The title is typically melodramatic and grabby, for Clark was a very headline-grabbing historian, junior politician, drinker, adulterer and diarist of genius.
Alan Clark
Alan Clark (1928-99) was the son of Sir Kenneth Clark, the immensely influential art historian and administrator. Alan went to prep school, Eton and served in a training regiment of the Household Cavalry. He went to Oxford and studied history, then studied for the bar, but decided not to practice and try to earn a living as a historian. His career took off with the publication in 1961 of The Donkeys: A History of the British Expeditionary Force in 1915, a scathing indictment of the incompetence of the British generals, which was popular and influential. Many professional historians have subsequently criticised the book for its inaccuracy and sensationalism but it remains a powerful work.
In the 1970s Alan became a Conservative MP, and in the 1980s served as a junior minister in Margaret Thatcher’s governments. He left Parliament in 1992 after Mrs Thatcher’s fall from power. The following year he published the first of three volumes of diaries and these turned out to be his most popular works, covering, between them, the years 1972 to 1999 and shedding much light on the behind-the-scenes machinations of the politics of the period.
Suicide of the empires
The Eastern Front 1914-18 is part of the ‘Great Battles’ series published by Windrush Press. These all follow a similar format – very short, very focused, lots and lots of contemporary photos or paintings or posters, brisk chronology at the end.
The illustrations take up a lot of space, so that I counted only about 56 pages of actual text in the entire book. Most of the other volumes in the series concentrate on just one battle e.g. Hastings, Agincourt, Edgehill, so it seems a bit bonkers to devote such a tiny space to an entire war, let alone one of the largest wars in world history.
What’s more, although it has half a dozen maps of specific campaigns, and although the key events are all lined up in the right order, Clark’s account is distinctly, and disarmingly, gossipy much, one imagines, like his diaries.
When he contrasts the two men at the top of the Russian army – Grand Duke Nicholas, tall, handsome, blue-eyed commander-in-chief of the army and uncle of the Tsar, and plump, feline, insinuating General Sukhomlikov – it is in terms of their character and ability to schmooze at the Imperial court.
The entire German campaign is presented as a clash of personalities, first between the Chief of the German General Staff Moltke and the commander of VIII Army, General von Prittwitz, who Clark takes pleasure in telling us was nicknamed der Dicke or ‘fatso’ — subsequently between the two Generals brought out of semi-retirement, General Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff, and the man who replaced Moltke as chief of General Staff, General Erich von Falkenhayn. Falkenhayn was, Clark tells us, tall, suave and cynical: he thought Germany could not win the war, and he was right.
General Paul von Hindenburg and General Erich Ludendorff
We get a similar profile of Feldmarschall Franz Xaver Josef Graf Conrad von Hötzendorf, Field Marshal and Chief of the General Staff of the military of the Austro-Hungarian Army and Navy from 1906 to 1917, whose timidity, Clark claims, caused catastrophic losses in the early months of the war.
Or, as Wikipedia puts it:
For decades he was celebrated as a great strategist, albeit one who was defeated in all his major campaigns. Historians now rate him as a failure whose grandiose plans were unrealistic. During his tenure, repeated military catastrophe brought the Austrian army to its near destruction.
Clark is amusing satirical about the army leaders lower down the food chain, as well:
Gradually, like some prehistoric monster responding to pain in a remote part of its body, [General Ivanov, Russian commander of the South-West front] made his adjustments. (p.46)
Back in Russia, Clark treats us to several excerpts from the diary of the French Ambassador to the Imperial Court, Maurice Paléologue, including over a page in which he describes taking tea with the Tsar in December 1914, which I think is included to show how naively optimistic Nicholas was.
All this meant that I had a good impression of the key military leaders and their developing enmities and infighting but, paradoxically for a series titled ‘Great Battles’, found Clark’s accounts of the actual campaigns and the vast battles fought on the Eastern Front often confusing and difficult to understand.
Key facts
Germany had a 400-mile eastern border with Russia.
The southern part of the border was protected by her ally Austro-Hungary. If Austro-Hungary collapsed, at least part of its eastern section, the Slavic nationalities, would come under Russia’s influence, thus extending Germany’s exposure to Russia even more. Thus the Austro-Hungarian Empire had to be defended at any cost.
Russia’s population was 170 million. Of these some 160 million were peasants living close to the land in often abject poverty. Above them sat some 10 million middle-class and petit-bourgeois lawyers, doctors, traders and shopkeepers, who got by. Above them were some 30,000 great landowners, some of whom owned vast estates, and above them the aristocracy leading up to the Imperial Court.
THE key decision of the war was taken by Moltke, the Chief of the German General Staff, when faced with the initial fast-moving advance of the Russian army into East Prussia in August 1914, to transfer three corps and a cavalry division from the right flank of the advance into Belgium, all the way back across the north of Germany, to face the Russians. This decision arguably decided the outcome of the war, because it weakened the German advance through Belgium just enough for the French and British to hold them at the Battle of the Marne, for a stalemate to emerge, and the attack to fail, condemning Europe to four years of armed stalemate.
At the three-day-long Battle of Tannenberg the cream of the Russian army officer corps, her best NCOs, her newest equipment, were slaughtered, shattered and lost. More importantly, the industrial productivity of Russia was weakest of all the combatants, and her rail and distribution network the most primitive.
In August and September 1914 Conrad sent the Austro-Hungary army north-eastwards into Russia where it was split up and cut to ribbons, forcing a general retreat, and the Germans to send troops to stiffen their ‘ally’.
The summer of 1915 saw the Germans and Austrians attack along the whole front, pushing the Russians out of the bulge they’d created and back, back towards their own frontier. Ammunition of all sorts ran low, there were scandals about corruption in supply, and for the first time the Russian army and people felt they might lose. Maurice Paléologue reports astonishing amounts of defeatism at all levels of Russian society, and a contact tells him about the Marxist firebrand Lenin, who actively wants Russia to lose, so as to overthrow the entire existing social system.
The tragedy of the failure of the Brusilov offensive of 1916, where Brusilov’s Russian army attack in the south into Austria was not backed up by Evert’s army coming in from the North to prevent German reinforcement, led it to grind to a halt with some 750,000 casualties. It was the last throw of the dice. If Evert had come in, decoyed the Germans in the north and allowed Brusilov to penetrate deep into Austria-Hungary, chances are the Hapsburgs would have been forced to sue for peace, and the Hohenzollerns soon afterwards.
The thing to realise about the February Revolution of 1917 was that it was the consequence of the failure of the Brusilov offensive, exacerbated by food shortages in the cities, strikes, marches, and then the troops firing on the crowd. It was two army generals who persuaded the Tsar to abdicate. Kerensky came to power at the head of a ‘liberal’ post-imperial government but made the terrible mistake of, in May, launching a new offensive under a new General. The army had by now exhausted all its resources and materiel, as well as leadership at officer and NCO level and after initial gains, gave up and marched home. Widespread rioting and political breakdown in Petersburg led to the vacuum into which the Bolsheviks stepped in October 1917.
Clark is revisionist about the end of the war, too. The conventional view is the Germans last offensive overstretched their lines and then the tide turned and the Brits counter-attacked. Clark with impish subversion, claim the British offensive was itself running into trouble when the end came from a completely unexpected direction: a small Anglo-French force broke out of its encirclement in Salonika and out into Bulgaria forcing the Bulgarian government to sue for peace on 29 September – and this was the straw that broke Ludendorf’s confidence,
Overworked, exhausted and having suffered a minor stroke, he advised the new Chancellor that the army could fight no more. Within a week, on 4 October, the Germans sued for peace, the Chancellor abdicated and civil war broke out all across the Reich. It was over. Although another generation of uncertainty, repression, and then inconceivable terror, was only just beginning.
Two more massive ‘books’ contained in one hefty 700-page paperback describing Britain after the war, the first one – The Certainties of Place, under review here – covering the period 1951-5 in immense detail. The main historical events are:
The Festival of Britain (May – August 1951)
October 1951 the Conservatives just about win the general election, despite polling quarter of a million fewer votes than Labour
Death of George VI (6 February 1952) and accession of young Queen Elizabeth II
3 October 1952 Britain explodes its first atom bomb (in Western Australia)
The Harrow and Wealdstone rail crash on the morning of 8 October 1952 – 112 were killed and 340 injured – the worst peacetime rail crash in the United Kingdom
The North Sea flood on the night of Saturday 31 January / Sunday, 1 February
Rationing: tea came off the ration in October 1952 and sweets in February 1953, but sugar, butter, cooking fats, cheese, meat and eggs continued on the ration
2 June 1953 coronation of Queen Elizabeth II
27 July 1953 end of Korean War
12 August 1953 Russia detonates its first hydrogen bomb
The book ends in January 1954, with a literary coincidence. On Monday 25 Lucky Jim, the comic novel which began the career of Kingsley Amis was published and that evening saw the BBC broadcast the brilliant play for voices Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas who had in fact died two months earlier, on 9 November 1953.
Tumult of events and impressions
But reading Kynaston’s books is not to proceed logically through the key events of the period accompanied by political and economic and diplomatic analysis: it is to be plunged into the unceasing turbulent flow of day-to-day events, mixing the trivial with the serious, it’s to see the world from the point of view of a contemporary tabloid newspaper – the Mirror and the Express competing for the title of Britain’s best-selling newspaper – with the big political issues jostling for space with the winner of the Grand National and gossip about the stars of stage and radio – and above all, to read quotes from a thousand and one contemporary voices.
Without any preface or introduction, the text throws you straight into the hurly-burly of events, festooned with comments by an enormous casts of diarists, speech-makers, article-writers, commentators, eye-witnesses and so on.
Thus at the top of page one it is Saturday 28 April 1951 and King George VI is presenting the F.A. Cup to the winners, Newcastle. Three days later, on Tuesday 1 May 1951 he is at Earls Court for the British Industries Fair. On Thursday 3 he is on the South Bank to open the new Royal Festival Hall and inaugurate the five-month-long Festival of Britain – ‘a patriotic prank’, according to the song Noel Coward wrote about it, ‘madly educative and very tiring’, according to Kenneth Williams (25).
What makes Kynastons’s books hugely enjoyable is the vast cavalcade of people, from kings to coal miners, via a jungle of ordinary housewives, newspaper columnists, industrialists, famous or yet-to-be-famous writers, actors, civil servants and politicians.
a) They are fascinating on their own account b) Kynaston deploys them not just to discuss the big issues of the day but quotes them on day to day trivia, the appearance of London, the menu at posh clubs, the ups and downs of rationing, the tribulations of shopping in the High Street. The breadth of witnesses, and the range of activities they describe, helps to make the reader feel that you really have experienced living in this era.
Labour exhausted, Conservatives win
Overall, the big impression which comes across is the way the Labour Party had run out of ideas by 1951, and how this contributed to their defeat in the October 1951 general election. (It is fascinating to learn that they only held an election that October because the king told Attlee he was going on a prolonged tour of the Commonwealth in 1952 and would prefer there to be an election while he was still in the country. Attlee duly obliged, and Labour lost. Thus are the fates of nations decided). (There is, by the by, absolutely nothing whatsoever about the Commonwealth or the British Empire: this is a book solely about the home front and domestic experiences of Britain.)
Labour were reduced to opposition in which they seem to waste a lot of energy squabbling between the ‘Bevanites’ on the left of the party, and the larger mainstream represented by Hugh Gaitskell. The bitter feud stemmed from the decision by Gaitskell, when Chancellor, to introduce charges for ‘teeth and spectacles’ in order to pay for Britain’s contribution to the Korean War (started June 1950).
The quiet Labour leader, Clement Attlee, now in his 70s, was mainly motivated to stay on by his determination to prevent Herbert Morrison becoming leader.
The most important political fact of the period was that the Conservatives accepted almost every element of the welfare state and even of the nationalised industries which they inherited from Labour.
Experts are quoted from the 1980s saying that this was a great lost opportunity for capitalism i.e. the Conservatives failed to privatise coal or steel or railways, and failed to adjust the tax system so as to reintroduce incentives and make British industry more competitive. To these critics, the 1950s Conservatives acquiesced in the stagnation which led to Britain’s long decline.
Rebuilding and new towns
What the Conservatives did do was live up to their manifesto promise of building 300,000 new houses a year, even if the houses were significantly reduced in size from Labour’s specifications (much to the growling disapproval of Nye Bevan), and to push ahead with the scheme for building twelve New Towns.
I grew up on the edge of one of these New Towns, Bracknell, which I and all my friends considered a soulless dump, so I was fascinated to read Kynaston’s extended passages about the massive housing crisis of post-war Britain and the endless squabbles of experts and architects who claimed to be able to solve it.
To some extent reading this book has changed my attitude as a result of reading the scores and scores of personal accounts Kynaston quotes of the people who moved out of one-room, condemned slums in places like Stepney and Poplar and were transported to two bedroom houses with things they’d never see before – like a bathroom, their own sink, an indoor toilet!
It’s true that almost immediately there were complaints that the new towns or estates lacked facilities, no pubs, not enough shops, were too far from town centres with not enough public transport, and so on. But it is a real education to see how these concerns were secondary to the genuine happiness brought to hundreds of thousands of families who finally escaped from hard-core slum conditions and, after years and years and years of living in squalor, to suddenly be living in clean, dry, properly plumbed palaces of their own.
At the higher level of town planners, architects and what Kynaston calls ‘activators’, he chronicles the ongoing fights between a) exponents of moving urban populations out to new towns versus rehousing them in new inner city accomodation b) the core architectural fight between hard-line modernist architects, lackeys of Le Corbusier’s modernism, and various forms of watered-down softer, more human modernism.
It is a highly diffused argument because different architects deployed different styles and solutions to a wide range of new buildings on sites all over the UK, from Plymouth to Glasgow: but it is one of the central and most fascinating themes of the Kynaston books, and inspires you to want to go and visit these sites.
Education
The other main issue the Conservatives (and all right-thinking social commentators and progressives) were tackling after the war was Education. The theme recurs again and again as Kynaston picks up manifesto pledges, speeches, or the publication of key policy documents to bring out the arguments of the day. Basically we watch two key things happen:
despite the bleeding obvious fact that the public schools were (and are) the central engine of class division, privilege and inequality in British society, no political party came up with any serious proposals to abolish them or even tamper with their status (a pathetic ineffectiveness which, of course, lasts to the present day)
instead the argument was all about the structure of the state education system and, in Kynaston’s three books so far, we watch the Labour party, and the teachers’ unions, move from broad support for grammar schools in 1944, to becoming evermore fervently against the 11-plus by the early 1950s
Kynaston uses his sociological approach to quote the impact of passing – or failing – the 11-plus exam (the one which decides whether you will go to a grammar school or a secondary modern school) on a wide variety of children from the time, from John Prescott to Glenda Jackson.
Passing obviously helped propel lots of boys and girls from ‘ordinary’ working class backgrounds on to successful careers. But Kynaston also quotes liberally from the experiences of those who failed, were crushed with humiliation and, in some cases, never forgave society.
The following list serves two purposes:
To give a sense of the huge number of people the reader encounters and hears quoted in Kynaston’s collage-style of social history
To really bring out how the commanding heights of politics, the economy, the arts and so on were overwhelmingly ruled by people who went to public school, with a smattering of people succeeding thanks to their grammar school opportunity, and then a rump of people who became successful in their fields despite attending neither public nor grammar schools and, often, being forced to leave school at 16, 15, 14 or 13 years of age.
Public school
Politicians
Clement Attlee (Haileybury and Oxford)
Anthony Wedgwood Benn (Westminster and New College, Oxford)
Anthony Blunt (Marlborough and Trinity College, Cambridge)
Guy Burgess (Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge)
Richard Austen Butler (Marlborough and Cambridge)
Winston Churchill (Harrow then Royal Military College, Sandhurst)
Kim Cobbold (Governor of the Bank of England 49-61, Eton and King’s College, Cambridge)
Stafford Cripps (Winchester College and University College London)
Anthony Crosland (Highbury and Oxford)
Richard Crossman (Winchester and Oxford)
Hugh Dalton (Eton and Cambridge)
Sir Anthony Eden (Eton and Christ Church, Oxford)
Michael Foot (Leighton Park School Reading and Wadham College, Oxford)
Sir David Maxwell Fyfe ( George Watson’s College and Balliol College, Oxford)
Hugh Gaitskell (Winchester and Oxford)
Gerald Kaufman (Leeds Grammar School [private] and Queen’s College, Oxford)
Harold Macmillan (Eton)
Harold Nicholson (Wellington and Oxford)
Sir John Nott-Bower (Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Tonbridge School then the Indian Police Service)
Kim Philby (Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge)
Enoch Powell (King Edward’s School, Birmingham and Trinity College, Cambridge)
John Profumo (Harrow and Oxford)
Shirley Williams (St Paul’s Girls’ School and Somerville College, Oxford)
The arts etc
Lindsay Anderson (film director, Saint Ronan’s School and Cheltenham College then Wadham College, Oxford)
Diana Athill (memoirist, Runton Hill School and Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford)
John Betjeman (poet, Marlborough and Oxford)
Cecil Beaton (photographer, Harrow and Cambridge)
John Berger (art critic, St Edward’s School, Oxford and Chelsea School of Art)
Michael Billington (theatre critic, Warwick School and Oxford)
Raymond Chandler (novelist, Dulwich College, then journalism)
Bruce Chatwin (travel writer, Marlborough)
Dr Alex Comfort (popular science author, Highgate School, Trinity College, Cambridge)
Richard Davenport-Hynes (historian, St Paul’s and Selwyn College, Cambridge)
Robin Day (BBC interviewer, Bembridge and Oxford)
Richard Dimbleby (Mill Hill School then the Richmond and Twickenham Times)
Richard Eyre (theatre director, Sherborne School and Peterhouse Cambridge)
Ian Fleming (novelist, Eton and the Royal Military College at Sandhurst)
John Fowles (novelist, Bedford School and Oxford)
Michael Frayn (novelist, Kingston Grammar School and Cambridge)
Alan Garner (novelist, Manchester Grammar School and Magdalen College, Oxford)
Graham Greene (novelist, Berkhamsted School and Balliol College, Oxford)
Joyce Grenfell (Francis Holland School and Mlle Ozanne’s finishing school in Paris)
Alec Guinness (actor, Fettes College)
Frank Richards (writer for popular comics, Thorn House School in Ealing then freelance writing)
Christopher Hill (Marxist historian, St Peter’s School, York and Balliol College, University of Oxford)
David Hockney (artist, Bradford Grammar School [private], Bradford College of Art, Royal College of Art)
Ludovic Kennedy (BBC, Eton then Christ Church, Oxford)
Gavin Lambert (film critic, Cheltenham College and Magdalen College, Oxford)
Humphrey Lyttelton (Eton, Grenadier Guards, Camberwell Art College)
David Kynaston (historian, Wellington College and New College, Oxford)
Kingsley Martin (editor of New Statesman, Mill Hill School and Magdalene College, Cambridge)
Frances Partridge (Bloomsbury writer, Bedales School and Newnham College, Cambridge)
Raymond Postgate (founder of Good Food Guide, St John’s College, Oxford)
V.S. Pritchett (novelist, Alleyn’s School, and Dulwich College)
Barbara Pym (novelist, Queen’s Park School Oswestry and Oxford)
William Rees-Mogg (editor of The Times 1967-81, Charterhouse and Balliol College, Oxford)
Richard Rogers (architect, St Johns School, Leatherhead then the Architectural Association School of Architecture in London)
Anthony Sampson (social analyst, Westminster and Christ Church, Oxford)
Raphael Samuel (Marxist historian, Balliol College, Oxford)
Maggie Smith (actress, Oxford High School, then the Oxford Playhouse)
David Storey (novelist, Queen Elizabeth Grammar School, Wakefield then Slade School of Fine Art)
AJP Taylor (left wing historian, Bootham School in York then Oriel College, Oxford)
E.P. Thompson (Marxist historian, Kingswood School Bath and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge)
Alan Turing (computer pioneer, Sherborne and King’s College, Cambridge)
Kenneth Tynan (theatre critic, King Edward’s School, Birmingham and Magdalen College, Oxford)
Chad Varah (founder of Samaritans, Worksop College [private] Nottinghamshire then Keble College, Oxford)
Angus Wilson (novelist, Westminster School and Merton College, Oxford)
Colin St John Wilson (architect of the British Library, Felsted School and Corpus Christi College, Cambridge)
Laurence Olivier (actor, prep school and choir school of All Saints, Margaret Street)
Grammar school
Politicians
Barbara Castle (Bradford Girls’ Grammar School and and St Hugh’s College, Oxford)
Roy Jenkins (Abersychan County Grammar School and Balliol College, Oxford)
Margaret Thatcher (Grantham Girls’ School and Oxford)
Harold Wilson (Royds Hall Grammar School and Oxford)
The arts etc
Paul Bailey (novelist, Sir Walter St John’s Grammar School For Boys, Battersea and the Central School of Speech and Drama)
Joan Bakewell (BBC, Stockport High School for Girls and Cambridge)
Stan Barstow (novelist, Ossett Grammar School then an engineering firm)
Alan Bennett (playwright, Leeds Modern School and Exeter College, Oxford)
Michael Caine (actor, Wilson’s Grammar School in Camberwell, left at 16 to become a runner for a film company)
David Cannadine (historian, King Edward VI Five Ways School and Clare College, Cambridge)
Noel Coward (dance academy)
Terence Davies (film director, left school at 16 to work as a shipping office clerk)
A.L. Halsey (sociologist, Kettering Grammar School then London School of Economics)
Sheila Hancock (actress, Dartford County Grammar School and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art)
Tony Harrison (poet, Leeds Grammar School and Leeds University)
Noddy Holder (musician, Walsall Grammar school until it closed, then T. P. Riley Comprehensive School)
Ted Hughes (poet, Mexborough Grammar School and Pembroke College, Cambridge)
Lynda Lee-Potter (columnist, Leigh Girls’ Grammar School and Guildhall School of Music and Drama)
Roy Porter (historian, Wilson’s Grammar School, Camberwell then Christ’s College, Cambridge)
Terence Stamp (actor, Plaistow County Grammar School then advertising)
John Sutherland (English professor, University of Leicester)
Dylan Thomas (poet, Swansea Grammar School)
Dame Sybil Thorndike (actress, Rochester Grammar School for Girls then the Guildhall School of Music and Drama)
Philip Toynbee (communist writer, Rugby and Christ Church, Oxford)
Colin Welland (actor, Newton-le-Willows Grammar School then Goldsmiths College)
Kenneth Williams (actor, Lyulph Stanley Boys’ Central Council School)
Raymond Williams (Marxist social critic, King Henry VIII Grammar School, Abergavenny and Trinity College, Cambridge)
Secondary modern / left school early
Alice Bacon (Labour MP in favour of comprehensive schools, Normanton Girls’ High School and Stockwell Teachers’ Training College)
Raymond Baxter (BBC presenter, Ilford County High School, expelled after being caught smoking)
Aneurin Bevan (major figure in the Labour Party, left school at 13)
Jim Callaghan (Labour Prime Minister 1976-79, Portsmouth Northern Secondary School, left school at 17)
Ossie Clarke (fashion designer, Beamont Secondary Technical School then Regional College of Art in Manchester)
Hugh Cudlipp (Howard Gardens High School for boys, left at 14)
Ian Jack (Dunfermline High School, left to become a journalist)
Clive Jenkins (left school at 14, Port Talbot County Boys’ School)
Stanley Matthews (cricketer, left school at 14 to play football)
Herbert Morrison (St Andrew’s Church of England School, left at 14 to become an errand boy)
Joe Orton (playwright, Clark’s College in Leicester)
John Osborne (playwright, Belmont College, expelled aged 16)
John Prescott (failed 11 plus, Grange Secondary Modern School and Hull University)
Alan Sillitoe (novelist, left school at 14)
Sociology
There are definitely more sociologists quoted in this book than in the previous two, especially in the very long central section devoted to class, which seems to have been the central obsession of sociologists in that era. Kynaston quotes what seems to be hundreds but is probably only scores of sociologists who produced a flood of reports throughout the 1940s and 50s, as they went off to live with miners or dockers or housewives, produced in-depth studies of the social attitudes of East End slums, the industrial north, towns in Wales or Scotland, and so on and so on.
The central social fact of the era was that about 70% of the British population belonged to the manual working class. And therefore, for me, the obvious political question was and is: why did this country, which was 70% ‘working class’, vote for Conservative governments from 1951 to 1964? What did Labour do wrong, in order to lose the votes of what should – on paper – have been its natural constituency?
This central question is nowhere asked or answered. Instead I found myself being frequently distracted by the extreme obviousness of some of the sociologists’ conclusions. Lengthy fieldwork and detailed statistical analysis result in conclusions like such as the working class are marked off from the ‘middle class’ by:
lower income
by taking wages rather than a salary
their jobs are often precarious
they are more likely to belong to trade unions
have distinctive accents
wear distinctive types of clothes (e.g. the cloth cap)
have poorer education
have distinct manners and linguistic usages (for example calling the mid-day meal dinner instead of lunch)
Other revelations include that the children of working class parents did less well at school than children of middle-class parents, and were less likely to pass the 11-plus, that rugby league is a northern working class sport compared with the middle-class sport of rugby union, that cricket was mostly a middle and upper middle class interest while football was followed obsessively by the proles, that the proles read the News of the World and the People rather than the Times and Telegraph.
As to the great British institution of the pub, in the words of the Truman’s website:
Saloon bars were sit-down affairs for the middle class, carpets on the floor, cushions on the seats and slightly more expensive drinks. You were served at the table and expected to dress smart for the occasion. You would also pay a premium on the drinks for this and usually there would be some entertainment be it singing, dancing, drama or comedy. You would generally be served bitter and in half pints.
Public bars, or tap rooms, remained for the working class. Bare wooden floorboards with sawdust on the floor, hard bench seats and cheap beer were on offer. You didn’t have to change out of your work wear so this was generally were the working class would go for after work and drink in pints, generally of mild.
Altogether this central section about class in all its forms takes some 150 pages of this 350-page book – it is a seriously extended analysis or overview of class in early 1950s Britain drawing on a multitude of studies and surveys (it’s almost alarming to see how very, very many studies were carried out by academic sociologists during this period, alongside the regular Mass-Observation surveys, plus ad hoc commercial surveys by Gallup and a number of less well-known pollsters).
And yet almost nothing from this vast body of work comes as a surprise: Most kids in grammar schools were upper-middle or middle class i.e. it’s a myth to say grammar schools help the working and lower working classes. IQ tests can be fixed by intensive coaching. The working classes liked football. The most popular hobbies (by a long way) were gardening for men, and knitting for women. Pubs were a place of comforting familiarity, where you would find familiar friends and familiar drinks and familiar conversations in familiar surroundings.
Compared to all the effort put into these studies, there is remarkably little that comes out of them.
Some of the sociologists mentioned or discussed in the text
Kenneth Allsop reported on Ebbw Vale
Michael Banton, author of numerous studies of race and ethnic relations
LSE sociologist Norman Birnbaum, criticising positive interpretations of the Coronation
Betting in Britain 1951 report by The Social Survey
Maurice Broady, sociologist who studied Coronation Day street parties (p.305)
Joanna Bourke, socialist feminist historian
Katherine Box, author of a 1946 study of cinema-going
British Institute of Public Opinion survey
Professor of cultural history, Robert Colls, author of When We Lived In Communities
Coal is our Life sociologial study of Featherstone in Yorkshire by Norman Dennis, Fernando Henriques and Cliff Slaughter
Mark Clapson, historian of suburbia and Milton Keynes
David Glass author of Social Mobility in Britain (1954)
Geoffrey Gorer 1950-51 People survey of what class people saw themselves as belonging to
historian Richard Holt writing about football
1949 Hulton Survey on smoking
Roy Lewis and Angus Maude authors of The English Middle Classes (1949)
F.M. Martin’s 1952 survey of parental attitudes to education in Hertfordshire
Mass-Observation 1949 survey, The Press and Its Readers
Mass-Observation survey 1947-8 on drinking habits
Mass-Observation survey 1951 on drunkenness in Cardiff, Nottingham, Leicester and Salford
Peter Townsend, social researcher (p.118)
Margaret Stacy studied Banbury (p.136)
T.H. Pear author of English Social Differences (1955)
Hilde Himmelweit study of four grammar schools in London
Richard Hoggart, author of The Uses of Literacy (1957) which reminisces about working class Hunslet
sociologist Madeline Kerr’s five-year study The People of Ship Street in Liverpool (1958)
Tony Mason, football historian
Leo Kuper vox pops from Houghton in Coventry
John Barron Mays’ study of inner-city Liverpool in the early 1950s
Ross McKibbin author of Classes and Cultures: England 1918-1955
Gavin Mellor research into football crowds in the north-west 1946-62
Peter Miskell’s study of the cimema in Wales
John Mogey, author of a study of the Jolly Waterman pub in St Ebbe’s, a suburb of Oxford
Alison Ravetz, author if a study of the model Quarry Hill estate in Leeds
Doris Rich authored a study of working men’s clubs in Coseley
James Robb, author of a study of Bethnal Green in the late 1940s
Elizabeth Robert conducted extensive interviews in north-west England into education (p.161)
Robert Roberts, author of The Classic Slum (1971) about Salford either side of the war
Rowntree and Lavers, author of the study English Life and Leisure
Alice Russell, historian of occupational welfare
sociologist Mike Savage (pp.148, 159)
American sociologist Edward Shils
Brian Simon, communist teacher then at Leicester University
Eliot Slater and Moya Woodside interviewed 200 servicemen just as the war ended about education
1953 report on Southamptons’s housing estates
Peter Stead, author of a study of Barry in south Wales
Avram Taylor, historian of working class credit
Philip Vernon, professor of Educational Psychology at London University’s Institute of Education
John Walton, historian of Blackpool landladies
Michael Young, author of Is This the Classless Society (1951) among many others
Ferdynand Zweig, wide-ranging sociological investigator of the post war years
As far as I could see all of these studies were focused on the working class, their hobbies, activities, beliefs and attitudes – as well as an extended consideration of what ‘community’ meant to them. This latter was meant to help the town planners who agonised so much about trying to create new ‘communities’ in the new estates and the new towns, and so on – but two things are glaringly absent from the list of topics.
One is sex. Not one of the researchers mentioned above appears to have made any enquiries into the sex lives of their subjects. Given our modern (2019) obsession with sex and bodies, it is a startling omission which, in itself, speaks volumes about the constrained, conservative and essentially private character of the time.
(There are several mentions of homosexuality, brought into the public domain by several high-profile prosecutions of gays for soliciting in public toilets, which prompted a) righteous indignation from the right-wing press but b) soul searching among liberal politicians and some of the regular diarists Kynaston features, along the lines of: why should people be prosecuted by the law for the way God made them?)
Secondly, why just the working class? OK, so they made up some 70% of the population, but why are there no studies about the behaviour and belief systems of, say, architects and town planners? Kynaston quotes critics pointing out what a small, inbred world of self-congratulatory back-scratchers this was – but there appears to be no study of their educational backgrounds, beliefs, cultural practices – or of any other middle-class milieu.
And this goes even more for the upper classes. What about all those cabinet ministers who went to Eton and Harrow and Westminster? Did no one do a sociological study of private schools, or of the Westminster village or of the posh London clubs? Apparently not. Why not?
And this tells you something, maybe, about sociology as a discipline: that it consists of generally left-wing, middle-class intellectuals and academics making forays into working class territory, expeditions into working class lives as if the working class were remote tribes in deepest New Guinea. The rhetoric of adventure and exploration which accompanies some of the studies is quite comic, if you read it in this way. As is the way they then report back their findings in prestigious journals and articles and books and win prizes for their bravery as if they’ve just come back from climbing Everest, instead of spending a couple of weeks in Middlesborough chatting to miners.
It’s only right at the end of the 150 or so pages of non-stop sociological analysis of ‘the working classes’ that you finally get some sociologists conceding that they are not the solid communities of socialist heroes of the revolution that so many of these left wingers wanted them to be: that in fact, many ‘working class’ communities were riven by jealousies, petty feuds and a crushing sense of snobbery. Umpteen housewives are quoted as saying that so-and-so thought she was ‘too good’ for the rest of us, was hoity-toity, told her children not to play with our kids etc. other mums told researchers they instructed their children not to play with the rough types from down the road.
People turned out to be acutely aware of even slight differences of behaviour or speech and drew divisive conclusions accordingly. The myth of one homogenous ‘working class’ with common interest turns out to be just that, a myth. THis goes some way to answering my question about why 70% of the population did not all vote for the workers’ party, far from it.
Above all, what comes over very strongly in the voices of ordinary people, is the wish to be left alone, to live and let live, and for privacy – to be allowed to live in what Geoffrey Gorer summed up as ‘distant cordiality’ with their neighbours.
‘You don’t get any privacy in flats,’ declared Mrs Essex from number 7 Battersea Church Road (p.339).
Contrary to the ‘urbanists’, like Michael Young, who wanted to help working class communities remain in their city centres, large numbers of the ‘working classes’ were about to find themselves forced (by the ‘dispersionists’, the generation of high-minded, left-wing planners and architects who Kynaston quotes so extensively and devastatingly, p.340) to move into windy new estates miles from anywhere with no shops or even schools. Those that did remain near their old communities found themselves forced into high-rise blocks of flats with paper-thin walls and ‘shared facilities’ next to new ‘community centres’ which nobody wanted and nobody used and were quickly vandalised. It is a bleak picture.
Love/hate
Lindsay Anderson (b.1923) was ‘a British feature film, theatre and documentary director, film critic, and leading light of the Free Cinema movement and the British New Wave’ (Wikipedia).
But in Kynaston’s opinion, Anderson’s 10-minute film O Dreamland, shot in the Margate amusement park of the same name, ‘marked the start of a new, increasingly high-profile phase in the long, difficult, love-hate relationship of the left-leaning cultural elite with the poor old working class, just going about its business and thinking its own private, inscrutable thoughts (p.220).
Here it is, disapproval and condescension dripping from every frame.
Lady authors
For some reason women authors seem more prominent in the era than male authors. It was easy to compile a list of names which recurred and whose works I really ought to make an effort to familiarise myself with.
Jean Rhys b.1890 (private school and RADA)
Sylvia Townsend Warner b.1893 (home schooled by her father, a house-master at Harrow School)
Elizabeth Bowen b.1899 (private school and art school)
Catherine Cookson b.1906 (left school at 14 to take a job as a laundress at a workhouse)
Barbara Pym b.1913 (private school and Oxford)
Doris Lessing b.1919 (private school till she left home at 15)
Lorna Sage b.1943 (grammar school and Durham)
Sue Townshend b.1946 (secondary modern South Wigston High School, left school at 14)
Lenin, following Marx, assumed the incompatibility of class interests: because the rich would always exploit the poor, the poor had no choice but to supplant the rich. [President Woodrow] Wilson, following Adam Smith, assumed the opposite: that the pursuit of individual interests would advance everyone’s interests, thereby eroding class differences while benefiting both the rich and the poor. These were, therefore, radically different solutions to the problem of achieving social justice within modern industrial societies. At the time the Cold War began it would not have been at all clear which was going to prevail.
(The Cold War, page 89)
John Lewis Gaddis (b.1941) is a renowned academic expert on the Cold War and has been teaching and writing about it since the 1970s. The preface to this book explains that his students and publishers suggested he write a popular, brief overview of the subject about which he knows so much, and that this book is the result.
The cover of the Penguin paperback edition promises to give you the lowdown on ‘THE DEALS. THE SPIES. THE LIES. THE TRUTH’ but this is quite misleading. Along with Len Deighton’s description of it as ‘gripping’, this blurb gives the impression that the book is a rip-roaring narrative of an action-packed era, full of intrigue and human interest.
Cover of the Penguin edition of The Cold War
Academic and theoretical approach
Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact the book feels much more like the textbook to accompany a university course in international studies. It doesn’t at all give a chronological narrative of the Cold War and certainly has no eyewitness accounts or personal stories of the kind that bring to life, for example, Jim Baggott’s history of the atom bomb, Atomic, or Max Hasting’s history of the Korean War.
Instead, the book is divided into seven themed chapters and an epilogue which deal at a very academic level with the semi-abstract theories of international affairs and geopolitics.
Nuclear weapons and the theory of war
So, for example, the second chapter, about the atom bomb, certainly covers all the key dates and developments in the history of the bomb but is, at its core, an extended meditation on the German theorist of war, Carl von Clausewitz’s, famous dictum that war ‘is a continuation of political activity by other means’ (quoted p.51). The chapter shows how U.S. presidents Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy, and their Russian opposite numbers, Stalin and Khrushchev, worked through the implications of this profound insight.
If war only exists to further the interests of the state (as it had done through all recorded history up till 1945) then a war which threatens, in fact which guarantees, the destruction of the very state whose interests it is meant to be furthering, is literally inconceivable.
Truman showed he had already grasped some of this when he removed the decision to deploy atom bombs from the military – who were inclined to think of it as just another weapon, only bigger and better – and made use of the atom bomb the sole decision of the civilian power i.e. the president.
But as the atom bombs of the 1940s were superseded by the hydrogen bombs of the 1950s, it dawned on both sides that a nuclear war would destroy the very states it was meant to protect, with profound consequences for military strategy.
This insight came very close to being ignored during the darkest days of the Korean War, when the massed Chinese army threatened to push the Allies right out of the Korean peninsula and plans were drawn up to drop atom bombs on numerous Chinese cities. Again, during the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, American generals were advising President Kennedy to authorise a devastating first strike on the Soviet Union with likely results not wildly exaggerated in Kubrick’s bleak nuclear satire, Dr Stangelove.
And yet both times the civilian authority, in the shape of Presidents Truman and Kennedy, rejected the advice of their military and refused the use of nuclear weapons. Truman signalled to both China and Russia that the Korean War would remain a conventional war limited to Korea only. And Kennedy made significant concessions to the Soviets in order to defuse the Cuba situation. We aftercomers owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the wisdom and restraint of both these men.
It is by following the ramifications of the new theory of war created by the advent of nuclear weapons, that Gaddis makes sense of a number of Cold War developments. For example, the development of regular meetings to discuss arms limitations which took place between the Cold War antagonists from the Cuban crisis onwards, talks which certainly continued to be fractious opportunities for propaganda on both sides, but which also proved Churchill’s dictum that ‘jaw jaw is better than war war’.
Capitalism versus communism
If chapter two considered the evolution of new military theory during the war, chapter three covers much the same chronological period but looked at in terms of socio-economic theory, starting with a very basic introduction to theories of Marxism and capitalism, and then seeing how these played out after World War One.
Gaddis deploys a sequence of significant dates each separated by a decade, which tell the story of the decline and fall of communism:
in 1951 all nations were recovering from the devastation of war, the USSR had established communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe and a newly communist China was challenging the West’s staying power in Korea
in 1961 Nikita Khrushchev visited America and gleefully told his audience that the communist countries would surge ahead in economic production and ‘bury’ the West
by 1971, as consumerism triumphed in the West, all the communist economies were stagnating and communism in China was accompanied by inconceivable brutality and mass murder
by 1981 life expectancy in the Soviet Union was in decline and Russia was mired in a pointless war in Afghanistan
by 1991 the Soviet Union and all the communist East European regimes had disappeared, while China was abandoning almost all its communist policies, leaving ‘communism’ to linger on only in the dictatorships of Cuba and North Korea
Capitalism won the Cold War. Marx claimed to have revealed the secrets of history, that the capitalist system was inevitably doomed to collapse because the exploited proletariat would inevitably grow larger as an ever-shrinking capitalist class concentrated all wealth unto itself, making a proletarian revolution inevitable and unstoppable. That was Marx and Engel’s clear prediction.
1. In direct contradiction to Marxist theory, living standards in all capitalist countries for everyone are unrecognisably higher than they were 100 years ago.
2. Marx predicted that his communist revolution could only happen in advanced industrial countries where the capitalists had accumulated all power and the proletariat was forced to rebel. In the event, communist revolutions turned out to be a characteristic of backward, feudal or peasant countries, namely Russia and China, later Cuba, and then a sorry string of Third World basket cases – Angola, Somalia, Ethiopia, Afghanistan. Communism only took hold in Eastern Europe because it was imposed by Russia’s military dictatorship, and was thrown off the second that Russia’s tyrannical grip was loosened.
It was the tragedy of both Russia and China that, in order to make their countries conform to Marx’s theories, their leaders undertook policies of forced collectivisation and industrialisation which led to the deaths by starvation or murder of as many as 50 million people, generally the very poorest of their populations. Communism promised to liberate the poor. In fact it ended up murdering the poorest of the poor in unprecedented numbers.
It wasn’t just their theory of revolution that was wrong. Lenin’s 1916 tract, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, is an interesting analysis of the history of the European empires up to that date and a contribution to the vast debate over the origins of the First World War. But its key practical suggestion was that capitalist states will always be driven by boundless greed and, therefore, inevitably, unstoppably, must always go to war.
Gaddis shows how Stalin and Mao shared this doctrinaire belief but how it led them to bad miscalculations. Because, in direct contradiction to the notion of inevitable inter-capitalist conflict, American presidents Truman and Eisenhower, both with direct personal experience of war, grasped some important and massive ideas, the central one being that America could no longer be isolationist but needed to create (and lead) a union of capitalist countries, to build up economic and military security, to ensure they never again went to war among themselves. The opposite of what Lenin predicted.
This was a big shift in American strategy. Throughout the 19th century America concentrated on settling its own lands and building up its own economy, happily ignoring developments beyond its borders. Despite President Wilson’s achievement in persuading Americans to intervene in the Great War, immediately afterwards they relapsed back into isolationism, refusing to join the League of Nations and indifferent to the rise of authoritarian regimes in Russia, Germany and Japan.
After the cataclysm of the Second World War, American policy shifted massively, finding expression in the Truman Doctrine, President Truman’s pledge that America would help and support democracies and free peoples around the world to resist communism. To be precise:
‘It must be the policy of the United States to support free people who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.’ (Truman’s speech to Congress on 12 March 1947)
The Truman Doctrine was prompted by practical intervention ($400 million) to support the anti-communist forces during Greece’s Civil war (1945 to 1949), which the Americans felt also had to be balanced by support ($100 million) for Turkey. In both respects the Americans were taking over from aid formerly provided by Britain, which was now no longer able to afford it. The doctrine’s implicit strategy of ‘containment’ of the USSR, led on to the creation of NATO in 1949 and the Marshall Plan for massive American aid to help the nations of Western Europe rebuild their economies.
Of course it was in America’s self-interest to stem the tide of communism, but this doesn’t really detract from the scale of the achievement – it was American economic intervention which helped rebuild the economies of, and ensured freedom from tyranny for, France, West Germany, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Belgium and Holland (in Europe) and Japan and South Korea in the Far East. Hundreds of millions of people have led lives of freedom and fulfilment because of the decisions of the Truman administration.
The power of weakness
Of course the down side of this vast new expansion of America’s overseas commitment was the way it also included a long and dishonourable tradition of American support for repellent dictators and right-wing rulers solely because they were the only available anti-communist figures available in many countries.
This lamentable tradition kicked off with America’s ambivalent support for Chiang Kai-shek, the semi-fascist Nationalist leader who America supported in pre-communist China, then the repellent Syngman Rhee in post-war South Korea, through Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, General Pinochet in Chile, the Shah of Iran, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and so on and so on.
This dark side to American post-war foreign policy is well-known, but what’s thought-provoking about Gaddis’s account is the thesis he hangs his fourth chapter on, a teasing paradox which only slowly emerges – that many of these small, ‘dependent’ nations ended up able to bend the Superpowers to their will, by threatening to collapse.
Thus many of the repellent dictators America found itself supporting were able to say: ‘If you don’t support me, my regime will collapse and then the communists will take over.’ The paradox is that it was often the weakest powers which ended up having the the strongest say over Superpower policy. Thus Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime in China was able to summon up American support, as was the equally unpleasant Sygman Rhee in South Korea, because America regarded these states as vital buffers to communist expansion, which meant that, in practice, both dictators could get away with murder and still be supported, often reluctantly, by the U.S.
But the same could also go for medium-size allies. In 1950 both France and China very much needed their respective sponsors, America and the Soviet Union. But by 1960 both were more confident of their economic and military power and by the late 1960s both were confident enough to throw off their shackles: General de Gaulle in France notoriously withdrew from NATO and proclaimed France’s independence while in fact continuing to benefit from NATO and American protection. France was weak enough to proclaim its independence while, paradoxically, America the superpower had to put up with de Gaulle’s behaviour because they needed France to carry on being an ally in Western Europe.
Mao Zedong was in awe of Stalin and relied on his good opinion and logistical support throughout his rise to power in China in 1949 until Stalin’s death in 1953. This respect for the USSR lingered on through the 1950s, but China came to despise the weakness of Stalin’s successor, Khrushchev, and the feebleness of the USSR’s hold over its East European satellites, especially after they rose up in revolt (East Germany in 1953, Hungary in 1956, Czechoslovakia in 1968).
I didn’t know that border incidents between China and Russia flared up in 1969 and spread: for a while it looked as if the world’s two largest communist powers would go to war – making nonsense of Lenin’s thesis.
This of course presented the West with a great opportunity to divide the two communist behemoths, and Gaddis is favourable to President Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger for the brave decision they took to visit China, to meet Mao in person and try to develop better trade and cultural links.
The Chinese, surrounded by a menacing Russia to the north, neutral India to the West and the traditional enemy, Japan, to the East, realised there was merit in reaching an understanding with distant America. Nixon realised what an enormous coup it would be to prise apart the two largest communist nations, as well as helping sort out some kind of end to the disastrous war in Vietnam.
By this stage, 25 or so years into the Cold War, the relative simplicity of a bipolar world divided between two superpowers had become considerably more complicated, an increasing complexity created by the newly independent nations of the developing or Third World, and the growth of a would-be ‘non-aligned’ group of nations seeking to avoid entanglement with either side, but cannily playing both superpowers off against each other in order to extract maximum advantage.
Other themes
These first chapters deal with:
the realisation of the nuclear stalemate and its implications i.e. superpower war is self-defeating
the failure of both capitalism and communism to deliver what they promised
the realisation by ‘weak’ states that they could use the superpower rivalry to their advantage
Further chapters discuss:
Human rights
The rise of the notion of human rights and universal justice, which was increasingly used to hold both superpowers to ever-tighter account. Gaddis looks in detail at the slow growth of official lying and ‘deniability’ within American foreign policy (epitomised by the growth in espionage carried out by the CIA) which reached its nadir when the systematic lying of President Nixon unravelled after Watergate.
Gaddis compares the discrediting of American policy with the long-term effects of the Russian suppression of the Prague Spring of 1968. In a kind of mirror of the Watergate experience, the Soviet repression in Czechoslovakia planted seeds of doubt about the legitimacy of communist rule in the minds of much of the Soviet population and especially among its intellectuals. From the 1970s onwards the Soviets had to cope with home-grown ‘dissidents’, most notably Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Andrei Sakharov.
Soviet Premier Leonid Brezhnev worked hard to secure the ‘Helsinki Accords’, a contract with the West giving a permanent written guarantee of the security of the communist regimes in Eastern Europe. He allowed the declarations of human rights which made up its latter sections to be inserted by the West as a necessary concession, but was appalled when these began to be used by dissidents within Russia to measure the government by.
When a Czech rock band was arrested by the authorities in 1977, leading intellectuals protested and signed Charter 77, which politely called on the Czech communist government to respect the human rights which were paid lip service in both the Czech communist constitution and the Helsinki Accords. And when the first Polish pope, Pope John Paul II, visited his homeland in 1979, he also called on the Polish government to respect human rights as defined in the Helsinki Accords.
Gaddis identifies this emergence of human rights, a realm of authenticity over and above the laws or actions of any actual government, of either West or East, as a major development in the 1970s.
The power of individuals
A chapter is devoted to the importance of individuals in history, contrary to Marxist theory which believes in historical inevitabilities driven by the power of the masses, themselves driven by the ineluctable laws of economics. Thus Gaddis gives pen portraits of key players in the final years of communism, namely Pope John Paul II, Margaret Thatcher, Vaclav Havel and Lech Wałęsa, but most space is given to the key role played by Ronald Reagan.
Gaddis explains that détente, the strategic policy developed by President Nixon and continued by Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, and on the Soviet side agreed by Brezhnev, amounted to an acceptance of the status quo, especially the borders in Europe, and thus solidified Russia’s grasp in the East. With these borders defined and agreed, both sides could:
Settle down to a routine of talks about reducing nuclear weapons (which, by this stage, came in a bewildering range of shapes and sizes – hence the complexity of the Strategic Arms Limitations [SALT] talks).
Sublimate their confrontation into the developing world: hence the stream of local conflicts in far away countries like Ethiopia or Nicaragua. Fascinatingly, Gaddis quotes Kremlin advisers confessing that the Soviet leadership often had second thoughts about getting involved in some of these remote conflicts, e.g. in Angola or Somalia, but felt trapped by the logic of needing to beseen to support ‘national liberation struggles’ wherever they involved self-proclaimed Marxist parties.
At the time it felt as if Soviet communism was successfully funding revolutions and spreading its tentacles around the world; only in retrospect do we see all this as the last gasps of a flailing giant. According to Gaddis, the great political visionary who brought it to its knees was Ronald Reagan!
As someone alive and politically active during the 1980s I know that the great majority of the British people saw Reagan as a bumbling fool, satirised in the Spitting Image TV show in a recurring sketch called ‘The President’s brain is missing’. To my amazement, in Gaddis’s account, Reagan is portrayed as a strategic genius (one of America’s ‘sharpest grand strategists ever’, p.217) who swept aside détente in at least two ways:
Reagan thought communism was an aberration, ‘a bizarre chapter’ (p.223) in human history which was destined to fail. So instead of accepting its potentially endless existence (like Nixon, Ford and Carter before him) Reagan’s strategy and speeches were based on the idea that Soviet communism must inevitably collapse (for example, in his famous speech in Berlin when he called on Mr Gorbachev to ‘tear down this wall’).
Similarly, Reagan rejected the entire twisted logic of mutually assured destruction which had grown up around nuclear weapons: he was the first genuine nuclear abolitionist to inhabit the White House, hence his outrageous offer to Gorbachev at the Iceland summit for both sides to get rid of all their nuclear weapons. And when Gorbachev refused, Reagan announced the development of his Strategic Defence Initiative (nicknamed Star Wars) i.e. the creation of a satellite shield which would shoot down any incoming nuclear missiles attacking the United States, thus rendering Russia’s nuclear arsenal obsolete, but also dangerously disturbing the delicate balance of power.
At the time these destabilising words and actions seemed reckless and dangerous, and what Gaddis portrays as the entrenched détente establishment on both sides strongly criticised Reagan. It is only with the enormous benefit of hindsight – the knowledge that the Soviet Union and communism were to collapse like a pack of cards in 1989 – that Reagan’s approach and all his speeches take on the light not of a mad old man (he was 74 when Gorbachev came to power in 1985) but of a bold visionary.
The steady growth in Reagan’s stature is a salutary lesson in how history works, how what we think about a period we’ve actually lived through can be completely transformed and reinterpreted in the light of later events. How our beginnings have no inkling of our ends. An object lesson in the severe limitations of human understanding.
Conclusion
To summarise: The Cold War is not a straightforward historical account of the era 1945 to 1991; it is, rather, a series of thought-provoking and stimulating essays on key aspects and themes from the era.
Each chapter could easily form the basis of a fascinating discussion or seminar (of the kind that Gaddis has no doubt supervised by the hundred in his long and distinguished academic career).
In other words, coverage of specific incidents and events is always secondary to the ideas and theories of geopolitics and international strategic ideas which the period threw up in such abundance, and which are the real focus of the text.
It’s a fascinating book full of unexpected insights and new ways of thinking about the recent past.
I was politically active during the 1970s and 1980s, so I remember the later stages of the Cold War vividly. Maybe the biggest single takeaway from this book is that this entire era is now a ‘period’ with a beginning, a middle and an end, which can be studied as a whole. As it recedes in time it is becoming a simplified artefact, a subject for study by GCSE, A-level and undergraduate students who have no idea what it felt like to live under the ever-present threat of nuclear war and when communism still seemed like a viable alternative to consumer capitalism.
Although many of its effects and implications linger on, with every year that passes the Cold War becomes a distant historical epoch, as dry and theoretical as the Fall of the Roman Empire or the Thirty Years War. I try to explain how it felt to be alive in the 1980s to my children and they look at me with blank incomprehension. So this is what it feels like to become history.
Credit
The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis was published by Allen Lane in 2005. All references are to the 2007 Penguin paperback edition.
A Small Yes and a Big No by George Grosz (1946) Grosz was a communist party member in the 1920s. His autobiography includes an account of a trip to Soviet Russia in 1923 where he met Lenin and was put off communism by the atmosphere of bullying and poverty.
Communism in Poland
Warsaw 1920 by Adam Zamoyski (2008) How the Polish army stopped the Red Army’s advance into Poland in 1920 so preventing them pushing on to support revolution in Germany.
The Captive Mind by Czesław Miłosz (1953) A devastating indictment of the initial appeal and then appalling consequences of communism in Poland: ‘Mass purges in which so many good communists died, the lowering of the living standard of the citizens, the reduction of artists and scholars to the status of yes-men, the extermination of entire national groups…’
The Rebel by Albert Camus (1951) Camus’s comprehensive rejection of communism in which he seeks to prove that communist rule will be necessarily tyrannical.
Communism in Spain
The Battle for Spain by Antony Beevor (2006) Comprehensive account of the Spanish civil war with much detail on how the Stalin-backed communist party put more energy into eliminating its opponents on the Left than fighting the fascists, with the result that Franco won.
Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (1938) Orwell’s eye-witness account of how the Stalin-backed Spanish communist party turned on its left-wing allies, specifically the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification which Orwell was fighting with, and how he only just managed to escape arrest, interrogation and probable execution.
Books & Boots 