Desert rats

I’ve found myself watching not one but two different programmes about the Desert War, being shown to mark the 70th anniversary of the Battle of El Alamein. As a result, I realised that when I was young I was sold a complete pup about the military skills of the British commander at El Alamein, Bernard Montgomery. Watching Jonathan Dimbleby’s endless documentary, it was clear that after Churchill had removed both Wavell and Auchinleck from the command in Cairo, Montgomery just happened to be the general standing in the right place by the time the British had weakened sufficiently the supply lines of the Afrika Korps and had mustered enough men and tanks to attack the German desert army. Either of his predecessors would have won comfortably as well – and Auchinleck was probably a better general.

The programmes helped me understand a few other things as well. Hitler, obviously, was notorious for over-ruling his generals (so much so that at Bletchley Park they sometimes thought messages they’d cracked were wrong because they made no apparent strategic sense) but Churchill had form here as well, insisting that his generals attack when the attacks were doomed. Wavell departed because he reluctantly followed Churchill’s order and lost disastrously; Auchinleck because he declined to do so because he knew the consequences would not be good.

Rommel, on the other hand, won Hitler’s trust through some outrageous tank attacks; he was a gambler who usually had a shrewd grasp of the odds. His letters to his wife, Lu, which were included in the programme, seemed surprisingly candid. But he lost his last gamble when he was implicated in the 20th July Plot. Even then his military record saved him from the humiliation of a Nazi trial, since Hitler allowed him to commit suicide instead.

A world war

I’d believed before that Britain’s commitment in North Africa was a sop to Stalin, to pin down some German divisions a long way from the Eastern Front. I’ve also had it argued that it was a way into the ‘soft underbelly’ of the Axis, through Italy, at a time when Britain knew an invasion across the Channel was impossible. (Though as a German commander said later, and the Allies learnt the hard way, if you’re going to invade Italy, don’t start at the bottom). But both the programmes I watched suggested that the British understood that it was a world war before other countries, perhaps because of the Empire. Churchill was obsessed with Egypt and the North African desert because he could see the link between the war effort, the Suez Canal, the resources of India, and the oil resources that Britain controlled in the Middle East. The oil in particular, was critical: the German army never quite had enough of it, and it did for them in the end. But it took a while for Churchill to persuade Roosevelt of this. (Eventually the Americans had to insist that the Allies pressed ahead with invading France.)

As an aside, the Dimbleby documentary seemed to have blown the entire budget on travel – he popped up in more locations than were needed to tell the story – which left the graphics to be done in Photoshop, or so it seemed. It made me realise how much the Snows, Peter and Dan, have done to improve the quality of military graphics on television. There were frequent occasions when my understanding of events and tactics would have been improved by a bit of Peter Snow’s electronic tabletop.

Finally, even if Montgomery happened to be lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, one can see how his name became so important. By the time of the second battle of El Alamein, Britain had been losing the war for two years. But El Alamein marked the turning of the tide, something more than “the end of the beginning”. Three months later the Germans were beaten at Stalingrad, and by then American equipment was pouring into Europe. The autumn of 1942 represented the point at which – largely thanks to the determination of the Soviet army – the Germans became overstretched. Although the Japanese had further successes, the Germans barely won again. But it’s a lot easier to say that in hindsight, now we know how things turned out. In late 1942 the relief of a victory well-won would have been overwhelming.

The image at the top of this post is from World War II Today, and is used with thanks.

The story of the blues

You’ve got to love Jack White. He’s going through with his plan – definitely file under “labour of love” – to release on vinyl through his Third Man label the records by Charley Patten, the Mississippi Sheiks, and Blind Willie McTell on the blues label Document Records. He expects to lose money on it, but he doesn’t care. In a long feature in the Guardian that might as well be a hymn of praise to the early bluesmen, he says:

“Some people might go out and buy a Ferrari or something, but I would rather spend my time and energy in releasing these records. If only a thousand people get something out of them, it’s still something that makes me and the people here feel excited, because they know the power of this music.”

In the article, he gives the journalist, Dave Simpson, his potted history of how these early recordings emerged from a clutch of different trends (and as a futurist, I like these kinds of trends stories too):

White is still in awe of the process by which events came together in America’s deep south to create the blues. There was the Great Depression, the technology of recording music and the fact that furniture makers had started making record players, and needed something people could play on them. So they started recording the poor black singer-guitarists that were emerging in the Mississippi Delta. “Something magical just occurred to create a moment in history that changed the world.”

White, though, is more interested in the cultural history – he argues that in that moment of recorded history, for the first time, the songs that individuals had written from their own experience were recorded and therefore available to people outside of their immediate world. It’s not quite right – for example the early recorded material of some of the English music hall performers was similarly personal and rooted – but it still represents an interesting tradition, and also a different perspective on the way in which blues and rock music, obviously deeply rooted in the idea that we share personal stories about the world, has changed our cultural ways of telling.

And I also liked his rationale for going back to these first recordings:

“It’s important to go back and cleanse your palate. If you like punk rock now, there were people who did this with way more things against them than a suburban kid who goes to a guitar shop or someone buys him one and he starts singing punk songs. There’s beauty in that, too, but to be black and Southern in 1920 and have no rights … that exemplifies struggle.”

Cleansing your palate. In our too-knowing post post-modern era, when (as Umberto Eco said) media has genealogy but no memory it’s important to strip away the layers of interpretation and irony and try to listen as if for the first time.

The picture at the top of this post is the cover of the first of Third Man’s Charley Patten releases, and is used with thanks.

 

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Just seventeen (you know what I mean)

If I were ever on one of those programmes where you have to choose a single Beatles song, mine would be I Saw Her Standing There, the first song on their first LP, Please Please Me, recorded fifty years ago this week. For me the song is both urgent and suggestive, the moment English rock ‘n’ roll stopped talking with an American accent and acquired its own voice. Lennon recalled having little to do with it, but McCartney’s version, later, was that he started it and he and Lennon finished writing it together one afternoon in the front parlour in McCartney’s house. A collaboration seems more likely. If the rule of thumb on Beatles’ songs is (I’m indebted to my brother for this) that McCartney songs go up and down and Lennon songs go along, I Saw Her Standing There definitely goes along.

The shift from American to English can be seen in a change Lennon made to McCartney’s original opening lines. McCartney’s version was, “She was just seventeen/Never been a beauty queen”. Lennon changed it to the more provocative, “She was just seventeen/You know what I mean.” The new line is at once both direct and indirect. Direct: English doesn’t get much more direct than five one-syllable words. Indirect: the listener is drawn complicitly into the world of the the singer. They have to know the code.

In his companion to the Beatles’s songs, Revolution in the Head, the late Ian MacDonald explains how the song’s lyric signalled a cultural shift in gear.

“[I]t called the bluff of the chintz-merchants of Denmark Street with their moody misunderstood ‘Johnnies’ and adoring ‘angels’ of sweet sixteen (the legal age of consent). By contrast The Beatles’ heroine was seventeen, a deliberate upping of the ante which, aided by Lennon’s innuendo in the second line, suggested something rather more exciting than merely holding hands. But the clincher for the teenage audience was the song’s straight-from-the-shoulder vernacular. Its hero’s heart didn’t ‘sing’ or ‘take wing’ when he beheld his lady love; this guy’s heart ‘went boom’ when he ‘crossed the room’ – a directness of metaphor and movement.”

The picture at the top is from the website Beatles Autographs, and is used with thanks.

Walking ‘A Christmas Carol’

I spent an afternoon just before Christmas on a walking tour in London of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, which seemed appropriate at the close of his 200th anniversary year. We started near St Dunstan’s, where Scrooge lived, and ended at the graveyard that once belonged to the church of St Peter Cheap, near Cheapside, where Scrooge is taken by the ghost of Christmas Yet To Come to see his grave.

In between we stopped in the lee of St Michael Cornhill, where Scrooge had his office (close to the The George and Vulture in Castle Court, one of Dickens’ favourite haunts), in Leadenhall Market, which in an earlier incarnation may have been the location where Scrooge sent the boy to buy the turkey for the Cratchit family, and the Royal Exchange where Scrooge is also taken by Christmas Yet To Come.

A Christmas Carol, written in six weeks, was an instant hit when it was published in 1843. While a lot of Britain’s modern Christmas traditions were imported from Germany by Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, our guide argued that Dickens had played a large part in the 19th century (re)invention of Christmas, connecting a new urban Christmas with rural Christmas traditions that were dying out. Historian Philip Allingham agrees:

It is A Christmas Carol, published on 19 December 1843, that has preserved the Christmas customs of olde England and fixed our image of the holiday season as one of wind, ice, and snow without, and smoking bishop, piping hot turkey, and family cheer within.

Piecing together the story, it was striking how this idea of Christmas was constructed through newly developing industrial age media. The Christmas tree gained popularity after a story in the 1848 Christmas edition of the Illustrated London News featured the royal family’s tree at Windsor, according to the guide, with the description a “pretty German toy”; many of Dickens’ other Christmas stories were serialised in the new mass circulation magazines serving an increasingly literate population; the Christmas card itself grew in popularity because of the falling cost of printing and the introduction in the 1840s of the penny post. And Dickens, in Christmas Carol, was the first to use the phrase “Merry Christmas” in print.

Perhaps it is not surprising that when Dickens died, a Cockney barrow-girl was overheard saying, “Dickens dead? Then will Father Christmas die too?”

The photograph at the top of this post, of the Christmas tree in Leadenhall Market, in by Andrew Curry. It is published here under a Creative Commons Licence: some rights reserved.

‘Up from the depths’

I’ve been reading Vassily Grossman’s book The Road, a collection of stories and reportage. Grossman may have been the finest war correspondent of the Eastern Front, a Soviet Jew whose mother certainly died at the hands of the Nazi Einzatzgruppen in the Ukraine.

This fragment of ‘The Old Teacher’, a story from The Road, seemed to be worth sharing here. The moment: The German army is 20 kilometres away and is likely to arrive in the village in only a day or so.

The night was dark from because heavy clouds had shut out the sky and covered the light of the stars. And it was dark from the darkness of the earth. The Nazis were a great falsehood, life’s greatest falsehood. Wherever they passed, up from the depths rose cowardice, treachery, murderousness, and violence against the weak. The Nazis drew everything dark up to the surface, just as a black spell in an old tale calls up the spirits of evil. That night the little town lay stifling, gripped by something foul and dark. Something vile had awoken; stirred by the Nazis’ arrival it was now reaching towards them. The treacherous and the weak-spirited had emerged from their cellars and gullies and were ripping up letters, Party cards and books by Lenin; they were tearing down portraits of their own brothers from the walls of their rooms. Fawning speeches of disavowal were taking shape in the hearts of the poor in spirit. Thoughts of revenge – for some chance word or some market place quarrel – were being conceived. Hearts were being infected by callousness, pride and indifference.
… And so it was in every town – large and small – where the Nazis set foot. Murk rose up from the beds of lakes and rivers; toads swam up to the surface; thistles sprang up where wheat had been planted.

The picture of The Road at the top of this post was taken by Andrew Curry. It is published here under a Creative Commons licence.

The song of John Ball

I’ve been listening to Chris Wood’s version on his Trespassers CD of the song ‘John Ball’, written in 1981 by Sydney Carter (who also wrote ‘The Lord of the Dance’) to mark the 600th anniversary of the Peasants’ Revolt in England. Ball was a radical Lollard priest who had been expelled from the priesthood and jailed for asking questions about equality in the eyes of God, and he gave the sermon to the peasant army as it was camped on Blackheath, overlooking the City of London.

His sermon started with these words:

“When Adam delved, and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?”

This sentiment would have chilled the beneficiaries of England’s hierarchical and feudal society. After the revolt had been put down – its leader, Wat Tyler, tricked into negotiations – Ball was arrested and hanged, drawn and quartered as a traitor.

But the phrase, and the radical idea embedded within it, has echoed down the centuries, to the Diggers, to Tom Paine, to the Chartists, to William Morris, even, it seems, to the Occupy Movement. We still remember him, more than 600 years on, and have long forgotten those who had him killed.

The picture at the top shows John Ball addressing the rebel Peasants on Blackheath. It is published by Wikimedia Commons and is used here with thanks.

Going Dutch

I went on the ‘Go Dutch’ Big Ride demonstration organised by the London Cycling Campaign a couple of weeks ago, which, despite the rain, was billed as the largest cycling demonstration ever to take place in London. The ride went from Park Lane to the Victoria Embankment, all on roads specially closed for the duration, taking in Piccadilly, Trafalgar Square and Whitehall as it went.
The theme – you might have guessed this by now – was that if conditions for London’s cyclists were a bit more like those in the Netherlands, more people would cycle and the government and the Mayor might hit their cycling targets.
So I was amused to read a few days later, in Bella Bathurst’s eclectic but entertaining Bicycle Book that when Holland plays Germany Dutch football fans chant at the German supporters ‘Give us back our bicycles’. Beating the Germans is something of a special occasion for the Dutch, especially at football, as Simon Kuper relates in his book Football Against The Enemy.
And sure enough, this chant dates from the war years, by Bathhurst’s account. In 1942, during the German occupation, the Nazi authorities confiscated Dutch bicycles both to stop the Resistance from using them to get around, and because they were running out of transport.
“No other German enactment has called up such bitterness in all ranks of society”, wrote a German officer. “The Dutchman, who is practically born on a bicycle, views the seizing of that bicycle as practically the worst thing that can happen to him.”
Of course, the London Cycling Campaign is right. Dutch-style cycle facilities in London would improve the city’s cycling numbers. But culturally, we have a little way to go just yet.

The picture at the top is from the ibikelondon blog, and is used with thanks. There are also images of the day at Ben Brown’s photostream on flickr.

Another country

I’ve had the miners’ strike more on my mind since I went to see the Jeremy Deller exhibition at the Hayward Gallery a couple of weeks ago, because the exhibition includes his famous reenactment of The Battle of Orgreave, when police cavalry charged protesting strikers.

So when The Guardian published some poems from Jubilee Lines, edited by Carol Ann Duffy (she has commissioned a new poem for each of the 60 years of the Queen’s reign) I turned first to the mid-80s. Sean O’Brien, whom I’ve written about here before, a child of the north, had claimed 1985 with a tough and unforgiving poem called ‘Another Country’:

Whenever someone sagely says it’s time to draw a line,
We may infer that they’ve extracted all the silver from the mine.

O’Brien’s poem starts with a epigraph from Auden, ‘Get there if you can’, the title of a 1930 poem. Here’s an extract:

Power-stations locked, deserted, since they drew the boiler fires
Pylons falling or subsiding, trailing dead high-tension wires;
Head-gears gaunt on grass-grown pit-banks, seams abandoned years ago;
Drop a stone and listen for its splash in flooded dark below…

Auden was born in York and brought up in Birmingham, but was fascinated by underground workings and mining machinery. This early poem – not included by him in his Collected Poems – was written on a visit to the north-east of England, where O’Brien now lives and works. It is one of several from the period that dealt with the decaying or lost landscapes of the early industrial revolution.

There are obvious echoes here of the industrial landscape that Britain has lost since Thatcher’s campaign de-industrialise the country (I use the word ‘campaign’ with care here) of which the calculated destruction of the National Union of Mineworkers was such an exemplary part. And echoes too, in O’Brien’s title, of the famous opening line of L.P. Hartley’s novel of loss, and of class antagonism. London, now, is the other country, as it milks the rest of Britain of resources.

But no matter what you do, history doesn’t vanish. (I had this argument once with an uncomprehending career coach who told me I could put the history I was embedded in to one side and simply ‘move on’ in the modern, deracinated, non-place manner. I was uncomprehending too). And this is how Sean O’Brien ends his poem:

Where all year long the battle raged, there’s “landscape” and a plaque,
But though you bury stuff forever, it keeps on coming back:

Here then lie the casualties of one more English Civil War,
That someone, sometime – you, perhaps – will have to answer for.

No matter how hard you try to tramp it down, the dirt insists on coming up through the roots.

The image at the top is a screenshot of Mike Figgis’ film of Deller’s reconstruction of The Battle of Orgreave, from the Bureaux blog, and is used with thanks.

Lenin in the garden

While in Tallinn recently, during our trip to the Baltic states, we took a short bike tour with the excellent City Bikes, a two-hour circuit that took in some of the sights beyond the city centre. As we went along a cycle path through a wood our guide pulled over, had us put the bikes down, and pushed through a screen of trees to a fence behind.

It turned out that this was the grounds of the Estonian History Museum, and a couple of salvaged statues of Lenin had been parked there while the curators decided what to do with them. Obviously the subject of all of the Communist-era statuary is a controversial one, even now, all across the former Eastern bloc.

In Lithuania an entrepreneur has opened up a theme park based around scores of Soviet-era statues; initially amid much criticism, it’s now a commercial success. Sadly, because it’s in Grutas, in the south of Lithuania, we didn’t get to visit it.

The photograph is by Andrew Curry, and is published here under a Creative Commons licence: some rights reserved.

Stating claims

I’ve just been on holiday to the Baltic states, and when I left Vilnius at the end of July there were posters of the poet Czeslaw Miłosz everywhere. (And I mean everywhere; it was if someone had bought up the city’s outdoor advertising inventory for a product launch). Miłosz won the Nobel Prize for Literarature in 1980, and this year marks the centenary of his birth. There is also a newly unveiled plaque to Miłosz in the University in Vilnius, also to mark his centenary.

Now, normally, I’d have written ‘Polish’ in front of the word ‘poet’ in the first sentence of this post, but in the complex 20th century history of central Europe, with its shifting borders, it seems that things are not exactly as they appear.

Miłosz wrote in Polish, and lived and worked in what is now Poland for nearly twenty years, but he was raised in what is now Lithuania – but was at the time of his birth still part of Tsarist Russia. He also attended university in Vilnius. Researching this post, I discovered that he identified himself as both Polish and Lithuanian. A couple of quotes in his entry in Wikipedia capture this ambiguity:

“I am a Lithuanian to whom it was not given to be a Lithuanian.”.

“My family in the sixteenth century already spoke Polish, just as many families in Finland spoke Swedish and in Ireland English, so I am a Polish not a Lithuanian poet. But the landscapes and perhaps the spirits of Lithuania have never abandoned me”.

These multiple identities, of course, are common across many parts of the world, especially those marked by wars and migration. In the second half of his life, Miłosz lived in France and then the United States. And if you’re one of Europe’s newest states, it is important to make these claims: Lithuania, like the other Baltic states, first became independent in 1918, only to be invaded by the Soviet Union in 1940, regaining its independence only in 1990. The advertising is working; for I’d have known none of this had the city not been decked in posters advertising the country’s most famous poet.

The photographs in this post were taken by Andrew Curry. They are published here under a Creative Commons licence: some rights reserved.