Orwell in Spain and Orwell and the Dispossessed (edited by Peter Davison)

A few years ago, Penguin Press released a series of four books that each take one of George Orwell’s works and place it in the context of selected letters, articles, essays written by Orwell which relate to the subject of the book. I’ve split this review of the four books into two parts, with this one focusing on Orwell in Spain and Orwell and the Dispossessed.

Orwell in Spain

The central text in Orwell in Spain is Homage to Catalonia, Orwell’s account of his time as a volunteer soldier in Barcelona and the Catalan area of Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Orwell joined the Independent Labour Party’s contingent, a group of two dozen or so British volunteers who were allied with the Workers’ Part of Marxism Unification (given as POUM, the Spanish-language abbreviation, in the text). Orwell sent several months in the front line and was finally invalided away from the front when he was shot in the neck — the bullet just barely missed his carotid artery, and the only lasting effect of the wound was a paralysis of one of his vocal cords. (People often told him how lucky he was to have survived, but Orwell usually responded by saying something to the effect of how it would have been even luckier not to have been shot in the first place.) Even after being invalided away from the front, Orwell’s troubles were merely beginning. He was very nearly arrested for being part of a militia that had been declared ‘illegal’ by the anti-Franco forces — the Spanish Communist Party was in the sway of the Soviet Union and was attempting to eradicate rival communist and anarchist groups — and he and his wife Eileen (who had accompanied him) had to flee Spain only a few steps ahead of the Spanish police.

The Spanish Civil War is a very confusing period of 20th-century history, and Orwell was writing for an audience which often had only the most general knowledge of what was going on in Spain at the time. But as the letters and articles emphasise, Orwell’s intent in writing Homage to Catalonia was not merely to denounce Franco and the Fascists, but to criticise the Communist forces in Spain for what he saw as their betrayal of the working classes AND to castigate the press (particularly the English leftist press) for its refusal to entertain any possibility that the Spanish Communists and their Soviet allies could be just as guilty of betrayal and deceit as the monarchists and the Fascists. Orwell’s experiences in Spain also had a direct influence on the writing of 1984. On a personal level he was very concerned with the case of Georges Kopp, a fellow soldier and friend who had been imprisoned by the Spanish police, tortured in an attempt to get him to sign a false confession, and subjected to a special type of punishment which involved being locked in a confined space with a horde of large rats. On a literary level, Orwell’s writings on the Spanish Civil War reveal some of the ideas that would later end up in books like 1984 — one example being the famous ‘two and two are five’ equation that would become so crucial to Winston Smith’s fate in that particular book.

Orwell and the Dispossessed

The central story in this collection is Down and Out in Paris and London, a predominantly autobiographical account of Orwell’s time ’slumming it’ as a restaurant dishwasher (plongeur) in Paris and a tramp in London in the mid-1930s. The book is a grim account of a grim life, as Orwell describes in great detail the backbreaking labour and low wages of the staff at a fashionable hotel and his struggles in a small cafe — and includes stomach-turning accounts of the utter filthiness of the kitchens in which he worked. The writings that deal with his time in as a tramp in London and the Home Counties are equally grim, presenting a grinding, depressing life of poverty and homelessness in the capital city that still bears a strong resemblance to conditions that exist today. His criticisms of charitable organisations and city-run lodging houses for the poor and indigent are particularly trenchant, and remain so 70 years later.

Down and Out in Paris and London is a fascinating read in its own right, but this volume also contains some of Orwell’s articles, essays, and reviews on popular subjects of the time. He analysed boys’ school stories (such as the Greyfriairs stories that feature Billy Bunter), compared British detective fiction to American ‘pulp mags’, and examined the political leanings of the serial novels published in women’s magazines. There are also a few essays about Orwell’s other ’slumming journeys’, including one where he joined a group of East End residents who travelled out of London to pick hops for a fortnight and another where he attempted to get himself sentenced to prison for drunk and disorderly conduct. In general, the material collected in Orwell and the Dispossessed focuses on the author’s observations of those who for one reason or another are deprived of choices in their own lives and societies — with subjects as diverse as the poor of India and Morocco, British schoolchildren, and the unfairly persecuted P.G. Wodehouse. And although the theme of this volume is not quite as solid and unified as that of Orwell and Spain, the compilation is a good collection of some of Orwell’s nonfiction writing.

Sailors: English Merchant Seamen 1650-1775 by Peter Earle

A few months ago, I was doing a bit of reading on the shaky financial status of British East India Company in the years leading up to the American Revolution. Intriguing subject, but somewhat out of my usual areas of research interest, and so I was glad to have this book to look to when I needed to check a few day-to-day details about what it meant to be involved in merchant shipping in that particular time period.

Sailors: English Merchant Seamen 1650-1775 by Peter Earle

From what I can tell, most of the fictional accounts of life on the seas in the Age of Sail tends to focus on two perspectives: pirates and navies. The careers of Horatio Hornblower and Jack Aubrey make for good sea-tales, as do the adventure stories of pirates and privateers on the high seas, where everyone is out for a good fight and a well-taken prize. Merchant shipping, on the other hand, doesn’t appear to have as much of the romance and glamour associated with navies and pirates. As such, a history book that focuses specifically on merchant shipping — whether of one or two ships owned by a single small-businessman to the vast fleets operated and administered by the powerful Dutch, French, and British East India Companies — doesn’t seem as easy to come by. Merchant shipping shared many aspects of lifestyle with the different navies or famous pirates, but there were also some noted and notable differences to consider. In this case, Peter Earle’s brief but detailed Sailors: English Merchant Seamen 1650-1775 provides a sound introduction to the workaday life of the men who all but created the concept of international trade.

The book covers the many different facets of a typical merchant sailor’s life, with chapters that examine the routine (the daily workload and general prospects for advancement) and the basic financial (possessions and general wealth) aspects to the more extraordinary situations (shipwrecks, punishments, mutinies, and court trials) that a sailor might face. Earle draws mostly on the primary sources of trial records from the Admiralty courts, as well as various logs and journals and accounts of the day. One such set of accounts is the Lloyd’s List, by now one of the world’s oldest continuously-running journals (dating back to 1734), which features shipping news and other market information of interest to the merchants, traders, brokers, and insurance underwriters who frequented Lloyd’s Coffee House in the City of London. As such, Earle is able to examine the relationships amongst members of the crew and between the crew and the officers — mainly because important and enlightening information tends to come out in the middle of court case testimonies. The chapters are short and straightforward, generally free of nautical slang and jargon and quite accessible even to those who have only a basic knowledge of seafaring life.

One aspect of this book that I found particularly interesting but rather understated was the differences between general trading ships and slaving ships. I think Earle could possibly have looked into slaving ships in more depth, perhaps even devoting a specific chapter just to the social history of life aboard a slaving ship during the various stages of its route. The history of merchant shipping in the late seventeeth and early to mid-eighteenth centuries really can’t be studied without looking at the slave trade, and I think Earle’s book is at a bit of a disadvantage for not devoting more time or page-space to looking at it. It isn’t a disadvantage that truly detracts from the book, but I do think that the book really would have benefitted from a study of that particular aspect of trade in human cargo. In general, though, Sailors does just what it sets out to do, and the information within on the social history of English merchant shipping might easily appeal to anyone interested in a more rounded picture of life at sea the Age of Sail.

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn and The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue by Michael Frayn and David Burke

Continuing the previous post’s theme of a play by Michael Frayn, here are two books connected to another Frayn play with a similarly historical bent.

Copenhagen by Michael Frayn (playscript)

The premise of Copenhagen is based on a historical event: in 1941, German physicist Werner Heisenberg travelled to Copenhagen — which at the time was under Nazi occupation — to meet with Danish physicist Niels Bohr. It is recorded that Heisenberg met with Bohr and Bohr’s wife Margrethe, and Bohr and Heisenberg later went out for a walk so they could speak without being overheard by the Gestapo. But when Bohr returned from the walk he was absolutely furious about something, and Heisenberg left shortly afterwards. Though Bohr and Heisenberg had been close friends for many years before that meeting, they barely spoke to each other again after that. The substance of the Bohr-Heisenberg conversation has never been fully explained. Some historians say that Heisenberg was attempting to recruit Bohr to help with the Nazi nuclear energy project (on which Heisenberg was working at the time) in exchange for academic reinstatement and advancement…even though Bohr was half-Jewish. The other, more sympathetic theory is that Heisenberg was trying to give Bohr information about the Nazi nuclear project in the hope that Bohr would be able to pass that information along to the Allies — essentially, that Heisenberg was trying to derail the Nazi attempt to build atomic weapons.

Frayn’s play takes both of these theories and weaves them together, never quite promoting one or the other but (intriguingly) connecting both theories to the principles of physics that both Bohr and Heisenberg were famous for creating: Bohr’s complementarity principle and Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle. It’s an amazingly complex and multilayered play that only has three characters, Bohr and his wife and Heisenberg, and yet seems to contain many more voices than just those of two men and one woman.

The Copenhagen Papers: An Intrigue by Michael Frayn and David Burke

The Copenhagen Papers was jointly written by Michael Frayn and by David Burke; the latter played Niels Bohr in the original London run of the play. The subject of the book is an elaborate practical joke that Burke played on Frayn during the run of the play, and the joke is complicated enough to require a short historical background even before I can summarise it. The history hinges on the fact that at the end of World War II, Werner Heisenberg and the other scientists who had been working on the Nazi nuclear energy programme were taken to England and interned at an out-of-the-way requisitioned house called Farm Hall, where they were closely watched and interviewed by British intelligence.

David Burke decided that he wanted to play a joke on Frayn, some kind of joke related to the play that Frayn had written. Burke began by inventing a woman named Celia Rhys-Evans, who had apparently lived in Farm Hall at some point during the 1960s and had discovered a number of documents hidden under the floorboards of the house. These documents were written in cryptic, barely legible German, which nevertheless seemed to hint that the captured scientists had been communicating with each other without the knowledge of their British captors. Burke enlisted the help of some friends to fake 50-year-old German documents, and then (as Celia Rhys-Evans) he sent a number of the faked papers to Frayn, along with a letter that asked if these old papers would be useful to him if he ever wanted to write another play.

Not only did Frayn believe that the documents were genuine, but he also began a correspondence with Mrs Rhys-Evans to see if there were any other documents she might have on hand that dealt with the captured scientists. And thus Frayn and Burke set out on a strange and occasionally journey where one forgery followed another and another. Neither was willing to let go of his side of the story, but as the correspondence continued they both became so immersed in the fiction that the whole thing nearly ended in an exhausted stalemate. In the end, Frayn actually had to be told that the whole thing was a hoax.

The Copenhagen Papers is an account of the whole joke from inception to discovery — the truth was revealed by a sympathetic friend who thought that the joke had gone too far. The book is meant to be an exploration of some of the themes touched on in Copenhagen the play: the uncertainty of history and historical evidence, the ambiguous nature of language, the questions that are raised every time we learn something new about the past and how it may have shaped the future…or in this case, the present. Frayn and Burke clearly seem to have come to an understanding over this incident, enough to write a book about it and treat it fairly dispassionately. And even if my historian side almost can’t help but writhe a little to read about a deliberate forging of historical documents for a joke, The Copenhagen Papers is an intriguing exploration of what it means to be present at the creation of ‘history’.

Collected Poems by Siegfried Sassoon

Still going back through reviews I’ve written previously, this time with another book of collected poems.

Collected Poems by Siegfried Sassoon

Siegfried Sassoon’s name, in many respects, is synonymous with the concept of ‘war poetry’. Sassoon, along with Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves and several other fellow poets, wrote about the experiences of soldiers in what would become known as the First World War (or it would be, by the time we realised that we might as well start numbering our massively devastating all-encompassing military conflicts). The Collected Poems hasn’t really changed since Faber and Faber brought out their first edition of it about forty years ago, but even after so long it is good to have this collection of the best examples of Sassoon’s lyrical, plain-spoken poetry.

It’s interesting to read Sassoon’s poetry and see how the writing style and source material changes and develops over the years, because the change seems to me to be a fairly noticeable one. His earliest pre-war poems are heavily sunk in a pastoral kind of Romanticism, as in paens to Nature like ‘The Old Hunstman‘, and even his early war poems are not truly free of the Romantic influence. Most, though not all, of his later poems lost much of this pastoral innocence. The Collected Poems also contains quite a few of Sassoon’s sharply satirical writings on subjects as diverse as the diary of a deceased ambassador (’The visionless officialized fatuity/That once kept Europe safe for Perpetuity‘) and his own fumbling attempts to reconcile his socialist leanings to his well-off background:

‘What do you know?’ exclaim my fellow-diners
(Peeling their plovers’ eggs or lifting glasses
Of mellowed Château Rentier from the table),
‘What do you know about the working classes?’

Yet it is for his war poetry and the immediate post-war poetry that Sassoon is most likely to be remembered. The Collected Poems pull together the works of a poet whose works always seem to have some resonance, no matter what the current political situation happens to be.

You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you’ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.

Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima by Stephen Walker

Occasionally, I do try to post reviews of books that I didn’t really care for. This book happens to be one of them.

Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima by Stephen Walker

Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima is a historical account of the events leading up to the dropping of the ‘Little Boy’ atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima, often told in the words of the participants. Walker tells the story in a vaguely narrative form, fleshing out the identities and characters of the scientists and military experts who worked on the bomb, the crew who flew the actual mission, and assorted Japanese civilians and military personnel whose stories illustrate what life was like in Hiroshima shortly before the city was levelled.

I spent a little too much time on my postgraduate work delving into the historiography and vast amount of literature on the end of World War II to make a book on Hiroshima my first choice of reading material. But the book looked interesting enough, and so I started reading through it to see if there was anything new or interesting that Walker mentioned that I might be able to pick up from the text. I was going along quite fine, until I reached the following passage:

Of course, the decision was always inevitable. So inevitable, perhaps, that it could hardly be called a decision. There were so many urgent reasons to drop the bomb. Together they made an irresistible cocktail. It would have been far more remarkable had it not been dropped.

Setting aside the idea of an ‘irresistible cocktail’ of reasons, this passage made me stop and stare. I may or may not have mentioned this in previous book reviews, but I’ll say it now: there is nothing that kills my interest in a history book faster than the author’s use of the word ‘inevitable’ in the context of crisis decision-making. I hate the use of the word ‘inevitable’ by historians because it is beyond sloppy, the equivalent in my mind of a vague handwave accompanied by an ‘enh’ sound. And to see ‘inevitable’ placed in the context of Hiroshima and the dropping of the atomic bomb…I will admit that I actually had to close the book and walk away from it in order to calm myself down. A visceral reaction, to be sure — almost certainly influenced by the fact that I’ve visited Hiroshima and seen the results of the bombing — but that one word infuriated me precisely that much.

There isn’t much more I have to say about the book after that. A little outside research would have me point to Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb and Shuntaro Hida’s The Day Hiroshima Disappeared as better alternatives to Walker’s book. Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima has its good points and interesting sections…but this is a subject that in my opinion deserves rather more thought and attention than Walker has given it.

The Loss of the Wager by John Bulkeley and John Byron

When I first told some friends about this book, I joked that the best way to describe was ‘Horatio Hornblower in Hell’, if only for the fact that you almost can’t turn a page without reading about someone freezing to death or falling overboard or dying of hunger or getting shot in the face by an increasingly fearful captain. I still think it’s quite an apt description.

The Loss of the Wager by John Bulkeley and John Byron

In 1740, Commodore George Anson set out on a long voyage to the Pacific with a small fleet of eight English ships. His mission was to harry the Spanish military and civilian naval traffic off the coast of Chile, but getting there meant that Anson’s fleet would have to navigate the cold and dangerous waters of the Strait of Magellan at the southernmost tip of South America. One ship, a transport and supply ship called the Wager, became separated from the company in a particularly nasty bout of squalls during the attempt to navigate the Strait, and was essentially driven onto the rocks in an inhospitable part of southern Patagonia. Of the scores of men who had made up the Wager’s crew, only a handful made it back to England alive. The rest died of disease, drowning, exposure, starvation…and one or two nasty incidents that gave rise to claims of mutiny and insubordination, and the possibility that the survivors of the wreck might well face a court-martial and death on the gallows.

The Loss of the Wager combines two stories of the shipwreck, written by crewmen who returned to England and published accounts of what had happened — mostly in an attempt to clear their respective names of the charges of mutiny. John Bulkeley was the ship’s gunner, and his account is in the form of a nearly daily diary he kept before and after the wreck of the Wager. The Hon. John Byron would become a vice-admiral in the Royal Navy, but he is perhaps better known as the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron. Byron’s account of the wreck, ‘The Narrative of the Honourable John Byron’, became the basis for Patrick O’Brian novel The Unknown Shore (and showed up in fragments in O’Brian’s later Aubrey-Maturin novels). Both accounts sold well in England, appealing to a public that enjoyed the dramatic narrative styles and the harrowing escapes from death that both sailors faced during their time in the wilds of South America.

One of the interesting historical facts about the Wager is that before Anson’s voyage, men who were serving aboard ships that wrecked were not paid for their time shipwrecked, and as a result many men took the opportunity to declare that they were no longer bound under military discipline and were not required to obey the orders of senior officers. The incident with the Wager prompted the Royal Navy to revise procedures, ordering that men were to be under military discipline even after a shipwreck and therefore liable to court-martial if they rebelled against their officers. Both Bulkeley and Byron’s accounts are written to exonerate their authors and attempt to restore their respective reputations, as well as to make a bit of money while the Admiralty tried to figure out how to hold hearings when neither Commodore Anson nor the Wager’s Captain Cheap had yet returned to England — and as such, there’s quite a bit of pushing the blame onto other people in these narratives, though no more than one might reasonably expect to find. Fans of Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series and C. S. Forester’s Hornblower books might find The Loss of the Wager a diverting read, if only to see that even if Jack Aubrey and Horatio Hornblower faced some perilous waters on occasion, the real-life experience was often far worse.

Forgotten Voices of the Second World War by Max Arthur

An appropriate choice for Remembrance Sunday, I think.

Forgotten Voices of the Second World War by Max Arthur

This book is something of a sequel to Max Arthur’s Forgotten Voices of the Great War, and both books have a similar backstory. Arthur went to the Imperial War Museum’s Sound Archive, a repository for recorded interviews, broadcasts, speeches, and sounds that capture in audio format the experience of wartime. Soldiers and civilians alike had their stories recorded by interviewers and kept by the IWM, and for this book Arthur went deep into the archives and pulled together a truly remarkable collection of narratives that present World War II from an eyewitness perspective.

The selections are short, most under a page long and some only a few sentences in length. The majority of the snippets come from British people (and of those, mainly men), though voices from other nations are scattered through the book to provide a little contrast or alternate colour. But naturally, each story is different, and it’s truly fascinating to hear an Australian soldier talk about what it was like in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp, or read what an evacuated schoolgirl felt when she boarded the train and left her parents behind in London shortly before the Blitz. These personal stories bring the war to life in a way that a book of purely military, social, or political history couldn’t duplicate.

Reading this book does make me wonder what Arthur had to leave out, though, whether for reasons of space or other reasons. The selections in a book are on the whole very Anglo-centric, which is hardly surprising considering the source of the material and the book’s target audience. And the story of the war is certainly told through the British perspective, leaving out much of the war in Russia, China, and the South Pacific in order to focus on the fall of Singapore and the battles for control of Burma and Egypt and other colonial areas invaded by the Axis powers. But there’s enough of a narrative thread to make the book a fascinating work of ‘living history’, even though I hardly dare to think that a quarter of those interviewed in these pages are still alive today to read this book. If ‘living history’ or World War II history interest you, you’d be well-placed to enjoy the fruits of Arthur’s extensive work.

The First Guide to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union by Avram Shifrin

I was looking for a suitable book to post to commemorate the 90th anniversary of the beginning of the October Revolution, but it seems that I’ve already gone through and posted most of my previously written USSR-related book reviews…except for this one. And since I don’t have my copy of my perennial favourite title, Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, with me at the moment, this book is the next obvious candidate.

A bit of backstory on how I acquired it: When one of my undergraduate history professors retired, he invited those of us who were taking his class on modern Russian history to come to his office and take anything we wanted off his bookshelves. He’d already gone through and cleared out all the books he had room for and wanted to keep, and he figured that it would be a lot easier for his students to clear off the shelves for him before he took the rest of the books to be recycled or donated….and no, I didn’t actually trample anyone in my haste to get to his office once the lecture had ended. That said, one of the books I made off with was this one.

The First Guide to Prisons and Concentration Camps of the Soviet Union by Avram Shifrin

As the title says, it’s a guidebook, first published by a Soviet dissident in the early 1980s. And by a guidebook, I mean that it gives general (and sometimes quite specific) locations of Soviet prisons and labour camps, the remaining substance of the gulag, broken down by area and region and type of prison. The guidebook even goes so far as to mention the type of labour that is done or thought to be done at each prison, whether in heavy industry or manufacturing…or the ’special’ camps where prisoners worked to mine radioactive materials (without adequate shielding) or performed tasks that can only be described as murderous (such as cleaning the nozzles on nuclear submarines). Also included in the guidebook are the location of politico-psychiatric facilities where prisoners were often held, generally with no attempt made to separate political prisoners from the actually insane. And since the book is written and edited by a man who spent several years in the prison camp system, based on research he compiled with others who had fallen foul of the Soviet justice system, there’s an authenticity to it that has to be seen to be fully understood.

This book is almost certainly out of print, and probably only available in used bookshops if anywhere. I only managed to get my hands on a copy by chance. But it’s absolutely chilling to read, because it shows the depth and breadth of the prison camp system in the USSR years after Stalin’s death. When you look at the book and think that every little dot on the map represents anywhere from two dozen to several hundred human lives, many imprisoned for their dissenting opinions or even their well-meaning attempts to reform their political system…well, it wasn’t so long ago, historically speaking. Shifrin’s guidebook manages to bring home the reality of the gulag in a way that few purely academic texts can hope to emulate.

Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942-45 by David Reynolds

I first picked up this book for a course on Anglo-American relations from World War II to the end of the Cold War. I don’t normally look into military-type history, but I suppose it helped that this book happens to be more about military culture than on campaigns and battles.

Rich Relations: The American Occupation of Britain, 1942-45 by David Reynolds

The story of American GIs in Britain has two sides: that of the British military and civilian population, who often dismissed the GIs as ‘over-sexed, over-paid, over-fed, and over here’; and that of the GIs themselves, who returned the cutting remarks by claiming that the British military were ‘under-sexed, under-paid, under-fed, and under Eisenhower’. Some American soldiers got on very well with the British people they met, quite often with young British women whose heads were turned by the smartly-dressed Yanks. But the problems and conflicts between the British and the GIs created some very ugly incidents, especially when black GIs were involved. The official segregation of the American forces forced both the Americans and the British to go to extraordinary lengths to keep the races separate — because the sight of a white British woman and a black American soldier walking out together was all too often the spark for an explosive confrontation.

David Reynolds has done his research well for Rich Relations, and does his best to be balanced in interpreting the often conflicting information that comes out of official memos and personal recollections. He separates the book into sections devoted to the official information from the top brass and the collected experiences of the individuals involved. Some of the stories are funny and many are sad, but some are particularly touching — one black GI recalls how he became fast friends with an older British couple who lived near his base camp, including the birthday party they gave for him which featured a small iced cake they had baked from their meagre rations (no sugar in the cake, only in the icing). There are quite a lot of good stories of this nature, and the book is rich in detail and interesting to explore.

Rich Relations does suffers a little from repetition in certain parts — do we really need to be reminded four times in the space of about two hundred pages that the pre-war black population of Britain numbered around 8,000 people? I must also admit that I skimmed through the parts dealing with battles and troop mobilisations, the parts that a military historian or World War II buff would probably find more interesting. I would not have minded if the sections about the D-Day invasions had been trimmed slightly; after all, the book is supposed to focus on the experience in Britain, rather than on the Continent. Yet the book does its job extremely well, shedding light on a fascinating time in Anglo-American (or should that be ‘Yank and Limey’?) relations.

The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War by Peter Hennessy

Yesterday, if I remember correctly, was the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik and the true start of the space race. I don’t happen to have any books that are particularly science-centric, but I’ve been meaning to post this review for a while now — and it takes the whole civil defence perspective of the time period into account.

The Secret State: Whitehall and the Cold War by Peter Hennessy

Peter Hennessy has combed through and analysed a slew of recently declassified documents that centre on the British government’s plans for what would have happen if World War III actually had come to pass during the Cold War. This topic is always a tricky one for historians to tackle, because too many viewings of Dr Strangelove tend to burn a misleading image in the mind: balding men in suits and cigar-chomping generals sitting round a table in the War Room, looking at the Big Board and listening to some scientist with a German accent talk about ‘mineshaft gaps’ and ‘ten women to every man’. The Secret State manages to present the kinds of stories that keep Strangelove in mind, but also manages to keep the nonsatirical and pathetically human element in mind. The stomach wrenches at the mental image of some unfortunate soul who had joined the Civil Service during the war trying to come to terms with the very real possibility that he might have to leave his family behind to face nuclear annihilation while he followed the Prime Minister into the Cabinet bunker tucked deep in the Cotswolds.

The Secret State touches upon a number of fascinating subjects in its 250-odd pages. The Cabinet reaction to the growing atomic rivalry between the US and the Soviet Union is engrossing, particularly the famous statement by Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin in 1946 that Britain could not fall behind in the acquisition and development of nuclear weapons: ‘We’ve got to have this thing over here, whatever it costs. We’ve got to have the bloody Union Jack on top of it.’ Hennessy also includes several copies of actual Civil Service documents about planning for nuclear attack, and a series of photographs of his visit to the real Cold War bunker in the Cotswolds — including a picture of himself going through the turnstile leading down to the shelters. (The plan to evacuate the Prime Minister and the War Cabinet to the bunker was at one point codenamed ‘TURNSTILE’.) The anecdote that got a bitter laugh out of me was the proposed plan to save the Queen from the nuclear devastation by putting her on the royal yacht and having it set out to sea until it was safe for her to return…presumably to what was left of her shattered country.

I’m always fond of Hennessy’s writing, and The Secret State is no exception. Much of the writing that’s out there on Cold War civil defence history tends to be very U.S.-centric, so it’s a welcome treat to have a well-researched, thoroughly enjoyable, and often thought-provoking account of the various plans in place to keep the government running if the missiles started flying.