The Codebreaker Girls – Only 99c!
6 days ago
The point is that the WSPU, though it is extraordinarily well known and has had a great deal of attention devoted to it by the journalists, writers and the entertainment industry, was only one of several organizations and not a particularly popular one among suffragists in general. (The word "suffragette" was first coined by the Daily Mail as an insult and has been used as a sort of rough distinction from "suffragists" who wanted to achieve votes for women through peaceful means and rational arguments.)
Looking at the undoubtedly fascinating collection of photographs, some known but mostly not, and documents issued by the police and the Home Office I was reminded that I still have not written sufficiently about Conservative suffragists, which I shall do very soon.
However, it was undoubtedly annoying to see some of the old myths being peddled if only indirectly. The introductory comments explained that the fight for women's suffrage had been going on for almost a century before the WSPU was formed but with no success. Therefore, some of the suffragists, led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, especially the lawyer Christabel, decided on ever more violent action. This made the cause well known though divided opinion, added the note. The implication, unstated because it would not be true, that the militant activity of the Pankhursts was successful in the way previous peaceful campaigning had not been.
Nothing could be further from the truth. Women did not get the vote until 1918 and that was the result of their supreme war effort that really destroyed the argument that women cannot be trusted to think about bigger issues than their homes.
It does seem to me that the myth of the victorious violent and often left-wing (certainly as far as Sylvia and Adela Pankhurst were concerned) should be laid to rest. Would the National Portrait Gallery consider an exhibition of portraits of Suffragists, many of whom were Conservative?
Having just read one of E. C. R. Lorac's novels, These Names Make Clues, (not one of her best, as it happens though it strengthens my suspicion that Edith Caroline Rivett, a. k. a. E. C. R. Lorac, a. k. a. Carol Carnac, was a crossword addict who would not have dreamed of starting her day's activity without finishing the one in the Times first) I have once again noted a curious aspect to Golden Age Detective (GAD) novels. The characters, if they happen to be educated literate ones, which they often are, always seem to have read every single recently published book.
When did they have time to do all that and do their own work as well as other activities and keep up with their knowledge and reading of the various classics? Were there fewer books published in the thirties? There certainly were in the forties because of paper shortage but it all picked up again in the fifties. Were there more hours in the day, more days in the week? Books were certainly cheaper but not that cheap, relative to income, so there is the financial consideration to be taken into account. Or was it simply the fact that they did not have to do the washing up and there was no TV to watch?
While we are on the subject of detective fiction characters' reading, I may add that one aspect of P. D. James's novels have always bemused me. Her hero, who rises through the higher ranks of the Metropolitan Police is Adam Dalgliesh, Commander, I believe, towards the end of the series (so far) and a well-known and highly regarded poet. Now, I happen to be acquainted with poets and know about the extent of poetry reading in this country. Actually, extent is not really a word one would use, so negligible it is, when it comes to newly published poetry. Yet, whenever Adam Dalgliesh with whatever rank turns up to investigate a crime and interview the various suspects and people involved, among them he always finds a number who have read his poetry and have acquired his latest book. This is not remotely realistic.
Before TH moves to a discussion of the two titles, the collection as a whole and of its astonishing author, let us look at the curious conundrum raised by Bryan Morgan (himself a railway enthusiast, author of books on the subject and editor of The Railway Lover's Companion as well as of an exellent collection, entitled Crime on the Lines):
The nexus between railways and the clergy (today including at least two bishops, and extended to include such fringe churchmen as organists) has been often remarked upon but never fully explained. Should one, for instance, accept the view of a current professor of scripture that the organisation of a railway is a microcosm of God's organisation of the universe, or agree with that vicar and author of popular children's books who claims that despite their faults the railways and the church are the best ways of transporting a man to his final destination? Or should one look to the late Canon Roger Lloyd's opinion that railway-lore is 'morally good in the sense that it healthily occupies the mind and so becomes a subsidiary and indirect cause of that self-forgetfulness which is at the root of all virtue'?Most certainly there is a link between railways and spy stories, at least those of that period as well as detective ones. But why the clergy should find itself so enamoured with trains and all matters to do with them remains a mystery and if Bryan Morgan cannot solve it, nobody can.
Certainly, though, the clerical or lay enthusiast of the early years of the present century was a happy man; for Britain's railways were then at their peak of glory. 'Brief years, from the death of Queen Victoria to the outbreak of war', as Mr Hamilton Ellis has written, 'were proud years. Enormous coal-trains rumbled and handsome expresses rushed about the country. Maintenance was high and locomotives were often painted in gorgeous colours.' Bradshaw ran to nearly 1200 pages (a figure never preceded or exceeded) and in many a country rectory stood as a work of reference beside Crockford's. Numerous parsons stumped while drafting a sermon must have relaxed intellectually by working out the quickest route between Saxmundham and Blisworth.
Whitechurch was an astonishingly prolific author of detective and other novels and short stories as well as books of topography and autobiography. As Mr Morgan says, his duties in the Church could not have been particularly onerous.
His knowledge of the railways seems to have been outstanding and several of the short stories have pages of incomprehensible detail about the various activities, which does not, oddly enough, detract from the actual plots that are usually very straightforward, sometimes of the detective, sometimes of the thriller variety.
Nine of the fifteen are concerned with the activities of the "first railway detective" as acknowledged by no less an authority as Ellery Queen and Dorothy L. Sayers, Thorpe Hazell, who shares his creator's knowledge of trains and railways but is also something of a diet and exercise weirdo. TH has wondered idly whether Mrs Ariadne Oliver's creation, the vegetarian Finn, Sven Hjerson might not have been influencd by the character of Thorpe Hazell, though the latter sticks to a seriously unhealthy diet of milk, lentils, macaroni and Dutch cheese with nary a piece of fruit or vegetable. He also eats Plasmon biscuits and chocolate and does quite ridiculous exercises before and after meals. But give him a problem such as how to stop a German messenger from taking a stolen document out of the country or how to ensure that an important diplomatic meeting takes place or what happened to a valuable picture and, indeed, the carriage it was in and Hazell is in his element.
There are also six non-Hazell stories and these are all thrillers with the villains ranging from German agents to Russian police officials and violent union leaders. All in all, quite interesting but not altogether thrilling. According to Bryan Morgan, the British Library catalogue renamed the collection from Thrilling Stories of the Railway to just Stories of the Railway, and that is how they were reprinted in 1977. As indicated above the Australian on-line version restores the original title as did the BBC when it recorded Benedict Cumberbatch reading inexplicably abridged versions of the stories.
Even better, this was a new edition, published by John Murray (sadly now a part of Hodder and Stoughton) in 2006, sixteen years after the original, during which time many things happened in Central Asia and a new Great Game started. Mr Hopkirk acknowledges this by a new Preface and a whole new map. TH is lost in admiration. There were five maps before and now there are six, with an extra one that depicts The Battlefield of the New Great Game. Excellent.
Equally excellent is the conclusion of the new Preface:
For the collapse of the Russian rule in Central Asia has tossed the area back into the melting pot of history. Almost anything could happen there now and only a brave or foolish man would predict its future. For this reason I have note attempted to update my original narrative beyond adding this brief foreword. Among all the uncertainties, however, one thing seems certain. For good or ill, Central Asia is back in the thick of the news once more, and likely to remain there for a long time to come.Eight years on, that remains true.
The picture above, in the National Portrait Gallery, shows him in a slightly unusual mode, as an art collector.
Here, on the other hand, is an article from History Today about the politician and his end.
Burke comes into that category of people about whom we all seem to know a little but few of us know much or with any accuracy. Most of the quotations attributed to him are bogus or misquotations. He did not exactly say that all it took for evil to triumph was for good men to do nothing or various words to that effect, which one can find on the internet. What he wrote in his seminal 1770 book Thoughts on the Cause of the Present Discontents was:
When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.That actually makes sense. To be fair, having silly but plausible quotes attributed is a problem Burke shares with, among others, Churchill and Lincoln. He also shares with them the fact that people tend to assign to them their own opinions and political affiliations. Thus, Churchill's checkered party political career is little known or ignored by many and Lincoln is routinely assumed to have been a Democrat though he was a Republican.
With Burke the situation is even more complicated as he lived, wrote and was politically active long before the modern British political parties were formed. No reader of this blog needs to be told that Edmund Burke was not a Conservative as that party did not exist in his day nor a Tory as he was a Whig. A Rockinghamite Whig, to be precise, and as Mr Norman shows in his book, the main creator of a group that could be seen as the prototype of later political parties. The Rockinghamites were more than just a faction or a following that many eighteenth century aristocrats who bothered with politics had: though in opposition for many years they kept together and developed a core body of opinions on a number of subjects such as the need to come to an agreement with the North American colonies that they kept throughout their existence.
To many Burke may seem to have been a somewhat changeable thinker and politician. Why, people ask, did he support the Americans in their fight against the British Crown but was so vehement in his denunciation of the French Revolution from a very early stage? Burke denounced the French Revolution, the destruction of the French Monarchy and what he saw a sinking into mob rule as early as 1790 before the full horrors had developed. His Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) and Letter to a Member of the National Assembly (1791) were accurate predictions of what was to follow. He proved to be much more capable of understanding events than many of his allies and opponents such as Charles James Fox, Thomas Paine or Mary Wollstonecraft. (Online Library of Liberty has a fascinating section in which one can read all the most important works in The Debate about the French Revolution.)
In fact, Burke's thinking was mostly consistent and it is a rare historian who cannot see the basic difference between the ideas that motivated the American "rebels" and the French revolutionaries. Burke was simply ahead of most people. He could also see what the British government was doing wrong in Ireland and the problems with the East India Company - both being species of oppression and unaccountability. Many of these ideas have been discussed by previous biographers, particularly by Conor Cruise O'Brien in his magisterial work The Great Melody. (Curiously, Mr Norman does not mention an excellent short introduction to Burke, which has figured on this blog by Dennis O'Keeffe.
Jesse Norman divides his book into two, dealing with the great man's life in the first half and his ideas as well as their possible influence on present day political thinking in the second. The life is detailed enough but is not in the O'Brien category and rightly so. The chapters present a good account of his life and his writings, including a discussion of the relatively recently discovered early essay on political parties. (While I have no complaints about the text, I have very serious reservations about the scrappy notes and references as well as the less than adequate index.)
Mr Norman is clearly an admirer of Burke but is, nevertheless, ready to be critical when he thinks it is necessary, for example when he talks of the latter's behaviour during the Regency crisis. There is also a certain reticence over the impeachment of Warren Hastings, a controversial subject, though Burke's attitude to His Majesty's Indian subjects was clearly well ahead of his time and in keeping with his belief in freedom and dignity as the necessary portion of all.
The second part of the book is less happy in this reader's opinion. Burke's thoughts, writings and speeches had already been analyzed in the first half and there is little to add. Mr Norman concentrates on the question of how Burke's ideas are to be used today, a laudable enterprise, but he goes further and falls into the error that previous authors, notably Jim McCue had fallen into, by discussing how Burke might or might not have reacted to certain modern political ideas. This is futile. We cannot tell how an eighteenth century thinker, brilliant though he was, would have reacted to ideas of the late twentieth or early twenty-first century.
Jim McCue in his Edmund Burke and Our Present Discontents introduced a long (perhaps the longest) chapter which ranted at feminism and proved beyond any doubt in the author's mind that Burke would have hated feminism. Jesse Norman does not go that far but he does discuss a great many modern political, economic, social and anthropological ideas to prove that many things he does not like in our present state Burke would have disliked, too.
Mr Norman's particular bugbears are modern economists none of whom, according to him, can see beyond simple wealth creation or money making and liberal individualism, which denies the need for social networks and institutions. To say that this is a simplification of modern economics and of the theory of liberal individualism is to understate the case. One cannot help being a little worried about a politician who asserts over and over again that social and political structures are more important than individualism and individual liberty, particularly if he simplifies what the latter two mean. Is there not a suspicion that his idea of what a satisfactory social and political structures would be gives a primary position to politicians as creators and guardians of those structures?
Despite the long and sometimes only tangentially relevant discussions of modern sociology and social anthropology together with the often conflicting findings, the book is worth reading, not least because we must all rejoice in the existence of a literate politician who has some interest beyond vote getting tactics.
Beyond that, there is no doubt that Edmund Burke and his thoughts are of significance today just as they were in the past. He laid down many fundamental ideas about politics, gradual change, the need for a coherent social structure and the notion that there is a seamless whole between past, present and future generations and these are still relevant though many of the details have changed. At a time when the Conservative Party and the right in general are searching for definitions we could all do much worse than study those provided by Edmund Burke two hundred odd years ago.
Jesse Norman: Edmund Burke - Philosopher, Politician, Prophet
2013 London, William Collins
100 years ago today, on June 28, 1914 the shots that ushered in the disaster of the twentieth century were fired in Sarajevo by a Bosnian Serb, Gavrilo Princip at the Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. I need not go through all the subsequent events that eventually led to the First World War which, in turn, led to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires, and of Europe in general, pushed Britain and the British Empire closer to the bankruptcy and dissolution of the second half of the century and unleashed the two most evil ideologies of history: Nazism and Communism.
Just out of interest here is a link to The British Newspaper Archive that shows the coverage the Archduke's assassination received in British papers.
The second act of the century's tragedy is also commemorated today. 95 years ago, on June 28, 1919 the Versailles Treaty was signed and many of the century's tragedies was unleashed then. Certainly, in the Middle East we are still dealing with the outcome and no solution seems to be in sight.
Barbarossa Day. The German invasion of the Soviet Union begins. Not of Russia or of what was then Ukraine but of the Soviet Union or, in other words, eastern Poland that the Red Army had invaded in 1939. Did Hitler make a mistake by the invasion itself? It did not look like it at first as the Wehrmacht rolled ahead and Stalin and his gang were caught "unawares" despite the many warnings. Nevertheless, it was his big mistake or, to be precise, the conduct of the war in the east was.
Tory Historian has been ignoring THAT anniversary though THAT date (of THOSE shots) is coming. However, the time has come, TH thinks to read something around the subject and this new book about the Habsburgs by Paula Sutter Fichtner, who has written a great deal on the subject before, seems to be the right way to start.
The book starts with some discussion of Usage, that is of names, both geographic and personal, a matter of huge contention when one writes about the Habsburg empire, which she prefers to spell with a small e, because there are debates as to whether it had any or some imperial characteristics. (You see? We have a fierce contention before we even start.)
When it comes to place names the subject is fraught with difficulties, with borders and political structures changing all the time and many places having at least two or three legitimate (by some standards) names. Explanations are all very well but one really needs is maps. Lots of maps and, preferably, detailed ones.
By leafing through the volume, Tory Historian, a lover of maps, found three maps of Central Europe a. k. a. Habsburg lands in 1250, 1570 and c. 1815. They are not very detailed but they are maps and they give a reasonable idea of what the region looked like at three crucial periods. Eventually, TH found where the maps are listed; well, not listed exactly but their source indicated: right at the end, after the list of illustrations (numerically but not by page numbers) and before an indication of the source for several excellent family trees, also necessary if you want to follow the vagaries of the dynasty.
Not too bad for modern publishing. Could be better but at least there are some maps.
People seem to be interested in E. R. Punshon, a shamefully neglected writer of the Golden Age period and beyond. He was not in the top bracket though interesting and popular enough in his day. Let's face it, too many of those writers, male and female, have been forgotten for no good reason. Readers of classic detective fiction will be very glad to be able to get hold of more than just novels by the "four Queens", good though they are.
Martin Edwards, quoted on this blog once before, is a source of information about "forgotten" books. Last week he wrote about a Punshon book I has not heard before, Dictator's Way, and his description intrigued me, not least because it seemed to raise the perennial question as to whether GAD (Golden Age Detective) writers are particularly conservative in their outlook.
This blog has maintained consistently that detective fiction is in itself a "conservative" art not because its practitioners necessarily support the Conservative Party or even the existing political and social structures but because the very idea of finding individual human life important enough for its destruction to be seen as inherently wrong and in need of investigation as well as some sort of punishment is conservative.
Mr Edwards thinks that is debatable:
Punshon had liberal/leftish political views, and takes the opportunity to show his contempt for Hitler, Mussolini and Oswald Mosley in the course of a story dealing scathingly with the so-called "Redeemer" of Etruria. This political perspective gives the book spice, and also gives the lie to the often repeated but false claim that Golden Age writers were just a bunch of cosy reactionaries. Why have so many otherwise sensible people made such a claim? I suspect it's because, for the most part, the really successful Golden Age writers were conservative in outlook, although I'd describe some of them at least as questioning conservatives.I disagreed with that statement immediately (well, one would hardly expect me to do otherwise) and pointed out that the listed dictators (or wannabe dictators as in the case of Mosley) were radical, statist and socialist in their outlook; a conservative, thus, would feel nothing but enmity and contempt for them.
Hitler and Mussolini came to power or held on to power through revolutionary means (despite those elections in Germany in 1932 and 1933), changing the political and constitutional structures of their countries as well as attempting to change the social ones. In this they did not succeed nearly as well as their contemporary Joseph Stalin did but none of them can be called conservative or reactionary. By the time Dictator's Way was written (late 1937 or early 1938 as the book came out in 1938) Mosley had put himself outside the political establishment and the couple of disdainful references to him in the book sum up quite well the general attitude towards him. The Labour Party and the trade unions, on the other hand, were by this time an integral part of that establishment and it was hardly radical to support them.
I took the book out of London Library, a great repository of GAD literature, and found it as well written and entertaining as Punshon's other books though as badly proof-read, a perennial complaint. It is, however, somewhat odd in plot and structure.
The hero is, as so often, Bobby Owen, a scion of a noble family whom he tries to avoid and to keep hidden and a Detective Sergeant in Scotland Yard. In this book he meets the woman who will be his wife and, to some extent, co-investigator, Olive Farrar. Incidentally, a quick look at some later Bobby Owen novels reveals that although he is still a Detective Sergeant in 1939 by 1948 he reaches the position of Acting Deputy Chief Commissioner. And people say that John Appleby had a remarkable career.
Dictator's Way, a clever pun of a title, falls into two unequal parts. The first and the longer one appears to be a straightforward detective story. Bobby has a free afternoon and is planning to go to Lord's to watch some cricket but is waylaid by another and far more obnoxious scion of the aristocracy who tells him some incoherent story of possible wrong-doing that he wants sorted but not made public. As a consequence, Bobby misses Wally Hammond's batting and wanders off to have a look at Dictator's Way, place of the possible (or, as the police think, probable) wrongdoings.
Here he finds a semi-wild park, a house that is part empty and part luxuriously furnished, a few rather curious indications of possible crime, a well-known heavy called Clarence who seems to be unusually afraid of the police and a rather extraordinary girl, who turns out to be Olive. It is, of course, understood in GAD novels that all Scotland Yard officers knew all London criminals, their history and present whereabouts. Uniform branches knew merely the criminals of their area. That worked both ways: the criminals knew all the police officers, too.
Then Bobby finds a dead body and the investigation is led mostly by Superintendent Ulyett who is not particularly bright at this stage with the help of other police officers who seem to be on the stupid and self-satisfied side and Bobby who is bright and observant as well as managing to be on the scene whenever he is needed.
The investigation is very leisurely with plenty of scope for animadversions against modern life, the English social structure and establishment, senior police officers and fashionable restaurants. Here Punshon comes a cropper. He describes in witty fashion how a particular restaurant in the suburbs, Twin Wolves, which serves Etrurian cuisine, has become the most fashionable of all but when Bobby goes there in pursuit of Olive, now a suspect and finds her in the company of a young man who rapidly becomes another, there is a slight disappointment in the description of the dull and inappropriate lunch ordered by male suspect: "grapefruit, truite de la maison, grouse à la reine Marguerite, pêche Melba with a château wine to follow". Lord Peter Wimsey or Reginald Fortune this chap is not. What on earth is a château wine to follow? And cricket at Lord's is in July; there is no grouse on the menu before mid-August. (I wanted to get that off my chest but it has no relevance to the plot except to make one wonder about the much touted sophistication of second suspect.)
We also get a good deal of musing from Bobby about Olive (yes, he has fallen in love but the poor sap takes more than half a book to realize that) and, above all, we get Etruria, whose name reminds one rather forcefully of Ruritania, the original of which was Central European but the imitations, except for Buchan's Evallonia, tend to be Balkan. There is a clear connection between practically everyone connected with the murder and the house in which the body is found (except for Clarence) and Etruria, which is ruled by a very nasty dictator who calls himself the Redeemer. (It may be of some interest that while none of the various European dictators called themselves that, the name was used by Kwame Nkrumah, the first leader and dictator of Ghana, who was known as Osagyefo or Redeemer in the Akan language. But I digress.)
The shorter second part turns into a Buchanesque thriller and events, though not the language, speed up. There are strange goings on in Olive's cottage; a car and motorcycle chase through the dark; hysterical outbursts from Olive, who is given to announcing that tens of thousands of men, women and children are killed all the time so one more will not matter; a kidnapping (Bobby's); a chase and gun battle in the sea and a murder confession that surprises nobody.
We also find out a good deal more about Etrurian politics first from Bobby who seems to be very knowledgeable and then from the confessed murderer who is also the leader of the Etrurian opposition in Britain, an able, charismatic but fanatical individual. The Redeemer is a very nasty piece of works but, despite his friendship with Hitler and Mussolini, somewhat old-fashioned in that there seems to be no ideology and he prefers to suppress trade unions to co-opting them, a far more sensible procedure. The people are oppressed and unhappy and ready to rise; even the army and the navy are planning to join them. The Redeemer's opponents are jolly nice chaps (if, on occasion, fanatical) but he persists in smearing them by calling them Communist.
It is noticeable that Punshon, in his references to dictators, tyrants and totalitarian states means Hitler, Mussolini and his buddies, not Stalin or the Soviet Union. Communists, explains the confessed murderer and charismatic leader, are not all that different from the English Chartists. Well, I don't know. 1937 and 1938 were the years of two huge show trials and the ever widening Great Terror that saw the imprisonment, torture, murder and exile of millions. These were also the years in which Stalin's opponents in the West were kidnapped and murdered and non-Communist fighters on the Republican side were as likely to be killed by Soviet agents as by Franco's. I suppose the Chartists never came to power but, somehow, I do not think they were anything like the Communists.
The discussions about Etruria, Olive's hysteria (she gets over it by the end) and Bobby's reluctant admiration for the charismatic leader and confessed murderer shake somewhat his assumption in the need for law and order and wrongness of murder. After all, the victim, an agent of the Redeemer worked for the oppression of Etrurians who would like to have the sort of rights and liberties one enjoys in Britain.
Before he can solve the conundrum, the sea chase is over, the yacht puts in a Scottish harbour and Bobby, after a rest, speeds down to London where there are a couple of red herrings to be disposed of before there is a second murder, the victim being First Murderer. Well, the man had to be got rid of somehow and it would have been altogether too radical to send him back to Etruria, there to exercise his capable charisma and fanaticism as the new leader.
Bobby spots the vital clue and Second Murderer is confronted just as the newsboy shouts that there is an uprising in Etruria, the Redeemer has been shot together with anyone who did not change sides fast enough and the Etrurian People's Party has taken power. Stricken by his conscience and by the fact of the regime change in Etruria, Second Murderer also confesses and explains many hitherto incomprehensible matters. He does not, however, explain how it is that First Murderer, otherwise the Redeemer's greatest enemy whom his agents have never managed to get, should suddenly have turned himself into an easy target.
And that might be that except for the fact that there is another thematic and political twist.We watch with amusement Etrurians rapidly changing sides and announcing that they always knew the Redeemer was a Tyrant to the accompaniment of sardonic comments by Superintendent Ulyett who, at one point, likens those people to the Liberals about whom one cannot be sure whether they turned Tory or are really Labour.
Second Murderer is tried and condemned on his confession. The sentence is then commuted and he is quietly released because the information he has on the Secret Services of the remaining totalitarian states (no, still not the Soviet Union) is valuable enough to Britain, the Dominions and the United States whither he departs to help the government. This is the sort of cynical but practical accommodation we shall get used to in later spy thrillers but here there is an added twist. There is no question but the authorities and with them our heroes as well as the author, having played around with amoral ideas in the name of politics, feel that this is really the domain of those foreigners and the sooner they can be got rid of one way or another the better. Let them get passionate about politics in their own home countries.
In 1937 or 1938 such an attitude can be described as wishful thinking and highly conservative wishful thinking at that.
The greatest sea-borne invasion force sets out to liberate western Europe from Nazi occupation.
"Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force! You are about to embark upon a great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months. The eyes of the world are upon you. The hopes and prayers of liberty loving people everywhere march with you. In company with our brave Allies and brothers in arms on other fronts, you will bring about the destruction of the German war machine, the elimination of Nazi tyranny over the oppressed peoples of Europe, and security for ourselves in a free world.
"Your task will not be an easy one. Your enemy is well trained, well equipped and battle hardened, he will fight savagely.
"But this is the year 1944! Much has happened since the Nazi triumphs of 1940-41. The United Nations have inflicted upon the Germans great defeats, in open battle, man to man. Our air offensive has seriously reduced their strength in the air and their capacity to wage war on the ground. Our home fronts have given us an overwhelming superiority in weapons and munitions of war, and placed at our disposal great reserves of trained fighting men. The tide has turned! The free men of the world are marching together to victory!
"I have full confidence in your courage, devotion to duty and skill in battle. We will accept nothing less than full victory!
"Good Luck! And let us all beseech the blessings of Almighty God upon this great and noble undertaking."
— Gen Dwight D. Eisenhower, 6 June 1944.
Review copies of two books have been received, both seem interesting and will, in due course, be written about. One is by Timothy Heppell, called The Tories and subtitled From Winston Churchill to David Cameron, "a comprehensive and accessible study of the electoral strategies, governing approaches and ideological thought of the British Conservative Party from Winston Churchill to David Cameron". This is not, perhaps, the most exciting of all topics and the book is academic in its language and approach but it has the makings of an important study.
The other one appears to me to be more interesting: A State of Play by Steven Fielding is subtitled British Politics on Screen, Stage and Page from Anthony Trollope to The Thick of It. According to the Wikipedia entry, this "sets out the constructivist view that how individuals view politics is constructed by fictional works about politics". There is a good deal to that and I am not sure that is a particularly constructivist point of view. I also think Steven Fielding's website is of some interest.
Now all I have to do is read them and review them.
The book I have just finished is of a lesser breed: it is called Movable Feasts by Arnold Palmer and deals with the changing times of various meals, especially breakfast and dinner and with the slow introduction of lunch or luncheon (originally nuncheon) and afternoon tea into the timetable.
The book, written and published in the fifties is charming and often informative but suffers from that playful coyness that we can find in a good many books on food of that period despite the efforts of such writers as Elizabeth David, Patience Gray and others. There are, however, some interesting facts culled from letters, diaries and works of fiction from the 1780s to the First World War in the way the timing of various meals moved, sometimes later, sometimes earlier.
As the author explains, mostly his account is of the aristocracy and the gentry, with some interpolation of city gents and businessmen because, on the whole, we know more about them (though, as it happens, the timetable of working classes, farmers and even farm labourers is not unknown).
The book was reprinted in 1984 with an introduction by David Pocock that consisted of some comments about post-fifties eating habits and possible future developments. We can always assume that any predictions for the future are going to be wrong and Mr Pocock's are no exception. How could he possibly have known the interest in more traditional food, the growth of local food shops and of farmers' markets and, on the other hand, the development of luxury and complex convenience foods? One cannot really blame him for that.
What I did find slightly odd was the information he received from his Mass-Observation correspondents on which he based his own observations. Because these were observations sent in by various individuals they could never give an adequate picture but they are strange, nevertheless. According to these observations, people had stopped eating lunch, subsisting on a diet of tea and biscuits. The seventies and eighties were the heyday of the big business lunches but, presumably, people who indulged in them did not send in reports to Mass-Observations. But even people who were not in the business lunch category must recall the sandwich shops and their queues, the boxes of packed lunch that one took to work and the cups of soup one bought from various shops. Lunch at one's desk did not consist of nothing but biscuits. It consisted of sandwiches, maybe salads, soup, tea or coffee and it was eaten at the desk in order to have time to do something else when going out for a lunch break.
Mr Pocock also talks of the demise of the afternoon tea. While it rarely exists in its full glory at people's homes, it never really died out in various hotels and restaurants. In the last couple of decades it has had a great revival with every hotel, restaurant, cafe, especially museum cafes competing with each other in the production of afternoon tea (sandwiches, scones and cakes) or cream tea (just scones with jam and cream) plus a far greater variety of beverages than our ancestors could imagine.
It is Mr Palmer in the main body of the book who mentions another disappearance, that of muffins. They were not to be found anywhere in the British Isles in his day. Well he would be pleased now: muffins are available in every bakery and every supermarket. Their return was, I suspect, via the American brunch in which "English muffins" play an integral part.
Predictions are always difficult and should not really be indulged in by people who write about history; they should know that the past does not predict the future and, in any case, when it comes to food, names of meals and their times, the changes in the various centuries have been so great that it would be foolhardy to make a decision what to use as a basis for a prediction.
I would have wished fewer references to Henry James and some to Saki, who is a mine of information about lunches in the Edwardian years and who actually has a highly entertaining story called Tea. The story contains several different items of interest. We find out that 4.30 was the sacred hour of tea in all good houses and it usually involved a good deal of silver and porcelain as well as tinkling laughter on the part of the hostess; that even a young lady who was living on her own had tea at that hour but it may well have been a "picnic tea" in the kitchen; most interestingly, though, we find out that such a young lady, though from a good family, who had to work for a living, creating couture hats, could still afford caviare for tea.
Or what of Harold Nicolson's delightful essay Edwardian Weekend in his 1926 collection Some People? There could be no doubt in any reader's mind of the importance of afternoon tea or any other meal to the Edwardians. In fact, the only conundrum faced by anyone who read that essay is the possible state of those people's stomachs and livers.
Sadly, Arnold Palmer does not refer either to Saki or Nicolson but he culls many interesting bits of information from Dickens (naturally, since it is food), from Fanny Burney, Maria Edgeworth and Jane Austen as well as the tiresome Henry James.
He also has several stories of his own childhood memories and of memories of people older than himself who could recall late nineteenth and early twentieth century habits. Undoubtedly, these memories constitute the most amusing part of the book and the most informative.
The death of Lady Soames, née Mary Churchill, at the age of 91 has been announced. While she lived to a very good age and achieved a good many things, there is always a slight sadness as the country loses (inevitably) another link with the past, particularly events of the Second World War during which she had a far more interesting time than most members of the ATS as she often accompanied her father on his many trips abroad.
She was her father's favourite child and eventually managed to work out a reasonable relationship with her mother about whom she wrote a highly praised book that came out two years after Clementine's death. It can even be said that of all the Churchill children, Mary was the successful one in her life, family and, eventually, writing and public career.
The obituary in the Telegraph is all too obviously treading lightly on treacherous ground, historically and politically speaking, while the one in the Guardian is a little more outspoken, particularly on the subject of Sir Christopher Soames's unfortunate stint as the last governor of Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and his friendship with Robert Mugabe.
As we await with some trepidation that promised "new Agatha Christie", as it is advertised but mysteriously being written by Sophie Hannah, there is some good news on the continuation front. Mike Ripley, himself a much lauded writer of detective stories, has completed the last Mr Campion adventure, and entitled it Mr Campion's Farewell, presumably fitting in with the previous two, Mr Campion's Farthing and Mr Campion's Falcon.
The completion of a fragment should, presumably, be in a different category from the continuation of a series, which consists of the appropriation of someone else's creation. (Dorothy L. Sayers who mused a great deal on creativity in The Mind of the Maker, would have particularly disliked it, in Tory Historian's opinion.) The story of Mr Campion's existence is a little complicated. He was definitely Margery Allingham's creation but there is evidence that her husband Philip "Pip" Youngman Carter participated in some way in the production of the novels. Mike Ripley refers to it as "collaborated" and that is a loaded term.
After Allingham's death in 1966 her husband completed the novel she had started, Cargo of Eagles (published in 1968) then wrote rather rapidly two more, the one about the Farthing (published in 1969) and the one about the Falcon (published in 1970). He completed a couple of chapters of a third one before he, too, died in 1969. So there we were, with a fragment, no plot outline or character analysis, published by the Margery Allingham Society in The Bottle Street Gazette in 2008 - 9 when Mike Ripley, a great fan of the Allingham books, an expert on Albert Campion and a man who lived for twenty years within ten miles of Tolleshunt d'Arcy in Essex, the home of Allingham and Youngman Carter offered to finish the novel and suggested the title (the society having called the fragment Mr Campion's Swansong) and his offer was accepted by Barry Pike, the Society's Chairman, the manuscript having been left to them by Allingham's sister, Joyce, in 2001.
All this background is necessary to explain why the story of this particular novel is slightly different from the usual continuation of detective series, though Tory Historian finds it a little hard to accept that having completed the manuscript Mr Ripley has found it necessary to write another novel in the series. The last page of Mr Campion's Farewell tells us that "Mr Campion will return in Mr Campion's Fox". Hmmm.
Mr Ripley makes it quite clear that his style is modelled on Philip Youngman Carter's and not on Margery Allingham's, which is a great advantage from TH's point of view, Allingham's verbose and opaque style not being a favourite. Having not yet read either Farthing or Falcon, TH cannot judge whether the modelling or imitation is successful but it is definitely crisper and more amusing than a good deal of Ms Allingham's own writing, a statement that is likely to produce anathema on this blog from a number of readers. The one complaint TH has to make is that Campion's supposed royal connection (invented as a one-upmanship against Dorothy L. Sayers, who had a duke's younger brother as a hero, even if it was the richest ducal family) merely hinted at by Allingham, becomes far too prominent in this novel.
Not many of the usual characters appear even though the action takes place in the Suffolk wool town of Lindsay Carfax, based, according to Mr Ripley who knows, on Lavenham and in Cambridge. Lady Amanda Campion née Fitton (as she is apparently still known professionally) makes her presence felt very strongly. She has become a well-known aeroplane designer and air industry consultant though the firm she and Campion's brother-in-law, Alan Dell, had set up in the thirties has, we assume, been swallowed up by the state-owned air industry, just as the Ruritanian kingdom her brother had taken over in Sweet Danger must have long ago become part of some People's Republic. None of this is mentioned in this novel. There is, however, a sly reference to Lady Amanda attending a board meeting of some investment bank where she is "struggling to present the benefits of a delayed and over-budget British jet engine over a much cheaper American one which they could buy off the shelf".
Lugg, the "vulgarian in Mr Campion's service" makes a fleeting appearance if that adjective can be used in connection with him and Charlie Luke, still only Chief Inspector, sends Campion off on his adventure by telling a tale of obvious and rather mysterious wrongdoings in Lindsay Carfax, casually mentioning that Campion's or, rather, Amanda's niece (presumably the "little king's" daughter), Eliza Jane Fitton, an artist, lives there and is very close to a young man who is known to be a "Carder", one of a mysterious group of people who run the town, no doubt, for its own good.
The Campions' son, Rupert, is now an actor and married to an actress who is a bit of a luvvie, and they both do a bit of sleuthing for the old man on the Riviera but TH cannot help regretting that Rupert did not marry Charlie Luke's daughter, last sighted by TH as a formidable toddler about to wreak havoc on a number of lives. Whatever happened to her?
Campion, who is about 69 in the novel and makes numerous comments about his age, becomes involved in the various nefarious goings on, trying to solve several mysteries at once. As is the wont of such novels those separate mysteries coalesce though only more or less. One strand is worked out quite cogently though not at all surprisingly and the clue about who might be a member of the Carders is very clever (though the people are rather obvious).
There are references to suspicious deaths in the past. Charlie Luke talks of one that had taken place about thirty years previously, adding that had he been in charge, it would have been a murder investigation. The reader is not overwhelmingly surprised to find out towards the end of the book that it had, indeed, been a murder though the motive is quite ridiculously slight. The other suspicious death or, rather, deaths is of two Cambridge archaeology students the previous year. It is all tangled up with an invasion by hippies (the summer of 1968) and the Carders imposing certain discipline or apparently so. In fact, we never really find out whether the two students were murdered deliberately or were accidentally given a much too strong dose of LSD by someone who did not know how to dilute the drug but wanted to teach them a lesson.
Tory Historian's main complaint, however, is about the editing and proof reading. There are far too many misprints and missing words. If character A is consistently described as character B's much younger brother, he should not suddenly be spoken of as his son. (Actually, making him the son would have made much more sense and no difference to the plot.)
Are these important problems or merely niggling complaints? It really depends on how seriously one takes detective literature. Tory Historian takes it very seriously and considers these complaints to be important while admitting that they did not spoil the enjoyment of the book for more than a couple of minutes at a time.
1886 was an important election in British history as it ended the Liberal dominance of parliamentary politics that had given that party victory in five of the six elections since 1859 and power for seventeen of those twenty-seven years. In the subsequent nineteen years the Libearals would hold power for only three of them. The results were particularly spectacular as the previous year the Liberals had won again but Gladstone's growing obsession with Home Rule for Ireland split his party. The Conservatives under Lord Salisbury won 317 seats and their allies, the Liberal Unionists under Lord Hartington and Joseph Chamberlain, 77. The Liberals had 191 seats and their more or less reliable allies, the Irish Parliamentary Party, still under Charles Stewart Parnell, 85. The Conservatives and Liberal Unionists had a handsome majority. One of the people who won a seat with a majority of 461 in a poll of just under 7,000 was George Nathaniel Curzon who thus became an MP for Southport. In his biography of the man David Gilmour makes the following interesting comments:
A significant aspect of the election was the difference in the voting patterns between England and the Celtic fringe: Gladstone lost heavily in England, but his supporters won a majority of seats in Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Nevertheless, the English predominance gave victory to Salisbury and enabled him to set about the composition of his second ministry.In fact the predominance, as can be seen from the figures above, was very handsome. Yet, it is interesting to see how early that pattern set in. These days it is the Labour Party that tends to win in the Celtic fringe with Northern Ireland presenting a picture that is as different from the rest of the country as Ireland was then. Some of us still remember when the Scottish Conservative Party was a power in the land and when a number of Scottish seats were more or less permanently reserved for the Liberal Party as it was then. All that has changed but the different pattern between England and the rest of the United Kingdom remains.
Tory Historian salutes the great Duke of Wellington, whose birthday it is today. As he was born in 1769, this is not a particularly notable anniversary (345 years) but worth remembering.
On to another Conservative politician, Lord Curzon. Tory Historian was re-reading David Gilmour's biography of the great man and came across the following paragraph in the chapter about his Oxford years when he began to establish in his own mind what he wanted to do in life:
Curzon was never a political intellectual. He cared for the display and workings of politics, for oratory, statesmanship, the practice of government. He was not much interested in Tory philosophers. Hume and Burke interested him far less than Pitt or Canning. Principles were more important the ideas and efficient administration more important than either.TH cannot help wondering how many politicians actually understand the difference between those concepts.
Last July this blog had an anniversary posting of Daniel Defoe's stay in the pillory for publishing The Shortest Way With Dissenters. As today is the anniversary of his death, History Today has reprinted (well, on the net so, maybe, that is not quite the right word) an article from 2003 about Defoe and that stay in the pillory.
Not only is today St George's Day (as every schoolchild should know) but it is the day we traditionally celebrate as Shakespeare's birthday though the real day is unknown. We do know he was baptized on April 26, 1564, that is 450 years ago and died also on St George's Day in 1616. So let us celebrate both of them and what better way of doing so than by watching Sir Laurence Olivier speaking that speech:
Tory Historian does not find it particularly shocking that the Leader of Her Majesty's Mostly Loyal Opposition should suddenly find his own God or religion after a lifetime of secular atheism as several elections start looming. The one that really matters will be next year but it is as well to prepare oneself in time.
Mr Miliband has not only decided to "do God" in political terms - an unwise decision in TH's opinion - but has announced that he was looking forward to being Britain's first Jewish Prime Minister. There was a general outcry of people who seem to know basic facts of this country's political history better than Mr Miliband. Have we not had a Jewish Prime Minister already in the nineteenth century? And did not Mr Miliband quote him or, to be quite precise, misquote him not so long ago, when he told the listening world that Labour was now the party of "One Nation", a phrase usually though erroneously associated with Benjamin Disraeli.
Ah yes, we are told, not least by Mr Miliband and his media minions, but Disraeli had been baptized in the Anglican Church and was, indeed, a practising member of it. Well, Mr Miliband was brought up as a secular, Marxist atheist and has, until now, been certainly a practising member of the last group. (We can discuss the Marxist part separately.) Where is the difference? Certainly, Disraeli's contemporaries thought of him as Jewish and called him that, whether in admiration, as Bismarck did, or not so much as various Liberals in Britain did.
Furthermore, Disraeli was all his life fascinated by Judaism and inserted ideas about it into his speeches and even more into his novels. Until this moment nothing has been heard from Mr Miliband on the subject.
It is, perhaps, time for Tory Historian to alert ambitious women politicians in the Labour Party: should one of them become Prime Minister one day (at present an unlikely contingency but events might intervene), she will not be the first woman Prime Minister in Britain. As with the Jewish one, the Conservative Party got there first.
Saying, as Wikipedia does, that he was a spy is making an elementary mistake. Our chaps and chapesses are agents, theirs are spies. It would appear that Bingham was one of the people on whom John Le Carre based his most successful character, George Smiley, though I do not think Bingham looked anything like Alec Guinness. In fact, if the story of his activity is anywhere near accurate he seems to have been of greater importance and use to this country than even Smiley was. Then again, he does not seem to have uncovered Kim Philby, which would have been the equivalent of Smiley's achievement in Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy.
John Bingham's first novel was My Name is Michael Sibley, which is the one I have finally read. As Wikpedia points out, it is known to have been rather daring for its time (1952) as it implied that the "British police do not always play fair". Interesting, I thought and read the book, finding it disappointingly uninspiring. A detective story with no detection, a thriller with no surprises, it did not seem to warrant the praises I thought had been heaped on it. Actually, I seem to have been wrong. Julian Symons in his seminal work, Bloody Murder, did indicate a certain partiality as the book showed the British police to be rather nasty:
A large part of the fascination rests in his accurate account of police interrogation, something that had rarely been attempted in the British crime story. We learn nothing about the Chief-Detective Inspector and the Sergeant outside the limits of the case. They are the embodiment of potentially hostile officialdom, polite English versions of Chandler's policemen but equally conscious of their power.
One can see what influence that book might have had on subsequent writers though whether the description of the ever more unpleasant interrogations, written from the point of view of the innocent narrator who nevertheless tells one lie after another, is any more accurate than Ngaio Marsh's or Freeman Wills Croft's can be discussed at length. Did Julian Symons know or did he assume on the basis of his own political views?
In any case, even Julian Symons had to acknowledge that there are no surprises in the book. The narrator who protests his innocence turns out to be just that: innocent (Bingham was no Christie) and this is finally recognized for incomprehensible and unexplained reasons. In A Catalogue of Crime Jacques Barzun and Wendell hertig Taylor were even less complimentary:
Told in the first person, this is the story of a mess created by the hero and heroine through lying to the police about a man they knew who has been murdered. Skillful composition, style not especially attractive, type of plot dreary.
Even I did not think it was that bad. For one thing I thought the style was rather good and the tension despite the lack of any surprises held well. Bingham manages to make the narrator, Michael Sibley, sound completely obnoxious and that is not easy to do. Of course, it is possible that Julian Symons is right and that obnoxiousness was not the intention, in which case, Bingham turned out to be a better writer than he knew himself.
The police are, indeed, menacing and apparently unscrupulous. But let us look at the case from their point of view as, say Ngaio Marsh or Dorothy Simpson would have done. Here is an unprepossessing young man, a suspect in a murder case who tells one lie after another to the police, makes his fiancee tell lies and even tries to bribe an ex-girlfriend to tell lies, all for no reason whatsoever unless he is guilty. Would Chief Inspector Alleyn or Inspector Thanet not try to catch him out? Of course, they would not threaten him with violence as Bingham's police officers do in a jesting sort of way but they are unlikely to pat him on the back either.
The murder is never solved though Sibley himself proposes a solution but only in his own mind and to the reader. It is a fairly obvious solution but is not followed up by anybody.
Well yes, another book about Disraeli and this one actually addresses the question as to why there are so many of them around. How does the mythology of Dizzy agree with the reality of Disraeli the politician and how did the former manage to take such a hold of the Conservative politicians (and others, including most recently, the leader of the Labour Party) and of historians of the period, including someone so very non-Conservative as Dick Leonard? (I note that the Conservative History Journal blog has mentioned Disraeli twenty times, which is a nice round number and does not take into account the various articles that have been published in the Journal itself over the years.)
This is an undoubtedly clever and witty book, what with that sub-title echoed in the chapter headings such as Christian and Jew, Doer or Dreamer?, Men and Women, Friends and Foes and others that appear to be oxymorons: Tory Democracy and Progressive Conservative. It goes through the biography in a tight fashion but manages to get most of the details in, even to dispel a few myths, some started by the great man himself some by others. But the real theme of the book remains that curious dichotomy between the reality of a politician who had very few principles though a number of romantic ideals and the astonishing image of the man who is seen as the progenitor of just about every Conservative political idea one can name.
Did Disraeli ever talk of One Nation Conservatism? Certainly not. He did not even support it. He wrote about the Two Nations but he did not actually object to it; he merely thought that there could be an ideal society in England in which the "two nations" could live in harmony and vaguely envisaged some form of a feudal structure that would create such a society.
Did he believe in protectionism as his followers in the great fight of the 1840s against Sir Robert Peel and the repeal of the Corn Laws did? Most certainly not and, to be fair, nor did he ever say so. When he became Prime Minister in the midst of a deep agricultural depression he refused to bring back any protectionist measures, realizing all too well how disastrous that would be for the party in electoral terms. His main complaint about Peel was that he had betrayed the party in the sense of changing his policies (free trade was not the first one) without consulting the members. This was a novel idea in British politics and, to a great extent, we can date the importance of well organized parties, as something to admire and something to deprecate from Disraeli. Curiously enough, though the authors mention this, they do not make too much of it when summing up Dizzy's achievements.
The historian John Charmley, has described Disraeli as the presiding genius of political spin doctors and the very existence of the mythology long after the immediate posthumous effect, the Primrose League(postings here and here) had disappeared from sight, would indicate the correctness of that analysis.
This book comes to a not dissimilar conclusion:
This in the end was Disraeli's great achievement. He may not have reformed the nature of British society. He may not have transformed our standing overseas. But he did make politics interesting and engaging, including for those with no vote. As one contemporary observed, 'I never listened to a speech of yours without thinking, this word, this sentence, will be remembered a hundred years hence.' This was indeed the true magnetism of Disraeli. It is the reason why successive generations of politicians are drawn to him. if we look in his career for solid achievement we shall be disappointed. But if we want something to raise our game, Disraeli is the man.Sadly, that last sentence demonstrates that even this well-written book, despite the many semi-slangy and often coy expressions, falls a long way short of Disraeli's own ability to communicate, while politicians of the day may refer to the great man but remain dull and pedestrian in their very references, let alone other speeches.
Douglas Hurd and Edward Young: Disraeli or The Two Lives
2013, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, London
It is fair to say that the war led to some reforms in military matters in Britain, a greater understanding of the need for nursing (though that took a long time) but above all it led to the Alexander II's great reforms, the greatest of which was the Emancipation of the Serfs in 1861.
There are many interesting comments in the diaries of Lady Knightley of Fawsley and a longer posting will appear in due course, as well as many more snippets, I have no doubt. This struck me as sadly ironic. Writing on March 8, 1906, almost two months after the catastrophic (for the Conservatives) election that also brought in twenty-nine Labour members (Lady Knightley thought as she heard the results in January that there would be forty to fifty) she mentions that a Resolution in favour of payment of Members brought in by William Hesketh Lever, Liberal MP for Wirral, had been passed in the House the previous evening. She was discussing this with William Ryland Dent Adkins, barrister, who was, by this time a Liberal MP for Middleton, Lancashire but still active in Northamptonshire politics, as they were waiting to be seen by the Board of Education.
He [Mr A.] one good point when discussing a payment of Members (a resolution in favour of which was passed last night). He siad it would make the Labour members more independent of the trade unions.Ho-hum thought I, as I read that. It is fair to say that practically none of the effects that payment of Members was supposed to produce came about.
Today is the anniversary of James VI of Scotland becoming James I of England in 1603, thus uniting the two kingdoms in the monarch's person. The anniversary is not a particularly notable one but History Today is celebrating it by reprinting a 1999 article by Roger Lockyer, whose name must surely be familiar to anyone who has ever studied that period. Can one even envisage school and university courses without Professor Lockyer's books, particularly Tudor and Stuart Britain? My own well-worn copy is still on my shelf, to be consulted from time to time.
The article, which gives a largely positive view of King Jamie, is well worth reading. Of course, it is no longer completely de rigeur for historians to say merely bad things about the King but the bad press that has been his fate since the first half of the seventeenth century is still accepted by many. Not by Roger Lockyer.
Tory Historian is reading Disraeli or The Two Lives, a cleverly titled book by Douglas Hurd and Edward Young. In chapter III, Doer or Dreamer there is a discussion about Disraeli's novels that have fallen completely out of favour. Hardly anybody who is not a specialist in Victorian literature or Disraeli himself reads them now though the later ones are not that bad. The early ones, on the other hand, are truly terrible.
The authors of Disraeli acknowledge the poor quality of the writing and plotting of the early novels and quote Anthony Trollope's contemptuous dismissal:
...the glory has been the glory of pasteboard, and the wealth has been the wealth of tinsel. The wit has been the wit of hairdressers and the enterprise has been the enterprise of mountebanks.A comprehensive indictment. But there is another side to it, say Hurd and Young:
And yet Trollope's attack does not quite ring true. This is not simply because in Disraeli's later novels we find real jewels of cleverness. Rather, in all his novels, bad and good, mature and puerile, Disraeli was seeking something other than literary achievement.That may not tells us a great deal about the literary quality of the later novels, such as Coningsby or Sibyl but the comment does try to grapple with some of the contradictions in Disraeli's personality, which is one of the book's avowed aims.
A conflict had emerged in Disraeli's early years which never fully resolved itself. On the one hand, Disraeli became a passionately ambitious politician, intriguing and manoeuvring with growing skill, choosing whatever tactics and relationships might take him up the greasy pole. On the other hand, through his interest in literature he developed a set of ideas to which he was devoted and which throughout his life he spent much time refining.
He refused to give up either his career or his ideas; so how could they be reconciled? The answer was through his novels. For Disraeli, literary sparkle held the key to great leadership. Here was a man who had diagnosed the nation's ills and could supply the relevant imaginative remedies. Together with his Jewish stock and ancient ancestry, it gave him, as he later suggested, the feeling on waking each day that he could topple governments and shake dynasties.
The other book is the Northamptonshire Record Society's edition of the later diaries of Lady Knightley of Fawsley. Lady Knightley was a remarkable woman and a separate posting about her when TH has finished reading her diaries will follow. She was married to Sir Rainald Knightley, later Lord Knightley of Fawley, a Tory MP of outstandingly old-fashioned views on politics and Parliament.
She, therefore, spent much time in political social circles and recorded her impressions of the people she met and of the various events as they unfolded. She campaigned for her husband, which he was rather uneasy about as he did not think that women should speak in public but, apparently, accepted. She was one of the earliest Dames of the Primrose League about which she wrote with characteristic vigour and humour on May 12, 1885:
This morning I spent on a Girls' Friendly Society Committee [one of many organizations Lady Knightley was active in]; then came back here to receive a visit from Lady Wimborne [sister of Lord Randolph Churchill] and be enrolled as a 'dame' in the Primrose League... It sounds all rubbish but the objects, 'the maintenance of Religion, of he Estates of the Realm and of the ascendancy of the British Empire', are excellent and I can quite believe that the paraphernalia helps to keep the Conservatives together; means, in short and army of unpaid canvassers.
The rest of the day's entry presents a picture of a day that is exhausting to read about, never mind experience.
Despite all the activity, she found time to keep a diary throughout most of her life. The early parts of the journal were edited by Julia Cartwright, later Mrs Ady and published in 1915 and are now available on line. The journals of the years 1885 to 1913 (when she died) were edited and exhaustively annotated by Peter Gordon and published 1999. These are the ones TH has been reading. They are not for the faint-hearted but are, nevertheless engrossing. In both these attributes Politics and Society: The Journals of Lady Knightley of Fawsley 1885 to 1913 resemble A Ride to Khiva.
Tony Benn (1925 - 2014) formerly known as Viscount Stansgate and Anthony Wedgwood Benn can claim one achievement in his political career and that is the passing of The Peerage Act 1963 but one wonders how pleased he was by the unexpected consequence.
No sooner was the Act passed than the 14th Earl Home used it to disclaim his peerage and to become, as Sir Alec Douglas-Home, the Leader of the Conservative Party and a not unsuccessful Prime Minister.
Readers of this blog know that there have been several postings on John Buchan in the past, he being something of a favourite for many reasons.
As part of my post-hospital convalescence I picked up one of the Buchan thrillers I had not read before, The House of the Four Winds, and read it in short order. It is probably the weakest of the three Dickson McCunn tales and is one of Buchan’s weaker thrillers, taking place not in Britain but in the invented Central European country, Evallonia, which resembles Austria in many ways but is not. A continuation of the tale in Castle Gay, it is a wonderful hokum that involves a nasty republican government backed by sinister Marxists, about to be toppled, a self-organizing young civilian army, Juventus, modelled to some extent on Mussolini’s fascisti, a complicated way of ensuring that Prince John becomes king and, above all, a circus run by a cousin of Allison Westwater’s and Janet Roylance’s with a thoroughly likeable and useful elephant by the name of Aurunculeia. We also meet many of the Buchan heroes: Dickson himself, two of the erstwhile Gorbals Die-Hards, Jaikie Galt and Dougal Crombie, Allison who ends the novel as Jaikie’s fiancée and the Roylances.
It is a little odd that Buchan did not write any more Dickson McCunn mysteries as he was obviously fond of the characters and the ending of The House of the Four Winds requires some kind of continuation. Though most of our heroes leave Evallonia, Jaikie remains, the trusted confidant of the about to be crowned King John and an officer in Juventus. Surely, there must have been some plan to get him back to Britain, to Allison who is unlikely to be happy away from Scotland and into that great career that everybody is predicting though nobody really knows what it will be. As we never hear of him later on as a rising politician, we must assume that he did not enter British politics. Was he snapped up by Sir Walter Bullivant’s successor for the secret service? Did he become another Sandy Arbuthnot with a very different sphere of interests and talents? We never find out. (At least, not as far as I know.) Of the series characters only Archie Roylance turns up in subsequent novels either in person (Island of Sheep) or as a mentioned name (Sick Heart River). We must assume that his marriage to Janet continues to be happy.
The book was published in 1935 by which time it was clear that Evallonia is unlikely to fare well in the near future. The Communist thug Mastrovin is particularly evil but Juventus has sinister overtones and there is something slightly frightening about them. In the immediate plot they side with the monarchists and help Prince John to the throne. Also several of their leaders seem to be either part-English or educated in England. In reality, as Buchan knew well, the likes of Juventus were not led by people with Cambridge education and were not particularly gentlemanly. Another reason for bringing Jaikie home, I should have thought. Perhaps, Buchan intended to do so but did not quite get round to it.
Thank you for all the enquiries. Had to spend longer in hospital than expected but all is well that ends well and I am back home now. Blogging starts soon.
Normally they just happen. This one is being announced. Blogging is being suspended for a week or so as I deliver myself into the hands of the NHS tomorrow morning (at 7 a.m. - ouch) but hope to be out of the hospital by the end of the week. I shall spend some of my time there working on that long piece comparing Sir Harold Nicolson and Sir Henry "Chips" Channon both of whose diaries I re-read in the last couple of weeks.
This is for the historical psephologists who, I have no doubt, look at this blog regularly. Anything you ever wanted to know about elections and voting in London from 1700 to 1850 can be found on the London Electoral Website.
