreign Minister and a noted appeaser, is favoured by Chamberlain, the King and most of the Tory Party. In real history he demurs. In this history he does not. After the German invasion of the West, and the disaster of Dunkirk, Halifax makes peace, entering into a treaty of friendship with Britain’s former enemy. Churchill withdraws, eventually to lead a Resistance movement against the new Vichy-style regime, headed in succession by Halifax, David Lloyd George and finally Beaverbrook.

Dominion is the first book that I’ve read by C. J. Sansom, though I’m told that he is well-respected for his Shardlake series, historical novels set in Tudor England. He has a doctorate in history; so, if that’s any measure, he is qualified enough to treat the subject with imaginative insight and a high degree of verisimilitude and empathy. Does he? Well, now, that’s the key question. At the risk of trying your patience I’m going to begin this review by looking at the justification for the premises contained in the novel, set out in a Historical Note at the very end.

Actually, if you are at all interested in the context, I would suggest that you begin at the end. It’s the key to all that goes before. It shows the author as a man with a mission. He has, in other words, a political intent; his novel is not merely for shallow entertainment. Rather it has a didactic purpose, namely to warn you against the dangers of nationalism and fascism in the real historical present by showing you nationalism and fascism in a fictitious historical past.

I suppose that this book might be compared, at least superficially, with It Can’t Happen Here, Sinclair Lewis’ 1935 novel warning of the dangers of fascism in America. It could have happened here, that’s Sansom’s point. But could it have happened in the way he describes in Dominion?

You see, what he gives us is an Anglo-Saxon version of Petain and Laval’s Vichy state. It’s really all based on a shallow idiocy of perspective, if I can put it like that. George Orwell, who also feared a form of fascism in England, was altogether more subtle than the inept Mister Sansom, at pains to advance his left-wing credentials. “What sickens me about left-wing people, especially left wing intellectuals”, Orwell wrote, “is their utter ignorance of the way things actually happen.”

My own doubts were raised early. Beaverbrook, in real history, was a close friend of Churchill and an effective minister in his wartime cabinet. In Dominion this same Beaverbrook is a man prepared to hand over Britain’s Jewish community to the Nazis. In justifying his portrayal, Samson quotes Clement Atlee, the post-war Labour prime minister, who said that the press baron was the most evil person he had ever met. Really? Is this the same Beaverbrook that Michael Foot, a former Labour leader and respected leftwing journalist, describes with such warmth and affection in his essay collection Debts of Honour?

Then there is Enoch Powell, the bête noir of Samson and his kind. His real credentials were impeccably anti-fascist, an opponent of appeasement and a man who returned to England from a comfortable academic position in Australia specifically to fight against the Nazis. The idea of him collaborating with Oswald Mosley is laughably absurd. Samson has simply advanced beyond his fictitious present to a real future, to Powell’s 1960s warning over the possible effects of mass immigration. He has then projected back again; for, as we all know, concerns about immigration equals fascism.

Powell, who only entered Parliament in 1950, was an admirer of British rule in India, that much is true, but by the early 1950s his imperial convictions were weakening. The depiction of him in Dominion is, quite frankly, childishly inexact. By Sansom’s measure Churchill might just as readily have been Secretary of State for India in a Beaverbrook cabinet, given his own past political commitments, his past refusal to countenance any form of independence for India.

So, what is there to say about Samson’s imagined Britain? It’s a drab place, economically depressed, a country in debt, a country that is no more than a satellite of a Continental superpower, a country where independence is all but a fiction, a country with an uncertain future. This is Vichy Britain, the only model the author seems to understand, a country whose cowardly leaders are prepared to hand over some of its citizens to an uncertain fate.

But Vichy was not the only model to hand. In real history there was Finland, an ally of Germany in the war against Russia, but one that preserved its democratic polity and refused to play any part in the Holocaust. Then there is Denmark, the ‘model’ protectorate, a country occupied by the Germans but one that still managed to undermine Nazi policy towards the Jews.

It’s perfectly true, in a world of limitless possibilities, that Samson’s alternate is just as valid as any other alternate, but does it stand up to scrutiny? My alternate is that if Britain had exited the war in 1940, instead of 1945, it would not have accumulated the massive debts, particularly to America, that so crippled its post-war economic performance.

Even in Sansom’s world the country would surely have done much better. There is no objective reason why it should have been so poor. Although allied to Germany, it was not involved in the war with Russia. Why on earth would the Germans have erected tariff barriers against British produce when such produce, particularly in armaments, would have been vital for the continuing campaign in the east? Sansom’s model makes no logical sense.

The truth is that Sansom’s depiction of a sad, indebted, economically and politically dependant nation is far closer to our contemporary political realities; a grubby Britain, a country increasingly uncertain of itself, a country falling to bits, a country tied to the European Union, an organisation the author clearly approves of.

The Historical Note, incidentally, which starts off objectively enough, ends up as a carpet-chewing rant against nationalism in general and – would you believe it? – Scottish nationalism in particular! Nationalism and patriotism, in Sansom’s view, are close kin to fascism. We are back in the mental world of those 1930s intellectuals who, when it came to understanding fascism, understood exactly nothing

I’ve tried your patience too far. The historical stuff may be of no interest at all to you. You have one question only: what of the novel, what of the story; is it any good? Yes, well, it is in part, now and again a bit of a page turner. Ignore the political manipulation – unfortunately I can’t - and you might actually enjoy it. The problem is that it is overlong and repetitive. More than that, the whole superstructure rests on an astonishingly weak base. The core plot device, the heart of the story, is as weak as marshmallow.

It centres on one Frank Muncaster, a geologist, who has learned a ‘dreadful secret’ that turns out to be no secret at all. I’m not going to tell you what the ‘dreadful secret’ is, simply that the Germans are anxious to find out, though what earthly good it could have done them is anybody’s guess. Muncaster learns his ‘dreadful secret’ from his physicist brother, who happens to be working with the Americans. In the contretemps that follows, the said brother is pushed out of the window of Muncaster’s flat, while he proceeds to wreck the place (why?), all the time shouting about the end of the world.

It turns out that Muncaster is the sort of fellow that a goose would say boo to, so his actions, to say the least, are just a tad out of character. But on his hissy fit all else follows; the Gestapo follow, the British fascist police follow, the British resistance follow; Churchill himself follows. Quick, let’s find Frank; our war in Russia depends on his ‘dreadful secret.’ Quick, let’s find Frank; let’s discover the ‘dreadful secret’ or get him away safely to America.

I’m really trying not to laugh as I write this, but there is so much in Dominion that is laughable; the lost and found chase through a thick London fog, Keystone Cops-style, is particularly funny. Poor Muncaster, freed from a loony bin, is aided by an assortment of individuals – David Fitzgerald, a civil servant and member of the resistance who befriended the forlorn chap (oh, just how many times do we heed to be reminded of his rictus smile?!) while they were at Oxford together. He is aided by Ben, a nurse at a lunatic asylum and a homosexual Scottish communist, also a member of the resistance, ye ken. He is aided by, of all organisations, the Fire Brigade, an organisation with impeccable left-wing credentials, which rides to the rescue through the fog!

And so it goes on, from high tension to low comedy, a series of increasingly implausible encounters. The scene on the beach below Rottingdean on the Suffolk coast takes verisimilitude to the Senate House, the SS headquarters in London, and tortures it out of existence. In the end Frank takes himself and the ‘dreadful secret’ into oblivion, an action, if taken earlier, that would have saved several hundred wearisome pages.

As a novel Dominion is real boys’ own stuff, difficult even for boys to swallow. In almost 570 pages of text the only believable character, the only character with any real human depth, is the world-weary Gunther Hoth, the Gestapo agent on Muncaster’s tail. There would seem to me to be a spot of plagiarism here, for he is simply a more ideologically committed dimension of Xavier March, the detective from Robert Harris’ Fatherland.

Dominion is based on a bogus historical premise; it’s based on the character assassination of real people. As a novel it’s too long, it’s repetitive, the characterisations are weak, the encounters unbelievable, the narrative plodding, as thick at point as the London fog and the fog in the author’s mind.

Samson does not write badly; he just doesn’t write very well. If he were not already Mister Shardlake I am convinced that this book would have gathered rejection slips rather than accolades from the likes of the Guardian and the Independent. Quite frankly, it’s a shallow and immature book, no more than a vehicle for the writer’s political prejudices. If you like alternate history and political thrillers go to Fatherland instead. It’s infinitely superior.

In Praise of William and Kate; in Praise of Monarchy

There was a post on Blog Catalogue congratulating William and Kate, the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, on the forthcoming birth of their first child, good news for them in particular and for the British monarchy in general, the succession now secured far into the future.  I added my own congratulations but the post also attracted ignorant comment from people who should know better but don’t. 

One American described our monarchy as a ‘travesty’ and an Australian pompously went on about what an anachronism it was in the modern world to have an inherited head of state.  This was supported by arrant nonsense about philosophers and political thinkers in the seventeenth century being “more modern and more rational.”  It demanded a response and response I gave, highlighting the importance of monarchy in history.  This is my broadside on ignorance.  It’s been slightly adapted and expanded. 

I’m not sure who the ‘more modern and more rational’ seventeenth century political thinkers were alluded to here. It just so happens that the seventeenth century is my speciality, a period of intense political upheaval in the history of England. It was the one time that we got rid of our monarchy, albeit for a brief period.

It was a period when the gentle authoritarianism of King Charles I was replaced by the military dictatorship of Oliver Cromwell and the dire Puritanism of the Major Generals. In the end the people had enough of Protectors, Republics and Confusion, calling Charles II home from exile. Since then the institution has gone from strength to strength, gently devolving its former prerogatives and powers to Parliament and People.

There is an acute historical irony here.  The monarchy, it might be said, is an institution in evolution.  It evolves now just as it has in the past.  In the eighteenth century the Americans rebelled against the perceived ‘tyranny’ of George III, eventually creating a monarchical republic.  As George and his descendents continued to devolve power to Parliament, an imperial presidency arose in the States.  Presidents as varied as Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt exercised forms of prerogative power that even Charles I would have found shocking.

Looking further afield, consider the history of France, where a monarchy was replaced by ‘rational’ forms of terror, mass murder and dictatorship. Look at the history of the last century, conceivably the most terrible in human history, where in place of traditional monarchies in Russia and Germany we had murderous tyranny; instead of Nicholas II we had Stalin; instead of Wilhelm II we had Hitler.

Bringing the story up to date, the most politically advanced, stable and culturally tolerant countries in Europe are all monarchies. Apart from my own country there is the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Denmark, Norway and Sweden. It was the monarchy in Spain that acted as the midwife to a modern democracy after years of dictatorship.

I do wish people would think a little more deeply before they use words like travesty or before they waffle on about anachronism and rationality.

Anyway, well done William and Kate, two more charming people I find difficult to imagine.  They will make splendid parents just as one day they will make a splendid King and Queen.  

Black Myth

Ten years ago the BBC conducted a poll on the 100 greatest Britons.  Those who notice this sort of thing noticed that no black people made it on to the list, so a black list was produced.  Sorry; how else am I to describe it?!  If I tell you that it features the Labour MP Diane Abbot that might give you a measure of the quality of ‘greatness.’ 

The whole thing is really quite ridiculous, risibly so at points.  I have no problem at all with black people looking for positive role models, but who really needs this kind of silly condescension?  These is also a kind of desperation, it seems to me, in the search for the century.  Philipa of Hainault, queen consort of Edward III, is on the list.  Why?  Because she was the mother of Edward, the Black Prince of Wales!  You know, and I know and anyone with any wit knows this had nothing at all to do with the colour of his skin! 

Mary Seacole is also there.  In fact she tops the list, this supposed black heroine of the Crimean War.  She’s rather the flavour of the day, this woman, even replacing Florence Nightingale as the true Lady of the Lamp.  This is not just a result of black elevation, but white guilt, as Lynne McDonald suggests in a brilliant, eye-opening piece in the latest issue of History Today (Nursing’s Bitter Rivalry).  I almost passed over this because, quite frankly, the subject does not really interest me that much.  I’m so glad I didn’t.  The Seacole story, I know now, is a lot of black propaganda. (Sorry; I couldn’t resist that either!)  It’s only fair to add that it’s not of the lady’s devising. 

I give you Jamaican-born Mary Seacole, an hotelier and herbalist by profession.  So far as the quality of ‘blackness’ is concerned black people would be well-advised to stay well clear of the truth; the myth is much more comforting.  She was three-quarters white and, as she explains in her journals, proud of her ‘Scotch blood’.  Her writing, moreover, is full of the usual nineteenth century stereotypes.  She refers to black people as ‘negroes’ and ‘niggers.’  It’s never a self-reference.  No, she took considerable pains to distance herself from what she called the ‘lazy Creole’ image, evidenced in her “good for nothing black cooks.”

But the myth has wings.  I understand that a massive statue is to be erected to this ‘Pioneer Nurse’ at St Thomas’ Hospital in London, the place where Florence Nightingale was based for forty years.  The monument, McDonald says, will even be visible from the House of Commons, taller both than that of Florence Nightingale at Waterloo Place and Edith Cavell in St Martin’s Lane.

I suppose I have to congratulate the fundraisers on fighting such a brilliant campaign, brilliant enough for the hospital trustees to grant permission on a foundation of evidentiary quicksand.  The statue will show ‘Britain’s black heroine’, with medals won for bravery, walking on to a Crimean battlefield to treat the wounded.  There is only one problem: it’s a lie.    

Here are the inconvenient facts.  Unlike Nightingale, Seacole never nursed, never trained as a nurse and never worked in a hospital.  In the Crimea she ran a hotel, catering specifically for officers, a thing she remarks on with a snobbish sense of delight.  She never won any medals, and never claimed to have won any medals, though that did nor stop her from wearing medals. 

Even the Nursing Standard, a magazine owned by the Royal College of Nursing, which supports the Seacole statue campaign, has contributed to the mythology. Over the past ten years it has published more than seventy articles lauding her ‘achievements’, even though they give not a single concrete example of Seacole’s contribution to the profession. 

The media has taken up the angel Seacole and devil Nightingale campaign.  In Mary Seacole: a Hidden History, a Channel 4 documentary broadcast in 2005, it was claimed on no evidence at all that Seacole had “saved thousands of lives.”  The fakery, for fakery it is, has even made it into children’s literature.  In The Life of Mary Seacole by Emma Lynch she is described as nursing soldiers from 5am until midday before going on to the battlefield, presumably to look for more.

It never happened.  She was present at only two engagements, the Redan assault in June and Tchernya in August 1855.  In her journal she gives no details, other than to say that it was ‘pleasant enough’ and a source of ‘strange excitement’.’  Yes, I suppose it was.  Meanwhile it was back to the British Hotel, where lightly wounded officers (the serious cases were sent to Nightingale in Turkey) could feast on such delights as lobster, oysters, wild fowl and game, all items well beyond the means of ordinary soldiers. 

If you really want to know about Seacole it’s best to ignore the saccharine-sweet hagiography.  Go instead to The Wonderful Adventures of Mrs Seacole in Many Lands, her own account originally published in 1857, a reasonably honest testament, unlike so much of the present dishonesty surrounding her memory.  We are all ill-served by this sort of nonsense, black people most of all, treated by a certain shade of white liberal opinion as though they were children to be indulged in a state of innocence.  It’s just a mirror image of the old racism. 

The Times of My Life – a Letter to a Friend

Seymour,

Thank you for your lengthy message on Facebook, a response to my review of Dominic Sandbrook’s Season’s in the Sun: The Battle for Britain, 1974-1979, a follow up to the comments you made here.  Before I proceed I would urge you to read this book, the basis, I feel sure, for future exchanges. 

But you are going abroad.  It’s a big book.  You may not have the time or the inclination to read it all.  If so, please just borrow it from the library.  Go straight to Chapter 31, that headed Rats on the Town.  Once you’ve read it I would ask you to address yourself to one simple question: do you really, really think things are just as bad now? 

Anyway, as I said to in response to your comment here, there is no fundamental disagreement between us.  All the faults that you can see I can see also.  My goodness, I’ve written about them often enough; I’ve written about our indebtedness, I’ve written about the awfulness of state education, I’ve written about a judiciary corrupted by alien legislation and alien concepts of law, I’ve written about the problem of mass immigration, I’ve written about the corrosive and malign effects of political correctness, I’ve written about the moral abasement of welfare, I’ve written about a lot more besides.  It would simply be too wearisome, and burdensome, to point you in the direction of all of the relevant articles. 

But these are my green and salad days; this is my life, this is my time; I do not and cannot live by politics and cultural despair alone, much as I admire the work of Oswald Spengler.  Like my parents then, there is a whole different dimension to my life now, personal things which I do not write about by and large on a blog that is chiefly about politics and literature.  Yes, I can see storms ahead, but, unlike so many others, I have ways out.  I’m more or less determined to leave England if Labour returns to office and Ed Miliband becomes Prime Minister, which I believe will mark a fresh low for our nation (not my emigration but that moron in high office!)

Sandbrook’s account, though he deals with culture, focuses principally on politics, and the politics of the mid-1970s seem to me to be absolutely dire, yes, in so many ways far worse than they are today.  The incompetence of the Labour administration of the time seems stunning, even more stunning than the incompetence of our present Coalition.

Here was a government captive to union power in the way that no government, not even that of Blair and Brown, has been since.  Here was a government that presided over unprecedented levels of inflation, stagnation and decline.  Here was a government that, in its cap-in-hand approach to the International Monetary Fund, took this country to the most shameful depths in its history.  How are the mighty fallen, not even in the midst of barrel.

You clearly have a longer perspective in history than I do; you can make comparisons that I can’t, though I can’t place you exactly.  You say that the 1970s was the time just before you and your friends arrived.  Is this a reference to age, or to a change of location?  Forgive me, but I assumed you were older.  Are you, like me, a child of the 80s? 

I grew up in a time of flux and transition, we all did, all of us who were born then.  Time accelerates. I don’t suppose there was really that much difference between the England of, say, 1920 and that of 1940.  But then we moved gradually into hyper speed. 

You are right - the Britain of the late 1930s is wholly different from the Britain of the late 1970s.  The old certainties had gone; the old sense of cohesion, cultural and ethnic, was going fast.  Who could ever believe from the empty glory of 1945 (yes, despite the triumphs, it was empty) we would descend to the rubbish and rats of 1979, to forms of appeasement that would have shamed Chamberlain? 

But we recovered.  Margaret Thatcher brought us back from a brink, albeit temporarily perhaps.  Her betrayal in 1990 was one of the shabbiest acts in Conservative Party history, an appalling Ides of March, when the old Heathites and the new Europhiles combined in political assassination.  It’s taken decades to recover from the curse of that year.  The Party laboured mightily and brought forth...brought forth what exactly?  Why, the heir to Blair. 

Yes, we probably are more left wing now than we used to be, certainly more left wing than the days of Thatcher, though not as madly left wing as the days of Wilson and Callaghan.  Tony Benn, that old ogre, comes across as politically if not actually clinically insane. 

When I said that I had a natural optimism I really meant the natural optimism of youth.  I was twenty-six at the end of June; I have my whole life ahead; I simply have to have my own seasons in the sun, just as my parents did before me. The various abuses and absurdities I write about here don’t depress me.  Rather they make me angry, and my response in anger is sardonic humour, the empty cry of Cassandra.

I have nothing to say about Future English, as you put it, because I simply cannot see any obvious solutions to our manifold problems.  I begin to despise this present Coalition Government as much as I despised the last Labour administration; I despise all shabbiness and moral compromise. 

We may have slightly different perspectives over the various issues I’ve touched on but there is no reason at all why we cannot share views and have the kind of stimulating discussions that you are looking for.  I am nothing if not intellectually and politically versatile.  

My apologies for wittering on at such inordinate length.  

Ana, one of life's poor players.  

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
Signifying nothing

The Way We Were

I could a tale unfold whose lightest word would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood and make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres.  Actually, I couldn’t but Dominic Sandbrook can; he has in Seasons in the Sun: the Battle for Britain, 1974-1979, the sequel to State of Emergency - the Way We Were: Britain, 1970-1974, which I reviewed here in October, 2010. 

I’m not quite sure how to describe this book, hovering as it does between history and black comedy.  I found myself laughing out loud at points at the sheer awfulness of our national life in the not so distant past, a past my parents lived through, a history they experienced.  I simply had to ask them if it really was that bad. 

Yes and no, they replied: politically, economically and socially times were bad - a time of IRA terror, a time rampant inflation, a time of irresponsible trade union barons, a time of Marxist militants, a time of drift and decay; but they were young, they were both undergraduates at the same Cambridge college; they were in love; they had their season in the sun.  Perhaps the day will come when I look back at our present troubled times through a soft-focused lens! 

Sandbrook’s title, taken from a whimsical song popular at the time, is deliberately ironic.  The period between the surprise victory of Harold Wilson and the Labour Party in the election of March, 1974 and the defeat of his successor James Callaghan in the election in May, 1979 comes as close as any to marking the nadir of modern British history.  It was a period that ended not in a Summer of Satisfaction but in the so-called Winter of Discontent, when the country, overwhelmed by a great wave of trade union militancy, saw rubbish pilling up in the streets and the dead queuing for burial. 

I knew that Labour governments were dysfunctional but, my goodness, I had no idea of just how dysfunctional.  Harold Wilson, who won two elections in the 1960s, came back to power a sad ghost of his former self, increasingly beset by paranoia and quite possibly showing the signs of early mental decay. He was completely dominated by his long-standing political secretary and confidante, one Marcia Williams, a truly ghastly individual.  At one point she even addressed Wilson in the hearing of others as “You little cunt!”  By the summer of 1974 her influence was so baleful that his inner circle even contemplated having her murdered.  Instead the next best thing served: she was sent upstairs to the House of Lords as Lady Falkender.  This Lady was no lady.  Even the Queen obliquely queried her elevation. 

Sandbrook rightly suggests that the mid to late seventies were not just important as prelude to Thatcherism, surely the most necessary antidote ever devised, but as a “decisive moment in our recent history.”  It was a time of transition, a time that saw the strange death of social democratic England, a time that saw the death of the consensus that had dominated British politics since 1945.  It was the time that saw the end of Old Labour, killed off, ironically, by its trade union allies.  I would say that if one wanted to understand Tony Blair and the modern Labour Party one could do no better than pay close attention to this period.

It was a time when illusions went hand-in-hand with delusions.  In March 1974, when it was clear even to the economically illiterate that it was no longer possible to spend one’s way out of a crisis, Denis Healey, Wilson’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, proceeded to spend his way out of a crisis.  More and more people began to wonder if Britain was on the road to Weimar, with hyperinflation an ever present threat. 

Actually the country had the worst of both worlds, inflation and economic stagnation, allowing a new term – stagflation – to enter the vocabulary.  The historian A. J. P. Taylor, who prided himself on his left wing credentials, wrote to his Hungarian mistress urging her to “Pray for the recovery of capitalism.  You can’t realise how near we are to catastrophe: all our banks may close their doors in a few months’ time…You are lucky to be living in a Communist country and safe from such things.”  Even Callaghan, Foreign Secretary at the time, said, in a mood of black humour, that if he had been a younger man he would emigrate.  Many did. 

The author does an excellent job in identifying some of the key cultural icons.  There is surely none more iconic than the inexpressibly vulgar Beverly Moss from Mike Leigh’s play Abigail’s Party.  She is a monster of social one-upmanship.  She is also a harbinger of things to come.  Most of all she is a representative of a new aspirational Britain, wholly material in concern, and this includes the trade unionists who, in their devil take the rearmost attitude, killed all hope of a bright new socialist future. 

There is surely no more pathetic case than that of the political fantasist Tony Benn, the Secretary of State for Industry, propping up one dying industry after another, full of socialist sentimentalism, when all the working classes really wanted was new fridges and package holidays.  Workers of the world unite; you have trips to Torremolinos to gain.  The trade unions are often seen as Margaret Thatcher’s greatest enemies.  In fact they were her best allies.  “The cowardice and irresponsibility of some union leaders”, Denis Healy later reflected, “guaranteed her election; it left them with no grounds for complaining about her subsequent action against them.” 

I’ve emphasised the politics of the period in this review by there is so much more in Sandbrook’s door stopper of a book, weighing in at a hefty eight hundred plus pages.  He covers so much ground, including the cultural and sporting highs and lows.  The highs and lows, depending on your point of view, might be best represented by the Sex Pistols, a dysfunctional punk band for dysfunctional punk times.  Yes, it was true: there were no more heroes anymore. 

There is also a very good chapter on schooling and the negative effects of fashionable, 'child-centred' educational theories, absurd beyond absurd, particularly in the example of William Tyndale Junior School in Islington.  This school might very well serve as a microcosm of England, an undisciplined free for all. 

Drawing on a huge range of sources, Sandbrook weaves an effective tale, though perhaps a little less effective than that told in State of Emergency.  To paraphrase Dickens, this is the best of books and the worst of books.  It is strong in narrative and anecdote, weak in depth and analysis.  The author’s industry is impressive though, given the quick turnaround between this and his previous book, perhaps a little too Stakhanovite.  I would suggest less labour and more reflection.  No matter; Sandbrook’s limpid prose carries one along quite nicely through an epic comic tragedy. He has the ability to make one laugh and cry by turns.  This is the way we were.  This is the way we never want to be again. 

My Name was William Kidd

I published this piece last year on another website.  I called it to mind recently, so it might as well be here also! 

It’s over three hundred years since Captain William Kidd was hanged.  He was by reputation one of the most notorious pirates who ever lived, of the Caribbean or any other of the seven seas.  Taken to Execution Dock in Wapping, he was hanged on 23 May, 1701, a particularly brutal event.  Twice the rope around his neck broke; the third time it held.

Afterwards, according to Admiralty custom, he was tied to a stake on the Thames Estuary to allow three tides to wash over him.  Not content with that, his bloated body was then dipped in tar and squeezed into an iron frame at Tilbury, there hanged anew as a warning to all future pirates.

The problem is William Kidd, for all the notoriety subsequently attached to his name, was not a pirate at all but a privateer, acting under licence at a time when Britain was at war with France.  That is to say, he was an ‘official’ pirate, whose plundering of enemy merchants had the sanction of the authorities, themselves party to a contract that promised a lucrative return in loot.  In the end he was betrayed in a shabby act of duplicity by the very people who had sent him out in the first place.

My interest in the subject was whetted by an article written by Angus Konstan in the BBC History Magazine (The Sacrifice of Captain Kidd).  Taking this as my cue I did a spot of further research, coming up with some rather intriguing material. There was even a suggestion in one report I read that he was deliberately framed by William III, the ruling monarch, because he was Scottish!

Kidd was certainly born in Scotland, though I can’t be certain where.  According to some accounts it was the neighbourhood of Dundee, while others say it was Greenock, places at opposite ends of the country.  Scottish he may have been by birth but he moved to the colony of New York when he was five years old; so by the time of his trial, when he was in his mid-forties, he was more American than anything else.

Kidd, who made a career as a professional seaman, caught the attention – unfortunately for him – of Richard Coot, earl of Bellomont, colonial governor of New York, as the man best able to intercept French pirates and merchantmen.  Bellomont joined with a number of other aristocratic backers to fund the venture, all members of the ruling Whig establishment.

King William himself was involved, signing a letter of manqué, which reserved ten per cent of the proceeds for the crown.  There is also a suggestion that he put up some of the venture capital, though the evidence here is far from certain.  Unusually, and perhaps fatally in the outcome, the Admiralty was not promised a share; in fact the Admiralty, as a branch of government, seems to have been duped in a manner that would now be considered fraudulent, duped by none other than Admiral Edward Russell, its own First Lord, one of Bellomont’s clique.  No, this was privateering at its purest; and at its purest the borders with piracy are particularly fine.

Armed with this dubious mandate, “trusty and well-beloved Captain Kidd” sailed from Deptford on the purpose-built Adventure Galley in September 1696.  This was voyage to be as ill-omened as that of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner.  His first misfortune came when he encountered a convoy of East Indiamen, escorted by Commodore Warren of the Royal Navy.  With Warren threatening to impress some of Kidd’s crew, the Adventure Galley sailed off under cover of night.

Warren, in a fit of pique, immediately wrote to the Admiralty in London, denouncing Kidd as a pirate, though so far he had yet to board a single ship.  The slander went round the world, repeated in India by the agents of the East India Company, which meant that all ports under its control were closed to Kidd.  Unable to make land, his crew became mutinous.  During a confrontation on 30 October 1697 Kidd threw a bucket at William Moore, his chief gunner, which hit him on the head, fracturing his skull.  He died the next day of concussion.

Later when Kidd was brought to trial, on civil and not Admiralty law, in addition to the accusations of piracy he was charged and convicted of the premeditated murder of Moore.  I find it difficulty to believe that there can be a more unusual case than this, one where the murderer’s weapon of choice was a wooden bucket!

After the bucket-wielding captain had suppressed the mutiny his luck changed, or appeared to change.  In November he captured the Rouparelle, whose captain carried a pass promising him the protection of the French crown.  In January he found an even greater prize, the Quedagh Merchant, the captain armed with a similar pass.  He also happened to be an Englishman by the name of Wright.  Though Kidd tried to persuade his crew to hand the vessel back, the pass notwithstanding, they refused.  Now his reputation as a pirate was cemented.

The Quedagh Merchant, which carried goods to the value of £75,000, a huge sum for the day, more than justified the voyage of the Adventure Galley.  Still denied the ports controlled by the East India Company, Kidd sailed for New York to meet Bellomont.  On the way he buried part of his treasure for safety in an island in Long Island Sound.  Though long since recovered it has done nothing to stop people looking for his pirate hoard ever since.

Bellomont, concerned by his business associations with a man now generally perceived as a pirate, greeted his protégé coldly, almost immediately having him arrested, later shipping him to England to stand trail.  First he had to appear before the House of Commons, there to face questions from the Tory opposition, anxious to determine to what extent the ministry was involved in his alleged acts of piracy.  He was finally called before the bar of the House in March 1701, by which time the French passes, the main basis for his defence, had conveniently disappeared.  They were not rediscovered until 1910.

Much had changed since Kidd first arrived in London.  The Tories were now in power.  Here was his moment, his chance to implicate his backers in what might have turned into a political trial.  But he simply held to one defence: that he was innocent and his sponsors had encouraged no wrong doing.  Disappointed, Parliament consigned him to a process where the matter had already been prejudged.

Kidd was a victim.  The victim of the king, who had to be seen as tough on piracy and tough on the causes of piracy, while hypocritically benefiting from the proceeds; the victim of the Admiralty, which refused to see the death of Moore as a consequence of mutiny; the victim of Bellomont and his shady Whig clique, anxious to cover the fact that they had diverted funds from the Admiralty for their own private profit.  He was the victim, as Konstan says in his article, of the manipulation of evidence, of perjury, of rumour-mongering and of deal-making.  He was the victim, above all, of political expediency.

The story has an interesting postscript.  In the summer of 2009, acting on the findings of researchers in America, the Fraternity of Masters and Seamen in Dundee decided to look into the facts, with a view to presenting a case before the Criminal Cases Review Commission.  The matter was subsequently taken up in the Scottish Parliament, aptly enough, by one William Kidd!  Mr Kidd, urging his fellow members to support the bid to clear the Captain’s name, said;

I don’t expect that there’s going to be a mass campaign on the streets for something that happened three hundred years ago but I do expect that people are going to be worried about the fact that someone can be used and abused in that way by the state, whatever time in history.

Apparently people are not worried enough, because I’ve been unable to discover any further developments.  Captain Kidd still remains a convicted pirate.

I do have a certain sympathy with the view put forward by the MSP, that there should be no limit on justice, that wrongs, no matter how distant in the past, are still wrongs.  Captain Kidd, when all is considered, was subject to a serious miscarriage of justice, bordering on outright conspiracy.

But does it really matter?  His final adventure was disappointing, tragic, mundane and fatal.  Innocent or not, he is dead beyond recovery.  Would he not have been better pleased by his re-emergence in fiction as a dark and abiding legend?  He continues to live in Washington Irvine’s The Devil and Tom Walker, in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Gold Bug and in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island.  What better posterity, what better legacy.

My name was William Kidd, As I sailed, as I sailed,
My name was William Kidd, When I sailed,
My name was William Kidd; God’s laws I did forbid,
And so wickedly I did, As I sailed.

1812 and all that

What great event in history happened in 1812?  I put this question at the weekend to people I know, all history alumni, mostly English though there were also a couple of Germans in the group.  It was by way of experiment, you see.  Almost everyone gave the answer I expected – it was the year that Napoleon invaded Russia (one mentioned the Battle of Salamanca in the Peninsular War!)  If I had asked a wider audience, people with a reasonable grasp of history, I’m reasonably certain that I would get the same answer.

Now, if I change the audience, if I put the same question to Americans and Canadians I think it reasonable to assume that the majority would answer differently; the Americans almost certainly would.  For 1812 was the year that America went to war with Great Britain.  It’s a conflict that is remembered in The Star Spangled Banner, the American national anthem.  That the young nation survived a war with a great imperial power was a source of pride.  It’s also the source of one or two national myths.

In England it really is the forgotten war, one which made little impact then or later.  It’s different for the Canadians, who, in resisting American invasion, found their own particular pride which was later to blossom into nationhood.  I’m not sure if they are planning to mark the bicentenary of the outbreak of the war, which falls next month, but Americans probably shall, if only to remember the Burning of Washington and the ‘rocket’s red glare’, as Old Glory fluttered above Baltimore’s Fort McHenry. 

It was America that declared war on Great Britain on 18 June, beginning a struggle that was to last for over two years.  American grievances were genuine enough, principally caused by British interference with commercial shipping, an essential part of the total economic blockade of France.  Stung by this and other issues, including the impressment of seamen who claimed to be American citizens, Congress declared war on the urging of President James Madison. 

It’s was really all a bit of a gamble.  Madison calculated that Britain would be fully preoccupied with the war in Europe.  After all, most of the army was fully engaged in the Peninsular War; most of the navy was blockading the coast of Europe.  Now with Napoleon about to enter Russia there could be no better time to attack, with land campaigns against the Canadian provinces and naval attacks on British shipping in the West Indies and North Atlantic.  But he had gone to war with an army scarcely fit to fight, evidenced by the fiasco that followed the invasion of Canada.  The tiny American navy performed creditably in single ship actions, but beyond boosting morale these had no lasting effect. 

So far as Britain was concerned the war was no more than a little local inconvenience.  As Andrew Lambert writes in a recent article in the BBC History Magazine (When Washington Burned), the government had one central war aim: to make the Americans leave Canada alone.  Canadian garrisons were reinforced but no troops at all were withdrawn from Wellington’s army in Spain.  Above all, there was absolutely no intention of challenging American sovereignty, and to describe the struggle as ‘second American War of Independence', as some were wont to do, is a huge exaggeration.   It might, with greater accuracy, be described as the War of Canadian National Integrity. 

None of this was new to me.  I was surprised, though, to learn of a mood of hysteria and hyperbole that gripped at least one prominent figure in American public life – former president Thomas Jefferson.  A letter of his was quoted – with admiration - recently on Blog Catalogue.  Dated 28 June 1812, when nothing significant had as yet happened, he wrote;

Our present enemy... may burn New York, indeed, by her ships and congreve rockets, in which case we must burn the city of London by hired incendiaries, of which her starving manufacturers will furnish abundance. A people in such desperation as to demand of their government aut parcem, aut furcam, either bread or the gallows, will not reject the same alternative when offered by a foreign hand. Hunger will make them brave every risk for bread.

New York was untouched, though British forces did attack and burn parts of Washington, including the White House, in August, 1813, in retaliation for a previous burning of the town of York, now Toronto.  Contrary to Jefferson’s expectations London survived intact, untroubled by fictitious gangs of starving insurgents. 

I said earlier that Madison’s actions were a gamble.  But there is more to this than the military imbalance involved.  There was also a political gamble, one which exposed the latent tensions in the American system of government, tensions left over from the formation of the Union that were not fully resolved until the Civil War. 

You see, his Democratic Republican Party did not have the confidence of the nation as a whole.  He represented the sectional interest of the states of the South and the West, committed to expansionism.  Opposition to the war was strongest in New England, where the states enjoyed good commercial relations with Britain.  There was even talk of secession as the war progressed.  Trade with the enemy, moreover, continued, as the British blockade was relaxed on this section of the Atlantic coast.  Wellington’s army continued to be fed with American grain. 

For generations after American historians celebrated the War of 1812 as a ‘victory’, though such a view is only tenable if one adheres to the second War of Independence thesis.  The truth is the whole thing was a glorious stalemate, one which crippled the American economy and stored up unresolved political problems.  By the time Napoleon abdicated in April 1814 the British blockade was acting like an anaconda, strangling trade, government revenue and domestic consumption.  By October of the same year America was bankrupt. 

The war was finally concluded officially by the Treaty of Ghent, signed in December 1814, though the embers continued to burn for some weeks after.  There were no victors and there were no losers (setting the Western tribes to one side).  It was a case of status quo antebellum – just the way we were.  So, yes, while Americans sing that their flag is still there it’s as well to remember that it was never England’s intention to take it away.

Enemy at the Gate

Who was Britain’s greatest enemy? The answer, according to a poll carried out by the National Army Museum in Chelsea, is George Washington, or at least he was according to a panel of seventy invited guests. All attended an event at the Museum on Saturday, in which a short list of five was considered, each case argued by a historian before a vote was taken.

The others on the list included Michael Collins, the Irish Republican leader, who came second, Napoleon Bonaparte, Erwin Rommel and Kemal Ataturk. In case you are wondering why no Hitler all had to have led armies against the British in the field, which excluded purely political enemies.

All great fun, I’m sure, and I’m rather sorry I was not there among the guests. The five commanders selected came from a broader list of twenty drawn up by the museum’s curators. To qualify for inclusion all had to come from the seventeenth century onwards. Michael Collins is a bit of an oddity, in that he was a guerrilla leader who never commanded an army in the field.

The event itself was preceded by an online poll on the Museum’s website, launched in February. Rather predictably, I suppose, Collins attracted a wave of support around St Patrick’s Day in March. Wider and wider went the net, with the Turkish media picking up on the inclusion of Ataturk, a great national hero. All at once the battle lines were drawn, with the Turk advancing fast on a wave of national pride. Fighting a new Gallipoli, he won comfortably, with 40% of the votes cast. Poor old George came forth, with less than two percent of the vote, alas another Battle of Long Island!

Ah, but the Museum’s strategists were alert to the danger of tactical voting along national lines, hence the final and secret poll. Before making up their minds, the select band focused on a specific set of criteria, not my hero is bigger than your hero, Turkish pride greater than Irish, but performance in battle.

Thinking of the five in question it seems to me to be a rather odd collection. In terms of battlefield performance I have no objection to Washington if the focus was specifically on great commanders, but he was hardly a great enemy in the way that Napoleon was a great enemy, and by that I mean a threat to our national existence.

I admire Washington, a political conservative as well as a skilled commander, as much as I despise the little Corsican upstart, who tore Europe apart in the pursuit of personal ambition. That he was trumped by Michael Collins, of all people, is a demonstration either of the skill of the historian who presented the case or the historical incomprehension of the audience.

The wider list, those who did not make it to the final poll, seems to me to be both eclectic and eccentric. There was Laksmi Bai, the Rani of Jhansi, the token woman, who was prominent in her opposition to the British during the Indian Mutiny. She may be another symbol of national pride but she can hardly be described as a great enemy or a great commander. There was Ntshingwayo kaMahole, the Zulu leader who won the Battle of Isandlawana in 1879, in the long run of things no more than a little local difficulty.

But, my goodness, where was Michiel de Ruyter, the seventeenth century Dutch admiral who lead the Raid on the Medway, an event I’ve described as a kind of English Pearl Harbor. I would even put Bonnie Prince Charlie or, to be more exact, Lord George Murray, above Ntshingwayo kaMahole…or even Michael Collins! Still, I’m sure an entertaining day was had by all, even by those with a less than perfect grasp of history, which would seem to include the Museum’s landlubber curators.

Scoundrels

In a recent article in the Spectator (Enemies within, 11 February) Jonathan Freedland rightly challenges some of the myths of 1940, Britain’s ‘finest hour’, when the country stood alone against the power of Nazi Germany. Contrary to the received perception, Britain was not fully united behind the war effort; there were fissures and dissenters even after the high noon of appeasement had passed.

There is the obvious example of the British Union of Fascists, whose leader, Oswald Mosley, was interned that same year as a threat to national security. Oddly enough Freedland does not mention this directly. Instead he alights on the Right Club, a secretive organisation founded by Archibald Maule Ramsay, a Scottish Conservative Member of Parliament, which functioned well into the first year of the war, hoping for an accommodation with Germany

Included in its ranks were a number of influential people from the aristocracy downwards. Even so, its political impact was minimal, restricted to the more eccentric fringes of national life, drawing in ideological crackpots like Lord Lymington, an exponent of blood and soil mysticism. Beyond a lot of talk, nothing practical was done to hinder the war effort, though Churchill, ignoring Parliamentary privilege, had Ramsay sent to Brixton prison, where he was to remain until 1944.

As I say, it’s odd that the author does not mention Mosley and the BUF directly. But the even odder omission is the opposition of the far left, with the Communists, at the behest of Stalin, denouncing the conflict as an ‘imperialist war’. After all, this was the balmy days of the Nazi-Soviet Pact. Unlike the Right Club, all jaw jaw, hostility on the left took a practical form, something that’s been rather submerged in the heroic accounts of 1940.

The Communist Party, through its trade union contacts, attempted to disrupt production. There were even strikes in aircraft factories during the Battle of Britain, as a respondent to Freedland made clear in the in the letters page of the ensuing edition of the magazine. The disruption was compounded by the attitude of the Labour Party, in charge of industrial policy under the wartime coalition. Refusing to apply the Defence Regulations, which would have subjected strikers to martial law, a new pattern of industrial appeasement was established, which was to continue well after the war.

There is also the so-called People’s Convention, which was supposedly set up by the Hammersmith Trades Council to fight for better conditions. In reality it was an initiative directly sponsored by the Kremlin. I’ve written before about this fraudulent organisation, though some of the political innocents who joined were not immediately aware just how fraudulent.

It was all quite subtle in the usual Communist style. People were encouraged to join in support of initiatives like higher living standards or better bomb shelters. Once safely enrolled they discovered that the 'real enemy' was not Germany but Winston Churchill and those members of the Labour party who joined the coalition. The best denunciation of the whole phoney front came from George Orwell, Harold Laski and Victor Gollancz, who in 1940, under the auspices of the Left Book Club, published Betrayal of the Left. In this Gollancz asked;

Can anyone carry self-delusion to the point of being able to read through the file of the Daily Worker [The Communist Party Newspaper] and still believe that this motive was any other than to weaken the will to resist? When, at the same time, you tell people that this is an unjust war, fought for no purpose but to increase the profits of the rich: when you jeer at any comment about the morale and heroism of the public and call it 'sunshine talk'; what possible purpose can you have but to stir up hatred of the government and hatred of the war, with the object of undermining the country's determination to stand up to Hitler?

The Convention, shameful as it was, attracted the support of some prominent intellectuals, including reptilian figures like Raymond Williams and Eric Hobsbawm, who wrote a pamphlet defending the Soviet aggression against Finland, because Stalin was only seeking to defend Russia against an attack by 'British imperialists'!

It was all quite different when Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in the summer of 1941. Then these sophists, traitors and moral cowards served to prove the point once made by Samuel Johnson. Yes, in some cases patriotism really is the last refuge of a scoundrel.

March of the Women

In January, 1911 Votes for Women, the paper of the Women’s Social and Political Union, an organisation campaigning for female suffrage in Britain, announced a new song which it described as a hymn and a call to battle. This was March of the Women, composed the previous year by Ethel Smyth. That same month it was given its first public performance by the Suffrage Choir in Pall Mall, introduced by Emmeline Pankhurst, head of the WSPU, as the suffrage movement’s new anthem.

I love it. It’s one of the most stirring songs ever written. If I had been alive then I would have been a militant suffragette alongside Emmeline and Cristobel Pankhurst, two of my all-time heroines. Yes, I would have sung those words at the top of my voice, those wonderful, heroic words;

Shout, shout, up with your song!
Cry with the wind, for the dawn is break-ing;
March, march, swing you a-long,
Wide blows our ban-ner, and hope is wa-king.
Song with its sto-ry, dreams with their glo-ry
Lo! they call, and glad is their word!
Loud and lou-der it swells,
Thun-der of free-dom, the voice of the Lord!

Long, long -- we in the past
Cowered in dread from the light of heaven,
Strong, strong -- stand we at last,
Fearless in faith and with sight new given.
Strength with its beauty, Life with its duty,
(Hear the voice, oh hear and obey!)
These, these -- beckon us on!
Open your eyes to the blaze of day.

Comrades -- ye who have dared
First in the battle to strive and sorrow!
Scorned, spurned -- nought have ye cared,
Raising your eyes to a wider morrow,
Ways that are weary, days that are dreary,
Toil and pain by faith ye have borne;
Hail, hail -- victors ye stand,
Wearing the wreath that the brave have worn!

Life, strife -- those two are one,
Naught can ye win but by faith and daring.
On, on -- that ye have done
But for the work of to-day preparing.
Firm in reliance, laugh a defiance,
(Laugh in hope, for sure is the end)
March, march -- many as one,
Shoulder to shoulder and friend to friend.


Such brave words for such brave women, women who fought so tenaciously in the face of hostility and hardship for something that we now consider to be a fundamental right. I’m no great enthusiast for specifically female causes, or for the forms of women’s liberation that emerged in the States from the 1960s onwards, but the campaign over the suffrage was something different, something all women could feel strongly about, no matter their class, politics or religion. Oh, bliss was in that dawn to be alive but to be young, and a woman, was very heaven.