Austerity Reading

All week, as this new reality continues to settle in upon us, I have been regularly thinking of my Glaswegian grandparents living through the Second World War in an area around the River Clyde ("Red Clyde") that was regularly targeted by the Luftwaffe (because it was the largest scene of shipbuilding in the British Empire at the time). The war is, at best, a very imperfect analogy because we are not being shot at or bombed day and night. Nor are we living--yet--with really severe austerity.

Nevertheless, when they listened to Neville Chamberlain on the wireless in 1939 declaring war, they must have had a similar sense of horror at the unfolding uncertainty before them, as we do now, and the dread of not knowing how it would all play out, or when it would end.

If you do suddenly find yourself with a lot of time on your hands, and are interested in wartime Britain, then let me recommend to you the three volumes authored by David Kynaston, beginning with Austerity Britain 1945-1951, which I discussed in some detail here. Until reading it, I had not realized that rationing got much worse only after the war, thanks in part to the immediate withdrawal in the summer of 1945 of American financial aid.

And yet, this was also the period in which the Labour government came to power and led in part by Aneurin Bevan, introduced the National Health Service. I discussed here a fascinating study of Bevan's "socialism."

Here I discussed a new and utterly riveting biography of Bevan's chief, Clement Attlee.

The picture of unrelenting privation improves somewhat in the second volume, Family Britain 1951-1957.

One of the many fascinating things he unearths here is the complexity of views on, and practice of, Christianity in Britain. The idea, which I heard often growing up, that the 1950s were a time of unvarnished church growth and vigorous and enthusiastic practice of the faith is not nearly so clear in what Kynaston writes.

It's also very clear that the much-discussed turmoil and change almost always associated with the late 1960s was clearly already at work in subterranean social tumult in Britain a good decade earlier.

Kynaston's genius is to write these big books, amassing huge amounts of evidence from then-new Gallup and World Observation and other surveys of mass opinion, but to maintain a lively and cogent narrative throughout, never lagging or losing focus amidst so many numbers. They are almost compulsively re-readable books.

The third, which I'm soon to begin, is Modernity Britain 1957-1962. 

About this book the publisher tells us this:

The late 1950s and early 1960s was a period in its own right-neither the stultifying early to midfifties nor the liberating mid- to late-sixties-and an action-packed, dramatic time in which the contours of modern Britain started to take shape.

These were the “never had it so good” years, in which mass affluence began to change, fundamentally, the tastes and even the character of the working class; when films like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and TV soaps like Coronation Street and Z Cars at last brought that class to the center of the national frame; when Britain gave up its empire; when economic decline relative to France and Germany became the staple of political discourse; when “youth” emerged as a fully fledged cultural force; when the Notting Hill riots made race and immigration an inescapable reality; when a new breed of meritocrats came through; and when the Lady Chatterley trial, followed by the Profumo scandal, at last signaled the end of Victorian morality.

David Kynaston argues that a deep and irresistible modernity zeitgeist was at work, in these and many other ways, and he reveals as never before how that spirit of the age unfolded, with consequences that still affect us today.

Notes on the London Review of Books 41/10 (23 May 2019)

If there's a theme to this issue of the London Review of Books it is surely historical materialism and its ghosts, for lack of a better phrase. A case in point is a review of Brett Christophers, The New Enclosure: The Appropriation of Public Land in Neoliberal Britain (Verso, 2018), 394pp. The review discusses Christophers' evidence of how much land has been sold off, and so cheaply and with so few requirements or regulations, in the last several decades in the United Kingdom, whose government has deliberately kept poor, vague, or non-existent records of much of this transformation. One result of this is that it has jacked up housing prices by an enormous margin ("on average--that is, for all kinds of housing--land now accounts for 70% of a house's sale price. In the 1930s it was 2 per cent").

Jacqueline Rose has a long essay, "One Long Scream," that makes for very harrowing reading indeed. She has done some very interesting work in a number of areas, including the intersection of psychoanalysis, politics, and trauma. She also notes one of the few psychoanalysts in South Africa today, Mark Solms, whose work has gained international attention

Her essay looks back over the last quarter-century in South Africa, discussing a number of works, including My Father Died for This by Lukhanyo and Abigail Calata.

As an Anglican coming of age in the 1980s, Archbishop Desmond Tutu was a hero to me from a great distance. I followed the move from apartheid to freedom with great interest, and later on I would review the work of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in great detail for how it handled some truly vexed questions about memories of the past and their possible healing.

But I have not followed events closely since the turn of the century, blithely assuming that progress was being made much more quickly and comprehensively than Rose shows it actually is. The tortured state of progress is illustrated in part by Rose discussing various presentations and evaluations of the life of Winnie Mandela, including, most recently, The Resurrection of Winnie Mandela (2018).

Clair Wills next reviews Eamonn McCann, War and an Irish Town (Haymarket, 2018), 330pp. This is a reissue of a book McCann first published in the 1970s. It shows the enormous complexity of the issues in the latter half of the twentieth century and how the politics was often shifting.

The essay has really forced me to start reading in Irish history. Previously I confess that my Scottish and English grandparents have left me with a residue of snobbery about the Irish, and a very strong pride about British imperialism. But I am increasingly recognizing that both were grossly unjust.

Sudhir Hazareesingh next reviews Herrick Chapman's France's Long Reconstruction: In Search of the Modern Republic (Harvard UP, 2018). It only reinforces my desire to read more about de Gaulle, who seems by all accounts to have been a maddeningly complicated man.

Poor Charles Darwin. Rosemary Hill reviews the latest volume (26) of his Correspondence. It seems the fate of all revolutionary men that they are bombarded with letters, and Darwin, we are told, is no less the case. But apparently with extraordinary patience and effort, he responded to nearly all his letters personally.

Cyprus Under the British

Cyprus seems to be coming in for some recent scrutiny, as a recent book, noted only last month, bears on parts of its history. Now another new book treats its more recent history: Christos Ioannides, Cyprus under British Colonial Rule: Culture, Politics, and the Movement toward Union with Greece, 1878–1954 (Lexington Books, 2019), 340pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

This is a unique book that combines a political narrative with poetry to examine the role of culture and the fusion of religion and politics during the struggle against colonialism. The context is Britain’s geopolitical interests in the Middle East. The author utilizes a vital cultural source echoing the authentic voice of the people, Cypriot folk poems, which has remained virtually unknown to the English reader until now. Translated into English, they are interwoven into the book’s narrative to reflect the yearning for social justice and the political sentiments of the vast majority of the population, the peasants, in a rural society. Lawrence Durrell’s literary masterpiece, Bitter Lemons, his politico-cultural chronicle on British-ruled Cyprus, is also discussed critically.

The Greek Orthodox Church led the anti-colonial movement revolving around union with Greece. Through his intimate knowledge of Greek Orthodox practices, the author elucidates how religious customs and rituals were intertwined with the nationalist ideology to lead to political mobilization. In the process, culture, with its religious underpinnings, shaped politics. This dynamic has been the case from the Middle East, Turkey and North Africa, to Eurasia and South East Asia. Prime examples are the Iranian revolution and the more recent Arab Spring, both of which caught the West by surprise. In Cyprus, the British, with their sense of superiority, remained alien to the local culture and discounted popular sentiment. The two rebellions that ensued caught Britain totally by surprise. This is a valuable case study on the convergence of religion and politics. Academics, students and non-specialists will find a captivating narrative on Britain’s colonial encounter in an idyllic but strategic island in the Eastern Mediterranean.

Politicians Who Aren't Loathsome: A Long-Lost Species

I have been reading biographies of, books by, books about, and books written by people somehow connected to, Winston Churchill for two decades now. Even before that, when I was quite young, my Glaswegian grandmother got me interested in him and in the war by telling me harrowing tales of her surviving the Blitz and Battle of Britain: her father worked in the shipyards on the River Clyde around Port Glasgow, and these were of course the subject of special attention from the Luftwaffe. She also mentioned the unity felt by the country as a result of his Churchill's famously stirring speeches, a unity she claimed was lost after the 1945 election. (Andrew Sullivan also indulges more recently in some Churchill nostalgia here, asking if we will have another today. I think the better question, after the turmoil of Trump, is whether we can have an Attlee instead.)

She put me off Churchill's successor, Clement Attlee, and the post-war Labour government, through for reasons that were never clear until recently reflecting on it more than a decade after her death. I think hers was the unreflecting prejudice of the family she married into in 1942: my grandfather's family were small-business owners who fell for Tory propaganda about Labour somehow being against them. As a result of all this, I never bestirred myself to look closely into these questions until early in 2017 I went back and read Alasdair MacIntyre's many "lost" essays from the postwar period in which he was actively involved in the politics of the British left. Those essays are found in an indispensable collection. I will soon read that collection alongside John Gregson's forthcoming study, which looks most fascinating: Marxism, Ethics and Politics: The Work of Alasdair MacIntyre (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 224pp.

So as a child and then adult who adored his grandmother and her often fiercely expressed opinions, I never realized what an utterly compelling life Clement Attlee led until I just finished reading John Bew's new and splendid biography of him, Clement Attlee: The Man Who Made Modern Britain (Oxford UP, 2017), 688pp. To my mind, it is a mark of a good biography that one is a little sad at coming to the end of it, and immediately files it away to be read again down the road, as I shall do with this one. For those with any interest in biography, wartime Britain, and the politics of the British left, this is a must-read.

Attlee, of course, was compulsively reticent and an almost sadistically taciturn man. I knew that much of him (and have often quoted his apparent response to Harold Laski's endless and prolix agitations: "a period of silence from you would be most welcome"), but not how far he carried that until reading Bew's biography. Once, a BBC interviewer had prepared 28 questions for what was to be a half-hour broadcast with Attlee, who answered all her questions in 5 minutes flat and then stared at her with his pipe as both wondered what to do next.

Attlee emerges as a thoroughly admirable character who seems never to have sought office, honours, or glory for himself. But he was certainly no pushover, no pious pacifist afraid of a fight. (Even though initially turned down as too old at the age of 31, he was eventually enlisted and fought in the Great War, including at Gallipoli, and was twice invalided out but kept wanting to get back into action as soon as possible.) He could be withering when needed, and saw off many attempts on his job as Labour leader (1935-55), which he usually managed to rebuff without scruple.

He didn't have much truck with explicit forms of Christian faith, but he had many virtues nonetheless, perhaps none so clear as his genuine desire to help the poor of the slums of London (and the Welsh coal-miners from whom key Labour ministers like Aneurin Bevan came), among whom he began to work as a social worker at the end of the Victorian era. Unlike some with such motivations, he seems never to have been condescending about it, and never to have thought himself above such people, or the working classes and trade unionists on whom he and his party depended so much. Almost until the end of his parliamentary career in the mid-1950s, he took the tube by himself to Westminster quietly reading the paper, and would often be asked by people "Has anyone ever told you you bear a striking resemblance to Clement Attlee?" to which he would reply "Yes, often" and leave it at that.

Having some time back read David McCullough's fascinating biography Truman, there are, I think, certain parallels between him and his contemporary, Attlee: both thrust most unexpectedly into office within weeks of each other in 1945 (almost everyone thought the Churchill Tories would be returned with a modest majority: nobody, least of all Attlee himself, thought Labour would win the largest landslide in its history), and both replacing wartime leaders who were then, and have remained since, giants on the global stage partly for their compelling ability to communicate with their followers--whether in FDR's fireside chats, or Churchill's speeches on the BBC and in Parliament. Both Truman and Attlee were moderately of the left, and both came after larger-than-life leaders and presented a welcome contrast of much more contained, direct, business-like and modest leadership without flashy rhetoric or fiery oratory. Both did not appear over-much to enjoy the perks of power or especially the limelight, and both gratefully retired to very modest surroundings in the 1950s.

When his memoirs, As It Happened, were published, the New York Times review said that Attlee had the maddening habit in every chapter of leading readers up to a cliff's edge and having them sit there, so drained was the text of all drama and so heavily downplayed the many major events and personages he was involved with. Bew retails many amusing instances of this, and it drove some people like Aneurin Bevan to distraction. Bevan, of course, was the fiery Welshman who brought in the National Health Service in 1948, and was always pushing Attlee from the left to do more and faster. But Bevan could not always restrain himself and often overshot.

Attlee, no violent firebrand or revolutionary he, much preferred the slow and incremental approach. In doing so, he strikes me as a quintessential character of his generation of the type well-understood by his contemporaries the Scottish psychoanalyst W.R.D. Fairbairn (whose rather interesting biography by John Sutherland I also recently read) and his English counter-part D.W. Winnicott: the "good enough" leader not overly concerned with ideological orthodoxy whose schizoid aloofness allowed him to survive much political turmoil and intra-Labour intrigue, and in doing so managed to accomplish a very great deal of good without going too far. In the end, he outlived almost all of the 1945 government, including those who would have gladly replaced him--Nye Bevan, Stafford Cripps, Ernie Bevin and others--and died full of honours: ennobled as an earl, and made Knight of the Garter, Companion of Honour, and Order of Merit. In typical fashion, he mocked this gently in a bit of doggrel he composed looking back on his improbable life:

Few thought he was even a starter.

There were many in life who were smarter.

But he finished PM,

A CH, an OM,

An earl and a Knight of the Garter. 

Austerity Britain

This book has nothing especially to do with Eastern Christianity; but I make note of it in case there are others who would be interested in the history it recounts so splendidly: David Kynaston, Austerity Britain 1945-1951 (New York: Walker & Co., 2008), viii + 692pp.

It's been out for a decade, but I just found a copy in a used bookstore a few weeks ago, and read it not merely with interest but with something approaching delight in the prose and the author's deft control of what, in lesser hands, could easily have been a sprawling and uncontrolled narrative bloated on masses of data. It has won consistently, and deservedly, high praise from all the reviews I've seen. You might think, given the unrelentingly grim era it covers, and the masses of data it draws on, that this book would be a plodding dullard, but you would be wrong. The author's wry outlook and propensity for finding the telling detail without being overwhelming is excellent.

I read it because I wanted to understand in more detail what drove my Glaswegian grandparents to flee to Canada after the war, my grandfather leaving in 1948 to find work and a home, and my grandmother, with my mother and her brother, following in 1949. They never really talked in a lot of detail about why they left, other than vaguely mentioning "greater economic opportunities." And, regrettably, I never thought to ask them about all this when they were still alive.

One thing, after reading Kynaston's book, that is now clear to me is the timing: my grandfather left in early 1948, not long after the worst and coldest winter (1947) in modern British history. Now I understand why, whenever I visited their house in Canada, the heat was always utterly unbearable: 85 degrees and above. You absolutely sweltered in their house (or in the car, if driving with them) and longed to go outside and roll in a snowbank. But for them it could never be too warm.

I knew that they had had many close calls during the war, living as they did along the River Clyde, then the largest shipbuilding site in the British Empire and thus an object of particular attention from the Luftwaffe; and I knew, vaguely, of the rationing; but I knew nothing of the detail and extent of the destruction--how many hundreds of thousands were living in the barest of "houses" with no plumbing, dozens packed into a few rooms without heat; and I did not understand how grim and far-reaching was the rationing--until reading Kynaston's book, which shows how the rationing got worse after the war, and in some cases things that were never rationed during the war ended up so afterwards. Again a piece clicked for me: my grandmother used to apply butter to her bread with a trowel, half an inch thick. Now I understand why--as, also, I understand why every meal included as fat a roast (pork, beef, ham) as they could lay their hands on. Oh, and the sugar. My grandfather was notorious for putting huge quantities of sugar on everything along with gallons of cream. They were making up for what they had not known for so long during a pivotal and memorable part of their life.

These factors--food, the cold, and the need for basic housing for hundreds of thousands of people--when combined with the huge numbers suffering from medical conditions they could not afford to treat also helped me understand the seemingly mysterious 1945 election with Labour's massive majority: it wasn't a repudiation of Churchill (whom my grandmother taught me to revere), who remained hugely popular and venerated; but it was a long-simmering desire for much better social conditions after enduring so much hardship in the war. (This election, I'm somewhat chagrined to admit, was also, I recall, one of the factors that my grandparents said drove them to leave. My grandfather's family were small business owners who felt like Labour would destroy the economy.)

Thus, for those interested in politics, this book covers, of course, the Labour government under Clement Atlee, when dramatic social changes--not least the National Health Service--were brought in. Had members of that government--in particular the fascinating and fiery orator and Welshman Aneurin Bevan--had their way, the changes might have been even more dramatic. The battles Bevan (who grew up in the staggeringly horrid conditions of the coal mines of Wales) fought against other more right-wing Labour ministers and members--to say nothing of the reactionaries in the British medical establishment--are retold in this book, making it of interest to those who follow, as I do, some of the intellectual developments of postwar British politics of the left. Nobody who doubts the existence of "class warfare" can do so after reading Kynaston's fascinating book--the first of a series, followed by, inter alia, Family Britain 1951-1957, and Modernity Britain 1957-1962, both of which I look forward to reading.

Arab Christians in Mandatory Palestine

As I've argued here and elsewhere, many people still today greet the concept of Arab Christians with slack-jawed disbelief: aren't all Arabs Muslims? Or if there ever were Arab Christians, surely they were all wiped out after the seventh century? The answer to both questions is of course No. But that having been said, our knowledge of Arab Christians remains woefully underdeveloped. To the recent collection The Orthodox Church in the Arab World, 700 - 1700: An Anthology of Sources (whose editors I interviewed here) we can now add a new book by Noah Haiduc-Dale, Arab Christians in British Mandate Palestine: Communalism and Nationalism, 1917-1948 (Edinburgh University Press, 2015), 232pp.

About this book we are told:

Recent conflict in the Middle East has caused some observers to ask if Muslims and Christians can ever coexist. History suggests that relations between those two groups are not predetermined, but are the product of particular social and political circumstances. This book examines Muslim-Christian relations during an earlier period of political and social upheaval, and explores the process of establishing new forms of national and religious identification. Palestine's Arab Christian minority actively engaged with the Palestinian nationalist movement throughout the period of British rule (1917-1948). Relations between Muslim and Christian Arabs were sometimes strained, yet in Palestine, as in other parts of the world, communalism became a specific response to political circumstances. While Arab Christians first adopted an Arab nationalist identity, a series of outside pressures - including British policies, the rise of a religious conflict between Jews and Muslims, and an increase in Islamic identification among some Arabs - led Christians to adhere to more politicized religious groupings by the 1940s. Yet despite that shift Christians remained fully nationalist, insisting that they could be both Arab and Christian.

The Sunset of European Empires

Hard though it may be to believe, we are fast coming on the centenary of the outbreak of what would come to be known as World War I, an event that, arguably, was the most consequential of the twentieth century and the most unnecessary.  In its aftermath, the map of Europe would be dramatically redrawn as the Russian, Ottoman, and Habsburg empires all collapsed. (The British Empire would take a little longer, and a Second World War, before it was dismantled, a story told in a book I just finished: Richard Toye, Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made.) The dissolution of those empires would have dramatic consequences for many Eastern Christians, especially in Armenia, Russia, Ukraine, and Poland. Boundaries would be drawn and re-drawn, new countries created, and old countries resurrected at, and in the aftermath, of the Paris Peace Conference, a story magnificently told in Margaret MacMillan's hugely interesting and entertaining Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World.

The collapse of most of Europe's empires after 1918 is told in a forthcoming book: Omer Bartov and Eric Weitz, eds., Shatterzone of Empires: Coexistence and Violence in the German, Habsburg, Russian, and Ottoman Borderlands (Indiana U Press, 2013), 544pp.


About this book the publisher tells us:

Shatterzone of Empires is a comprehensive analysis of interethnic relations, coexistence, and violence in Europe's eastern borderlands over the past two centuries. In this vast territory, extending from the Baltic to the Black Sea, four major empires with ethnically and religiously diverse populations encountered each other along often changing and contested borders. Examining this geographically widespread, multicultural region at several levels--local, national, transnational, and empire--and through multiple approaches--social, cultural, political, and economic--this volume offers informed and dispassionate analyses of how the many populations of these borderlands managed to coexist in a previous era and how and why the areas eventually descended into violence. An understanding of this specific region will help readers grasp the preconditions of interethnic coexistence and the causes of ethnic violence and war in many of the world's other borderlands both past and present.