RosieBell

VE Day

I found this terribly moving:-

The last recorded message to be intercepted from a German military communications network at the end of the Second World War has been revealed to the public for the first time.

It shows that Britain’s Bletchley Park code breakers carried on working in the dying days of the war to ensure there would be no final stand by the Nazis, according to GCHQ historian Tony Comer.

Mr Comer added the message, released to mark the 75th anniversary of VE Day, gives “a small insight into the real people behind the machinery of war”.

With the Allies closing in and the network having retreated to the German town of Cuxhaven, a messenger who is identified only as Lieutenant Kunkel sent out a statement.

The intercepted message, which was sent as he signed off on 7 May 1945 at 7.35am, said: “British troops entered Cuxhaven at 1400 on 6 May – from now on all radio traffic will cease – wishing you all the best. Lt Kunkel”.

Last loneliest loveliest lacerated

I have been mourning that my beautiful, laid-back homeland should be so violated. We expect physical earthquakes, like the one that knocked down Christchurch back in 2011 and killed 185 people. We don’t expect to be shaken to pieces by terrorism. The last terrorist attack was back in 1985, when a couple of French agents blew up the Rainbow Warrior, with one casualty. 

The country is trusting and easy-going and feels itself immune from invasion and terrorism, which is why the perp chose it. If he could strike New Zealand the massacre would get world coverage, as it did, and no country feel itself to be safe.

There is a redneck tendency in Christchurch but I am uncertain if it takes an organised form, and it is not known if he had helpers. It is also not yet known what kind of failure there was of surveillance and policing of a political movement that meets on-line instead of in cellars. He seems to have acted like Anders Breivik, as a lone show-off pretending to be a warrior for western civilisation. Why don't these guys listen to Mozart or visit cathedralsto celebrate this western civilisation?

I’ve read the statement by the alleged perpetrator. It’s standard fascism - ethnic cleansing with a whiff of master race, the re-creating of family life to bring up the birth rate, despising our society’s soft liberalism and hedonism, and love, over-powering love for violence and warriordom. There’s also a touch of eco-fascism. Mosely is cited, as is Breivik.

It’s hellishly cheeky for an Australian in New Zealand to complain of cultural and population take overs, which were inflicted on the indigenous populations of both countries, and where that colonisation is still a live issue.

David Toube of Quilliam, and once of this site, has an excellent piece of analysis on Radio Scotland.

He outlines the following:-

1. The influence of Camus’ Great Replacement (see here for more detail) a theory that the European capitalists are conspiring to replace the white population. This is similar to the motivation behind the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, where Jews were blamed for bringing in non-white people.
2. The vision of the perp as a soldier in the 1000 year battle against Muslim invaders (he aspires for Istanbul to be restored to Constantinople and the Hagia Sophia to be turned back into a church though he has no belief in Christianity.) This battle runs up to the Bosnian conflict, with Serbian nationalists co-opted as allies.
3. The far right symbolism which shows he is an ethno-nationalist rather than a cultural nationalist. He uses the black sun symbol as per Himmler as well as Odin’s cross and other neo-Nazi slogans. Do these people actually believe in Valhalla as ISIS believe in martyrs and 72 virgins?
4. Like ISIS this kind of ideology works as inspiration for self-motivated atrocities rather than organisations of cells and members. This makes it difficult for would-be perpetrators to be tracked down.
5. He uses the language of the meme outrage LULZ culture, and its revolting look-at-me, how-far-will-I go nihilism. There are in-jokes for the 8chan audience (Bellingcat analysis here and article by Ben Sixsmith here).

Jason Burke has a piece on the similarity between the far right and Islamist extremists:-

Though there are substantial differences, rightwing and Islamist extremism, and extremists, share a great deal. The basic mechanics of the process of radicalisation – by peers, through the internet or otherwise – are very similar. As is the way both forms of violent activism are on the fringe of a much broader movement, much of which has bled into the mainstream in different parts of the world. There are no “lone wolves”, at least not in the sense of a solitary actor without links, whether virtual or real, to others.

“This is not New Zealand,” said the Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, who has acquitted herself well in an unprecedented situation for New Zealand leaders. It is now. Sadly, our modest kiwi exceptionalism has died. 

(An Australian Facebook friend pointed out that like Breivik the perp chose a country that wouldn't torture him to death.  Despising liberal civilised countries for being soft, he chooses one that will be soft on him.)

Update:-

I have just had an email from a family member who lives in Wellington. She says:-

“A big state of shock, with vigils being held all around the country including one in Wellington last night which had to be moved from the Civic Centre as so many people turned up - over 11,000 people at the Basin Reserve. There is another gathering in Wellington on Thursday and many of the smaller communities are holding vigils or remembrance events as well. I think the thing that we all echo is “this is not New Zealand”. It has had a colossal effect on everyone and there is a real sense of deep sadness, but also an outpouring of support for our Muslim community, the families, and the people of Christchurch. I haven’t spoken to anyone yet who didn’t have tears when they saw or heard what had unfolded.”

The perp’s intention was to cause a civil war between Muslim immigrants and refugees, and the native population. He hasn’t succeeded so far in New Zealand.

More James Lees Milne

James Lees-Milne, who was Secretary to the National Trust in its early days, did have an enviable job of going about the country looking at properties and deciding if the Trust would take them on.  He is constantly meeting decayed aristocrats in collapsing damp buildings of great beauty. He gives the impression of being a charming, likable, witty man, with a love of art and an appreciation of human beings. I imagine he was ideal for his job.  I caught 3 very good Radio 4 plays about him (only Radio 4 would do 3 plays about such a man), which got me interested in his diaries.

Wednesday, 26^th July 1944

After lunching in Salisbury we drove to Trafalgar. This great red-brick house lies beyond Longford, in the same valley, on the same river, surrounded by beech trees. It was built in 1733 by John Wood, with a Grecian portico added by Revett in 1760, as were the two connecting pavilions. A niece with a distinctly off-centre accent welcomed us. Presently there was a hurried puffing sound, and in bustled Lord Nelson. He is 187, the great-nephew of ‘the Admiral’ as he refers to his forebear, as small as Nelson, with white flowing hair and a large mouth. His spare build, peculiar shape of head and features are identical to the Admiral’s. With a little mutilation, an eye out here, an arm off there, he would be the very incarnation.

War Stories

For years afterwards in the 1950s, the war remained an inexhaustible subject with a huge audience. The memory thus transmitted to later generations is a fragmentary one. An obvious reason is the unparalleled extent and complexity of Britain's war. For Russians, arguably the war can be encapsulated by the sieges of Leningrad and Stalingrad, the core of Vasily Grossman's… Life and Fate. For Americans, memory seems to focus on Pacific islands and D-Day. For the French, on the “syndrome” of occupation, collaboration and resistance. But for Britain, the only European country to have fought the whole war, it cannot be easily abbreviated. Dunkirk, the Battle of Britain, the Blitz, the 'Desert Rats' in north Africa, the Battle of the Atlantic, Arctic convoys, 'Dambusters', the Burmese jungle, SOE agents, prisoner-of-war camps, D-Day, Arnhem, and lately code breaking and decryption – all of these have powerful resonances… So the war has become a bewildering kaleidoscope of episodes. One of the most important war novelists, Evelyn Waugh, set action in Norway and Crete – both defeats, and both of secondary importance… The Dam Busters (1951) commemorated a real but highly unusual operation. The more realistic themes of wartime films disappeared after 1945, the involvement of ordinary people in and out of uniform, the prominent role of women, and the down-to-earth solidarity of the nation.
    Instead, films of the 1950s – such as The Wooden Horse (1950), The Cruel Sea, (1953) and The Cockleshell Heroes (1955), - concentrated on small-scale historically based episodes emphasising the strains of war on a few stoical but sensitive individuals….
    Despite a commonplace view that the English are excessively interested in the war, it rarely figures as an important theme in post-1960s culture. Its literature is largely forgotten. Films and television serials may occasionally be set during the war years- The English Patient (1996), Charlotte Grey, (2001), Enigma (2001), Atonement (2007) and TV series such as Foyle's War (from 2002) – but they are not about the war, which provides a background for costume drama. This sets England apart from most other countries involved, for which the war remains important as epic or a trauma. No English film is comparable with Lacombe Lucien (France, 1974) Come and See (USSR, 1985), Au revoir les enfants (France 1987), Stalingrad (German, 1993), Saving Private Ryan (USA, 1995), Band of Brothers (USA, 2001), The Pianist (Poland-France, 2002), Downfall (Germany, 2004), Black Book (Holland, 2006), Indignes (France, 2006), Katyn, (Poland, 2008) or In the Fog (Belarus, 2012).

[I would have said Das Boot as well.]

...Nothing with the ..power of First World War poetry remains in our culture from the Second…

The English and their History by Robert Tombs (Chapter - Memory, History and Myth)

What Tombs describes as “the involvement of ordinary people in and out of uniform, the prominent role of women, and the down-to-earth solidarity of the nation” would have been impossible for Waugh to portray, who had no love for ordinary people and whose disllusioned view of the war in his Sword of Honour trilogy, Brideshead Revisited and Scott-King's Modern Europe was that a war that should have been fought for Christian and preferably aristocratic civilisation had been won by Christian-persecuting Stalin and the welfare state.

The most powerful interpretation of that war for me is the documentary The World at War. I think of the title and I can hear the music and see the face after face under the flames. Britain has made excellent television and that was a high point.

The cultural products of World War II that have been taken to heart and are quoted are the television comedy series, Allo Allo and of course the far greater Dad's Army, the creator of which, Jimmy Perry, has just died.

Alan Coren's wrote a perceptive review when Dad's Army first hit the screen:-

They belong to the oldest regiment in the world, the men of Dad's Army. The Sidewinder may replace the siege-engine, and the Armalite the longbow, but the nature and composition of the King's Own 17th/21st Incompetents change not at all. I watched them all troop on again last night, out of step, ragged, potty, insubordinate, inept, and who are Arthur Lowe and Clive Dunn and John Le Mesurier, I said to myself, but Bardolph and Nym and Ancient Pistol. Or, come to that, Schweik and Yossarian and Stan Laurel…

these particular khaki fools do not discredit to the great tradition… The essential quality of mock-heroic is always sustained by the parody of the Brit-in-arms...  and behind the daftness there lies a certain valuable poignancy which is not altogether explained by nostalgia. I suppose what I mean is they would have died too, if the greater folly had demanded it.

Bardolph, Nym and Ancient Pistol are part of a grander and nobler story, the warrior king Henry at Agincourt, whose cause, we are elaborately told, is just, whose valour apparent and who ultimately conquers. Captain Bank Manager Mainwaring, Spiv Walker, and Stupid Boy Pike have no such juxtaposition in the text. Instead the just cause and valour and winning are cultural and historical memories hanging in the air. The England that they are defending is class-ridden, amateur, cosy and lovable - a sea-side town on the south coast with Church teas and a vicar.  Mainwaring is a pompous buffoon but we never doubt that he is patriotic and brave, that his absurd platoon are touched with heroism and self-sacrifice and that the enemy is worth defeating. 

The Rebel Yell on Facebook

My piece on the railways made the obvious point that as trains were an unstoppable technology transforming society, so for us tare computers. We have seen from recruiting jihadis and social media exchanges, which was one thing that stoked up the Yes vote in the indyref, how the internet is changing politics.

This article by Kevin Maney makes a similar parallel in the context of the American election. The development of the railways, as well as the telegraph and industrialism in general exacerbated the differences between the North and South of the USA and ushered in the American Civil War (the first modern, much photographed war).

Like today, the technological revolution in the mid-1800s ushered in a disruptive new era of connectivity, and transportation technology was key...

Amazingly, none of the presidential candidates talk much about technology, yet our software-eats-the-world whirlwind drives everything that’s cleaving the country and throwing its politics into chaos. The parallels to the dynamics of the 1850s are a little scary. After all, the Whigs’ self-destruction was a prelude to the Civil War.
…..

In 1850, New England was essentially Silicon Valley, and the Northern states created and embraced new technology while the Southern states held tight to agriculture and a way of life that also happened to include the moral outrage of holding slaves. ..

Look today at red states vs. blue, or even Trump supporters vs. “establishment” Republicans. Those divisions broadly define where digital-cloud-mobile technology and the modern economy work in favor of the population vs. where they work against them. Trump says “make America great again,” which, to his supporters, means “make America what it used to be.” To people whose livelihoods have suffered because of economic shifts ushered in by technology, moving backward looks better than moving forward—not just in economic issues but in social mores as well.

Kevin Maney doesn't really press the parallel along to a civil war. I suppose if an industrial revolution of steam and metal produced weaponry on the battlefields, in a digital revolution most of the actual fighting between the anachronisms and the moderns will remain on line. I have to steal this quote from a FB friend:- I've come to the conclusion that Trump is what would happen if the comments section became a human and ran for President. “

The Railways: Nation, Network and People by Simon Bradley

I'd like to be magisterial and say The Railways: Nation, Network and People by Simon Bradley is the definitive work, or as comprehensive a book as you can find on the history of Britain's railways. I'd like even more to be the happy pedant, pointing out lacunae in the description of how Britain adopted the standard gaurge against Brunel's broad gauge. But I know almost nothing of railways, though I love travelling by train, so have to come to this book as the general reader of a well-written, entertaining piece of social history that cites novelists and poets as well as engineers. Simon Bradley quotes the book-making Victorians – Dickens, Trollope and Surtees as well as films like Brief Encounter, The Railway Children and the opening scene of a Hard Day's Night, where the Beatles dodge their screaming fans “behind poster hoardings and into telephone boxes and photo booths” in the cluttered concourse of the 1960s.

 

Bradley's book tells a big story – the technical development of the railways and their social impact, and embroiders it with fascinating details eg the contents of the luncheon baskets and the placing of toilets, the slight ring underfoot on the Southern Railway's preferred concrete over timber platforms. He devotes a whole chapter to signals, which doesn't stoke my boiler, however, his writing flows and he never loses sight of the human beings – in this case, the solitary signal-man on duty in his box. He explains the sensible height of British platforms (set at 915mm i.e. 3 feet) with a step or two to the train compared to the steep climb on the Continent. He gives the reason why Cambridge station is such a trek from the town centre because the dons feared loss of control of undergraduates and pulled strings to ensure that the station was built well over a mile away from the town.

Former platform on National Cycle Network 1

The railways created their own kingdom “a physically separate domain, in thousands of route-miles fenced off from the rest of the country and ruled by their own mysterious rhythms and laws.”

Cyclist on National Cycle Network 1

Simon Bradley was a young train-spotter – not just of the locomotives but of those working on them. “Driver and ganger alike belonged nonetheless to the world of proper work, visible and practical and comprehensible – a world away from the office-bound lives of most of our own fathers.” He conveys the excitement of the Victorians as this great force entered into their lives, as transforming as computers and the internet in ours. The landscape was altered with embankments and tunnels and viaducts.

Detail of former railway bridge, now carrying cyclists and pedestrians

He points out that bridges were a relatively rare sight before the railways came. Oldest bridges were almost all bespoke structures. Only when canals arrived were bridges multiplied to standard engineers' design. Now their striding arches are one of the splendours of the British landscape. (For cantilevered iron, the Forth Bridge beats the preening Eiffel Tower any day of the week, and how much finer the Glenfinnan Viaduct is than pompous static showoffery like the Arc de Triomphe.)

Viaduct on the National Cycle Network 1

“Part of the fascination of the railways is their permeation with memories and traces of obsolete working routes, and the human lives and destinies they shaped. The physical record is often patchy, because different aspects of the system have changed and developed at wildly varying speeds. The modernised freight network envisaged by Dr Beeching is already utterly lost; the diffuse small-scale system which he knocked for six is more remote still. Yet the bridges, tunnels and earthworks that carry the twenty-first century traveller are still predominantly those the Victorians witnessed take shape.”

Bradley moves beyond the Victorians and their share-owned competing railway companies through to British Rail and to today's mess of ownership – state subsidy of dividends to share-holders:-

“The old British Rail system was subsidised between 1 billion and 1.5 billion. Subsidies since this time have reached as high as 6.3 billion….Much of this money comes nowhere near the operating side of the railway, but is sucked straight out again in dividends, administrative and legal costs ,inflated salaried and bonuses. Nor is the system cheap for its users. [Grossly expensive, and Byzantinely complex in fact.] All of these features are intrinsic, not accidental, parts of the business model under which the railways were privatised – a process that,… was meant to address the supposed scandal of a public opened system which required high subsidies in order to operate. It has proved an extremely expensive way of saving money.”

Though Bradley does follow to the modern age via the marshalling yards and the change to diesel, it is the Victorians and Edwardians who dominate from when the technology was innovative and exciting.

The new words such as stoke, shunt, siding, running out of steam, on the right lines. Time, once set by the “guildhall and town hall and church steeple” was set by the “power of capital”. The landowners were challenged and there would be battles between the surveyors and navvies and estate workers where theodolites would be smashed. (In Middlemarch there's just such a scene – not quoted by Bradley.)

As the railways developed they were felt at the time to be as unstoppable and transforming as our own digital revolution. So in Trollope's Rachel Ray set in Devon, which was late to be connected, the timid matron Mrs Ray says of her journey to Exeter:- '“I thought the train never would have got to the Baslehurst station. It stopped at all the little stations, and really I think I could have walked as fast." A dozen years had not as yet gone by since the velocity of these trains had been so terrible to Mrs. Ray that she had hardly dared to get into one of them!' ' There are obvious comparisons with the elderly of today who once wondered at the young's sci-fi interweb thing now complaining of the speed of their Skype.

The railways have been with us for long enough to have created their own archaeology. I live across the road from the busy Edinburgh to Glasgow line, which I walk or cycle under every day. My commute goes past an embankment which was once a line and is now the National Cycle Network 1 cycleway. On the route are ghosts of platforms and you are riding unaware over a viaduct which is visible from the street a hundred feet below. There was a railway yard, now a place for billboards (advertising was a huge feature of Victorian stations). Another part of it is scrubland which the Council is planning to turn into a further cycleway, restoring a bridge or two.

Once a railway line, now scrubland, future cycleway

The living railway, Glasgow to Edinburgh line

When I see the great nineteenth railway structures – the viaducts, the Forth Bridge, the grander railway stations, I feel that we are lesser beings living in the half ruin of a mightier civilisation. We don't build such grandeur any more but conserve with our heritage industries, our endless touristing.

Bradley's last chapter is about the volunteers running old lines. He describes a “steam-hauled express arrives from a visitant from the another world, a sort of industrial unicorn or dragon.” Crowds gather to view this icon of another age, as beautiful and obsolete as a full-rigged man of war.

“Made vivid again, here is something that transcends Nature, an amazing work of man; what H.G Wells, writing in 1901, proposed as the best symbol for the century that had just passed, 'a steam engine running upon a railway.”

The Flying Scotsman

Where are the faxes of yesteryear?

I get a lot of my social history from novels and second- and third-rate novels can unintentionally tell interesting stories about the customs of their age. So when I listened to Lucy Kelloway's lively History of Office Life (sorry deadline passed – memo got lost in the internal mail/you must have accidentally deleted my message) I was reminded of Dorothy L. Sayers' Murder Must Advertise, which is set in an advertising agency, Pym's Publicity. 

Murder Must Advertise is not much of a detective story, as the plot is elaborate rather than ingenious and the hero is Lord Peter Wimsey, the most annoying of the amateur sleuths from the golden age of detective fiction. But it does pick up the atmosphere of the office – those daytime villages with their feuds, friendships, gossip, rumours, the management being the squires alternatively disciplining and giving the villagers treats.

On the first page we are taken to the typists' room, which is the social hub. The workers are “frivoling” and arranging a sweepstake. Enter one of the managers.

“Mr Ingleby, can you spare me a moment?”

At Mr Hankin's mildly sarcastic accents, the scene dislimned as by magic. .. Mr Willis, rising hurriedly with the tray of carbons in his hand, picked a paper out at random and frowned furiously at it. Miss Parton's cigarette dropped unostentatiously to the floor, Mr Garrett, unable to get rid of his coffee-cup, smiled vaguely and tried to look as though he had picked it up accident and didn't know it was there, Miss Meteyard, with great presence of mind, put the sweep counterfoils on a chair and sat on them. Miss Rossiter, clutching Mr Armstrong's carbons in her hand, was able to look businesslike, and did so. Mr Ingleby alone, disdaining pretence, set down his cup with a slightly impudent smile and advanced to obey his chief's command.

“This,” said Mr Hankin, tactfully blind to all evidences of disturbance, “is Mr Bredon.”

When the city took over from the tribe or clan human beings created a neighbourhood or a guild or a political group or a blog-with-commenters or some other small community. The office workers travel to populate the daily office village and instead of the blood tie it's the work that pulls the group together – the work and the profit if it is a money-making concern. In the early nineteenth century Charles Lamb returned to his East India Office after he had retired and found that he was now a ghost, as colleagues are when estranged from the business of the office and have become merely part of its history and folklore at best.

Sayers herself worked in an advertising agency in the 1920s.* Middle-class women started working in offices around the late nineteenth century. They were first of all kept segregated in case they distracted the men and for fear of corrupting their own morals. In Sayers' office mild gallantry and a little flirting are allowable but the women were still supposed to stay chaste.

He went and told Hankie once that he'd seen me at the dog-races with a gentleman friend. As if it was any business of his what a girl does out of business hours. … Just because anybody's a mere typist it doesn't mean one's a heathen slave.

And Miss Meteyard, the only woman copywriter, can be blackmailed because “of some man or other”, which the strait-laced owner of the company would take a dim view of.

Later on offices became more raunchy until the 1960s when the secretaries were pinchable bottoms, which preceded our own time of appropriate behaviour and sexual harassment.

The business in Murder Must Advertise is the new profession of advertising which was less hide-bound than, say, law. So it is possible for Miss Meteyard a Somerville graduate, to be a copy writer as Sayers was (she worked on the Guinness Toucan campaign).* The rest of the women are secretaries, typists, facilities managers and cleaners, as they tend to be today.

The typists tapping rhythms on their percussive typewriting machines are the female heart of the office, and they have feminised it, buying the cakes for tea and organising collections for wedding presents – still pretty much part of the secretarial job. This feminisation makes the atmosphere of Sayers' office very different from Trollope's all male clerks outfits where social life was at the chop-house. Many secretaries and PAs take on the matriarchal and social oiling role – buying flowers, offering tissues and concern and handing round the giant Sorry You're Going farewell card for everyone to sign.

From the 1973 television adaptation. They had cups and saucers those days.

The internal telephone is not used as it would have been in an American office of the same vintage. The British stuck to their messengers for a long time, and in Sayers' novel the office boys have an important part in the plot as the eyes and ears. A modern counterpart would be the IT support person who accesses everyone's computer in person or digitally and can snoop. In the Golden Age of detective fiction the murders were usually done in a country house or village or some other limited community so everyone could be accounted for and alibis concocted. Sayers got round the problem of a hubbub of employees through the office boy's tenacious memory and sharp observation to narrow down the pool of suspects. (Later on P D James stuck to outfits like a publisher's or research unit to keep the number of likely murderers down.)

Sayers' office workers have proper tea breaks and a woman with a tea trolley – something I'm old enough to remember from a few decades ago, a time when you went out for lunch with a beer or two chucked in, instead of the sparkling water, a sandwich and a browse of the internet at the desk. They are still Misters and Misses and will be until the 1960s until there is only one ancient scary bloke who everyone calls Mr (as in my place) and email address lists are organised by first names rather than last.

Lucy Kelloway now has a new series The Joy of 9-5.  It was unionised factory workers who won the 9-5 and the paid holidays which spilled over to the office workers. These days though many paper-pushers and email-copyees work punishing hours. However the maternalism still remains in that although the hours hurt, HR and the management hand out pain-killers in the form of stress counselling. Admonitions are wrapped up in praise. Rather than being nosy about our sexual morals the management worries about our personal problems which they investigate with psychometric tests finding out whether you are a Dominant Influencer Steady or Compliant (DISC) . The many courses we are offered on work management, self-realisation, know yourself, how to be more effective – it is a blurring of lines between office and home, along with the other blurrings. Thus work steals more and more time. Sayers' characters below top management level had to sign the time register; these days it's moral pressure of not wanting to be seen to be the first to leave.

We are mostly doomed to work and if we can, we find something interesting to do among congenial colleagues. Sayers' advertising agency in spite of murder and blackmail is more fun than than the paper suppliers of Ricky Gervais's The Office.

Miss Meteyard,:- “Sopo Day is Cinema Day.” “Leave the Laundry to ruin itself while you addle your brains at the Talkies.” Muck! Dope! And they pay me £10 a week for that sort of thing. And yet, if we didn't do it, what would happen to the trade of this country? You've got to advertise.'

And everyone smokes as they did to about the beginning of this millennium. I remember when the accounts room was blue with haze.

The big campaign Sayers' advertising agency works on is cigarettes.. “This scheme should carry a strong appeal to women.. We want to get women down to serious smoking. Too many of them play about with it.... You can smoke a lot more of them in the day without killing yourself. And they're cheaper. If we increase women's smokes by 500 percent – there's plenty of room for it-”

That is what really makes this novel show its age. Also, the newspaper that runs the advertisements is the Morning Star.  It's a fictitious paper. The Commie rag with that name was then called the Daily Worker. 

*She came up with the Toucan rhyme for Guinness:-

 

We Conquer'd Them at Waterloo

Ebenezer Elliott, iron monger, Radical and Corn Law poet wrote a lament for the enemy of his country, Napoleon Bonaparte. To a later generation it sounded shocking. W H Auden said of it, that it was like finding a poem saying Now Hitler lies dead in Berlin.

When working blackguards come to blows,
And give or take a bloody nose,
Shall juries try such dogs as those,
Now Nap lies at Saint Helena ?

No, let the Great Unpaid decide,
Without appeal, on tame bull's hide,
Ash-planted well, or fistified,
Since Nap died at Saint Helena.

When Sabbath stills the dizzy mill,
Shall Cutler Tom, or Grinder Bill,
On footpaths wander where they will,
Now Nap lies at Saint Helena ?

No, let them curse, but feel our power;
Dogs! let them spend their idle hour
Where burns the highway's dusty shower;
For Nap died at Saint Helena.

Huzza! the rascal Whiglings work
For better men than Hare and Burke,
And envy Algerine and Turk,
Since Nap died at Saint Helena.

Then close each path that sweetly climbs
Suburban hills, where village chimes
Remind the rogues of other times,
Ere Nap died at Saint Helena.

We tax their bread, restrict their trade;
To toil for us, their hands were made;
Their doom is seal'd, their prayer is pray'd ;
Nap perish'd at St. Helena.

Dogs! would they toil and fatten too?
They grumble still, as dogs will do:
We conquer'd them at Waterloo;
And Nap lies at Saint Helena.

But shall the villains meet and prate
In crowds about affairs of state?
Ride, yeoman, ride! Act, magistrate!
Nap perish'd at Saint Helena.

Elliott was living through the early nineteenth century. Habeas corpus suspended, tough censorship laws, men press ganged for the navy, a cruel penal code, the poor starved by Corn Laws and shut out of enclosed lands. To many it was a tyranny and the French Revolution, and Napoleon, the Revolution's saviour, meant hope of a transformation. Elliott's poem is full of scorn and bitter anger at the injustice within the legal and economic system.

Napoleon was much admired by the progressive spirits of his day as an alternative to old rotten regimes. Martin Kettle in The Guardian:-

William Hazlitt, the most ardent of all British radical admirers of Napoleon, called the battle of Waterloo “the greatest and most fatal in its consequences of any that was ever fought in the world”. William Godwin, another of the Waterloo dissidents we should be remembering this week, railed against the “miserable consequences of that accursed field”, and continued throughout his life to believe that, however flawed Napoleon might be, he was still to be preferred to the restored Bourbon kings.

... William Cobbett put it in this way: “The war is over. Social Order is restored; the French are again in the power of the Bourbons; the Revolution is at an end; no change has been effected in England; our Boroughs, and our Church, and Nobility and all have been preserved; our government tells us that we have covered ourselves with glory.”

William Hazlitt and William Cobbett are two of the best writers and the most generous minds that Britain has ever produced.

Kettle says that they may seem like useful idiots and it is reminiscent of how a powerful figure in a foreign land – Lenin, Stalin, Chavez – is picked up as a sign of hope that the old oppressive power can be broken. Sections of the Left fell into despair when the USSR collapsed, as better a false hope than no hope at all. 

Napoleon was no Stalin and a reformer in many ways but his scheme for a conquered Britain sounds more like propaganda than actuality. “I would have proclaimed a republic and the abolition of the nobility and the House of Peers, the distribution of the property of such of the latter as opposed me amongst my partisans, liberty, equality and the sovereignty of the people.” 

There would have been some liberal measures – emancipation of the Jews for instance – but Napoleon's habit was to install one of his useless siblings on the thrones of the countries he conquered. During the nineteenth century Britain went its own way to a more liberal and democratic government, out of Old Corruption to cleaner politics and a less jobbing civil service.

So I'm glad that the Emperor of the French got done over by Wellington and Blucher at Waterloo, the battle that Wellington described as “ been a damned nice thing — the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life. “ Blucher had wanted to call Waterloo the Battle of La Belle Alliance but Wellington decided on Waterloo as more easily tripping off the English tongue. I've always had a liking for Wellington if only for his laconic pithiness of speech compared to Bonaparte's bombast and grandiosity.

There's plenty of French Empire bling in the television series that Andrew Roberts, the military historian and an admirer of Napoleon, is presenting. 

He also has a five parter on Radio 4 on the Corsican Usurper and yesterday he was telling us how Napoleon screwed up winning the Battle of Waterloo. 

“The history of a battle, is not unlike the history of a ball. Some individuals may recollect all the little events of which the great result is the battle won or lost, but no individual can recollect the order in which, or the exact moment at which, they occurred, which makes all the difference as to their value or importance. .. “ Wellington.

Two sorts of pedalling

From The Singing Bourgeois

About the decline of the British ballad in the 1890s:-

There are other factors to consider, however, not the least of which concerns the improvements made in the comfort and safety of bicycles. The attraction bicycling held for young women in the 1890s created growing resentment in the music trades, culminating in a welter of anti-cycling propaganda in 1896. Here is an examle taken from the Musical Times of that year:

We may point out that a new and msot formidable enemy of the pianoforte has arisen of late in the bicycle. . .there are literally thousands of young ladies whose leisure hours, formerly passed in large part on the music-stool, are now spent in the saddle of the 'iron bird' … proof positive is afforded by advertisements which announce the sale of pianofortes by individuals at great sacrifice on the ground that their owners are 'going in for cycling'.

Attempts were made to dissuade women from cycling by appealing to their concern for health – 'the rapid passage through the air my be a positive source of danger' – or by appealing to their vanity – 'the bicycle hand … becomes flattened, bulges out at the sides, gets lumpy and out of shape, and the fingers become crooked.; The last bit of 'expert' advice issued from the United States where cycling was also turning women away from music during their leisure hours. It would be wrong, therefore, to see the bicycle as something only threatening the profits of the British music trade. The situation was obviously being exaggerated since there still remained an enormous demand for teachers of music (particularly piano teachers), the number of 'music masters' almost doubling between 1881 and 1911, according to census figures. These teachers were forced to compete in a 'payment by results' environment where the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music developed a system of graded examinations.. However, their pupils were now able to gain good passes on all of the exams by restricting their learning to a few pieces a year. In 1899 the British Medical Journal voiced their concern not against cycling but against too much piano practice, suggesting it was responsible for 'the chloroses [green sickness - a form of anaemia] and neuroses from which so many young girls suffer'...

I would have thought a young middle-class woman would have leisure for both bicycling and piano, since during bad weather she could play the piano. However, it may have been part of the general hostility towards girls cycling at the time.

I did the Royal Schools of Music grades during my youth and I think they were a menace because you only did concentrate on about three pieces.

Also The Singing Bourgeoisie: Songs of the Victorian and Drawing Room and Parlour is probably sound about the actual musical quality of drawing room songs but is otherwise a bit glib in which it derives songs from the economic sub-structure.  I bought it thinking it was a collection of songs.   

ANZAC day

Yesterday being 100 years since the landing on Gallipoli, I'll repost this:-

Today, 25th April is ANZAC day, which in Australia and New Zealand is the equivalent of Armistice Day.  It commemorates the landing of the ANZAC forces in Gallipoli during the First World War, where they were ultimately defeated by the Turks.  In Britain this is called the Dardanelles campaign, but in Australia and New Zealand it’s called “Gallipoli.“  This song by Eric Bogle tells the story of a crippled veteran:-  

Eric Bogle emigrated to Australia from Peebles in Scotland .  He does the odd tour in the UK and I have seen him received rapturously by a Scottish folkie audience.  He’s short and a bit tubby, and a young bloke sitting next to me said, “He’s a god, isn’t he?” in a voice of pure worship.  I’ve met him a few times and he’s a very nice, unassuming guy.

I find the song heart-breaking but the last verse is wrong:-

And the old men march slowly, all bent, stiff and sore
The forgotten heroes from a forgotten war
And the young people ask, "What are they marching for?"
And I ask myself the same question.

The war, the Gallipoli part of it, isn’t forgotten by a long stretch.  The young people know about it and on their almost compulsory overseas travels go there to be greatly moved and greatly accusing of the British, especially Winston Churchill (then First Lord of the Admiralty and chief instigator of the campaign) for leading their ancestors into such a mess.  In my primary school I was taught it as one of the great cock-ups of history.  The film Gallipoli presents the British as tea drinking incompetents and ignores the great numbers of British troops who were also killed in the campaign.  Gallipoli, both in historical fact and legend, influences the movement for an Australian republic. 

There is no ill feeling towards the Turks because they are seen as defending their own territory.   Turks are also friendly and welcoming to travelling strangers, and are generally liked.

I have done the tour of Gallipoli myself, gazing at the beach landing where the invading troops had to scramble up a cliff, and the little hill tops they had captured briefly and then lost.  The place smelt of pine, the grass was brown and brittle, the cicadas were chirping,  the air was hot, the sea blue and the terrain steep and hilly.  It reminded me of Auckland, where some of my family live.  The tanned Australians and New Zealanders in shorts and t-shirts were very respectful around the graves and treated the English guide like Jeremy Paxman interviewing a politician.  “So who was responsible then?”  They told each other stories about dysentery and thirst that had been handed down by grandfathers and great great uncles.  “They stood in shit (pronounced “sheet”) all the time and the smells were awful.”

They acknowledge the bravery and endurance of the soldiers, and become terribly emotional about their suffering, without feeling they need to defend the cause for which they fought, just blaming the old imperialist state.  Colonial lions led by donkeys sitting around a table in London.

For the Turks their victory was an inspiration for Turkish nationalism.  Mestafa Kemal was a divisional commander and his success at repelling the invaders gave him huge prestige, helping him in his later political career which finally culminated in his becoming Ataturk, the Father of Turkey, whose statues and portraits are found all over the country. The tourists look at the many British and Commonwealth graves and memorials to find their family names but they also stop at the slab on which are carved Ataturk’s words of reconciliation:-

Those heroes that shed their blood and lost their lives. You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side here in this country of ours.. You the mothers who sent their sons from far away countries wipe away your tears. Your sons are now living in our bosom and are in peace. Having lost their lives on this land they have become our sons as well.

Australians and New Zealand English wouldn’t produce such rhetoric but they are touched by it. 

The Turks call the campaign after the port Çanakkale where the Turks repulsed the Royal Navy and they have their own beautiful song,  Çanakkale içinde, which is very popular.

 

 

The war is declared.
It came down on us like fire.
The whole country shed tears.
The Anyali Carsi,
the market place, in Çanakkale
I'm leaving for the enemy Mother
And there goes my boyhood.
The cypress tree grows tall in Çanakkale
Some of us were engaged,
Some married,
And there goes my boyhood.
They've shot me in Çanakkale
Put me in a grave, I wasn't dead!
And there goes my boyhood.

It is not a victory song but like Bogle's song a lament for lost youth.

While I was looking for a translation of the lyrics of that song, I found an Islamist take on Dardanelles/Gallipoli/Çanakkale.

We have celebrated the annual commemoration of the martyrs of Çanakkale (pronounced Chanakkalé) with a mawlid on Thursday night. The actual day was Wednesday, March 18th.

Sheykh Abdul Kerim Efendi reminded us of the significance of this battle as the last real jihad authorized by the Caliph, the Sultan in Istanbul. This 19th Crusade to destroy Islam failed as a consequence of about 250,000 martyrs, mostly young men aged 18-25. It marked the triumph of spiritual and religious power over state of the art materialistic power.

And on the back of that triumph the atheist Ataturk set up a secular state.

(I wrote this later):-

Generations

(for my brother-in-law, John Lyall)

From Australia, my mother made a call.
“What are you doing? “Nothing much at all.”

“I remembered young Dave Lyall today,
Your great uncle, killed at Suvla Bay.

At seventeen,” And that was young to me,.
David Lyall, left in Gallipoli.

And my grandfather, who was crippled from,
A bullet in the neck got at the Somme.

We cleared my mother’s house and found his pack,
The unit number stencilled on the back.

The empires spilled and caused a mighty stain.

This cafe is encased by Auckland’s rain.

I think of that old war, and it’s so sad,
And long ago. I tap my phone. “Hi, Dad!”

“Whatcha doing?” Nothing much. Work and fun”
No khakied man taught us to fire a gun.

I talk to David Lyall, Davo, my son.