Category Archives: Books

Arts, Books, Britain, History, Military, Photography

Book Review: Birth of the RAF (& Gallery)

(LONG-READ COMPOSITION)

THE order to ‘Scramble’ had finally come and the ever-eager Squadron Leader Douglas Bader led his team of Spitfires and Hurricanes in a fast ascent into the sky over southern England.

It was September 1940, the height of the Battle of Britain. In the distance, a cluster of black dots scattered across the sky.

Over the radio came the cry: ‘Bandits, 10 o’clock!’ There were 70 of them, Dornier bombers and their fighter plane escorts. Bader closed fast, ignoring the streams of tracer streaking at him from their rear gunners.

. See also Britain: ‘RAF and the ‘Battle of the Beams’…

A Messerschmitt floated into his sights. He gave a quick burst of fire and felt a moment of triumph and relief as he saw it fall, smoke pouring from its tail.

Relief turned to fear as there then followed a horrible, jarring shock as German cannon shells slammed into his own plane. Instinctively, he banked hard left as his cockpit filled with smoke. He was going down in flames.

Gripped by the inevitable, he pulled back the hood to bale out – until the slipstream cleared the smoke and he realised the fire had miraculously gone out. He was all right after all.

Using all his strength and skill, he eased the Hurricane out of its screaming dive and gave chase to another Messerschmitt, firing three sharp bursts.

It veered groundward and seconds later exploded. But Bader was in real trouble now too, his aircraft crabbing awkwardly, left wing dropping, holes in the cockpit and the side of the airframe.

His flying-suit was gashed across the right hip. Somehow, he nursed the Hurricane back to base, landed, taxied to the maintenance hangar and climbed out, barking: ‘I want this aircraft ready again in half an hour!’

Here was the raw, do-or-die courage, the refusal to be beaten, that came to typify Britain’s Royal Air Force. The service is now set to celebrate 100 years since it was founded on April 1, 1918.

The formation of the RAF had a difficult birth. Conceived in panic against the wishes of the other armed forces, the RAF was sniped at from all sides and only just managed to survive as an independent organisation. It was a good job it did.

It nurtured the likes of the indomitable Bader (who’d lost both his legs in a pre-war crash when showing off his aerobatic skills), without whom the Battle of Britain, its finest hour, would not have been won. It has proved its worth ever since.

Spitfires Oil Painting

Oil Painting: ‘Spitfires’

 

IN a new book by historian Richard Overy, it comes as a surprise to learn that getting the RAF off the ground took herculean effort – and very nearly didn’t happen.

Britain had war planes in service ever since the start of World War I, with their importance in battle growing even though flying then was still rudimentary and dangerous.

Flimsy planes made of wood and fabric and held together with wire were liable to break up or crash.

Pilots took to the air in combat after just a dozen hours training, wrapped up in layers of clothing and multiple balaclavas to keep out the cold in the open cockpits. There were no parachutes.

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Arts, Books, Britain, History, Society

Book Review: Hearts And Minds

SUFFRAGISTS–SUFFRAGETTES

Smashed windows, lobbed bombs and underhand tactics. A fascinating new book in this 100th year of the suffragette movement casts new light on the bitter rivalry between the women who fought for the vote. The war between the sisters.

A USEFUL mnemonic for remembering the difference between suffragists and suffragettes is ‘Millicent: non-militant’.

Millicent Fawcett and her suffragist crowd were the peaceful ones who trundled around Britain in horse-drawn caravans, waved embroidered banners, dropped leaflets from hot-air balloons and used the art of gentle persuasion.

The suffragette Pankhurst and her troupe were the ones who went around smashing shop windows, bombing pillar-boxes and slashing paintings in the National Gallery.

Jane Robinson’s lively new book on the subject, published in this 100th anniversary year of the Representation of The People Act of 1918 – that, at last gave women the vote – is an excellent source of reading for fleshing out those spare bits of general knowledge.

Suffragists, Robinson tells us, were rude about suffragettes, calling them a “dictatorship movement of the sort that drives democracy out”. Suffragettes were rude and curt back, saying that suffragists were “staid, so willing to wait, so incorrigibly leisurely”.

The author of this book brings all these straight-backed Edwardian ladies to life, telling the story of the centrepiece of the suffragist movement: the Great Pilgrimage of 1913, in which thousands of suffragists walked all the way to London from far-flung corners of Britain for a mass rally of 50,000 in Hyde Park.

The aim was to drive the world’s attention (and that of stubborn prime minister Herbert Asquith) to the growing swell of opinion in favour of the women’s vote – and to prove women had the ability to turn the world upside down without violence.

 

THEIR peaceful protest proved to be the prototype for others, from the Jarrow march of 1936 to the Greenham Common peace camp of the 1980s.

Did the pilgrimage do any good? Well, trying to get Asquith to change his mind was like banging your head against a brick wall, and it would take a four-year World War to bring about the Act of Parliament for which the campaigners yearned.

But it was their suffragist training that gave women the confidence to step into men’s jobs when the war started; and by their war efforts in factories and hospitals they “worked out their own salvation”, as Asquith himself put it.

On a sunny morning in June 1913, the Great Pilgrimage began – the Watling Street Pilgrims setting off first, for their five-week walk from Carlisle.

It was thanks to a sensible piece of sartorial advice for the pilgrims – that skirt hems should be taken up four inches to prevent them getting caked in mud – that skirt lengths began their slow progression up the leg from that moment on.

Some pilgrims wore their smart new Burberry raincoats (“airy, light and porous … the ideal coat for the Pilgrimage”, according to Burberry’s own advertisement). Lady Rochdale, carrying her rolled umbrella, strode out side-by-side with Emily Murgatroyd, a weaver at a cotton mill since the age of ten. In those class-ridden days, this pilgrimage was the first coming-together of women from all walks of life – though the wealthier ones did enjoy the luxury of posting their dirty laundry home and picking up parcels of nice clean blouses en route.

The Land’s End Pilgrims started next, then the Great North Road Pilgrims, then the North Wales Pilgrims, and so on, until the Brighton and Kentish Pilgrims stepped out in the final week, all fixing their compasses on Hyde Park.

One of the less literate pilgrims spelled “suffrage” wrong in her diary – “sufferage”. Robinson coins this spelling mistake as a useful word to describe how some of them suffered for their cause. Vast swathes of the public couldn’t tell a ‘gist from a ‘gette, and classed them all as “pantomime villains” who deserved to be beaten up or pelted with rotten tomatoes, stones and rubbish.

In Birkenhead the Pilgrims were pelted with coal – not by disaffected men, but by women and children, reminding us that there was vociferous female as well as male “antis”, who believed that women should shut up and (as one poem went) be satisfied with “The right to brighten earthly homes / With pleasant smiles and gentle tones”.

To a woman, they picked themselves up, dusted themselves down, rearranged their sashes, and started all over again. They wore body armour in the form of pieces of cardboard which they moulded to the body in the bath and then allowed to dry, so they fitted snugly. The more “sufferage” they endured, the stronger their sense of sisterhood grew.

 

LUCKILY, there were just as many kind and supportive locals across the country who gave them hot baths, as well as crumpets for tea and beds for the night. By the day of the Hyde Park rally on July 26, the atmosphere in London was celebratory.

From the gates at all four corners of the park, thousands of pilgrims poured in. Seventy-eight speakers stood up on platforms, announcing that the “tide had turned”. An hour later, bugles sounded, and the resolution was proposed: “This meeting demands a Government measure for the enfranchisement of women.” It was passed unanimously.

A page later, Asquith’s pompously anticlimactic reply to the suffragists’ post-rally letter demanding that he take notice will have many readers banging their heads against a brick wall. “I feel bound to warn you,” he wrote, “that I do not see my way to add anything material to what I have lately said in the House of Commons as to the intentions and policy of the Government.” In other words, “Nice try, but no cigar.”

The suffragettes continued with their usual business of window-smashing and raiding Downing Street – all of which, the suffragists believed, did more harm than good to “the cause”, blackening the reputation of campaigners. Everyone was so busy smashing things up or not smashing things up that none of them noticed that “the war to end all wars” was creeping up behind them.

During that cataclysm of a war, women really proved their worth. By 1915, the slogans on their banners had changed to: “Shells Made by a Wife may Save a Husband’s Life”. And indeed they did.

Suffragists and suffragettes alike did astonishingly demanding war work, including running hospitals on the Western Front.

The great suffragist Katherine Harley – who had come up with the idea of the Great Pilgrimage – was killed in 1917 by a shell while caring for refugees in Serbia.

“We can’t give these suffragists and their militant sisters much in return,” Robinson writes, “except a promise to use the vote they fought so hard to win and, wherever it’s necessary, to keep on fighting.”

– Hearts And Minds by Jane Robinson is published by Doubleday for £20

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Arts, Australia, Books, Britain, History, Maritime

Book Review: The Bounty Mutiny & The Founding of Australia

PARADISE IN CHAINS

Mutinous Mary’s miracle on the high seas follows that of Captain Bligh who survived one of history’s most perilous voyages, a Cornish woman transported Down Under was inspired to do the same.

MOST of us know the story of Captain Bligh and the mutiny on HMS Bounty from the Hollywood movies, variously starring Charles Laughton, Trevor Howard and Anthony Hopkins, through which Bligh became a byword for shipboard tyranny.

In contrast, few have heard of the female convict Mary Bryant, transported Down Under in 1787. But, as Diana Preston’s vivid, continuously compelling book reveals, there are intriguing links between Bligh and Bryant.

Preston’s revisiting of the mutiny is rich in detail. Bligh’s orders were to sail to the Pacific island of Tahiti, gather breadfruit seedlings and take them to the West Indies to grow food for plantation slaves.

His troubles began when he arrived in Tahiti, that “fabled paradise of plenty and pleasure”.

European visitors had, from the time of the island’s discovery, been both delighted and scandalised by what they found there, and sex-starved sailors had rejoiced in what seemed like Tahitian free love.

The Bounty’s men were no different, and they were unsurprisingly reluctant to leave at the end of their five-month layover, but Bligh hauled them back to the ship.

Once they had left Tahiti, relationships on board the Bounty rapidly deteriorated. Bligh’s outbursts of temper and foulmouthed ranting undermined the men’s already low morale.

 

PARTICULARLY distressed by what he saw as his unfair treatment was Master’s Mate Fletcher Christian who, within weeks, could take it no longer.

On April 28, 1789, he and fellow mutineers took over the ship. “You have treated me like a dog all voyage,” he told Bligh. “I am determined to suffer it no longer.”

Bligh and 18 men loyal to him were ordered into an open boat 23ft long and 6ft 9in at its widest – and left to the mercies of the sea.

What followed was more extraordinary than the mutiny itself. Bligh decided to head for Timor, 3,600 miles away in the Dutch East Indies. All the men agreed to a daily ration of one ounce of bread and a quarter-pint of water, which Bligh measured out using scales and weights improvised from two coconut shells and pistol balls (which can still be seen in the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London).

Unsurprisingly, these rations caused pains in the lower bowels and constipation. “Most of us 18 days without an evacuation,” noted Bligh in his sea journal.

Despite the hardships, Bligh successfully navigated his tiny boat to its destination. Six weeks later, it arrived in the Dutch harbour of Kupang and Bligh hoisted a Union Jack he had fashioned from signal flags. All but one man had survived.

In Britain two years earlier, as the Bounty was setting sail in search of breadfruit, the first plans for criminals to be exiled Down Under were drawn up.

When the First Fleet of 11 ships sailed from Portsmouth for New South Wales, there were more than 700 convicts on board. The oldest was an 82-year-old rag-and-bone woman convicted of perjury; the youngest was nine-year-old John Hudson, whose chimney-sweep master had pushed him through the skylight of a house to steal from it.

Maid Elizabeth Beckford had taken several pounds of Gloucester cheese from her mistress’s larder. Thomas Chaddick had appropriated 12 cucumbers from a kitchen garden.

Compared to these petty thieves, Mary Broad was a major criminal. She had been a highway robber and was sentenced to death, but this was commuted to transportation.

By the time she set off for New South Wales, Mary was pregnant – probably by one of her guards. During the voyage, she gave birth to a girl and took up with William Bryant, a fisherman convicted of smuggling. They married once they arrived in what was then called New Holland.

Conditions in the new colony were hellish. Deprivation and disease were everywhere, and punishments were severe.

William Bryant and his wife seem to have decided that anything was preferable to remaining in New Holland. They may well have heard of Bligh’s extraordinary journey from a passing Dutch ship captain and were inspired to steal a boat.

Together with their children (they now had two) and seven other convicts, they made their bid for freedom. Heading like Bligh to the Dutch East Indies, they travelled 3,254 nautical miles along Australia’s eastern seaboard, westward through the feared Torres Strait and across the largely uncharted Arafura Sea. Whenever they ventured on shore, they were threatened by hostile natives. They faced seas “running mountains high” and lived in dread “that our boat would be staved to pieces and every soul perish”.

 

SIXTY-NINE days later, they arrived in Kupang, where they claimed to be the survivors of a shipwrecked whaler. Their true story eventually emerged and they were taken back to Britain, coincidentally on board the same ship as some of the Bounty mutineers who had been captured while enjoying more sex and sunshine in Tahiti.

Both the open-boat voyage made by Bligh and his men and the one by Mary Bryant and her companions rank among the most remarkable in maritime history.

Bligh’s subsequent career included service under Lord Nelson and a spell as Governor of New South Wales, during which he faced another mutiny.

Mary Bryant’s case was taken up by distinguished men, including Dr Johnson’s biographer James Boswell. She was given a free pardon in 1793 and returned to her native Cornwall, where she is assumed to have died some time before the end of the century.

In telling these tales in parallel, Preston provides a fresh perspective on both the endlessly fascinating saga of the Bounty and the early history of Australia.

– ‘Paradise In Chains: The Bounty Mutiny and The Founding of Australia’ by Diana Preston is published by Bloomsbury for £25

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