Category Archives: History

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.

Continue reading →

Standard
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

Standard
Arts, History, Philosophy

(Philosophy) Essential Thinkers: Plato

c.427 – 347BC

Plato seeks to understand and discover the ideal form of society. This is propagated through his concept of The Republic. But this notion has had scholars divided.

STUDENT of Socrates and founder of the Academy, the first reported institution of higher education – no philosopher has had a greater or wider-ranging influence in the history of philosophy than Plato. Alfred North Whitehead once said, with much justification, that the safest characterisation of Western philosophy is that of a series of footnotes to Plato. There is no topic of philosophical concern for which one cannot find some view in the corpus of his work.

Accordingly, it can be difficult to characterise such a vast and comprehensive canon of thought. However, much of Plato’s work revolves around his conception of a realm of ideal forms. The world of experience is illusory, Plato tells us, since only that which is unchanging and eternal is real, an idea he borrowed from Parmenides. There must, then, Plato asserts, be a realm of eternal unchanging forms that are the blueprints of the ephemeral phenomena we encounter through sense experience.

. More Quantum Leaps: Plato

According to Plato, though there are many individual horses, cats and dogs, they are all made in the image of the one universal form of ‘the horse’, ‘the cat’, ‘the dog’ and so on. Likewise, just as there as many men, all men are made in the image of the universal ‘form of man’. The influence of this idea on later Christian thought, in which man is made in the image of God, is only one of many ways in which Plato had a direct influence on Christian theology.

Plato’s Theory of Forms, however, was not restricted to material objects. He also thought there were ideal forms of universal or abstract concepts, such as beauty, justice, truth and mathematical concepts such as number and class. Indeed, it is in mathematics that Plato’s influence is still felt strongly today, both Frege and Gödel endorsing Platonism in this respect.

The Theory of Forms also underlies Plato’s most contentious and best-known work, The Republic. In a quest to understand the nature and value of justice, Plato offers a vision of a utopian society led by an elite class of guardians who are trained from birth for the task of ruling. The rest of society is divided into soldiers and the common people. In the republic, the ideal citizen is one who understands how best they can use their talents to the benefit of the whole of society, and bends unerringly to that task.

There is little thought of personal freedom or individual rights in Plato’s republic, for everything is tightly controlled by the guardians for the good of the state as a whole. This has led some, notably Bertrand Russell, to accuse Plato of endorsing an elitist and totalitarian regime under the guise of communist or socialist principles. Whether Russell and others who level this criticism are right or not is itself a subject of great philosophical debate. But it is important to understand Plato’s reasons for organising society in this way.

The Republic is an attempt, in line with his theory of forms, to discover the ideal form of society. Plato thinks there must be one ideal way to organise society, of which all actual societies are mere imperfect copies, since they do not promote the good of all. Such a society, Plato believes, would be stronger than its neighbours and unconquerable by its enemies, a thought very much in Greek minds given the frequent warring between Athens, Sparta and the other Hellenistic city-states. But more importantly, such a society would be just to all its citizens, giving and taking from each that which is their due, with each working for the benefit of the whole. Whether Plato’s republic is an ideal, or even viable society, has had scholars divided ever since.

Standard