Great Britain

Blue remembered hills – a land of lost contentment

Paul Hemphill 4 Comments
Let everyone debate the true reality
I’d rather see the world the way it used to be”
A little bit of freedom’s all we lack
So catch me if you can I’m goin’ back
Carole King and Gerry Goffin as sung by Dusty Springfield

Blue Remembered Hills

Into my heart an air that kills from yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again

From The Shropshire Lad. AE Houseman

Houseman’s famous poem looks back at childhood as a “land of lost content”; when you are a child you are innocent, and you don’t have a care in the world. He says that childhood is a “happy highway where I went and cannot come again”, implying that they are the best years of your life but that you can never go back there. When the late British playwright Dennis Potter took the poem and turned it in to a play about a group of children on their school holidays in the Forest of Dean in Gloucester, he was asking if childhood is indeed such a land of lost content and are children really so innocent.

“Nostalgia”, literally the pain associated with the thought of home, or homesickness, is derived from the Greek “nostos”, a theme used in Ancient Greek literature – most notably in Homer’s Odyssey –  involving an epic hero returning home after a long time away, often by sea. In Ancient Greek society, it was deemed a high level of heroism or greatness for those who managed to return. The Greeks compared the feeling to the pain of an old wound, a twinge in the heart more potent than memory alone. The Odyssey reveals the deepest longings and tensions of the human soul and the fundamental structure of the journey of life: nostalgia for a home that our younger selves took for granted, and bittersweet return to people and places that have changed forever.

But nostalgia isn’t all it’s cracked out to be. And indeed, it can bring out the worst in us becoming a millstone of bitterness and regret strung about the necks of discontented souls who drift off into a maze of memories, meanings and emotions.

In the seventeenth century, many considered it an illness that was curable, and could be treated with opium or with trip to the countryside. Other scholars of the phenomenon have noted that until the nineteenth century it was regarded as more a geographical longing than a temporal one, homesickness for a place rather than for an era. American author and essayist Thomas Mallon  wrote in a review in New Yorker: “In the same seventeenth century that prescribed methods of relief for nostalgia, writers like the poet John Milton and Robert Burton, who actually wrote a book called The Anatomy of Melancholy. went hunting for twinges of wistfulness as if these were magic mushrooms. Through the centuries, it has been regarded sometimes a harmless solace and occasionally, as a dangerous indulgence, a mental quicksand in which we allow the past to drown the present”.

Nostalgia’s pain can be exquisite, and many of those susceptible to it have sought to cultivate rather than banish the condition. But even if we do not dive in and get lost in the past, it is nevertheless built into us consciously or subliminally. We practice it culturally all of the time. It is often more triggered by the elemental senses, smell and taste and touch, than the sights and sounds from which constant revivals of fashion and music are constructed. Which, I guess, is why folk still flock to ever recycled retreads of the musicals of Andrew Lloyd Webber. 

The film Casablanca has probably inspired more feelings of nostalgia than any other movie, no matter that its famous song insists that “the fundamental things apply time goes by”. Likewise Yesterday, , the most covered song in history with well over two  thousand iterations: “Yesterday, my troubles seemed so far away.  Now it looks as though they’re here to stay.  Oh, I believe in yesterday”.  As Paul sings in the “outro”, “mmm-mmm-mmm-mmm, hmm-hmm”. I reckon he played us softies like a fiddle. “Oh, it makes you wonder”, exclaims Robert Plant in Stairway to Heaven, another opaquely nostalgic piece

Comedians have been know to lampoon nostalgia. Monty Python’s famous “Four Yorkshiremen” sketch is an absurdist riff on nostalgia itself, its quartet of old codgers wallowing in pseudo-memories of deprivation and competing for pride of place with the sheer awfulness of the pasts that they invent. Australian comic Rodney Rude went outrageously further. Go google.

And then there are “memberberries”. These featured in the long running American TV show South Park in 2016 as a purple sentient grape like-fruit that rots the brain with fake nostalgia. They evoke feelings of nostalgia in those who eat them, recalling pop culture icons that engender comforting feelings for the supposedly good times of the past. They almost constantly talk about things people remember fondly, particularly the original Star Wars trilogy. They always phrase their reminiscing as “member…?” They also make conservative comments, like recalling when marriage was only between a man and Ronald Reagan. “Member when there weren’t so many Mexicans?” They appear seem to be indestructible as one was seen burned by a torch and acid, and electrified with little to no effects, but, can be squished, eaten, and shot. Their exact origin remains unknown, but they are believed to date back to Ancient Rome.

But seriously, nostalgia is like a “pathology” that  presents as an inability to move forward and accept change. As technology frog-marches us into the future, we keep a constant backward glance. 

Personal genealogical research, German academic and cultural historian Tobias Becker reminds us in his recent  Yesterday- A New History of Nostalgia that it is the third most common use of the internet after shopping and pornography. Some of those pursuing it, he notes, are just casually curious,. Others are taking what feels like refuge in an earlier time, or seeking a more solid sense of an ethnic identity that can shape their own outlooks and politics.

And this is where it can get dangerous because the word itself can be weaponised. People on the left often insist that people overtly inclined to nostalgia are really seeking a fig leaf for their own racism. Folk of the right cleave to the revival of glory days of old, whether they existed or not, which at its most extreme can be used as a battle cry in the “war against woke”, “replacement theory” and the likes of the MAGA movement, and even Brexit.

Thomas Mallon, quoted above, provides what I consider a fair explanation for this present day fascination, and to some, preoccupation, with our past. Nostalgia, he reckons, goes much deeper than just an idea or concept. So deep in fact “that one wonders if it isn’t a neurological condition, something fundamental and immune to the vagaries of history. As people begin living beyond their Biblical allotment of seventy years, they experience the first exaggerated panics over forgetting a name or a date, which is usually remedied by a Google search. But then comes the growing realization that short-term memory has nothing like the staying power of the long-term variety. Mentally, the seven ages of man speed up their full-circling, until the past’s sovereignty over the present is complete. The further along one gets, the more one understands that the past is indeed another country, and that, moreover, it is home. Long-term memory’s domination of short may be a hardwired consolation that nature and biology have mercifully installed in us”.

Margaret Thatcher, however, often she might have invoked her hardworking grocer father, generally regarded the past as a place where she wouldn’t be caught dead (she was happier sitting atop a bulldozer or a tank).

[For a broader, academic discussion of the topic see The Future of Nostalgia by the late American cultural theorist and artist Svetlana Boyd (Basic Books, New York 2001 or this précis http://monumenttotransformation.org/atlas-of-transformation/html/n/nostalgia/nostalgia-svetlana-boym.html  She wrote about two kinds of nostalgia: restorative nostalgia, which is an attempt to restore the past, and reflective nostalgia, which focuses on longing, loss and the instability of memory. I don’t want to be 17 again – that starry-eyed slacker! – but neither would I wish that self away. Then there’s Bulgarian author and essayist Maria Popova’s analogy that we are all our ages “stacked within the current self like Russian nesting dolls, not to be outgrown but to be tenderly incorporated”.]

A warm inner glow

What happened to the boy I was?
Why did he run away?
And leave me old and thinking, like
There’d be no yesterday?
Spike Milligan, Indian Boyhood

There’s nothing inherently or intrinsically wrong with nostalgia. Nostalgia is not just wanting to go back to something that no longer exists, but wanting to go back to something because it no longer exists. It’s not just that the past is another country, to borrow JP Hartley’s famous aphorism, where they did things differently, as did we, they perceived and thought things differently too. Whilst we rejoice in “the good old days” of our youth, like the parable of the blind wise men examining an elephant, our perspective is coloured by our experiences and our circumstances before, during and after, and the expectations and assumptions, prejudices and predilections that these engendered.

When we were younger, time appeared to move more slowly than in our later years. It is in our nature to imagine and indeed, re-imagine our salad days as the best of times and the worst of times. But looking back through our back pages, these years was perhaps no better or worse, no more significant or seminal than any era fore or aft. Like objects seen through the rear-view mirror, memories always seem a lot closer and bigger. When I’ve revisited roads and streets where I grew up, playing or sauntering or rolling home with a skinful in the pale moonlight, they are no way as wide, long or spacious as they are to the mind’s eye.

Vivid memories can distort time, making you feel that that weren’t that long ago. It’s not easy to let go of what you can’t forget, particularly if your imagine yourself in a perpetual winter of discontent in which everything passes and everything changes, and the pace, the degree and the contours of change are difficult to comprehend, leaving you feeling discombobulated, disassociated and maybe, even, a little disappointed. But we do, however, enhance our depth of perception and perspective and accordingly, our understanding.

Yet, memories are fallible at the best of times, and the way we narrate our own lives can often be partial versions of the truth. Whether our images of worse-but-better times are accurate, or just scrappy patchworks of meme, myth and memory, they are deeply ingrained.

But with most things, it’s all a matter of proportion.

call it memory, call it geography, call it
the vast landscape of childhood or night—a thing
disappearing—a country turning into a map.
Stav Poleg, Memory and Geography

Sunbathing in Banalities

When we talk about the past, we always reveal something about the present. It is hard to imagine a more intriguing or overlooked body of evidence for assessing recent British social history than the Facebook groups that have proliferated in the last couple of decades as young folk have surrendered the Facebook social media space to us “boomers”. These nostalgia communities have flourished on Facebook as its user base has grown ever older in the past decade.

It may not be “representative” in any quantifiable way, but the sample size is vast, and the memes are a canvas for a whole range of contemporary insecurities and collective memories. History might be written by the winners, but anyone can share a post on Facebook. It has given us something like a more chaotic, 21st-century version of Mass Observation, that treasure trove of vox populi reportage from the ‘thirties onwards.

Though there is nothing generationally unique in the desire to bask in the banalities of our pasts, there are now many Facebook groups devoted to commemorating the same mundane aspects of life. They’re not necessarily rivals – many folk subscribe to several. British groups include The Yesteryears Revisited, Do You Remember This?, I Grew Up In The 1970s, The British Nostalgic Bible, and One Hundred and Ten Percent British. Together, these Facebook groups have close to 2 million members: more than the official pages for the Labour Party, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems combined. The baby boomer nostalgia industrial complex is thriving.

I am a member of several such groups. My favourites are Midland Memories, celebrating where I grew up in Birmingham and it’s environs; Swinging Sixties London, rejoicing in those generous times of music, colour and adventure; Yesterday’s Britain, It was a Better Britain, which i believe is now defunct, was long on nostalgia and short on tolerance for “the new “, but had wonderful pictures; and three fabulous Hippie Trail groups which are a kind of virtual “school reunion” for now superannuated former rovers like myself and many friends who journeyed overland to India and beyond in the sixties and seventies.

On these blue remembered hills, there are no births, marriages or deaths, no wars, no world-historic events, no great men and women of history. There is no post asking “who remembers the Cuban missile crisis?” or “who remembers the sinking of the Belgrano?” Or even, given the recent broadcasting of deliciously subversive The Crown, “where were you when you heard that Prince Di had died?”  Those questions are too remote from ordinary life. Instead, we have “Who remembers ….? … bin men, street cleaners, milkmen and coal men, dinky toys and chocolate bars, gramophones, Dixon of Dock Green and Listen With Mother. We truly are … The Village Green Preservation Society:

We are the Sherlock Holmes English Speaking Vernacular
Help save Fu Manchu, Moriarty and Dracula
We are the Office Block Persecution Affinity
God save little shops, china cups and virginity
We are the Skyscraper condemnation Affiliate
God save Tudor houses, antique tables and billiards …
Preserving the old ways from being abused
Protecting the new ways for me and for you
What more can we do?
Ray Davies, The Kinks

The “proper binmen” (the featured picture of this post) and like memes are popular to a degree that may feel initially baffling. They attract phenomenal interest and enthusiasm from older Britons on Facebook, where a whole constellation of meanings and memories are projected on to them: pride, anger, resentment, weariness, ennui and fond, at times very touching, personal recollection. They embody a lost postwar idyll – and often, in many people’s imaginations, point to a decline in the fortunes of a once-proud and powerful nation and its national character, as seen in what is perceived as the apparently appalling state of their modern-day counterparts, and indeed, society as a whole, which is rotten in spirit, character and service.

The gripes of wrath

There used to be trams
Not very quick got you from place to place
But now there’s just jams, half a mile thick
Stay in the human race, I’m walking
They’ve stuck parking meters outside our door to greet us
No, Fings ain’t wot they used t’be
Monkeys flying around the moon
We’ll be up there wiv ’em soon
Fings ain’t wot they used t’be
Once our beer was froffy, but now its froffy coffee
No fings ain’t wot they used t’be
Lionel Bart, as sung by Max Bygraves

This was actually the title song of a 1959 musical produced by British playwright Joan Littlewood with songs by Lionel Bart (of Oliver fame). It launched the career of “Carry On …” star Barbara Windsor. The Carry On films, featuring the cream of contemporary British comedy, were themselves an audiovisual time capsule of a simpler time with their contrived plot lines, slapstick humour and “nudge nudge wink wink” innuendo.

It is a revelation to observe how lovely snaps of the past and “the way we were” (yet another retroflective weepy) can so easily trigger the rantings of “grumpy old white folk” against “wokey snowflakes”. The past was not better or worse than the present. It was just different and we held different views, perceptions, prejudices and, as importantly, expectations. And maybe, it is disappointed expectations and the realities of ageing that engender a jaundiced view of today’s world. To quote American baseball ace Yogi Berra, “the future ain’t what it used to be”.

Those were days when boys were boys, girls were girls, and  “when chips were chips”, not microchips, and preferably with lashings of salt and vinegar and wrapped up in newspaper. These, like so much else, were much better then.

“Everyone knew their place”, lament some aging nostalgists. One member of a “memories” group shared: “In those days we had capital punishment, homosexuals were jailed, and prison was not like a holiday camp. Hardly any illegal immigrants, most children were brought up in a family with two parents who were allowed to discipline their children if necessary. The woke brigade did not exist and snowflakes only fell from the sky in the winter” Another wrote of “a lack of discipline in all walks of society, therefore lack of respect. Too many immigrants from the 50s on, not heeding Mr Powell’s wise words. Glad I’m old and won’t be here in 20 years time; I feel sorry for generations to come. Certain areas are already like the lawless, drug-fuelled, murderous parts of the Caribbean. You can never bring back those wonderful early post war times portrayed in that picture”. And another: “No wokey snowflakes, no oil protesters, no green loonies, people being allowed to get on with their lives. Happy days!” Also, while we’re at it, let’s reclaim well-loved and once casually used words like “gay”, “queer” and “fag” and many others that mean something else, usually unpleasant, today. And we never did get an answer to Spike Milligan’s Goon Show query: “What’s become of that crispy bacon we had before the war, ey? 

Back in those days, we were “a gentler, kinder more law abiding and respectful society”. There was respect, you read. “Men were men and women were women. Streets were cleaner, as was our language. Policemen were politer. There were no litter, no wogs, no tattoos”. There was no intrusive and onerous health and safety regulations, so kiddies could play on the spotless streets and on unfenced and cluttered bombsites without fear of accident and stranger danger, and almost ever face you’d see was white, and you could actually see those faces

The right wing has an advantage in appealing to dislocated and atomised people: It doesn’t have to provide a compelling view of the future. All it needs is a romantic conception of the past, to which it can offer the false promise of return. When people are scared and full of despair, “let’s go back to the way things were” is a potent message, especially for those with memories of happier times. Those were invariably remembered as socially cohesive – and white.

Ever since then, to quote another song, “It’s been a hard days night …”

Many folk comment about the absence of coloured faces, hijabs, etcetera in old photos, and rant about “the invasion”. They blame “the government” for introducing mass immigration. Hardly surprising when half the government are immigrants themselves”. Some add that politicians ought to to be indigenous – whatever that means as indigeneity is a murky subject. One states that any politician should be an indigenous person . “What idiot first allowed immigrants to take office. Us ordinary folk know they don’t give a hoot for their own people they are in it for themselves and power trip and I’m talking about our own indigenous MPs as for the others …Can you imagine Brits going to Asian countries and being elected to the three highest offices in their government?it just would not happen, but here is does. this is why were are the state we are in”.

When a group member declared “time take the country back!”, I cheekily replied “where to? 1950?”

“There was a time”, someone wrote, “a time when the Sceptred Isle [that came from the Bard of Avon] was full of proper born and bred British folk … who had been through two world wars … Fought for this country … got married had two lovely white children, a boy wearing boys’ things a girl wearing girls’ things … No doubt husband still slogging away twelve hours a day down some coal pit, not sunning himself on some Caribbean island … Showed respect to king and queen … Armed forces … Police and doctors … And discipline was enforced in school and home … There was conscription and hanging and children called out “mum and and dad, auntie and uncle” … A policeman, doctor, teacher were Sir or Miss or Mrs … church on Sunday .. Christening, Confirmation, Holy Matrimony. The priest was a Vicar for the CofE … Vicar was called “Father” there were no women vicars … Catholics were tolerated but the Irish were a problem … I could go on reminiscing but it’s time for my meds and an afternoon nap … GOD SAVE THE KING and GOD SAVE THIS SEPTIC ISLE …

At this point, I realized that this stream of unconsciousness was probably a wind-up. But it encapsulated perfectly a mindset of disconsolate misery. We are not only surrounded by the ghosts of Old Britain – and here in Australia by a comparable cohort – but also by its living dead, the remnants and survivals, the attitudes and assumptions, the fallacies and fears, the nostalgia and the neurosis. As American author William Faulkner wrote, “the past is never past. It is always with us”.

Glory days

I could tell you my adventures—beginning from this morning,” said Alice a little timidly; “but it’s no use going back to yesterday, because I was a different person then.
Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

And so, the past takes on the appearance of a mythical landscape, and escapist fantasy even, of the monoculture, the civility, the cleanliness of minds, hearts, and places, the abiding sense of order, the and the idea – or the lie, more like, that if things were better run nowadays, we can retreat to it.

The following comment to an article like this one in my favourite e-zine Unherd on 3rd October 2023 put it thus: “… as my generation has aged and the future hasn’t perhaps turned out as well as our parents would have hoped, we have created a slightly cartoonish overly sentimental narrative that harks back to ‘our’ glory days. But of course, they weren’t our glory days at all – they were the glory days of our parents”. WH Auden said it similarly in a sonnet of 1938:

Some could not like or change the young and mourn for
Some wounded myth that once made children good,
Some lost a world they never understood,
Some saw too clearly all that man was born for.

There were never any “good old days”, really. There was poverty, slum dwellings, inequality, intolerance, deference, corporal and capital punishment. Things might seem bad today, but social, medical and technological change and growing awareness and concern for others have made life better overall. The “freedom” of those “good old days” was an illusion. Step out of line, be you female, gay or Red, long-haired or “other”, and you were taunted, cold-shouldered, black-balled or bullied. Homosexuals were jailed. “It was hard”, one member once commented, “but respectful of community. To which I replied: “…yeah, but no, but … there was always an “other”. Irish, Catholics, travelers, beatniks, teddy boys, gays, West Indians

As for everyone “knowing their place”, my place would’ve been at the bottom if not for the social and political change, including free healthcare and education, that enabled working class children to grow up healthy and ambitious.

And what’s with the discipline thing? One group member commented that the banning of corporal punishment in schools was “the start of the rot”, whatever that meant to him (yes, it’s usually males who seem dig a bit of biffo against school children – you see it often on social media when schoolies walk out on climate strikes). I never relished the ruler, cane or gym pump (which I endured, infrequently, fortunately).

Corporal punishment was often administered by teachers who enjoyed meting it out – that it was a power thing, and arguably, at times psycho-sexual. In short, child abuse. I was caned and slippered on several occasions, not for indiscipline at all but for academic performance. The teachers inflicting it were known to be bullies but the powers that be tolerated it because such measures were for “our own good” and didn’t cause long term harm. The “it made a man of me” school are possibly retrofitting their childhood experience to suit their contemporary grumpiness.

The “this will hurt me more than it hurts you”, “it’s for your own good”, and “spare the rod …” etcetera, left me cold. Nor the likes of “manners maketh the man”. I can’t say that this made a “man” of me! That, I put down to the National Health Service, free public education right through to sixth form and scholarships to university – and public libraries.

[As an aside, Fintan O’Toole’s “personal” history of modern Ireland, We don’t know ourselves, describes the horrific abuse meted out on generations of Irish children by church run schools, children’s homes and reformatories – to which the authorities turned a blind eye, and which the public tacitly condoned with its silence. O’Toole is mostly definitely in the “corporal punishment is potentially sadism or sado-masochism” camp]

When it comes to modern devices and distractions, folk hark back with a “we didn’t have … and ….” and “we had to made do with …” To which I reply “we would’ve if we could’ve if it had been invented”. Which is probably the case as we boomers took enthusiastically to music cassettes and cds, Walkman and PCs, mobile phones and smart TVs. Odds are the group members are typing their griping on an iPad or iPhone or similar.

I get it that, for some folk, there is an atavistic, rueful longing for the good old days, a golden age when things were simpler albeit less comfortable, when folk were respectful and deferential, and appreciative of the achievements and sacrifices of their fellow countrymen and, at times, women. otherwise”. But, those “seasons in the sun” were, to quote Boz, “… the worst of times and the best of times”. They were then and now is now.

Think I’m going down to the well tonight
And I’m going to drink ’til I get my fill
And I hope when I get old, I don’t sit around thinking about it
But I probably will
Yeah, just sitting back
Trying to recapture a little of the glory of
Well, the time slips away
Leaves you with nothing, mister, but boring stories of
Glory days
They’ll pass you by, glory days
In the wink of a young girl’s eye, glory days
Bruce Springsteen

A glass half full

“So what? Yes, things change. I’ve noticed. Yes”, wrote British stand-up comic, satirist, writer, and broadcaster Simon Evans, in Quillette, 2nd March 2023. “The sands of time will run through the hourglass and the desert winds will blow away the dust of my bones and raze my vainglorious monuments to the ground. Big deal. I like change. New things replace the old and the world would be boring were it not so”.

Indeed! To riff once more on Charles Dickens, the past and the present are no better or worse, just different. Times change. Things change. We change. I was born in 1949, grew up in the fifties and came of age in the sixties. “Then” was good. It is now 2023, and “now” is good too. Back “then”, I could never have imagined today. 

I’m a glass half full person, and also, a keen participant on social media nostalgie. Not because I’m embittered or regretful, but rather, I derive great enjoyment from basking in “les temps perdu”. Things change, for change they must – and not all change is for the best. To some changes, I am reconciled. Others sadden me, but I have accepted that it is less than politic and also quite pointless to complain.

The “good old days” narratives that “we might’ve been poor, but we were happy” and that simpler, slower-moving times were better than today’s fast-paced, economically and socially and culturally changing world, might be comforting, but may not be realistic ones. Yes, we recall that might’ve been happier, more contented even, as Houseman might’ve thought, and our world seemed bigger and brighter, like objects seen through the rear-view mirror, as noted above; but we were young and naïve and everything was new to us. We looked about ourselves with fresh and un-taught eyes and minds. Back then, we may have been young gods and goddesses, and the open road was laid out before us.

And yet, give me today any day for all its faults, challenges and complications – and its cultural and technological advances. In truth my wife and I would not be here now if not for modern medicine. And that might well be the problem when it comes to our present “civilization and its discontents” (that’s from my old friend Nietzsche). In olden days we’d’ve been dust by now and wouldn’t have had to go through this existential “vale of tears”.

If, like dear dead Dusty, my school boy crush, who opened this piece, I’d like think that if I could go back “to the things I learned so well in my youth, those days when I was young enough to know the truth”,  I’d like to take with me my twenty first century septuagenarian sense and sensibility, sans the world-weary cynicism and physical inconveniences of my age and aging – and my iPad. Forget the phone!

And every day can be my magic carpet ride

On a personal note, back in those dear gone days, I was a Roman Catholic and my folks were paddies and went to a school that was secular with a very strong CofE ethos. Boy Scout, Senior Scout. Working class, obedient to a degree but never deferential to the powers that be, republican from an early age, socialist when I reached the age of independence, though with half-informed thinking, got into fabulous music, went to uni, had sex, did drugs, hitchhiked, travelled the hippy trail, dodged the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, and even worked for the MoD, emigrated to Australia, where, through hard yakka and a shitload of good fortune, I did quite well for myself. So I’ll admit that my up-beat perspective of today is to a very large degree due to my good fortune. Not that I’ve been especially astute, canny, and opportunistic, but rather, I’ve been lucky with the hands that have been dealt me throughout my life.

And that went right back to the beginning. As I have written often before, my brothers and I grew up in a a comfortable, happy home with loving parents and a great aunt, “with free medical treatment for all our ailments, and free optical and dental care. I still have crooked teeth – no fancy orthodontics on the NHS – but I have all my teeth still. And my eyesight. We were educated, for free. This came in during the war with the Butler Act. So, thanks to the Welfare State, we were housed and healthy enough to get to primary school and beyond. Once there, we had free books, free pens and paper, and compulsory sport, and doctors and nurses would turn up on a regular basis to check our vitals. When we came out the other side, we were free to make our own choices, and chart our own course through the reefs and shoals of life. And thus, we were able to reach the glorious ‘sixties ready to rock ‘n roll”.

The Spirit of ’45

Back in the days gone by

My memories are my greatest riches
From back in the days gone by ,,,…
Time moves on like a melody, and
I can hear those memories sing
Larkin Poe, Tears of Blue and Gold (2020)

Yes, my formative years were the sixties, and I wouldn’t have missed them for quids (not that I’d had anything to do with being born at the right time in the right place), when, if we wished, we were able to break free of the surly bonds of the past. I have written earlier:

“Cynics say that most people who remember the sixties were not there. Well, I was, and I remember it all so well. And was it as great as they say? Yes it was, to me at any rate. But in reality, the story of the ‘swinging sixties’ has grown with the telling. In the closing scene of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, the journalist says: “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend”. And much of what has been remembered, written, and said about those years has followed that maxim.

This was indeed a decade of change and ferment. Values changed, morals changed, habits changed, clothes changed, music changed (the best music ever, many have argued). The way people looked at the world and thought about it. We often look back and remark that a supernova of creativity burst over the western world during those years, the likes of which was not seen before and has never been seen again. And nowhere more so than in decadent, decaying, depressing, old England, trapped in tradition, class, and prejudice.

And yet, this revolution road was walked by but a few. The greater proportion of the populace, young and old alike, carried on as if nothing untoward was happening. Following in their fathers’ footsteps, faithful to social and economic scripts written before their time, possessed of neither time, means, opportunity or inclination to indulge in the sensual, intellectual, artistic and political playground that was accessible to students and socialites of that generation. People were more affluent, no doubt, more comfortable in a maslovian sense, more socially mobile, better educated (a relative term, this), but overall, not overly adventurous. And truth be said, many of the social and political changes that are said to epitomize the ‘sixties, were well underway during the ‘fifties and even earlier or did not reach true fruition until the decades that followed.

But for we few, we happy few, in our own private Idahos, our little self-important backwaters of intellectual and cultural elitism, times were indeed a’changin”.

London was the “scene”, and then only the West End. The rest of the was still pretty drab and monochrome. But everywhere, clothes and music started to brighten things up.

With these metaphorical themes, so then did the threads unravel, so began a journey that is now drawing to a conclusion. These were the moments I occupied, looking out onto England, but imagining the wider world. And then, from the far side of the world, where the journey will most likely end, in the midst of an Australian forest. Here we are then, with the world literally at our fingertips, as we look out onto a world that is smaller, more knowledgeable, more prejudiced, less wise, more dangerous, more enthreatened, but as ever, beautiful, unfathomable, and magical. And at times like these, perhaps like Banjo, “I somehow fancy that I’d like to change with Clancy” as he “sees the vision splendid of the sunlit plains extended, and at night, the wondrous glory of the everlasting stars”. And hope that like the Bobster, we shall “dance beneath the diamond sky with one hand waving free, silhouetted by the sea, circled by the circus sand, with all memory and fate driven deep beneath the waves”. But let’s leave the last words to AA Milne as we bid farewell forever to The House at Pooh Corner: “wherever they go, and whatever happens to them on the way, in that enchanted place on the top of the Forest, a little boy and his Bear will always be playing”.

Back In The Day

The beat goes on

When we reminisce about our “salad days”, they’re nothing more emotionally satisfying than the music we listened to; it is a portal to those times because there is nothing like songs and music from our past for unlocking memories. As the old crooner used to sing, those “magic moments” provided us with our very own soundtrack, a veritable code that even today, connects us to our contemporaries.

One constant nostalgist Facebook meme is the audio cassette tape. It inaugurated an era when it was possible to control one’s private soundscape, something we all take for granted now. It was cheap, portable, easy to use, and eminently shareable. It could live in the footwell of the a car or the bottom of a backpack. And was thrilling to those of us raised on vinyl. Suddenly, anyone with a cheap tape player could record music and share it. With its advent of the audio cassette, many of us took to compiling party tapes and car tapes of favourite songs to mark our passage from adolescence to adulthood, tapes that we would share with friends and also, with the objects of our young emotions and affections.

Nowadays, we have more ways to access music than at any time in history and a whole world of unfamiliar styles to explore, aided by instant access if we desire, to platforms like You Tube. And yet, there has been research to show that our willingness to explore new or unfamiliar music declines with age. It’s as if we believe, like American songwriter and musician Bob Seger: “today’s music ain’t got the same soul; like that old time rock ‘n’ roll”. There appears to be a consensus that people are highly likely to have their taste shaped by the music they first encounter in adolescence when our brains have developed to the point where we can fully process what we’re hearing, whilst the new experiences and heightened emotions of those years create strong and lasting bonds of memory based on pleasures past.

Donovan and Jenny Boyd wear the love like heaven

Farewell Middle Earth 

I’ll leave my conclusion to American writer, artist and Druid (yes), Cerri Lee:

I suddenly realized it is a profound and overwhelming sense of loss for their world and mine that I feel as the Elves sail away from the Grey Havens. When the Elves leave, they take with them the enchantment from the land, something dies in it and I am left on the shores of Middle Earth amidst a fading beauty, as they sail on into the distance. The realization that now humans will have no restraints in their actions and will push forward the rise of mechanism, commerce on a global scale, and a discarding of anything that even looks like ‘fluffy’ thinking. My Middle Earth will never be the same again and I am constantly mourning its passing through this story. It leads me to wonder if some part of that feeling is what drove Tolkien to write his story.

As a fifty something woman I am starting to feel my age in the way I think. Occasionally I fall pray to the “In my day” ‘rose-tinted’ view of how things were ‘back in the day’. I don’t really think times were ever any better as such, no, definitely not better. But maybe the problems seemed more understandable, more bite sized and chewable. In truth they were not, but memory is a funny thing, as we all know, it can warp and change how we view the past.

I know that things on the global scale have always been complicated, difficult and a fine tightrope walk between warring factions, people in famine and glut, all striving for a peaceful coexistence. It is only the access to media coverage that bring the problems so close to home leaving me with the sense that I am standing before the Black Gates of Mordor, with the armies of the enemy massing on the other side and the Great Eye glaring down on me from his Tower.

© Paul Hemphill 2023.  All rights reserved

Finally I understand why Tolkien’s Elves make me cry

Red and white terror – the Russian revolution and civil war

Paul Hemphill 7 Comments

… as a policeman, I would say, get hold of a man’s brother and you’re halfway home. Nor was it admiration for a better man than me. I did admire him, but I didn’t think he was a better man. Besides, I’ve executed better men than me with a small pistol. 

She’d come to Moscow to look for her child. I helped her as best I could, but I knew it was hopeless. I think I was a little in love with her. One day she went away and didn’t come back. She died or vanished somewhere, in one of the labor camps. A nameless number on a list that was afterwards mislaid. That was quite common in those days.

Yevgraf Zhivargo, in David Lean’s Doctor Zhivago (1965)

“The terror,” declared British Historian Simon Schama in his iconic Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution “was merely 1789 with a higher body count; violence … was not just an unfortunate side effect … it was the Revolution’s source of collective energy. It was what made the Revolution revolutionary’. In short, “From the very beginning […] violence was the motor revolution”.

At the end of the chapter on the coming of thw Revolutionary Wars, he writes: ‘ … poets of romantic weather forecasting like William Wordsworth continued to describe the revolution is a cyclonic disturbance, but increasingly it was no longer the storm that invigorates in cleanses rather a dark and potent elemental rage moving forward in indiscriminate destruction its breath was no longer sweet but foul. It was the wind of war and if the wind of war comes, can the storm clouds of war be far behind’.

I thought a lot about the events of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars which followed it as I read English author and historian Anthony Beevor’s latest foray into Russian and Soviet history, Russia – Revolution and Civil War 1917-1921. 

Some books can be unrelentingly bleak and brutal, so grim and graphic in fact that you have to push yourself to finish them. Cormac McCarthy’s odyssey tale The Road is one such. But one doesn’t often say that about history books. Usually it is time, ennui or both that cry “enough, already!” You set it aside, promising to return to your bookmark – but you never do. I persevered with a veritable catalogue of the horrors that men can inflict upon their fellow humans (and yes, the perpetrators are apparently exclusively male, and the victims are males and females of many ethnicities). Beevor’s previous, highly acclaimed books Stalingrad and Berlin 1945 are chilling, but his latest takes top prize. And finish it I did …

The following is not a review of Beavor’s grim opus as such, but rather a thematic compendium of thoughts and observations derived from or inspired by the book.

Most academic accounts and university courses focus on the ideological and geopolitical dimensions of the origins, rise and consolidation of the Soviet Union, and its ultimate disintegration seventy years later. General public knowledge of the Russian Revolution and the civil war which followed it is relatively limited and cursory, often derived and books like Mikail Sholokhov’s saga of the Don Cossacks, Quiet Flows the Don and The Don Flows Home To The Sea, and Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago. Indeed, it was these novels and David Lean’s powerful adaptation of Doctor Zhivago that first attracted my interest in Russia as a school student in Birmingham. I majored in Politics at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, and Soviet history and politics were an important part of my studies. Between those days and today, I’ve read widely about Russia’s history, past and present, and I am familiar with the events, ideas and personalities, their role in the broader and longer tableau of history, and the reverberations that are still felt today.

I have written often in In That Howling Infinite on Russian and Ukrainian history. Although I am no expert, and profess an amateur interest only, I do possess a short and humble pedigree. My tutor in Soviet Studies at Reading was exiled Hungarian academic and historian Tibor Szamuely, Like many refugees from Communism, he was descended from both perpetrators and victims. An uncle of the same name served in the Hungarian Soviet Republic that took power for six months under Béla Kun in 1919 and died violently that year when the revolution failed. He was among that government’s most bloodthirsty ministers and was called “Butcher Szamuely”. Szamuely’s family wound up in Moscow, where Tibor was born, and where his father was executed in Stalin’s purges. Young Tibor served in the Red Army, and he too was arrested and sent to a labour camp. Rehabilitated, he served as Chancellor of Budapest University. In 1964, then nearing 40, he was teaching in the “ideological institute” of Ghana’s Marxist president Kwame Nkrumah when he defected to England.

Back then, I was a political ingenue and a naïve communist sympathizer and fellow traveler, although my evolving perspectives were transforming and expanding. As my tutor, he advised me to study with an open mind and to put off juvenile thinking. He hadn’t been well when I knew him, and he died a year after I graduated. Under his tuition, I’d resolved to specialize in Soviet Studies – but events intervened, and I ended up in the Middle East (and that is another story. see: Tanks for the Memory – how Brezhnev changed my life). I nevertheless retained an active interest in the history and politics of Eastern Europe.

He would always impress upon me the historical and political continuity of what he called The Russian Tradition – the title of his one and only book, The Russian Tradition, published shortly before his death, and now, regrettably, out of print. I purchased a first edition when it was published and it is on my bookshelf still.

Szamuely believed that the bloodstained drama of the revolutions of 1917 – there were two, the social democratic one in the February, the Bolshevik one in November – and the years that followed, including civil war, the establishment of the USSR and Stalinism largely obscured the underlying consistency of Russian history. He did not live to see the decline and fall of the Soviet Union, and the advent of Putin and Russia Redux, but the basic pattern persists, circular and repetitive. The frequent turmoils that have overtaken this vast continent have in their various ways made changes that were essentially superficial, leading in the end to the intensification, under new forms, of the old authoritarian structure.

You – Bolshevik recruiting poster 1918


Contemplating civil wars

A civil war can emerge from the ashes of a wider, ongoing conflagration when factions or parties dispute the nature and terms of the post-bellum status quo and fracture along political and ideological lines. Many civil wars have arisen from the ashes of a prior war when there are what are perceived as existential issues unresolved and the availability of weapons and materièl and experienced and discontented men to use them.

There is a view that civil war can retrospectively be seen as a crucible of nation, a fiery furnace through which the righteous must walk – an ex post facto rationalization of the Nietzschean paradox of “that which does not kill us makes us strong”. Abraham Lincoln verbalized this in his Gettysburg Address in 1863 on a battlefield where the fallen had been only recently interred. Franco made a similar play as he laid claim to the wreckage that was Spain in the wake of three years of carnage, but then petrified his riven, country in autocratic stone until his death many decades later. The Russian Civil War was not accorded such a nation-building ethos as it was viewed by the Bolshevik victors as the crushing of a counter-revolution against a new world already being born.

Given Russia’s vast expanse, long history of restive regions, and large non-Russian ethnicities – all a result of centuries of imperial conquests – there is always the potential for the disintegration of centralized control and fragmentation. There is a rich history of state collapse following wars, revolutions, system breakdowns, economic crises, and other epochal events. Napoleon’s empire collapsed after his disastrous march on Moscow and subsequent defeat at the Battle of Leipzig. In 1918, the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian empires all collapsed in military defeat. Of course, people, decisions, and policies played a role, but ultimately it was war and the attendant economic and social crises that pushed these states over the edge into political chaos and often violence.

Once thing for sure, civil war, the Hobbesian “war if all against all” (Hobbes was thinking England’s) is undoubtedly the saddest, bloodiest and most visceral of all conflicts. I leave the last words to WB Yeats:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

See: In that Howling Infinite, A House Divided – the Nature of Civil War

All fall down …

Revolutions are unpredictable. They never run in straight lines. They reverberate, the shockwaves expanding and impacting on their vicinity, and way beyond. The shots ricochet, like drive-by shootings and crossfires, and you never know who will be hit, where the bullets will come to rest, and who will be damaged or destroyed. Many people will be liberated, and many enslaved. Many peoples will prosper, and many, many will perish. As TS Elliot wrote, “between the idea and the reality falls the shadow”.”

When the Tsarist Russian empire collapsed halfway through the First World War, it was the first of four great empires to disintegrate. By war’s end, the conflict had destroyed the German, Hapsburg and Ottoman empires. But unlike these three, though the imperial house perished, the empire it ruled did not disintegrate. A handful of national movements, Finnish, Polish, Estonian, Latvian, and Lithuanian succeeded in breaking free, but most of murdered Tsar’s realm emerged from the convulsions of world war, revolution and civil war within a new Soviet empire, one that still ruled millions of square miles and a multitude of peoples.

The Russian Revolutions – the two in 1917, and a failed rising in 1905 in the wake of the disastrous (for Russia) of Russo-Japanese War – and the civil war that followed can be said to have defined the contours of modern European geopolitics, setting the stage for the Cold War and also, the current Ukraine war. The 20th Century was not kind to the countries of Central and Eastern Europe. Historian Timothy Snyder called them “the blood lands”.

The USSR was officially declared in the Bolshoi Theatre on 30th December 1922. Most people find this slightly surprising, because we assume that the Soviet Union must have been proclaimed immediately after The Bolshevik Revolution in November 1917. In fact, it only came into existence after a horrendous civil war that killed an estimated 10 million people, in which the deep national and ethnic tensions inside the old Russian Empire had been laid bare for all to see.

Historian Orlando Figes says in his seminal book about the Bolshevik revolution, A People’s Tragedy, that the failure of democracy in 1917 was deeply rooted in Russian culture and social history and what had started as a people’s revolution contained the seeds of its degeneration into violence and dictatorship.

In Russia, the revolution of February 1917 did not provoke a counterrevolution. The initial absence of any attempt to fight back was illustrative not so much apathy, as a feeling that there was very little of the ancien regime left that was worth defending. The overthrow of the czarist regime prompted a variety of reactions amongst the former ruling class: a resignation to events, bitterness at the incompetence and obstinacy of the Imperial Court, yet also an initial optimism among its more liberal and idealistic members. Most of the nobility and bourgeoisie supported the Provisional Government in the hope that it would at least restrain the worst excesses and keep the country together.

Soon after the November 1917 revolution, Lenin made it clear to the Bolsheviks that civil war was necessary to cleanse Russia of reactionary forces and old ways and to rebuild as a communist state and society. Moreover, he was confident that the Bolsheviks’ example would ignite revolution in the countries of Western Europe. German and Hungarian communists obliged, establishing people’s republics, which in turn invited counter revolution, the ousting of the revolutionaries, and reactionary military and police exacting bloody revenge on any leftists that could find.

The determination to resist only crystallized when the Bolshevik programme in the wake of the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917 polarized opinion. The question is important when it comes to the origins of the Civil War itself, which led to the deaths of up to 12,000,000 people, the impoverishment of the whole country, and suffering on an unimaginable scale.

In June 1918 the Bolshevik regime was enjoying a brief respite from the rigors of revolution and civil war. Although surrounded on all sides by hostile forces, the Bolsheviks were in no immediate military danger. This welcome hiatus, lasting from the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918) to the collapse of the Central Powers at the end of the year, allowed the Bolsheviks to consolidate their political and military strength.

In an uneasy alliance with the Bolsheviks were leftwing Socialist Revolutionaries who still dreamed of a constituent assembly and the anarchists who regarded Brest-Litovsk represented the watershed of the Revolution. In coming to terms with the Central Powers, the Bolsheviks had paid a staggering price in territory and resources. But, more importantly, they had preferred to make a pact with the imperialists rather than attempt to propagate the Revolution through popular initiatives, in particular, by partisan warfare.

Shortly after Brest-Litovsk the Bolsheviks turned against their erstwhile allies. The Cheka (the successor to the Czar’s Okrana secret police and the precursor to the NKVD, the KGB and the FSB) ostensibly created to suppress counterrevolutionaries, was unleashed on the Bolsheviks’ critics on the left. There were fierce battles between Chekists and anarchists in Petrograd and many other Russian cities.

It was game on.

It is difficult to comprehend to scale of the civil war that broke out in Russia in terms of its territorial extent, the numbers of nations and would-be states engaged in the conflict, and the destruction and carnage it wrought to soldier and civilian alike. Nor the ongoing relentlessness. Western European invaders had been defeated in the past (and indeed, the future) by what Mikhail Kutuzov, the Russian general who defeated Napoleon, called General Winter, but within the empire and its Soviet successor, weather did not stop play. Certainly, it complicated military operations, played havoc with logistics and supply-chains, and inflicted indescribable suffering upon soldiers and civilians. And the war went on …

The last of the Romanovs – Tsar Nicholas and his family, murdered by the Bolsheviks in July 1918

Revolution and reaction

If Lenin was politically flexible with foreign powers, he was ruthless with his own people, including rival parties on the left. He grabbed power when the hapless provisional government lost its way in setting up a constituent assembly that was intended to be a democratic representation of all Russians. Lenin initially paid lip service to the assembly, while calling for power to go the “soviets” – people’s councils. In reality he had no intention of allowing any diminishment or oversight of his control of the Bolshevik party and, through its Council of People’s Commissars, the battered Russian state.

But no sooner had the Bolsheviks cemented their rule than they were fighting a civil war on multiple fronts against a mind-boggling array of enemies, stretching from revolutionary socialists  and anarchists to unreconstructed “White Russian” tsarists, nostalgic for a corrupt and flagrantly unjust regime and in between the Reds and Whites were the Greens or Partisans, mainly deserters from all sides who hated both Reds and Whites and attacked both, increasingly so as the war continued. And a range of foreign powers dealt themselves into the game to further their own strategic and ideological interests. [the featured picture of this piece is an idealized manga depiction of charismatic Ukrainian anarchist and Green Nestor Makhno, a larger-than-life figure who miraculous survived the civil way and died in his bed in exile]

The Whites were a confused, fractured and often dysfunctional coalition with rapid changes of command occasioned by personal ambitions and fluctuating military fortunes. White generals were committed to restoring the integrity of the Russian Empire, a self-defeating handicap that alienated potential allies on the fringes, like Finland, the Baltic states and Poland. Churchill underestimated this imperial obsession which prevented the alliances he wanted to defeat the Bolsheviks. The Greater Russia obsession also hampered efforts in the Caucasus where Georgians stirred regions like Ingushetia, Chechnya and Dagestan, giving Britain nightmares of Bolshevism spreading through Central Asia towards India, an obsession that continued through the twenties as described in Peter Hopkirk’s Setting the East Ablaze – Lenin’s Dream of an Empire in Asia.

Out on the edge of the old empire, White warlords endeavoured to carve out kingdoms for themselves. Many commanders spent more time terrorizing locals than fighting the Red partisans who were operating behind enemy lines across the war zone, creating a legacy and tradition the persist to this day.

The diffusion of opponents played into the Bolsheviks’ hands, as their differences were so extreme that a unified opposition fighting force was never a viable option. But if the battle lines were often blurred, the hatred felt by the combatants for each other was nightmarishly vivid.

The White’s defeat in the civil war wasn’t for lack of outside moral and materiel support. It was due largely to their inflexibility, including their refusal to contemplate land reform until it was far too late, and their refusal to grant any autonomy to nationalities of the Czarist Empire. Their administration was so useless that it’s barely existed. Paradoxically, they lost for reasons very similar to the way the Republicans lost the Spanish Civil War two decades later. In Spain, the antifascist alliance of the Republic could not prevail against Generalissimo Franciso Franco‘s disciplined and militarized regime. In Russia, the utterly incompatible alliance of socialist revolutionaries and reactionary monarchists didn’t stand a chance against the single-minded Communist dictatorship.

A leftist libertarian with St. George’s Cross, and a Sister of Mercy nurse, 1916.

World War 1.2

It in many ways it became World War 1.2. The idea of a purely Russian Civil War is misleading simplification, prompting one historian recently to describe it instead as ‘a world war condensed’.

It was waged across European and Asian Russia, including present day Belarus and Ukraine and the successor states of the Soviet Union in the Baltic, the Caucasus, and Central Asia – from Warsaw and Eastern Europe to the Urals and eastwards through the vastness of Siberia’s forests, deserts and tundra to Vladivostok in the Far East, from the arctic north to Crimea and the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea and the borders of what in 1918 ceased to be the Ottoman Empire. Fronts stretched for thousands of miles and advances and retreats likewise. The Trans-Siberian Railway, stretching the length of the former empire from Moscow to Vladivostok, was almost six thousand miles long, and it’s tributary lines served as strategic and logistical thoroughfares for all protagonists who weren’t mounted like the innumerable Cossacks tribes and the nascent Red Cavalry, bringing to prominence the armoured trains that became a symbol of the revolution.

It drew in most of Russia’s contemporary neighbours and more far-flung nations, including The USA, Britain, France, Germany Italy and Japan – the latter providing the largest contingent, estimated by British Intelligence as some 85,000 soldiers, more than many of the various White armies. Combatants included soldiers from these countries, the British dominions of Canada, Australia, South Africa, and India, and Chinese and Mongolian troops. And a multitude of ethnicities fought for their own warlords, their national place in the sun or else their very survival. Caught up in the transcontinental maelstrom were Slavs, Cossacks, Tartars, Turkmen, Arabs, Azeris, Persians, Turks, Armenians, Chechens, Kazakhs, Buryat Mongols, Kalmyks (Europe’s only Buddhist nation) and Jews. White divisions were augmented in Siberia by Mongolian, Chinese, Uighur and Kirghiz mercenaries.

Various nationalist movements arose, successfully and unsuccessfully in all parts of the former Russian Empire. The aftermath of the First World War and the collapse of the Russian Empire saw Polish, German, Italian, Hungarian, Romanian, Czech, and myriad other nationalities fighting for disparate sides, and Beevor skillfully frames the bizarre impact of this on the ethnic nationalist dimensions of the conflict.

The scale of military manoeuvres was unprecedented, as were the physical and supply difficulties over vast distances, and the extremities in climate, particularly the bitter Russian winter. The conflict became very much a cavalry war and indeed, a “railway war” notable for its armoured trains and the logistical lifeline of the Trans-Siberian Railway, protected for much if the conflict by the Czechoslovak Legion, a force of Czech and Slovak nationalists who having fought in the Czarist army, joined the Whites who controlled many towns in Siberia.

In addition to the Czechs, there was also a Polish Legion operating in the Far East. The commanders of both forces became increasingly disenchanted with the White officers who refused to countenance the independence of the border states and who shocked many with their brutality towards prisoners and civilians, and though thousands of miles from Europe, demanded repatriation – ostensibly by sea from Vladivostok.

Western Allies’ ideological perspective of the civil war was ambivalent. Though many, politicians and military alike, were viscerally opposed to Bolshevism and what it stood for, and feared a Red contagion infecting their own countries, a fear that was not unfounded. In the wake of the Revolution, a concatenation of revolts detonated across the globe. Bolshevism spread westwards, from Vienna through Budapest and Sofia to Kiel. The Bavarian Soviet Republic was briefly established in April 1919, before the far-Right Freikorps did it in. Britain wasn’t immune to the ferment. Between the February and October Revolutions, the Leeds Soviet did indeed appear to be the beginning of something, whilst strikes and demonstrations proliferated to be violently put down by the police and army. Winston Churchill alone of his cabinet colleagues wanted a full-on allied intervention and dreamed – some believed he was indeed dreaming but others claimed that he fantasized – of creating an effective White army and a borderlands alliance to defeat the Bolsheviks. But his aspirations were foiled by the imperialism of the White leadership and of White officers and the various national movements’ fear that that if the Whites prevailed, they would restore Russian rule. Britain’s rulers were reticent about shoring up and providing financial, material support and also, soldiers sailors and airmen to brutal to demonstrably homicidal Cossack brigades and revanchist and reactionary royalist autocrats.

British regiments were nevertheless deployed in Siberia and in the Far East as well as the Arctic and Caspian Sea. Royal Navy flotillas blockaded Petrograd in the Baltic, floated up the Volga in the south and down the Dvina in the arctic north, and controlled the Caspian Sea and the waters around the Crimean Peninsula. The Royal Air Force deployed Sopwith Camels and sea planes in surveillance and surveillance missions against the Red forces, who British officers called the “Bolos”. And artillery units and armoured car squadrons were attached to the various White armies.

Wider imperial concerns were in play too. Churchill rang alarm bells as the Reds pushed the Whites back in Siberia and Central Asia, alarming even his reticent cabinet colleagues with prospect of Reds on the borders of the Raj. The Great Game still had over a quarter of century to run before the final whistle blew. In the Far East, Britain and the US, and Reds and Whites alike, were nervous about the designs imperial Japanese was revealing with regard to the resources and the empty lands of eastern Siberia, the island of Sakhalin, the pacific littoral and Manchuria. Intelligence reports revealed that Japanese forces in the region exceeded all others involved, including the warring Russians.

Pogrom

Fratricidal wars are bound to be cruel because of the lack of definable front lines, because of their instant extension into civilian life, and because of the terrible hatreds and suspicions which they engender. The fighting ranged right across the Eurasian landmass was violent beyond belief, especially the unspeakable cruelty of the Cossack atamans in Siberia. Even that archconservative politician VV Shukgin believed that one of the major reasons for the failure of the whites what is a “moral collapse” – that they behaved as badly as their enemy.

There was nevertheless one subtle yet important difference. All too often, whites represented the worst examples of inhumanity, yet on that score, the Bolsheviks were unbeatable. It has been said that their ruthlessness has few parallels in recorded European history up until that time – believing that history was on their side, and that a new world was being created. The almost religious zeal with which they brutalized and killed combatants and innocents alike could be likened to the Albigensian Crusade in the early thirteenth century. [The Crusaders were accompanied by an official representative of the Pope, a French Cistercian monk named Arnaud Amalric. According to accounts written decades later, as the attack began, a soldier asked Amalric how they would be able to tell which Beziers townspeople were Catholics and which were Cathars. Some sources give the alleged quote as “Kill them all, for the Lord knows his own” or as “Kill them all. The Lord knows his own.”]

The focus on ordinary people also means their suffering is brought to the fore. And Beevor is unsparing in showing the chaotic violence of the conflict, and unrelenting in showing the sheer violence of both sides. Reds and Whites are both revealed as more than comfortable burning villages, shooting traitors, suspected or real, and torturing and massacring prisoners, and men women and children caught in the crossfire.

There were many instances of racist violence mainly on the White side – particularly towards Jews. The Whites’ antipathy towards Jews was to some degree due to their perception that most senior Bolshevik were Jewish, but mostly it was that old devil that never went away, antisemitism. The fall of the Romanovs and the ancien regime and the anti-Semitic pogroms they perpetuated continued. Retreat from the major cities brought out the worse in the Whites, with terrible massacres of Jews – although they were not the only perpetrators. Playwright And author Isaac Babel, attached as a correspondent and propagandist to the Red Cavalry on the Polish Soviet front in late 2020 posed the question: “what sort of person is our (Red) Cossack? Many layered: looting, reckless daring, professionalism, revolutionary spirit, bestial cruelty. The population await their saviors. The Jews look for liberation – and in ride the Kuban Cossacks”.

It is estimated that there were some 1300 anti-Semitic pogroms in the Ukraine during the civil war, with some 50000 to 60000 killed by both sides. There were pogroms in Belarus also, but these were not nearly as murderous as in Ukraine. A Soviet report of 1920 mentions 150,000 dead and as many again badly injured.

Churchill was well aware of the effect of the pogroms on public opinion in the West and sought in vain to exert pressure on white leaders to restrain their forces.,

Terror begat terror, leading to greater acts of conspicuous cruelty. After a particularly hard-fought battle in early 1919, a young White horse artillery officer recalled “for the first time since the start of the civil war, prisoners were not shot. There were too many of them”. This did not happen often – and such was the brutality meted out to captives on both sides, shooting was actually a blessing. An Odesa women witness after the fall of the city to the Whites, “Urrrraaa! Four and a half months under these five-pointed star oppressors”. Two days later, Beevor notes, she noted that all the Jews were in hiding. When a city held by the Reds fell to the Cossacks, a a female surgeon observed that fearing a program, two Jewish doctors in her hospital wisely ran to hide in the attic.

Bolshevik leaders and commanders on the field eventually realized that brutality did not endear their cause to the general populace and moderated their behaviour. Some Whites too came to that conclusion, and sought to prevent it at least limit atrocities, but reactionary officers and uncontrollable Cossacks persisted in burning, looting, torturing and murdering, inflicting irreparable damage to the anti-Bolshevik cause. Beevor reports instances when allied forces actually fired on Cossack perpetrators.

The End

As the whites retreated, support for the red army amongst the populace grew, as did its numbers as deserters returned to its ranks encouraged by the announcement of an amnesty and as defections from the White forces grew. Peasants grew less reluctant to serve in the Red Army Fear that with white advances and victory, old landlords would reclaim their land. Success bred success. The Whites’ ranks thinned with desertions defections and the need to transfer troops to defend its rear from attacks by partisans and freelance militias units. The Cossacks, disappointed and tired of war, turned about and headed home to their stanitsas laden with loot. The size of the frontline Red Army was eventually twice that of the Whites, as it eliminated the White armies in the north and east and closed in on the last remaining area under White control, Crimea, where rearguards held out long enough to ensure the evacuation of 150,000 soldiers and civilians by sea protected by the British and French navies.

In the aftermath of total Soviet victory, starvation struck the towns and cities across the land. Food requisitioning detachments scoured the countryside for supplies, their rapaciousness and brutality igniting peasant rebellions from Belarus to Siberia; tens of thousands of peasants rose in revolt, dealing brutally with any Bolshevik that came into their hands. The Red Army and Cheka reciprocated in spades with burning and looting, rape and torture, execution and exile to the emergent Gulag. Workers went on strike in the starving cities, and with the Whites vanquished and the civil war won, the call for democratization of Soviet rule grew louder.

And then, the sailors of the Baltic Fleet at the Kronstadt naval base, who’s guns had heralded the fall of the Romanovs, and whom Trotsky had called “the pride and glory of the Russian Revolution”, rebelled. The regime responded with lies – that the sailors had been suborned and were now Whites – and that White forces in Finland would be crossing the ice to help them. When this didn’t work, I resolved to crush them without mercy, dispatching trustworthy forces against them.

At the end, of 16000 sailors and their families, most were able to cross that ice to final and. But some 3000 fought a last stand and died by assault or firing squad. One of the last cries of protest by the Kronstadt sailors was “All of Soviet Russia has been turned into a Russian penal colony”.

Thus ended the Russian Civil War in November 1920.

… all wars come to an end. And that’s where history restarts.
British war and foreign correspondent Robert Fisk

Evacuees board ship in a Crimean portEpilogue

Epilogue … history repeats

Whilst there were many active fronts during the civil war, often simultaneously, extending for thousands of kilometers, around Archangelsk and Murmansk in the arctic, along the great rivers the Volga, the Don and the Dniester in the south, in the Baltic provinces, and in Belarus, and along the length of the Trans-Siberian Railway. And as during WW2 and the present-day Ukraine war, opposing armies advanced and retreated across Ukraine. Kiev was occupied, often several occasions, by Reds, Whites and Greens, and finally, the Polish Army which invaded Russia and Ukraine in 1920 to reclaim and defend the independence of the onetime Polish state, long divided between the now destroyed Russian, German and Austro-Hungarian empires. The names of the war-torn cities are today tragically familiar. Mariupol and Melitopol, Karchiv and Kherson. Kiev, Odessa and Lvov are now Kyiv, Odesa and Lviv.

© Paul Hemphill 2023 All rights reserved

Posts in In That Howling Infinite, about Eastern Europe:

Outlander – if I didna hae bad luck, I’d hae no luck at all …

Paul Hemphill 1 Comment

History can’t be trusted
Brianna Randall

It’s good I’m Scottish. I’m Scottish. I am Scottish.
I can complain about things, I can really complain about things.
Peter Capaldi, the Twelfth Doctor, discovers he has a Scottish accent

The pipes, the pipes are calling …

Well, after nearly a decade, we heard them at last and surrendered to Outlander  

The promise of exotic Celtic locations, steamy sex scenes, and graphic violence was too irresistible – all this and the fact that we’d run out of tempting things to watch on Foxtel, SBS and Netflix … And so we settled down to what would be eight  seasons of the celebrated time-shifting highland fling (before bingeing on Game of Thrones for the umpteenth time. By happenstance, the final episodes dropped on Netflix on the same day as GoT’s imaginative prequel The House of the Dragons – a fine time for fantasy fans. 

If you’re into stories with eye-candy, period costume, great music, loads of gratuitous violence and soft porn garnished with some history, this one’s for you. It’s a bit like reading Playboy for the stories.

And, of course, there’s time-travel, a perennial fantasy and science fiction trope. Nor is time travel involving Scotland original. The many incarnations of Doctor Who have made many visits to Scotland during their adventures. Way back in 1966 The Highlanders saw Patrick Troughton’s Second Doctor arrive in the Scottish Highlands in 1746 just after the Battle of Culloden. It was here that The Doctor met Jamie McCrimmon (actually, Yorkshire actor, Frazer Hines), a piper of the Clan MacLeod who would go on to be a regular and popular companion to the Doctor. Since then, there have been four Scottish Doctors and many Scottish lead characters. American author Diana Gabaldon says she created the Outlander stories (on which the series is based – there are nine of them) after watching Hines in Doctor Who and based her leading man on him. Hines actually has a role in the 21st century Doctor,  Season 1, episode 11.

Fraser Hines as Jamie, 1966

The Whovian Paradox

So, here we were, time-hopping back and forth between 1745 and 1945, the ‘45 Scottish Highland rising and the end of WWII, and then, the American colonies before and during the American War of Independence, the late nineteen sixties and early eighties. The traffic at the magical stone rings of Craigh na Dun, somewhere near Inverness (they’re actually on Lewis in the Outer Hebrides) and North Carolina (apparently, they’re styrofoam) reaches rush hour proportions as one, two, one again, three and four, family members and other sundry “travelers” pass to and fro’.

The title of this piece, as everybody ought to know, is borrowed from the old blues song Born Under A  Bad Sign, immortalised, of course by the best rock trio ever, Cream. It describes a narrative arc which follows a “Groundhog Day” formula. The heroine Clare Fraser late of 1945, a former WWII battlefield nurse, after landing in the Scottish Highlands in 1744, is over ensuing years captured by British Army Redcoats, press-ganged by the Royal Navy, arrested by colonial vigilantes, almost burnt for a witch by superstitious puritans, has sex with Bonnie Prince Charlie, and is serially rescued in the nick of time by her husband, rebellious and handsome highlander Jamie Fraser. Jamie is captured, arrested, flogged, enslaved, kidnapped and worse, and is rescued, in the nick of time by his resilient spouse. This happens numerous times, with sundry villains outwitted, overcome and served their just desserts – with plenty of time to spare for many interminable sex-scenes (why take five minutes of screen time when you’ve seven seasons to fill), and one excruciatingly graphic and gratuitous episode of sexual violence which, counting flashbacks, must’ve taken up to a hour or more of screen time. It must have caused consumer conniptions because by series seven, the show runners had seriously toned down the adult content.

Their ill-starred son in law Roger Mackenzie endures a similar helter-skelter ride as he embarks on a literal “hero’s journey” from academic and folksinger to preacher to late twentieth century “househusband” – his adventures including being press-ganged by pirates, “sold” to native Americans, and fighting successively for the British army and the insurgent Continental Army. 

For all the back and forth, the melodramatic fol-de-rol, the surfeit of rumpy-pumpy and violence, and the gorgeous highland and American scenery, as a historical and well-costumed drama, it presents a well-researched and historically accurate – if simplified – portrayal of society and politics leading up to the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745-46, including a brutal reenactment of the Battle of Culloden, the last battle fought on British soil, and the American Revolutionary War, of the French court at Versailles, of medical techniques in the 18th Century (Clare is an experienced battlefield nurse and qualified twentieth century doctor), and of the original sins that still haunt the United States today: the institution of slavery and the fate of the indigenous Americans. There are many historical characters including an unflattering portrayal of Bonnie Prince Charlie, the leader of the Jacobite forces, and a more sympathetic George Washington (but not his alleged wooden teeth). There is also a brief cameo for the not yet treasonous Benedict Arnold. 

There was an original and to my mind amusing walk-on role which may have gone over the heads of most viewers, particularly as no reference is made to her back story. When Charles Stewart was on the run after Culloden, he was aided in his flight by minor aristocrat Flora MacDonald who was subsequently arrested for her role and consigned to the Tower of London, but later amnestied. She married an army captain also named McDonald, and they emigrated to the American colonies, where she is fleetingly introduced to our Jamie at a society soirée. Her captain actually served with the British forces during the American War of Independence, and as a result, their property was confiscated. They relocated to Canada and soon, after, returned to Scotland. 

One early criticism I had of Outlander was that the highlanders all spoke Scottish Gaelic. Not that I’ve a problem with the tongue because it’s a beautiful language and I wish I could’ve learned Gaelic in the past – it was my Irish mother’s native tongue, though she lost it after years of living in England. But because there were no subtitles. I realized very soon that this was intentional as it emphasised just how alien the whole scene must’ve been to English Claire, now dependent upon Jamie, who, like Mel Gibson’s William Wallace, was multilingual, and a handful of bilingual clansmen to understand what was being said around and about her. Jamie’s pet name for her is Sassenach, meaning foreigner or, indeed, Outlander, derived from the English saxonīs or saxons, and used by Catholic highlanders for protestants of the Anglican persuasion. By the second season, to borrow from Jamie, I “dinnae fash”.

Many books and films of the fantasy genre have endeavoured to resolve what one could call the Whovian Paradox – the desire to go back and change history for the better. But, as the ever-regenerating Doctor himself always cautioned his constantly changing and ever-enthusiastic companions, you can’t just go back and alter history.  We’ve seen it often in films like Terminator, 12 Monkeys and Looper.  For all its melodrama and conjecture, Outlander manages to weave, at times clumsily, through the conundrums and contradictions. But no spoilers here … 

Songs of Rebellion 

Now, let’s talk about the music. The Outlander books by Diana Gabaldon make constant references to songs and music from the periods in which the stories are set, be these eighteenth century Scotland and America or the twentieth century. The series’ soundtrack created by American composer and musician Bear McCreary works well in providing a sense of place and time. As an old folkie of Celtic blood, I enjoyed hearing snippets of songs and tunes that I’ve known since childhood, including Marie’s Wedding and Johnny Cope.

The main theme, in the opening TikTok’s, and as a leitmotif throughout story  is the ersatz Jacobite song Over The Sea to Skye. It’s a grand old song, and I’ve written about it before:

There are many folk songs that we are convinced are authentically “traditional”, composed in the days gone by an unknown hand and passed down to us by word of mouth and then, perhaps, by broadsheets and handbills, rustic kitchens and Victorian parlours, until finally pressed into vinyl during the mid-twentieth century folk revival. And yet many such songs were indeed written by poets and songwriters of variable fame. One such is The Skye Boat Song. 

This famous song is one of many inspired by the Scottish Jacobite Rising against Protestant England’s rule in 1745. It recalls the journey of Prince Charles Edward Stuart, “Bonny Prince Charlie”, from Benbecula to the Isle of Skye as he evaded capture by government troops after his defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. The Jacobite Rebellion was sparked by many political, cultural and economic factors. but essentially, it was a dynastic civil war. 

Songwriter and philanthropist Sir Harold Boulton, 2nd Baronet composed the lyrics to an air collected by Anne Campbelle MacLeod in the 1870s. According to Andrew Kuntz, a collector of folk music lore, MacLeod was on a trip to the isle of Skye and was being rowed over Loch Coruisk (Coire Uisg, the “Cauldron of Waters”) when the rowers broke into a Gaelic rowing song “Cuachag nan Craobh” (“The Cuckoo in the Grove”). MacLeod set down what she remembered of the air, with the intention of using it later in a book she was to co-author with Boulton.

It was first published in 1884 Around 1885 the famed author Robert Louis Stevenson, considering Boulton’s lyrics words “ unworthy”, composed verses “more in harmony with the plaintive tune”. Purged of Jacobite content, these mentioned neither Charlie nor Culloden.

Boulton’s is the one that endured, along with the sentimental perspective Bonny Prince Charlie

But historical fact has never dimmed the popularity of the song. It is often played as a slow lullaby or waltz in many and varied contexts including soundtracks, including Outlander (adapting the text of the text Robert Lewis Stevenson’s poem “Sing Me a Song of a Lad That Is Gone” (1892).

Billow and breeze, islands and seas,
Mountains of rain and sun,
All that was good, all that was fair,
All that was me is gone.

The rendering of the song changes through the seasons, with female and male solos, a capella and choral. The most poignant is that of season 7, featuring as it does Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor, who passed away this July , not long after the season aired fir the first time. Listen to it below. 

There was another piece that was used to excellent and atmospheric effect in the lead up to the Battle of Culloden. Bear McCreary has written: “To properly underscore these episodes, I needed a song that was written during the Jacobite uprising as opposed to after it, a song that makes no comment about loss, only promises of victory.
 I turned to famed Scottish composer and music historian John Purser, who was gracious with his time and assembled a collection a historically-accurate songs for me. I was immediately drawn to the soaring melody in Moch Sa Mhadainn, song composed by Scottish Gaelic poet Alasdair mac Mghaighstir Alasdair (known in English as Alexander MacDonald), a member of Clan MacDonald of Clanranald). A celebrated poet of the Jacobite era, Alasdair composed this song upon hearing the news that Prince Charles Edward Stuart had landed at Glenfinnan. That was perfect!  When Jamie opens the letter in “The Fox’s Lair” and learns he has been roped into the revolution, this song was actually being composed somewhere in Scotland at that very moment.“ Moch sa Mhadainn ‘s Mi a’ Dùsgadh (Early As I Awaken), also known as Oran Eile Don Phrionnsa (Song to the Prince) or Clan Ranald’s Welcome. I have published it at the end of this post.

A Scottish footnote

The two Scottish rebellions of the 18th century were as much civil wars as insurrections against the English Crown. Lowland Scots of the south were against the highlanders of the north. Catholics fought Presbyterians – but many Protestants fought the Crown, a legacy perhaps of the English Civil War, Cromwell’s Commonwealth, the Restoration in the previous century. Clan chiefs allied themselves to the Crown or to the Jacobite cause based upon family ties and self interest. The Crown’s forces at Culloden contained many Scottish soldiers, including senior commanders. Irish Catholic forces who had no love for protestant England fought on the side of the Jacobites. The forces who tracked down the rebels after the battle were often Scots, as were the soldiers and officers carrying out the reprisals and infamous Highland Clearances that followed – the latter being dictated by economics as much as politics, often in the interests of Glasgow and Edinburgh landowners who wanted the land cleared of residents so they could run lucrative sheep farms. A larger than life character like the celebrated Rob Roy MacGregor was very much a charming scoundrel who always had some sort of scheme going, and like most clan leaders, he had contacts in the highest places, including the palace.

I recently rewatched a televisual recreation of the battle of Culloden that I’d first seen in 1964 by British film maker Peter Watkins. For its time, it was a well-balanced account, featuring “interviews” with the principal protagonists on both sides, an engrossing narrative, and some pretty harrowing scenes of the carnage inflicted on the Highland forces by the well-armed and well-trained Redcoats. There is a link to the full film below. 

The Jacobite Rebellion itself was sparked by many political, cultural and economic factors. but essentially, it was a dynastic civil war. The battle on Culloden Moor dashed for two and a half centuries the Scots’ dreams of independence. Charles Edward Stuart, the “Young Pretender” to the Protestant Hanoverian English throne that once belonged to the Roman Catholic Stuart clan, fled into exile in France. And that’s where he remained, although his last resting place is in the crypt of Saint Peter’s Basilica in Rome – an ironic ending for this could’ve been champion of Catholic hopes. Bonny Prince Charlie had many romantic and rousing songs written about him. But in reality he wasn’t the dashing, gallant leader that the songs portrayed and that the Scots and their Celtic Irish allies yearned for. He was an indecisive and vacillating leader who thought himself much cleverer and popular than he actually was. portrayal in Outlander is most unflattering. When the going got rough, he got going – and left the the Scots and Irish who supported him with blood and treasure to the tender mercies of the Sassenach foe”.

And yet, the songs live on to this day, most notably in The Skye Boat Song, Mo Gile Mear, Will Ye No Come Back Again. The old and well-recorded favourite Óró sé do bheatha ‘bhaile has also been associated with the Jacobite cause as Séarlas Óg (“Young Charles” in Gaelic). The poet Padraig Pearse, leader of the doomed intifada we know as the Easter Rising of 1916, added new verses, and so the song entered the rebel canon.

Thou art the choicest of all rulers
Here’s a health to thy returning,
Charlie His the royal blood unmingled
Great the modesty in his visage
Moch Sa Mhadainn (Song to the Prince)

The Jacobites: ‘Don’t let romanticism obscure the threat they posed

Alison Campsie, 19th Nov 2020

 
The Battle of Culloden as depicted by Swiss painter David Morier, who was paid a pension by the Duke of Cumberland, the commander of the British Army at the battle. PIC: Creative Commons.
The Battle of Culloden, David Morier, who was paid a pension by the Duke of Cumberland, the commander of the British Army at the battle. PIC: Creative Commons.

The romanticism of Jacobites should not obscure the threat they posed to the British Army in the years following the Battle of Culloden, a leading historian has said.

Professor Murray Pittock, Pro Vice Principal at Glasgow University, said that Jacobites had to be contained “so extensively, and so completely” after the battle in April 1746 with some 12,000 British Army soldiers remaining in Scotland – around 25 per cent of the regular army’s strength at the time.

They soldiers were stationed in 400 cantonment camps – from forts to staging posts – from Lerwick to the Western Isles and from Aberdeen to Gretna, with 60 patrols remaining in Scotland a decade after the battle.

 
Professor Pittock, in an online lecture hosted by History Scotland magazine, said: “Although Jacobitism became romanticized, that romanticism should not be obscured by its reality.
 
“Its reality was that it had to be contained so extensively in such a prolonged way and so completely.”
 
He added: “Although the Jacobites became romanticised the romanticisation was itself a reaction to the seriousness of the threat it was seen as posing at the time.

“Romanticism kept the Jacobites alive but it also kept it at a safe distance.”

Prof Pittock noted that around 1,000 Jacobites died at Culloden with another 2,000 killed in the days that followed given the army’s ‘licence to kill’ supporters of the cause.

Soldiers were paid 16 guineas for the capture of Jacobite colours and 2s and 6d for every Jacobite musket or broadsword seized, Prof Pittock said.

He added that Cumberland and his commanders rotated their soldiers every three months in order to prevent connections being forged with local people.

 

Their longer term role was to police ‘Highland dress’, protect the collection of taxes and “overawe the local population”.

But residents chose not to help the soldiers in some cases with a report from Glen Dessary noting that ‘the people are unwilling to part with any provisions’ for the forces.

Desertions were not uncommon, with two deserters from Pulteney’s Regiment sentenced to death. However, it was decided that one should be spared, with a roll of a dice determining who should live, research by Prof Pittock found.

He pointed to the building of Fort George at Arderseir, which served as a British Army garrison from 1757, which cost around £2m to build at a time when Britain was heading into the Seven Years War while servicing a massive national debt.

“What that should tell us that whatever people might think about the Jacobite cause being romanticised, or it being wrong, it was not what their enemies thought at the time,” Prof Pittock added.

“That is extremely important. You cannot understand Jacobitism by looking down the wrong end of a telescope,” he said.

Details of the British Army occupation of Scotland following Culloden have also been brought to light by the Stennis Historical Society, which has researched and digitised hundreds of records of cantonment camps set up across the country post-Culloden.

The Jacobites who fought on after Culloden

The Scotsman, 16th Apr 2019

The battle was lost, the rising was over, and the rebels were told by their leader to go home. But for hundreds of Jacobites, the fight was still on, despite their defeat at the Battle of Culloden, with many remaining armed and engaged long after Bonnie Prince Charlie went on the run on April 16, 1746.

Around 1000 Jacobites ­gathered the following day at Ruthven ­Barracks, where a written order from Prince Charles Edward Stuart told them to “seek their own safety” and disband,

But, for many, surrendering was too dangerous an option, according to Professor Murray ­Pittock, ­historian and pro-vice principal of Glasgow University.

As time went on, the risks of Jacobites handing themselves in became clear.

Prof Pittock said: “The mood of the Ruthven meetings was downcast. Many fought on to avoid capture or because the risk of surrendering was high.

“To see how the British Army is dealing with people, there is not really a lot of incentive to go home. They think they will be at more risk.

“In June, a number of Jacobites went into Fort William after the British government ­promised six weeks’ immunity. Captain Scott drowned them in a salmon net.”

Jacobites engaged in low-level disruption, raiding and ­protection of vulnerable tenantry as well as recruitment to the Irish Brigade and probably Scottish regiments in French service, including Ecossais Royales.

Assassinations of unpopular ­government officers or sympathizers were also recorded. The British government still considered the Jacobite threat to be “major” at this time with around 12,000 to 13,000 soldiers deployed across the entire country – from Berwick and Stranraer to Elgin, Forres, Stonehaven, Inverbervie and Montrose – by the end of August 1746.

As government forces mobilized, significant units of armed Jacobites continued to appear in the field, said Prof Pittock, who is due to publish a book on the British Army between 1746 and 1760.

At the end of April, 120 armed MacGregor men were recorded in Balqhuidder after marching home ‘colours flying and pipes playing’ with the Army unwilling to tackle or pursue Jacobite units that maintained discipline, Prof Pittock said.

One battalion of Lochiel’s ­regiment was still operational in May – as were 500 men under ­Clanranald. Orkney remained under Jacobite control until late that month and, despite British attacks, four local Jacobite lairds remained successfully hidden.

Clans made concerted attempts to resist Cumberland and his men with around a dozen chiefs meeting at Mortlaig in early May.

“At the meeting… they entered into a bond for their mutual defence and agreed never to lay down their arms, or make a general peace without the consent of the whole,” according to an 1832 account by James Browne.

“By the bond of association, the chiefs agreed…to raise on behalf of the prince and in defense of their country, as many able-bodied armed men as they could on their respective properties.”

Around 600 men gathered later that month across the north and west but the clans “ultimately did not have the time or morale to raise or retain enough men in the field,” Prof Pittock said.

Although a unified response failed to materialize, Jacobites remained active across Scotland. Jacobite expresses – the non-stop delivery of letters by horse – continued until August. A British regiment was deployed across Banffshire in the summer of 1746 with insurgents reported in Argyll that September.

Arms were surrendered in the Mearns right into the summer of 1748.

“British atrocities may have been carried out against innocent ­victims, but there were plenty of continuing Jacobite threats,” Prof Pittock said.

© Paul Hemphill 2023 All rights reserved

Over the sea to Skye

Mo Ghile Mear – Irish myth and melody

Mo Ghile Mear – Irish myth and melody

Rider Haggard and the book that launched a genre

Paul Hemphill 2 Comments

In 2014, English author and academic Katherine Rundell published an entertaining article in the London Review of Books entitled Fashionable Gore. It served recently as the primarily source and backdrop for a podcast in the highly addictive podcast The Rest is History. The hosts, historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook, specialist in ancient and modern history respectively, have a jolly good time  discussing the legacy of English fin de siècle author Henry Rider Haggard, and particularly, his hugely popular adventure yarn King Solomon’s Mines.

Rundell writes: “King Solomon’s Mines is a very Victorian fable of endurance but it’s also a glorious romp, if you don’t mind your romps racist, sexist and tin-eared … It would be surprising if any white man born in 1856 had written non-racist, non-sexist fiction, whether it was set in Africa or not … You make a choice with Haggard: if you suspend not just disbelief but politics, logic and taste, the rewards are very real”. She first encountered the novel as a liberal-minded, educated adult when she could judge a book on its merits and its shortcomings. I was a pubescent early teen when it was recommended to us schoolboys by our English teacher, and was soon hooked on the adventure, the exotic settings and, especially the violence – and quickly moved on to its sequel, Alan Quartermain, follow up and 

I republish Fashionable Gore below. It’s a very good read.  Here is The Tom and Dom Show. But read on …

As a young man, in January 1879, Henry Rider Haggard walked the field of Isandlwana in present day in Kwa-Zulu Natal Province, South Africa just days after the battle in which a Zulu army totally destroyed – indeed, massacred – a British army. He was fascinated by and enamoured with Africa, the “dark continent” of myth and story. Having spent but a few weeks in the African bush, I fully under it – though I was accustomed to Australia’s big sky, the “vision splendid of the western plains extended” (that’s the “banjo”), the eldritch aura of Uluru, and the primeval magic of the coastal rain forest, we too succumbed to its spell.

To Henry, Africa was the “heart of darkness”, and yet also, a Garden of Eden, the home of the “noble savage” where a white Englishman, freed of the bonds of straightened Victorian Britain, could walk unexplored and uncharted lands, encounter many wonders, and in “proving” himself and testing his mettle, find himself and weigh his own worth.

You could say King Solomon’s Mines, his third of many adventure novels, could be said to have launched a thousand clichés and I’ve used a swag of them just then …

It all started with a bet …

Henry did not bide long in Africa, though long enough to be involved in the annexation of the Boer state of the Transvaal after the first Boer War in 1881, one of the triggers for the second and greater Boer War in 1899. He’d returned to England by 1885 when his elder brother pledged him five bob if the he could write a book half as good as Robert Lewis Stevenson’s hugely popular pirate jaunt “Treasure Island”.

By the end of the year, he had penned a novel that would become the foundational text of the lost world literary genre. King Solomon’s Mines was one of the first English adventure novels set in Africa, a story brimming with treasure, bravery and romance, and featuring all-action hero and big game hunter (naturally) Allan Quartermain and his conflicted band of British brothers (Scots and English to be precise – Stevenson, and before him, Sir Walter Scott

It was a romantic and what we call today white supremacist, man’s world of Britishness and brotherhood, martial prowess and manliness (or as Tom and Tom jest, “men in tight trousers”) in which the plucky British adventurer bested beast and barbarian and laughed in the face of fear. A “boy’s own” universe indeed, which I and my school chums lapped up with vicarious pubescent relish in the early sixties. All this “derring-do” is now dismissed as an outdated and anachronistic perspective of earlier generations, and what I perceived early on in my coming of age, as old-school Englishness. It was, of course, of its times. It lacked none of the sardonic ‘seventies irony of George McDonald Fraser’s celebrated Flashman comi-tragic adventures in which the eponymous antihero, the unreconstructed villain of Thomas Hughes’ Victorian yarn Tom Brown’s Schooldays, roves and rogers his way through the wars of the nineteenth century, somehow managing to escape by the skin of his teeth from one military disaster after another, including Custer’s famous “Last Stand” at Little Big Horn, the Charge of the Light Brigade, and the last stand of the 44th Foot at Gandamak during the disastrous First Afghan War of 1842.

In his turn-of-the-century prudish, Henry would never have let Quartermain and his pals go forth in such amours and priapic array as the nineteen seventies unchained and unzipped Harry Flashman. Though he shyly dallied with the picaresque – like Fraser, his few female characters were either portrayed as drop-dead gorgeous and dangerous or as plug-ugly and dangerous. But he views womenfolk with an almost schoolboy insouciance and deflection. Rundell observes that “the noble native woman always dies in Haggard – Quatermain feels ‘bound to say … that I consider her removal a fortunate occurrence, since, otherwise, complications would have been sure to ensue’, whilst she and the podcast pals chuckle over the male protagonists’ “euphoric homosociality”, taking great pleasure in quoting at length the following mellifluous piece of Victorian soft porn from King Solomon’s Mines: 

I am impotent even before its memory. Straight before us, rose two enormous mountains, the like of which are not, I believe, to be seen in Africa, if indeed there are any other such in the world, measuring each of them at least fifteen thousand feet in height, standing not more than a dozen miles apart, linked together by a precipitous cliff of rock, and towering in awful white solemnity straight into the sky. These mountains placed thus, like the pillars of a gigantic gateway, are shaped after the fashion of a woman’s breasts, and at times the mists and shadows beneath them take the form of a recumbent woman, veiled mysteriously in sleep. Their bases swell gently from the plain, looking at that distance perfectly round and smooth; and upon the top of each is a vast hillock covered with snow, exactly corresponding to the nipple on the female breast. The stretch of cliff that connects them appears to be some thousands of feet in height, and perfectly precipitous, and on each flank of them, so far as the eye can reach, extend similar lines of cliff, broken only here and there by flat table-topped mountains, something like the world-famed one at Cape Town; a formation, by the way, that is very common in Africa. To describe the comprehensive grandeur of that view is beyond my powers.

Much to my surprise and mirth, I’ve learnt that Shebas Breasts actually do exist.

Sheba’s Breasts Ezulwini Valley Swaziland

Rundell wrote of the titular character of She, Rider Haggard’s follow up adventure yarn, “she was wise and beautiful beyond imagining: a sultry multilingual virgin, wish-fulfillment made flesh … and even more than King Solomon’s Mines, it’s a book out of which obsessions and anxieties leak”. More into power than sex, she was, of course, the original “She Who Must Be Obeyed”. A Hammer horror film version released in 1965 starring pneumatic Bond siren Ursula Andress was an international success and notwithstanding the dusty demise of Ayesha, led to a 1968 sequel, The Vengeance of She, with another femme fatale from Mitteleuropa, Olinka Berova, in the title role. Neither film has aged well, though both ladies are still with us today. 

Ursula Andress as Ayesha

Rider Haggard’s work, particularly King Solomon’s Mines and She, would would inspire authors from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty first. His literary legacy can be tracked from his contemporaries and pen pals Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling, both of whom were to visit South Africa during the Boer War, including the former’s Lost World and Kipling’s Gunga Din and Kim, through early twentieth century early Irish Republican Army “martyr” Erskine Childers’ Riddle of the Sands, John Buchan’s Thirty Nine Steps and Prester John, and Edgar Rice Burroughs Tarzan series, to JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (to many, regarded as the pinnacle of the adventure novel genre). Grahame Greene and Ian Fleming have acknowledged their debt to Rider Haggard, whilst the book has inspired movies from the beginning of the art form, including several remakes of King Solomon’s Mines and (the featured picture is from a loose British adaptation of 1937 starring Cedric Hardwicke, Anna Lee, and my namesake Africa American crooner and socialist Paul Robeson – unlike the movies, Henry would never have countenanced “leading ladies” in his manly romps) and latter day day blockbusters like the original Star Wars , and the Indiana Jones and Tomb Raider film series.

King Solomon’s Mines, its follow-ups and the many subsequent imitators are all variations on the derivative ‘hero’s quest’, the mono-myth popularized by by Joseph Campbell in his celebrated book The Hero with a Thousand Faces.That author described it thus:

A hero ventures forth from the world of common day into a region of supernatural wonder: fabulous forces are there encountered, and a decisive victory is won: the hero comes back from this mysterious adventure with the power to bestow boons on his fellow man.

Campbell borrowed the term monomyth from Irish author James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake – Joyce’s Ulysses was also highly influential in the structuring of the archetypal motif. He published The Hero’s Quest in 1949 but the idea behind the monomyth preceded him by millennia – think Odysseus and Aeneas, Beowulf and Sigurd/Siegfried, contemporaries like JRR, and latter-day film makers and authors. Star Wars creator George Lucas and Richard Adams, bunny-quest Watership Down have both acknowledged their debt to his book.

And so, to Fashionable Gore. The title refers to what Rundell refers to as a particularly Victorian fascination with bloodshed: “Second only to the relish of battle is Henry’s fascination with unusual ways a man might die”. A bit like Vikings, really, without the bonking …

© Paul Hemphill 2023 All rights reserved

See other stories of Africa in In That Howling Infinite: Johnny Clegg’s Impi – the Washing of the Spears and The ballad of ‘the Breaker’ – Australia’s Boer War and for more on “the hero’s quest”, see One ring to rule us all – does Tolkien matter? 

Fashionable Gore

Katherine Randell, London Review of Books, 3rd April 2014

I first encountered King Solomon’s Mines in the children’s section of a public library in Harare. Most of the books smelled of water damage and many had been taken out so rarely that the last ‘return by’ stamp pre-dated Mugabe and decimalisation. I was working through shelves of books about horses and morality tales written by women who manifestly did not like children, and took King Solomon’s Mines because it’s set in ‘the Manica country’, a province a few hundred miles east of Harare. It seemed run of the mill at the time, much like the other books in the library: it was tightly plotted, suspense-driven, lavishly sexist and racist. In fact, though it is often read as a children’s book, it isn’t; nor is it run of the mill. It is the book which sowed the seed for John Buchan’s Richard Hannay, for Indiana Jones and James Bond, and though less slick than its successors, its anxieties and lunacies are more interesting. It isn’t suitable for children; perhaps not suitable at all.

As a child Henry Rider Haggard was believed to be stupid: his father told him he was destined to become a greengrocer. The books aren’t proof that he wasn’t stupid; but they are proof that he was dogged and canny, with a strange and lurid imagination. Haggard’s father lived long enough to see his son become wealthier than he was and the author of a 15-volume series which ran for forty years; he was dead by the time his son was knighted in 1912 (a knighthood for services to literature was at the time largely unheard of, so his was given for services to the development of agriculture in Norfolk). King Solomon’s Mines was written in answer to a bet Haggard had made with his brother that he could write a book as good as Treasure Island. He said it took him six weeks (though novelists always lie about that sort of thing) and it was an immediate bestseller. The 1870 Education Act had produced a large cohort of literate citizens with an appetite for fiction. There was much in the book to be admired by the stay-at-home population of late 19th-century England: in the world Haggard created the governing principle was survival, not class or intellect, and the rewards for bravery were blood (other people’s) and diamonds. Graham Greene said that he valued Haggard’s book ‘a good deal higher than Treasure Island’.

The story follows the narrator Allan Quatermain – an elephant hunter with good manners – and his colleagues, Sir Henry Curtis and Captain Good, on a journey into Mashukulumbwe country. Quatermain early on stakes his claim to heroic status when he says that he has already killed, but always with the stern regret of the Victorian imperialist: ‘I have killed many men in my time, yet I have never slain wantonly or stained my hand in innocent blood, but only in self-defence.’ The men’s aim is to find Curtis’s estranged brother, about which they are guardedly optimistic, and to discover King Solomon’s diamonds, about which – not knowing the title of the book – they are sceptical.

The novel is peppered with geographical detail conveyed in the confident vernacular of contemporary explorers’ reports, though the information itself is often mildly insane. In Manicaland, only the Chimanimani mountains and Mount Nyangani, Zimbabwe’s highest peak, could serve as the basis for ‘Suliman’s Mountains’. The heroes expend much blood and sweat traversing snowy terrain (which, in real life, 11-year-old schoolchildren climb as a matter of routine). In a crevice Quatermain’s hired bearer freezes to death (‘like most Hottentots, he cannot stand cold’) and deep inside a cavern the explorers discover a dead body three hundred years old, preserved ‘fresh as New Zealand mutton’ in the atmosphere. Even in the coldest months the temperature in the Chimanimanis is between 12 and 15 degrees Celsius; Nyangani last had snow in 1935. Haggard knew Southern Africa – he made his first trip to South Africa as secretary to the governor of Natal at 19 and was later master and registrar of the High Court in the Transvaal – but the land he paints is as lurid and fantastical as the witches and secret kings who populate it.

Following an ancient Portuguese map, the three men and their servant, Umbopa, walk into the territory of a hostile tribe, who are awed out of their murderous intentions by the spectacle of Good’s false teeth and white legs. Good, the light-relief character, is forced to walk much of the journey without his trousers, so enamoured of his lower half are the Kukuana people. The tribesmen are also impressed by Quatermain’s gun, as he picks off an antelope from seventy yards with childlike pleasure. ‘“Bang! thud!” The antelope sprang in the air and fell on the rock dead as a door nail. A groan of simultaneous terror burst from the group before us.’ The Kukuanans, Quatermain learns, are ruled by an impostor king called Twala, who is in thrall to Gagool, a witch so pocked and wizened by age that Quatermain mistakes her for ‘a withered-up monkey, wrapped in a fur cloak’. Luckily, Umbopa turns out to be the rightful king of the Kukuana people: a snake tattooed around his middle is the proof. The next night, under cover of a convenient lunar eclipse, Umbopa unveils himself and declares war on the usurper king.

Most of the book focuses on the Kukuana kraal and the battlefield; despite the title, the quest to find the stones takes up only the last fifty pages. When the diamonds are found, in a cave with a hidden door, the moment is muted: ‘The chest was three-parts full of uncut diamonds, most of them of considerable size. Stooping, I picked some up. Yes, there was no doubt about it, there was the unmistakeable soapy feel about them.’ In the novel it isn’t the diamonds that shine but the sweat of male bodies at war. There’s no sex in the book: where there is delight in things bodily, it’s in the euphoric homosociality of the post-battle glow. Haggard’s reluctance to involve women is the most obvious difference between the Quatermain books and those of the writers who emulated them. John Buchan followed Haggard’s adventure-suspense formula closely and self-consciously: in The 39 Steps, the hero’s story is said to be ‘pure Rider Haggard’. But Buchan moistens his stories with sensual descriptions of food – particularly ham – and of beautiful women. Haggard’s heroes are small, bluff men, part of a literary tradition of beta males performing great feats, but the companions – Henry Curtis in King Solomon’s Mines, Leo Vincey in She –have beautiful bodies:

Round his throat he fastened the leopard-skin cloak of a commanding officer … the dress was, no doubt, a savage one, but I am bound to say that I seldom saw a finer sight than Sir Henry Curtis presented … It showed off his magnificent physique to the greatest advantage, and when [Umbopa] arrived presently, arrayed in similar costume, I thought to myself that I had never before seen two such splendid men.

Second only to the relish of battle is Haggard’s fascination with unusual ways a man might die. The highlight of King Solomon’s Mines for most children is the moment when a bull elephant, wounded by a bullet, attacks Good’s servant: ‘The brute seized the poor Zulu, hurled him to the earth, and placing one huge foot onto his body about the middle, twined its trunk around his upper part and tore him in two.’ It was in part because of the death of the poor Zulu that the manuscript was rejected by one of the first publishers to see it: ‘Never has it been our fate to wade through such a farrago of obscene witlessness …nothing is likely in the hands of the young to do so much injury as this recklessly immoral book.’ But it was a fashionable kind of gore. At the Colonial and Indian Exhibition, held at South Kensington in 1886, the entrance was taken up by a diorama depicting a stuffed tiger attacking a stuffed elephant. The exhibition attracted more than five and a half million visitors. Like Haggard’s fiction, it was lit by the radiance of Livingstone, Richard Burton and other empire-building Übermenschen. King Solomon’s Mines is a very Victorian fable of endurance but it’s also a glorious romp, if you don’t mind your romps racist, sexist and tin-eared.

It would be surprising if any white man born in 1856 had written non-racist, non-sexist fiction, whether it was set in Africa or not. Quatermain says of the Kukuana people: ‘These women, for a native race, are exceedingly handsome … the lips are not unpleasantly thick as is the case among African races.’ Narrators, of course, are not spokespersons for their authors and Haggard certainly wrote in the idiom of the time; the explorer Mungo Park, in the purportedly factual Travels in the Interior Districts of Africa, wrote in similar vein: ‘The noses of the Jaloffs are not so much depressed, nor the lips so protuberant, as among the generality of Africans … they are considered by the white traders as the most sightly Negroes in this part of the continent.’ You could say that if we excised all patriarchal books from the canon we would be left with The Very Hungry Caterpillarand little else, but few writers have embraced the status quo with such conviction. The racism in King Solomon’s Mines takes the form mainly of exhaustingly oracular pronouncements: there is none of Forster’s anxiety, or Kipling’s affection. Foulata is a tribeswoman who falls in love with Good, and risks her life to save him. When she dies – the noble native woman always dies in Haggard – Quatermain feels ‘bound to say … that I consider her removal a fortunate occurrence, since, otherwise, complications would have been sure to ensue’. The Quatermain novels become more explicitly unsettling as the series progresses; in a diary entry written in 1924, the year before his death, Haggard foresaw conflict between races as inevitable and bloody: ‘The great ultimate war, as I have always held, will be that between the white and coloured races.’ The sexism, on the other hand, is glossed as a charming foible: ‘I can safely say there is not a petticoat in the whole history.’ His characters describe themselves as misogynists with the same irritating coyness with which people today describe themselves as chocoholics.

She (1887) is a very different book; it certainly isn’t coy. It follows wise but ugly Ludwig Holly and beautiful but slow Leo Vincey to unknown lands on the east coast of Africa. Leo’s dying father bequeaths him a potsherd on which is written in Greek a family history showing that Leo is descended from the royal house of pharaohs, and an instruction that he seek out a beautiful white sorceress and her fiery pillar of eternal life. Haggard gives the Greek in full, in both uncial and cursive, and some of the earliest jacket covers used a photograph of a potsherd, made by Haggard’s sister-in-law, to add verisimilitude. (Vintage Classics has rejected the pot in favour of an orgasmic-looking woman.) The men travel by sea and land to find Ayesha, also known as She Who Must Be Obeyed: an all-powerful ruler, her beauty so terrible she is concealed from face to foot in ‘corpse-like wrappings’. She is wise – ‘the wisest man up on earth was not one-third as wise’ – and beautiful beyond imagining: a sultry multilingual virgin, wish-fulfilment made flesh. She, like King Solomon’s Mines, was written in six weeks and even more than King Solomon’s Mines, it’s a book out of which obsessions and anxieties leak. As Kipling wrote to Haggard, ‘you are a whale at parables and allegories and one thing reflecting another.’

The plot is as simple and linear as that of the earlier book: Queen Ayesha believes that Leo is the reincarnated soul of Kallikrates, a man she had loved and murdered when he remained loyal to another woman. When she learns that Leo too is in love with another woman, Ustane, Ayesha kills her with a gesture. Ayesha’s beauty is so overwhelming that Leo forgives her and kneels at her feet. The terrifying power of female beauty shapes the book. ‘No doubt she was a wicked person,’ Holly says, ‘and no doubt she had murdered Ustane when she stood in her path, but then she was very faithful, and by a law of nature man is apt to think but lightly of a woman’s crimes, especially if that woman be beautiful.’ And later: ‘What a terrifying reflection it is, by the way, that nearly all our deep love for women who are not our kindred depends … upon their personal appearance.’ Ayesha offers to reveal the source of her absolute power, and leads the men to the Fountain and Heart of Life. She bathes first, unclothing herself and re-wrapping her snake belt around her falling hair. It’s the only erotic moment in the book. Suddenly, as the men watch, she begins to shrivel in the flames, ageing before their eyes until she is ‘no larger than a monkey, skin puckered into a million wrinkles’. The powerful monkey-like woman seems to be a keystone of Haggard’s imagination: Gagool, unidentifiable as a woman when first encountered, is ‘so shrunken in size that it seemed no larger than the face of a year-old child’, ‘a withered-up monkey’ with ‘a skinny claw’; Ayesha’s body becomes ‘no bigger than that of a two-months’ child …the delicate hand was nothing but a claw now.’ Holly and Leo flee; Holly’s servant, Job, has died of fright, and they leave his corpse behind.

At the heart of the book is the sense that women, given power, will reign like despots or fail like children. As Margaret Atwood points out in her introduction, Haggard and his siblings had a doll called She Who Must Be Obeyed, who lived in a cupboard and whom the children both tortured and were haunted by. Read as an embodiment of Victorian neuroses and desires, She is a marvel. There are good feminist interpretations: Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar connect the witch-goddess figure with the newly fierce debates over the rights of women in Victorian England, and the proliferation of semi-scientific studies of woman’s ‘true nature’. With or without this reading, Shehas extraordinary moments. You make a choice with Haggard: if you suspend not just disbelief but politics, logic and taste, the rewards are very real. There is a peculiar and beautiful scene in which tribesmen, at Ayesha’s command, dance an ‘infernal and fiendish cancan’ in a room lit by burning corpses. ‘As soon as ever a mummy had burned down to the ankles, which it did in about twenty minutes, the feet were kicked away, and another put in its place.’ She burns the body of her two-thousand-year-old embalmed lover with acid: there is ‘a fierce fizzing and cracking sound’ and the man is turned into ‘a few handfuls of smoking white powder’. V.S.Pritchett wrote: ‘Mr E.M. Forster once spoke of the novelist sending down a bucket into the subconscious; the author of She installed a suction pump.’

The trouble with She is that it’s structured around a blank face. We are told that Ayesha had beauty ‘greater than the loveliness of the daughters of men’, but her beauty is sketchily imagined, asserted but never depicted. The result is that she is impossible to desire; a problem exacerbated by her voice and what she has to say. She rants like Nigel Farage, and has only one point to make: men are powerless in the face of beautiful women, women desire not men but power. The greatest woman to have lived is a disappointment, a heckling sex witch. Haggard would think I’m jealous. He says as much, near the end:

Of course, I am speaking of any man. We never had the advantage of a lady’s opinion of Ayesha, but I think it quite possible that she would have regarded the Queen with dislike, would have expressed her disapproval in some more or less pointed manner, and ultimately have got herself blasted.

Well, quite.