Conservative History Journal

Just found this blog written by the historian John L. Hancock, called Liberty Inherited. Lots of interesting stuff, particularly on the links between English and American thought. Here is a posting on the Second Amendment that causes frissons of horror in so many people on this side of the Pond who obviously do not know that the right to bear arms first appeared in the Declaration of Rights in 1689, a document that needs a little more attention than it usually gets.

To all those who are in or near London at around lunchtime on Friday, here is a reminder of an event in Parliament in connection with Spencer Perceval's assassination 200 years ago.

An anonymous comment on the posting added:

There is a commemorative service at St. Luke's Church, Charlton Village on Sat 12th May.

He was connected to Charlton and is laid to rest in the vault.

As every school child ought to know but probably does not, only one of this country's Prime Ministers was assassinated and that was Spencer Perceval. This blog will have more on him on May 11, the 200th anniversary of his death but in the meantime, we have great pleasure in advertising an event.

Dr Caroline Shenton, (Clerk of the Records, Parliamentary Archives) will be giving a talk about Spencer Perceval on May 11 at 1 o'clock. It will take place in the Boothroyd Room in Portcullis House (that's that newish one with the fig trees in the atrium). Entrance, for those who do not know, is on the Embankment.

There is no need to register and anyone can turn up for the talk. Do, please allow time for the security check.

ADDENDUM: London Historians site lists other events at All Souls, Ealing, that will be commemorating Spencer Perceval's assassination.

Harvey Klehr is one of  the undoubted experts on matters to do with Communist infiltration, espionage and agents of influence in the United States and has fought the good fight with many in the media and academia who still insist that a.) Alger Hiss was not a Soviet spy because b.) he has always said he was not and c.) if by some chance it may be remotely true that he passed on some insignificant amount of information to a deeply unpleasant hostile regime then he was fully justified to do so because d.) there was McCarthyism and whatever else before that.

A few days ago, Professor Klehr reviewed, mostly positively, another book on the case in the Wall Street Journal.

There really is nothing new to say about Alger Hiss's guilt, which has been proven beyond any doubt over and over again. There might be when the archives of the former Soviet military intelligence, the GRU are opened, which will happen very soon after the devils build their own ice skating rink.

What is of interest is the refusal by so many of the media and academia to accept this evidence, a refusal that amounts to a collective pathological state.

To Ms. Shelton, the Hiss case excites intense emotion because it was a battle between "collectivism and individualism, between central planning and local/state authority, and between rule by administrative fiat and free markets." Perhaps it was, but she is wrong to take a perjurer at his word when she accepts Hiss's claim that he was a loyal New Dealer. (He said that he was the victim of a conservative cabal intent on dismantling the welfare state). In fact, most of the young lawyers and economists who joined communist cells in Washington, D.C., in the mid-1930s were disappointed with the New Deal and with President Roosevelt, believing that his reforms did not go far enough.

What better way of celebrating St George's Day as well as Shakespeare Day than by posting Laurence Olivier's rendering of Henry V's speech outside Harfleur.

Some time ago there was a review on this site of Alistair Cooke's (now Lord Lexden) excellent book on the Primrose League, the country's first and largest popular political movement. (Those who point to the Chartists ignore the fact that these had no time for women members.)

Today is the anniversary of the death of Benjamin Disraeli, the Earl of Beaconsfield, whose favourite flower the primrose was alleged to be and in whose honour both Primrose Day and the Primrose League were established.

PRIMROSE DAY IN LONDON

My only difficulty is that I want to repudiate all the accusations at the same time. That doesn't matter; I am in the middle of my speech without any realization of how I began. 

'You say that the story should be told directly, but that, I assure you, would not add any sense of actuality. I have never seen a murdered corpse, and I could not describe one in a manner which would make a reader believe that I had. On the other hand, I have often enough sat late in Common Room discussion crimes, and have advanced theories about disputed cases in courts of law. To me, then, the conversations in Common Room are much more real than any direct story would be. 

And I would go further. A detailed realism is no necessary part of a detective story, for the detective story, for the detective story follows highly artificial but well-established conventions. How often is a cursory and unnecessary concession made to the belief that the story should be made realistic without any influence on the reader's mind at all! Usually at the sight of the corpse one of the characters vomits, or alternatively another remarks, "I did not know there could be so much blood in a human body." But that is all, and the reader hurries on to the rest of the story without pausing to let the horrid spectacle of the corpse sink into his mind. 

Reality has little to do with detective fiction. At most there is only a sort of pseudo-realism. 

What could be more conservative in the true sense of the word that does not imply any idea of class, let alone class warfare, than gardening? Whether we mean a large garden in the country, a suburban square behind the house, a small town garden, just a balcony in a block of flats, mucking about with soil, plants, bulbs, seeds, cuttings or bushes is being part of a long tradition. Even new or newish, radical or supposedly radical ideas of change in gardens remains within that tradition of creating and growing.

Tory Historian has just read a delightful little history of gardening and gardens in England (not really any other part of the country) by Anne Scott-James, illustrated by her husband, Osbert Lancaster (he of the pocket cartoons and the Littlehampton family), entitled The Pleasure Garden.

From the British Roman estate that so resembled those of villas in Italy itself through gardens that were and are monastic or Tudor, in the grand French or the enclosed Dutch manner, romantic or formal, suburban or railway all the way to the patio of the seventies the chapters are witty and knowledgeable and the drawings are a joy to study.

Staying off the internet has its good and bad signs. Not sure where forgetting this anniversary fits. Thirty years ago yesterday Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands. The Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, announces the invasion in the House of Commons.

In a way Michael Dirda's elegant and delightful little tome On Conan Doyle: Or, The Whole Art of Storytelling is misleading. He pretends to be entirely fair in that he warns his readers: this is not a book about Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, it is about Conan Doyle as a storyteller; it is about his other books, a little bit about him and a great deal about the post-Doyle Sherlockian developments, notably about the Baker Street Irregulars, a slightly loopy society of eminent lovers of the canon who "play the game" of elucidating gaps and contradictions. Having issued this warning Mr Dirda can sit back and smile as his disappointed readers find that he has, indeed, been completely fair.

This book is not about Sherlock Holmes, or not exactly about him; nor is it exactly about his fascinating creator; it is more about the effect Conan Doyle has had on his readers, on the literary world and on his faithful followers.

Those who call Conan Doyle the greatest story teller are right. His prose, spare in the more modern stories but with mediaeval and eighteenth century overtones in the historical novels thrown enchantment over the reader from the first line. He had a fine sense of pace, an excellent ear for dialogue and a sense of humour that ranged from sly to slapstick, the latter to be found in some of the stories of medical life and in the Professor Challenger ones.

Michael Dirda is no mean stylist himself. He tells of his youthful discovery of the Holmes stories, of his subsequent investigation of other thrillers and detective tales, of his career as a literary journalist and critic, of his further adventures with Holmes and, finally, his involvement with the Baker Street Irregulars. En route he manages to point out that T. S. Eliot's love and use of matters Holmesian go beyond the obviously villaionous Macavity.

His brief analysis of the Holmes canon and its astonishing hold on people's imagination is excellent though he limits himself to the Anglo-Saxon world, specifically Britain and North America. (I do wish, however, that he had not repeated the nonsense about Holmes wearing Inverness capes and deerstalkers in London.)

Dirda is less fond of the rest of Doyle's output though Professor Challenger is obviously a favourite and he is good on the supernatural tales and has some interesting ideas about White Company, which Conan Doyle valued very highly.

The highlight of the book is his account of the Baker Street Irregulars, their book collecting habits and fantastic discussions of likely and unlikely events in the lives of Holmes and Watson as well as their real and fictional contemporaries. Dirda'a own articel about Langdale Pike, a briefly mentioned character in one of the weakest stories of the Casebook, The Three Gables, which includes an hitherto unknown "Case for Langdale Pike" is joyously funny though one needs to read it in full in Canadian Holmes: The Journal of the Bootmakers of Toronto. Yes, I think that is real and there are good reasons why the Holmesians of Toronto should be called The Bootmakers.

On Conan Doyle is not an introduction to the life and works of Sir Arthur or the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels but a delightful long essay for those who already know and love the master and his output but would like to read a highly knowledgeable person's opinions.

While the subject of appeasement in the thirties has been analyzed over and over again (though popular mythology seems to be impervious to historical arguments) less has been written about the appeasement of Stalin in the years 1943 - 45. As it happens, I came across a few details concerning the treatment of Poland in Norman Rose's biography of Harold Nicolson.

Nicolson's political career was chequered, to put it mildly, and there is something to Rose's theory that he had been "persuaded - some would say, blackmailed - to leave a profession for which he was eminently suited", diplomacy, and found himself entering another, politicws, "for which he was patently ill-suited". Nevertheless, he did have a part to play in the tragicomedy of Parliamentary activity before and during the Second World War.

Having been one of the prominent anti-appeasers in the late thirties, he seems to have finished the war by becoming one of the most prominent pro-appeasers of Stalin. He was overwhelmed by the Yalta Agreement, thinking that the Western allies had brought off a tremendous coup and he spoke in the debate on February 28, 1945:

Ever since the war, Harold assured the House, Stalin had demonstrated 'that he is about the most reliable man in Europe'. These sentiments, to a later generation alarming in their naivety, were soon to change as the harsher realities of the Cold War se tin. But for the time being Harold was in good company. On returning from Yalta, Churchill reported to his Cabinet. He felt convinced that Stalin 'meant well to the world and to Poland', and 'he had confidence' in him: Stalin 'had kepthis word with the utmost loyalty'. (Hugh Dalton who was present at the cabinet meeting, put it more dramatically. He reported Chuchcill as saying, 'Poor Neville Chamberlain believed he could trust Hitler. He was wrong. But I don't think I'm wrong about Stalin.')

March, on the whole, is not a good time for tyrants and oppressive regimes. It is the month of uprisings and revolutions, regardless of what happens to them afterwards. March 15, for instance saw the start of the Hungarian revolution of 1848.

Most famously, of course, it is the Ides of March, the day on which Julius Caesar was assassinated by a group of conspirators, some of whom, at least, were intent on preserving the Roman republic. That came to a bad end, too. Here are a few illustrations:

I have started reading Robert Crowcroft's Attlee's War, mentioned on this blog yesterday. It promises to be very interesting though Alistair Cooke's complaint in the review of the book that the author is a little too apt to push himself into the picture is accurate.

Summing up in his Introduction why it is absolutely vital that Attlee's role both in the Labour Party and in government during the war should be understood, Dr Crowcroft says:

The whole of the period c.1940-79 is now genuinely a complete historical era. Until quite recently, at least, the 1970s have still felt contemporary, but no longer. This offers both an opportunity and a necessity to rethink the politics of that era. In the historiography of British politics, the period c.1880-1920 is traditionally the era that has generated extensive paradigm-changing work. But the period that encompasses the Second World War to the rise of Thatcher could become conceptually the most exciting era of modern history.

Throughout the 1930s the whole of Whitehall, and most of Westminster, were in awe of a very great man, Neville Chamberlain. He was unrivalled in the despatch of public business. He was unrivalled too in his command of policy in many diverse areas. .... What mattered above all to Chamberlain was the domestic battle that he pursued remorselessly to establish a welfare state based on Tory principles.

Even during the tempestuous events abroad in the late 1930s he continued to work tenaciously on the decisive next stage of his grand vision for a better Britain. A draft manifesto for an election planned for 1940 set out radical proposals: they included action to bring the whole population within the national health services he had already established, a wider and more generous pensions system developing a Chamberlainite achievement of 1925, the introduction of family allowances, and the intensification of this massive slum clearance programme. 

Under Chamberlain more new houses were built every year than under post-war Conservative governments with their 300,000 annual target. It all added up to a welfare programme that provided for a properly funded, two-way partnership between the individual and the state, unencumbered by the plethora of benefits that were to drag Britain down in the post-war world. Whether he was in Birmingham or Downing Street, Neville Chamberlain always balanced the books.