Brexit, avant la lettre

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Cyril Connolly, Harold Wilson, Winston Churchill

This morning I came across the following passage. It was written by Cyril Connolly and published in Horizon in 1947. And it seems to me that, apart from some specifics of time and place, this could very easily apply to Brexit Britain.

For context: 1947 was one of the harshest winters in recent British history. It was the worst since the 1890s, and there has been nothing like it since. Snow blanketted the country for months, in many place food and fuel could not get through. Since food and clothing were still rationed (food rationing would continue well into the 1950s), it was a hard time for everyone. Winning the war had brought no tangible benefit. The country was in so much debt that every cent of Marshall Aid it received went to pay those debts, so there was none of the investment in repairing infrastructure and buying new technology that happened in the rest of Europe. (I remember there were still bomb sites around my home in the suburbs of Manchester throughout the Sixties and into the Seventies.) This was one of the reasons why, industrially and economically, Britain lagged behind other European countries right up until the time we joined the Common Market in the 1970s. The other main reasons, of course, being antiquated management practices, appalling labour relations, and the policies of successive governments during the “thirteen years of Tory misrule” between Churchill shutting down the Festival of Britain and Wilson extolling the “white heat” of technology.

So we were poor, hungry, freezing and probably wondering what was the point of winning the war. And Connolly, a misanthrope who complained about everything, wrote:

The advantages which position, coal, skill and enterprise won for us in the nineteenth century have been liquidated and we go back to scratch as a barren, humid, raw, but densely over-populated group of islands with an obsolete industrial plant, hideous but inadequate housing, a variety of unhealthy jungle possessions [though, of course, empire has gone now and the various former colonies rightly care little for us], vast international commitments, a falling birth-rate [it was actually rising at the time, but is falling now] and a large class of infertile rentiers or over-specialized middlemen and brokers as our main capital … Most of us are not men or women but members of a vast, seedy, over-worked, over-legislated, neuter class, with our drab clothes, our ration books and murder stories, our envious, stricken, old-world apathies and resentments – a careworn people.

In Pink

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Clement Attlee, D.J. Taylor, George Orwell, Katherine Burdekin, Neville Chamberlain, Ramsey McDonald, Stanley Baldwin, Victor Gollancz, Winston Churchill

Sometimes, the most unlikely of sources can make you see something that has been staring you in the face forever and has just passed you by.

I am continuing my intermittent read of The Prose Factory by D.J. Taylor, and his chapter on the 1930s is, predictably, all about left wing literary movements. It is a reasonably fair account, I think, given that I suspect Taylor’s own political inclinations are centre-right and he doesn’t come across as at all sympathetic to Marxist views. But he manages to connect a few things that I hadn’t really connected before.

Let me try and put this into chronological order. In 1929, the Wall Street Crash had sent the Western economies spinning into the Great Depression. In May of that year, the Labour Party under Ramsey MacDonald had come out ahead in one of the tightest of elections and formed a minority government. That is not the most stable situation for dealing with the economic shocks that were to come over the next couple of years. So, in 1931, MacDonald entered into coalition with the Tories as the National Government, which won an overwhelming victory in the 1931 election. The National Government held something over 500 seats in Parliament, the only opposition being provided by a small group of rebel Labour MPs. Despite the National Government being theoretically a coalition, it was overwhelmingly dominated by the Conservative Party, with the Tory leader, Stanley Baldwin, taking over as Prime Minister in 1935.

What this meant (and the connection that Taylor spelled out for me) was that the left had no political voice, just at the start of a decade that was filled with causes for which the left needed to be heard. And so the left started to turn to extra-parliamentary ways of making their views known. Thus you got things like the hunger marches, which had been occurring intermittently since the start of the century, but which now became much larger and more frequent. One march from Scotland brought 100,000 people to Hyde Park in 1932. These marches were often organised by the communist party, and so were just as often brutally put down by the authorities. The communist party was also behind the large numbers of working class young men who travelled to Spain to fight for the Republicans (there were some British volunteers who fought for Franco, but they were neither so numerous or so well organized as those who fought against him).

But this activism also had a more intellectual underpinning, provided by the spread of the Workers’ Educational Association, which had been formed at the beginning of the century but which was at its largest and most successful during the 1930s. And also by the totally unexpected success of Victor Gollancz’s Left Book Club, which aimed to break even with 2,500 members but had over 40,000 within the first year. The club would make books more widely available and far cheaper than usual, and published works ranging from George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier to Murray Constantine (Katherine Burdekin)’s Swastika Night; books that brought home again and again the social conditions and political enemies that those on the left were up against. There were Right and Centre Book Clubs, but these had neither the reach nor the effect of the Left Book Club.

With the sense of community and purpose provided by the likes of the hunger marches and the Spanish Civil War, and the spread of ideas promulgated through bodies such as the WEA and the Left Book Club, the left found a powerful and often working class voice throughout the 1930s, just at the time when they had no voice in government.

The National Government shed all pretence and became a straightforward Conservative government under Baldwin, as it remained under his two successors, Neville Chamberlain (from 1937) and Winston Churchill (from 1940). Under Churchill, and with a war to fight, the government again became a coalition National Government, but again it was predominantly Tory. After Baldwin’s election of 1935, there was no general election until 1945, when it was generally assumed that the great wartime leader, Churchill, would sweep back into power. It was a shock, therefore, when Clem Attlee won an overwhelming victory for Labour. But it perhaps shouldn’t have been, because that victory was the fruit of all those years during the 1930s when the left had been deprived of a political voice and so had found new ways to make their voice heard. The Attlee victory, if you like, was a direct consequence of Victor Gollancz creating the Left Book Club, which had, after all, published a book by one C.R. Attlee.

The Deceivers

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Bernard Montgomery, Christopher Priest, Clifton James, David Fisher, Dudley Clarke, Dusko Popov, Erwin Rommel, Glyndwr Michael, Jasper Maskelyne, John Mills, Joshua Levine, Juan Pujol, Nicholas Rankin, Winston Churchill

A year or so back, I came across a television broadcast of the old 1950s film, I Was Monty’s Double. It is not a very good film (Clifton James was not a particularly talented actor), nor was it an especially honest film (at least two better, and better known, actors were approached to take part in the deception before James; James was a drinker, who brought the deception to an end earlier than planned because he was drunk and Montgomery was a strict teetotaler; and the whole drama involving the John Mills character never happened); but I found myself intrigued yet again by the whole notion of wartime deception. This particular deception, Operation Copperhead, as it was called, doesn’t seem to have had much if any effect on the German war effort, but still the whole idea was just so bizarre.

Also, it reminded me of another film of similar vintage about another, and far more effective, wartime deception. And lo, The Man Who Never Was showed up on television just a little while later. What’s more, not long after that a different channel was showing a documentary, Operation Mincemeat, which filled in some of the details that the film missed (including giving the name of poor Glyndwr Michael, which hadn’t been released at the time the film was made, and who is one of the few civilians in the Roll of Honour on the Commonwealth War Graves Commission website).

I Was Monty’s Double was a fairly simple deception: make Montgomery appear on Gibraltar and in Algeria, and the Germans will think the D-Day planning is not at an urgent stage, and maybe relax their attention a bit. The Man Who Never Was was a much more complex deception. Have a body wash up off the coast of neutral Spain as if he had died in a plane crash, have the body carry secret documents suggesting that the allied invasion of Southern Europe would be through Greece not Sicily, and then hope that the massive network of German agents operating in Spain would get hold of those documents and believe them. As if that wasn’t complex enough, they had to find the right body whose actual cause of death would not be detectable to Spanish pathologists (as it was, the body was kept on ice for so long that signs of decay were starting to show in the extremities by the time he was pushed into the sea off Huelva); then they had to create an entire backstory to make “Major Martin” appear like a real person and like someone who would be carrying such documents. What’s more, the documents contained a double bluff, since they referred to the actual plans for the invasion of Sicily, Operation Husky, but as if this was itself a deception to distract the Germans before the real attacks on Greece and Sardinia. It worked like a dream, Rommel along with masses of men and armour were actually moved from Sicily to Greece, then sat there with nothing to do throughout the Allied landings.

The more I learned about Mincemeat, the more complex it became. And then, in one of those instances that make you question the whole efficacy of algorithms, I was searching guitar tutor sites on Youtube when suddenly I came across a documentary about Operation Fortitude. Now, I knew vaguely about dummy armies being massed in Kent during the run-up to D-Day, but I knew no details, and I didn’t know it was called Fortitude. But the documentary did no more than whet the appetite, I had to know more. So I went out and got three books on the subject, as you do.

The first of these, Churchill’s Wizards: the British Genius for Deception 1914-1945 by Nicholas Rankin, would, I hoped, provide me with a good basic overview of the subject, which would allow me to fill in details later. And I suppose it did, to an extent, though not the extent that I’d hoped. This is partly because he keeps coming back to Churchill, even though Churchill himself was rarely more than tangentially involved in any of this; he likes to give detailed accounts of campaigns and battles which often involved little in the way of deception; and he is too easily distracted, an account of radio deception spends several pages talking about Tommy Handley and ITMA. If he had kept strictly to his subject, a 600-page book would have been closer to 300 pages, and all the better for it. Nevertheless, what is in there, for instance on camouflage in the First World War, is often very good, though I could have done with more detail, for instance, on how fake buildings and patterns of light and fire were used to deceive German bombers. What I particularly like is being introduced to

Dudley Clarke in and out of his Madrid ensemble.

the extraordinary character of Dudley Clarke, brother of T.E.B. Clarke who would write so many of the great Ealing Comedies. Dudley seems to have expressed the family’s creative genius in the form of some of the great deceptions of the Second World War. It was Dudley Clarke who came up with the idea of the commandos, and later in North Africa decided to trick the Germans into thinking there was an elite commando unit operating behind their lines which he called the Special Air Service, only for David Stirling to think that was a good idea, and turn the deception into a reality. Then there was the curious incident in Madrid when Clarke was arrested by Spanish police in women’s clothing; no one has quite managed to work out what he was doing in Madrid or why he was in drag. Don’t you just want a full biography of Dudley Clarke?

At the opposite extreme to Churchill’s Wizards is The War Magician: The Man Who Conjured Victory in the Desert by David Fisher, which is the story of Jasper Maskelyne. Now I was interested in Maskelyne because he came from a family of stage magicians, his grandfather John Nevil, and his father Nevil, were both renowned magicians (and one or other of the Nevils, I suspect the elder, played a significant part in Christopher Priest’s The Prestige). But this is probably not the book to read. Fisher writes it like a bad novel, with conversations that could not possibly have been recorded (including one conversation between two men as they die alone) and lots of sentimental asides about Jasper and his wife. There is no source given for anything he tells us, and though he says at the start that some of the characters are composites we have no indication who these might be. But more than that, I don’t believe it, there are details that are simply wrong (Dudley Clarke is described as the head of a spy network, but Clarke had nothing to do with spies in that sense, and as the person in charge of deception throughout the North Africa campaign he would have been Maskelyne’s commanding officer) and others that are misleading (a number of the deceptions that Maskelyne is credited with inventing are variants of things being used extensively elsewhere). I don’t doubt that most if not all of the deceptions described in this book actually happened, I just think that Maskelyne’s role is being massively over-inflated. Rankin says as much in Churchill’s Wizards: “Maskelyne’s theatrical charisma has cadged him more credit than perhaps he deserves” (that “cadged” is a nice touch); but I think I would have doubted this book even if I hadn’t read Rankin first. (I’ve just checked on Wikipedia, which says that his very brief command of the Camouflage Experimental Section was not a success and he was transferred to welfare, ie, entertaining the troops, and that according to official records his wartime role was very marginal.)

Still, the deceptions that Maskelyne was, or claims to have been, involved in are quite spectacular. These include fooling German bombers into attacking an empty bay instead of the crowded harbour at Alexandria, and using dazzling lights so that pilots could not aim their bombs accurately at the Suez Canal. Most spectacular was the preparation for El Alamein. Rommel knew that Montgomery would have to attack somewhere along a relatively short and distinct line, but he did not know where or when. The allies started creating a water pipe towards the south of the line: this would be essential for supplying any advance, but the rate of construction was such that it could not be completed before November. Meanwhile supply trucks were parked and forgotten at the northern end of the line, while tanks were massed at the southern end, then, in a carefully stage-managed operation, the tanks were transferred to the northern end where they were disguised as trucks, while fake tanks replaced them at the southern end. When the attack came at the beginning of October, it took the Germans completely by surprise.

This deception, of course, recalls the preparations for D-Day, which brings me to the third and by a long way the best of these three books. Operation Fortitude: The Greatest Hoax of the Second World War by Joshua Levine tells a story that is more complex and more wide-ranging than I had ever imagined, and Levine tells it in a way that is compelling without reverting to the fake novelistic mode of Fisher, full of telling detail that is both more succinct and more convincing than Rankin’s rather long-winded manner.

It turns out that the fake tanks and the rest in Kent were largely irrelevant to the deception, because by this stage in the war the Germans didn’t have the facilities for reconnaissance flights. They were entirely dependent on their agents on the ground, and though they didn’t realise this, they didn’t actually have any agents. I have long heard the story that every German agent in Britain during the war was either captured or turned, but I didn’t know the details. Levine very carefully lays out how Operation Fortitude was almost entirely a product of the Double Cross system. Germany doesn’t seem to have thought to put any agents in place in Britain before the war, and the first ones they tried to infiltrate once war began were singularly incompetent and ill-trained. Some barely spoke any English, most seem to have had no knowledge of the geography of the country, all were rounded up within a day or so of landing. Of these, most were happy to play along with their British captors and start relaying false information back to their handlers. That was the tentative start of the double cross system, but it really got going with the appearance of two extraordinary characters. Dusko Popov was a Yugoslav lawyer and playboy (who may have been one of the inspirations for James Bond) who got himself recruited by the Abwehr, then went straight to the British and volunteered to be a double agent. Throughout the war he ran a string of fake agents in Britain that kept Germany informed of everything we wanted them to know. Then there was Juan Pujol Garcia, a Spanish chicken farmer who volunteered himself to the Abwehr only to sit in Lisbon making up stories based on a tourist guide and an old map of Britain. At one point he told his German handlers that a Glasgow workman would reveal any secret for a litre of wine, and nobody in the Abwehr blinked an eye. It took him several attempts to get the British to take him on as a double agent, but once they did he set up a network of fake agents even bigger than Popov’s, and remained Germany’s most trusted informant right up to the end of the war. With Pujol and Popov in place, and the dozens of agents they apparently controlled, the Abwehr decided it wasn’t worth the risk of trying to infiltrate any more spies, which is how Britain (through the Twenty Committee, the XX or Double Cross Committee, led by our old friend Dudley Clarke) more or less dictated everything the Abwehr knew throughout the war.

What I like about Levine is that he is not only a good storyteller who clearly relishes the various deceptions he describes, but he is scrupulous in showing how well or ill they worked. Fortitude was in two parts, for instance. Fortitude North suggested an army being amassed in Scotland ready to invade Norway, and though this seems to have worked to the extent that it kept German troops in Norway that might have been transferred elsewhere, that force was not huge and was not augmented by additional forces. So Fortitude North was not exactly a resounding success. Fortitude South, on the other hand, had the advantage that it was trying to suggest that the European invasion would come at the Pas de Calais. That was the obvious location for an invasion, and both Rommel and Hitler believed that that is where it would happen, so the deceivers were preaching to the converted. So successful were they that even after troops had landed at Normandy they were able to convince the German High Command that this was just a feint and the real attack would follow at the Pas de Calais once the troops there had been drawn away. Before D-Day, Eisenhower asked the deceivers to keep the Germans tied down at Calais for three days; he actually got more than two weeks.

Apart from the Levine, there have to be better books about the hall of mirrors that is British wartime deception. But even so, the stories they tell are endlessly intriguing. I have a feeling I’m developing another obsession.

Churchill!

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Brian Cox, Gary Oldman, Neville Chamberlain, Winston Churchill

The queue for the afternoon showing of Darkest Hour was made up of people who weren’t quite old enough to remember the events of the film. But I think they wanted to believe they were. Half a dozen places ahead of me, one woman clearly had no idea of the title of the film she was here to see and so stood dithering for some time trying to think which screen to choose. At last inspiration struck: “Churchill!” she declared in a glass-shattering yelp that must have been heard in France.

That’s what this is about: just old reliable Winston, the man half the population of Folkestone believes should still be leading the country. Darkest Hour is an entertaining enough film redeemed by a mesmerising performance from Gary Oldman under an ocean of prosthetic makeup. But that is precisely what bothers me about it.

This is the second film about Churchill I’ve seen in the last few months, after Brian Cox’s performance in Churchill.

This is the second film I’ve seen recently that climaxes with the “fight them on the beaches” speech, after Dunkirk.

This is the third film I’ve seen in less than a year that turns upon that invidious British myth of Dunkirk, after Dunkirk and Their Finest.

This is the fourth film I’ve seen in less than a year about plucky British wartime spirit, after Churchill and Dunkirk and Their Finest.

And I am getting very concerned about the mythmaking. I assume that the realities of film making mean that all of these films were at least conceived before the Brexit vote. But they are all Brexit films.

These are films about Britain standing alone, and of course being victorious in its isolation. This is Britain being better than, and better apart from, the rest of Europe. These are films about heroism being endemic in the character of ordinary Brits (the word “plucky” is inescapable here, even though in reality it hasn’t been used for decades). And here anyone who talks of negotiation, of talking to the rest of Europe (rather than the commands Churchill gives to his French counterpart) is a weaselly figure who’s the next best thing to a traitor (ie, Halifax in Darkest Hour – I have no particular brief for Halifax, but her is here made into a too-convenient antagonist).

Darkest Hour is full of cringingly bad moments, such as the penchant for beginning or ending key scenes by looking directly down from high overhead, or the idea that even after he was deposed Chamberlain held such power over the entire Parliamentary Conservative Party that he could dictate whether they cheer or remain silent. But the scene that almost had me laughing out loud was when Churchill took the tube. As the girl who showed him how to read the map told us, he was going only one stop. The scene that followed on the tube train was long enough to have travelled all the way around the Circle Line. He found himself in a carriage that was full of the sort of cheerful Cockney cliches that we all remember from far too many British films of the 40s and 50s. They were all polite and smiling and unfailingly bellicose, and the black man even completed Winston’s quotation from “Horatius at the Bridge”, because in 1940 every working class Londoner knew the works of Thomas Babington Macaulay by heart.

Both Darkest Hour and Churchill show Winston boldly taking difficult decisions that will cost lives. There’s a suggestion, pretty explicit in Darkest Hour, that this somehow redeems the tragedy of Gallipoli, because Winston was of course right all along. And such sacrifice is necessary and ultimately good for us. Wipe out the garrison at Calais in what is a pretty futile gesture, and we’re all better for it. And it’s right, of course, because doesn’t Dunkirk show us that even the most ordinary British Tommy will become Herculean for surviving that miserable experience. And doesn’t Their Finest show us that we crave the myth of Dunkirk, not any truth, because the myth makes us all happy and brave.

And don’t all of these films collectively show us that we are better off on our own, unattached to the rest of Europe. And though there may be hard times, the very fact that we’re British means we have grit and pluck and will come through stronger than ever. And anyway, eventually our good friends the Americans will turn up eventually and make it all right again. Yeah, sure!

None of these films is exactly great. Both Cox and Oldman put in remarkable performances as Churchill, Dunkirk has some pretty spectacular film making, and overall Their Finest  has an unassuming levity that makes it easily my favourite of these films. But great, no, the message gets in the way of that.

Reprint: Alternate History

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A.J.P. Taylor, Bruce Sterling, G.K. Chesterton, G.M. Trevelyan, Harold Nicolson, Harry Harrison, Harry Turtledove, Hilaire Belloc, Hilary Bailey, J.C. Squire, Keith Roberts, Kingsley Amis, L. Sprague De Camp, Len Deighton, Lisa Tuttle, MacKinlay Kantor, Martin Cruz Smith, Philip K. Dick, Richard Dreyfuss, Robert Harris, Stephen Baxter, Terry Bisson, Vladimir Nabokov, Ward Moore, William Gibson, William L. Shirer, Winston Churchill

Someone asked for more of my Cognitive Mapping columns, so here’s another one. In fact, this is the first one I wrote. It appeared in Vector 186 (December 1995). To be honest, I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the term ‘alternate history’, one cannot help feeling that grammatically it ought to be ‘alternative’, but usage means we are stuck with it. As a sub-genre, however, it is one of my favourites.

Reprint: How to Change the World

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A.J.P. Taylor, David McCullough, G.M. Trevelyan, Harry Turtledove, Hilary Bailey, J.C. Squire, James M. McPherson, John Keegan, Keith Roberts, Kim Stanley Robinson, MacKinley Kantor, Paul J. McAuley, Philip K. Dick, Robert Cowley, Terry Bisson, Ward Moore, William L. Shirer, Winston Churchill

A few days ago I said I was going to do something further on Hard SF to follow up on my posts of a few days ago. Well, I’m several hundred words into it, but it looks like it might end up being longer than originally imagined, so it might be another few days before it appears. So I started casting around for another reprint to appear here and happened upon this essay about alternate history. It is clearly something I wrote, but I have no memory of writing it, I have no idea who I might have written it for, and I have no record of whether it was actually published anywhere.